Notes

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The Sons of Champlin's sprawling, double-LP debut album, Loosen Up Naturally, had its launch marred by the discovery of an obscenity in the cover art that resulted in a mass recall and ruined its commercial chances. They were also beset by internal strife, and when the time came to release their second album only six months later, they chose to de-emphasize the primacy of lead singer and main songwriter Bill Champlin by shortening their name to "the Sons" and also giving that name to the record. But their music remained essentially the same, a mixture of Champlin's thoughtful lyrics and gritty singing with Terry Haggerty's inventive lead guitar work and the two-man horn section of Tim Caine and Geoffrey Palmer. As usual, there was almost too much going on in the arrangements, which gave the songs touches of folk, rock, jazz, and psychedelia, often in the same song, as a couple of the tunes extended beyond ten minutes in length, changing tempo and feel in mid-flight. Clearly, this was a band that was accustomed to using its songs as frameworks for free playing in concert, but the bandmembers still hadn't quite figured out how that worked in the studio, and their arguments about musical direction could be heard in the music itself. Champlin remained the strongest presence in the band, but his songs (all of which were credited to the Sons communally) took a backseat to the group that was playing them any way it wanted to. The results could be exhilarating, if in a somewhat anarchic way. But it was no surprise that the album only spent half a dozen weeks in the charts or that the band broke up five months after it was released.

One of the last and more obscure bands to emerge from the late-'60s San Francisco psychedelic scene, the Sons of Champlin were relatively unusual among Bay Area bands for favoring heavily soul-influenced material and employing a prominent horn section. Their more introspective songs can recall the more subdued efforts of Quicksilver Messenger Service and Moby Grape, and their longer compositions boasted unusually complex song structures and tempo shifts. Revered by some collectors, their work hasn't aged as well as the best of their peers; the vocals weren't gritty enough to carry the R&B-based material and the ambitious longer tracks were prone to some half-baked songwriting and meandering jamming. Their first three albums (issued on Capitol between 1969 and 1971) are considered their best, though they recorded some other LPs in the '70s with shifting personnel. In late 1997, the Sons of Champlin reunited for a series of hometown reunion concerts, resulting in the release of their first-ever live LP a year later.