Chris Bess

Chris Bess I was born in Missouri, not too far from where the first non-Arkansas Wal-Mart was unleashed, so you could say my birth coincided with the decline of western civilization as we know it.  My mother tells me I walked before I crawled, the first of many attempts to bypass fundamental learning in favor of the easy way forward.  The outcome was mixed; did I learn to walk? Sure, but not before falling into a coffee table and getting a dozen stitches put into my head—A head that was (and is) melon-huge, but utterly deficient in guile. I started playing music at age six, when my Dad bought a piano with the money received from a workman’s compensation check after he injured a hand on the job.  Through high school, I learned to play a number of other instruments—some better than others.  By the time I hit college, I had started and ended several bands, and earned an anti-hipster rep for playing accordion when no one else would touch the things with a ten-foot pole.  But playing that lame-ass squeezebox got me tons of session work, including albums with Mojo Nixon and Uncle Tupelo, not to mention a three-year stint touring the country with Granite City Illinois’ Enormous Richard, and out-of-country gigs with Chicago’s New Duncan Imperials.  By 1996, I was playing in three bands at once; accordion in Swing Set, organ in the Civil Tones, and everything I could get my hands on in Noises Dad Makes.  It was a fun year.  But 1997—not so much; one band fired me, another fell apart, and the other was mothballed after I blew out my vocal chords. Coming to the rescue was Chapel Hill’s Southern Culture on the Skids, who, after recording a few tracks of their album “Plastic Seat Sweat” with me, hired me on to tour the world with them—and paid me for doing so!  It was supposed to be only nine months, but it ended up being nearly six years before bandleader Rick Miller gave me my walking papers. I started doing soundtrack work from my home studio around 2000, mostly because I just bought a fancy hard disc recorder, and wanted to make use of the pile of cheesy instruments I had collected over the years.  The best of this stuff got put on a CD-R that has subsequently been used all over cable TV, earning my lame ass a pile of royalties from a very small initial investment.  People who liked the stuff suggested I form a band to play it live, which is how Killer Filler came to be. We just put out an album of my music, and are starting to get lots of regular gigs, so who knows?  Hopefully it gets better from here. Learn More!Crispy_-_20Q.htmlshapeimage_3_link_0

KEYBOARDS, GUITAR, BASS, AND PERCUSSION

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