It had been five years since the Chamber Strings last played in Chicago, but it might as well have been a million when the band took the stage at the Double Door Saturday night. Following waves of praise and buzz, bad luck and worse habits led Chamber Strings leader Kevin Junior to Los Angeles, where by his own account he lived for years on the brink of death — homeless and starving, coping with divorce, depression and drug addiction.
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If the Chamber Strings’ two albums, 1999’s “Gospel Morning” and 2001’s “Month of Sundays,” sound like lost ’70s masterpieces, then Junior’s return to performance felt a little like a near-forgotten cult icon fighting his way back from obscurity, resisting the dustbin of history in a bid for renewed relevance.
With his spiky rock-star hair, Junior was all smiles, swigging from a bottle of wine and exchanging glances and grins with his bandmates, remarkably the same Chamber Strings lineup that recorded “Month of Sundays” so long ago, a testament to their lasting friendship as well as their trust in Junior’s impeccable songcraft.
At one end of the spectrum were jaunty but bittersweet singalongs such as “The Fool Sings Without Any Song” and “Make It Through the Summer,” at the other existed rousing rockers such as “Dead Man’s Poise,” which sounded like at least three classic Rolling Stones songs rolled into one. All were delivered with if not always tight then certainly purposeful drive, as if the band had something to prove both to themselves and to the healthy crowd.
This time, though, Junior clearly knows what’s at stake, as the heartbreaking confessional “I Come Apart” revealed.
“Things come apart so easily,” he sang, with the resignation of someone’s who’s seen that happen first hand.