Jeff Gray - Live...In Concert at Saltair
Location: Salt Lake City
Year: 1970’s
Label: KALL Radio
Catalog Number: N/A
Style: Novelty
Right from the beginning of track one with Jeff Gray banging on drums and featuring a puberty cracked voice (with made up accent), butchering Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” you know you’re in for a very odd and bizarre ride through juvenile private press recording glory. Upon first listen, you may have a similar reaction to my wife of “how did this even make it onto a record?” Track two gets “worse” with Jeff Gray (and friend) doing a sloppy drum cover of “Downtown” while replacing title lyric by shouting “DRINKING!” (hiccups included). That’s it, just drums and annoyingly hilarious crappy teenage vocals on every track.
Although the cover shows him performing on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, these recordings are neither “live” nor “outdoors.” The album photos depict a gloriously nerdy Gray playing drums with a fly swatter and and even an odor eater.
This record was first brought to my attention in the first chapter of “Incredibly Strange Music Vol. 2” where Jello Biafra muses, “With records like this, it’s not how close they come to “greatness,” it’s how they f*** things up that opens new doors of dementia.”
To me the entire record sounds like a familiar snotty class clown in 9th grade band class, recording his greatest hits that made fellow students (and you) snicker and bust up, even though you feel like you shouldn’t be laughing at this or giving him any attention. The liner notes mention that he was from Evergreen Junior High in Millcreek. Where are you now Jeff?
I once tried to call every Jeff Gray in the phone book, but with no success in finding him for a phone interview or return performance back in the day, for “Oddity Rock Radio” on KWCR. Speaking of radio stations, this album is part of a string of novelty records released on the Kall Radio 910 label, that also put out the unfunny “Strep Throat: A Sock Hopera,” “Coach Swanee Bucknell's Greatest Hits,” and another record worth seeking out, the “Ophir State Marching Band” doing wonderfully terrible renditions of Herb Alpert type instrumental music.
The Jeff Gray record goes way beyond mere novelty, it borders on outsider home recording, and even though the music is intentionally bad it still has that certain magic of being something strangely real and authentic. As far as local Utah records go, this should be a holy grail (though currently it is not) because let’s face it, this is exactly the messed up, other worldly dimension of “oddio” you would hope to find on an obscure thrift store record, complete with hand pasted sleeve art. An absolute private press masterpiece.
(BC Sterrett, host of Oddity Rock Radio on KWCR & Lost Media Archive on WFMU)
