Zen Rebel Diaries

Category: Music

  • From Upsala Radio to Mixcloud: My Four-Decade Journey with The Chameleons

    From Upsala Radio to Mixcloud: My Four-Decade Journey with The Chameleons

    I first heard “In Shreds” on Upsala College’s radio station in New Jersey. I was living in Hudson/Bergen County at the time, and their signal came through strong and clear—one of those college stations that played what mattered rather than what was safe. The song cut through everything else—visceral, immediate, undeniable. Mark Burgess’s voice carrying this weight of betrayal and longing over guitars that somehow managed to be both crystalline and crushing.

    I was in the middle of my own betrayal at the time, the kind that leaves you questioning everything you thought you understood about connection and trust. But The Chameleons didn’t just soundtrack that moment. They gave it a language.

    Soon after, I was at Danceteria when “In Shreds” came on again, and hearing it in that chaos of bodies and sound—on one of those multiple floors where the downtown scene collided every night—confirmed what the radio had told me: this band was essential. I made the pilgrimage to Sounds on St. Mark’s Place, tracking down the EP and then the entire album. That’s how it worked in 1982: you heard something that grabbed you, and you claimed it as yours. You bought the physical artifact, took it home, dropped the needle, and let it become part of your permanent collection.

    I wouldn’t say The Chameleons saved my life exactly. That would be too neat, too VH1 “Behind the Music.” But they gave me a vocabulary for devastation that made it possible to recognize I wasn’t alone in it. Those guitars—somehow both jagged and crystalline—made beauty out of the same chaos I was drowning in.

    When the Past Returns With New Chapters

    Their records never collected dust in my collection. “Script of the Bridge” and “Strange Times” made the cut every time I purged belongings for a move. When I finally went digital, they were among the first albums I ripped to MP3s. But in my mind, The Chameleons existed in a perfect, preserved amber of pre-1990 output.

    Sometimes I’d put on “Second Skin” during those late nights when you need music that knows precisely where the tender spots are. Or “Swamp Thing” would shuffle into my headphones on a gray morning commute, and suddenly the Manhattan skyline would have this atmospheric, melancholic halo that felt right. They remained a private soundtrack for specific moods – music I rarely evangelized about because the few times I’d played them for friends, I’d get polite nods instead of recognition. Some bands are just yours.

    I assumed they’d gone the way of so many brilliant but commercially unsuccessful groups – maybe a few reunion shows for the faithful, then back to day jobs and nostalgic interviews in niche magazines. The dustbin of cultural memory that claims even the deserving.

    Then, earlier this year, I was mindlessly scrolling through YouTube recommendations when I saw it – a thumbnail showing The Chameleons performing live, recent footage. I clicked on it (KEXP.ORG – The Chameleons Live June 5, 2024) expecting that slight disappointment you feel when bands you loved try to recapture something that time has taken away.

    What I saw instead left me stunned. Mark Burgess, somehow defying vocal physics, sounding exactly like himself. Not the diminished version, not the careful version – that same voice that could sustain impossible notes, that distinctive vibrato intact, that emotional precision undiminished.

    As I clicked through more videos, I noticed the lineup had changed. Dave Fielding, one of the original guitarists whose interplay with Reg Smithies created that signature sound, was gone – apparently, he and Vox (Burgess) had reached a creative impasse. But the new guitarist, Stephen Rice, wasn’t just filling space. He brought the same expansive, atmospheric quality, the same ability to create mood and texture through layers of sound. Some bands never recover from the loss of founding members. Others find new blood that honors the foundation while building something fresh on top of it.

    I also learned that John Lever, the original drummer, had passed away in 2017. His replacement, Todd Demma, had that same precision, that ability to provide both foundation and atmosphere. This wasn’t a tribute band or a diminished version of The Chameleons – this was a genuine evolution, perfect for this new phase of their musical journey.

    The band wasn’t just going through the motions. Those signature guitars still created that particular space that only The Chameleons could make – somewhere between urgency and atmosphere, between intimacy and vastness.

