Eugene Chadbourne

Eugene Chadbourne was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1954 and grew up in Boulder, Colorado. He picked up guitar at eleven or twelve, drawn in by the Beatles, and played in a garage band inspired by Jimi Hendrix before deciding rock and pop were too conventional for him. Hearing Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey pulled him toward avant-garde jazz, and Braxton talked him out of a planned career in journalism.

In the early 1970s he lived in Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, then settled in New York City in the mid-1970s, where he played free improvisation alongside Henry Kaiser and John Zorn and released his first album, Solo Acoustic Guitar. In the early 1980s he formed the avant-rock band Shockabilly with Mark Kramer and David Licht.

His work has run through country and folk forms as readily as improvisation: he has played with a Cajun band and a Russian folk band at a festival in Winnipeg, led the country-improv outfit LSD C&W, and spent years in a duo with Jimmy Carl Black, once the drummer for Frank Zappa. Other collaborators have included Han Bennink, Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp and Charles Tyler.

His 1993 solo record Songs paired politically pointed originals such as 'Hello Ceausescu' with covers of Nick Drake, Phil Ochs and Floyd Tillman, part of a self-released discography that runs to hundreds of titles.

He is known for building his own instruments, chiefly the electric rake, made by fitting a guitar pickup to a garden rake, which he has played in duet with pianist Bob Wiseman and on a Sun Ra tribute record. Live, his sets move between virtuosic improvisation, deadpan humour and political commentary.