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-- Brett Champlin --
Brett played rhythm guitar and
sang lead or backup vocals on most songs. He
occasionally switched to bass when Bob played slide or
lead guitar. He wrote or co-wrote most of the
band's original material.
Before the band:
Brett started learning guitar at age
13 when he bought an old guitar from a neighbor and taught himself to play "Rumble" by Link Wray as did
most of his contemporaries. The first record he
bought was a Buddy Holly EP and he learned to play and
sing a couple of those songs. When his family moved to
Oakland, California in 1963, he took folk guitar lessons
at UC Berkeley. He played saxophone and sang in a high school
rock band called "The Lonely Rebels".
Brett started at Southern Illinois
University in the Fall of 1964 and formed a folk trio,
"The Pebbles", with Alan Dillard and Nancy Jo Zacha to
perform in the freshman talent show that year.
They took their name from a Pebble Beach tee-shirt Brett
was wearing when they formed. They won a few
campus competitions before drifting apart as
they became more involved in their studies and campus
activities.
He formed a folk duo with Jim
Moody called the "Moody Two" shortly after that.
Eventually they added two female singers, Brett's
younger sister
Jackie, and Gail Reilley, and with the addition of Fred Wiley
on bass, they changed the name of the group to "Moody & Co.".
Moody & Co. won the big talent show on campus
(Theta Xi) that year
and took second place the next. They performed in
several local dinner clubs and were a featured group in
a television special called "Illinois Sings" in 1966.
More or less at the same time,
Brett had formed a rock and roll band to play at
parties, high school dances, campus events and pretty
much for anyone that asked them. That group was
called "Om", the Hindu term for, among other things, all
sound. The first version of "Om" was Brett singing
lead and playing guitar, John "Jake" Byrum,
who went on to become a Hollywood
writer/director/producer on bass, Ron
Steen on guitar, and Jay Gervitch on drums with
miscellaneous occasional other players. As often
happens with college groups, the lineup changed from
year to year or even semester to semester as did the
playlist. They played mainly contemporary hits,
older R&B, and Chicago blues. One version of the
group went by "Om Again", and in one, they played only
songs that started with "I'm" in the title which they
changed to "Om", as in "Om A Man", Om Cryin'",
etc.
Brett took a semester off and
returned to find that Bucky Harmon (playing bass) and
Robbie Stokes (playing lead guitar), two friends who
had just graduated high school had been playing
as "Om" along with Jerry Goodman, a violinist,
who later went on to play and record with "Flock" and "Mahavishnu
Orchestra" and as a solo artist. They had
also recruited a new drummer, Steve Sweigart, formerly
with a group called Hearts of Darkness.
After an unfortunate incident
(see Farm Bust Blues, The Real Story on the Stories page) which left Bucky unable to perform with the group, Brett
and Robbie recruited Bob Laughton who they both knew as
a versatile and talented musician who had played in
several groups as varied as bluegrass (Dusty Roads Boys)
to Chicago blues (Nite Owls). This band, still
known as "Om" began playing at every opportunity.
They became the "house band" at a new music venue, The
Hippodrome" which had recently been opened by a
house painter and would-be
entrepreneur recently transplanted from San Francisco. They began to write their own songs and
to rehearse in earnest to prepare for a trip to the West
Coast.
After the band:
Brett decided to return to school
and try to finish his degree. He found that he
could learn computer programming at SIU's Vocational
Technical Institute and took classes there for a year.
He dropped out again to travel to Europe for a year with
a girlfriend. They flew to
Ireland and traveled from there to Manchester, Bergen,
Copenhagen, and Amsterdam then flew to Athens. As
these things go, they broke up after spending a month on
the island of Ios and she flew home, but
Brett kept traveling. First to Istanbul, through
Iran, and to Afghanistan where he stayed for a couple months in
Kabul. There he chanced to meet a Frenchman who
happened to know an old friend from school, Annie
Williams, living in
Paris and playing in the French band, Mormose. So he headed to Paris. In his
travels, he made his way playing folk songs in small
clubs and occasionally busking.
Eventually he came back to the
states and after visiting family around the country,
made his way to Chicago where he started plans to form a
new band with Jon Stocklin (Nite Owls, Rotary
Connection) but the plans fell apart when Jon broke his
hand in a bar fight. Brett worked
various odd jobs for a while and started a book store
with a girlfriend who he later married. They had
two sons while Brett worked for a time as a manager of a
book store, medical
technician, paramedic and then as a programmer.
He went back to school and got his
degree in Computer Science and later an MBA. He
continued to work as a programmer, then systems analyst
and IT manager and is currently a manager at a F100
company. He taught computer science and graduate
management courses at Roosevelt University for 18
years and has been teaching at the University of Chicago
part time for the last 5 years. He is
active in professional associations and is a popular
speaker at
conferences internationally .
He still plays guitar and sings around the house and
occasionally jams with friends and at open mikes at
local blues clubs.
In 1980, Brett produced demo 45's
for two Chicago groups - the Marquis and
Strange
Circuits.
Some
links to Brett related sites:
Brett's sons Justin and
Devin...
More about:
Robbie Bob
Steve Stories
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