Snapshot

Here we are in April of 1990, standing in front of what was left of the Berlin Wall (it having been torn down during our exhausting and financially disastrous 1989 tour). Left to right: Colorblind James, David McIntire, Ken Frank, Phillip Marshall, Joe "the Bone" Columbo and James McAvaney.

This blog is a highly personal document of the “Golden Age” of the Colorblind James Experience. ("Golden age" was a quote of Chuck's, at the CD release gig for 'Solid! Behind the Times' in 1992) “Personal,” in the sense that any of the other band members would likely pick different topics or reminiscences than these here. CbJE was a band that existed from about 1980 until Chuck's death in 2001. Mainly based in Rochester NY, it also had a phase in San Francisco prior to my time. Phillip Marshall's blog (see right) has several vivid essays about that period.

At any given time we had a repertoire of well over 200 songs, at least 150 of which were originals, so there was a lot to choose from. The band in its various incarnations made a lot of recordings, on 45s, LPs, cds and radio sessions for the BBC, an attempted live album on the '89 tour. A lot of this recorded activity was never released, or else in an unsatisfactory format. Our acoustic album ("Strange Sounds from the Basement"), one of our finest efforts, was never released in the States. Some very good songs never got recorded. None of them were written down (except for lyrics, which Chuck kept in an enormous black book); all of the arrangements were in our heads only. This had its advantages, but it could also create havoc onstage as we would try to remember a song that we hadn’t played in a couple years.

As a musician he went by “Colorblind James,” but people who knew him called him Chuck. He started writing songs in college, did some folk coffeehouse type gigs and then put together a band in the late ‘70s. The first one was called the Water Street Boys, followed by Colorblind James and the White Caps; they played in Oswego NY, where Chuck was living at that time. The next band was called the Colorblind James Experience; it started somewhere around 1980, and it lasted (with varying lineups) until Chuck died in 2001. They were based in San Francisco for a couple years, then they moved back to Rochester NY in 1985. I joined them in ‘87, after graduating from Nazareth College. At the time, I worked at a record store with their guitarist Phil Marshall, who one afternoon told me that Chuck was thinking about adding a clarinet to the band, and would I be interested in doing trying out? I was.

Rehearsals were twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday), and three hours long, but they often would run a lot longer. We usually played out at least twice a month, sometimes much more. In the summer we would be especially busy doing weddings and folk gigs. We did three tours of Europe in ‘88, ‘89 and ‘90, and played all over the Northeastern US.

The usual practice at a gig was to never use a set list. Chuck would choose a song to start the set, see how it went, and then go from there based on the audience’s reaction to what we did. We had to stay on our toes, often having to invent horn arrangements on the spot, as Chuck would frequently call out a song we hadn’t ever actually rehearsed. This drove our European management nuts, who wanted us to have very scripted, well-planned shows. Such a notion was anathema to Chuck, who sought to achieve a sort of mystical spontaneous alchemy from each show. They also wanted our more popular or at least better-known songs carefully placed into each set we played. This bothered Chuck as well, who assumed that the Europeans would be more than pleased to hear songs that they didn't already know. In Europe we never got to do more than one set at a show, but in the US we’d always play three sets--like a typical bar band, except it was mostly originals.

I left the band in ‘92 to return to composition studies. When I hear the songs now, I’m struck by their originality and the sense of unified purpose that we projected, even when we didn't entirely agree with one another; something that extended beyond friendship, to something rare and altogether remarkable. It was a joy and an honor to have been there.