Chucklehead
The Funk is on the Loose!
It’s about midnight on a Saturday night at the China Club in downtown Chicago. The Boston based band, Chucklehead is in the middle of one of their patented, up-tempo jams called “The Funk is on the Loose.” Dave Rengel hammers out an ultra-fresh retro groove on his six-string bass while vocalists Brian Gottesman and Huck Bennert pepper the song with breakneck speed scat-rap. The awestruck audience is going apeshit. To say the funk is on the loose would be a gross understatement. But it isn’t the supergroovy basslines, funky drums and percussion or even great horn section that makes Chucklehead an extraordinary group. It’s lead guitarist Eben Levy’s multi-colored plush fur overalls that push the band into the realm of super creative genius. Chucklehead is much more than a band playing a gig. They’re a runaway train musical extravaganza and funkier than James Brown’s first grade drawers.
Saxaphonist Lenny Alkins sums up Chuckleheads’ musical philosophy. “We want the audience to feel the funk and have a good time and not worry about the world for a few hours. We’re playing a style of music in which we can convey a message and yet make people dance. Nothing else matters unless people feel the funk and dance.” Dave elaborates, “People are going back to their roots. back to the classic rock, disco and real funk.” Besides becoming hometown favorites, the Beantown band has gained a fairly large following in D.C., Philly and New York City. But Boston will always be where Chucklehead can “fuck up and it’s allright.” Dave adds, “We don’t need shit to go over in Boston, we need it to over in the midwest and the West Coast.”
Chucklehead is a head on collision between funk, rap and rock. The secret recipe for their sumptuous gumbo of groove is that each member of the band comes from a different part of the country, which creates combustible, explosive energy that’s commonplace during the bands wild performances. Newcomer Meyer Stathan (vocals and trombone) says, “It’s just a total blitzkrieg of funk!” The band also twists pop culture into the mix using obscure samples from Planet of the Apes and the Brady Bunch. Add to this the diverse influences of Frank Sinatra, Sly and the Family Stone, P Funk and various groups from the D.C. GoGo sound and you have a band that taps into the scatter brained psyche of sophisticated twenty-nothings.
Chucklehead brings an auricular bumrush to the audience with their onslaught of alternative rock/rap/dance/whatever, so there’s no time to contemplate every rhyme or lyric, so just buckle up and enjoy the ride. They take pride in driving stimulus overload to an unprecedented level. You can say they are ahead of their time, or you could say they’re just really, really funky.
Originally published in CAKE magazine circa 1993.
