“It started as a rant and turned into what Sarah Brown [his Austin bassist of choice] calls a meditation,” Kirchen says. “I felt like I was getting at something I was thinking and feeling; I wasn’t just making it up.” The lighthearted “One More Day”, he says, “reflects my cockeyed optimism, and I felt good about not having to strike a pose different than my own.”
His revivals are equally imaginative. He takes “Devil With The Blue Dress” at a midtempo more reminiscent of Shorty Long’s original than of Mitch Ryder’s better-known remake, and turns in a sad, well-seasoned reading of Arthur Alexander’s “If It’s Really Got To Be This Way”. Other highlights are “Skid Row In My Mind”, a down-and-outer from Kevin “Blackie” Farrell, a former Cody/Airmen running buddy from Northern California who knows from down-and-outers; and the sublime rhythm jaunt “Soul Cruisin'” from Bay Area singer-songwriter Joe New.
As it happens, Kirchen is also in personal transition as he releases his first new album in five years. His father-in-law died about a year ago, and the Kirchens are returning to Maryland. In fact, though his wife is still in Austin and they’re both doing their share of back-and-forth these days, as we spoke he was stuck in Maryland and forced to do this interview by phone, thanks to ice storms that had shut down the Austin airport. After four flight cancellations, he’d given up on getting back to Austin for now; an East Coast tour was set begin in just two days. This is, after all, the man who did Dallas Frazier’s “Home In My Hand” on Commander Cody’s 1971 debut Lost In The Ozone.
Kirchen was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he went to high school with Bob Seger and Iggy Pop. A natural born rocker as a kid, he was guided toward the folk scene by a classical trombone instructor — hey! don’t laugh! — and took up guitar to learn Mississippi John Hurt-style fingerpicking. He quit leading his own rock band to become a charter member of Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, whose rhythm guitarist John Tichy introduced him to hard country music.
When the group broke up briefly, Kirchen went to the Bay Area, where two important things happened. He realized there was room out West for Cody & the Airmen, and he summoned them to join him. And while working as a motorcycle messenger in San Francisco, he traded for his first and last electric guitar — he’d played a loaner in Michigan — the Fender Tele. Kirchen immediately immersed himself in the crackling west coast sound of Don Rich with Buck Owens, Roy Nichols with Merle Haggard, Gene Moles with Red Simpson, and other Tele-toters such as James Burton and Phil Baugh.
The rambunctious-sounding guitar fit perfectly with the hellbent-for-more-beer-and-pot roadhouse raunch of Cody. With their emphasis on punchy songs rather than endless virtuoso soloing and their insistence on rocking good times over Art That Will Change The World, they couldn’t have been more proudly out of step with what was happening at the time in San Francisco, even if it meant that local jobs were confined pretty much to the East Bay.
You really had to see them live to get the full effect, because they never did come across well in the studio. Down in Hollywood, the emerging country-rock of Gram Parsons and company was shaped by a folkie perspective inclined toward, say, Merle Travis and the Louvins; but up in the Bay Area, Cody and Asleep At The Wheel were more into western swing, Texas shuffles and honky-tonk. It’s no coincidence that Cody’s best audiences were at Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters, where they recorded one of the era’s great live albums. But Cody and the Wheel provided the entree into country music for plenty of us in the Bay Area and then, especially after “Hot Rod Lincoln” hit, around the rest of the country — even if they don’t get the credit today that the L.A. scene does.
Kirchen is more sanguine. “We probably don’t get enough, but I don’t know, that’s for others to say,” he submits. “I know we turned people on to country music because I hear it all the time from fans; we definitely had our impact. We also had a lot of fun and probably as much success as possible for a band like that. I know I had way more fun than I deserved. If others don’t realize what we did, that’s OK; I know what we did.”
Cody eventually succumbed to increasingly high times and low sales. Kirchen formed another bar band, the Moonlighters, who found common ground between soul and western swing; DeLone, the piano player, even got Lowe to produce their second and final album.
In 1986, Kirchen moved to Maryland, where he sat in one night with Danny Gatton’s rhythm section and soon found himself fronting trios that evolved into Too Much Fun. He began making records again in 1993. He had weekly gigs at two different D.C.-area clubs, and enough other work within easy striking distance that he could afford to spend more time at home than on the road.
The highlight of his live show is still “Hot Rod Lincoln”, but it’s a long long long version, during which he apes a succession of guitarists, playing trademark licks of everyone from Luther Perkins to Jimi Hendrix to Maybelle Carter to the Sex Pistols. You might call it the Triumph of the Telecaster.
But then, you might say that about Kirchen’s whole career.
John Morthland wrote for Rolling Stone and Creem when those things still mattered. He’s still at it.
