Chin Ho! are one of the great what-ifs of Vermont music history. Singer Andrew X Smith and guitarist Dave Morency formed the band in 1989 after meeting at Johnson State College when Smith bought weed from Morency’s roommate. They became perhaps the closest Vermont ever came to making a splash in the alternative-rock boom of the 1990s.
Along with contemporaries such as the Pants and Wide Wail, Chin Ho! formed a more robust indie-rock scene than Burlington had ever seen before — or, arguably, has seen since. Smith became an almost mayoral figure. His zine and indie record label Good Citizen served to connect a previously disjointed community of musicians and fans, in the Queen City and throughout the state. The city’s music scene had an aura in those days, an air of excitement bordering on certainty that Burlington bands — Smith’s chief among them — would make it.
Ever searching for commercial success, Chin Ho! moved through different phases, from the R.E.M. and Replacements-like college radio rock of their 1991 debut, Drink, to the heavier, post-grunge vibes of their 1997 final LP, Low Flying Planes. The band produced seven albums, played more than 1,000 shows across the country, shared the stage with the likes of Counting Crows and the Tragically Hip, flirted with Elektra and Tommy Boy Records, and provided music for TV shows such as “Dawson’s Creek” and MTV’s “Making the Band.” Yet it never quite achieved breakout success.
After 27 lineup changes and multiple “almost” chances, Chin Ho! unceremoniously disbanded in 2003. Feeling jaded and forgotten by a scene they helped create, most of the band members were sure they’d reached the end of their story.
“Putting into context what we did is sort of hard,” bassist Chris Parizo said as he sat beside Smith and Morency at Seven Days‘ office in Burlington last week. “It’s easy to say we weren’t successful. We were aiming high, as we should have, but it didn’t happen and there were some bad feelings that came with that.”
At the far end of the table, Smith smiled ruefully, rubbing a hand over his skull, which is as hairless as it was in the band’s heyday, though his goatee has gone snow white. At 63, he still exudes a palpable energy, his wiry frame rarely motionless while speaking, though there is a touch more gravel in his voice.
“Honestly, I’ve said no to this for fucking 20 years,” he admitted. “I’ve only just stopped being terrified in rehearsals. These guys make me laugh so much, though. It’ll be nice being a band again, even if it’s just one last time.”
What Smith has tried to avoid, and last year relented on, is the classic reunion gig. Spurred on by a failed documentary of the band, he finally put aside his reluctance to “do the cliché thing” and marshaled his troops for a one-night reunion show this Saturday, October 28, at the Higher Ground Showcase Lounge in South Burlington.
As they prepare to return to the stage, Chin Ho! are contemplating their place and legacy in the Queen City’s music history. And they’re basking in the feeling of making music without the commercial pressures they put on themselves decades ago.
“Look, Dave had triple bypass surgery a few years ago,” Smith said. “Matty [Vachon, drums] has a new hip, and I pretty much take care of my mother 24-7…”
“I’m getting a colonoscopy the week of the show!” Parizo added with a laugh. “Maybe I should do it onstage?”
“Point is, we’re all in very different places these days than we were back then,” Smith continued. “We’re not worried about status. We’re just enjoying making music with friends, which is why you play in bands in the first place.”
Neil Cleary remembers the Burlington music scene in the early ’90s, with its electric atmosphere that made it feel like anything — even rock stardom — was possible. As the drummer for another great could-have-been indie-rock act, the Pants, Cleary saw how the grunge boom in Seattle changed the game, if only for a moment. Small, college-town scenes such as those of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Athens, Ga., were getting unlikely attention from big record labels.
“For a minute it was like, ‘Fuck, maybe us, too?'” Cleary said. “Ultimately a lot of it was us huffing our own fumes in a little terrarium, but Chin Ho! were the rare example of a band that actually understood what it took to take a run at being a real band — like actually trying really hard and taking it seriously.”
According to Cleary and Chin Ho!, the band took plenty of heat from its local contemporaries for that attitude.
“Trying really hard doesn’t always look supercool to the rest of us entitled slackers, who apparently expected to make it based on a cool jacket,” Cleary said.
“People called us ‘Chin Whore,'” Smith recalled.
