Mastedon wasn’t the only band to make its one and only appearance at Cornerstone Festival in 1991. Steve Taylor (featured earlier in our video from 1984) attempting to move into more mainstream music joined the band Chagall Guevara. Chagall Guevara was a slight departure from Taylor’s sound, but still resonated roots of bands like The Clash with Taylor’s pointed lyrics, though not as overtly evangelistic. The band with the difficult to pronounce name secured a contract with MCA and produced their self-titled album in 1991. However, MCA gave the band no support and the album was out-of-print almost as fast as it was released. Beset with finanicial difficulties from low album sales and no promotion, the band disappeared into the ether before it ever got off the ground.
The band did make one round of festival appearances, though, playing on the Main Stage at Cornerstone Festival 1991.
Before the days of iTunes and MP3’s when music was still a scarce commodity, the Chagall Guevara CD was something of a Holy Grail for collectors as so few were printed. I can remember internet posts with people selling and buying the CD for as much as $100 and that’s what I remember most about Chagall Guevara. It’s a good CD, to be sure (I had it on cassette…not as valuable as the CD, but nonetheless, still a prized item), but I don’t know that it’s $100 good. Audio quality for this video is okay with some flutter from video tape, but otherwise, it gives a nice perspective of what’s it’s like to see a band on the main stage from the crowd, complete with goobers crowd surfing and even a nice cartwheel from Steve Taylor on stage.
Back in the pre-web days when Chagall Guevara came out, it was REALLY hard to find information on release dates and such. There was talk of the CD on rec.music.christian, and there was the giant catalog of CDs that record stores had, and for Christian stuff there was the news column in CCM magazine, and that was about it. I’m not even sure there
was a reliable “new stuff comes out on Tuesdays” system like there is now. I remember haunting local record stores (an old Sound Warehouse store on Peachtree, plus the lamented Lenox Tower Records) for months waiting for this CD to finally surface. It was kind of a disappointment to me once it came out – it wasn’t as fun as Taylor’s earlier stuff, it was lacking the sax and New Wave sound, and it was a little rougher around the edges. I never really warmed up to it.
I never saw the band live. I wish I’d been at Cornerstone ’91 for CG and Mastedon, but alas… I did have tickets to a show with Chagall Guevara opening for Jeff Healy Band (the blind guy that had a minor hit with “Angel Eyes,” or something like that), but CG cancelled, and I was actually able to get a refund on the tickets as a result.
From what I read in Jerry Wilson’s interview with Taylor in his _God’s Not Dead_ book, part of the problem with Chagall Guevara (in addition to the lack of label support) was the “too many chiefs” issue, with three band leaders (Taylor, Perkins, Nichols) that were unable to agree on any business-type decision (who to tour with, etc.), so they ended up doing next to nothing, and finally just packed it in. Taylor then recorded his _Squint_ album that was more like the CG stuff than his earlier stuff (and therefroe wasn’t a favorite of mine), and that’s been it for his musical output.
Oh, but I did finally find an MP3 of uber-obscure Chagall Guevara b-side “Still Know Your Number By Heart,” which was a decent tune, and I also really liked their cover of Mark Heard’s “Treasure of the Broken Land” on the Heard tribute album that surfaced following his death. (Any video from his final Cornerstone peformance out there on the YouTubes?)
The Mark Heard show is coming on Wednesday (thanks for ruining the surprise, man!)
C-stone 91 would’ve been something… Mastedon, Chagall Guevara, and a fresh faced OTR on the New Band Stage to boot. I seem to recall someone saying there were a LOT of power outages that year as they adjusted moving to Bushnell.