Avant-garde singer-guitarist who has a large body of work and has gained a loyal following in the world of indie rock. Eugene Chadbourne, an innovative guitarist and singer-guitarist, is one of the most respected and well-respected eccentrics in the underground. His seemingly endless and eclectic catalogue of albums made him one of the community’s most popular and well-respected. Chadbourne was born January 4, 1954 in Mount Vernon (NY). His mother, a refugee from the Nazi death camps, raised him in Boulder, CO. He was inspired to learn to play guitar at the age of 11 by the Beatles. Later exposure to Jimi Hendrix led him to experiment with fuzzboxes and distortion pedals. He eventually became dissatisfied by the conventions of pop and rock music and switched to an acoustic guitar, where he learned to play bottleneck blues. Chadbourne’s greatest formative discovery was jazz. He was initially attracted to John Coltrane, Roland Kirk and later became an acolyte for the avant-excursions of Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton. Chadbourne was initially a journalist but his career was halted when he fled to Canada to fight in Vietnam. Only President Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for conscientious objectionors allowed Chadbourne to return the U.S.A in 1976. He then plunged into the New York City music scene. He released Solo Acoustic Guitar in 1976. In 1976, he started collaborating with John Zorn, the visionary saxophonist, and Henry Kaiser, the well-known guitarist. Chadbourne quickly created a unique style that included equal parts protest music and free improvisation. He also added his bizarre, squeaky vocals to the mix. Chadbourne has had many collaborations with other artists and genre workouts, but his first notable attention was as the frontman for Shockabilly in the early 1980s. This demented rockabilly revisionist band also featured Kramer. After the breakup of the group, Chadbourne began to pursue his own unique brand of country and folk music, appropriately dubbed LSD-C.
