Bill Kirchen - Washington D.C.
King Twang - Master of the 'caster
by Pat Ferris

As soon as I heard his Hot Rod Lincoln LIVE! CD, I immediately knew I wanted to feature him. What an opportunity! The chance to talk with a living legend in the line of work!

Bill Kirchen is the legendary guitarist who helped shape the sound of early '70s country-rock with his trademark guitar licks from the Commander Cody classic 'Hot Rod Lincoln'.

Slinging a VERY worn Fender Telecaster, Kirchen's hard-driving honky-tonk, blurs the boundaries between country, rock and blues. Some call it rockabilly, some call it 'truck-drivin' music' but no matter what you call it, Bill Kirchen and his band, Too Much Fun, are a good ol' fashioned, high-octane, fuel-injected, American rock and roll band that defines the epitome of a successful indie artist...flying under the radar of mainstream fame for nearly 30 years, while consistently earning a viable living playing music for two generations of fans.

Bill was inducted into the WAMA (Washington Area Music Association) Hall of Fame along with Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) and John Phillip Sousa - Sunday February 24, 2002 at the State Theatre in Falls Church, Virginia, and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance of 2001 for Poultry in Motion, a track from Tied To The Wheel, his most recent release through High Tone records, and the 23rd in his professional career.

Being from the old school (schools without computers) made setting up the interview with Bill a little challenging, so we finally resorted to using the telephone when we exhausted our Internet options.

HotBands - Hi Bill

Bill Kirchen - Hi Pat. Thanks for doing this by telephone rather than the Internet...I'm technically challenged.

HotBands - No problem! You've had such an incredible and long career, and it's a great honor to talk with you!

Bill Kirchen - Well thank you! Likewise! I'm honored to talk to you! It's good to be able to make a living at this.

HotBands - I was first exposed to your music when Hot Rod Lincoln was in the top 10. I must have been 8 or 9 years old. By that time, you were really still just a kid yourself. Let's start at the beginning, and tell me when you first started out with music, when you first decided this was a career you wanted to pursue.

Bill Kirchen - I'll give you the Reader's Digest short bio. I grew up in a house with music, mostly classical. My parents were older, born around 1909 and 1910, so they were listening to popular music of the '30s, '40s and show tunes, so I grew up with classical and Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, so that was burned into my brain early. I played trombone from 4th grade on, and studied that at Interlocken national music camp, which is a classical music camp in upstate Michigan. I had a cabin counselor there that had a 12-string guitar and was playing folk songs right around the time of the folk scare of the early '60s. I got really fired up and pulled my mother's banjo out of the attic, got the Pete Seger book on 'How to play the 5-string banjo', and I was off to the races.

HotBands - Did you play bluegrass?

Bill Kirchen - No, I was more claw-hammer style and basic strum kind of stuff. I didn't care for bluegrass until later, but I did get to see a lot of good bands. Living in the '60s in Ann Arbor Michigan, I saw a lot of great music that you can't see any more. I saw The Stanley Brothers, Bob Dylan played my local high school as a solo and I saw him again at his first electric appearance the Newport folk festival in '64 and '65, along with all kinds of great country and blues player; Mississippi John Hirt, Skip James, Rev. Robert Wilkins, Lightnin' Hopkins...all the great blues cats...they were still alive and great and made a big impression on me. I learned guitar specifically to play John Hirt songs,

HotBands - How old were you when you got your first guitar?

Bill Kirchen - I went from banjo to guitar when I was a senior in high school. The last couple of years of high school in Ann Arbor was a rich environment for hearing music. I hitch-hiked to New York and saw The Lovin' Spoonful before they had their big hit with 'Do you believe in magic?' I saw more in the folk direction than the rock and roll direction. In my 1965 high school yearbook, there's a picture of me with a jug band, and we, by that time had plugged in and gone electric. At the same show was my classmate, James Osterburg, drummer for the Iguana's, and James of course went on to become Iggy.

HotBands - Iggy Pop?

Bill Kirchen - Yeah, we were both the class of '65 from Ann Arbor High.

HotBands - What did you do after you graduated?

Bill Kirchen - I started my own psychedelic folk rock band in '66 doing extended jams...kind of like the jam band of the time. About that time, I ran into these wacky guys from art school that recruited me George (Frayne) and John Tichy...I was kind of the town hippy, but these guys had jazz and blues backgrounds. As a group, we showed each other all the stuff we knew, and one of the things I got turned on to then was country...Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Hank Williams, Bob Wills...so our shows were an amalgam of rockabilly, country, boogie woogie and blues for rock and roll audiences. I then moved to California and scoped it out in '67 while George went on to teach art and John went on to get a PHd at Georgia Tech, Billy C went to Chicago to play blues. I knew we needed to have the band out here, so I called home and convinced the guys to move out in '69.

HotBands - So you're self-taught, and learned from learning the licks from country greats?

