It appears that people discovered this obscure 1983 album several years ago and it's legend just grew. Recently, they found a sequel, a 1985 album at Recordland in Inglewood.
It's one of the biggest threads on Hipinion and the albums have won accolades worldwide and seems to be a phenomenon in musicphile and vinyl circles for their authenticity, ethereal, rawness, anachronism, and sometimes disturbing quality.
People are still trying to identify and find Randall. He's undoubtedly from Calgary. His mother worked at the Bay. He lived in Hawaii and back in Calgary in the 70s with a much older American girlfriend who described him as perpetually broke and trying to scrape by. At some point, he appeared to have adopted a Miami Vice looking lifestyle, jet-setting around with money, booze, girls, and a white Mercedes and claiming that his wealth came from being a stock broker in the 80s. He has been potentially ID'd as being in Vancouver in 2002 recording as a Randy Duke but hasn't been seen or heard from since.
There are a lot of interesting Calgary connections. The 2nd album was worked on by the Calgary recording engineers that founded Q Sound (remember from all the Capcom arcade games in the 90s?).
I just spent the last 2 hours listening to his albums and reading through that entire thread on hiponion and feel like locating this album in town.
http://forums.hipinion.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=65579
You can read that yourself, it was pretty funny seeing the devotion and memes about some guy from Calgary 30 years ago and exciting to see the posts when the 2nd album was first discovered and put on Ebay by Recordland and sold for $1800.
Hilarious. I know the owners of Recordland and that guy has been his Facebook profile pic for a few weeks now. I had no idea who it was, thought it was Don Johnsons brother.
Doesn't surprise me they found the album there though. The Cohens have a HUGE record collection.
I'm still not convinced this whole thing isn't a hoax. It's just too incredible to be, well, credible. That said, I enjoy both Lewis cds even if they are over-the-top schmaltzy.
__________________
The great CP is in dire need of prunes!
"That's because the productive part of society is adverse to giving up all their wealth so you libs can conduct your social experiments. Experience tells us your a bunch of snake oil salesman...Sucks to be you." ~Calgaryborn 12/06/09 keeping it really stupid!
Legend of Calgary Artist Lewis
