When guitarist Bill Kirchen wailed on his Fender Telecaster guitar in the mid-1960s, a little bit of everything came pouring out.
Not much has changed since.
The native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is regarded as the “Titan of the Telecaster,” a player whose impressive form and finesse on the Fender favourite has been called upon to give that distinctive twang to records by Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Hoyt Axton, among others.
Four decades into his career, Kirchen is credited with being one of the first performers to popularize the strain of roots music known as Americana, though his music often flirts with dramatic interpretations of the form.
“I dearly love country music in the style that was played from the 1950s up to the early 1970s,” Kirchen said. “I started out as a folk nerd, and then got into country blues. But when I discovered electric country music, I didn’t know a damn thing about it.
“All at once, I got a crash course in the old guys at the time. That was the heyday of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. That Bakersfield sound really got me, and I was off to the races.”
Kirchen’s first break came when he moved to the Bay Area of California at a time when a melting pot of rock and country was starting to find an audience. He had moved to San Francisco looking for work because his Detroit-based band, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, had unofficially called it quits. When he saw that the getting was good for rag-tag groups of rebels, he put in a call to George Frayne, the titular Commander Cody. The group came west to join Kirchen, and the rest is outlaw country history.
“I specifically wanted to get involved with the music scene there, but I also specifically wanted to be in San Francisco,” Kirchen, who is now based in Austin, Texas, said. “Who didn’t in 1968?”
The celebrated musician is coming to Vancouver Island this week for the guitar showcase A Mighty String Thing. The project combines Kirchen with five other guitarists — Kevin Breit (Toronto), Doug Cox (Cumberland), Cécile Doo-Kingué (Montreal), Sam Hurrie (Powell River) and Mark Stuart (Tennessee) — to perform in an in-the-round setting. The tour stops tonight at the Sid Williams Theatre in Courtenay and Saturday at the Dave Dunnet Theatre at Oak Bay High School.
Kirchen knows only a few of the performers under the Mighty String Thing banner, but his specialty is finding a way to fit in. He spent years in Washington, D.C., what he calls a “Telecaster town.” There was a big country scene in the district, and he was among the best at blurring lines.
“I don’t really like to call myself rockabilly, because that’s such a specific genre. I’m more rock ’n’ roll than rockabilly. A little bit louder.”
The rockabilly tag has been applied to Kirchen plenty over the years, in part because of his iconic playing on Commander Cody’s biggest hit, Hot Rod Lincoln. The up-tempo song — rockabilly, pure and simple — is a showcase for Kirchen’s considerable skills, which pushed the song into the Top 10 on the pop charts in 1972 and led to concerts with Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson.
Few bands at the time could match the range of Kirchen’s pot-smoking, rabble-rousing group.
“We did enjoy being bad-boy rock ’n’ rollers, but I thought we were the guys playing the most hardcore country music. We were more traditional when we did country music than a lot of the Los Angeles country-rock scene. For that reason, I never enjoyed the label country rock — it seemed to indicate something that we weren’t doing. We played hard, blood-and-guts country, and we played rock ’n’ roll.”
The band was pushing the limits in Nashville before Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings took outlaw country into the mainstream, in fact. When Commander Cody and Co. recorded the 1973 song Everybody’s Doin’ It, “which had the F-word about two dozen times,” Kirchen said, a sticker was placed on the front of their Country Casanova album warning radio programmers of the language therein.
Ironically, the warning mentioned the incorrect song and Everybody’s Doin’ It made it to air, with disastrous results.
“The sticker actually referenced a gospel track,” Kirchen said with a laugh. “We got a call from Jim Fogelsong, the president of Dot Records, who said: ‘Gentlemen, we have a serious problem here.’ And that signalled the end of our flirtation with Nashville.”
Kirchen’s career as a singer-songwriter is in full swing today, with a record produced by Flatlanders member Butch Hancock coming later this year. However, he marvels at how easy the bands of today have it, in terms of opportunities. “When I think back to what we did and what we got away with … we’re out there as an eight-piece band that liked to get drunk and play old hillbilly music and sing about pot. I don’t think that’s really something you can do today.”
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen maintains a rabid cult audience. More than a few fans think the band and its contributions to the counter-culture are often overlooked. “People say we didn’t get what we deserved, but I don’t know about that,” Kirchen said.
“I think we were lucky to get as far as we did.”
What: A Mighty String Thing featuring Kevin Breit, Doug Cox, Sam Hurrie, Cécile Doo-Kingué, Bill Kirchen and Mark Stuart
When: Saturday, 7:30 p.m. (doors at 7)
Where: Dave Dunnet Community Theatre, Oak Bay High School, 2121 Cadboro Bay Rd.
Tickets: $30 at eventbrite.ca and Lyle’s Place, Ivy’s Bookshop, Long and McQuade, and the Royal McPherson box office