Tell Me, Poor Girls, Where is Ricky Lee Now?

By Chuk Baxter

Ricky Lee began playing guitar when he was 9 years old, some 38 years ago, in his hometown of Crothersville, IN. His first successful band came in the late 1960's, when he replaced another kid named John Mellencamp as the bass player for a Seymour, I• R&B band called Crepe Soul. That group featured a pure soulful vocalist, Freddy Booker, as well as drummer Duane Zimmerman (Bob's cousin).

Ricky Lee has always been a prolific painter, and he attended art school throughout the 1970's at the Louisville School of Art, Fairleigh Dickenson in New Jersey, and Columbia in NYC. Frustrated by the formalism of art school, Ricky Lee quit school just 16 hours short of a doctorate degree in fine art, and devoted his full energies to pursuing his individual artistic vision.

When Ricky Lee returned to Louisville, he played a few shows with Louisville's first punk band, No Fun, and recorded with Bobby Idol & the All-Stars. From 1980 through 1982, he played driving bass with the Mindpods, a ferocious experience featuring Bill Barney on guitar, Becky Venus on vocals and Mike Drummer, uh, drummer.

In 1982, Ricky Lee and an Indiana friend, Kenny O. Williams, founded Poor Girls as an artistic tribal collective, as prolific with paintbrushes as with beatnik punk songwriting. Playing frequently at Tewligans, the Beat club and the few other Louisville venues available, Poor Girls became focused as a 4-piece rock outfit, releasing one cassette and one album of unique tunes, recorded at Jeff Carpenter's Real to Reel studio. In addition to Ricky Lee's bass and Kenny O.'s vocals, Chuk Baxter (that's me) played guitar and Barry Stucker drummed. Other occasional participants in the noise included Roea Wallace on pots, pans and kitchen chairs, and Pierre Vendette on sax. The group moved to Philadelphia in 1985 seeking East Coast opportunities and an eventual chance to go play Amsterdam. The band shared stages with groups as diverse as the quirky Violent Femmes and the hard-rocking UK Subs and Big Black. Unfortunately, Poor Girls left another recording project unfinished and unmixed in Philly when they broke up in late 1986.

Through a series of splinter groups and free-wheeling jam ensembles, Ricky Lee kept playing and painting. In the early-mid 1990's he picked up a Stratocaster and led the Hools, a Bloomington, I• band, in persistent high-energy songcrafting. The Hools featured a world-class violin player, a powerful bass player, drumming, additional female vocals, and percussionist extrodinaire Rich Krupa.

Currently, Ricky Lee is playing acoustic guitar. Ricky Lee is some type of cross between John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Pablo Picasso.