Music: Obscure Recording Artists: the Rick Hipple Duo:

The Rick Hipple Duo Yes, all record collector scum such as ourselves frequently pick up records at yard sales and flea markets by old cheesy lounge acts, and enjoy them for the kooky thrills they provide, but how many of them are genuinely GREAT, not just campy or funny? Meet the Rick Hipple Duo. Rick Hipple plays organ and provides some very Wayne Newton-esque vocals, while Lou Stansfield plays the drums. They performed their act at the Cabaret Lounge and the Robert E. Lee Inn, both in New Albany, IN, and also played at a Holiday Inn in Louisville. They were either very successful or very ambitious, because they released at least four LPs. Their repertoire was all over the place, stylistically. There were the obvious pop-lounge numbers ("Raindrops keep Fallin' on my Head", "I Believe in Music", "Tie a Yellow Ribbon"), and jazz standards ("Night Train", "When the Saints go Marchin' In", "Sing Sing Sing"), but when the was last time you ever heard a 1970s lounge-organ duo perform "Rock Around the Clock"? Or "76 Trombones"?? Even Henry Mancini's "Mr.Lucky" and Bob Wills' Western classic "San Antonio Rose" make it to their eclectic set list. Clearly, this is a true lounge act in the greatest sense of the word, unfettered by the mundane concepts of genre or taste. Soup to Nuts is their first album, and it is this one that appears most often in Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, often with Rick's autograph. They did a live album with a rendition of Ray Price's country-schmaltz hit "For the Good Times" years before Sinatra covered it. They also did a Christmas album, of which we know precious little and speak of only in hushed and shuddering tones. We think Rock around the Clock was their final album, which shows the boys looking older and wiser and grimmer, and features covers of such songs as Jim Stafford's "Spiders and Snakes" and the perennial country classic "Tips of my Fingers", originally by Bill Anderson but also covered by Roy Clark, Eddy Arnold, and Jean Shepherd. Sometime in the late 1970s the duo just disappeared. No one seemed to know what happened to them. Like so many other things in life, they probably were not truly appreciated until their absence was felt. "Hey, whatever happened to those crazy guys in suits who actually played "Aquarius" on the organ one night when my drunk girlfriend screamed at them to play it? They were a trip". We now know that Hipple moved to Florida and released a solo record there, which is rumored to have found the man drifting towards ELP/ELO territory. Hipple tragically died of brain cancer a few years later. Where Stansfield went is still a mystery. A reliable source tells us he's a truck driver still living somewhere in Indiana. It's hard to measure the influence of the Rick Hipple Duo. The JSH Combo has named Hipple as a great source of inspiration, sharing as they do a similar love for the Bill Black Combo. Artists Steve Rigot and Cathy Irwin, who saw the duo live many times, painted a primitive neo-expressionist portrait of them which is now in the permanent collection of Louisville's Deatrick Gallery. The records Hipple released have no doubt provided puzzling evidence to many unwitting persons who plucked them for chump change in a junk store somewhere, and hopefully will continue to astound and inspire the youth of today who seek to unravel the arcane mysteries of the early 1970s. Do you have any information about the Rick Hipple Duo? Please e-mail us and let us know!