    I stayed up until 2 AM that night, following video after video. That’s when I discovered they weren’t just touring old material but creating new music – actual albums released without fanfare or major distribution. I found their Mixcloud account that July night and saw they had a new album announced for September release. I didn’t hesitate – I pre-ordered it immediately, paying directly to the band. The transaction felt right somehow. No Spotify algorithms, no record label taking a cut, just sending money to artists who’d been speaking to me for decades.

    Then came the waiting. I’d check my email almost daily through August, wondering if they’d release it early. There’s something beautifully anachronistic about anticipating music in 2025. We’ve become so accustomed to instant access that delayed gratification feels almost like time travel – back to when you’d circle album release dates on calendars, call record stores to see if shipments had arrived.

    When September finally came and the download links appeared in my inbox, I created a ritual around it. I cleared my schedule for the evening, made sure I had good headphones charged, and dimmed the lights in my house, with Nag Champa incense permeating the room. The kind of listening experience we rarely give ourselves anymore – not background music while working or commuting, but sitting with the album as its own event.

    “Where Are You?” and the Body’s Memory

    The album opens with “Where Are You?”—and those first guitar riffs bypassed my critical faculties entirely. I found myself physically responding—my head moving, my shoulders, the kind of unconscious movement you can’t fake. This wasn’t nostalgia. This was recognition. My body remembered this band before my brain could analyze them.

    There’s a particular sound The Chameleons have—something about the way those guitars layer and chime that creates space rather than just sound. You don’t just hear it; you live inside it. And there I was, inside it again, like no time had passed at all.

    “Lady Strange” and the Permission to Feel

    But it was “Lady Strange” that enveloped me completely. The track opens with acoustic guitar so close you can hear fingers on strings—almost invasively intimate, like someone’s playing in your bedroom while you’re trying not to listen. Then the electric guitars arrive, not crashing but materializing, layer after layer of shimmer and depth that feels both vast and precise.

    I didn’t expect to cry. I’m not twenty-something anymore, raw and undefended. I’ve built the same fortifications everyone builds to get through the day. But sitting there, something gave way. Not performance tears, not aesthetic appreciation—the kind that happens because something true has found its way past every defense you’ve constructed.

    The Chameleons have always understood something most bands miss: transcendence isn’t announced, it’s built. You begin with vulnerability so naked it almost hurts, then let it expand until it fills every available space.

    “Magnolia” and the Courage to Need

    “Magnolia” hit next with its surf guitar atmosphere and slow, sultry tempo. This was love song territory, but not the easy kind. Burgess singing about being alone now, wanting to repair what’s broken, needing “hope’s sweet touch.”

    When he sings “My soul is dead without you, what did I do?”—I physically twitched. Not because it was bad, but because it was too much. Too naked. The kind of thing I’ve felt at 3 AM but would never say out loud. There’s something about hearing someone else articulate your weakest vulnerability that both wounds and heals.

    When David Bowie Takes My Hand

    And then came “David Bowie Takes My Hand”—and I wasn’t prepared for how directly it would speak to an actual moment from my life.

    The song opens with guitars that sound as though they are untethered from reality, creating the exact dissociative fog that occurs when emotional pain becomes too intense. It’s the sound of watching your own life from behind glass.

    “Washroom walls of whiteness surround me / My fear has found me on the floor / Somewhere near I can hear laughter / Forever after, behind the door.”

    Those weren’t just lyrics. That was me, years ago, curled on a bathroom floor while life continued on the other side of the door. The specificity of it froze me—the whiteness of those walls, the sound of people laughing while your world ends. How did Burgess know? How could he possibly have articulated something so private, so particular to my experience?

    The spacey, ethereal production creates the exact feeling of that moment—the way trauma makes everything seem unreal, distant, observed rather than lived. And then that voice, the one I’ve been listening to since the 80s, breaking slightly toward the end as the emotion becomes too much to contain within the craft.

