Friends of the Fullertons:

Dreadnot

The project: Old friends and relations of Leon Fullerton got together to showcase some of their favorite Neon Leon tunes.

The group is now busking feverishly to produce its  first compact disc, Just Like Tom Joad's Blues. With luck, two more will follow: When the Wagon Rolls 'Round and This Is the Road.

But you don't have to wait. Tracks for all three (like life, subject to change) are below for your audio entertainment..

The band: The artists include Fullerton's son Jasper "Jazz" Jones, on guitar and former members of Fullerton's New Mexico house band, Oberon O'Blivio and the Outcasts of Samarra: Yazoo Chaz on vocals and guitar, Delmont Fullerton on guitar, dobro, and mandolin; Raphael Gunn on backup on bass, Memphis Manny on blues harp and organ, and Obie O'Blivio on percussion.

Special thanks: A tip of the neon sombrero to our good friends the Maine-based garage rockers the Fullertons for their support, encouragement, and faith. Neon Leon lives thanks to them.

The small stuff: All songs copyright Leon Fullerton. Producer: Yazoo Chaz. Publisher: Twangri-la Records. 

​The tunes: Here are the tracks to the planned CDs:

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Just Like Tom Joad's Blues

In 1940, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie saw The Grapes of Wrath and rushed out of the theater to find a typewriter (a twentieth century apparatus combining the functions of keyboard and printer while foregoing the inconvenience of electricity).

Guthrie stayed up all night typing, singing, and strumming, aided and abetted by a jug of non-union wine. The first time the young and unforgivably cocky Leon Fullerton heard the resulting song, he was unimpressed. He wrote in his journal that it sounded: “like it was written by a boozed-up sleepwalker.”

Fullerton wrote to Gutherie: “Sleep-writing and you are a match made elsewhere than in heaven, Woodrow. I’ve enclosed what I humbly submit is a tune that hits the nail a little squarer on the head.” He enclosed words and chords.

Critics, of course, have unanimously disagreed with Fullerton’s estimation. Folklorists consider “The Ballad of Tom Joad,” which appears on Gutherie’s Dust Bowl Ballads (Vanguard), a masterwork. Gutherie, however, was far from offended by the young upstart. He promptly replied: “Keep kickin’ up the dust, kid. That’s how they make mountains.” Beneath his signature was a drawing of a little boy in a twenty-gallon hat kicking dust into a pile three times his size. 

Many years later, an older-if-not-wiser Fullerton conceded to biographer Rex Geronimo that no one knew more about dust than Guthrie.

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When the Wagon Rolls 'Round

Long before founding the First Church of Latter Day Cowboys, which he continues to serve as Archshaman, “Neon” Leon Fullerton was penning gospel tunes. “When the Wagon Rolls ‘Round” proved to be a sure-fire tent-rattler. In a 1980 Vidalia Vanguard review of his album Seven Ways from Sunday, he spoke extensively about his secular music:

I’m the product of a mixed marriage. My mother was a woman, and my father was a man. There were religious differences, too. Daddy’s side was a pack of pure-D Bible belters, and they knew how to put on a revival. Those Fullertons played at lots of meetings, and they managed to get on live radio pretty often. 

Music was on Ma’s side, too, but it leaned more to popular styles, stuff you’d expect from her Judeo-Hebraic upbringing. She had a trumpeter cousin who made it big in Tin Pan Alley, Sol “Stink” Baum. A couple of Baums were cantors. I have a nephew fronting one of those apocalyptic punk outfits, Adam Baum and the Eve of Destruction. Not what you’d call a strictly sacred sound, but there’s not mistaking the lineage.

What really brought my parents together was folk music. Neither of ‘em could get enough. Carters, Almanacs, Sonny and Terry, Woody, Aunt Molly Jackson, whatever. It was their uncommon denominator. That six-string flattop sound has pretty much always dominated the whole family, musically.

This Fullerton tribute album ranges far from the secular. But Leon’s folkabilly roots show shine through in everything he ever penned.

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This Is the Road

Leon Fullerton was making his way toward Fort Wayne, Indiana, one April night in 1980 during a millenium thunderstorm. He’d paid $250 for the car that afternoon, and he and Belinda Neptune, a shoe store clerk from Sadusky, Ohio, with whom he shared an affinity for hand-sewn cowboy boots and whom he had promised an adventuresome life, had driven it straight out of Toledo dealership and into a downpour. It was late, all the motels they passed glared NO VACANCY, and the wipers were turning out not to be the car’s  primary selliing point.

He’d just determined as much when an eighteen-wheeler came up fast behind them. “Between those headlights was a cross of maybe a couple dozen fat green lights shining big, bigger, biggest in my rearview,” Fullerton recalled in the liner notes of the lost album None of Your Truck.

The machine blasted past on a right-leaning curve and swung viciously close, forcing the stalwart but aging ’49 Merc off the road. A Graves tractor pulled the truck out of the mud in the morning.

At the Grammys later that year, Fullerton told producer Jerry Wexler, who was there as producer of born-again Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, “Damn, Jerry, I was born again when I saw that semi coming on hell for leatherette. I sent up a prayer to the dashboard deity. If it landed somewhere short of Nirvana, I ain’t complaining.”

Neptune, who accompanied Fullerton to the awards show, added, “That mothertrucker had him some religion. I launched a quick ‘Hail, Mary,’ myself.”

We dedicate this folkabilly collection to “Neon” Leon, all ’49 Mercurys with working wipers, and all prayers lost in eternal uncharted orbit between Fort Wayne and the Promised Land.​

They must be around here somewhere.

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What’s widely known about “Neon” Leon Fullerton could, at least until now, have been written on the inside of a truckstop matchbook. He has, however, maintained a small, loyal following, and two of his most ardent fans, yellow-dog journalist Rex Geronimo and guit-slinging, folksinging Yazoo Chaz, have set out to elevate Fullerton’s reputation to its proper place in America’s cavalcade of twentieth century originals. The most difficult part of the task has turned out not to be researching or recording, but documenting conclusively that Fullerton has or had ever lived at all.

The task: formidable. The jury: hung. Although Fullerton is said to have disappeared in 2002, sightings continue to this day. But his unavailablity to confirm or deny his existence has complicated Geronimo and Chaz’s task exponentially.

Nonetheless, they forge on, generously aided by Fullerton’s son, two nephews, and three old friends, who perform on this album. And to Fullerton deniers who continue to cast doubt on the Barstool Bard’s corporeality, Geronimo has written in the introduction to his forthcoming A Fretful Life: The Low Life and High Times of “Neon” Leon Fullerton: 

Yes, Virginia — and the rest of the world — there is a “Neon” Leon. Wherever the moonshine lights up the sunshine, wherever lowlifes live the highlife, wherever the heartbeat of the heartland synchopates a blue tattoo on the drumhead of desire, wherever the lost and lonely find reason to grin and bear one more dusty mile while Masters of the Universe wonder who keyed their SUVs, “Neon” Leon is there.​​

In short, this is not a tribute album or folkabilly send-up. It’s a leap of faith. “Neon” Leon lives.

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"One more star
​sinks in the past.
​Show me something built to last."
Robert Hunter