music & nightlife |

Photograph by Amy C. Elliot
Titan of the telecaster: King of the Dieselbilly: Mr. Bill Kirchen.

By Greg Cahill

He’s the undisputed dieselbilly king, a master of the Fender Telecaster whose twangy guitar licks helped rocket Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen to the top of the pop charts in 1972 with the hit single “Hot Rod Lincoln.”

Bill Kirchen still packs plenty of punch, as evidenced on his latest album, Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods, released last week. The album, Kirchen’s first in five years, features longtime collaborator Nick Lowe on bass and Marin musician Austin DeLone on keyboards, among others.

It’s a catchy collection of tender ballads (“Rocks into Sand”), drinking songs (“Skid Row in My Mind”), rockabilly raves (“Heart of Gold”) and blue collar anthems (“Working Man”) that rival the best of the Blasters, all steeped in no-nonsense trash, twang and thunder.

And the secret of that twang?

“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” he jokes during a sound check at Sweetwater Saloon in Mill Valley. “Like anything else, twang is in the ear of the beholder, I guess. But I’m just hearing something in my head and trying to get it out into the airwaves. I like that big shredding crunch, but I also like the clean guitar sound when you hear the string go boiiiiing!

“I tend to spend a lot of time in the bottom quadrant of the guitar,” adds Kirchen, a lanky figure with a mischievous grin. “I get dizzy above the seventh fret and I get a nose bleed once I move past the 12th fret, so I tend to hang around down there on the fat strings.”

Kirchen, who brings his band to the Last Day Saloon next week, can sport a thick, bluesy tone that can rival Mark Knopfler one moment or he can echo the twanginess of the best Nashville pickers the next.

“I came up through classical music [as a trombonist] and then moved up through the folk scare–you know, figuring out Pete Seeger’s How to Play the Banjo book,” he says. “I liked that finger-picking style of Mississippi John Hurt and wanted to learn to play like him. When I first got into playing electric guitar, I discovered Buck Owens and Don Rich, and Merle Haggard and Roy Nichols, and James Burton with Elvis and Ricky [Nelson]. Those were the guys that really knocked me out, along with Gene Vincent and a bunch of other guys. So I really got a crash course in the late ’60s in the hillbilly, Western and rock ‘n’ roll guitar of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

“To this day, I know almost nothing about all of the mid-’60s English guys.”

Kirchen grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he attended high school with Iggy Pop and Bob Seger. In the late ’60s, after leading the hippie rock band the Seventh Seal in Ann Arbor, he helped form Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airman and relocated them to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969. The band–a mix of rockabilly revival, Western swing and cosmic cowboy ethos–recorded seven albums before breaking up in 1975. Rolling Stone named their Live from Deep in the Heart of Texas one of the 100 best albums of all time.

During the 1970s, Kirchen met Nick Lowe, then a member of Rockpile and a pivotal figure on London’s pub-rock scene, while touring England with Commander Cody. He was later reintroduced to Lowe through DeLone, then an ex-pat playing in the seminal pub-rock band Eggs over Easy.

Kirchen became a regular fixture on the North Bay music scene, playing with the Moonlighters until moving his family to Maryland in 1987.

He reemerged in 1994 and has recorded seven solo albums, all critically acclaimed, and contributed his twangy Tele to Lowe’s smash 1994 comeback album The Impossible Bird.

“I learned a lot from him making that album,” Kirchen says.

But onstage, it’s all about those celebrated chops as evidenced by his perennial showstopper, a stylistic smorgasbord of classic guitar licks, from Chuck Berry to Duane Eddy to Link Wray.

“That’s my ‘Hot Rod Lincoln’ medley,” he says. “I throw about 30 or 40 guitar quotes into the space of about eight minutes.

“It’s my big Wayne Newton climax.”

Bill Kirchen and his Buckshot Boys perform on Sunday, Feb. 11, at the Last Day Saloon, 120 Fifth St., Santa Rosa. 4pm. $10-$12; all ages. 707.545.2343.

FIND A MUSIC REVIEW

Volker Strifler surveys the Nutty Irishman, a faintly lit, clamorous lounge on the industrial side of Santa Rosa, before sliding with me into one of its well-worn booths and sweeping some leftover crumbs from the vinyl table covering. He flips open a menu with all the dry routine of a daily regular, glances at it for a moment and puts it down. “I don’t know why I even look at this thing,” he says. “I have it memorized by now.”

In addition to being a regular at this dark haunt, Strifler is a triple-threat guitarist, singer and songwriter who has just released one of the most richly satisfying blues albums in years, the highly acclaimed Dance Goes On. The Volker Strifler band perform Feb. 10 at the Last Day Saloon.

