The Chesterfield Kings – Here Are the Chesterfield Kings! (Full Album) garage rock, garage revival When 14 covers truly opened the garage revival of the eighties...
The dazzling saga of the mid-eighties beat revivalism was an important phase of my life, one of those prickly passions that pass through you, overwhelming your senses. Something that demanded total dedication, a purifying bath within the ethic/aesthetic of a decade often fantasized about as blessed but still, one sensed, all yet to be discovered, sometimes a sterile brooding in the desperate attempt to historically perpetuate not just the soul of a sound but an entire universe, even reaching forms of extreme temporal escapism (Shelley Ganz locking himself away in desperate isolation, Mike Stax dating his letters written almost twenty years later to ’66…NdLYS).
Something totalizing, acritical, extreme, childish. Youthful to the point of bordering on paradox: the quintessence of rock ‘n’ roll. Here Are represented for me and thousands of other peers a sort of baptismal font.
Not an album but a true treasure chest.
A chest full of those golden coins that pirates would place on the eyes of the deceased before sending their souls to Hell.
Fourteen coins to gain the services of Charon and ferry the spirits of the garage bands of the sixties into the damned circle where the Chesterfields were forced to atone for their sins.
It was the stubborn refusal to grow up.
Here Are is an album that not only made history but took care of it, acting as its guardian and looping it for the use of generations who were unaware of its flavor, barely scenting the aroma among the hazy memories of an old beat dad. An album of only covers, executed with the sole intent of preserving the spirit that breathed on each one of them without altering their flavor.
A time machine in the shape of a catapult.
The debut of the Chesterfield Kings did not stop at the rediscovery of the beat essentiality already undertaken by punk or the reevaluation of the expressive rawness typical of every teen music that many had or were recovering. No, Here Are was an album that went beyond: the five Kings of Rochester sunk their incisors into a trunk full of nuggets and presented them to us with the same identical, precious gleam with which they had been buried 15 years earlier. Exasperating the concept of philological rigor, Greg Prevost and his companions even went so far as to re-record, when possible, those 14 songs with the same instruments used by the original authors.
An austerity that borders on the maniacal.