    There’s a line where Burgess invokes Dylan Thomas: “I wish I could fight / Against the dying of the light.” And then that desperate, repeated plea: “Pull me up / I’m falling too fast / Take my hand.” It’s not just good songwriting—it’s the sound of someone describing what it feels like to be genuinely suicidal without ever having to say the word.

    When he names Bowie in the title, he’s invoking the artist who always represented transformation, escape, and otherworldliness. Not God, not a lover, but an artist reaching down to pull you back from the edge. Because sometimes that’s what saves us—not religion, not therapy, but art that meets us in our darkest moments and says, “I’ve been here too.”

    Finding Three Among Seven

    Not every track hit me with the same force. “Free Me” traces the dissolution of a relationship from dreamy love to the need for escape—beautiful, solid, but not something I need to replay outside the context of the whole album. “Feels Like the End of the World” – amidst the jangly, wistful guitars and strings – carries a political edge I don’t personally share, Burgess sounding sarcastic about how religion is used to shield people from historical horrors. I understand his perspective without needing to agree with it.

    That’s the thing about a real album versus a collection of singles—not every song becomes personal scripture. Out of the seven tracks, three have made it into my permanent rotation: “Where Are You?” for that rush of recognition, “Lady Strange” for those tears that caught me off guard, and “Magnolia” for that surf-guitar vulnerability.

    What Stays When the Music Stops

    The bands that shaped us—really shaped us—they become part of how we navigate the world. Not background music, not lifestyle accessories, but actual interpretive frameworks. When betrayal happens, when fear finds you on the floor, when you need hope’s sweet touch—these aren’t abstractions. They’re lived experiences that require language.

    The Chameleons provided that language in 1982. They’re still providing it now. For all the changes in music distribution—from vinyl hunted down at Sounds to direct Mixcloud downloads—the core transaction remains unchanged: artists who tell the truth about what it means to be human, and listeners who recognize themselves in that truth.

    Mark Burgess’s voice hasn’t weakened with time. The guitars still create those spaces you can live inside. The questions remain just as urgent: Where are you? Can you take my hand? Is there hope’s sweet touch waiting somewhere beyond alienation?

    For those of us who grew up when radio could change your life with a single song, who remember when finding music required physical pilgrimage, who understand that ownership meant something tactile—The Chameleons represent something increasingly rare. Artists who never compromised, never chased trends, never pretended connection was easy or answers were simple.

    They just kept making beautiful, devastating music about what it feels like to be broken open by the world and somehow still standing.

    When Burgess sings “Pull me up / I’m falling too fast” and I think about my own moments on bathroom floors, in church pews begging God to help me understand life, in dark bedrooms trying to understand betrayal. It’s not nostalgia connecting us. It’s recognition across time. Some wounds don’t heal; they just become part of your geography. And sometimes, years later, you hear someone mapping that same territory and realize: you never walked it alone.

    This new Chameleons album requires headphones, solitude, and the courage to feel whatever comes up. Some music has earned that level of attention. Some artists have earned that level of trust. When they ask, “Where are you?”—the only honest answer is “Right here. Still listening.”

  • Frequency Freedom: WSOU, WFMU, and the Underground Soundtracks of a Jersey Misfit

    Frequency Freedom: WSOU, WFMU, and the Underground Soundtracks of a Jersey Misfit

    The commercial radio wasteland of late-70s New Jersey stretched endlessly as the Turnpike—Journey and Styx pumping from car stereos like musical novocaine, dulling the senses one power chord at a time. But somewhere on the left side of your dial, buried in static and broadcasting from college basement studios, voices were transmitting something else entirely. Something dangerous.

    WSOU 89.5 FM and WFMU 91.1 FM weren’t just radio stations; they were contraband frequencies—sonic speakeasies where DJs slipped you sounds that corporate America had quarantined. While Casey Kasem counted down sanitized hits, these stations were playing Sex Pistols, Killing Joke, and Siouxsie and the Banshees like dispatches from a parallel universe where music still had teeth and fingernails.

