Doug Hream Blount

San Franciso funk outsider Doug Hream Blunt has been championed by the likes of Ariel Pink and
former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt, who took his name. David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint
makes the once obscure Blunt readily acccessible with the My Name Is compilation.

Featured Tracks:
"Ride the Tiger" — Doug Hream BluntVia SoundCloud
Even with assistance from the Internet, some cult records still have to travel off beaten paths, their
pleasures imparted by friends in the know. Just how I came to know about a singer from San
Francisco named Doug Hream Blunt four years ago, I am not exactly certain, though I suspect it
was on a tip from either a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti or else Park Blvd. Records co-
owner Jason Darrah. But the moment that pneumatic, rinky-dink keyboard figure that opens "Fly
Guy" wheezed and wormed into my ears, I was charmed and confounded. The sleeve art was
nothing but a generic white sleeve with a gold sticker advertising the 'hit' "Gentle Persuasion" and it
was hard to tell if it was a put-on or else proof that outsider music could remain relevant and vital in
an age when any musician could upload his music to MySpace and be discovered, when most clues
could be tracked down with a simple Google search. I’m not the only one besotted by Hream Blunt,
as Ariel Pink is a champion, while former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt posits himself as the
progeny of the man.
Once hovering in obscurity and mystery, My Name Is makes Doug Hream Blunt readily accessible
thanks to David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint, no stranger to tracking down itchy, quirky folks like
William Onyeabor and Tom Zé. Even as the comp clarifies some of the Frisco fog that enshrouded
that self-released CD and its bootlegged 12", there remains a slippery, eel-like quality to these 10
songs. We learn in the liner notes that in the mid '80s as a 35-year-old prone to taking odd jobs,
Blunt answered a flyer for a workshop called 'How to Form a Band.' Nevermind it was intended for
Bay Area teens, Blunt approached the classes with a similar sense of the naïf, imparting that spirit
onto the other adult students, four of them women who comprise his band.
There's the spirit of the Troggs, the Shaggs, and Half Japanese to the grooves, something stupid yet
undeniable, unlearned yet impossible to replicate. The whinnying, cyclical keyboard figure that
Jeannie Killmer repeats ad nauseam on "Fly Guy" brings to mind '90s Ethiopian pop as well as what
you might come up with at Guitar Center on a synth using the flute patch and your thumb. Even
more charming and baffling are the lyrics, where Blunt makes a streetwise observation about
capitalism: "The rich use paper then they charge you more," talks about teaching the youth and then
adds: "Girl, I just wanna chill."
A similarly simple yet inveigling melody and needling guitar sidewinds through the wobbly boogie
of said hit, "Gentle Persuasion". For all the speculation as to what it means "to do the ninety-nine",
the notes just equivocate it to the mystery dance itself. Still, it takes a certain kind of Romeo to
make a panty-dropping non sequitur of "like ice, your butt is like dice now, daaaamn."
Charming as those two tracks are, they both run past six minutes and verge on exhausting. But as
"Big Top", "Caribbean Queen", and "Break Free" reveal, Blunt sets about recycling both melodies
onto other songs to where their appeal becomes threadbare. Perhaps in keeping with the Haight-
Ashbury spirit of his home, each song also contains extended, aimless guitar soloing. And while he
might have a two-track mind musically, it's solely one track when it comes to his primary theme.
Outside of the last song (an instrumental version of "Fly Guy"), the other nine share a similar beat
and subject, the word "girl" uttered in every song. So even as My Name Is pulls back the curtain on
Doug Hream Blunt’s mystery music, it also makes clear that the opposite sex will always remain
one to him.
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