Instantly impressive from start to finish, the album has a polished sheen that remains rooted in the same well-worn soul that makes places like the Nutty Irishman tick. Strifler reclines in casual jeans and a sweater to talk about his new album, and around the restaurant relics of the past abound: wood paneling, bird’s-eye photos, mesh hats atop grizzled faces.

“I have a lot of respect for things that over time get lost,” he says, harking back to pioneers like Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. “I really respect what these guys did with what they had to work with, considering a lot of the technology that’s here now. Every time something gets invented, there’s something gained–but there’s also something lost.”

Through his refusal to succumb (“Be creative with the technology, don’t let the technology create you,” is how he puts it), The Dance Goes On is a pristinely organic listening experience. But it’s Strifler’s songwriting that elevates his sound. These are expertly crafted songs that achieve the near-impossible feat of not only creeping into the brain but under the skin, borrowing from every decade, not just the classic blues era of the 1940s.

“It’s certainly worth preserving,” Strifler notes of the traditional style that he was raised on. “But if you limit yourself to imitation, you’re not really bringing much progress to the music. I don’t think you’re really keeping it alive, you’re just painting a nice picture of it. It is important to keep developing the music.”

A good example of this is “On a Day Like Today,” a tune that starts out with a finger-plucked intro and a low, guttural lyric about surrender–basic blues stuff. Two minutes later, the drums kick in, the horns and Hammond B-3 organ are blaring, and Strifler works over his guitar like an amphetamine-addled extra from Derek and the Dominoes’ Layla sessions. Even hard-line traditionalists would admit that it kicks at least a little bit of ass.

Strifler, now 44 and a permanent resident of the United States, spent his childhood in Heidelberg, Germany. He didn’t start playing music until he sold his motorcycle and bought a guitar at the age of 17, after he and two friends, Claus and Stefan, discovered that being in a band led to girls. They played a lot of rock and roll (“UFO, Scorpions, the Sex Pistols, whatever was happening”) until an American ex-G.I. who married a German woman hired them as a backup band for American blues songs.

“He introduced us to that particular style,” Strifler recalls, “and it immediately stuck.”

When he turned 22, Strifler moved across the Atlantic, leaving his friends behind–and for the last two decades he’s continued to play with them almost every year, airfare be damned. “There just was that connection that’s really hard to find,” he says of his transcontinental allegiance. “I had a really hard time finding the same thing here, that same connection.”

Strifler breaks into a smile; his food arrives. “This is their idea of a salad,” he asides, motioning to his plate of iceberg lettuce tossed with fried potatoes and blanketed with strips of steak. He digs in and keeps talking.

“I really, really wanted to have a band here that would play the music,” he stresses. “It took me a while to decide on who to ask, and I got lucky–everybody I asked said yes.” It doesn’t hurt that Strifler, who has long been a member of the Ford Blues Band, supporting brothers Robben, Pat and Mark Ford onstage and in the studio. He had more than a few friends to ask.

And indeed, with contributions from his old childhood pals Claus and Stefan, the band for The Dance Goes On is top-notch. Strifler’s first-round draft picks include drummer Gary Silva (on loan from Charlie Musselwhite), David Shrader and Carl Bowers on horn, local veteran Don Bassey on bass, and Chip Roland (whom Strifler calls “the heart and soul of things”) on organ and piano.

Witness the album’s title track, where a single-chord ambience supports Strifler’s spectral snapshot of a preacher’s counsel, a devil’s temptation and a flattened lizard in the hot sun. As to its film noir shadings, Strifler nods. “I love that style of filmmaking, and I love that style of music. Anything from the ’60s junky jazz to the new Tom Waits stuff.”

Threaded throughout the rollicking blues tumble of “Angel,” the Willie Dixon-penned “Evil”–for which Strifler wrote an updated lyric about Iraq–and the Kenny Burrell-flavored soul-jazz instrumental “Shuffelupagus” is a passionate drive, peppered with stunning technique. “I don’t want to limit myself to just constructing blues songs or trying to stay within that idiom,” Strifler says, “and I don’t have a set plan.”

“It’s more like, I have an idea, and I try to go with it,” he adds. “I try not to let myself be limited by, ‘Oh, I can’t do this, because that’s not the way B. B. would have done it.’ I just let it go, and hopefully good things come out.”

The Volker Strifler Band perform on Saturday, Feb. 10, at the Last Day Saloon. 120 Fifth St, Santa Rosa. 10pm. $8-$10. 707.545.2343.