    For a kid who’d shuffled through five different schools before high school—a perpetual outsider with posters of Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy slowly giving way to Ian Curtis and Joe Strummer—these stations became lifelines. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin records still scattered across my bedroom floor suddenly felt like artifacts from someone else’s religion. Hugh Downs had accidentally blown my circuits one night in ’77, delivering a “20/20” segment on punk rock that sent me hunting through radio static for more of whatever the Sex Pistols were saying.

    Alison Steele—the velvet-voiced “Nightbird” of WNEW—would occasionally drop these strange new sounds between her progressive rock sets, but it was WSOU that delivered the uncut stuff. Their playlists read like manifestos: The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Chameleons, Hanoi Rocks, The Church. None of these names registered on commercial radio’s radar. They existed in a parallel dimension where melody didn’t have to be comfortable and lyrics didn’t have to play nice.

    I’d hunt through imported zines for Rodney Bingenheimer’s legendary “Rodney on the ROQ” playlists, tracking bands like constellations, waiting for them to appear in WSOU’s rotation. When they finally did, the validation was electric—proof I wasn’t alone in hearing something vital in these strange transmissions.

    By ’78, my cousin Nancy was pulling me deeper into the underground, her gift of Duran Duran’s first album for my 18th birthday a passport to somewhere else entirely. The radio stations had been maps; the clubs were territories. Nancy guided me through doorways that might as well have been wormholes—Hurrah’s, Peppermint Lounge, Danceteria, Maxwell’s—each threshold crossing me from Jersey nobody to participant in something that felt like history.

    Inside Maxwell’s, on that small stage in the back, The Bongos and Human Switchboard turned alienation into electricity. At Hurrah’s, Yellow Magic Orchestra and James Chance and the Contortions bent sound into shapes that made your organs shift position. The Bush Tetras’ hypnotic post-punk incantations. The industrial assaults of Foetus that left you feeling scoured and new. None of this would ever make American Top 40, but for the scattered tribe who found these frequencies—both radio and physical—it was salvation.

    We were bridge-and-tunnel kids, carrying the stench of suburbia that the Manhattan club elite could smell from across the dance floor. Their perfect goth eyeliner and mohawks, thrift-store jackets and practiced disaffection made clear the hierarchies, even in these supposed utopias. However, the music democratized everything, even if only for the duration of a set. The college radio DJs— kids with shaking hands and encyclopedic knowledge—had prepared us for this communion, this gathering of scattered believers.

    These stations did more than play records—they created context, community, and continuity for those of us perpetually starting over. In the wasteland between disco’s death and MTV’s birth, they kept alive sounds too raw, too strange, or too truthful for commercial airplay. They were cultural lifelines for misfits, incubators for bands that would reshape music, and proof that somewhere beyond the mall parking lots, people were making art that refused compromise.

    Those radio waves traveled through bedroom walls like whispers of conspiracy—college kids with turntables and microphones telling us that we weren’t crazy, that the world was, and here was the soundtrack for navigating its beautiful ruins.

    These passionate broadcasters weren’t just playing records; they were casting spells that opened doorways to a new world. Doorways that led to 2 AM odysseys across bridges and through tunnels, heart still pounding with bass lines, fingers sticky with spilled drinks, trying to make it home before dawn erased whatever magic had happened under those club lights. Doorways that eventually led westward, to Los Angeles, chasing something I couldn’t name. Doorways that led, improbably, to me working at the Rainbow Bar & Grill in LA, finally inside the machinery that had once seemed so impenetrable.

    But those are stories for another frequency. Another transmission from these Zen Rebel Diaries, where the past isn’t just nostalgia—it’s evidence that we were alive once, electric and unafraid, hunting for sounds that might save us in the static between stations.

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    At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi. Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur. Imagine flipping through a stack of Polaroids from a ’90s road trip, mixtapes labeled in sharpie, or the thrill of sneaking into a midnight showing of Pulp Fiction—a time when life felt raw, unfiltered, and gloriously analog.