Chagall Guevara was a quirky rock group formed by some Nashville musicians in the early nineties, centering around the vocal and lyrical work of Steve Taylor. Chagall Guevara was a Christian band by some definition, but their music was aimed at the mainstream rock market.
The members of the band were:
- Steve Taylor
- Dave Perkins
- Lynn Nichols
- Mike Mead
- Wade Jaynes
During their short life, the band produced a single self-titled album which was released on MCA records, as well as some songs for collections and other odds and ends. The self-titled album recieved praise from Rolling Stone, comparing the band to The Clash, which Steve Taylor claims was one of the highlights of his life. The band planned on touring, but it never happened. Except for some, future involvement in Steve Taylor's next album, Squint, nothing has been heard from the band since, but most of them are active musicians.
The album's songs and lyrics are similar to some of Taylor's solo work. The lyrics are obscure and the music is mellow rock in the vein of Taylor's earlier work. My personal favorite from the album is "Violent Blue", which is written as a monologue from someone to an old acquaintance about life and belief. "Escher's World" is a neat mockery of relativism, obscurity and abstraction, using reference to Escher's artwork ("Stairways cirle back to where you' been") and plain nonsense ("up's down, down is up, out is in").
As far as I know, there are no longer any albums being sold containing any Chagall Guevara music at all. (The last one out of print was either Now The Truth Can Be Told, Steve Taylor's boxed set, or Liver, his live album.)
One Chagall Guevara song, Treasure Of The Broken Land, is still available through iTunes. The remainder of Chagall Guevara's music and all of Steve Taylor's commercially unavailable music has been made available online by fan sites, on the grounds that Steve gave vocal permission for this in an interview some years ago.
- http://www.renc.igs.net/~adt/qrstuv/bio.html#chagall
- http://www.onfritz.com