What I've Been Up To

Okay, the last year and a half have not been exactly normal for most of us. The Diamondville crowd got a bit of a head start on that, since our leader had to retire at the beginning of 2018, so the shutdown didn't shoot us down mid-project. I decided to spend my now-ample free time rooting around in my archives, and experimenting with making videos for the various things I found there. And in the process, I uncovered a lot of strange relics that invited me to do a lot of rethinking and occasional recategorizing. And some brought back long-forgotten or long-neglected stories. This is one of them.

When I first arrived in LA, I was hoping to get into the recording studio game, and it happened for me fairly quickly. The very first session I did in LA turned out a surprise hit record, and it's one you might even recall, if you're old enough and perverse enough. The artist called himself Daddy Dewdrop, and the hit was "Chick-a-Boom." You may even recall a bit of the lyric: "Don't you just love it." It was a top 10 record, at a time when the charts meant something, and its success led to an album. Daddy Dewdrop, or Dick Monda, as he was legally known, included a song I had written back in Indiana and recorded as a demo once I got to LA. The album didn't do as well as the single, but I loved his version of my song, and I loved the idea of playing on a hit record. For a while, I believed it happened automatically.

Flash forward fifty years, and I find my song, as performed by Daddy Dewdrop, in my archives. I wondered whatever had happened to Daddy Dewdrop, a question that was easily answered by a bit of internet searching. Turned out he's still alive and active, still writing and recording, and living not far away.

We were nearing the end of the shutdown when I called him up and asked him if he'd be interested in lip-syncing "Five Card Stud" for my own devious purposes. It turned out thought that was a fine idea, so he came over, my first post-pandemic visitor, and we caught up on many decades of friends and other stuff, great and small—and he turned out to be a great lip-syncer, a view underscored by Daisy Press, after seeing the video:
"Wow... Daddy Dewdrop is an incredible lip-syncer and knows how to improvise the smoothest moves. He knows who he is in every way. And knows how to wear his beard." If Daisy says so, it must be so. You can judge for yourself by watching the video.

Five Card Stud is a song about poker, which is one of the things we liked to do while we were on tour, which made it a natural fit with the songs on my Taking America to America album. Coincidentally, one of my goals during this time was to make videos for all the songs on that album. Will I succeed? Who knows? Have I done more? You bet I did, and I'll be showing them off around here, so bookmark my site if you care to keep up and see more. Why have a pandemic if you can't have a little fun?

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