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Earth to Chet

Jan 07, 2026

For our 95/96 US tours, I’d been clean and sober approximately 80 percent of the nights. An accomplishment of sorts. Except that for the remaining 20 percent I’d gotten so completely fucked up that it pretty much nullified whatever ground I’d hoped to gain.

It became clear to me, finally, that this was an absolute situation. Spring 96 marked the first time since my early teens that I became completely sober and drug-free for an extended period of time.

The timing was perfect. I was the designated driver of the newly formed Earth to Chet Orchestra.

Earth to Chet was a Kingston superband comprised of Mercury Rev, Agit Pop, Perfect Heller, and a loose handful of other misfits. We came up with some originals, like The Monkey Song, I Love Hockey, and Adam’s Clean (a great mystery to everyone in the band at the time.)

But what defined Earth to Chet more than anything was the chance to explore as a group some of the Great American Songbook stuff I was working on simultaneously at the piano bar. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore. I’m a Fool to Want You. Georgia on my Mind.

I played a monster Mark V Fender Rhodes. The action was ridiculous, you invited carpal tunnel just getting the keys to work, but the low-end reverberated fabulously, like the sound of a passing truck. I played the bass parts with my left, chords, melody, and the occasional solo with my right.

KP from Perfect Heller had her drum kit set up next to me. The style wasn’t her forte, but she held it down, and between us we kept the thing running.

Our horn section was fucking mental and played whatever they wanted, sometimes together, sometimes in five different directions.

Up front were Jonathan and Joe. Earth to Chet didn’t have a straight man. Each spurred the other on to greater heights of drunken mayhem. I likened Jon and Joe to two competing Dean Martins.

All of us dressed Rat Pack, which went with the music, but was also a tribute of sorts to the earlier lives of some of the characters we hung with, whose generation was still propping up the bar at Artie’s on any given evening.

We played at Artie’s at least once so those guys could watch us. We played at what would eventually become BSP on Wall Street. Probably our best shows were at The Loft, which was Chris Gonyea’s space on Broadway by the train tracks.

The Loft was the closest we came to recording. Our New Year’s Eve show there was filmed and broadcast live on, of course, Kingston Cable Access Television.

Jonathan fell onto my Rhodes, which collapsed onto my lap. The 88-key behemoth weighed over a hundred pounds, not including Jonathan. Somehow I kept playing.

My neighbor Mrs. McCloskey was watching that night. I used to play the piano in their living room after school, so I think it tickled her to watch me play (or try to) on cable access.

“Why did they keep jumping on your piano?” she asked me when I stopped by her house shortly thereafter.

“I really don’t know,” I said.

But it wasn’t a mystery. Though I was sober, I kept going to Artie’s so I wouldn’t fall out of the loop. Bartender Mike always said, “Hey Adam!” with a smile and set a refreshing tumbler of club soda in front of me without me having to ask.

The first few times were weird at Artie’s, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. My friends were saying the most peculiar things to me. Like, they all seemed a little crazy to me.

That’s when I realized:

Oh, this is what people act like when they’re getting drunk!

I had never realized what drunk people looked and sounded like, because I’d been always been one of them. It was highly amusing. With no judgements whatsoever, it helped solidify my resolve not to drink.

Earth to Chet lived for a while in the borderlands between focused effort and oblivion. It was inclusive, democratic, and frivolous in a way that none of our “real” bands with business concerns could quite be. It was also a party band, which was a good contribution at the time, because Kingston was in need of a few good parties.

Technically speaking, we absolutely murdered Ellington and Carmichael. If Chet Baker were still alive, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with us either.

But, seeing as Chet had passed to the great beyond, we imagined he might be squinting back from beyond the stars as we conjured him. No doubt he was shaking his head at the mess we were making, but we liked to think he was getting a small kick from our undisciplined attempts anyway.

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