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Chuck's music background began at age 5 with the start of his taking private
piano and music theory lessons. While he never excelled on the piano, the
experience and understanding of music resulting from his private training
proved valuable to him as he progressed (or, some might say, "regressed") to
playing drums at age 12 and playing in bands with classmates at age 15.
Chuck and friend/classmate Ken Raley played together in a few bands in the
early '80s, and experimented with songwriting and "multitrack" music
recording, using a cassette-to-cassette overdubbing technique that employed a
tiny Radio Shack mixer and two cassette decks.  These early bands did not perform live very often (perhaps Chuck's first live show made him a bit gunshy - in the middle of "Johnny B. Goode" at a Junior High prom dance he fell backwards and hit his head against a wall, causing him to pass out for a few seconds), but Chuck and Ken formed a group called Blitzkrieg in 1982, which was Chuck's first group to stay together for more than a couple months, and by 1984 Chuck had focused his interest very much on writing and recording in addition to playing drums and guitar (he had also started to learn guitar a few years earlier). That year Chuck joined a hard rock group called Hammers Rule, which was beginning to make a name for itself in Colorado at the time. Hammers Rule performed mostly original songs, and was very aggressive in its business of putting together a dramatic live show and making an album of its best material, which it did by the end of the same year. Some of the material from the album got a small amount of radio airplay in the US and Europe, and European hard rock fanzines, which at the time were hot on artists such as Iron Maiden and then-upstart Metallica, published stories about Hammers Rule, its music and its live show, which had evolved into quite a production (including a 7-foot high drum riser with steps, pyrotechnics, and smashing skulls on stage with a spike-laden sledgehammer). While Hammers Rule was a musical milestone for Chuck, disagreements over the band's business practices caused him to leave the group in early 1986. Chuck spent that year writing quite a bit of his own material and studying recording engineering. The next year, he got heavily involved in the Denver music scene, playing bass guitar in a lounge group which performed original material, helping friends produce a local music fanzine, making himself known in the local recording studios, and eventually taking a job as a recording engineer at Colorado Sound, one of the top studios in town. Chuck also met NC-17 bandmate Ron around that time. Ron had recently begun playing with a guitar player named Jeff Paxton, and invited Chuck to join them. With a singer and keyboardist subsequently added to the group, Paxton's Empire performed one-nighters in clubs around Denver for several months, and then relocated to Jeff's hometown of Long Beach, CA in the beginning of 1989 (Jeff had moved to Denver from Long Beach only a couple years earlier). A small number of performances later, the band ran out of steam, and Chuck moved back to Denver for several months. Chuck returned to L.A. in early 1990 to give Paxton's Empire another go, and though it never really materialized, Chuck did end up taking an engineering job working for record producer George Tobin, who owned a three-studio recording complex in North Hollywood, CA. The job had Chuck working with studio clients, then managing the studio, then engineering all in-house record production, and eventually managing the entire studio, production, publishing, and record label operation. Chuck engineered many albums during his tenure, including Tiffany's "Dreams Never Die" and Kicking Harold's "Ugly & Festering" albums. Chuck stayed with the organization until early 1999. Ron got Chuck involved in NC-17 in late 1991, when things were not working out too well with the band's drummer at the time. Chuck actually started out doing the band's live sound for a series of its shows at a Hollywood club called The Central - perhaps a sly way to work a new band member in, but it got the job done. Soon after, Chuck became involved working with Frank and the rest of the group on songwriting and production of the group's recordings, and has played both drums and guitar on most of the recordings. Highlights from current releases include writing, production, drums and guitars on "Inside/Outside" (from the "Hellhead" cassette EP), and guitar on the song "Hellhead." Chuck also played drums and guitars on Frank's solo album "Crimes Against Nature" (highlight: guitar on "The Avoid Song"), and has much production, songwriting, and performing work into NC-17's recording project currently in progress. Chuck Hohn |