Photo Courtesy of Deborah Samuel
The Kings
The Kings Are Here
They had the attitudes of punks and the chops to be a Canadian Beatles.
The story of how I discovered The Kings could have come directly from one of their songs. Several years ago, I was at the Wellesley, Mass. home of a woman I was dating at the time. Her father, a bona fide rock fan, had a series of framed vinyl albums adorning one wall of his spacious basement. Among the titles was the group’s 1980 debut album The Kings Are Here. No image on the front other than a white band logo on a black background.
My mission was clear, learn all I could about the group to get in good with the dad — oh and impress his daughter too.
It didn’t work.
Yet even though I lost the battle, I won the musical war – she broke it off not long after this visit, but I’ve loved The Kings Are Here ever since.
This album is the greatest of their collective musical arsenal, equipped with powerfully hook-laden tracks that can appeal to everyone from teenage horn dogs to the blue-collar workforce. However, collective sentiment seems to reflect that 80 percent of it is a mere shell for its two most popular songs, “This Beat Goes On” and “Switchin’ to Glide.”
Both tracks are great, don’t get me wrong, as they sound tailor-made for the world of AOR. Yet the essence of what makes the group terrific lies in its other songs. Arguably, this can also apply to other Canadian contemporaries of the era – FM, Prism, and Red Rider all have great tracks apart from “Phasors On Stun,” “Don’t Let Him Know,” and “Lunatic Fringe,” respectively.
For me, the crux of what makes The Kings’ debut one-of-a-kind is its middle-finger in the air lyrics: “It doesn’t matter not one bit, not two shits, it’s OK” on “It’s OK”; “So you think that I’m an asshole!!” on “Anti-Hero Man”; “This is our party, and I’m a party maniac!” on “Partyitis.” Thirty minutes, that’s all it takes to realize this band was fast headed out of the Great White North to supreme musical heights.
Before The Kings Are Here ever saw the light of day, the group — guitarist Mister Zero, vocalist David Diamond, keyboardist Sonny Keyes and drummer Max Styles — spent years honing its songs and style in the bars of Toronto and elsewhere, initially forming as a more prog-rock oriented-outfit named WhistleKing. They even won a Canadian radio songwriting contest for a tune (“Turn My Face to the Wall”) that would be remodeled for their first album as “Don’t Let Me Know.”
“At a certain point we were playing the clubs more and realized punk and new wave was coming along. We were a bar band – we were playing Cheap Trick and Elvis Costello and that kind of music in the bars. We decided to try to go with shorter type songs and see if we could maybe write some hits as catchy, three-minute jobs. That’s how that evolved,” Zero told me recently. “We were aware of the scene at the time and just tried to find our place in it.”
With saved money, the band began recording an album on its own at famed Toronto studio Nimbus 9 when they encountered legendary producer Bob Ezrin (of KISS, Alice Cooper and Lou Reed fame), fresh off producing Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That, as Zero tells me, is when the band’s “Cinderella story” truly begins.
Ezrin agreed to produce the group but emphasized their songs needed an all-but-complete retooling. Before his studio wizardry could be applied, Ezrin took the already recorded tapes to Elektra Records in Los Angeles and secured the band a record deal. After rehearsing their updated songs for a month, the band hit the studio with Ezrin behind the console.
“We’ve heard some of the stories about Bob. He couldn’t be any more professional and understanding to us at that time as novices compared to him in the studio,” Zero said. “There was not any kind of over-the-top behavior of any kind. [He was] real congenial and professional and really helped to try to get stuff going. That’s why the album sounds so good.”
Once released though, album success outside of Canada for band was slow going. Despite spending 23 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, “Switchin’ to Glide,” released as its own single, only peaked at Number 43. Things changed somewhat once the band secured a new manager (now legendary music executive) Randy Phillips, and earned opening slots in the states for legends like Jeff Beck as well as a frenetic performance on American Bandstand. Once “This Beat Goes On” and “Switchin’ to Glide” were combined into one masterpiece, listeners took notice.
I’m sure you’ll take notice if you listen to the power chords and vocal and instrumental punch behind both songs. The lyrics, “Hey little Donna, still wanna? You said to ring you up if I was in ‘Toronta’” and “Nothing matters but the weekend from a Tuesday point of view,” are direct but carry a charming devil-may-care mindset all their own.
“People just responded to it instantly, and that’s when the label really got behind it,” Zero told me. “I have to say that to us the biggest compliment we always got was when people thought we were an American band or somewhere not from (Canada) because it meant that we were more big time in our estimation.”
The band released one more album on Elektra, Amazon Beach, before being dropped by the label. Fortunately, their first album still maintains a shelf life.
“We play seven or eight out of those 10 songs in our live show now,” Zero said. “They’re all stalwarts and have stood the test of time.”
“I think that that is great that people find out about (The Kings Are Here) later,” he added. “Our feeling is that if we come up with something that good, don’t you think there’s a chance we might have another couple of good songs. I think if people try to check out more then they’ll find out there is more to us.”
“Partyitis” alone proves this fact, and “Go Away,” and “My Habit,” and “Don’t Let Me Know.”
The band plans to release a new single soon — another two-in-one deal. Here’s hoping they can find their way to the states to keep the beat going (pun intended). Zero says it best: “To me, the important thing is that we’re still at it and still going. We’ve had our ups and downs in the music business but so have a lot of other bands. You’re either going to keep going because you believe in your music and you love doing it or you’re going to just pack it in over the vagaries of the music business, which is nonsense.”
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