I Want A Shot of the Magic Kingom

David Kamm Shouts! “I Want A Shot of the Magic Kingdom!” There’s enough tension in the air to raise the hair on the back of every cat in town. And Davis Kamm is quite a cat himself. He’s the cat who yells the loudest in Burlington’s urban folk nightmare Famous Potato. And he’s yelling up a whole mess of quirky tales about love and hate and anger and desperation and characters you might not mind running into in the middle of the night and then some that you just might. Famous Potato is folk because they tell very rural sounding stories about the land and the people who inhabit it. Famous Potato is urban because they scream and shout and make you nervous all over again. And they’re a nightmare because they want to be a nightmare. Nightmares are always interesting. And they always make you nervous. We chose Famous Potato as the cover story for the very first issue of Good Citizen because they represent what we’re hoping to be all about. They create original music in Vermont. They’re relatively unknown to most Vermonters. They manufacture and market their own music.  Bands like Famous Potato work very hard and they receive embarrassingly little support. We’d like to help change that. We’d like to encourage people to turn off the mass-produced, mass-marketed and same-as-it-ever-was music they’re listening to and turn on to local sounds. There’s some amazing music being made in Vermont… your support will help it become history. What can you do? Call the radio station you regularly listen to and tell them that you would appreciate some locally produced music being mixed in with their regular programming. Go out and see a local band. Tonight. Tomorrow night. And buy local music. CD’s, tapes, singles. Please. 

   Speaking of history, here’s mine: My British expatriate parents landed me in Monkton, Vermont a painfully long time about. I graduated from Mount Abraham Union High School and attended Johnson State College. While at college I was music director and general manager of WJSC and started my real obsession with music and the whole idea of turning people onto new tunes. And my obsession with locally produced music started with a band from Johnson called pinhead. They released two albums on their own B-Sharp Records in the early eighties. The whole DIY (Do it yourself) work ethic rocked my world. Anyone can do it. I owe my current occupation to that band and that realization. And I owe the name of this magazine to one of their songs “Be a Good Citizen.” And I find it pretty cool that I’m not friends with Mia Sladyk, the current general manager of WJSC, who was in elementary school in Johnson when I was at the college. Round and round and round and round. 

    I should also add that I am in a band. A band that, coincidentally enough, started in Johnson. My can is called Chin Ho! And we’re an alternative, original music group with three recordings available. We own Monastery Records and put out our own music. We’ve been doing that for four years. We’ve played in Johnson and Lyndonville and St. Albans and South Royalton and Bennington and Middlebury and Montpelier. Just last summer we got to stand on the stages and Ben and Jerry’s One World One Heart Festival and the Big Music Fest in Hardwick and the Vermont Jam ‘94 in Johnson and people were forced to listen to our music. Pretty cool experiences. Pretty cool way to spend the summer. I like this state and I like a good percentage of the people who live here. It’s a damn hard place to make a living as a musician…especially if you want to make original music.

   And last year I founded Split Records with my friend Brad Searles and we’ve put out five vinyl 45’s with a total of ten Burlington bands. They’re available at locally owned record stores throughout Vermont. We started Split to help out some of the bands that we were into.  We send Split singles out to radio stations and press all around the country as a way of bringing attention to the bands and to the Burlington music scene. We’ve been written up in Atlanta and Seattle and North Carolina and California. And every article says “Good job, Burlington.” I’m into people hearing the music of my home. I’m into the idea that I know people who make music as totally brilliant as Famous Potato or Slush or the Pants. And I want to help them make more of it. If that’s what I can do, then I’ll do it. If you want to do better…well, I want you to do better. We will all gain if you do. But please…shut up and do it. Or help me do it. I don’t dig whiners or people who slam the hard work of other people. We can get that right out of the way: I’m into positive actions. And I’m not one of the “too cool” people who devote all their energies to tearing apart other people's work. Sorry. 

    Enough already. This is our first issue and I hope that there will be many more. We will be a success if you find something in here that you want to go out and buy and we’ve helped divert some of your money to a Vermont artist. And, be a Good Citizen.