Another charge likely to be leveled at The Flower And The Knife is that Kinney has joined the ranks of the jam bands. He laughs at that one, citing his recent experiences playing a few neo-hippie festivals as proof that he doesn’t exactly fit the bill.
“I think I have a little too many words for ’em. I think I might bum ’em out a little bit. But I don’t care. They need to give their props to Dylan and folk music and understand what that’s all about.”
Interestingly, the bittersweet ballad that opens the album, “Trail Of Seasons”, is Kinney’s fictional account of the original hippie era. “It’s about people traveling and winding up parting ways, but remaining friends,” he explains. “I guess it’s not really anything I’ve ever been a part of, but I always kind of hoped relationships would end that way.”
Other Kinney compositions, such as “Whatever”, “This Town”, “40 Miles Of Mountain Road” and “Above The World”, mix his signature melancholy melodies and urban working-class lyrics. But while his last solo outing, Down Out Law, was just Kinney and his guitar, this time there’s Haynes’ powerhouse slide guitar, not to mention Popper’s unmistakable harp riffs.
The man who Kinney calls “the Jimi Hendrix of harmonica” comes in big on a distinctly upbeat reprise of the early Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ emblem, “Scarred But Smarter”. Then there’s the Haynes/McCain/Kinney remake of “Straight To Hell”, a Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ epic from 1989’s Mystery Road that has become a bona fide Southern anthem. “I don’t think people in New York know it,” Kinney says. But below the Mason-Dixon, he’s absolutely obliged to play it every time he performs.
On a warm evening in Atlanta, with the smell of Confederate jasmine wafting in the breeze, Kinney is closing out a show at the Red Light Cafe in Midtown. He’s traveled down from Athens with a small cadre of friends in tow, including singers Kitty Snider, who’s playing guitar, and Don Chambers, who’s playing banjo. Big brother Mikel Kinney, who lives in Atlanta, has been playing keyboards, fiddle and anything else he can get his hands on. Mikel grabs a lap steel as his younger brother picks out the opening notes of “Straight To Hell”.
“I grew up just west of tracks, hold me down, hold me back,” Kevn intones, while nearly everyone in the room chants along with every single word. By the time the first chorus comes around, the crowd nearly drowns out the musicians onstage, shouting in unison: “I’m going straight to hell, just like my Momma said, I’m going straight to hell.”
It’s an amazing little tradition to behold, the kind of live music moment most singer-songwriters lust after. But while Kinney is appreciative, he also sees irony and maybe even a little hubris in the way Southern audiences have turned this rueful tune by a transplant from Milwaukee into a shit-kicking redneck sing-along.
“It’s a great anthem of being a hypocrite,” he says. “But people do not understand that. It’s about a single mother raising a son, and she’s not really acting in the way she wants her son to act. The idea came out of that whole generation of latch-key children. It’s a real story about real people, but it’s not my story. I grew up west of the tracks, on the west side of Milwaukee, so that much is true.”
Kinney’s youth was pretty much standard-issue until he turned 16 in 1977. That’s when he started a quick and dirty punk-rock fanzine called The Sheet. It was a one-page broadside with record and concert reviews produced on his grandfather’s mimeograph machine. “It was immediate,” he says. “That’s for sure. I would go see the Ramones or something and I would go home and type it out and run it off.”
Later he became a roadie for a band called the Haskells and helped found an alternative paper called Express. Finally, he started playing music in a punk band called the Prosecutors. He bought an acoustic guitar after seeing D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan film Don’t Look Back at a local art theater. The rest, he says, is a much more complicated bit of history.
After joining his brother Mikel in Atlanta in 1983, Kinney got a day job working in the sewage plant in Roswell and starting playing out in a burgeoning folk scene that eventually gave rise to the Indigo Girls. The first gig he and Mikel got was opening for fellow Milwaukeeans the Violent Femmes at the 688 Club, which was ground zero for Atlanta alternative music. Soon after, Kevn joined forces with bassist Tim Nielsen and drummer Paul Lenz, who were in a popular band called the Nightporters. They chose to name their new band after one of Kevn’s songs, “Drivin’ N’ Cryin'”, which they felt reflected the range of their music.
Kinney is by turns proud and pained about the legacy of Drivin’ N’ Cryin.’ Right now, he says, the band is a part of his past. “I never say never, but I just needed a break. I’ve taken that road as far as I could take it. I don’t want to play Southern rock festivals for the rest of my life. The thing is, we made eight albums or so in 14 years. That’s a lot. How many records did Crazy Horse make? I guess I would like them to be more of a Crazy Horse band for me.”
He has also come to regard the Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ catalog from an “older and wiser” perspective. One album he used to despise, Whisper Tames The Lion, he now loves. Produced by Golden Palominos mastermind Anton Fier, it was the band’s first recording after signing with Island Records in 1987, and was “like going to graduate school before you went to college,” Kinney says.
“I’d been shoveling shit at a sewage plant for three years, so I didn’t mind working hard. He [Fier] made me a better musician, but I hated him at the time because he wouldn’t let me get away with anything. And it wasn’t really a Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ record, as much as it was a Golden Palominos record.”
