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CHARLIE BURTON | 1950-2024 Charlie Burton, the best-known and most acclaimed musician from Lincoln of the '70s, '80s and early '90s, died Sunday after a battle with cancer. He was 73. Burton, with his band Rock Therapy, captured the attention of the nation's rock critics in the late '70s with the release of his signature single "Rock 'n' Roll Behavior" and toured across the country in the '70s and '80s, playing legendary venues like New York's CBGB, Los Angeles' Club Lingerie and Austin's Continental Club.
"Just to be in The Village Voice, in Robert Christgau's 'Consumer Guide,' was, for the time, amazing," said Dave Boye, who played bass with Burton in the late '80s and early '90s. "You can't talk to anybody today who is younger to get them to understand how hard it was to become well known back then. You had to be different, cool, original and unique in some way to get any kind of attention and notoriety.
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Burton's uniqueness came from his idiosyncratic humorous rockabilly-rooted songs and his legendary live performances that usually found him out in the audience, singing from tables, rolling around on the floor, thrashing around on stage and delivering very funny monologues. Here's how the "dean of American rock critics" Christgau reviewed the debut album of Charlie Burton and the Cut-Outs "Is That Charlie Burton or What?!?!": "Burton's only competition among nouveau rockabilly composers is the Blasters' Dave Alvin, and like almost everyone with a knack for song form in 1982 he's flexible. In fact, his only remaining link to pure rockabilly is a fondness for novelty numbers like the factual 'Rabies Shots' and the utterly heretical 'Breathe for Me, Presley!,' and in the end his sense of humor is his limitation.
In rock and roll of any kind, you have to sing better than Robert Klein. B+". A 1968 Lincoln Southeast High School graduate, Burton attended Antioch College in Ohio, where he met critic Ed Ward, who prompted Burton to begin his music industry career as a critic, first as a Rolling Stone contributor, then as the magazine's country music critic.
He also wrote for Country Music magazine. Burton quit his rock critic career in 1973, when he returned to Lincoln to take over the family harpsichord factory. He almost immediately put together the '70s band the Star Spangled Wranglers, which was followed by the Megatones and then Rock Therapy, which broke out of Lincoln, powered by "Rock 'n' Roll Behavior.
" "I was a little wary at first," music producer Peter Jesperson writes of Rock Therapy's December 1979 booking at Jay's Longhorn Bar in Minneapolis. "Three nights for a band I'd never even heard of before? The A side of the single was called 'Rock 'n' Roll Behavior.' It was in a paper sleeve, the label said WILD in crude hand lettering and a xeroxed insert had a low quality photo of the band, looking like they were vomiting into buckets.
But when I auditioned the single in my headphones, I was instantly won over. "By the time the band hit town, a groundswell of support had built up. When they took the stage on Dec.
19, a good crowd was on hand, in spite of a nasty blizzard and the band blew everyone away. Charlie and the band became staples at the Longhorn, playing multiple night stands and packing the place several nights a year." Jesperson, who singled out Burton and his longtime drummer Dave Robel in the acknowledgments of his memoir "Euphoric Recall," also served as the connection between Burton and The Replacements, with whom the Lincoln rocker toured around the Heartland.
Over the years, Burton and company also shared the stage with a wide range of bands, leading him to joke that his was the only band to have opened for both REO Speedwagon and R.E.M.
Burton's handful of 45s almost instantly became collectors items, searched for and scooped up by the likes of R.E.M.
guitarist Peter Buck. Burton, whose humor came through in the names of his bands — the Cut-Outs, the Hiccups, the Go Gups, the Dorothy Lynch Mob — recorded four studio albums and the live "Puke Point at the Juke Joint" tracked at Omaha's now-defunct Lift Ticket Lounge. Locally, Burton served as the foundation for the now-prolific original music scene.
"Now, there are like 200 bands in Lincoln Exposed playing original music," Boye said. "Nobody in the 1980s played original music except Charlie Burton. And, more important, nobody made any money playing original music.
We did. It was always playing what we wanted, the way we wanted with Charlie doing all that crazy stuff." Burton moved to Austin, Texas, in 1991, where he joined up with guitarist Evan Johns and recorded under the band name the Texas Twelve Steppers.
He returned to Lincoln a decade later, where he continued to record — he released "Salad" with the Dorothy Lynch Mob, one of his best albums, in 2006 and performed in the past several years with the band "Or What?!?!". Burton also worked at Schmitt Music and managed Homer's Music in Lincoln until it closed in 2009. An avid record hound, Burton had a collection of more than 5,000 45s, many of them rare.
Burton is survived by his children Matt, Molly and Bill. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox!.
