Santa Rosa’s Last Day Saloon welcomes Bill Champlin

Did he finally hit rock bottom? Kick the bottle and find religion?

Does this mean the same thing as “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me"?

Quite the opposite.

That would’ve been the case back in the early ’80s when Champlin was trolling Los Angeles as a session guy “going around with a couple of six-packs of beer, a bag full of blow, a couple of joints and a couple packs of cigarettes — hey, that should be enough to get through the first song.”

These days, he’s getting back to his roots and reviving a solo career that’s been on hold for more than a decade.

An early disciple of Lou Rawls, the Tamalpais High grad lit up the Bay Area music scene in the late ’60s and ’70s with The Sons of Champlin, a freewheeling R&B and groove outfit that Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead once described as “the most talented of all the San Francisco bands.”

But unlike many bands with half their chops, the Sons never scored national acclaim.

At 62, Champlin splits time between Nashville and Los Angeles. His wife, singer Tamara Champlin, and son, keyboardist Will Champlin, both lend their talents to his new album. After 28 years, he recently parted ways with the super band Chicago — a gig that paid better than anything else in his career. Recharged by the new solo material, he’s hitting the road for a West Coast tour that swings through Santa Cruz, Mill Valley and lands at the Last Day Saloon in Santa Rosa on Saturday.

On the 11th day of band rehearsals in Las Vegas, he took a break to chat about new material, Donna Summer and the curse of Jamoca Almond Fudge ice cream:

Q: How are the Vegas buffets treating you?

A: Oh god, tell me about it. They got Mexican food, Chinese food, Mongolian food — it all looks the same.

Q: How are rehearsals?

A: Awesome. I’m using most of the guys from my live solo CD “Mayday.” The guys in the studio — Billy Ward on drums, (guitarist) Bruce Gaitsch and (bassist) George Hawkins — I couldn’t get them out on the road. But these guys I’m touring with are all great players and they can sing — that’s the thing. I didn’t want to get into that thing of getting samples of the vocals from the record.

Q: You don’t want to stack it all up at a live show.

A: No, even though everybody does that now. I don’t think anybody’s even put down for doing that anymore. The last bands you would expect in the world are doing that.

Q: But Chicago doesn’t, right?

A: Oh they absolutely do.

Q: Only kidding. So after 28 years, you decided you’d had enough?

A: It was sort of a mutual — well, not even really a mutual decision. All of a sudden I was just gone.

Q: Had you been thinking about it for years?

A: Oh yeah. It’s been pretty obvious to anybody that the direction they’re going in has been to become their own tribute band. I’m ready to go back and resume what I was doing with my own songwriting.

Q: What will you miss the most?

A: The money. It was a very lucrative gig. But you know what — I’ll figure a way around it.

Q: I have to admit I was a little worried when I saw the title of your new CD, but there’s some great stuff on there.

A: You know, it goes in a lot of directions. One of the only blues songs I’ve ever recorded was a TV show theme — “In The Heat of the Night.” And I actually started off as a blues singer. So I thought I’d do a real swampy kind of blues album for a change. The guys at the record company said, “Just send us everything you got — old, new, it doesn’t matter.” They called back and said, “I don’t know why you wanna do just a swampy blues album. You’ve got so much different stuff — there’s some nice pop stuff, some in-your-face R&B and there’s even some jazz — just don’t use the ‘J’ word.”

Q: Have fans been asking where you’ve been the last 10 years?

A: It’s funny, I walked into a guitar store in Nashville when I first moved there and this guy comes up and says, “Man, you know you could win the Bill Champlin look-alike contest.” I said, “Well, I should hope so” and he says, “Where have you been? What have you been doing? We lost you like 25 years ago.” The last time he saw me was with the Sons. I said, “I’ve been hiding backstage at the Chicago gigs.”

Q: It sounds like this was a unique situation this time around with “No Place Left to Fall” with DreamMakers Music and recording in an old church in New Jersey.

A: It was. They just wanted me to be me. We all go — wow man, records were really cool when everybody played it all together. So I kind of went — let’s rehearse and play it all together.

Q: Is this kind of a rebirth for you?

A: Well I just look at it from the point of view of musically I’m able to do something other than those same eight or nine songs (with Chicago) every night.

Q: What was the one song with Chicago you were really sick of singing?

A: Well, I don’t know, it’s hard to say. Lately, I’ve hardly been singing with Chicago. They’ve been passing out the vocals to everybody else. I think on “Look Away” I got to play one verse and chorus of it in a medley.

Q: I noticed you got a stripped-down acoustic version of “Look Away” (No. 1 Chicago hit, penned by Diane Warren) on the new CD.

A: That’s actually how we were playing it with Chicago. The audience really liked it and we were getting standing ovations and of course they pulled it from the set.

Q: Do you still cherish that description — Bill Champlin is “the best known unknown singer in the world"?

A: That’s something Donna Summer called me one time. I kinda dig it on some level. I’d like to be better known than that, but a lot of people hear me. I’ll give you a quick story — right before we played with Earth, Wind and Fire the first year, the manager of Chicago said to me backstage, “Hey, do you think there are actually any songs you could sing with Earth, Wind and Fire?” And I just looked at him incredulously and said, “Dude, I co-wrote one of their biggest hits — ‘After the Love is Gone.’ And you’re my manager?”

Q: Why didn’t the Sons make it in the conventional sense of the term?

A: I always tell people, “Every time opportunity knocked, we answered the phone.” We just basically missed a lot of opportunities that were right there in front of us.

Q: You were too stoned?

A: Yeah, pretty much. It’s not like we were out of whack with everybody else. But there was a lot of weed smoking going on. It’s like, well, you know on second thought, maybe I’ll have another Jamoca Almond Fudge and sit back and relax.

Bay Area freelance writer John Beck writes about entertainment for the Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014 or john@sideshowvideo.com.