Bill Kirchen - I'm self-taught, but the thing that really knocked me out was I started hearing a common thread from certain players, Don Rich from Buck Owen's band, Roy Nichols playing with Merle Haggard, James Burton who was on Ricky Nelson, Elvis and some Merle Haggard records...and it came to my attention that all these guys were playing a telecaster, so I was gravitating toward that sound. For some reason a telecaster really got to me, so right from the start I was never a Les Paul or Marshall person, I went Fender to Fender...telecaster into a Fender twin, and that’s kind of what happened to me. It stills thrills me to hear that twang sound. I've owned other guitars, but 99 out of 100 shows, I’ve played the same tele through one Fender amp or another.

HotBands - It certainly looks like your guitar has been played a lot!

Bill Kirchen - I traded a Gibson SG for it...it was cherry when I got it...hardly a scratch on it. Now there's a canyon where my little finger rests between the pickup and volume knob. I got it 30 years ago...I was much better looking then too!

HotBands - Going back to the late '60s, how did you get the band out to California?

Bill Kirchen - I got a job as a motorcycle messenger and eventually talked the band into coming out. I sold a couple of motorcycles I had, and George had some money saved up from teaching, so we supported the band for a while. We rented a big house in Emeryville near Oakland, and we all lived there together. We got our food from the food bank, bought day-old bread from the Wonder-Bread distribution center. We were kind of funky...we pooled our resources to get by...pan handled...anything. It was cool in those days, but I don't know if you can get away with that these days. Back in those days, we could live pretty cheap, and after a while we were able to support ourselves playing music.

Did you get a chance to play with any of the other big names in the Bay area during that time?

Well, let's see...we were on the bill with a ton of them. We did a bunch of shows with The (Grateful) Dead, but I never jammed onstage with any of those guys, but backstage I would do some picking with Jerry sometimes. Jerry was the most engaging, outgoing and friendly of that bunch. We opened for them in Family Dawg in '70 or '71, and afterwards, Bobby lectured me saying "..man you gotta update your tonality". Luckily, we never did. We also played with Airplane who became Starship, and we toured a lot with them, played with The New Riders and Purple Sage, The Kingfish...

HotBands - When did Commander Cody first start making it on the scene?

Bill Kirchen - We made our first record in '71, and had hit off that record in '72. We were already touring and playing some big festivals by the end of '70.

HotBands - Did you write Hot Rod Lincoln?

Bill Kirchen - No, it was a hit back in the late '50s, but our version was a bigger hit and it certainly still gets played today. We were already touring nationally as more of an underground band more than a year before it became a hit, so it really didn't change things for us that much. Our music was more underground FM music...our originals were country swing, honky-tonk, which later became 'Americana'.

HotBands - You did 10 albums with Commander Cody...what was the demise of the band and how do you feel about it today?

Bill Kirchen - That band started in the late '60s and we broke up in '76. I played with Cody off and on after that. Looking back, I think we were ahead of our time and that we were more important in the family tree of a certain kind of music than we were a mainstream band. We certainly never got rich from it, but I have absolutely no regrets or complaints...a lot of the wounds we suffered were self-inflicted. We partied fairly hard and it took its toll on us. We just did a reunion in Ann Arbor last year and they when they asked me what I thought we should call the tour, I said we should call it "The nobody's dead yet tour". You wouldn't have bet on that some time before that. We watched other bands become quite a bit more successful than us, but in hindsight, I think we got everything we were ready for. I have zero regrets...I had a delightful time...way more fun than you're supposed to have!

HotBands - You've gone on to make some other records and have played with some really big names. Danny Gatton is one of the names listed on your website. I wanted to ask you about him since you're in the Baltimore/DC area now. What did you do during the '80s and '90s?

Bill Kirchen - I met Danny in the early '70s. I needed some work on my guitar and Al Anderson gave me Danny Gatton's number...I don't even remember knowing that Danny was a player, but he worked on my guitar and afterwards, we jammed a little. Needless to say, you can imagine how mind-boggling it was to see this guy go. 15 years later, when I moved to the D.C. area in 1986, I looked him up. I played with his rhythm section when he wasn't on the road, so he helped me get started in the D.C. area. Later on, I got to play in his band as a rhythm guitar player for a while.

HotBands - What was that like? Were you intimidated?

Bill Kirchen - I thought it would have been pretentious of me to be intimidated because if there was going to be a competition between me and Danny, I wasn't going to win it...you know what I'm saying? I mean... nobody could play like that. I knew that and wouldn't worry about it, I just figured I had the best seat in the house to see Danny Gatton play and he enjoyed my approach and musical sense of humor.

HotBands - I was re-introduced to your music from your Hot Rod Lincoln LIVE album. I was so impressed by all of the guitar impressions, and have played that CD for dozens of friends.

Bill Kirchen - We came upon that entirely by accident. We just started doing it for fun and that's how it was developed, but it's become the big Wayne Newton climax of the set. Let's put it this way, and I don't mean it negatively, but we're definitely stuck with doing that every concert until we die, but that's alright...I love playing something that people love that entertains them...that's what I do for a living. It's a beautiful thing.

HotBands - That's a great approach...giving to others rather than doing it for 'me'.

