Few things are as likely to guarantee a band will fail than early good fortune. The Comfortable Chair - what a name that is - formed in California in 1967 around the core songwriting skill of Bernie Schwartz whose loose-limbed, bare-footed, feelgood, face-stroking hippie-folk-rock was clearly influenced by the San Francisco sound of Jefferson Airplane and It's A Beautiful Day.
Discovered - if you can bear such a ridiculous showbiz conceit - by Jim Morrison, they signed that summer to impresario Lou Adler's Ode Records (already home to the mighty Giant Sunflower) and soon after were cast as, well, a hippie-folk-rock group in the Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason movie How To Commit Marriage. A month later the Chair signed to a new production company called - with heartbreaking simplicity, Bliss - formed by those other Doors chaps John Densmore and Robbie Keirger and a debut single Be Me / Some Soon, Some Day was prepared. The starting pistol fired, or maybe mis-fired.
The debut album arrived that November and earned some good reviews, but then the trail goes decidedly cold, which is a great shame as the record itself is a delight. Rich, textured sunshine-pop harmonies run up against perfectly pitched psychedelic dream weaving and it's all delivered with the most wonderfully straight face. The band's devotion to moodelevating transcendental meditation is all over gorgeously unpredictable wig-flippers like Stars In Heaven and Pale Night Of Quiet, while Be Me and Ain't No Good No More are both terrifyingly groovy in all the right ways.
By 1969 pretty much all desire for feel-good hippie-folk-rock was gone and the Chair fell apart. Their star had barely shone, but the music, as ever, lives on.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion