Le Roux (band) - Albums

Albums

In 1977 several former members of a group called the Levee Band, who had been playing as backup players for Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and Clifton Chenier, signed a deal with Capitol Records as The Jeff Pollard Band. Leon Medica, the band's producer and bassist, had presented a demo tape to Paul Tannen at Screen Gems-EMI while doing a session in Nashville and making trips to Colorado to contribute bass parts to a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album at William McEuen's Aspen recording Society Studios. McEuen, Tanney, and Attorney John Frankenheimer helped Medica secure the contract with Capitol.

By early 1978, they had changed their name to Louisiana's LeRoux, which refers to roux, a Cajun gravy base used to make gumbo. The band was originally composed of Jeff Pollard (vocals, guitars), David Peters (drums, percussion, backing vocals), Leon Medica (bass, backing vocals), Tony Haselden (vocals, guitars), Rod Roddy (vocals, keyboards, synthesizers), and Bobby Campo (horns, percussion, violin, backing vocals). All of the songs on the self-titled 1978 debut album were sung and written by Pollard, except "New Orleans Ladies", which was written by Medica and Hoyt Garrick. It reached #59 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1978. Two more albums followed (Keep The Fire Burnin' in 1979, and Up in 1980), but after neither was able to expand the band's fan base, they were dropped by Capitol.

Starting with the Jai Winding-produced Up, they dropped "Louisiana's" from their name and became simply "LeRoux". At this point they began to move toward a more AOR-friendly sound. In 1981 they signed with RCA and issued their 4th LP, Last Safe Place, which was their highest-charting album. The album spawned three hit Billboard singles in 1982: "Addicted" (#8 Mainstream Rock), "Nobody Said It Was Easy (Lookin' For the Lights)" (#18 Hot 100), and the minor-charting "Last Safe Place On Earth" (#77 Hot 100).

Other changes were in store as Campo and Pollard both quit later that year, with the former returning to school to complete his Master's degree in music and the latter renouncing rock music to enter the Baptist Christian ministry, where he remains today. Fergie Frederiksen and guitarist Jim Odom took over for Pollard on the 5th album, So Fired Up (which was released in February 1983). The album contained the minor-charting "Carrie's Gone" (#79 Hot 100), which Odom and Frederiksen had written after Frederiksen's breakup with actress Carrie Hamilton, Carol Burnett's daughter. The music video for the band's second single "Lifeline" also received MTV rotation. It wasn't enough to keep them from being dropped by RCA, however, and the band called it quits by 1984. Frederiksen then stepped in to replace (former Levee Band member) Bobby Kimball in the band Toto.