Chester Forfeit - Galapagos (1976)

 

The name Lemuel Strongtrout may not mean a lot to you, but it means even less to Strongtrout himself, who has spent much of the past 50 years trying to escape it.

A member of Toronto psych-prog outfit Mit Avec in his late teens, he recorded one album with them as lead singer, before all his bandmates tragically died in a series of murders that he himself definitely didn't commit, and for which he had a series of watertight alibis.

Strongtrout left his native Canada - with his head held high and reputation unsullied - to lie low for a while, and, in time, to record the seminal 'Galapagos' album, released under the pseudonym Chester Forfeit, which made him an international star and indeed an unlikely sex symbol.

With its capricious licks and plunging fuck-funk basslines, it was a record that literally everybody owned in the late 1970s, and under some jurisdictions non-ownership was actually punishable by imprisonment.

Forfeit had the world at his feet - at his forefeet indeed - but there was to be no follow-up. At least not under this particular guise.

As Malkom he released the disco classic 'Dr. Flabby' in 1980, before reinventing himself once again as MC Bass. E Base and reaching No. 199 in the album chart (in the Dominican Republic) with 'EngRaver's Slice', before a series of unsolved crimes prompted him to lie low in order to work on new material and not because he had killed again. Or at all.

In the late 1990s he re-emerged as Isaiah Mekubal, claiming to be the first Jewish man to sport not one but two foreskins, and briefly achieved notoriety for the cover of 'The Prophet', which controversially featured a photograph of a gay horse.

Living for a time in the UK, he released two albums as Truckle Pilson, which were largely ignored by the music press - perhaps fortuitously as most of the tracks were thinly veiled confessions to earlier crimes - giving him an opportunity to lie low. Not that there were any earlier crimes.

He maintained an equally residual profile during his spell as Chantenay Micropenis - a drag act considered to be in such poor taste that any memory of it was instantly erased from the minds of anybody who saw or heard it.

In recent times things have improved somewhat - he is still in the music business, and 'Symphonies No. 1 and 2 by Dr. L. Timothy Strongtrout, recorded by the Orchestra dell’Accademia Schiettezza was the 67th best-selling Classical album of 2019. 

Does he have any regenerations remaining? Only time will tell, if indeed it will. Or can.

As he approaches his 83rd birthday, it is unlikely that he will ever re-reach the heights of Galapagos, with its meaty guitar solos and demi-prosaic sense of rhythm, but that is perhaps for the best. 

Discographicalz

• Galapagos (1976)
  

  

• [barely legal bootleg 21" 62 RPM vinyl] (1977)
  
• Dr. Flabby (1980, as Malkom)
• EngRaver's Slice (1987, as MC Bass. E Base)
• The Prophet (1998, as Isaiah Mekubal)
• Skank! (2003, as Truckle Pilson)
  
• Scent of Hegemony (2005, as Truckle Pilson)
• Confessions (2010, as Chantenay Micropenis)
• Live from the alley behind Somerfields (2011, as Chantenay Micropenis)
• [even less legal bootleg] (2011)
• [possibly the least legal bootleg ever, yet inexplicably on a DVD-Audio disc] (2013)