The footnotes and legends that line the 40-year career of British guitarist and songwriter Michael Chapman are the stuff of thick biographies and fireside storytelling sessions. Chapman, for instance, suggested Mick Ronson for the electric guitar parts on his second album, 1970's Fully Qualified Survivor, a move that put the local gardener in touch with a performer named David Bowie. Elton John tried to recruit Chapman to be his acoustic guitarist (and, like Led Zeppelin, arguably borrowed some of Chapman's music for his own), and he was part of the cadre of songwriters like Syd Barrett and Shirley Collins who made Harvest Records such an important early outlet for wild, weird records. Chapman toured and befriended John Fahey and Jack Rose, recently finished work on LPs for Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace!, and has published a novel. It's possible to make Chapman sound like an incredible musician without examining his music at all.
But Chapman should be known for more than the myths around him, and thanks to the diligent excavations of two excellent American labels, he might soon be: In late February, Light in the Attic Records released Fully Qualified Survivor, Chapman's second LP for Harvest and the home of his most famous tune, the perfectly heartsick "Postcards of Scarborough". A terrifically unpredictable album, Survivor, even four decades later, feels beyond any genre tag. He proves he's a world-class songwriter, portraying lovesick loneliness during the gorgeous "Kodak Ghosts" with the same detail-driven despair of Bill Callahan and John Darnielle. He's an articulate, spirited guitarist, too, treating each of the notes on the brief instrumental "Fishbeard Sunset" with a Fahey-like care and commitment. "Aviator" is a 10-minute lament that never feels like an unfocused ramble. Its forlorn violin and cello (arranged by Elton John-collaborator-to-be Paul Buckmaster) push against the guitars in sinister streaks, Chapman offering his Dylan-sized invective through daring Yorkshire slurs. Fully Qualified Survivor is a boldly open-ended record, then, the kind that makes the freak-folk of the last decade seem less freaky and more like a point along an old continuum.
If it's forever his hallmark, Fully Qualified Survivor is a fitting one, as it jumps from complex, 10-minute dirges of sadness to optimistic ragtime jolts, from gritty electric boogie to forlorn folk drifts. Really, though, that's just the sign of everything else Chapman would later do. "Survivor is varied in style, but that's me. That's why people don't know what to do with me," he explains in the reissue's liner notes. Chapman has been an accidental professional musician for more than four decades, and, for many of them, his adamant eclecticism has pushed his music into unexpected and often undefined places. That's the key takeaway from Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967–2010, a two-disc set of Chapman originals released by Tompkins Square on the same day Light in the Attic reissued Survivor.
Trainsong includes new recordings of Chapman instrumentals written between 1967 and 2010-- 1970's jolly gem "Naked Ladies and Electric Ragtime", 2001's restfully fluid "Caddo Lake", 2010's cautiously bright "Thurston's House". Chapman is a world traveler and, it seems, an adventurous musical consumer, and here he incorporates everything from blues moans to an almost new-age calm into his music. That's not to mention the gamelan, African, and Appalachian touches that appear throughout his career. As guitarists go, he seems to be one with fewer stylistic reservations than most, bridging techniques in unconventional sequences. "Slowcoach", for instance, pairs beautiful harmonic splashes with sad passages of slide guitar and long, unfurling runs that suggest a jazz master's vamp. His electrified "Hi Heel Sneakers" alluded to Morricone in a Texas snake pit, or George Thorogood in a conservatory. The combination of distortion and reverb give his pristine lines a touch of snarl and a skin of grit. Chapman makes that blend feel natural and comfortable, as though these are the pieces that should've always been together. It's genuinely surprising work, the music of someone who seems to have heard and played enough to have found his own approach. Of course, the same could have been written 40 years ago, when Fully Qualified Survivor was first released.
