Streaming Everywhere Now: The Complete Lennan Records Discography
Over twenty years ago, when we went to reissue Lil’ Lavair and the Fabulous Jade’s funk masterpiece “Cold Heat,” we had one source for the audio: a CD-R that the Scottish collector and DJ Keb Darge had given Egon. At the time, Egon had only heard the group’s A-side, “I’ll Be So Happy,” once, at Keb’s Deep Funk night in London, where he played the Northen Soul classic as a favor to our erstwhile founder. He’d owned the record for years, but never really rated the track. And it was in that Deep Funk era in which Lil’ Lavair’s fortunes changed, and with them, those of Leonard Wojtowicz and his small Southern California concern, Lennan Records.
Wojtowicz was a Polish Holocaust survivor who made his way to America with his family after World War II. He was a lifelong fan of music, and he went by the moniker “Polka Leonard,” his preferred genre, and the subject of a long running radio show he hosted. When Egon first contacted him for a Lil’ Lavair license, Wojtowicz granted it, with the caveat that Egon would have to find the band himself: he had lost contact with this mixed group of Mexican and Black Americans teenagers shortly after their record saw release in the San Bernardino area.
With the release of the Now-Again anthology Cold Heat, Egon did find the band. Or, rather, the band found him: the band’s trombonist, a principal in San Bernardino, saw the album and contacted him. It was in short order, at that same high school, that Lil’ Lavair and the Fabulous Jades reunited – for the first time in over 30 years – for a piece around their improbable rediscovery in the San Bernardino Sun.
Lil’ Lavair and the Fabulous Jades, circa 1968. Courtesy Ralph Payan.
A year or so, later Egon received a call from Wojtowicz. “I’m moving to New Mexico,” he declared. “And I’ve found some of my records at my house. Come get them – they’re yours if you want them.” A few hours later and Egon was standing in the threshold to the Upland, California home that Wojtowicz had built forty years prior, looking at stacks of 45s and LP’s – nearly all polka – and, there amongst the Ukrainian school boy cum polka jamboree band issues, was a small stack of Lennan 45s. The Chocolate Light Bulbs. Flames Ltd. And Lil’ Lavair and the Fabulous Jades masterwork.
Wojtowicz didn’t have any master tapes, and he didn’t even have a copy of each of his Lennan 45s. It’s taken us the better part of two decades to assemble them all and collate them into an anthology that spans the entirety of Lennan Records’ discography, and showcases the regional talent that Wojtowicz discovered and attempted to break in this threshold to the Southwestern Desert.