Diesel Bill

Kirchen keeps on truckin'

by David Ritchie

Bill Kirchen loves the road. As a teenager, he twice hitchhiked from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Newport Folk Festival, where he heard Bob Dylan debut Mr. Tambourine Man, then go electric with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. There he took in the blues of Son House, Skip James, and Lightnin' Hopkins, the African-American gospel and work songs of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, and the bluegrass of the Stanley Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs. He traveled the country throughout the '70s as lead guitarist for Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, and now he fronts his own band, Bill Kirchen and Too Much Fun, with whom he continues his deep appreciation for American roots music: rock and roll, honky-tonk country, blues, hillbilly boogie, and rockabilly.

"You've gotta travel, and either you figure out how to do it and have fun, or you just better get out of there."

Kirchen, who appears this weekend at the Lowell Folk Festival, helped form Commander Cody in 1967 in Ann Arbor with a group of guys who shared a love for old country music and early rock and roll. They took their name from a 1955 Saturday-morning show called Commando Cody, Sky Marshall of the Universe but never considered fans would want to know which band member was Cody. The piano player, George Frayne, was elected, not so much because he was the band leader but the "dad figure." Kirchen doesn't remember being in the running, but he's glad he didn't have to be the Commander. "I do enough of that stuff without having the name, too; and at least I have the freedom to wander off and do other things, too. But on the other hand, I love the stuff we did . . . more and more I find some of the stuff I stumbled onto in my late teens and early twenties is the very stuff I love today."

Early Commander Cody hits included "Truck Drivin' Man" and "Mama Hated Diesels," a song cowritten and sung by Kirchen. In his solo work, he's returned to that theme time and again. "People ask me, 'Do you like trucks?' No, not really, and I don't really aspire to be a truck driver or hang around truck stops . . . it's the road thing, I think, is what I like about it."

The first big hit for the Cody band was "Hot Rod Lincoln," a song Frayne lifted from a Johnny Bond record, originally written and recorded in the early '50s by Charlie Ryan. Their 1972 version was fueled in part by Kirchen's Telecaster leads, and he's revived the song a quarter century later as the title track for his newest CD, Hot Rod Lincoln Live! (Hightone Records). It's always a huge crowd pleaser, because he's obviously having so much fun with the cadenza that he's continually refashioning for the song's finale: "It started out with me playing a little Luther Perkins lick in the middle, and one thing led to another . . . by now we're quoting between 20 and 50 different guitar players in the middle, just with little snippets of guitar hooks you'd recognize. . . . It usually starts with '50s guitar players and gets through the Sex Pistols."

Kirchen calls his music "dieselbilly." Coining your own descriptive term has some advantages: no one else claims to be the King of Dieselbilly, so Kirchen avoids the limitations and unwanted connotations that other labels tend to have. For instance, country music as Kirchen plays it has little to do with the country music you hear on the radio and at line dances -- Kirchen considers that more suburban dance party music. "It doesn't seem to me as focused on the soulful songwriting and adult themes. . . . I don't mind it, it just doesn't really speak to me. But that's all right too. Things change."

His mastery on the Telecaster and the solid rhythm of bassist Johnny Castle and drummer Jack O'Dell have brought Bill Kirchen and Too Much Fun attention in his adopted hometown, Washington, DC, which bestowed 10 Washington Area Music Awards (Wammies), including 1996 Musician and Songwriter of the Year. Then the May 1998 issue of Guitar Player deified Kirchen as a "Titan of the Tele" along with such luminaries as Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan.

Kirchen's talents have been sought out by Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Link Wray, Gene Vincent, and Don Walser, to name a few. "Now I'm frontin' the show myself. Three great guys, three great chords -- that's our motto. I've got no one to blame but myself if anything goes wrong these days."