When I interviewed Greg Kihn in 2017, he was in the midst of a career revival. The “Jeopardy” singer released Rekihndled, his first album of all new songs in 21 years, with his guitar playing son, Ry, on board, and was starting to get back in the swing of playing live. Kihn told me he was anxious to do more shows, and apparently someone heard him because 2018 is turning out to be an extremely busy time.
For one, he’s part of Best In Show, a package tour featuring Rick Springfield, Loverboy and Tommy Tutone, that’s taking him around the country for the summer. Then there’s a mounting number of headlining shows with the Greg Kihn Band, along with the occasional acoustic club gigs.
Like most everything he’s done — from his red-hot escapades in the 80s as MTV’s favorite poster boy, to a thriving 18-year run on morning radio, to writing novels — Kihn is fully committed to the work at hand, which, in this case, is bringing and reintroducing his music to the public at large.
I spoke with Kihn about the Best In Show tour, the Greg Kihn Band, Rekihndled and new music he has in the works. We also got into his novel writing, which is a bit of a moving target in terms of which book he is working on at any given time. Like his music, as long as he is having fun doing it, there’s no end to the amount of work Greg Kihn is willing put in to it.
~
So the last time we spoke, we went pretty deep into your history. This time, I think the first thing we need to talk about is the Best In Show tour you’re doing with Rick Springfield. Loverboy and Tommy Tutone. I know you’ve already played a couple of shows. How did those go?
They went go great and I got to tell you…there was a little trepidation because I’m not using the Greg Kihn Band, I’m using Rick Springfield’s band. They’re really good. So I couple of weeks before that, before the first gig, I called up my buddy Eddie Money because Eddie knows everybody in LA. So I said, “What do you know about these guys?” “Oh, I’ve used them before. They’re great. They’re like the cream of the cream of the LA session guys.” So That’s kind of a thrill for me to be playing with LA session guys like that. You know, while they’re playing with me, I asked them if they would come up with a name, Like Greg Kihn and the Conspirators or something like that, and they came up with the Procrastinators.
The Procrastinators?
Why do it today when you can always put it off until tomorrow. So I’ll be working with the Procrastinators.
Are they like the house band, backing everybody on the bill?
No, they’re backing me and they’re backing Tommy Tutone and then Loverboy is actually Loverboy with most of the original guys, and then obviously Rick Springfield. And you know, it really works great and it harkens back to what we used to do back in the old days. It was all package deals. Most people didn’t go out on the road, unless you were a headliner, you would usually go out as a package deal with four or five bands. When I was a kid, I used to go to the Baltimore Civic Center and you could see the Who and Led Zeppelin. All these guys would be on these little package tours.
I’m really thrilled to be doing this with the guys because we’re doing a bunch of dates and all of August is taken up. It’s a lot of fun and I’m really enjoying playing with the guys. At the same time, I just rehearsed with my band all day today. We just got back from the studio about half an hour ago. We’re going to be back in the studio making another Greg Kihn album. We got two songs already finished. I know that right now it’s a really busy time, everybody’s on the road. But as soon as that’s over, probably by September, we’ll be back in the studio and working on another album. We already got two songs and they sound great!
I thought Rekindled was a great comeback record. Are you playing songs from that record on this tour?
I’m so glad you asked me that because yes, the answer is unequivocally yes. I’m doing some new material. Obviously, when I go out to play a show like this, I got to do the hits like “Jeopardy” and “Breakup Song” and stuff like that. And I also usually go into my catalog and pull a handful of songs out that seem right for that night like maybe “For You” or “Madison Avenue” or whatever. I also have all these new songs that I can choose from. So I’m doing “The Life I Got” and “Pink Flamingos.” They’re sounding great. There’s something about that album. All the songs are really fun to do live. We went back into the studio. We just picked up where we left off with a whole bunch of new material. I tell you, it’s been a creative time.
I saw that you’re playing Sacramento this weekend. Is that with your regular band?
Yeah, that’s with the Greg Kihn Band. That’ll be a real interesting gig. The problem is — the key word here is “Cabo.” So my longtime bass player and band leader and songwriting guy and also the producer of the Greg Kihn is Robert Berry. We’ve been working out of his studio now for year, so it turns out that he had this plans months and months ago, so he’s in Cabo. He promised his wife this beautiful vacation, so he’s in Cabo.
So I said, “Well, I’ve got to get a bass player for that.” So Dave Lauser comes to us from the Cabo Wabo band, — Sammy’s Cabo Wabo band — and he said, “Let’s call Mona, Mona Nader. She’s the bass player for the Cabo Wabo band.” I said, “Wow, man.” So if I got Dave Lauser on drums and Mona on bass, I would say that constitutes 50% of the Cabo Wabo band. So you’re going to get half Greg Kihn with me and my son Rye, and half Cabo Wabo. It should be an intoxicating mix.
Yeah. Wow. I wish I could come up for that.
Yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
And then you’re playing the Orange County Fair.