A relentless gigging machine during their prime, Chin Ho! were driven by Smith, who was determined to achieve success on the band’s own terms. When local promoters warned him that the band was oversaturating Burlington’s small market, he booked them at Nectar’s as a Chin Ho! cover band.
“As a band, they set an example by creating a path for themselves,” said James Lockridge, executive director and cofounder of the Vermont music repository Big Heavy World. The nonprofit’s name comes from an unreleased Chin Ho! track that Lockridge overheard the band rehearse while he was living with Smith years ago.
“And Andrew had an original voice as a singer and a songwriter at a time when originality was especially valued,” Lockridge continued, “during the rise of the ‘alternative’ format.”
Smith still has trouble reconciling the hard work he and his many bandmates put in and the extensive touring they did with the lack of recognition they received outside the Green Mountains.
“Sometimes I’d just ask myself, We’ve played 1,000 shows. How come no one has ever heard of us?” he said.
“Obviously, we were playing the wrong places,” Morency quipped, sending his bandmates into a fit of laughter.
Chin Ho!’s impact on the Vermont music scene can’t be measured in album sales or dashed dreams. They never did get that big record contract or even score a minor hit and become one-hit wonders to the rest of the world — as Smith admits he always hoped to. Yet the band left a changed music scene in its wake. For one, it showed other local musicians that it was possible to take a stab at stardom, even if you were a Vermont band not named Phish.
“I still have their poster in my old room at my mom’s house,” said Danny LeFrancois, front man for the indie-rock/Americana act Danny & the Parts, one of the opening acts at the Chin Ho! reunion show.
LeFrancois first heard the band when an uncle brought him to the Vermont Reggae Fest — where, in true hustle fashion, Smith had booked Chin Ho! even though the band never came near the reggae genre. Taken by the band’s muscular indie rock and Smith’s frenetic stage energy, LeFrancois sought out Chin Ho!’s 1992 album Recovery, which he recalled buying on cassette at Recycle North — now known as ReSOURCE and decidedly less stocked with local music releases.
“As a musician, I was just beginning the journey, and Chin Ho! inspired me with their cool merch and funky songs,” LeFrancois said.
It wasn’t just the band’s music that changed the scene. Smith had always wanted to create a hub for musicians and fans to follow what local acts were up to. The result was Good Citizen, his zine and label dedicated to all things Burlington- and Vermont-made music. Before it folded in 2000, he published 14 issues of the zine and produced a dozen compilation albums.
Parizo, the youngest member and fifth bassist of Chin Ho!, remembered Good Citizen as an integral part of his musical DNA growing up in Burlington. Only 18 when he auditioned for Smith, he was already steeped in the mystique of the Burlington scene, thanks to the zine.
“Chin Ho! was a gateway drug for me,” Parizo said. “I discovered them at the same time I was just getting into grunge, and I was like, ‘Fuck Seattle. Burlington has a great scene.’ There was such a mythos and vibe around everything here then, and we’d all read Good Citizen whenever it came out.”
Smith was creating the infrastructure of a healthy music scene with his compilation albums, magazine and radio shows. He also gave up-and-coming bands chances to tour with and open for Chin Ho! — one part of the grind he misses to this day.
“A lot of us got our first taste of legitimacy off those platforms Andrew created,” Cleary said. “And I think a lot of us owe him more than we realize, certainly more than he gets credit for. In my opinion, he deserves a statue on Church Street alongside ‘Big’ Joe Burrell.”
While a statue isn’t exactly on Smith’s mind, the reunion show has made him consider what sort of future Chin Ho! might have, if any.
“None of us want to be the cliché, right?” Smith said, adjusting his white-framed glasses. “Just milking nostalgia and all that shit. Because we have no idea who may or may not give a shit about us dragging our asses back up on that stage, we don’t know how the tickets will sell.”
When he learned the show was actually selling rather quickly (it’s since sold out), Smith’s eyes lit up — the flicker of an old ghost, perhaps, of ambition and the eagerness to seize opportunities. For the first time in years, the entire band lives in the greater Burlington area. It’s not hard to detect traces in Smith of the fire that drove him to push his band from a tiny college town on tours of the country.
“I don’t know if this is it or not,” he admitted. Then he added, “We do have two unfinished records, so you never know. You just never know.”
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The original print version of this article was headlined “The Late Greats | Burlington indie-rock royalty Chin Ho! reunite”
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This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2023.
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