Fiddler and guitarist Chip Cohen first broke into show business as a ventriloquist. A child prodigy, he appeared on both the Tonight Show and the Ed Sullivan show before his sixth birthday. At age nine, disillusioned with ventriloquism and its accompanying lifestyle, he quit to pursue his first love, roller derby. Twelve years later, at the peak of a brilliant career, he lost three toes to frostbite while panning for gold in the Yukon, never to skate again. He reluctantly returned to ventriloquism and began touring with Milli Vanilli. Between shows he taught himself to play the fiddle, and soon left Milli Vanilli to join Jim and Van Morrison's short-lived band, the Van Doors. He went on to record with George Strait and Marvin Gaye on their classic album, "Strait and Gaye" - that's Chip's fiddle you hear playing the familiar opening strains of the hit single "I Gave Her the Ring (She Gave Me the Finger)".
After working for years as a sideman, Cohen finally realized his true musical vision when he struck out with his own band, Barney Rubble and the Cosmic Cavemen. The Cavemen, later to achieve intergalactic prominence under the more commercially viable name Philip Space and the Celestial Meatballs, pioneered the sound which has come to be known as neo-classic post-modern old-time new-age klezmer-cajun-surf-punk-grass.
Chip currently lives with his three wives and eleven children in Eugene, Oregon, where he runs the National Institute of Ventriloquism for the Deaf. In his spare time he collects celebrities' fingernail clippings and raises weasels.
