This is Medium Rotation, a newsletter about the bands we used to play on my college radio station, 88.3 WSBU-FM, St. Bonaventure. Today, we’re looking back at Brooklyn indie-rock band Sam Champion, who are no longer together.
I began this newsletter writing about two bands that played at my college. I contemplated continuing that trend until I ran out of stories to tell, at which point I’d shift to indie also-rans and forgotten gems whose biggest moments were being featured on Starbucks point-of-sale comps and the like. But in a way, those barely remembered bands just might be way more fun to talk about — especially the ones with no vestigial social-media footprint to speak of in 2021. So let’s talk about one that shares its name with a New York weatherman and typifies the kinds of CDs I was scrambling to save to my iTunes library in 2008: Sam Champion.
To clarify, this Brooklyn quartet did not name themselves after Sam Champion, the convivial meteorologist/news anchor who did stints on WABC and Good Morning America. No, as vocalist Noah Chernin explained to Rolling Stone in 2008, the band’s namesake was instead “a principal in a high school in Texas where I almost went to school. We were on a late-night road trip and we decided that would be a funny name for a band.” (For those keeping track, that marks the second band featured here to find its name during a car journey.) It’s the kind of name that makes you have to type “Sam Champion band” in order to get any relevant results. When you do, you click through a portal to another time: quick-hit rising-band profiles in RS, Spin, Gothamist, and The Guardian that paint them as “Ryan Adams covering songs off Pavement’s Wowee Zowee”; lukewarm reviews in Pitchfork and PopMatters; and a delightful Quit Your Day Job feature in Stereogum highlighting drummer Ryan Thornton’s nursery-school teaching gig.
No Twitter, no Instagram, but a long-dormant Facebook page. Sam Champion, four dudes who loved making noise and who even wrote a handful of captivating melodies, remain representatives for the last era a rising band could’ve survived without a boisterous social-media presence. You might think it eerie, a ghost band with no socials, but I think it’s fine. Healthy, even. This is the way it used to be. Bands that made a Twitter in 2012 but broke up in 2017 have decrepit-ass timelines now with their last posts about “our new single” preserved in digital amber like Pompeii denizens. It’s spooky! Some real abandoned amusement park energy.
I’ve had a lot of fun connecting to Sam Champion directly through their music instead of cobwebbed social profiles. Listening back to Heavenly Bender, their ‘08 album, is the experience of hearing what sounds like a dozen different bands bringing a dozen different styles to a recording session. To start, yes, there are some Terror Twilight echoes on opener “Like A Secret” and later glorious bluesy mess “There Was A Doubt.” If I’d known who Pavement were in 2008, I might’ve listed them under RIYL when I wrote a blurb about the album for WSBU’s music department. Instead, I think I gravitated to the chunky beer-commercial riff of “Be Mine Everyone” and the White Blood Cells-y stomp of “You Can’t Stop.” I definitely got “Like A Secret” into light rotation, though, because its opening guitar rings like a melodious siren, and I was pleased to find they made a fun beachy video for it. They also strummed it through the Lower East Side streets.
By then, the group was a fixture of New York spots like Mercury Lounge and Bowery Ballroom, where Chernin worked. They formed on Halloween 2004 when Chernin, Thornton, and guitarist Sean Sullivan (a.k.a Sean Bones) all linked up. They started writing and playing together and apparently even had a particularly loud show in Syracuse shut down by the cops. You wouldn’t know it by their first album, Slow Rewind, which they released the following year on Razor & Tie. It sounds a bit like Ben Kweller doing Yo La Tengo and yes, Pavement, although it might be more accurate to name-check Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks. It’s full of moving moments that reach upward, collapsing in a final sigh of “I’m too broke to go get drunk” that actually feels arena big. It’s “Fillmore Jive” left out in the sun and found sweaty and sunburned a decade later. There’s also an endearing song called “You Can’t See The Stars In This Town” that balloons into a gentle melodica and horn-filled outro befitting indie’s contemporaneous baroque-pop moment. That’s followed immediately by an Everclear pastiche with a gooey harmonizing-guitar center. It’s a cool collection! It’s easy to see how it landed Sam Champion on the Bonnaroo stage in 2007. “Girl Talk rocked my socks off yesterday,” Sullivan says in a time-capsule backstage interview from the fest.
