Upon tallying how many decades he’s worked as a professional guitar slinger, Telecaster master Bill Kirchen quips, “Well, they don’t make 50 years like they used to.”
They don’t often make careers like his, either. From performing with his Who Knows Pickers jug band in Ann Arbor High School’s senior talent show (also on the program: the future Iggy Pop), to birthing the Americana genre with the original “hippie country band,” Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, this affable Austinite has been everywhere, man, flying alongside some of the planet’s coolest cats — including the Jesus of Cool, Nick Lowe, and Lowe’s old protégé, Elvis Costello. Kirchen has toured the world with Lowe, who produced an album by Kirchen’s post-Airmen band, the Moonlighters, and Costello recruited Kirchen for high-profile gigs like the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival — and even named his festival band after Kirchen’s Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods album.
Lowe appears on that 2006 album, and its 2010 follow-up, Word to the Wise, along with Costello, Maria Muldaur, Dan Hicks and other luminaries. And now those albums, plus Kirchen’s third Proper American release, 2013’s Seeds and Stems, are being combined as a two-CD retrospective titled The Proper Years. The package, on U.K. label The Last Music Co., arrives July 24th. Waxworks, a vinyl best-of version, also releases July 24th.
A well-balanced mix of engaging originals and wonderfully rendered covers, The Proper Years admirably conveys Kirchen’s versatility as a player and singer — one of the first to mash up rockabilly, country, Western swing, honky-tonk, jump blues, jazz, boogie-woogie and even the “psychedelic folk rock” he played with the Seventh Seal, the band he formed while attending the University of Michigan. (MC5 manager/activist John Sinclair got them a deal on the ESP-Disk label, home of Sun Ra, but the band turned it down.) Somewhere between steering Commander Cody’s “Hot Rod Lincoln” into a top-10 hit and scoring a Grammy nomination for Best Country Instrumental Performance, Kirchen dubbed his sound “dieselbilly,” wrapping his fondness for country’s truck-driving song subgenre (as in big rigs, not pickups), its intersection with the Bakersfield Sound, and his own name into one memorable moniker.
Along with the exciting news of Kirchen’s new album, Glide is premiering the new track “Shelly’s Winter Love,” which features guest appearances from two legendary British singer-songwriters, Nick Lowe and Paul Carrack. Together, these three artists take on Merle Haggard’s 1971 ballad with sweeping harmonies reminiscent of the Everly Brothers. Twangy guitar, softly strummed acoustic guitar, and piano coming together to complement the crooning bring to mind country music titans like George Jones while also staying faithful to Haggard’s original. This is a beautiful honky tonk song, but Kirchen, Lowe and Carrack manage to inject it with a touch of their pop shared pop sensibility. In true Bill Kirchen fashion, he also manages to sneak a twangified blues-surf guitar solo smack dab in the middle of the song as a gentle reminder that, while this may be a Haggard tune, it has that unmistakeable Kirchen stamp.
Kirchen shares the story behind how the song and collaboration came to be:
“I met Nick Lowe briefly at London’s Dingwalls Club in the early 70s when he was in Brinsley Schwartz. We reconnected when Austin de Lone snagged him to produce our second Moonlighters album, which was released on his esteemed manager Jake Riviera’s Demon Records imprint. Not only a soulful singer, songwriter, bass and guitar player, Nick is a formidable and fascinating theoretician concerning all matters musical. I’ve played on three of his albums and toured the world with him as his guitarist. That is one of the few jobs on this planet I find as enjoyable as my usual gig, travelling and playing with my own crew. We re-assembled his 1993-4 recording and touring band The Impossible Birds (Nick, Robert Treherne, Geraint Watkins, Paul Riley and myself) plus Austin de Lone for my previous Proper album – Hammer Of The Honky-Tonk Gods. Nick and Paul (Carrack) tell me they had Merle Haggard’s Shelly’s Winter Love by the Osbourne Brothers on a tape while touring the USA and would sing it together on the bus. Why reinvent the wheel, I thought? I just let ‘em at it and tried not to get in the way.
I met Paul Carrack through Nick Lowe and consider him one of the finest singers I have ever heard. I played with him when either he or I sat in with the other. He’s sung on more hits with more bands than anyone I can think of, from How Long with Ace, through Tempted with Squeeze and The Living Years with Mike and The Mechanics. Nick and Paul were a deadly combination as the alternated fronting Nick Lowe’s Cowboy Outfit.
This reading of Shelly’s Winter Love may be the only time someone has sung a Haggard tune where I liked the vocal better than the original. Paul could sing these liner notes and they’d no doubt rocket up the charts.”
LISTEN:
The Proper Years is out on July 24th.
