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Bill Kirchen performs "Rockabilly Funeral"

ARTVOICE: Hi Bill, how’s it going?

BILL KIRCHEN: Oh, I’m drivin’ along the beautiful eastern shore of Virginia…between the Chesapeake and the shore of the Atlantic Ocean right now.

AV: Well, you don’t live down there anymore, do you?

BK: No, I live in Texas, but I get back a whole lot. I just gotta check on something…there’s something bizarre going on here…is there something on fire? I’m going through a construction zone and there’s a big cloud of shit…never mind, I’m back. Fuck it. So I hear you’re gonna be able to write something up for the paper.

AV: Yeah, but I wasn’t quite sure what to talk about.

BK: I’m not quite sure either…my CD will not be out when I get there so I don’t know whether it’s stupid to talk about it, you know what I’m saying? It won’t be out until September 12. I’ll be in Buffalo a whole month in advance, so I’m kinda caught flat-footed. Usually, I have no trouble ravin’ on about all manner of bullshit.

I’ve been recording in England, I guess, for an album that’s coming out in early September…you can say that. I did some of the recording in Austin. I got some Austin players, Cindy Cashdollar to play some steel on it and fiddle player Danny Levin. He’s got a jingle house called Tequila Mockingbird and he used to be in Asleep at the Wheel many, many years ago. But the record I made has all the same guys I knew touring with Nick Lowe about 12 years ago. Nick plays bass on it, and the guy who played bass on the tour produced it…his name is Paul “Bassman” Riley and he used to be in the original Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers years ago, you know, with Pete Thomas [of Elvis Costello & the Attractions]. I’ve known these guys a long time.

AV: Is it new material?

BK: Yeah. A couple oldies, but I wrote a bunch of it. I brought in a couple of my buds. A couple covers. It’s about the Telecaster. It’s a good record, man.

AV: Have you been able to hit the road as hard as you were able to out of DC?

BK: Well, yeah, but it’s kind of a slightly different mix when you fly in…I’ve been flying in for weekends. One thing I haven’t done so much lately—although I will when the record comes out—I haven’t found it desirable or necessary to go out for three, four weeks on the road anymore. With gas prices and whatnot, it’s better to get good weekend gigs and go out three-, four-day shots and go home.

AV: You know, the younger bands don’t know any better, but the cost of gas must really put a dent in things when you’re bouncing around in a van.

BK: Man, yeah. Well right when you called me I almost told you to call me back because I wanted to go look at this Fed-Ex truck. You know what they use in Europe are those Mercedes Sprinter vans. And if I’m not mistaken they get 30 miles per gallon. And in my Ford one-ton that I toured heavily in—that got 10 miles to the gallon. So if you’re gonna do a thousand miles a week, if you do the math at three bucks a gallon—if you’re really getting 30 miles per gallon—that’s a savings of $200 a week. So that’s a van payment right there. That’s enough to pay for a van and buy your cappuccino every day. Unbelievable.

AV: When you come up here will it be with Too Much Fun? What’s the lineup?

BK: It is Too Much Fun and it’ll be the original drummer Dave Elliott from the Tombstone Every Mile record. He played with Danny Gatton for many years. And the bass player is Claude Arthur.

AV: What else have you been busy with? Are you doing any seminars, any teaching?

BK: Man, it’s just been making this record. Spent a lot of time in England. I haven’t really been doing much teaching and I kind of miss it. I’ve just been strictly playing and I’m not complainingI consider myself screamingly lucky that I still can do it. that I’m allowed to do it. You know, with the ebb and flow of commercial music, that they still let me do it. And that I can support the family doing it, it’s just a wonderful thing.

AV: That is a wonderful thing. What’s the size of your family?

BK: I have a daughter. She’s 21 so she’s gettin’ out on her own, so that’s a little easier…you know, as near as I can tell from what I’ve heard, a common deathbed complaint is not “I wish I’d spent more time away from home making money and less time with my kid.”

