![]() Look hard and you can also spot, in an embryonic state, the kind of politics still shot through his core. It was here, with Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn on regular rotation, that country music first became a key ingredient in Chadbourne’s mix of influences. When the family was briefly broken into two units while his father taught in Los Angeles, his brothers mailed him the weekly KIMN Top 50 sheet distributed to Colorado record stores. The Rolling Stones, Dave Clark Five, The Beatles, plus all the horrible stuff you had to endure until it fell off the charts, Barry Sadler’s ‘Ballad Of The Green Berets’…” He and his older brothers listened to Denver, Colorado’s KIMN (100.3 FM), eager for their personal favourites to do well in the charts. ![]() “It was especially memorable listening to it when on duty as safety patrol at Whittier Elementary. ![]() “Both of my parents encouraged creativity in different ways, my mother was a great combination of influences, the German work ethic, she absolutely loathed rock and roll and wanted the Nazis back to deal with the hippies – this from a World War Two refugee! – but she conspired for me to buy electric guitars and amplifiers as long as I would earn money to pay for the stuff myself.”Īt twelve years old, Chadbourne got his first transistor radio, beginning “a period of freedom associated with personal listening tastes. “My mother and father and my brothers, we all liked different kinds of music and like many kids we made up our own songs,” he says. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado. He implicitly and explicitly linked music that I knew, music that I didn’t know and wanted to know about, and music that I still don’t know about to this day.” Bad Scene by Eugene Chadbourne & Jim McHughĬhadbourne, who speaks to tQ in a series of emails, had moved to Greensboro in the 1980s. “Then you’d see Eugene playing a Merle Haggard song, going into a cover of Dead Kennedys or something even weirder, then into some free jazz piece. “Before the internet was super ubiquitous, whatever washed up on your redneck desert island, whatever seemed different from the music playing in cars passing by to throw bottles at you for skateboarding, was the answer,” McHugh says. As a teenager, McHugh often saw Chadbourne playing in the local record store. McHugh grew up near Greensboro, North Carolina, where Chadbourne had been based since the early 1980s. ‘Eugene, did you ever play on a Prince Far I session?’ He’s like, ‘I don’t remember. I was like, ‘I know that sound! Could it be? Eugene?’ I called him. I heard this fucked up guitar at the end. “Once I was tending a bar, and I was listening to Prince Far I’s Dub Encounters 3. “I was overwhelmed by the idea of trying to get it all in, all his history,” he tells tQ on a video call. McHugh, when writing press material for the record, found it similarly difficult to sum Chadbourne up. At the beginning of this month, Chadbourne and Jim McHugh, of the psychedelic prog-jazz outfit Sunwatchers, released a collaborative album called Bad Scene. Perhaps it’s best to start in the present. When writing a feature on him, it is hard to know where to begin. His embrace of whatever he finds interesting, whether traditional country and western or radical jazz, and his trenchant left-wing politics, make for an uncompromising, for some uncomfortable, mix. His distinctive high-pitched vocals and the surreal, comedic nature of a lot of his work – in 1991 he released an album of classical piano and ‘electric rake’ duets – has sometimes put him at odds with the more po-faced alternative rock canon. To some extent he’s a victim of his own inventiveness, too mercurial to be summed up in an easily digested narrative. He is a cult figure, yet sometimes it feels strange that he is not more widely revered. He has played live constantly for decades, both on his own and in groups, performing everywhere from his local record store to the Soviet Bloc. From John Zorn and Jello Biafra to the Violent Femmes and Camper Van Beethoven, Toshinori Kondo, Carla Bley, Han Bennink, Susan Alcorn, Corrosion Of Conformity, Henry Kaiser, Wadada Leo Smith, They Might Be Giants, Half Japanese, Derek Bailey, Polly Bradfield and Anthony Braxton, to name but a few, he has worked with hundreds who are pioneers in their own right. According to Discogs he has played on at least 358 albums. Eugene ‘Doc’ Chadbourne’s career has been absurdly prolific.
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