That’s going to be a lot of fun too. That’s a Springfield gig. This summer, I’ve got all kinds of gigs. I’ve got Greg Kihn Band gigs, where we’re usually the headliner. Then I got the Rick Springfield gigs. And also, I got these acoustic gigs that we’re doing here and there. Just turned down a couple of them. We’ll probably do more of those before the year is over. So, there’s three kinds of gigs that I’m playing out there and they’re all fun.
Your music career is in full bloom right now.
Yeah, I have to say it is. it’s a good time because you know because I don’t worry about anything. You know, I just kind of go in there. Very spontaneously, we write the songs. It’s much more organic and it really feels good. You know what I mean? The songs I’m writing now are like the ones that were on Rekindled. I love those songs.
There’s “Cassandra” and “The Life I Got.” Those songs stayed with me. They were deeply personal, and we’ve kept up at that same thing going. In fact, I got a couple of songs I made for the free downloads. You know, a couple of songs towards the next album, so that’ll be a lot of fun. And then the fans can go over to GregKihn.com and just get a free download. I mean, how cool is that?
That’s always a good thing. Free is always good. Do you have a title?
You know, I’m thinking Kihnetic Energy.
Kihnetic Energy? Yeah, keeping the “Kihn” name in there.
Yeah, got to have “Kihn” in there. What was the other one? We had three or four of them picked out. You know, we’re never going to run out of those “Kihn” names. It just keeps going on and on. I wish my mother was alive because she loved them. She bought every one.
When are you expecting to finish it up and get it out there?
Well, see now, that’s the cool thing about working with the band right now and working with Robert — we don’t have a date. It’ll be done when it’s done. We’ll know when it’s done. We’re only a couple of songs into it right now. I’m thinking, based on my habits, probably by the Fall we’ll start thinking about compiling all the songs I write songs pretty quickly these days.
Yeah, well I know Robert has a new record out.
Robert is a super-talented guy. Yeah, I mean we’re wasting him on the bass because he’s much more than a bass player. He’s a fabulous keyboard player and he’s playing that really complex, progressive music right on this record.
He plays all the instruments. He’s playing like these Keith Emerson licks and it’s pretty well done.
He was a junior Keith Emerson. He really understood Keith’s creative mind. They really they bonded and that it was really tragic when he died. I’m really super proud of what Robert Berry’s been able to achieve and I think his album is fabulous and I wish him the best of luck with it. I tell you, it’s a creative time right now.
That’s for sure. Speaking of creativity. I did want to also talk to you about your books. After I interviewed you last year. I bought your Rubber Soul book and I read the whole thing. I couldn’t put it down. I just loved the attention to detail and Dust Bin Bob was a really believable character to me. It’s funny because when I was young, the Beatles were my first band, and I used to have this fantasy about being their best buddy and here you went and wrote a book about it.
Yeah. That was always a fantasy of mine. Just my entire generation, you know, all my musician friends all point to The Beatles on Ed Sullivan as the starting point. Of course, you were 11 or 12 years old when you saw them on Ed Sullivan, that’s when it started. When I was on the radio on KFOX doing the morning show, which I did for 18 years, I got to interview a lot of the people in the Beatles universe. I talked to Paul McCartney twice, and a couple of times to Ringo Starr, and Geoff Emerick, their engineer. I got to talk to Yoko and people like that.
Anyway, one of those things I always wanted to know was where the Beatles got their music. You know, there were no import shops. How did they get a copy of “Money” by Barrett Strong? How did they find that? I asked Ringo and I asked McCartney. and they gave me the same answer: “We knew friends that were merchant marines that were bringing back singles from the States.” Where a new Ray Charles or a new Chuck Berry would be out in the States, it would never come out in England. You have to special order it, by mail order. But the Beatles, they had Dust Bin Bob. A lot of those catalog items that the Beatles covered in the early days, they had to learn really quick, because they were doing like seven sets a night. They were doing stuff like, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” by the Shirelles and “Hey, Mr. Postman.” It was an amazing time and I kept thinking to myself: Where are they getting this stuff?
I was growing up the Baltimore, which was the home of R&B on the East Coast, and we could get some of that stuff. In fact, all of that stuff in Baltimore — that was a real record store we used to go. It was like King Washington’s record store and I would go and we would hear stuff on Baltimore radio that you hadn’t heard in the rest of the country. Maybe the only other place was Harlem. So, a lot of these R&B records would come out and they were a big hit in Baltimore, six months ahead of the rest of the country. That’s when I thought, somebody could be their best friend and give those records to them — he would have been the man who made the Beatles.
Paul McCartney must have gotten a copy of “Twenty-Flight Rock” from somebody because that’s the song that he played for John Lennon to get into the Beatles.
That’s right. And how George Harrison playing raunchy. I remember Paul saying to John, “He does the best raunchy in the neighborhood man.”
If you just step back from all of this and we’re talking about the Beatles. And we probably wouldn’t be talking if it wasn’t for the Beatles. To what do you attribute the Beatles and their impact on virtually everything?
