Corky's Debt to His Father

Corky's Debt to His Father is the first solo album by Mayo Thompson.

Corky's Debt to His Father
Studio album by Mayo Thompson
Released	1970
Recorded	1970
Studio	Walt Andrus Studio Houston, Texas
Label	Texas Revolution
/

Track list

Side A

No.	Title	Length
1.	"The Lesson"	2:39
2.	"Oyster Thins"	6:00
3.	"Horses"	3:09
4.	"Dear Betty Baby"	3:47
5.	"Venus in the Morning"	2:30

Side B

No.	Title	Length
1.	"To You"	2:50
2.	"Fortune"	2:11
3.	"Black Legs"	3:50
4.	"Good Brisk Blues"	3:07
5.	"Around the Home"	2:50
6.	"Worried Worried"	5:03
Total length:		37:56

Background

• Recording began in February 1970
• Released mail-order only in 1970 by Texas Revolution
• Album release show at Of Our Own in Houston (note: the venue opened in August 1970)
• Side of the sleeve says "Corky's Cigar"
• Instrumental B-side outtake: Woof
• Released a single as in January 1971 as Saddlesore: Old Tom Clark
• Reissued in the 80s by Glass Records
• Reissued in 1994 by Drag City
• Mayo Thompson played the full album in concert in 2013 and 2019

Further reading: Jasper Leach and Joel Minor's article "Fortune, Fates, And Random Chances: The story of Mayo Thompson’s Corky’s Debt to His Father"

Cover art

The cover image is an illustration by John Charles Dollman for an article in the British newspaper The Graphic published September 10, 1892.

• 
  Wanderings in the Zoo, 1892

Mayo Thompson & The Corky Band

In 2013, Thompson first performed Corky's Debt live in full. For the album's 50th anniversary, Thompson and the Corky Band performed twice before the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 put future performances on hold. They resumed in summer 2023.

		Date	City		Venue
		September 28, 2013	Louisville	KY	American Turners Club
		December 8, 2019	New York City	NY	Le Poisson Rouge
		January 9, 2020	Los Angeles	CA	Hammer Museum
		August 31, 2023	Los Angeles	CA	Zebulon
		December 2, 2023	New York City	NY	Le Poisson Rouge

Personnel

Mayo Thompson - vocals, guitar, bass

Additional musicians

Mike Sumler, Joe Dugan (piano), Chuck Conway (drums), Jimi Newhouse (drums), Carson Graham (drums), Frank Davis, Le Anne Romano (baritone horn), Roger Romano, The La La's (backing vocals), The Whoaback Singers (backing vocals)

Technical

• Mayo Thompson - producer
• Frank Davis - producer, engineer
• Roger Romano - producer, engineer

Releases

Texas Revolution

1970

• 
  Ad in Rolling Stone, January 7, 1971
• 
  Ad in Not Fade Away Vol.1 No.2, 1977

Glass

December 1985

Drag City

June 20, 1994

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2023

Personal—yes. It’s a solo album—unlike in the Crayola, where “I” is tropic. On 'Corky’s Debt To His Father' "I" is not meant indexically. After 'God Bless The Red Krayola And All Who Sail With It' tanked I left the label [International Artists] again, having decided to try my hand without a band. Again Frank Davis and Walt Andrus figure, and Roger “Rock” Romano, one of Houston’s most accomplished and versatile players. Rock and I knew each other from college. He was working at Walt’s. He, Frank and I drafted players from different bands—all dab hands. We took our time—working not every day. It gave us time to think. It took three months. Walt had started a label—Texas Revolution—and 'Corky’s Debt To His Father' was to be the first product. Walt’s partners hated it. That wasn’t an uncommon reaction. A friend living in a commune told me how he would get stuff thrown at him if he tried to put it on. As Joe Dugan said, "Mayo’s voice is an acquired taste." Only some hundreds were pressed. Some sold via mail orders. No release. It sat on the shelf until Dave Barker released it in England in the ‘80s. Drag City has released it here. These days The Corky Band and I perform the songs occasionally. Appreciation has appreciated over time.

