At last: the Nick Lampe story

In his professional musical career Nick Lampe sang in a 50s doowop group, toured with Alan Freed, hung out with Dion and Kenny Rankin in Manhattan, recorded an album at Muscle Shoals and, incidentally, put a single onto the charts in Melbourne, Australia. After that, he quit the business, headed for the mountains for a while, and ended up studying for a degree in Psychology. For years now he's been a social worker with disabled people in New York.

Nick Lampe's full name is Nicholas Lampariello. He is a New Yorker, born in Brooklyn, whose musical career goes back to the mid-50s, when he first appeared in the doowop group The Bop Tones on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour.

Out of those early TV appearances came the release of a Bop Tones single on Ember, I Had A Love (an original by the four group members) with the B-side (Be My) Pussy Cat (1958). The Bop Tones toured with Alan Freed, the original rock’n’roll disc jockey who put on shows packed with current singing stars.

(Brian Lee, at doowop site ColorRadio.com, tells me The Bop Tones were from the Bensonhurst-Coney Island section of Brooklyn and the other members, apart from Nick Lampariello, were Bob Kutner, John Ench and Dave Antebi.)

Later, in the 60s, Nick Lampe appeared at The Improvisation and The Scene in Manhattan, in off-Broadway shows, and on the Steve Allen and Pat Boone TV shows. Among his friends and colleagues at this time were Richard Pryor, Richie Havens and two of his mentors, Kenny Rankin and Dion Di Mucci, both credited as spiritual advisors in the notes to Nick's 1970 album It Happened Long Ago.

After heading for Los Angeles, where he appeared at The Troubador, Nick tried his luck with local record companies and was signed to Atlantic. In 1970 he recorded his solo album of original songs for the Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama. Flower Garden was the opening track, and it was the single that charted in Melbourne, released in Australia on Atlantic through Festival Records (above).

Nick left the music business for a mixture of artistic and personal reasons.

He had complained to Atlantic chairman and producerArmet Ertegun when he heard the finished version of his album, which added strings and chorus to his six-piece studio sessions. Nick believes his “art had been bastardized with bubblegum”, but that’s how it was released.

In the end, Nick and his first wife moved to the mountains of Northern California with their young son (he appears with Nick on the album sleeve of It Happened Long Ago, right). At this time, Nick’s wife was attempting to recover from the devastating effects of marijuana that had been covertly laced with PCP. During this period, Nick supported his family by playing in bars and on street corners in San Francisco, and later at Lake Tahoe, the Californian ski resort.

Eventually, Nick Lampariello remarried, moved to British Columbia to study for his BA in Psychology, and became a counsellor to victims of abuse.

Nowadays Nick works with disabled children in New York, helping them to develop essential life skills. He says: I don't make much money but I get a lot of love… I'm called Uncle Nicky by some 150 individuals who at one time may not have been able to speak: can't put a price on that. Musically I lead worship for three ministries and consequently I am always involved with music.

I still have my guitar, an old Martin D-18. It's about forty years old and is my love...

(Source: Nicholas Lampariello, by email.
Thanks also to Robert Thompson)

Nick Lampe: alive and well in New York

Back in July I wondered about Nick Lampe, whose single Flower Garden charted in Melbourne in 1970. I could find out almost nothing about his career, and he'd apparently dropped off the musical radar screen sometime in the 70s, leaving one album and no clues for a whatever-happened-to.

After that post, Robert Thompson emailed from Melbourne to tell me about his long but unsuccessful attempts at researching the life and career of Nick Lampe.

I gave up the search, but Robert persevered, and a few days ago he phoned a surprised Nick Lampe at his workplace in New York.

I've found that artists' reactions are unpredictable when you contact them out of the blue: some are flattered and keen to reminisce about the old days, but others are just not interested.

Fortunately, Nick Lampe was delighted to hear from a fan in Australia. Not only that, but he had been unaware that his single of Flower Garden was known in Melbourne.

Since then, thanks to Robert, I've exchanged emails with Nick Lampe, and he has filled me in on his career and his life since leaving the music industry, so I'll post about that shortly. (Update: See At Last: The Nick Lampe Story.)

The Lampe File

Since posting about the elusive Nicholas (aka Nick) Lampe I've had an email from Robert Thompson in Melbourne who has been trying to research the 70s singer-songwriter for some
time. He has contacted several personnel from the album, but they all say they lost contact in the 70s. One said Nicholas Lampe was working as a social worker on the East Coast in the 70s.

I posted a question to the Spectropop Group without any response, and there's usually somebody there who can answer just about anything.

It sounds as if Nicholas Lampe may've done a J.D. Salinger: as Robert points out, he might've just turned his back on the music business and chosen to be left alone. That sounds likely, and I guess that's as much as we can add to the Lampe file for now.

(Update: See At Last: The Nick Lampe Story.)

Flower Garden by Nick Lampe (aka Nicholas Lampe)

[UPDATE: See my later post At last: the Nick Lampe story which answers the questions raised here.]

If there were any justice in Pop Chart History Land then Nick Lampe's 1970 single Flower Garden would be one of those evergreens that you love to pieces but just wish your local oldies station would hold off playing for the 437,085th time.

As it is, this fine record, produced by Armet Ertegun and Jackson Howe at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, seems to have sunk without trace. Even at the time, Flower Garden charted at #16 in Melbourne, Australia, but didn't make the national charts in the US or Britain. I can't vouch, of course, for the charts of Portugal or Norway or Cedar Rapids, IA, so I won't say it didn't chart anywhere else.

You will find very few Web references to Nick Lampe (as on the single) or Nicholas Lampe (on the album) and I've yet to find any biographical information.

All Music Guide has track and personnel listings for what was apparently his only album, It Happened Long Ago (January 1971), but no other details. At the 60s And Further website, Gilbert Weingourt has a historic black and white photo entitled Nick Lampe and Friends (scroll right down: the topless friends are a bit of a distraction, but that would be Nick in the centre with the guitar). Both Sides Now lists the album on its discography for Cotillion, a subsidiary of Atlantic.

The personnel on It Happened Long Ago (Flower Garden was Track 1) were the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section which included the four founders of the studio, drummer Roger Hawkins, rhythm guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood and keyboardist Barry Beckett, along with lead guitarist Eddie Hinton.

Thus, the Nicholas Lampe album is mentioned at The Hideki Watanabe Archives on its pages about Eddie Hinton and engineer Marlin Greene. Pop-jazz singer-songwriter Kenny Rankin, acknowledged in the liner notes, has his own website, but the only reference there to Nicholas Lampe is in an unanswered question posted to the forum by an Australian. (The discographies at the Muscle Shoals website don't mention him, but they may focus on better-known artists: well worth browsing nevertheless.)

Apart from that, you are mainly left with tantalising references at the sites of record dealers who have the album or the single for sale on vinyl.

Audiophile, for example, includes a colour scan of the album cover. Undergroundalbums.com has it as a "very obscure item": '70 moody singer-songwriter w/ lots of electric piano, he credits Dion & Kenny Rankin as "Spiritual Advisors" on back. At the Last Vestige Music Shop it's a gritty twang folkrocker with the MUSCLE SHOALS crew, and a current Ebay auction lists the album as Rare Southern psych folk, a little fuzz.

And that, as far as I can see, is that, on the subject of Nick Lampe aka Nicholas.

Photo: Nicholas Lampe, from the cover of It Happened Long Ago.

[Updated in At Last: The Nick Lampe Story.]