Deepest Kihndolences

Flashing back on the recently departed Greg Kihn

I was really saddened, perhaps more than I would have expected, to hear about Greg Kihn’s passing last week — especially by the news that such a vibrant, positive spirit had been extinguished by Alzheimer’s Disease.

While I never crossed paths with him, Kihn always seemed to me like one of rock’s true good guys. Most of the journalists and music fans I know who were around in the Bay Area during the 1970s and early ‘80s still fondly remember the Greg Kihn Band’s marathon, high-energy club shows, and the friends of mine who actually met Kihn have all described him as funny, friendly, self-effacing and totally down-to-earth.

Kihn was certainly a good follow on social media, where he would regularly answer questions from fans, serve up tasty bits of trivia — such as the fact that the “Rose Bimler” writing credit on several of his songs was actually a nom-de-plume of Beserkley Records head honcho Matthew King Kaufman — and suggest fun films to watch while stoned. (On marijuana, that is; Kihn may well have indulged in other substances in his younger days, but he remained a dedicated weed enthusiast almost ‘til the end…)

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If Kihn’s recorded output never attained a similar artistic or commercial standing to Bruce Springsteen or Elvis Costello — to name two contemporaries whose musical styles and influences heavily overlapped with his — he certainly got within spitting distance of Nick Lowe, another witty gent with a knack for nagging hooks, ringing chord progressions and enjoyably cringe-inducing puns who (unlike, say, The Boss and Mr. McManus) almost never took himself too seriously. If I had to put it in Big Hair & Plastic Grass terms, I’d liken (likihn?) Greg Kihn to the Milwaukee Brewers’ Jim “Gumby” Gantner, a good-natured career .274 hitter who spent much of his 17 major league seasons playing in the same infield as much bigger stars like Paul Molitor, Robin Yount and Cecil Cooper, but whose name still brings a warm smile to the faces of those who rooted for him back in the day.

Not being a Bay Area resident or a kid with any real awareness (yet) of pop music that was outside of the mainstream, I didn’t hear of Greg Kihn until the spring of 1980, when Rolling Stone reviewed the Greg Kihn Band’s new album Glass House Rock. (Not to be confused with Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, which was released — probably much to Kihn’s annoyance — around the same time.)

The Rolling Stone write-up was a tad lukewarm — Kihn himself was a little cool on the album, later describing its writing and recording as having been motivated by an uncharacteristic desire to be “taken seriously” — but it also nonetheless implied that Kihn was a promising artist who, both by virtue of his previous work and his connection with Beserkley Records, was well worthy of continued attention. I made a mental note to keep an ear out for him; and while I don’t think Chicago’s WLUP ever played anything off of Glass House Rock, I soon connected Kihn’s name with “Madison Avenue,” a 1977 track that The Loop occasionally did play, and which I liked a whole lot.

Though I never actually bought any of his records during the 1980s, Greg Kihn was nonetheless a fairly constant presence in my life during the first half of that decade, much like the friend you enjoy bullshitting with in the high school hallway but for whatever reason never get around to inviting over to your house. When Kihn scored his first Top 20 hit in the summer of 1981 with “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em),” it felt like a most welcome blast of snappy, smart, guitar-driven power pop at a time when the Billboard Hot 100 was overflowing with lowest common denominator bilge like Air Supply, The Oak Ridge Boys and Stars on 45. I remember watching him lip-synch “The Breakup Song” on Solid Gold (hey, I grabbed whatever music-related TV programming I could get in those pre-MTV/Friday Night Videos days), and thinking that not even the cheesy choreography of the Solid Gold Dancers or Dionne Warwick’s mid-song walk-on could diminish the song’s infectious charms.

The fall of 1981 coincided with the height of my Bruce Springsteen obsession. After witnessing Bruce and the E Street Band at the Rosemont Horizon that September on the last leg of the River tour — still my favorite show of his — I could no longer be fully sated by the five Springsteen studio albums that were then available, and thus began to actively explore his live bootlegs and the songs that he’d written for (or had been covered by) other artists.

