Guest
The Chocolate Watchband were one of those 60's California garage rock groups who collapsed nearly as fast as they rose. Driven by David Aguilar's Jagger-esque vocal snarl and Mark Loomis' lead guitar work, their sound mixed the R&B/blues of '64-65 garage bands with the psychedelic trippiness of the Summer of Love. The group only managed to release a handful of studio albums in their brief existence. Unfortunately for them, their producer Ed Cobb favored the use of session musicians to supplement songs, so it is rare to find tracks where all 5 members contribute. Ed Cobb even brought in a session vocalist (Don Bennett), who both wrote songs and sang lead on numerous Chocolate Watchband tracks, including “Are You Gonna Be There.“ In an interview from 2020, original vocalist David Aguilar stated that the band was furious to learn that their debut album was riddled with songs and vocals that they had never recorded. Aguilar said that “We threw the box of albums the recording company had sent us into the air and shot them out of the sky with a double barreled 12-gauge shot gun.“ After leaving the music scene, Aguilar became the Director of Science Information at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA--quite a career change-up.
