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Mike Ladd - Lead
Vocals & Guitar I Blissfully unaware of the launch of Sony's Walkman™ and the overthrow of the Shah in Iran , Chimera congealed from the remnants of Electric Mistress and Hunter around 1979. I remained its sole survivor throughout a seven year eternity. I did have a sense that the family spawned from that extended adolescent haze was something much stronger than the characteristic griping led outsiders to believe. I did not then adumbrate the peptic gurglings of remembrance, some pleasant some distasteful, ebullient in my gastric psyche. Was it our keyboardist Jon Miles who raked the band name from the leaves of a Greek mythology tome, damaging its spelling in his single-mindedness? No doubt he'd apply a bit more gold plating to the event and conveniently forget that I was even there at the time. Was I?
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We've both been muddled in part by
the monophonic synthesizer Jon would have to bludgeon to correct the
pitch of its portomento – mid
song, of course. Lance Vardis wore glasses back then. Joe Miglionico was fifteen when he joined Hunter for its one gig before Chimera rose from its ashes. Bart and Joe were natural together – flesh and bone, nuts and bolts, darkness and fear. Bart McCracken was left handed and had a cigarette grafted precariously to the corner of his mouth. His body wailed on the drums like Shiva while his head perched atop vigilant to the cigarette's balance. Joe's toe-like fingers obscured the strings of his bass, but were as nimble as a rubber hammer on the knee, each note scoring a reflex. Lance played guitar back then. A maroon Gibson Marauder wretched and squealed under his assertive yet taxing coercion. Jen Jackson wheedled us away from the waning southern rock genre that dominated our repertoire, turned us on to the new wave exploding out from under disco and FM album rock. |
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Rehearsals
sonically scarred the walls of St. Francis Church in Holden and
Jen's parents' garage. Our first gigs at Wachusett Regional High
School went over very well, the sound man, Larry Boria, fed into
our developing hubris and began concerning himself with this collection
of ingenuous teenagers.
II The metamorphosis began with the Battle of the Bands
at E.M. Loews theatre. It was still Wormtown in those days; there was
an electric music scene, as brilliant as a nicotine-yellowed bulb in
a tenement hallway. R & B ruled, the punk was dirty garage rock, gothed up and glammed out. The young bands sassed behind each others' backs, teenage angst loaded and cocked in cliques of guys and their gunpowder girls. The theatre that night was packed with impending violence. We were the newcomers; we didn't expect to win but knew we could. Sage had won the competition the year before, and were the favorites. They were accomplished players (for their age) doing Zeppelin, Queen and Van Halen covers. We had two female singers. It was Jen Jackson's farewell show, and she was sharing the stage with her replacement Leslie Buck. | |
The girls were stars, dreamed on and bayed at in the testosterone night. Rendered surly from my routine Jack in a large cup, I flipped birds and spit at the front rows as they surged collectively like a heart about to burst. The tricephaly of Chimera had come to parturity – the musicianship we aspired to, attitude, and providing the audience with a good time. We would come up short more often than not to have all three heads on straight, but that night we came with few supporters and won over enough to take second place in what really was a draw with Sage. To be continued... |
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