Oberon O'Blivio and the Outcasts of Samarra

Friends of the Fullertons:

Oberon O'Blivio
and the Outcasts of Samarra

Son of Sunshine:
A trio is born

In the broiling Mojave summer of '72, a hitchhiker Leon Fullerton knew only as Sunshine made off with his wallet, inspiring the Barrelhouse Bard's ballad "Mystery Town" (Tales of the Enchanted Mesa).

But on that gone-but-not-forgotten day in a dust-encrusted Four Corners ghost town, Artemnesia "Sunshine" Jones absconded with more than just Fullerton's wallet. And on Christmas Eve, 2015, Jasper Leon "Jazz" Jones, the issue of that brief union, knocked on the door of Fullerton's sister, Cat, in Fresno, California - the nephew she never knew she had.

Inquisitive and resourceful by nature, Jazz had deduced at an early age that Leon Fullerton was his father. Confronting his mother with the information he had gleaned and the conclusion he had accurately jumped to, Sunshine Jones entered into protracted negotiations with the boy, ultimately eliciting his promise (she was understandably reluctant to reconnect with the eccentric, volatile, and imposing recording artist she'd robbed) not to attempt to contact his father until she was safely dead.

Which she now was, owing to an uncosmic convergence of haste, sleet, fog, a Thanksgiving-cheer-replete oncoming Chevy pickup truck driver, an ill-timed response to a trivial text message, prescription side-effects, and the caprice of the hairpin switchbacks zigging and zagging the Blue Ridge Parkway. Either that or an arguably overdue swift kick with extreme prejudice from Old Man Karma.

Although the whereabouts of Fullerton himself is still not known, the rest of his family has welcomed Fullerton's son to its collective bosom. Learning that Jazz is an accomplished singer, bassist, and band leader in his own right, Fullerton nephews Delmont Fullerton and Raphael Gunn (a.k.a. the Del-Rays) promptly recruited their new-found cousin to replace the vocal tracks and add bass tracks to all the music on this website's virtual albums.

Also appearing occasionally on some of these recording is Obie O'Blivio, the group's percussionist and spiritual advisor.

The result: over a hundred much-improved recordings worth revisiting if you haven't been here lately. (Neither Del nor Ray has ever boasted vocal ability, and neither owns a bass to record with.)

Jazz and Obie have also promised to add their prodigious musical magic to all future audio recordings to appear here.

Welcome to the club, Obie! Welcome home, Jazz Jones!

Scroll
to the bottom of the page to hear:

The Monkey's Business
The Ballad of Fenton Baxter
Down On the Avenue
Raining All Around the World
Maggie Brown
Kentucky Outlaw Nomad Bad-ass Biker Dude
Yellow Cafe
El Gusano (The Worm)
The Crossing
Just Like Tom Joad's Blues
Dakota
Icarus
Delta-bound
Nightfall at the Bide a Wee Inn
This Is the Road
Laika's Lament

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Contact info:

Del, Jazz, and Ray: info@thefullertons.net

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The Del-Rays
+ 1 = The Outcasts
For several years now, Leon Fullerton's nephews Delmont Fullerton and Raphael Gunn have been recording the mp3s on this website. While the recordings offer a window, or at least a keyhole, on "Neon" Leon's life work, several weakness had been insurmountable. The most obvious have been overcome with the arrival of Jones.

After an intensive three months of replacing Del's place-holder vocals with Jazz's dulcet grumble, adding his bass tracks, and remixing the songs, Delmont and Ray have agreed that a new name is needed for the duo-turned-trio.

While Jones has yet to encounter his MIA (missing in America) prodigal father, Leon Fullerton, he has spent much of his adult life haunting the periphery of Fullerton's labyrinthine orbit - the bottle clubs, bars, VFWs, and chitlin circuit nightclubs where his father had played, for instance, as well as Naropa University and other landmarks of Fullerton's lateral ascent to stardom. Most significantly, Jones has been a vaunted habitué of Fullerton's New Mexico ranch, Samarra, having made the climb six or seven times over the years.

On every visit to the mesa-top eyrie, he made it a point to conscript whatever musical miscreants were infesting the compound at the time into a working band. A cauldron of wayward artistic spirits, Samarra's head-count varied considerably from visit to visit, and Jones was invariably able to assemble a motley unit to play pass-the-hat hit-and-run shows throughout the Four Corners and, on a few occasions, Mexico. He once finagled a gig at a pig roast on Maui. The repertoire invariably included a healthy dose of Leon Fullerton's music.