Around this time, Chernin and Thornton were rendered effectively homeless for a bit after a fire tore through their Park Slope apartment building. As Chernin told BrooklynVegan in 2007: “Our bathroom and back of the apartment … are completely destroyed. Ryan’s room and my room were pretty much untouched, except my windows were smashed out and some smoke damage. It's still a crime scene, I think. We are slowly going back and getting our things. No instruments or gear really got damaged.” In the immediate aftermath, they turned to couch surfing and staying at girlfriend’s places to figure out their next moves. It’s the kind of thing that might’ve inspired a song or two, but their sophomore LP had already been written and recorded.
In late 2006, around Christmastime, the band trekked north to Woodstock to track inside what The Guardian delightfully referred to as an “arachnid-infested barn-cum-studio.” By the time the Heavenly Bender CD found its way into my laptop in fall 2008, it was nearly two years old — and those languid and scuzzy guitar lines that garnered comparisons to Crazy Horse had been laid down in the frigid air of an upstate winter. Despite the conditions, Heavenly Bender is an exceedingly warm record, stacked with overdubs and the sweat of a barroom band. They’d financed it themselves, raising a reported $5,000 through fan donations, their day jobs, and a fiscal sponsorship program designed to aid the arts. “I raised all this money through a nonprofit organization that helps artists of all kinds,” bassist Jack Dolgen said around the time the album dropped. “I partnered up with them, and that allowed us to make the album we wanted without being slave to a corporation.” As a result, Heavenly Bender is a singular work.
They meant to release in fall 2007 but it got delayed to the following year. It’s the kind of what-if scenario that makes you wonder if the LP would’ve gotten more traction before the Brooklyn scene of 2008 — which gets an entire section of Lizzy Goodman’s seminal 2000s New York music history tome Meet Me In The Bathroom — had solidified into a firm shortlist of Vampire Weekend, Grizzly Bear, and such. (Probably not, but it’s worth a ponder.) While not a staple of best-of ‘08 album lists, Heavenly Bender did end up the final work Sam Champion offered before their last gig at Brooklyn’s Union Hall in December 2009. By all accounts, the four members had solid gigs outside the band, and Thornton’s words about his school job make it sound frankly awesome. (“Many parents are in bands themselves. … Four kids in my class have gotten drum kits this year, which makes me so happy that I cry.”) He’s still a teacher and releases excursions under the moniker Charm Parade. Sullivan makes music as Sean Bones and Terribly Yours; 2020’s sparkly “A Love That Don’t Diminish” is a bop. Chernin works in artist management.
Bassist Jack Dolgen, meanwhile, has had the most conspicuous post-Sam Champion career. He’s best known for his work on beloved CW show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, writing and directing episodes as well as crafting the lion’s share of the show’s zany, highly shareable, and endlessly replayable songs alongside creator Rachel Bloom and late Fountains of Wayne songwriter (and all-around cult hero) Adam Schlesinger. “Sexy Getting Ready Song,” “I Gave You A UTI,” “I Go To The Zoo” (my wife’s personal favorite) — these are all in part Dolgen’s doing. He co-wrote songs about giving birth and MRA sleazebags and really nailed both. “As a dude in a predominantly female writers room, I’d learned to keep my ears open and learn about shit I don’t know about,” he told Vulture a few years ago. He won an Emmy for his work on “Anti-Depressants Are So Not A Big Deal” in 2019. That’s neat.
So why write about Sam Champion? Because they happened, and now, over a decade later, one guy in the band is a quarter of the way to an EGOT. Everybody’s got a story. The weather guy might be far more famous, but “Sam Champion band” still yields some interesting search results.
ABOVE VIDEO: Sam Champion perform “Like A Secret” on the streets of New York City in 2008. Thanks to My Old Kentucky Blog for capturing it and preserving it.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
In high school, Chernin slung CDs for Guster as part of the group’s grassroots rep program. He became fast friends with the group and, years later, Guster drummer Brian Rosenworcel signed on to produce Slow Rewind. I don’t hear too much Guster on either Sam Champion album, but I definitely hear a band influenced by Guster. I’d even pay to hear Sam Champion covering all of Keep It Together.
My research illuminated two different Icky Thump references writers made in profiles about Sam Champion. Just another reason 2007 must’ve been an incredible time for music blogging. You could use “icky-thumping” as an adjective and it was fine.
This was the era of indie bands flooding songs on Gossip Girl, but Sam Champion (or “The Champ” as Stereogum once called them) actually had a member appear on the show. It was Dolgen, presaging his future career in television.
UNTIL NEXT TIME: There could be an entire newsletter dedicated to the rise of indie bands gobbling up sync opportunities with car companies, beer brands, and all sorts of ad money (and rightfully so). I won’t get into it here, but this one deserved some Nabisco money at least. That riff!