John Lennon's TOOTH, and a CLONE IN LOVE...Reggie Knighton

A recent headline imagined the cloning of John Lennon's tooth, the only bit of matter that has survived of the cremated Beatle. The creepy publicity-mad dentist who owns it even has a website for it, with all kinds of nonsense about the cloning process (which, fortunately, is not yet perfected). The old fashioned way of replicating somebody works fairly well doesn't it? I mean, that first Julian Lennon album wasn't so bad, was it?

Why, there are people not even related to John Lennon who've done work worthy of him. I still have my promo press release on Reggie Knighton, where Columbia happily quotes L.A. Times writer Robert Hilburn: "There are traces in his work of Paul McCartney's simple melodic charm, John Lennon's primal urgency and John Fogerty's delta rhythms."

There's also more than a bit of 10cc in the selection below, "A Clone in Love," which isn't too surprising. Reggie's band opened for 10cc in support of the album that includes that track, which you'll find in the download link below, the standout on Reggie's eclectic, but sadly final album as a Columbia artist.

Despite the bulkiness of vinyl, and keeping promo copies and press releases, I've held on to Knighton's albums all these years, mostly because I liked the "Clone" song and Reggie's out-of-the-blue cover of the theme to the old TV show "Highway Patrol." And so it was a simple matter to convert "Clone" to mp3, and better to ponder it than the future of Lennon's tooth.

As for the future of Mr Knighton…well, he's one of many restless 60-somethings who'd like to get back into the game in some way or other. He was in The Grass Roots in the mid 70's, worked on John Sebastian's "Welcome Back" album in 1976, and finished out the 70's with his two albums on Columbia. When they dropped him, he began to consider a day job…and eventually disappeared into the burgeoning world of technology, if not cloning: "I was involved in the development of a graphical user interface for a checkbook size personal computer back in the mid 80's. and in the early 90's I helped design a traditional recording console's on screen graphical representation as part of a (at the time) state of the art automation system for a Neve console."

Knighton may yet return to what Record Review Magazine admiringly noted as more than just good rock music: "It's the lyrics and their ironic absurdity with underlying meaning that give real strength…" to his work. Meaning, he might be able to come up with something quite startling in a new song, and not have to just clone "A Clone in Love."

REGGIE KNIGHTON A CLONE IN LOVE