Charles & Eddie's Eddie Chacon: 'It took me 10 years to recover from being a one-hit wonder' | Pop a
Charles & Eddie's Eddie Chacon: 'It took me 10 years to recover from being a one-hit wonder'
This article is more than 3 years oldAndrew MaleThe soulful singer had a worldwide hit with 1992’s Would I Lie to You, but he was dropped and his musical partner died. Now, he has poured his pain into a cathartic comeback album
Eddie Chacon still remembers hitting rock bottom. “It was 15 years ago,” he says. “And it sounds like something from like a bad movie.” Since childhood, he would get up at 8am and work on music. “That morning, my wife walked into my studio and I was just sitting there. She asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ I just said, ‘Nobody’s listening.’ I turned everything off, walked out, and I never went back for 10 years.”
It’s a warm summer’s morning in Los Feliz, Los Angeles and Chacon is sitting in the bright, white study of his 1930s Spanish-style casita and talking about his new album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness. If you know Chacon’s name it’s most likely as one half of early 90s US duo Charles & Eddie, who were No 1 for two weeks in 1992 with the sweet neo-soul pleader Would I Lie to You. Eddie was the androgynously handsome Latino one with the hoop earrings and the mane of thick, dark black hair halfway down his back. He sang the Marvin-meets-Jacko falsetto parts and those little cries of “Oh yeah!”
I always said if I got my head screwed on straight I could make one record where I was honest with myselfToday the hair is shorter, and greyer, the beard salt-and-pepper, but he still looks good, like a tired lion. On one level, he’s just another old soul singer making a comeback – but if you’re expecting Pleasure, Joy and Happiness to be one of those cookie-cutter retro-soul revival albums, you’d be dead wrong. Recorded with Solange and Frank Ocean collaborator John Carroll Kirby, it’s an ethereal, stripped-down collection of haunting confessionals, Chacon’s hypnotic falsetto shrouded in Kirby’s vaporous melodies. It’s also an album of proud middle-age, made by a 56-year-old man revisiting past failures and regrets over blurred synth lines and skeletal drum patterns: Krapp’s Last Tape via Channel Orange. “I always said if I got my head screwed on straight I could make one record where I was honest with myself,” says Chacon. “I’ve wanted to do it my whole life, but it’s taken my whole life to get there.”
Chacon grew up in Castro Valley, northern California, the youngest of three boys. The oldest was into Led Zeppelin, the other obsessed with Bette Midler. “I was in love with it all,” says Chacon. “I dreamed of being Rick Derringer.” But his father wanted him to be a singer, so Chacon was coached in pitch and timbre and was soon singing in his neighbourhood’s teen garage band, alongside future Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin and late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton. “They were a little older,” says Chacon. “I was 12 and obsessed with songwriting. I had this little Radio Shack tape recorder with a pitch button and I’d slow down songs in order to fully understand what was going on.”
After school, Chacon moved to LA and started sending out demos. One landed on the desk of Michael Eisner and led to a solo deal at 20 with Columbia. “An amazing surprise followed by terrible failure,” explains Chacon. “Of course it flopped. I was heartbroken.” More misfortunes followed. A solo deal with Luther Campbell’s Luke Skywalker Records got lost in the success of 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As We Wanna Be, then an album project with Paul’s Boutique producers the Dust Brothers became an education in heavy weed consumption. “Ten months to make seven songs,” says Chacon. “By the end of the album I felt ancient. I was 26.”
Moving to New York with his Dust Brothers demos, Chacon signed with Capitol A&R man Josh Deutsch. Then came a meet-cute straight out of Hollywood. Travelling on the C train, Chacon met a young Philadelphia singer called Charles Pettigrew carrying a vinyl copy of Marvin Gaye’s 1972 soundtrack Trouble Man. Turns out they were both signed to Deutsch. “A tremendous coincidence,” insists Chacon. “We were both like, ‘How the hell did we not know each other?’” The pair started writing songs, “in the back of cabs, on bar napkins” and collaboration turned to friendship and success. The sweetly seductive Would I Lie to You was No 1 around the world in the winter of 1992 while their ballad Wounded Bird became the love theme of Tony Scott’s True Romance. Then, nothing. A second album, Chocolate Milk, disappeared. They were dropped. “What happened hurt me deep for decades,” says Chacon. “Josh was our champion. Then, at our peak, he left for a bigger label. As a grown man, I’m like, of course, he did what was right for his career. But as a young man I was so angry. I felt like he’d ruined us.”
The plan was to find another deal but disillusion set in. Months turned into years. Then, in April 2001 at the age of 37, Pettigrew died of cancer. “He never told me he was sick,” says Chacon, still audibly hurt. “We’d started mailing demos to each other again. I was lost. Suddenly the phone isn’t ringing, you start partying a little too much. I joke about it now but it took me 10 years to recover from being a one-hit wonder.”
Chacon shut down his studio in 2005. A friend, who saw he was struggling, sent him a camera with a note saying: “You’d be good at this.” Chacon transformed himself into a photographer, doing fashion shoots alongside his wife, wardrobe stylist Sissy Sainte-Marie, who turned his old studio into her own. He dipped his toe in music again, in an electronic duo with Sissy called The Polyamorous Affair.
“But I was still obsessed with my persona,” says Chacon, “and it bums me out. Most of my career I’d just felt this great inferiority complex that I’d mask with ego. I wanted to let go of all that. Also 24-hour news, social media was starting to have a massive impact on my mental health. I want to make a record that was the complete opposite of all that, something meditative, rejuvenating.” Then he met John Carroll Kirby.
A mutual friend brought them together, says Kirby. “We met in Eddie’s car in a parking lot, a very LA thing to do. I played him the songs of Laraaji and this track Vai Gorilla, by Fabio Frizzi, which rips off Trouble Man brutally but it’s not quite so deep. It’s more modish, frailer. We talked about stuff like that as a concept for the album. I’d say, ‘Don’t try to be soul. You’ve got soul.’”
Working at Sun King Studios in Highland Park, Los Angeles, Kirby adopted a decidedly relaxed, therapeutic approach to recording. “He’d would put together these beautiful sounds on vintage instruments,” says Chacon, “then hand me this cheap SM 58 mic and I’d sing these stream-of-consciousness lyrics and he’d be like: ‘Yeah, that’s good. What’s in you is valid. Go with that.’ It made me realise I’d been working too hard on things, squeezing the life out.”
Says Kirby: “Eddie has a gorgeous voice, but a lot of time I’d be saying: ‘What are you telling us?’ I mean, he’s seen everything in the music business, he’s had it all, lost it all. I guess we were trying to get at that.”
As a result, Chacon is finally singing about his past and himself, drawing on deep reserves of hurt and unhappiness, his relationships, his father and his own failures. However, as the album title suggests, the results are strangely uplifting: ethereal, soothing, cathartic. “I was on a morning walk recently and listening back to it,” says Chacon. “I was moved to tears. Honestly. Up until that point, I didn’t feel I’d ever done anything real or great in my life. I finally felt like I’d done something good.”
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