Sons of Champlin Review
Humphrey’s Backstage Lounge

March 9, 2005
by Dave Good
for the San Diego Reader

“I raised my daughter on this music,” says a graying woman, smiling, perhaps as an apology for her wild dancing. “She’s been listening to the Sons of Champlin since she was a little girl.” Sure enough, if the woman didn’t already know all the words to Get High and Freedom and every one of the other venerable classics that the Sons performed on a recent Saturday evening in San Diego, her daughter did. I tell the woman about Will, son of Bill Champlin, who at 21 has released a double album of his own. “Great stuff,” I say. “Sings better than his dad, in my opinion.” She gives me a look. “I’m serious. He’s that good. Like a Michael Jackson, but back when he wrote good songs. Only with more funk.” Her shapeless, flowing shift reminds me of 1973. That’s the year I first heard the Sons of Champlin. They performed on a bill with Tower of Power and Edgar Winter at the Balboa Stadium. The Sons of Champlin were at their peak. Such memories! Tie die and patchouli were fashion statements, and mushrooms came in plastic baggies, sold by the gram. Something passes through the women’s eyes that tells me she shares similar memories.

From the opening downbeat of Spr’unt, the Sons shuffle old favorites with new material – There Goes Your Allnight, Real Mutha Fo Ya, Rooftop: “Gotta buy a new car/But the price ain’t right/Be a lot cheaper/If I started ridin’ a bike.” The horns sound like a lot more than just Mic Gillette and Marc Russo. They punctuate skintight vocal harmonies like a string of firecrackers, trading solos back and forth from keys to sax to trumpet to guitar that finally culminate, during a medley of D-Groove/Look Out, in a jaw-dropper by Geoff Palmer. That’s something that Chicago never had: a vibraphonist. Geoff Palmer lets it rip on D-Groove, mallets ringing like they are being pounded on the bones of something old and rare.

A waitress in black materializes, rubs her new pregnant belly. I am distracted from my drink order. “Water. Ice. And,” I manage to get out, “a glass of house cabernet.” My girlfriend orders a beer. I’m sweating. It has been impossible to hold still in the presence of the Sons’ blue-eyed soul. It occurs that I’ve been bashing into the table behind us. The woman eventually moves without a complaint. But when I turn to apologize, she stares back at me with hard tunnel-rat eyes.

Bill – his voice has been compared to Lou Rawls, but I think it’s the other way around – is talking to the room: “…a song nobody wanted to release,” he says to the packed house, “because we’re not a boy band. We don’t have funny haircuts.” I’d been drifting off into space, daydreaming about something pleasant at the edge of all that rare Bar Kays-meets- flower-power funk. Bill tells the audience that none of the Sons have tattoos or piercings either. “Or at least any piercings,” he says, “that were gotten willingly.” Meaning, I suppose that the Sons just aren’t industry hip. Champlin himself is a little road weary and battle scarred, but he’s still one of us. He hasn’t sold out. He is a friend from back in the day, a soul messenger with a guitar, his Hammond B3, and his voice, which is one of the more underrated sets of pipes in rock.

“Until I saw him live, I didn’t know Bill was white,” admits a friend who stops by our table.

The set is a clever blend of Sons’ highlights that flow into each other on the edge of solos. Misery Isn’t Free, Hey Children, and Welcome become one seamless performance, followed by You, Get High, and Freedom. Music instruments are traded faster than hands at a poker table; it is easy to lose track of who is playing what. The Sons overwhelm the senses until you lose track; that has always seemed to be their game plan. It is well into a stellar instrumental passage before anyone realizes that it’s Carmen Grillo who has been tearing it up. But the most raucous performance of the evening is Marc Russo’s sax break during Misery Isn’t Free/Hey Children/Welcome, which earns him a standing ovation at the end of the solo and again at the end of the night.

Throughout the evening, Champlin alludes to that chunk of black-hole time when the Sons simply ceased to exist. His between-song rap is a funny stream of self-effacing references to opportunities blown and albums not released, including a new record that has as of yet failed to find a label home. But at one point speech fails him. He rocks back on his organ bench and lets rip with some kind of wicked laugh. “Bill majored in communications,” deadpans Grillo. “He’s having a Marin moment,” offers Geoff Palmer. Marin moment or not, Champlin’s laugh tells me something different: that he knows his band is once again pulling it off on a stage somewhere far from the 60’s, and that record deal or no, tonight the Sons of Champlin are very much alive.