Charlie Chesterman

CHARLIE CHESTERMAN
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Despite that drawn-out process, the record's vibe is more akin to if Chesterman called the boys over to the garage after picking up a case of beer for a late-night-into-early-morning jam.Dynamite is the best example yet of Chesterman's knack for creating a seamless blend of original material and choice covers.

Opening with the rollicking, horn-driven blaster "Goodbye To You", Chesterman and his band - dubbed the Legendary Motorbikes - spend the next 35 minutes firing off riffy salvos of old-fashioned hot-rod-flick rock 'n' roll, most of the 12 tunes clocking in at under three minutes.A revved-up greaser instrumental ("Go Go Li'l Fairlane") bumps up against a timeless but contemporary gem titled "Everybody's Baby" from a little-known band called Brent's TV - "a bunch of crazy kids from Eureka, California, just playing on campus or something, but that's just a beautiful song, so totally perfect in the way that good songs are," Chesterman says.

Elsewhere, the slow burn of "Wants To Be Bob Dylan Singing Electric Guitar Blooze" is sandwiched between the old Freddie Cannon hit "Tallahassee Lassie" and the perfect pop of "Bread & Butter", a song Chesterman heard while producing a record for Pittsburgh's Frampton Brothers.It's obvious that, for Chesterman, it's all about the song, regardless of the source.

"We ended up recording 17, maybe 20 songs, and when it came time to figure out which ones made sense as an album, those covers fit just as good as any of the original stuff," he says."It's kind of a little bit of everything; it sums up a lot about what I've been doing, or what I can do."

And he's been doing this for quite awhile now.It was 1981 when Chesterman and his band The Law - which included bassist MacPaul Stanfield and future Young Fresh Fellows drummer Tad Hutchison - moved from Iowa to Boston.
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The band didn't last a year, but soon afterward, Chesterman hooked up with guitarist Stephen Fredette.
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"I think ultimately the thing that was Scruffy's demise, at least as far as I'm concerned, was everything we had done from the time we started until a little after Moons Of Jupiter, we never had to think about," reflects Chesterman.
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Following the split, Chesterman briefly resurfaced with the short-lived Harmony Rockets (not to be confused with the Mercury Rev offshoot of the same moniker).The band's recorded output was relegated to a lone three-track single on Rockville Records released in 1993, with bandmate Mike County taking all three songwriting credits ("he was doing a better job writing songs at the time, and those three songs are really good," Chesterman says).

The band didn't stick, but the concept for the project did."It was a weird thematic thing," Chesterman explains.
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Chesterman took a couple years off after the Harmony Rockets dissolved before he returned to the recording studio.When he did it was as a solo artist, with the autonomy to record his vision.He refers to the creative process that bore From The Book Of Flames, his 1994 solo debut on Slow River, as "trying to figure out how to be in the studio by myself with some friends and trying to get it together."Those friends included Scruffy alumni Fredette and Stanfield as well as present Motorbike guitarist Andy Pastore; there was even a reunion with Hutchison when Chesterman traveled to Seattle for a little session with fellow Fellows Scott McCaughey and Kurt Bloch.
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The record was a solid representation of where Chesterman had been and, more importantly, where he was going.With all its tracks recorded on either the first or second take, Book has a loose, homey ambiance that works well as a backdrop for his unaffected vignettes steeped in romantic naiveté.Musically, the horn charts on "Hello Judy" and "Got You Bad" were his first flirtations with brass (more have since followed), while plaintive guitar-and-vocal tracks such as "Pink Lemonade" and "On A Stack Of Bibles" laid the groundwork for the brilliance that followed in the form of Studebakersfield.

It's obvious after talking to Chesterman for a bit that Studebakersfield was, and still is, special to him.The antithesis of Dynamite, the record has a soul, as opposed to just having soul (if that makes any sense).It's a work of beautiful melancholia, with Chesterman's heart sewn squarely on the sleeve of his motorbike jacket.The frailty found in songs such as "Trash" and "Truth Stars" is underscored with weepy steel accompaniment, while "Mona's Prayer" and "The Confession" (Harmony Rockets #3 and #4, respectively) digress from the "loud fast rules" aesthetic to present arguably the two strongest tracks in that conceptual series to date.It's a lovely record that, when finished, took Chesterman completely by surprise.

"When [producer] Pete Weiss and I sat down to start working on this thing, we actually were shooting for Nashville Skyline," Chesterman says.
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All of which probably explains why, when asked if that guitar-and-vocal record might be on deck in the recording circle, Chesterman instead throws out the possibility of placing those songs in a band setting and making "a mellow, sweet record in the vein of Studebakersfield."

In the meantime, he'll be doing what he can to support Dynamite Music Machine, including some gigging up and down the East Coast before possibly venturing a little further away from home in the new year (maybe a road trip back home to the Midwest).But all that depends on schedules, as jobs and mortgages and adulthood can sometimes get in the way of stuff like rock 'n' roll.What a drag it is getting old.

Kevin Hawkins has actually seen Scruffy The Cat and Charlie Chesterman, but sadly missed the Harmony Rockets.