Post Description

Louisiana"s LeRoux (a.k.a. LeRoux) is a pop (rock) band founded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA that saw its heyday from 1978-1983. Their biggest hits were "Take a Ride On a Riverboat" with its 4-part a capella intro, the regional smash "New Orleans Ladies", "Nobody Said It Was Easy (Lookin" For the Lights)" (their highest charting single), "Addicted", and "Carrie"s Gone". Their music, though pop-oriented, combined many elements such as funk, R&B, Dixieland jazz, rock, and some Cajun-flavoring, thus defying a pigeonhole into one definable category like many other diverse Louisiana artists, common to an area known for its many musical influences and tastes. The band continues to perform live throughout the U.S. including a handful of shows at fairs and festivals back home in Louisiana in 2008 and 2009.


In 1977 several former members of a group called the Levee Band, who had been playing as backup players for Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, signed a deal with Capitol Records as The Jeff Pollard Band. But by early 1978, they had changed their name to Louisiana"s LeRoux, which refers to roux, a Cajun gravy base used to make gumbo. All of the songs on the self-titled 1978 debut album were sung and written by Pollard except the big, "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, the band was 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 towards 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 and included their only Top 40 single, "Nobody Said It Was Easy", which reached #18 in early 1982. Addicted reached #77 that summer. Other changes were in store as Campo and Pollard both quit later that year, with the latter renouncing rock music and entering 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 January 1983) and they scored a minor hit with "Carrie"s Gone" (#79) which Odom and Frederiksen had written after Frederiksen"s break up with actress Carrie Hamilton, who was Carol Burnett"s daughter. It wasn"t enough to keep them from being dropped by RCA and the band called it quits by 1984. Frederiksen then stepped in to replace(former Levee Band member) Bobby Kimball in the band Toto.