Mayo Thompson, 2015

Corky is a portrait of me. It shaped up battling clichés, genres that are like black holes which swallow my novel solutions to the same problems everybody has, while recognizing there is no escape, only twisting the familiar to my ends, insisting on my take on them, presenting my ideas effectively via negativa. That record was made post-Crayola/International Artists, with Frank Davis and Roger “Rock” Romano producing. I met Frank hanging out at the Jester Lounge—a Houston folk venue. Rock I knew from college. He’s a great dude, a tower of Houston musical power from the start.

Roger "Rock" Romano, 2017

I loved workin' with Mayo [...] I co-produced [Corky's Debt to His Father] with him and Frank Davis, and it's, it's a legendary cult album now [...] that was one of the great things that I got to do as a producer, at Andrus, and of course when we finished it, Frank took it up to the people that we knew at Uni and they looked at this, and they said, man, we can't do anything with this [...] so we just got it pushed back in our face and Walter released it on his own label, and they only probably printed a thousand copies, and I'm one of the few people that has one. Actually, it was [...] redone later on. Mayo brought me some redone copies and instead of Texas Revolution Records, it was done on Drag City Revolution Records. They even made a special label for it, imitating the original label.

Mayo Thompson, 1996

Walt Andrus was head of the best studio in Houston, and in that particular period, he recorded everybody [...] The technical level came out of traditional recordings of all kinds of regular kinds of music. [...]

Pop music has changed, obviously, with punk, completely. But at the time that I made the solo album, it was Walt Andrus' own label. He had a lot of money which he had gotten to start a label [...] He was partners with a couple lawyers in Southern California who had gotten some money to do a blues reissue from somebody and blah blah blah, and there was this kind of money, so we were able to make this record. And he was like a few weeks short of really having it all together, Texas Revolution being really together. And then the whole partnership collapsed and fell apart for some reason. And the dream ended. But that would have been a really...that was going to be an interesting project, because Walt Andrus and Frank Davis, he was also an early hero of mine, a real legend in Houston, a great musician.

[...] it does have a different character from the Red Krayola material. I would say that is largely informed by the fact that the musicians were all from elsewhere. They were not players that I had worked with. People I knew, but I didn't work with them before, from other kinds of bands and stuff like that. Also, the material was very personal, the lyrics were very personal, whereas the Red Krayola was seldom personal. [...]

The period of the complete failure of the solo record—when I found out that people—I had a friend who lived in a commune in New Mexico, and he'd get up and put that record on and people would throw things at him—"Don't put that goddamn record on again!" They hated it. They just didn't want to hear this stuff.  And I thought, I wonder why? So I delved more deeply into one of our original thoughts about music. It was original to us, it was one of the origins for our impulse, which was that music is instrumental, in the sense that it's a form in which you can say various things and do various things. Those formal characteristics of music have their own weight and gravity.  What you do is you balance them against the other kinds of things that you want to put into them as a carrier or some kind of support structure, if you like.

Reviews

New Musical Express

January 18, 1986

Richard North

Apparently this "legendary" and rare LP was first released in Texas in 1972 with only 500 pressed. Hats off to Glass for resurrecting it. One always looks forward to Mayo's output 'cause of his kooky-colourful work with Red Crayola, Pere Ubu, et al. A fine track record which is only enhanced by Corky's Debt. [...]

CMJ New Music Report

June 13, 1994

Drag City has reissued Corky's Debt To His Father, the hard-to-find 1970 solo album by Mayo Thompson, leader of the Red Crayola for almost three decades and a member of Pere Ubu in the early '80s. Corky, his only solo outing, is unlike anything he's done before or since, with a focus on melody and twisted lyrics in song structures that are relatively conventional compared to the psychedelic freakouts, experimentation and jagged pop of the Red Crayola. The beautiful ballad "Dear Betty Baby" is an unqualified masterpiece. Look for the first two Red Crayola albums to be reissued on the Collectibles label and a new Red Crayola album in the fall, with Thompson joined by members of Gastr Del Sol.

