Mount Ephraim's Ben Vaughn returns.
Off the tube and back to his own music
It's ironic, Ben Vaughn was musing from his home in Santa Monica, Calif.
"My strong suit all along, I thought, was my lyric writing. But the minute I shut my mouth, everything took off."
The music maven from Mount Ephraim, Camden County, was referring to his great success in TV. After building a reputation in the Philadelphia area and beyond as a retro-minded rocker with a wry, often deadpan lyrical bent, he really hit the jackpot when he left for California in 1995 in his trusty Rambler. That's when he found work for more than a decade creating soundtrack music for the sitcoms 3rd Rock From the Sun, That '70s Show, and Men Behaving Badly.
As lucrative as those gigs were, however, they came with a price.
"Hollywood painted me as an instrumental artist, very successfully," Vaughn says. "That's where my image may stay if I didn't do something about it."
And so he is. Now that Vaughn's no longer "swept up in the vortex of episodic TV," the 55-year-old singer and guitarist is back to focusing on his own music. Among his projects so far are three volumes of Vaughn Sings Vaughn, albums that mix new material with rerecorded versions of old favorites like "I Dig Your Wig" and "I'm Sorry (But So Is Brenda Lee)." A fourth volume is in the can.
Vaughn has also become a disc jockey. His one-hour show, The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn, airs in four markets, including in Philadelphia on WXPN-FM (88.5) at 5 p.m. Saturdays.
"It's my version of the history of music," says Vaughn, who does a theme show once a month but, taking his cue from the show's title, otherwise keeps it pretty free-form. A segment from one recent show segued from Bobby Womack to Link Wray, Fred Neil, Paul McCartney, the Stooges, and Merle Haggard.
As you'd expect from a guy who says he has "a huge record collection that ends in 1972," you won't hear much that's new.
"There's so much music that has already happened that no one has played," he says. "Chasing new music is a hard job, and it's not something that comes naturally to me."
For this Philly homecoming gig, Vaughn will be joined by four of his old musical compadres. And opening the show will be his former sound man, Dan Montgomery, who has developed into a superb singer and songwriter in his own right.
After leaving town, Vaughn will head to Austin, Texas, where he will cut some new songs with Tex-Mex legend Augie Meyers, the king of the Vox organ, and other hotshot Lone Star musicians who once played with the late Doug Sahm. He's not yet sure what will become of the results, but -
"What I've learned in the current music business is, if you have an idea and you're excited about it, don't think about what the market is going to do with it. Otherwise you won't ever start the project."