For Kings of Joy, getting reacquainted has been a treat
On Sunday, a new band — or rather, a group of Boston-area music-scene vets who may be in the process of becoming a band — will play its second gig, at Atwood’s Tavern in Cambridge. David Champagne, Jim Fitting, Jeffrey Foucault, Jeremy Moses Curtis, and Jeff Berlin will perform under the moniker the Kings of Joy. The billing for the show on the club’s website points to the connections of that aggregation to Treat Her Right. During its short-lived heyday in the 1980s, both Champagne and Fitting were members, along with Mark Sandman and Billy Conway, of that spare yet supercharged noir-blues band, and there are a myriad of threads running between it and other Kings of Joy participants, including Foucault’s long musical association with Conway, who died last year. Ahead of Sunday’s date, Champagne spoke on the phone about how the show came about, and how it will and won’t represent Treat Her Right.
Q. How did you all come together as the Kings of Joy?
A. This summer there was a memorial service for Billy Conway, who was the drummer in Treat Her Right. I have a new band with Jerome Deupree, who was a good friend of Billy’s. At the service, I did the music the first night, so I played with the new band, which is called Jigsaw Trio. Jim Fitting, who played harmonica in Treat Her Right, also played, and Jerome played drums, because Jerome knew all the Treat Her Right stuff. Jeremy Curtis played bass; he played a lot in combination with Billy and Jeffrey Foucault. Jeffrey sat in on some songs as well, and when we finished, he was very excited; he had so much fun rocking out like that that he wanted to do it again, and he booked a show at the Parlor Room in Northampton. We played that show in October, and that went well and everybody had a good time, even the club owner. So we decided to do another show.
Q. What did you decide to play at the Northampton show? Did the show focus on Treat Her Right songs?
A. We didn’t rehearse, we just played [laughs]. Jeffrey had been on tour, and he was like, “Well, I’m not going to have time to do anything except show up, so I’ll just play some blues, you know, ‘Spoonful,’ some simple mostly one-chord things.” I played some newer songs that were easy enough to jump in on. Jim played, I guess, mostly if not all songs that he had sung in Treat Her Right. So it was a very Treat Her Right-oriented thing. But a little different, partly because there were two guitars.
Q. The show this Sunday is not intended to be a Treat Her Right tribute or something of that sort, correct?
A. Not at all. I think we’ll play fewer Treat Her Right songs than we did at the October show. For me, it’s the fact that we can make that sound. I’ve written a lot of things since Treat Her Right in the same kind of vein, so for me, it’s like, Oh good, I get to do these songs that would have been Treat Her Right songs if there was still a Treat Her Right.
Q. Treat Her Right was part of a very fertile Boston music scene in the mid to late 1980s.
A. It was a good thing, you know, and now you can see the Kings of Joy re-create it in a way. It’s always nice to get back together and find that we still have it, we can still do it. It’s like flipping a switch. So we’ll see. We have the show booked at Atwood’s and then, who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if we played every couple of months. More than that, it becomes a different thing.
Q. There was also a brief resuscitation of sorts of Treat Her Right in the late 2000s.
A. We played probably four or five shows around 2009, I think. That was good, but there was something that didn’t seem quite right about it. So we’re using a different name partly just because nobody really wanted to play under the name Treat Her Right, but how do you get people to come see you if you just go out and say “Hi, it’s Dave”?
Q. How did you come up with the name Kings of Joy?
A. I stole it. There was a semisuccessful gospel group in the ‘50s called the Three Kings of Joy. I sent around some names for people to consider, and that was one that people liked, so that’s what we ended up with. I liked the fact that it was a not very successful gospel group. And, you know, it’s a positive message for these dark times. We’ll see if we can live up to it.