Sounds From The Junkshop #113 - The Chesterfield Kings

 

"I'll have to learn to live without until my time is through..." - The Chesterfield Kings - Streaks And Flashes

It's safe to say that I was VERY late getting into the Chesterfield Kings. By the time I got wise to them, they were already two decades into their career and, indeed, would split up after just one more album. There's an argument that they might have fit better in the Garbage Days Revisited column but seeing as they just to say count as a band I was listening to while they were still active, they've scraped it into the Sounds From The Junkshop column.

My introduction to the Chesterfield Kings was when they cropped up in two places which should by all rights be completely exclusive to each other. The first was a book on '80s hair metal and the second was an '80s garage rock compilation called Children of Nuggets which I was listening to at the time. And let's be honest, you don't expect to find, for example, the Prisoners and the Barracudas rubbing shoulders with, say, Wolfsbane and the Quireboys in many circles (except maybe this 'ere webzine but I digress). I think my initial response was that there must have been two Chesterfield Kings bands doing the rounds at the time. I mean, they were named after a brand of cigs, it kind of maybe figures that two bands from this era would have taken that as inspiration?

Nope, it was the same lot*. And when I found out that they had a new-ish album out at the time, The Mindbending Sounds Of The Chesterfield Kings (released on Wicked Cool records, run by Little Steven Van Zandt aka Springsteen's guitarist, Sal from The Sopranos and an accomplished solo artist in his own right), well I kind of had to investigate really. And if I'm honest, that didn't really clear things up much either. It was a shameless nod back to '60s psychedelia but carried off so well that you couldn't help but get swept along with it - Running Through My Nightmares remains an absolute classic of its time while the likes of I Don't Understand and Mystery Trip were great stuff as well, tapping into that classic '60s Small Faces/Pretty Things sound but adding enough of a kick to it to drag it into the 21st century (indeed, it's probably fair to say that the Kings were a big factor in me investigating quite a few bands of that ilk in later years).

* NB - Although a quick disclaimer here, the Chesterfield Kings are NOT to be mixed up with late '80s indie types the Chesterfields, they of the jangle-pop classic Ask Johnny Dee. Also confusingly, neither band was from Chesterfield - the Chesterfield Kings were a New York band and the Chesterfields were actually from Yeovil. Complicated stuff at times this SFTJ business I tell thee. Anyway...

As I said at the beginning, the Chesterfield Kings were already two decades into their career by this point, having formed at the start of the '80s in Rochester, New York. They'd started as a garage rock revival band (there was quite a big scene for that sort of music over there at the time) but after three albums of this, they pulled off a bit of a swerve by going full on Dollsy glam-punk for their fourth album, 1990's The Berlin Wall Of Sound. Which is actually not that big a jump as you might think - like prime time Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls were one of the few groups who got respect from both the garage rock and sleaze rock community so there was a link of sorts there, plus this was New York in the late '80s where the likes of the Throbs, Uncle Sam, Circus of Power and Smashed Gladys were looking like the bands most likely to and even groups like the Ramones were muscling their sound up a bit on albums such as Animal Boy and Too Tough To Die. Unfortunately, the album went down like a cup of cold sick among the group's paisley-clad following and they wouldn't venture further down that route. Well, for the time being anyway.

Instead, the Kings would go through a series of Bowie style reinventions - 1994's Let's Go Get Stoned was, as it's title suggests, heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones, right down to a cover of Street Fighting Man (it has to be said as well that Chesterfield Kings singer Greg "Stackhouse" Prevost's vocals definitely owe more than a passing nod to Mick's) while 1997's Surfin' Rampage! was a 31-track double album of Beach Boys style surf rock. Then after that came The Mindbending Sounds... which is where we came in earlier.

Sadly, the Chesterfield Kings would last for just the one more album after I discovered them with 2008's Psychedelic Sunrise being their swansong but it was a damn fine effort to go out on with the group mixing the psychedelic tendencies of Mindbending Sounds... with the Stonesy raunch of Let's Go Get Stoned to create something genuinely great, right from the moment Sunrise (Turn On) kicked the album into gear. Streaks and Flashes was three minutes of yearning psychedelic loveliness, Gone was howlin' at the moon blues rock which made Jack White look like the half-arsed hack that he is while Stayed Too Long's strutting rhythm could almost be what would have happened if Mick Jagger had joined the Faces. Yup, seriously, that good. It's just a real shame that the band would choose to finally call time on their career after 27 years the following year in 2009.

Greg "Stackhouse" Prevost has put out two solo albums since the Chesterfield Kings folded - 2013's Mississippi Murderer and 2016's Universal Vagrant - and I heartily recommend you listen to them both (Bandcamp link here - go investigate). It seems like he's taken the opportunity to explore the whole sleazy scuzzy rock 'n' roll with a bit of a blues nod direction now that he's out on his own and the guy is quite simply very very good at it. Blues-rock seems to have become a bit of a dirty word among those of us who like our rock 'n' roll scuzzy, raunchy and fun with various "make music trad again!" bores suffocating us with tedious Joe Bonamassa style fretwanking and those horrible over-studied over-pained sub-Joe Cocker vocals to dull a lot of the genre's shine but both of Prevost's albums show how it much fun it can be when it's done right. In fact, make that how much fun it SHOULD be.

It's one of my big regrets that I didn't discover the Chesterfield Kings until so late into their career - they really were princes among the garage rock community (I mean how they somehow failed to get a bounce off the back of the Strokes going mainstream when literally EVERY New York garage band managed to find a hole in the wall to crawl through and sell a few records in that era is still something that mystifies me). I never saw them live either - in fact, I'm not sure they ever even toured over here in the UK: they were very much a cult band in the States and I never used to hear them namechecked in the Brit music press which again is a bit odd because they definitely had a bit of an Anglophile set of influences to them. But all I can say is that if you were unaware of this lot until now then go check them out - pretty much all of their back catalogue is well worth a listen. You can thank me later.