The Ballad of James Killingsworth

Back in the early Aughts, I worked for a company called ARS, and Brad York was my right-hand man. Brad and I sat across from each other with four or five other people in a dingy little office that had once been the card room of a golf course clubhouse, luxuriating beneath sagging drop-ceiling tiles in the soft glow of a dozen monitors. We passed the time the way bored, vaguely overqualified people in low-paying jobs always do—with jokes. Elaborate ones, preferably with a long tail. We committed to the bit.

One of our best was about James Killingsworth.

James worked upstairs in what could charitably be described as a closet. He was quiet, polite, a little older than the rest of us. Seemed harmless, at least to most of us. The coworker that shared the closet with him, Van Zant, said he thought James was going to turn him into a lamp. But nah, James was an unassuming, nice guy. Which made him perfect for what we had in mind.

We told Rodney—another coworker, smart, skeptical, tech-savvy—that James used to be a studio musician. A bass player. Never a frontman, we said. No, never that flashy. Mostly studio work, we told him, low profile. Brad tossed out Bread. I added the Lovin’ Spoonful. Rodney squinted, asked questions. We nodded and said yeah, man, it’s all out there if you look hard enough.

So we made it true.

We edited dozens of obscure Wikipedia pages. We listed James Killingsworth as providing "meditation and inspiration" in the credits to the album The Feeding by metal band American Head Charge. We added James Killingsworth’s name to the liner notes of Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man. Said he played bass and cello on tracks 4 and 13.

We rewrote the page for Kak—the self-titled debut album of a psychedelic San Francisco band nobody but record store lifers remember—to say James was a founding member who left under mysterious circumstances that doomed the once promising band. An actual member of Kak changed it back. We changed it again. Wikipedia messaged us. We replied, in earnest: “Who are you going to trust? The guy who played with the Lovin’ Spoonful or this dude claiming to be Kak’s lead singer?” Perhaps it was because they were unwilling to doubt the word of James Killinsgworth...perhaps because they realized that no one gave a shit about the band Kak...Wikipedia simply removed the page for the album and the band altogether, and Kak wasn't enshrined in internet history until someone (I'm guessing the aforementioned lead singer) rebuilt the page in 2021.

Unlike the name of whoever was the lead singer of Kak, for a little while James Killingsworth existed on the internet as a real part of music history.

His biggest claim to fame was the Blinky page. You remember Blinky? Probably not. Her foremost achievement was singing the Good Times theme. We slipped in a line about her song I Wouldn’t Change the Man He Is being “reportedly written about Lovin’ Spoonful studio bassist James Killingsworth.” No one noticed. It stayed.

Years passed. Rodney eventually moved on. I did too. The whole place is gone, and the building was abandoned for a long time. Brad died in 2013 long before his time. And James? He actually thought the whole thing was pretty funny, even though he was no where near old enough to have even listened to, let alone jammed with, the Lovin' Spoonful. James is gone now as well. But every so often, usually around April 4th or so, a celebrity birthday website or AI scraper resurrects that old fiction.

“Happy birthday to James Killingsworth,” it says. “Studio bassist for the Lovin’ Spoonful and rumored inspiration for the Blinky soul classic I Wouldn’t Change the Man He Is.”

And in that weird echo chamber where internet myth becomes fact, I remember that dark office with the inexplicable sink in the middle, and Brad bullshitting in his deep bass voice about the subtleties of turkey-cheese or about James playing bass for the Lovin' Spoonful. I remember the way we used to amuse ourselves by bending reality just enough to make something stick. We didn’t know it then, but we’d made a ghost. A real one. And the damned thing’s still out there, grinning, every time some bot or blogger wishes a happy birthday to a man who never played bass for the Lovin’ Spoonful.

We were lucky. In a lot of ways, I think we all knew those were the good old days while we were in them. I often find myself missing that time and those people. I miss Brad. But sometimes, like when I see James Killingsworth’s name and legacy as a first-call bass player and song-inspirer floating through the digital ether, it really hits home. Those jokes, it seems, had a very long punchline, and they still make me smile.