Throughout the history of popular music, certain managers, producers and promoters have been willing to engage in a variety of options. On an extreme level, that has occasionally even included sending a bogus version of a group out on the road. Rock’s history includes tales of ersatz Zombies, Moby Grapes and Fleetwood Macs. From a different angle, when groups such as The Beach Boys, Paul Revere & The Raiders and The Byrds were busy, playing shows for example, studio players were sometimes enlisted to cut basic tracks for those acts.
In the case of The Chocolate Watchband, there was even a studio aggregation recording complete songs, which were then released on a record right alongside songs by the actual group. That seems a step beyond, right? Not if you were Ed Cobb, the producer (best known, perhaps, as writer of Tainted Love) who worked with The Chocolate Watchband.
Starting up in 1965 just outside San Jose, California, the history of The Chocolate Watchband can seem rather complicated. However, from another perspective, it’s quite simple. The original line-up came together in Los Altos, California, largely playing cover tunes. Within a year, that group had dissolved, leaving behind no official recordings. In 1966, founder member and guitarist Mark Loomis put together a second line-up of the band, with only drummer Gary Andrijasevich returning from the original group.
It was this second configuration – Loomis and Andrijasevich, plus bassist Bill Flores, guitarist Sean Tolby and singer Dave Aguilar – that would build a following. The frontman recalls how he came to join the group.
“I was in a different band and one night I noticed a couple of guys watching me from the audience,” says Aguilar, who spent most of the years between 1967 and 1999 completely out of music, working in the aerospace field. Recalling how he came to join the group, he says: “One was Mark Loomis and the other was Sean Tolby. They were looking for a lead singer, and they asked if I was interested in joining a new band.”
He was.
The band’s setlist in 1966 featured a good deal of British music. “We really tuned into The Kinks,” Aguilar recalls. “We were doing See My Friends and I’m Not Like Everybody Else, a B-side that people in the States hadn’t heard.” Watchband shows also featured The Yardbirds’ Mr You’re A Better Man Than I. Aguilar notes that, today, The Chocolate Watchband still include those tunes in their live set: “We’ve revived them from the earliest days of the real Watchband.”
Aguilar pauses to let his point sink in. “When I say ‘the real Chocolate Watchband,’ there was really only one Watchband that broke out, that the world knew,” he says. “I listen to historians who want to go back to the first day that the band came together. I think it’s interesting, but in reality, they accomplished nothing. They didn’t record; they just did covers.”
The real group – as Aguilar describes it – quickly developed into a hard-edged unit with impressive stage presence and musical chops. “I could relate to the very early Beatles in Germany and very early Stones, in that we were a cohesive group, even though we’d been together for a very, very short time,” Aguilar says. Within a month or two of forming, the Watchband with Aguilar found themselves opening for Frank Zappa’s Mothers.
“It was a try-out,” Aguilar explains. “We were approached by Bill Graham to play at the Fillmore. Graham would book a local band to see if they had the calibre to play with the big guys.” The bill that night – 25 June, 1966 – also featured comic Lenny Bruce in what turned out to be his final performance. No recordings exist of the Watchband’s set that night, but Aguilar insists the group was powerful onstage.
“When I talk to younger people,” Aguilar attests, “I tell them, ‘Understand that sometimes you’re going to come together with other talented people, and you’re going to have an incredible power. It can get out of control and be misused, but it can also be focused like a laser in doing what you want to do.’” That was the mindset of The Chocolate Watchband in those days, he says. “What an incredible feeling to walk out onto a stage and know you command it, it’s yours, and you’re about to change history with the music that you play. And that’s how we felt as kids.”
The Fillmore show was a success, and Graham wanted to sign the Watchband to
a management contract. But the group had already signed with a manager, who brought them to producer Cobb. It’s intriguing to speculate on how the band’s path might have been different had they gone with Graham. “Well,” Aguilar ponders, “we wouldn’t have had access to some of the songs that Cobb wrote for us. So that’s a negative.” But he notes that Graham’s stated plan for the group would have raised its profile.
