Jerry Chambers and Kissing Daylight - By Jerry Lovett
Jerry Chambers passed away on Aug. 26, 2011 at age 56. Jerry was a musician, artist and producer. He had played in local and national "all original" bands his whole life. He had a love and passion for the art's unlike I've ever seen. While our friendship was breif, Jerry had a huge impact on why this band is here. Here is that story....
I met Jerry in the May of 2010. The cover band (Visual Kaos) I was in at the time was playing up the street from his house, so my girlfriend called him to come check us out. My girlfriend had known Jerry and his wife for about 15yrs and while we had talked numerous times about taking me to meet him it had just never happened. Jerry enjoyed the band that night and in particular my guitar playing. Being a guitar player himself, we hit it off well. We naturally talked shop also and during the course of this conversation the subject of originals came up. I explained to him my story of how I had always played originals, but had gotten into a cover band some 12yrs earlier and was sort of resigned to my fate because of my age. Jerry blew up on me! His exact words to me were "just because you think you are having some kind of goddamn midlife crisis doesn't mean you can't play originals. You're not resigned to any fate. No one cares how old you are, just whether the music is good". We talked more and I told him about my old band Kissing Daylight and how much I had wanted to get it back going, but just wasn't sure if it was the right thing. He said I need to come to his house sometime and check out his home studio and musical gear along with just talk more and hang out, so 2 weekends later that's what I did. I brought a 5th of Jack with me as a gift so we could have a few drinks. We would end up drinking the whole thing that night. Jerry had one of the largest collections of musical gear I had ever seen, not to mention a huge collection of cd's, vinyl, tapes, whatever format music could be put on. That night we talked, played, listened and got really drunk! So drunk I never got my Kissing Daylight cd out of the car to let him listen to it. Luckily he reminded me before I left that I had never brought anything for him to hear from the band, so I ran out to the car and got it for him. I really wasn't sure what he'd think of it, but I knew he'd tell it like it is. If there was one thing I had learned about him already was he told you exactly what he thought good or bad. About a month went by before I got a call from him. He loved it! He offered to help me get it all going again by having me come back to his studio and finish recording 4 of the songs on the cd (you'll have to log into the "members" page to hear the story of the cd). At that point I talked to Poe about quiting Visual Kaos and getting back to doing all original music and Poe said let's do it. I talked to Jerry and told him I wanted to get a drummer before I came in to record. Unfortunately that took awhile, but once we found one I set things up to go back to his place. So in April of 2011 I went to Jerry's to begin working on the recordings. I would spend about once a week there over the next several months getting things done. While they didn't turn out as good as we had hoped for, which was no fault of his because of the poor quality of the masters, I had a nice demo I could get out with. This demo would start the talks between me and the bands original drummer and lead to him coming back to the band. Here we are now!
I can say I have few really serious regrets in my lifetime. One unfortunately comes with the story though. One being that he wanted me to come back over after the recording sessions to jam and try out one of my amps along with a couple of other pieces of gear I had. He called several times about this, but because I was so busy getting things together for the band I told him it would have to wait a little bit. The biggest regret though was I never told him how much his help in getting this band going meant to me. I unfortunately never will now.
Thank you Jerry for all you did for me and my music. It has made my world a better place. Rest in peace my friend....
P.S.- The songs recorded at Jerry's were engineered by Aaron Madrigal. Check out his band Lemon Sky . Jerry loved this band and Aaron. He played a huge part in their existence also.