Like his father, Jones is somewhat compulsive about covering his tracks. So though the name Jazz Jones should be marquee fodder in its own right, he invariably made his percussionist friend Obie McFee the headliner (even when McFee wasn't in the show), billing the act, regardless of personnel, as Oberon O'Blivio and the Outcasts of Samarra (or just The Outcasts, if the medium at hand was grafitti). Several of the tracks below feature McFee on tambourine.*

Del, Ray, and Jazz are therefore pleased to announce that, while material assembled thus far in the virtual albums on this website will continue to be credited to the Del-Rays, future virtual albums, as well as CDs, tapes, and vinyl produced by the trio will be issued under the name Jones has used for many years.

Watch for Oberon O'Blivio and the Outcasts of Samarra on the Fenderbender Records label.
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* Obie's given name is actually Ordell, but Jones' artistic sensitivities have always prevailed in matters of theatrical aesthetics. He says Oberon sounds better.

McFee also got the gate. As Jones explained to Del and Raphie, "McFee speaks to the fact of the man. O'Blivio speaks to his spirit. I'll allow that the spirit is useless for hauling firewood or buying the next round of Old Overholt, but you can't give a tambourine a decent pounding without it."

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Mave's faves:
"The guitarier the better."
We asked Mavis Fullerton, Leon's grandaughter via his daughter Gwen, to select what she considerd the best tunes on the website. She chose fourteen. A discerning fifteen-year-old, her criteria were carefully considered.

"So, numero uno," she told us, "it's gotta sound old, like Grandpa. Crusty. No synth, no pitch correction, no compression, lots of guitar. Guitar that sounds like guitar. The guitarier the better. That's Grampa. He was a true twangero. The strings gotta zing. Not some meedly-meedly metal dive-bombing, fret-tapping mess. Real dig-into-it guitar. Soulful.

"Obie and the Outcasts really ride that wave. Nothing synthetic or techy about their sound. It's in the genes, I guess. I should get back to practicing my triangle. And kazoo. And nose whistle.

"Next, it's got to be Prozac-free. Depression and heartache and despair and gut-wrenching misery are all right-on, but I can't stand that 'five-P' Post-Punk Progressive Prozac Pop, all that alt-emo pseudo-sensitive crap. Most of the kids in my school, they don't how to feel. Their parents zap 'em with mood scripts whenever they show the slightest symptom of humanity. The goldfish dies, pop a pill. Something crazy hits the news channels, pop two pills. You know that movie Garden State? Like that. My school bud Zack hates The Catcher In the Rye. Says Holden shoulda just upped his dose. I'm like, Zacky, all they had then was aspirin and booze and reefer and heroin. And he's like, fine, whatever.

"Grandpa's songs don't tell you how he feels. A songwriter can either write about feelings or write a song that makes you feel something. Grandpa told stories in his songs. Stories with heart. That's what I like.

"Love songs are the Anti-cool. Love songs suck. Janky, wanky, or cranky. I don't think I picked any. Grandpa didn't write a lot of 'em anyway. I mean, what's up with 'Baby, I love you'? You don't even know me. You're singing to a flippin' microphone. Snap out of it.

"I don't exactly hate jazzy stuff. I appreciate it. I know Mel Torme was bad-ass. But I mean like a little goes a long way. I almost picked maybe one or two quasi-bluesy tunes. But I ended up picking stuff that mostly drives right down Grampa's center line. Even the eletric tunes are folky. In the good way, not the five-P way or the kumbaya way. The Fullerton Way. I'd almost say Americana, but the top Grammy-snatching Americana acts these days are so Prozacky it's like listening to creamed vanilla styrofoam.

"Dance music is cool, too - trance, jitterbug, techno, line dancing, the mambo, whatever. But only for dancing. It sucks for listening. Grandpa could get the whole room dancing to rock 'n' roll and cowboy swing and stuff, but most of his writing was really for listening. At least, that's my favorite of his stuff. So that's what I picked.

"He wasn't easy-listening. He was hard-listening. His best lyrics stand up on their own. A tune doesn't have to have words, and words shouldn't have to have a tune, either. But when you decide you want both, they need to work together to make something bigger. That's what Grandpa did best."