Sugar Daddy

Lynette
with
Kai-Ray & Crew
(Richard A. Caire, Lingua-Musica BMI)


Sugar Daddy

Backed by Kai-Ray and his Crew. Kai-Ray is Richard Caire, of "Trashman's Blues,"  The song was the namesake for the Trashmen, a Minneapolis group widely known for the 1963 hit "Surfin' Bird," and for whom Caire would later write songs.

Richard Caire, by all accounts, was not a very talkative guy about his own music. There was an (unsuccessful) interview attempt by James Marshall (ironically titled Kai Ray, the legend tells James Marshall everything) published in 1992 by Kicks Magazine #7, p.19, followed by a short discography. And according to his daughter Julie Devereaux, a Boston radio DJ :

Although conversations with her father always revolved around music, she didn't learn of his own musical accomplishments until the internet emerged."It was surprising that he didn't talk about it," she said. "It's just something that he had, that he maybe didn't realize how important it was."

Richard Caire died in 1981 (see StarTribune article). We can therefore no longer count on him to have some info on Lynette . . .

Sugar Daddy

Lynette

with Kai-Ray and Crew

Sugar Daddy

Richard A. Caire, Lingua-Musica BMI

Lodestar 74-62

1962

This is the flipside of "Limbo, Limbo" by Kai-Ray and Crew which was a minor hit on KUTT, Fargo, North Dakota and KXLW, St. Louis, Missouri in 1962.

Minneapolis-based Trashmen, of “Surfin’ Bird” fame, took their name from Kai-Ray’s first release on Lodestar ("Trashman's Blues).  

Richard A. Caire, or Kai-Ray or Shane Kai-Ray or Tony Caire came from Wichita, Kansas. He and his band played for some time at the Five Spot bar in Fargo, North Dakota before moving to Minneapolis.  He played lead guitar for several other Minnesota groups, most notably The Bandits and King Krusher & The Turkeynecks.  He was the first in the Twin Cities to have a fuzztone on his guitar (1964). He was also a songwriter, producer and small-time label owner (Kairay label).

A Kai-Ray discography can be found here.  The earliest Kai-Ray known record is on Lodestar in 1961, but I've found a song penned by Richard A. Caire and copyrighted in November 1958, titled "It's Called The Blues".

 

 Lodestar trademark

The label name was taken from the Lockheed Lodestar 

twin engine aircraft that was produced in the late 1930s.

Clarence B. Brown had started his first label, Pleasant Peasant (old time "oompah" music), in 1958. He was living in Seattle at the time.  In January 1959 he moved to Minnesota. The center of his activity was New Ulm, Minnesota. with a close connection to Brown's Music Store, owned by an uncle of C.B.Brown.   

The Lodestar label was started in as an outlet for pop music, with one brief Country/Western album. Even though address of Pleasant Peasant and Lodestar was listed as Minneapolis, it was actually Bloomington, Mn, a southern suburb of Minneapolis and about a 90 mile drive from New Ulm.

Most of the recordings were performed at Kay Bank Studios in Minneapolis.