Ken Champion likes to joke that he hasn’t worked a day since 1969–the year he became a professional musician. In the 70s he played guitar in barnstorming bar bands, and in the 80s he was a journeyman pedal steel player gigging six nights a week; since the mid-90s, improbably enough, he’s been in demand as an indie-rock sideman.
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Champion, who grew up in Oshkosh, picked up his first guitar at 12 and developed an interest in jazz a few years later. Though he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a physics major in 1967, within a year he’d started playing in a variety of jazz and R & B outfits, and by ’69 he was making enough money gigging that he decided to drop out of school. Two years later he and several other Madison musicians formed a 50s rock revival group called Dr. Bop & the Headliners. “It started as a joke,” says Champion, “but it was so successful and so well received we decided to do it full-time.”
Nostalgia for the 50s was at a peak–it was the era of American Graffiti, Sha Na Na, and Happy Days–and Dr. Bop became a popular regional and national touring act. The band played a weeklong stand at the Whisky in LA in 1973, and in its heyday shared stages with Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, the Eagles, and Bob Hope–a fledgling Cheap Trick even opened a few shows.
A year or so after the first Owens bash in 1995, Champion got a call from O’Rourke. “I guess he’d heard about me somehow. I’d never heard of him,” Champion says. O’Rourke asked him to play on Smog’s Red Apple Falls, which he was producing for Drag City. Champion had done some demo work, recorded a few singles, and put out a live album with Dr. Bop, but he’d always been principally a stage musician–this would be his first significant studio experience.
“Steel guitar is not something that anybody gets overnight,” says Champion. “I started playing it in ’73, and I’m still learning new things. That’s one of the things I enjoy about teaching and playing with younger musicians. It keeps me on my toes.”
Price: Free
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