Chicago Reader

June 16, 1994

John Corbett

Chicago Tribune

1994

Greg Kot

Recorded 24 years ago in Houston for an obscure record label and then all but forgotten, "Corky's Debt to His Father" has been reissued on CD, its considerable wonders undiminished. Thompson has fashioned a significant legacy in underground circles as a producer, talent scout and recording artist (notably with the Red Crayola), and this record presents his catholic tastes and eccentric talents at their most accessible. Ranging from baroque pop worthy of Van Dyke Parks to stark acoustic ballads and barrelhouse blues, "Corky's Debt ..." is musically dazzling. The sophistication of the arrangements and writing — particularly on "To You" and "Around the Home" — makes Thompson's sometimes uncertain tenor seem even more vulnerable as he pours out his erotic longings.

Tower Pulse

1994

Scott Miller

Mayo Thompson's Corky's Debt to His Father isn't being reissued as much as it's finally having its day. The album was recorded in 1970 after Thompson's ground-breaking yet completely overlooked group, the Red Krayola, temporarily disbanded. It's a beautiful and introspective album, along the linen of Big Star's 3rd or the Beach Boys' late-'60s work. Backing off from the urgent stabs at ideas and possibilities that characterized Krayola, it shows a more immediately traditional (coherent) approach toward songwriting. But aside from a small U.K. repressing in the mid-'80s, it was out of print for almost a quarter century prior to the recent Drag City reissue (the label also has a new Krayola album due soon).

"I started making music because I thought it was wide open," says Thompson from his home in Houston. "That all one did was have ideas — perform these ideas — that interesting ideas did come through and that it was possible to do interesting things in this framework." Though it may not initially sooths, this is not an alienating record. It has a timeless quality — not fitting readily into any one category or era. Thompson was taking an honest shot at competing in the solo artist world that prevailed in the early '70s — presenting a stimulating alternative to the mind-numbing strains of James Taylor and friends. "I was anxious to distinguish myself from the people with whom I saw myself in some generic association — the solo artist, the songwriter." Corky operates on several levels and deserves to be heard. It's humorous and wistful, lyrically stimulating — bluesy at times, though it's more like the blues are playing Thompson than the other way around. He writes in a style all his own, twisting common language into poetry. Always uniquely Thompson, Corky blurs boundaries and begs only for an attentive ear.

Ben Is Dead

1995

Damion

Up until now, this was an extremely rare and sought after LP. Originally released in 1970, this is the first of a series of Red Crayola and related “archival” re-releases to be put out by Drag City. The eleven songs range from rock to blues to ballads etc.... Pretty accessible. Thompson may sing a little out of tune here and there but I guess that’s a plus. It’s a great and classic forgotten piece of 1970. Sincere and worthwhile.

The Trouser Press guide to '90s rock

1997

In 1970, Thompson actually did record a solo album, Corky's Debt to His Father, which got an obscure local-label issue at the time in Texas, was revived in England years later and was finally introduced to American CD racks through the good offices of Drag City. A left-field version of a blues and neo-vaudeville album — played mostly acoustic on slide guitar, piano, bass and elementary traps, with some horns and electricity — Corky's Debt doesn't sound much closer to any mainstream in 1995 than it would have done a quarter-century earlier. The fairly titled "Good Brisk Blues" might have come from a Dylan bootleg, and "Venus in the Morning" does suggest a functional knowledge of barrelhouse music, but the lyrics ("they cover her politely from all indelicate eyes") are from a completely different realm. A self-conscious embrace of abnormality in all its glorious dislocation.

Sunday Times

August 7, 2005

Stewart Lee

A vast programme of reissues by the Red Krayola, the determinedly different Texan collective led by Mayo Thompson, is headed up by a solo album from 1970 that suddenly sounds utterly contemporary. Fans of outsider artist singer-songwriter types such as Smog or Jandek will see the ground plans for a whole school of quirky, lo-fi weirdness here. Around the Home has an almost vaudeville bent. Worried Worried anticipates the angular guitar pop of the currently hugely influential Glasgow sound of the early 1980s. They thought he was mad. Turns out Thompson was just 35 years ahead of his time.