ASHLAND — If you are a video game player of a certain age, you may remember a Sega Genesis game from the 1990s known as Kid Chameleon. In the game, the main character wears masks to change into other people and use their powers.
The Ashland-area rock band that borrowed the video game name for their trio also love the music of the ’90s, and that influence is clear in Kid Chameleon’s music.
Kid Chameleon is made up of 18-year-old bassist Noah DeBracy of Ashland, 21-year-old singer/guitarist Chandler Sweatshirt of Loudonville, and 20-year-old drummer Connar VandeVoorde of Mansfield.
The trio came together in January after DeBracy and Sweatshirt parted ways with their previous drummer. The pair had met VandeVoorde not long before and remembered the drummer.
“So we jammed, and now here we are,” VandeVoorde said.
One day after practice, the band was discussing video games they loved.
“I said, ‘Kid Chameleon,’ and Connar hadn’t heard of the game and he was like, ‘Dude that would be a cool band name,’ and that was it,” Sweatshirt said.
Sweatshirt started playing guitar when he was 13.
“I knew this older guy who ran a local shop in Loudonville and he just had an old guitar set up in the back and he played sometimes. And I just thought, ‘Man that’s cool. I want to play guitar,’” Sweatshirt said.
He got a guitar for Christmas and spent hours playing the instrument.
“It’s all I did for about four years,” Sweatshirt said.
The guitarist joined his first band, Carpathian, a year or so after picking up the guitar.
“We had a show 30 days from when we first started and I had never sang before and it was terrible,” Sweatshirt said.
Carpathian lasted only about five months. Sweatshirt then played lead guitar for No Condition to Drive for another five months before hooking up with DeBracy and their previous drummer.
VandeVoorde got his first taste of music at an even earlier age, starting around age 9.
“My grandpa played drums his whole life and I would watch him play at family events. He had drums from Tibet and wherever you could think of. I always thought drums were super cool. He gave his son, my step-dad, his old drum set and I would sit there and watch my step-dad go crazy on drums.
“I would sit there and watch him play and I would try to replicate it and I couldn’t do it at all. So my grandpa actually taught me and he taught how to play jazz at first.”
VandeVoorde started listening to more ‘90s music, which influenced his drumming as he developed new styles and experimented.
DeBracy, who has a deep love for jazz music, took guitar lessons for a few months when he was 10, but it didn’t really click with him. Fast forward three or four years to a jam session with his dad.
“They needed a bass player and I kind of remembered what I was doing from guitar so I just translated that to bass and ever since then I just stuck to bass. It clicked with me in a way that guitar didn’t,” DeBracy said.
DeBracy’s first band experience was called Uproar in Ruin. The bassist was playing with Uproar in Ruin when he met Sweatshirt.
The band says their music is hard to classify, but it’s all rooted in rock and their love of ’90s rock bands like Radiohead, a band all three point to as their idols.
“We’re working on a song right now that is surf rock and our next song will be funky and our next one will be grungy,” VandeVoorde said.
“The couple of places we’ve played outside of town people have called us indie. I wasn’t a huge fan of that, but I guess it’s whatever,” Sweatshirt said.
Kid Chameleon plays mostly covers when performing live, “because that’s what people want to hear,” Sweatshirt said. But the band is in the process of recording its first EP of original songs. The group has five or six songs completed and several more in various stages of creation.
“Our creative process is a whole lot of jamming the same stuff with a lot of the things not happening the same thing twice, until it cements,” Sweatshirt said.
“One of us comes up with a cool riff and then we jam to it, and then we’re like ‘hey that’s cool.’ Then we remember it the next time and we jam it again until it’s a little different. And eventually we do it enough times where it just becomes its own thing,” VandeVoorde said.
Although the band has only been together a relatively short time, the trio has already performed a number of gigs and have others scheduled.
In August, Kid Chameleon performed at the Safe Haven Domestic Violence Shelter fund-raiser in Ashland. Last weekend, the band played at The Outpost in Kent. Locally, Kid Chameleon has performed at Relax in Mansfield, the River Room in Loudonville, the Back Room in Mansfield and the Wagon Wheel in Ashland.
Like most budding rockers, the trio say they would love to be able to do music full-time and give up their day jobs, but they also know how tough the road can be.
“Realistically though it’s just something that we all love to do, and if we can make a couple bucks on the weekend doing it, that’s cool,” DeBracy said.
To find out more about the band and follow their exploits, visit their Facebook page.