Bill Kirchen - People ask me if I ever get tired of playing it, but I really don't. I have a local gig in D.C. and sometimes I won't play it there unless someone requests it, but to be honest with you, I don't have a problem with it. It's not about having to play something different every night to challenge myself...it's always difficult to play well and you're always trying not to suck onstage...that's what it's all about.

HotBands - Have you had the same band since you moved to the D.C. area?

Bill Kirchen - Yeah, but there have been some personnel changes. I've been together at least 10 years with the bass player and 6 or 7 years with the drummer, so we've been together for a while. There were a few other people in there before, but this is the 3rd bass player and 2nd drummer since I moved to D.C.

HotBands - You've won a lot of local area music awards and continue to put out an album just about every year. Is this all of your own music?

Bill Kirchen - It's not all my own. There's a mix of covers and originals...I don't have a big huge drive to write songs so I have to sit down and remember to do it sometimes. This last one, I wanted to have a lot of hard honky-tonk, truck driven songs, so some of the ones were songs I heard way back in the '50s. These songs influenced me and kind of put me where I am today, so I wanted to include them so I could pass them along to people.

HotBands - From my position, HotBands.com has a lot of readers that are up and coming, and you never know what is going to click with an individual...they may not hear anything from today that excites them, but something from 50 years ago may take them in a new direction, so my job is to extract information from the artist I'm interviewing that may have a lasting impression on somebody reading the article.

Bill Kirchen - I understand that, and that's a good thing. That's what I'm trying to communicate too. What really happened was that I always liked music, and when I got a chance to be able to play on my own, I took that chance and always played stuff I liked. In my case, it didn't happen to coincide with exactly what was going on musically at the time. I started searching out older forms of music back in the '60s...I was already looking back to the '50s and '40s for stuff. Mainly, it's music that I love. You'll always grow and learn, but the stuff I listened to back when I was a teen, I still love today. That's why I feel so extremely lucky that I've not only been able to play the music that I love, but to turn other people on to it. I think that's a lot of my job...I consider myself a folk-lorist. When I tell people I play country music, it doesn't really have a whole lot to do with the commercial country of today. I've been able to not only play it, but now support myself and my family playing whatever the hell I want for the past 1/3 of a century, so I feel I'm the luckiest guy in the world.

HotBands - That's awesome!

Bill Kirchen - It IS awesome! And another thing...this is without ever becoming a big star! I haven't had a major label deal in 27 years, and I'm still making a living just fine, thank you. There's room for everybody out there.

HotBands - Do you think the music industry is harder today than it was 30 years ago?

Bill Kirchen - Don't know! I'm in my own section of it, so it's very difficult for me to say. I think it's different, and I doubt a band can come up wild and wooly like we did and make it, but you never know...it's hard to say where the parallels are. It's a different era. We didn't set out with a business plan and a game plan to get a major record deal, we were just downstream guys and the next thing we knew, we were in the middle of it. If I had looked at it in a career building way, I would have done it differently, but I didn't at the time and did what I did. I'm a little more conscious of that now, but even so, I still get to do it playing the music I love.

HotBands - What would you have done differently?

Bill Kirchen - I might have concentrated on writing a little more...we were just wild and wooly...we were too stoned. I don't really recommend that...it seemed like a good idea at the time, but man, I lost a lot of friends. When I look at the band (Cody) and see nobody's dead yet, I'm kind of surprised. That whole lifestyle has proven to be shortsighted. That's another thing I may have done differently...but then again, I did what I did and am glad for a lot of what I did...I'm not approaching this with regret, but if I had to offer advice to a younger man, I might tell him to take it easy, but on the other hand, I'm fine with how things turned out for me. Musician years in that lifestyle are like dog-years...7 years on the road is more like 49 years!

HotBands - How do you see the Internet changing the music industry?

Bill Kirchen - I understand that it's intellectual property that's being taken and that it's an issue, but I have to say that from where I sit, that it doesn't hurt me. I've never really made my money from record sales; I've made my money from touring. In that way, it's not a big problem for me, and in fact it actually helps me, but talk with me again if all of a sudden I'm selling 1/4 million units and I'm not getting paid for 125,000 of them. I don't know...to me, I'd love to be in that position, but it's going to be hard to stop. It's like the people's rebellion and they're going to have to find a new way to deal with it...it's unstoppable.

HotBands - What type of advice would you offer a beginning band?

Bill Kirchen - If somebody came up to me and said "Bill, I'm thinking of getting into the music business", I'd tell them to not bother...stay out, don't clutter it up...leave it for us guys who can't help ourselves who have to be in there, but if you come up to me and say "Bill, I can't help myself...I gotta play music 24 hours a day and I want to play for people and I have songs that I want people to hear", I'll talk with you about it. The people that come in and want to approach it from a business decision, I don't know what to think because I don't know it that way...I can only talk from experience. I don't have any real words of wisdom, but I learned this one the hard way "Don't leave your wallet in the dressing room!" That's the kind of shit you need to know. If you're a kid, get yourself an electric guitar tuner and play in tune.

HotBands - I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity to interview you and look forward to seeing you in Seattle on July 12th at The Tractor Tavern.

Bill Kirchen - Mighty fine, Pat! It's been my pleasure! Thanks man, and stay in touch!