Terry Haggerty

Guitarist Terry Haggerty is buried treasure. As guitarist with the Sons of Champlin, Haggerty was always accorded the full respect of his peers on the ‘60s San Francisco rock scene like Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen, Carlos Santana. He has been known—throughout the world—among guitar cognoscenti via the handful of recordings he made over the two decades of the Sons’ existence.

At the heart of it all—both his legend and his obscurity—lies his insistence on music for music’s sake. Try as he might—and over the years, rest assured, he has tried—Terry Haggerty cannot corrupt himself. He is, uniquely and inexorably, himself. “Harmonically, I hear things that are out and emotionally, that’s where I’m at,” said Haggerty, “I’ve tried to stay as true to what comes through me as I can. I’m never going to take this stuff inside me and modify it to make money. Not because I don’t need money, but because the music itself is such a wonderful, profound gift.”

He lives modestly in a storage and rehearsal facility near San Rafael, California, the dead center of Marin County, where Haggerty grew up and entered the professional musical world as a member of the Opposite Six, a bad-ass band of Marin R&B rebels that eventually became the Sons of Champlin.

This is a musician who said he likes to compose on keyboards because—get this—“that keeps my guitar playing free of anything intentful, more of a statement of the now.”

Every so often, he forgets or agrees out of an impulse to please someone and accepts an invitation to a session, like the recent experience with Chris Isaak. ~What drives everybody crazy about me,” he said, “is that I never play anything the same way twice. I don’t even think that way. There’s not a bone in my body that way.” So whether or not the world at large ever discovers the inter-planetary significance of Terry Haggerty doesn’t matter. He is a fully realized artist operating at the peak of his human powers on occasion—“I can do anything on any level,” he said, “it’s just indefinable as to what kind of music it is”—and that is his earthly goal. As for the rest of the world, well, it won’t be his loss.
-Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle Pop Music Critic, author Summer of Love