{"id":15912,"date":"2019-01-16T05:30:47","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T10:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=15912"},"modified":"2019-01-15T10:54:59","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T15:54:59","slug":"no-way-out-the-curious-case-of-the-chocolate-watchband-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2019\/01\/16\/no-way-out-the-curious-case-of-the-chocolate-watchband-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"No Way Out: The Curious Case of The Chocolate Watchband (Part Three)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cI can\u2019t think of too many bands that manage to build a reputation through as small a body of work,\u201d says Palao. \u201cWhen anybody looks at \u201860s garage, \u201860s punk \u2013 whatever you want to to call it \u2013 the Chocolate Watchband is always going to be one of the first two or three names.\u201d<\/p>\n

After his time with the group ended, Aguilar went on to become an astronomy professor, doing work connected with the U.S. government\u2019s NASA program. \u201cI worked with astronauts, I worked with the Hubble telescope repair, and I was one of the first human beings to see what Pluto looked like when the spacecraft sent us the images,\u201d he says. Aguilar left music behind, seemingly for good.<\/p>\n

But interest in the Watchband endured, kept alive in part by the inclusion of a track on the Lenny Kaye-curated garage\/psych compilation, 1972\u2019s Nuggets<\/i>. As psychedelic and garage revivals popped up, many acts acknowledged a debt to the Chocolate Watchband.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first inkling that something weird was going on was when I would get these random, out of the ozone phone calls from young kids who were big fans of the band,\u201d Aguilar says. \u201cThey tracked me down while I was working at an aerospace company. The second indication came in \u201886 when Rolling Stone<\/i> put out its \u2018100 Best Albums\u2019 list. We were #78.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Several years later, Richie Unterberger\u2019s book Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll<\/i> filled many of the gaps in the Chocolate Watchband’s story, and spurred new interest in the band\u2019s long-deleted catalog. In the late 1990s, publisher, author and musician Mike Stax arranged a reunion of prime-era Watchband. For the event billed as 66\/99, he brought together Aguilar, Andrijasevich, Flores and Tim Abbott (a fixture of the post-Aguilar \u201860s lineup); the success of that show led to a tour, and a 2001 album, At the Love-in Live!<\/i> In more recent years, the reunited group \u2013 with journalist-author Alec Palao taking over for Flores on bass \u2013 has released new albums and continues to perform live.<\/p>\n

A 2012 album, Revolutions Reinvented<\/i> (reissued in 2015 as I\u2019m Not Like Everybody Else<\/i>) was a revisionist effort aimed at setting the band\u2019s record straight: it included songs that had been part of the group\u2019s mid-\u201960s live set, as well as remakes of songs like \u201cExpo 2000,\u201d this time played by the actual band. In 2018, the Watchband released two new singles, along with the promise of more new material.<\/p>\n

Today \u2013 some fifty-plus years after the release of its debut album \u2013 the band that never made it outside California now plays to enthusiastic audiences as far away as Europe. While the 1960s-era Chocolate Watchband never got its proper due, today the group enjoys well-deserved (if belated) acclaim. \u201cWe can\u2019t wait to get on that stage,\u201d Aguilar says. \u201cThe greatest flattery you will ever have as a musician is when you\u2019re in a foreign country \u2013 maybe one where not all of them speak English \u2013 and the audience sings your songs back to you while you\u2019re onstage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Palao says that the Watchband was \u201cthe quintessential \u2026 I hesitate to say \u2018garage band,\u2019 but they just sort of crystallized that combination of the arrogance and the nerve of the British thing with the way that music on the West Coast was starting to evolve. They nailed it, that particular kind of energy.\u201d Acknowledging that the Chocolate Watchband was never properly represented on albums bearing its name, Palao asserts, \u201cthose recordings still added to the mystique \u2013 pun intended \u2013 of what they were as a band.\u201d<\/p>\n

You may also enjoy my 2015 interview with Chocolate Watchband\u2019s Tim Abbott.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two… \u201cI can\u2019t think of too many bands that manage to build a reputation through as small a body of work,\u201d says Palao. \u201cWhen anybody looks at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15919,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,41,57,59,62],"tags":[516],"class_list":["post-15912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-garage","category-interview","category-psych","category-punk","category-rawk","tag-chocolate-watchband","cat-33-id","cat-41-id","cat-57-id","cat-59-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15912"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15927,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15912\/revisions\/15927"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}