Guitar lessons from Jose Feliciano. A week-long slot opening for Jimi Hendrix. A musical and marital partnership with folk legend Karen Dalton. These were all bullet points in Richard, Cam & Bert’s biographies before they even got together to form a group. But together, they became underground heroes of the late ‘60s Greenwich Village folk scene, with a vocal blend that put CSN to shame, and a mix of trad roots and trippy reverie that was in tune with the times. Their aptly titled album Limited Edition was only sold at gigs, and they split not long after its release. So, for more than 50 years, Richard, Cam & Bert were barely a rumor to all but the lucky souls who’d seen them play. Somewhere in the Stars finally ends that silence, offering a portrait of a golden moment that was nearly lost. The album unearths a tantalizing batch of RCB live and demo recordings, all of which make it obvious why the downtown cognoscenti took the trio to heart.
Richard Tucker was a singer, songwriter, and acoustic guitarist who had ridden the legendary Furthur bus with counterculture pioneers Ken Kesey, Wavy Gravy, and their crew of Merry Pranksters. He was on the NYC folk scene working with Tim Hardin in the early ‘60s when he met preternaturally talented folk singer Karen Dalton, a cult figure destined to gain greater renown posthumously. Tucker and Dalton quickly fused, both artistically and personally; he became her accompanist and husband. The pair bounced back and forth between New York and Colorado, but eventually Dalton’s inner tumult became too daunting, and the pair split in 1967.
Campbell “Cam” Bruce sang for Natty Bumpo, a Baltimore/D.C. psychedelic band that briefly became a hot property after a multi-night opening stint for Hendrix. They moved to New York and cut two singles for Philips Records before things started going south. Bruce was banging around on his own by the time he met Tucker, and they started busking together in Central Park.
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Bert Lee was a 15-year-old runaway from upstate New York when he hit the Village in late 1967. “I arrived at the end of the Summer of Love; it was called the Autumn of Indifference,” quips the wry singer/songwriter. He already had original tunes under his belt and some serious guitar chops thanks to the tutelage of a young Jose Feliciano.
“Considering all the things a runaway kid could get up to in the East Village, I could have ended up in some junkie flat,” reckons Lee. “But I ended up surrounded by brilliant people.” He fortuitously fell into an East Village commune headed by famed science fiction author Samuel R. Delany, playing in a commune band that was also overseen by the novelist. Delany later wrote a novella about the band. The book, the band, and the commune were all called Heavenly Breakfast.
Richard, Cam & Bert came into being in 1968, when Lee joined Tucker and Bruce in their busking. They were all living in the East Village, and they started hitting West Village folk joints together. It was a transitional time for the scene—a lot of the musical heroes who built the Village’s rep had left, but there was still some electricity running through the circuit. Lee had his head turned around by Tim Hardin’s performances and the arrival of Eggs Over Easy, another harmonizing trio, who eventually relocated to England and helped kick off the pub-rock revolution there. “They taught me a lot about performing with a relaxed vibe,” he says of the easygoing Eggs. “We ended up playing a lot at The Gaslight; I even got to sit in with the Mingus ensemble once,” says Lee. “I didn’t deserve it. But he said to me, ‘Just play, like, two chords and you’ll get it in no time.’ His best advice to me was, ‘Don’t confuse the knocking of the heat pipes with the drum part.’”
There were non-musical inspirations in the air, too. “I got to watch Lily Tomlin take off at The Gaslight,” remembers Lee. “The energy with which she wrote just blew my mind. George Carlin—exactly the same kind of energy. We used to play at a club called The Olive Tree. George Carlin would come in and he’d improvise, and he’d write shows on the spot. They were big influences, even though they weren’t songwriters.”
The Richard, Cam & Bert sound was all about the union of three distinct voices. “Richard and Cam could sing pretty high,” says Lee, “Cam with a slight raspiness, Richard with a kind of country tenor clarity. When they harmonized, the blend was just beautiful. And all it really lacked was an authoritative low tenor or upper baritone, which is where my voice sits.”
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The trio’s active duty overlapped with the heyday of Crosby, Stills & Nash. But while RCB’s harmonies were equally involved and unmistakable, the intent was different. “I loved the band [CSN] an awful lot,” says Lee, “but everything was very compressed and equal-sounding and you’d be hard to pick one voice out over another. Whereas when we constructed our harmonies there was a deliberate attempt to keep all the voices individuated: A little bit of grain, a little bit of smoothness, a little bit of funky blues, all together they make a real nice texture. We focused on that when we were writing the songs and constructing the arrangements.”
Musically, each member brought something different to the table. “Richard brought a sparse, funky style of lead guitar playing that had some influence from the blues, and he was a rather good, spare finger picker. Cam was very good at helping cement the harmonies. Cam taught me about a kind of good, steady, bluesy folk singing and playing. I brought into the band a primitive sort of jazz standard; classical guitar; I brought unusual songs into the mix that helped the band have variety in the show. The two of them loved hillbilly blues and that kind of light, funky folk blues—everything from [John Lee] Hooker to Lightnin’ Hopkins. I brought in some feeling of Beatles; of classical music.”
Richard, Cam & Bert were blowing them away at the basket houses (so named because artists were paid by passing a basket through the crowd) and even earned plaudits from The New York Times. But the major labels weren’t exactly breathing down their necks. By 1969, their options were thinning out. “Busking became very hard because of politics on the street,” says Lee. “The Vietnam War was going on and you’d be out there busking and suddenly there would be a demonstration in front of you. Plus, we were coming into the ‘70s, and the ‘70s were economic hard times for everybody. We had to rely on what few jobs we could get that paid.”