My high school friend Brian, who was my loyal guide in this particular realm, soon hipped me to the fact that Kihn had not only covered Bruce’s “For You” on Greg Kihn Again — the same 1977 album that contained “Madison Avenue” — but that Bruce had also actually given Kihn an unreleased song called “Rendezvous”. Recorded during sessions for the Darkness on the Edge of Town, but disqualified for inclusion on that bleak and brooding album due to its radiant glow of romantic optimism, “Rendezvous” was a perfect fit for Kihn’s excellent 1979 album With the Naked Eye. Here’s Kihn on the song (leaving his charming typos intact):

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN had been to see the band at the Roxy just 6 months before and he liked our version of FOR YOU so much that he gave me another song- RENDESVOUS, which was an outtake from his BORN TO RUN album. Bruce sent me a cassette (I wish I still had it!) of the song and I tried to figure out the lyrics from the tape. However, Bruce is not known for his diction and I there is a line in the bridge which I swear sounded like “We desire so much more than squirrels.” I knew there weren’t any squirrels in the song. I asked Bruce backstage at the Berkeley Community Theater a few months later and he gave the real lyrics which were “We desire so much more than this, girl.” What a revelation! RENDESVOUS became the centerpiece of the album and I still perform to this day (although the high notes nearly kill me!) I played my Rickenbacker 12-string electric and gave it the old “Byrds” sound.

Kihn scored his biggest hit in 1983 with “Jeopardy” (from that year’s Kihnspiracy LP), a song which peaked at #2 on the Hot 100 on my 17th birthday, and which was in heavy rotation during the first time I ever laid eyes upon MTV. (You couldn’t get basic cable within Chicago city limits at the time, so it took a spring break ‘83 visit to Los Angeles to acquaint me with the addictive joys of that music video channel.)

While “Jeopardy” wasn’t at all in my musical wheelhouse at the time, I dug the video’s mixture of goofiness and creepiness, and was genuinely happy to see one of “rock’s true good guys” enjoying such a big hit. And when the song was later parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic as “I Lost on Jeopardy,” Kihn further reinforced his “good guy” bonafides by actually making a cameo in Al’s video.

I only ever saw the Greg Kihn Band in concert once, and that was as part of a memorably strange July 1984 show at Poplar Creek, an outdoor shed in the northwest Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates. Despite having two big (and fairly recent) hits to their name, Kihn and Band had been booked as the opening act on a US tour with Little Steven & The Disciples of Soul, whose recent second album Voice of America had stalled at #55 on the Billboard 200.

Little Steven, of course, had left the E Street Band a year earlier during the making of Born in the USA, due both to clashes with co-producer Jon Landau and the desire to pursue his own muse. I was a huge fan of the first Disciples of Soul album, 1983’s Men Without Women (still am, in fact), and when their July 27, 1984 show at Poplar Creek show was announced about a month ahead of time, my fellow Springsteen aficionado Brian — who still had the same sweet ticket connection that had hooked us up with prime Kinks seats the year before (RIP, Mr. Witz) — immediately jumped at the opportunity to score us a pair of tix. Having the Greg Kihn Band as the opening act was icing on the cake, so we decided to show up early enough that evening to catch their set. But when we did, there were so few cars in the Poplar Creek parking lot that we wondered at first whether we’d actually mixed up the date of the concert…

In retrospect, the whole thing was remarkably ill-conceived. Poplar Creek had a 25,000-person capacity, or a good 7,000 more than the Rosemont Horizon, which Bruce and the E Street Band had just packed for three nights less than two weeks earlier. Maybe Little Steven’s booking agent thought he had enough Bruce juice to fill a venue of that size for a single show, regardless of his middling album sales. But even if that had been the actual case, and even if the show had been announced earlier and promoted better, it was still a laughably hubristic idea for Little Steven to play Chicago just nine days after his former Boss had rolled through.