Graham told Aguilar,
“I want to shuttle you between here and the
new Fillmore on the East Coast,” Aguilar says. “We would’ve been playing every weekend with the Dead, the Airplane, Carlos [Santana] and Janis.” And he suggests that experience “would’ve kicked me in the butt to start writing more songs, so we would have had more original material.” That, he suggests, might have helped prevent “the bullshit that was pulled on us by the record producers: sticking other songs – and other people – on our albums.”
Aguilar believes that when the label and management promoted The Chocolate Watchband, they did so in all the wrong ways. “We were considered a black group because of our name; that’s what some idiot in upper management thought,” he says. Bizarrely – considering The Chocolate Watchband was an exemplar of what is now known as proto-punk – the band was featured on bills with vocal troupe The Coasters.
But even those dates didn’t take the Watchband outside of its native California. “We never made it out of the state,” Aguilar says. “All we did was play up and down from Hollywood to San Francisco to Northern California.” The group regularly drew large crowds when booked at the Coconut Grove dance hall in Santa Cruz, California. “Capacity was 500,” Aguilar notes, “but there would be 800, 900 kids up there every time we played.”
The punky ethos of Watchband songs like Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In) and Let’s Talk About Girls (later recorded by The Undertones) was no put-on; the band could be wild. Aguilar relates one of many typical tales from the era: “We played for Hollywood producers on this big ship. We emptied out the trophy room; we took the five-foot model of the ship and tried to stick it in the back of our van while the party
was going on, but our manager caught us and made us put it back. Then Mark dropped acid in the [punch]; we had a whole ship full of people on acid, with no idea who had done it.”
Speaking of Hollywood, The Chocolate Watchband experienced some opportunities that looked as if they would lead to bigger things. One was being asked to take part in the 1967 film Riot On Sunset Strip. The group turned in a fiery performance of Don’t Need Your Lovin’, a Stones-y rocker inexplicably never recorded. Aguilar says the whole episode happened quickly: “We got a call on a Wednesday that said, ‘Hey, guys. Pack up your bags. You’re leaving tomorrow morning. You’re gonna do a Hollywood movie,’” he recalls. Next thing they knew, the band was on the set, “walking around with cameras, and actors, and starlets and producers. And then they said to us, ‘Oh, yeah, by the way, you’ll do two original songs. Can you write them really quick? We’re recording tomorrow.’” Music historian (and current Watchband bassist) Alec Palao still marvels at the performance captured on film. “They totally communicated the sort of band they were, in only two minutes of footage.”
When it came time to go into the studio, producer Cobb had his own ideas about what the music should sound like. Aguilar had begun to write (Gone And Passes By made
it onto the LP), and some songs from the band’s live repertoire were recorded. But when presented with tunes from outside writers, the band members sometimes balked at Cobb’s suggestions.
Aguilar recalls, “He’d say, ‘Now, I want you to record this song, Hot Dusty Roads.’ We looked at it and said, ‘That song’s a piece of shit. That’s not us; that’s not who we are. We won’t record it.’” So Cobb brought in studio players and cut the Stephen Stills tune without the Watchband’s participation. “He wanted a band that was malleable and could live up to his idea of what psychedelic rock was,” Aguilar says. And Aguilar believes Cobb’s LA perspective was out of sync with what was happening in Haight-Ashbury, closer to the Watchband’s home.
“We had four days in the studio and that was it,” Aguilar recalls. He notes that the early Beatles and Rolling Stones albums were recorded simply: “Stand up, turn the microphones on, and play the stuff you’ve been playing on the road.” He reckons that approach could have served the Watchband well. “But we were learning new songs that Ed Cobb was throwing our way, and that really slowed the process down. So, in four days, we might get two new Ed Cobb songs and three of ours. And then he’d say, ‘Okay, That’s a wrap. That’s an album.’”
But even Aguilar admits that sometimes Cobb’s instincts were spot-on. “He gave it
a good shot, and there are some great songs on our albums that are not ours,” he says. Today, the re-formed Watchband plays some of those tunes, including Richie Polodor’s excellent instrumental, Expo 2000.
In the face of what Aguilar considers mishandling and neglect, the “real” Watchband fell apart after about a year, shortly after the release of its 1967 debut LP, No Way Out. “I didn’t leave the band,” Aguilar insists. “The band left itself. By that time, Mark Loomis was really, heavily into drugs; there was some scary stuff that was out there at that time.”