Lee landed a publishing deal with Peer International, which led to Tucker and Bruce doing the same. The trio cut a batch of publishing demos for the company in ‘69 that were coordinated by future big-deal producer Jimmy Ienner, but, Lee says, “Peer signed us up and didn’t do much for us. But everybody thought they needed a publisher in those days.” Those sessions did more for posterity, eventually occupying the bulk of Somewhere in the Stars.
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That year, musician and indie entrepreneur Warren Schatz, who heard the trio busking in Central Park, offered to make them the inaugural act on his fledgling label, Trilogy. Schatz would go on to great success in the ‘70s as a producer, arranger, and A&R man, but Trilogy was a shoestring operation.
Distribution was virtually nil. Mostly the band sold Limited Edition at gigs. “We didn’t sell a lot of them,” says Lee, “but we sold enough in those days to pay our rent for the month. NRBQ were friends of ours, and we would go out to their barn in Elizabeth, New Jersey and practice out there, and they all bought a bunch of those albums because they wanted to give them to people.”
Other simpatico spirits in the RCB orbit included their friends in The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs. Those bands’ brand of subversive folk rock with freak flags at full mast was right in line with the trio’s amiable stoner sensibilities, even if Richard, Cam & Bert’s musical mix of roots and next-level harmonic ideas was more complex. “I smoked entirely too much pot for a long time,” admits Lee, “and Richard and Cam could keep up with me.”
Distribution was virtually nil. Mostly the band sold Limited Edition at gigs. “We didn’t sell a lot of them,” says Lee, “but we sold enough in those days to pay our rent for the month. NRBQ were friends of ours, and we would go out to their barn in Elizabeth, New Jersey and practice out there, and they all bought a bunch of those albums because they wanted to give them to people.”
Other simpatico spirits in the RCB orbit included their friends in The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs. Those bands’ brand of subversive folk rock with freak flags at full mast was right in line with the trio’s amiable stoner sensibilities, even if Richard, Cam & Bert’s musical mix of roots and next-level harmonic ideas was more complex. “I smoked entirely too much pot for a long time,” admits Lee, “and Richard and Cam could keep up with me.”
Between his recreational activities and his science fiction fandom, it’s easy to understand how Lee drifted into a tune like the dreamy, musically adventurous “Mmmzzz,” versions of which appear on both Limited Edition and Somewhere in the Stars.
“I was really concerned about the news at that point,” he remembers. “There was all this talk of space warfare. Because I’m a science fiction buff, my imagination ran away with me and I tried to envision a future in which people…sort of fell asleep as a group mind. The musical inspiration came from listening to a lot of 6/8 jazz. In live performance we would go for a long time on those improvisations. Richard Tucker had a beautiful hand at improvising without showing off.”
“Sittin’ in the Kitchen,” Tucker’s laidback, late-night snapshot of the trio at work, is emblematic of the band’s bluesier side. “I had just joined the band and we were sitting in the kitchen in Richard’s apartment,” says Lee. “And the next time we got together for rehearsal he said, ‘I actually wrote this song about us.’” Tucker’s earthy croon of “If you ain’t free, what’s it all for?” feels like prime hippie ethos.
Tucker’s “Are You Leaving for the Country” has a similar folk/blues flavor, but the lyrics are shot through with casually potent poetry. Karen Dalton cut it for her 1971 album In My Own Time, though Tucker didn’t find out till years later. “Sleeping in the Garden,” never recorded outside the Peer demos, explodes the notion that Dalton wasn’t a songwriter. Co-written by Dalton and Tucker, it’s a gently folky parable about attaining a higher consciousness, with Jesus and his disciples at the center of the metaphor.
“Stockholm” is the only track on Somewhere in the Stars not from the Peer sessions. Recorded live at the Denver Folklore Center in 1970, the sweetly gauzy love song spotlights Bruce’s vocal and guitar prowess, with the instrumental section verging on John Fahey/Leo Kottke territory.
During the latter days of RCB’s run, there was a feeling of things winding down. “The Village got harder to play in,” explains Lee. “In 1969 it was as if a magic cannon wiped the landscape clean of opportunities. Rock became the main attraction, not folk music. Most of the basket houses closed. Most of the places that would play our kind of music were now booking comedy. There were just less opportunities.”
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The trio wrapped it up around 1971. Tucker and Bruce pursued a couple of other projects together, and Lee spent most of the ‘70s with respected Western swing band The Central Park Sheiks. An elusive collector’s item and some warm memories would’ve been all that remained of the Richard, Cam & Bert legacy if not for Delmore Recording Society founder Mark Linn pulling those Peer sessions together on Somewhere in the Stars. “It’s the best pickin’ party you could ever imagine being invited to,” says Linn. “It always existed, but no one knew about it, until now.”
After more than half a century, the music’s unhurried grace can still sneak up on you and seep into your DNA. “We were at our best when we were playing kind of effortlessly,” says Lee, who remains an active singer/songwriter. “MacDougal Street was full of showoffs; but our band had a different vibe to it.” That hippie Zen magic permeates Somewhere in the Stars. “Listening to this record, you feel you’ve been transported back to a simpler time,” ventures Linn.
In a 1970 New York Times concert review, Mike Jahn wrote that the trio “seem to have grasped The Great Harmony. That is, ensemble singing that is at once sweet, precise, funky and a bit sardonic.” Richard Tucker passed in 2023, and his mates are on to other things. But thanks to Somewhere in the Stars, you can conjure that easy-rolling, deep-diving sound at will. After the inevitable cloud of pot smoke clears, out come poetry, fantasy, country blues fingerpicking, and three very human voices fully stocked in the heart department.
