The Chancellors
Listen/Download – The Chancellors – I’m a Man
Greetings all.
The record you see before you is one of those things that I picked up so long ago I have no specific memory where it came from.
My suspicions are that I picked it up in the pre-interwebs/eBay days, when you had to go out and dig around in record stores, flea markets and such, probably during the peak of my garage obsession in the mid-80s.
I can say with some certainty that I grabbed it because of the Soma label, home of the Castaways of ‘Liar Liar’ fame.
The Chancellors were a local (to the Soma home base of Minnesota) garage band that put out two 45s in 1964/65, right before what we would consider ‘prime garage’ was a thing, but in that sweet spot where all kinds of US-based sounds were starting to enter the UK-beat feedback loop (i.e. US rock bands rediscovering US blues/R&B material that they had heard second/third-hand from English bands) and also starting to whip a little snot into the mix.
Some of this, as it was with the Limeys, was white boys (literally BOYS) trying to imitate/emulate middle aged black bluesmen, and I do mean IMITATE, i.e. using their still-cracking adolescent pipes and suburban grammar school diction to approximate the earthy growl of Mississippi Delta gone to Chicago heavies like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
Here we have the Chancellors digging into Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m a Man’.
Though the group sounds as if their collective weight wouldn’t balance out against Bo Diddley’s testicles, they have that groovy Seexteez ponk zound, in which they work out the vocal tics over some primitive, Maureen Tucker-esque drums and churning rhythm (almost ALL rhythm) guitars.
‘I’m a Man’ is a pretty basic, deceptively uncomplicated groove that requires a certain level of pounding commitment, and while the Chancellors were never going to make it in Chicago, I’m sure they had the local middle school girlies swooning.
Thanks be to the forces of nature that there were so many groups just like them.
Dig it, and I’ll see you all next week.
Peace
Larry