John Ciambotti
John Ciambotti was a bass player from Mill Valley, California, a founding member of the country-rock band Clover, which backed Elvis Costello on his 1977 debut album My Aim Is True. He later played on records by Lucinda Williams, John Prine and Carlene Carter, and after leaving the road he became a chiropractor who specialized in musicians’ injuries.
He was born on 6 September 1942 in Mill Valley. Clover formed there in 1967 out of the Bay Area band Tiny Hearing Aid Company, with Alex Call on vocals and guitar, John McFee on guitar and pedal steel, Ciambotti on bass and Mitch Howie on drums, and moved from psychedelia toward country rock. Fantasy Records released the albums Clover in 1970 and Fourty Niner in 1971.
The band later moved to Britain, where the lineup grew to a sextet with Huey Lewis, then billed as Huey Louis, on vocals and harmonica and Sean Hopper on keyboards. Signed to Vertigo, they made the album Unavailable and then Love on the Wire in 1977, both produced by Robert John “Mutt” Lange, and toured Britain supporting Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy and Graham Parker and the Rumour. In 1977 Ciambotti, McFee, Hopper and the drummer Micky Shine backed Elvis Costello on My Aim Is True, uncredited for contractual reasons. Clover broke up in 1978.
Back in the United States he played bass with McFee and Hopper on Carlene Carter’s recordings of “Ring of Fire” and “Too Proud” for her album Musical Shapes (1980). He was in the Lucinda Williams Band on her 1988 Rough Trade album Lucinda Williams, playing upright and electric bass, played bass on John Prine’s The Missing Years (1991), and played upright and electric bass on Williams’s Sweet Old World (1992). He played bass on the title song of Jim Lauderdale’s Pretty Close to the Truth (1994) and on every track of Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), switching to upright bass for “Jackson.” He had given up touring in the late 1980s to become a chiropractor, opening his own office, which catered to musicians and other entertainers.
On 8 November 2007 Ciambotti, McFee and Hopper reunited with Costello for two benefit concerts in San Francisco, with Pete Thomas on drums, playing My Aim Is True. He died in Glendale, California, on 24 March 2010, aged 67.
