Career
As a solo artist he released singles and albums and teamed up with ex-Electric Flag bassist Harvey Brooks to form the Lester Chambers Harvey Brooks Band. He also added vocals to Bonnie Raitt"s Sweet Forgiveness album. In March 2011, Lester Chambers was inducted into the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame.
Chambers has reported that despite the group"s success, he did not receive any royalty payments from 1967 to 1994.
In a chat session on the Soul Patrol website, he discussed such injustices that many black artists have endured. She said that Columbia Records told them that "there were no overseas sales to report because The Chambers Brothers records were never licensed to an overseas distributor".
But she later discovered copies on eBay of numerous foreign pressings of their records on Columbia foreign affiliate labels for which they were not compensated. In 2003, the home of Lola and Lester Chambers was broken in to and their record collection, consisting of over sixty Chambers Brothers albums and over one hundred singles, was stolen.
Lester Chambers developed a number of medical problems that went untreated because he lacked insurance.
In March 2012 Lester started an Internet campaign that went viral to publicize what he claims to be a lack of equitable royalty payments. His Facebook posting received over 2,500 "likes" and over 2,000 "shares" in the first 15 hours on his "Wall". lieutenant was featured on the front page of Reddit and there were hundreds of tweets about the story.
On July 13, 2013 Lester Chambers was reportedly assaulted onstage during a performance at the Russell City Hayward Blues Festival after dedicating a performance of "People Get Ready" to Trayvon Martin, the day the jury found his killer not guilty of a criminal offense.
Chambers is a resident of Petaluma, California. Lester also spoke with Reddit users on December 13, 2012, at an American Medical Association (Ask Maine Anything) event and to mention the to those interested.
