Ric Menck

Best known because the drummer for power-pop cult favorites Velvet Crush, Ric Menck also recorded an endless group of indie label singles under a number of names like the Springfields and Choo Choo Teach. A indigenous of Champaign, Illinois, through the middle-1980s he shaped his very own label, Picture Reserve, to release materials by himself in addition to close friends and collaborators including Paul Chastain; possibly the perhaps most obviously of Menck’s early tasks was the Springfields, which between 1988 and 1990 released a set of outstanding singles — “Sunflower” and “Wonder” — in the renowned UK indie Sarah Information. Those same singles — in addition to materials from Choo Choo Teach — were afterwards collected in the LP The Ballad of Ric Menck, released in the Summershine label in 1996.