AV: One of the big introductory points for people regarding your music is the Commander Cody stuff. Do you have any comments on all of that?

BK: Funny enough I was just listening to some of the live album from the Armadillo [World Headquarters] because some people asked me would I do one of the songs off it that I used to sing, and I’d forgotten some of the order of the words. So I was listening to it, relearning it, and I was able to hear things that I had taken for granted or missed back then. And I was struck by how cool it sounded, really. Without tooting my own horn, it was a good band…

AV: I think it was unique for the time.

BK: It really was. And I think it had an important place…I mean, that’s for other people to say, but in my mind it had its own territory in the world of roots music or country music or whatever you wanna call it. And I think we were fairly unique in our stance—you know we weren’t a kind of LA, Byrds-influenced country. We were who we were, you know? And I kinda liked it more, really. I still like what we did a little bit more than that LA country—which was pretty good.

AV: I gotta hit you with a sort of philosophical question if you don’t mind.

BK: Please do.

AV: Which came first, the heartache or the sad song?

BK: [Laughs.] You know the backstory on that song? It’s from the book and then of course the movie High Fidelity. This guy’s sitting around in anguish ruminating on that question: “Which came first, the heartache or the sad song?” I’d just read the book and really liked it and I like that author, and it was a cool book. So I go into the studio and I cut a cover of the song “The Key’s in the Mailbox”—I believe Harlan Howard wrote it but I think Buck Owens had the hit with it, you know, the country shuffle: (sings) “The key is in the mailbox, come on in/Sittin’ here wishin’ I had your love again/I’ll never even ask you where you been…” The pre-AIDS era, you know?

But at any rate I had cut that song and got home and my wife goes, “Oh, by the way, you messed up the chords on that.” And I went, “No, I didn’t.” And I pick it up and sure enough I’d played the wrong chords. By this time I had a basic track, not only with the whole rhythm section but I had Buddy Charleton who’d put down some great pedal steel parts. So I decided there was nothing for us but to take those chord changes and write a new song to those chord changes which were just like those to “The Key’s in the Mailbox” except for one chord that I held too long or didn’t hold long enough or something. And then I had to go find the poetic feet of the song. So we got “The songs that fill the honky tonks tend toward the hurtin’ kind/and a man can stand it better when a jukebox does the cryin’/The records play and who’s to say the line is growin’ thin/where the sad songs end and the heartaches begin.” It’s a different melody, but it’s got almost the same number of syllables, so the pedal steel fills would come out the same. And you, as a songwriter, can appreciate this. It was an interesting example of writing a song basically on demand. It was sort of like doing a sudoku puzzle or a crossword puzzle or something.

AV: I think there have been studies done where psychologists try to link depression to sad country songs.

BK: Interestingly enough, I’ve always really liked really sad songs. And I’ve never felt they’ve increased any melancholy or depression that I might…but I don’t tend to suffer from that anyway. But I love sad songs, the sadder the better. And I also like songs that have a sort of a morbid twist…I don’t mind things like Phantom 409.

AV: Or like “Womb to the Tomb”?

BK: “Womb to the Tomb,” exactly. That’s my nod to that whole thing. Also one of my all-time favorite songs is “The Cold Hard Facts of Life.”

AV: I don’t think I know that one.

BK: Oh! Buck, hang up on me and go get it! Porter Wagoner…Bill Anderson wrote it. It’s unbelievable! It’s a taut little tale. Two verses, two choruses and it’s over. Go listen to it and tell me if you don’t think it’s a wonderful song. “Cold Hard Facts of Life.” And you gotta get Porter Wagoner doing it—accept no substitutes. You gotta have that sweat beading up on his forehead type of thing—you gotta be talkin’ Porter.

AV: And the suit and everything?

BK: And the suit, yeah, you need Porter for this. You don’t want to entrust it to a lesser mortal.