Well, you know, it was the times, right after the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. By the Spring of 64, the whole country was waking out of its doldrums. The whole country been in mourning for months. Finally there was something else to focus on — it was these crazy guys from Liverpool. I remember watching the press conference when they first landed at LaGuardia Airport. It was funny, man. Of course, we saw them on Ed Sullivan with, you know, the hair and the look. It was a revolution. I came home that Friday from junior high school. I think I was about 12. Anyway, I went home and my idol was Dion. I loved Dion; I had a whole bunch of Dion records. I used to have my hair up in a pompadour like Dion’s. Then we saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and that Monday — that’s how quickly it changed — that Monday everybody in my entire school had Beatles haircuts. The pompadours were gone. The grease was gone. they didn’t they didn’t put Vitalis in their hair anymore.
And it was a revolution right that coincided with me getting into girls and, you know, having buddies and we all played guitars. It was just an amazing time. I was learning when I was a kid. It dawned on me that all of the great songs, all of the songs I learned, like from folk music, like Tom Dooley and the Kingston Trio. That was my first love because my cousins had Kingston Trio records. I got my first guitar and I learned The Kingston Trio songs. Imagine my shock when I realized that C, F and G were the same as all the Beatles songs. They the same three chords I was playing for all the Beatles songs. Man, I’m telling you, a light went off of my head and I realized I could play just about every song on the radio with these three chords.
When I did speak to you last year, you told me we were working on a new book, a punk rock book that involved a 16-year-old heiress.
That’s right! I gotta tell you because here hangs a tale. I was about two-thirds way through that book, which was called Anarchy by the way. It was the third is the series of the Dust Bin Bob Trilogy. I got about three-quarters of the way through it, and then I had this idea for Southern Gothic. So I took a little vacation from the first book — just took a little mental vacation — and I started working on Southern Gothic. I sent it to my literary agent and she said, “You know, I like this a lot better. Why don’t you finish Sothern Gothic first, and then go back and finish Anarchy because your publisher has already said that they would accept the third Dust Bin Bob book, so it’d be nicer to maybe you come up with something new and fresh, and then follow it with the Dust Bin Bob book.”
I just started working on it again last week. You know, when you go back and it’s been two or three months since you worked on something, you see it completely differently. Of course, I went to the beginning and I started rewriting it. I couldn’t stop. It’s one of those things that if you don’t do it right now, you’re never going to do it. You’ll forget it or the moment will pass. I finally I got Southern Gothic finished and did the editing and sent it off to my editor. And so I’m right back to Anarchy — about where I was the last time we spoke.
Is Southern Gothic about southern rock?
Well sort of. Hanks Williams is in it.
Oh, so country music?
Actually, it takes place the last couple of days of his life. He died on the way to a gig in Canton, Ohio, on New Year’s Day 1953. He died en route to that gig; he never made that gig. So I concocted this whole story about how he died and what happened and it was so much fun to write it, man. I really enjoyed it. So yes, country music. You know, the Louisiana Hayride is in there. When Hank Williams died, it was such a shock because he was only in his twenties. It was kind of like when Hendrix, Morrison and all those guys died. It was a shocker.
It’s so cool how’ve found this niche all your own where you’re writing these books with real people but it sort of has a foot in reality and a foot in fiction.
Yeah, I call it historical fiction. Because what I do is I take the historical facts about let’s say Hank Williams, and then I spin the fiction around it using real things that happened, incidents that happened in the guy’s life, as touchstone moments in the novel. That was the fun of when I was doing Rubber Soul. I got to put in all of these little tiny details, like when they first got together, they had funny names. You know, it was Carl Harrison, and it was Paul Ramon for Paul McCartney. Of course, Long John Silver was John Lennon. The new one takes place in punk territory. I was in England for the entire punk movement and I saw all of those bands and played with them. I just recall that scene like it was yesterday.
Getting back to your tour with Rick Springfield. Are you guys jamming together? Do you have any plans for anything like that?
We’ve only done three or four shows so far. I’m planning to do some jamming with those guys. I just wanted to get out on the road there, and get a week or so under our belts, so we get even tighter. I’ll tell you the truth — it’s kind of like summer camp. “Hey, we’re all going to play gigs in weird places.” It’s like summer camp.
It’s been a while since you’ve done a big, extensive tour, correct?
That was my problem. The problem was for 18 years, I was getting up at 4 a.m. and doing the radio show. So, for 18 years, I never gigged. I played maybe three or four gigs a year. But I hadn’t actually done a proper tour in 18 years. A lot of people have short memories, but now they hear “Breakup Song” or “Jeopardy” or the Weird Al version, and they go, “Oh I get it, Greg Kihn.” A lot of time I don’t think they really put two and two together until they see the band and they go, “Oh, geez. I love these guys.”
So you’re going to tour through August and then you’re going to try to get the new record out in the fall. Do you have anything planned beyond that? Do you think you’ll hit the road again and promote the new record?
We had a couple of nibbles from some booking agents to try and maybe do a Fall tour. I don’t want to jinx it our anything, we’re in negotiations with that. So I might go back on the road in November, just for a couple of weeks. I tell you, if there’s a gig out there, I want to play it.
