Loosening up with Bill Champlin - Newspaper article
3.9.06

By Bob Doran :: HumBlog

Back in the’60s and the early’70s, long before the age of CDs, the record album was your basic music delivery unit. In heavy rotation on my turntable was one titled Loosen Up Naturally by a band from Marin County, Sons of Champlin. I particularly liked use of horns and the fact that one whole side of the two-record set was devoted to one long-ass song, "Freedom," a topic near to my heart then and now.

"That was back when we were all too young to know what we were doing," said bandleader Bill Champlin, a guy who is still making music 30-some odd years down the road. He's moved from Marin to Nashville, and spends less time leading The Sons than he does as a member of Chicago (he joined in 1981), but his old band is still close to his heart. He's bringing them to Mazzotti's this Saturday, March 11, with much of the original lineup intact.

While the Sons formed in the S.F. Bay Area at the beginnings of the hippie era, he doesn't exactly see himself as part of that musical movement. "Lyrically I think we were going there, but musically we were in a way different spot than the Airplane and the Dead, Quicksilver and Big Brother. We were probably closer to what Janis wanted to do with Big Brother [with] the sort of R&B roots that we had."

He has mixed feelings about the band's rep as jammers. "We definitely open up, but we're not a jamband. We write songs, we don't do 45-minute jams. We have a lot of places where we let it fly, but there's a lot of places where we really rehearse it, shed it up so the audience is right in with us. We don't really play that often, and there's a small kind of select crowd that might not know us that well, but they know when they come home from a Sons' gig they're gonna come home just groovin'." (I'm sure I will.)

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