Many Chicagoland area Springsteen fans had attended all three of those Rosemont shows (some of them paying big bucks to scalpers for the privilege) and stocked up on t-shirts, posters and other souvenirs while they were there, completely blowing their concert-going wads for the entire summer in the process. Even though tickets were only $14 for the pavilion and $10 for the lawn for the Little Steven/Greg Kihn show (or about $52 and $30 in today’s currency), a lot of the folks who might have otherwise attended were already tapped (or maybe just Bruced) out. The turnout at Poplar Creek was abysmal; the pavilion, which had about a 7500 capacity, was maybe twenty percent full that night — and that included the folks with lawn tickets who had been ushered down from the venue’s vast green expanses above to fill up as many empty seats as possible.

Sitting in the front row, Brian and I had a close-up view of the performers and their reactions to the situation, and the contrast between Greg Kihn and Little Steven’s attitudes couldn’t have been more stark. Van Zandt, clearly expecting to be greeted as some sort of conquering hero, was visibly aggrieved when he took the stage later that night by the sight of the empty lawn and the many rows of unclaimed seats. His sidemen, a motley but immensely talented crew that included Jean Beauvoir of the Plasmatics and Dino Danelli of the Young Rascals, simply put their heads down and powered through like the pros they were, but you could practically see the steam billowing from their leader’s ears. Van Zandt kept shouting things between songs like, “Chicago! You are small but mighty!” — statements which only drew additional attention to the fact that you could have fit the entire audience into the right (or left) field bleachers at Wrigley Field with plenty of room to spare.

The Greg Kihn Band, on the other hand, were completely unfazed by this unhappy turn of events. They would have had every right to be bummed out, considering that they were stuck opening for a less popular band in a mostly-empty shed, but they gave no appearance at all of being anything but thoroughly stoked to play some rock n’ roll music for the few of us who had actually bothered to show up.

Though they didn’t perform either of the Springsteen-penned songs in their repertoire (I always wondered if they’d been omitted from the setlist in deference to Van Zandt, who — thanks to the blockbuster success of Born in the USA — was now even more in Bruce’s shadow than he’d been as a member of the E Street Band), Kihn and his bandmates handily won the small crowd over with their energetic, joyous and fully committed opening set. The highlight of their performance was an extended and surprisingly soulful rendition of “Jeopardy,” which saw Kihn working up such a sweat on this hot late-July evening that he had to hand off his Vox Phantom XII to a roadie for a mid-song wipedown. The performance received a standing ovation, which may well have been the only time I ever saw an opening act get a spontaneous “Standing O” from a sit-down audience.

And speaking of that Vox 12-string…

The summer of ‘84 was when I learned my first guitar chords, and when my interest in guitars of all shapes and makes accordingly leapt to the forefront of my consciousness. I had only been to maybe 20 concerts up to that point in my life, but with the possible exception of Peter Buck’s Rickenbackers at the Aragon a few weeks earlier, Greg Kihn’s set was probably the first show where I ever witnessed someone playing a vintage guitar that wasn’t a Gibson or a Fender. I didn’t know a ton about guitars yet, but I still knew enough to identify Kihn’s Vox Phantom XII as an immensely cool relic of the 1960s, and I was deeply thrilled with the guitar’s jangly sound and impressed by Kihn’s taste in employing it. Van Zandt and Beauvoir, on the other hand, came out that night toting some weird custom BC Rich-style metal axes with gaudy colors and matching zebra striping, which were about the most uncool guitars I had ever seen up close.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the Disciples of Soul show immensely — on the way out, I even bought a sleeveless Little Steven t-shirt that I wore exactly once before belatedly remembering that my skinny arms and shoulders required as much sleeving as possible. But between their ugly-ass guitars, Van Zandt’s inability to conceal his foul mood, and the once-sharp-looking Danelli’s headband-aviators-and-kimono ensemble, I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed for them. Greg Kihn, on the other hand, had absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about that night.

Rock in Peace, Mr. Kihn. I’ll always remember you as a real one, that’s for sure…

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