We wanderers ever seeking the lonlier [sic] way, begin no day where we have ended another day: and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.
— Le Souvenir, 1974
So the Guzzlers disbanded. (We’ll skip the details: another one of those band things.) Five years after high school graduation, on the eve of his 23rd birthday, Bob Chaney eloped with the woman who would become mother to his child. Then it was a residence in South Jersey, two-bit jobs (yard man for Chem Lawn, etc.), night school work at the University of Pennsylvania and diaper-changing at home. Zach was born in 1979, and Bob spent the first half of Ronald Reagan’s first term as a husband and father who occasionally played music.
In 1983, 27-year-old Bob Chaney became Lonesome Bob once again, as he began banging the snare drum for old friend and ex-Budguzzler, Ben Vaughn. “He was living the life of a non-creative person at the time,” Vaughn said. “He was married, and he had a job as a security guard. Bob wasn’t really a drummer, but I never knew him not to be good on whatever instrument he picked up. I knew he’d bring a great harmony voice, and great enthusiasm for the material and the experience.”
Amy Rigby first heard Bob as part of the Vaughn Combo. She recalls seeing him standing up and pounding on a comically undersized drum kit. “The Combo was fun, and they were distinct characters onstage,” she said. “The focus wasn’t just on Ben; it was Ben and Bob and Gus [Cordovox] and Aldo [Jones]. And they lived in New Jersey — in America, not in New York City. It seemed like if you lived in the East Village you had to put off some kind of hipness, but they didn’t have to worry about that. They were…goofy.”
Goofy, and gone most of the time. The Ben Vaughn Combo played up and down the East Coast, regularly drawing between 200 and 500 people in their heyday. The songs were all Vaughn’s, but each band member took a place in the spotlight, and Lonesome Bob became something of a cult hero to those who favored Vaughn’s “Shingaling With Me” and “Lookin’ For A 7-11” to rock radio’s steady diet of hair metal and Madonna.
“We did something where I’d don a smoking jacket and walk from behind the drums, sit at a table where there were girls and sing a medley of Bread songs,” Bob said. “We called it a Breadley. I’d do ‘Baby, I’m A Want You’, and some other stupid stuff, and we thought that was pretty funny.”
For the Combo, road life was…well, it was road life. A whole lot of clubs and a whole lot to drink and a whole lot of music and not much else. Bob’s marriage dissolved somewhere in there, and Zach stayed in New Jersey with his mother.
“Bob was pretty wrapped up in fatherhood,” Vaughn said. “There were three fathers in that band, and all of us ended up as single dads. Maybe it had less to do with up playing music than it had to do with the fact that we all got married too young.”
Along with the myriad concerns and regrets inherent in a busted marriage, Bob worried that his son would acquire some troubling family traits.
“There is a genetic predisposition toward addictive behavior, and it runs like gangbusters through my family,” he said. “Both my mom and my dad have avoided it, but my dad’s side, especially, is just a whole lot of serious, alcohol-related dysfunction. And that was something they preached to me about, endlessly.”
Bob,
To a great fellow classmate and basketball player. May you excel in the journalism field and may God bless you in the future.
— Warren
(as written in Le Souvenir)
More than a decade and precisely three time zones separated from Audubon High, Bob took off in a van with the rest of the Ben Vaughn Combo on a trip through the Rocky Mountains.
“We had a date in San Francisco on a Saturday night and another date in Denver on a Monday, and we had to drive all that way, with no heat,” Bob said. “We were living on nothing. No money, and we didn’t have any food. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, but there were flaring tempers at that point. We were ‘Go with the flow’ guys, but the flow stopped. We’d had great, fun times, but basically it just disintegrated on that trip. I was probably the most vocal about it, which caused Ben and I not to talk to each other for a long time.”
