Dec. 1, 1973: Debby Ash and Mike Campagna

Another talented spinoff from Spoon and the House Rockers.

Dec. 1, 1973 

Couple Leaves Rock Band for Acoustic Music 

“IT WAS AN OMEN,” Debby Campagna reflects. “It would have been wrong to turn it down.”

          On the strength of that omen, Debby, who sings under her maiden name, Debby Ash, and her husband, guitarist Mike Campagna, have forsaken the demands of leading a rock ‘n roll band for the quieter joys of acoustic music.

          The sign came about a month ago in the praise they got after their first acoustic appearance, sharing the bill at a UB Norton Hall Coffeehouse with singer-songwriter Eric Kaz, who is one of their favorites.

          Like most omens, it just came out of the blue. The UB Coffeehouse people had seen them with their band, the All-Stars, in a Hertel Avenue club and called them to fill in when another act canceled out.

          It came at an auspicious time, as well. At that point, the meteoric All-Stars were falling to pieces in a fashion all too common lately among Buffalo bands, their seven-member collaboration burning out in discouragement and frustration after a few weeks of breakneck enthusiasm and heady inspiration.

* * *

“PEOPLE REALLY liked us,” Debby recalls. “Everybody was playing out of their thing and it all fit. It was very spontaneous.”

          “There were boundaries,” Mike adds, “but we got to the point where everybody could play together well and create. We got to where the energy was.

          “But we went as far as we could go and we couldn’t find new places to play. There isn’t enough club work around Buffalo right now to support more than two or three bands like ours.”

          The All-Stars also were notable for being blues singer Elmo Weatherspoon’s third and last full-time band before he abandoned his brief comeback late in the summer.

          “We’d do two sets and then he’d come in from the second shift at the Chevy plant to finish up the night,” Mike says, “but playing four nights and working got to be too much for him.

* * *

“WE’D NEVER really rehearse his stuff. He’d just tell us the key and we were supposed to take it from there. But it was a good experience. It taught us a lot.”

          This night is Mike and Debby’s third acoustic outing, filling in between sets by David Drullard, a folksinger who sounds something like Neil Young, in the big back room of an old-time tavern south of Hamburg.

          This unlikely club arrangement is the brainchild of a lanky, intense young man named Doug Belcher, who loves acoustic music and wants to organize an upstate cooperative among folk clubs and folksingers.

          His first task, however, is to start up a successful folk showcase in the Buffalo area. And since the proprietor of the North Boston tavern doesn’t want to invest the additional time and patience to nurture the venture, this is the last folk night here. Dour Belcher slouches, wondering where to try next.

* * *

MIKE AND DEBBY, meanwhile, show they can move a gathering no matter what the circumstances. They do it with just seven songs – a couple Eric Kaz tunes, some rock numbers and a blues – in two abbreviated sets.

          Debby, in addition to having a fascinating repertoire of facial expressions and an easy stage manner, has a simply fabulous voice.

          She sounds like a cousin to Tracy Nelson (whom she greatly admires) and Maria Muldaur. And her vocal control is matched by a sense of playful invention that can send a note lilting like a falling leaf before she brings it in for a pinpoint landing.

          Mike, smiling like he’s just as charmed by his wife’s voice as everyone else is, picks off slide guitar licks and quick single-note leads lines that testify to his experience in rock.

* * *

WHEN HE CALLS Willie McDermott, a burly college friend of his brother’s from whom he learned ‘50s rock guitar, up to join in a blues song, it’s clear that another guitar playing rhythm would be a worthy addition. Debby says she’s working on guitar so she can do just that.

          When they finish, they retreat to the wooden booths in the barroom out front to talk about ideals and goals and the past.

          Mike’s 25 and grew up in North Buffalo with his uncle, Leonard Catalano, who played with Benny Goodman and Louis Prima, to look up to. Though he always wanted to be a guitarist, he started out on bass.

          “It was the easiest thing in the beginning,” he says.

          A football player at Bennett High School, he started music seriously after graduation, first with Oyster & The Atomic Parakeets (“We were into setting off smoke bombs and stuff”), later delving into tonal clusters and white sound with Cisum Revival.

          “You had to be pretty spaced out to get into it,” he says. “We were into a lot of ideas at that point. Now I’m more into composition and making things more understandable.”

* * *

DEBBY, 22, also is from North Buffalo and remembers as a child going to church for the music.

          “I changed churches once,” she says, “because I didn’t like the singing.”

          In Bennett High, she became associated with the Buffalo Theater Workshop.

          “We did acting, improvisation, mime, dancing, singing, it was everything,” she says.

          “It’s important because it shaped a lot of my attitudes toward performing,” she explains. “One of the things they stressed was awareness of self and awareness of others and that everybody’s the star, man.

          “All this time I’d always hated rock ‘n roll. The stuff I heard on AM radio didn’t move me. Mike, he turned me onto good music, the Grateful Dead. It was like an electric symphony, everybody would be soloing and it all fit.”

          With that, Debby quit UB, where she was majoring in drama, married Mike and devoted her energies to learning as much as she could about music and listening to an incredible variety of records ranging from Balinese music to Charlie Parker.

* * *

IN THE WAKE of the All-Stars, her first band, she doesn’t want to do another rock group. Not if there’s the same problems of self-expression. She and Mike want to be free to work out their own musical ideas.

          “We’re very personal in what we want to present,” Debby says. “It’s just energy wasted when you’re with people who don’t believe in themselves or what they’re doing. Because all you have to do is say yes and you can do anything that you want to do.”

          “That’s why we’re trying to have people around us who are really aware of that,” Mike says, “like our sound engineers Dave Parry and Mike Solomon. They’re people who have talent and care.

          “There’s the two of us the way we are at home and the two of us the way we are out playing. In our living room back home, that’s where it’s happening. We’re trying to bring the living room out into the club.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Mike Campagna and Debby Ash.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Michael Campagna had quite a background in the blues before he became an All-Star behind Elmo Weatherspoon. Inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2014, his bio tells about his teenage nights playing with James Peterson in the Governor’s Inn and how he had an offer to go on the road to play bass with Freddie King.

          However, that was about the time he and Deborah were getting married. They didn’t hit the highway until 1975, after Bonnie Raitt heard them in the Bona Vista and said go West.

          In L.A., they worked with Chaka Khan (they shared management) and saw her record two of their songs. They also wrote songs for Jennifer Holliday and Maxine Nightingale and did club dates with a band that included Chick Corea’s son Thad on drums.

Michael toured and recorded with the experimental group Psychic TV, led a band called the Average Johnsons and hooked with session drum whiz Gary Mallaber on that band and a bunch of other projects. According to his BMHOF bio, they’ve written more than 100 songs. He also is creative director for the South Pasadena Music Center and Conservatory.

Deborah is still in L.A. and comes home to Buffalo occasionally (I saw her in a club on Hertel Avenue one night back before the pandemic and she’s still in great voice). Her LinkedIn page describes her as a “diva soul singer, songwriter, playwright” and notes that her paintings appeared in the film “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.”

         When they were married, she and Michael spent some time in India as adherents of spiritual master Meher Baba and they both currently turn up on the Meher Baba’s Life & Travels website, where her CDs are on display and links are available to her live performances.