Nevertheless, the Aguilar-era lineup’s recordings would be spread – albeit thinly – across two more albums. February 1968’s The Inner Mystique featured anonymous studio musicians on its entire first side. The album’s highlight, a reading of Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz’s I Ain’t No Miracle Worker, features Aguilar’s vocals, even though he had been gone from the Watchband for several months by the time of its release. In stores three months later, One Step Beyond featured more tracks made by session musicians – including Moby Grape guitarist Jerry Miller (“Mark freaked out and they had to replace him with somebody”) – and yet more leftover tracks featuring Aguilar’s vocals. “That was pulling stuff out of the vaults,” Aguilar admits. “The label needed to fulfill one more album, but they had no more money for publicity or promotion. They really didn’t care; you might as well have had five dogs barking in the studio.”
Despite the dodgy circumstances surrounding their creation, original copies
of the Watchband’s three 60s albums are highly-prized, changing hands for hundreds of pounds. If Aguilar had a few spare copies in his garage, he could easily sell them and make a tidy profit. “We could,” he agrees, laughing. “But we hated those albums so damn much. Absolute truth: we took two cartons of albums and went skeet shooting off our back deck up the Santa Cruz Mountains. We shot at them with a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun.”
“I can’t think of too many bands that manage to build a reputation through as small a body of work,” reflects Palao. “When anybody looks at 60s garage, 60s punk – whatever you want to call it – The Chocolate Watchband is always going to be one of the first two or three names.”
After his time with the group ended, Aguilar went on to become an astronomy professor, doing work connected with the
US government’s NASA program. “I worked with astronauts, I worked with the Hubble telescope repair, and I was one of the first human beings to see what Pluto looked like when the spacecraft sent us the images,” he reflects. Aguilar left music behind, seemingly for good. But interest in the Watchband endured, kept alive in part by
the inclusion of
a track on the Lenny Kaye-curated garage/psych compilation, 1972’s Nuggets. As psychedelic and garage revivals popped up, many acts acknowledged a debt to The Chocolate Watchband.
“The first inkling that something weird was going on was when I would get these random, out-of-the-ozone phone calls from young kids who were big fans of the band,” Aguilar says. “They tracked me down while
I was working at an aerospace company. The second indication came in ’86 when Rolling Stone put out its
‘100 Best Albums’ list.
We were #78.”
Several years later,
RC contributor Richie Unterberger’s book Unknown Legends Of Rock’N’Roll filled many of the gaps in The Chocolate Watchband’s story and spurred new interest in their long-deleted catalogue.
In the late 90s, publisher, author and musician Mike Stax arranged
a reunion of prime-era Watchband. For the event, billed as 66/99, he brought together Aguilar, Andrijasevich, Flores and Tim Abbott (a fixture of the post-Aguilar 60s line-up); the success of that show led to a tour, and a 2001 album, At The Love-in Live! In more recent years, the reunited group – with journalist-author Palao taking over from Flores on bass – has released new albums and continues to play live.
A 2012 album, Revolutions Reinvented (reissued in 2015 as I’m Not Like Everybody Else) was a revisionist effort aimed at setting the band’s record straight: it included songs that had been part
of the group’s mid-60s live set, as well as remakes of songs like Expo 2000, this time played by the actual band. In 2018, the Watchband released two new singles, along with the promise of more new material.
Today – some 50-plus years after the release of its debut album – the band that never made it outside California now plays to enthusiastic audiences as far away as Europe. “We can’t wait to get on that stage,” Aguilar says. “The greatest flattery you will
ever have as
a musician is when you’re in a foreign country – maybe
one where not
all of them speak English – and the audience sings your songs back to you while you’re onstage.”
Palao believes the Watchband were “the quintessential … I hesitate
to say ‘garage band,’ but they just sort of crystallised that combination of the arrogance and the nerve of the British thing with the way that music on the West Coast was starting to evolve. They nailed it, that particular kind
of energy.”
Acknowledging that The Chocolate Watchband were never properly represented on albums bearing their name, Palao asserts: “Those recordings still added to the mystique – pun intended – of what they were as
a band.”
The band released two new songs in May: Judgment Day and Secret Rendezvous, available on iTunes and Spotify.
