Over the nearly three decades I’ve known Steve Kimock, I don’t think he’s ever really wanted to do anything other than play his guitar well. He has always preferred to – or, more accurately, had to – follow his muse, letting the chips fall where they may commercially. Nevertheless, with the increasing national exposure he has received by way of his appearances with acts such as The Other Ones (former Grateful Dead members), members of Phish, Bruce Hornsby, and String Cheese Incident, to name a few, it seems that wider recognition of his special genius may be finding him after all. This winter sees him in the midst of an aggressive national tour that hits all the old haunts but also reaches deeply into new territory; making plans for several studio projects; and collaborating with a fresh and musically monstrous lineup. As always, he seems as deeply absorbed in the pure pleasure of the guitar as an end in itself, but he also seems to be enjoying the heck out of all that has recently arisen in his life, and appears genuinely excited about the future.
After opening his 2003 tour confronting the blizzards of New England, the leader of the Steve Kimock Band (SKB) advanced his way south along the busy interstate to the sunnier climes of North Carolina. In the late afternoon of March 4, Steve arrived in Raleigh to prepare for his first appearance in the area at a lovely old place called the Lincoln Theatre. Earlier that day, I had accompanied Steve to a “meet and greet” session at Temple Ball Studios in the neighboring town of Carrboro. Near the start of the session, Steve seemed dismayed that the room we were in was rather dark and cool compared to what was happening outside. After wandering around for a few minutes, he looked over at me and whispered, “pssst!” and beckoned toward a side door he had discovered. The door opened to the studio’s loading dock, which, to his great delight, he found was bathed in the warm Carolina sun. We grabbed our instruments (my Hawaiian steel, Steve’s baritone ukelele) and a couple of chairs and sneaked outside unseen and began to play. Within minutes, of course, the crowd found him, and we ended up performing a short acoustic set – a few little bluegrass tunes and one very long eastern-inspired improvisation over a droning pedal tone.
Afterward, as we waded back through the rush hour traffic to Raleigh, Steve, ever the teacher, pulled out his baritone ukelele and began demonstrating and explaining various east Indian rhythmic patterns he had been working on. Many measures of 9 and 16 beats later, we found our way to the venue where the band had gathered for a long soundcheck. With soundcheck at last complete, Steve vainly attempted to write up a setlist for the evening while we sat on the sofa in the “green room” and chatted about what’s been happening in his eventful life these days. Below is a transcription of that conversation between me and Steve.
MB: Welcome to my adopted home, North Carolina.
SK: It’s a beautiful place.
Isn’t it though?
It is.
It’s so good to see you!
It’s great to see you! And it was fun to play! Man, we were doing the dronality. We had the tonality of the drone. The dronality. [Laughs.]
Well, it was a great idea. I should have known you’d find a place in the sun.
Well, I needed it, man, I’ve been freezing my butt off for months now.
Actually, that’s a good segue into my first question
Freezing my butt off? The “Freeze Your Ass Off Tour.” (Laughs)
Yeah, freezing your butt off. Tell me about this tour. I understand this started in the in the worst of climatic conditions.
Yeah, we figured it was January or February, so we went to Winooski, Vermont to play a gig. I guess we did a couple of things long the way, but we ended up driving back through the worst blizzard in ten years. I drove all the way back through that giant blizzard thing, it was going north and I was going south. And I fought it the entire way, and turned a 5 1/2-hour drive into an 11-hour drive. But it was really, ah, it was focusing.
Auspicious beginning.
Auspicious focusing.
So this is probably the first remotely warm weather show you’ve done.
This is the warmest weather gig I’ve done in months and months and months. So it’s kind of nice.
Well, tell me a little bit about the tour, in my memory, this is probably the heaviest schedule I’ve seen you take on, really, since as long as I can remember. Maybe there was one period with Zero?
No, I think this is pretty much hitting it. We’re hitting it.
About how long is this tour going to go on at this rate of shows?
I don’t know, man, it’s going to be a while, 4 to 5 weeks, anyway.
Seems like you keep adding shows.
It goes bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. That’s okay. I think everybody knows going in it’s sort of hanging at the ragged edge of the burn-out factor to do it this way, but I think it’s good. I think we do need to go out and do some concentrated work, to get ready to do some recording, and to get the material really sorted out, because, any tune left standing after this run is going to have to be a winner. [Laughs.]
In terms of looking ahead to recordings, earlier today you mentioned something about doing some work in the studio. What’s that looking like?
Because I finally have a house, and a place where I can play music, I can figure out a way to record there. At this point, if you’ve got a computer, you can record. You kind of need a room. I’ve got a room. I’ve got a computer, I’ve got a band, I’ve got some music. It seems like as I work the bugs out I should be able to be producing viable, if not commercially competitive product in the privacy of my own home. So, that’s what I’m trying to do. And I’ll probably start small by doing some solo acoustic stuff, and just gradually build it up from there. Probably the next thing that will happen will be an acoustic thing. I hope it is. Probably exactly what we were doing today. That’s going to be on a record.
I think that would be a winner.
I think so, too.
Now you’ll have your full armory of guitars finally…it’s been a long time…you’ve had a lot of stuff in storage.
Yeah, stuff gets spread out here and there, it’s just nice to be able to get to it all. So now, when I get home, I’ve got my amps, I’ve got my guitars, I have a room and I play, and I’m so happy. So, it’s fun.
Any new acquisitions? We were talking earlier about the deadly disease of Guitar Acquisition Syndrome earlier.
Oh, no, man, the House Acquisition Syndrome has completely erased the guitar acquisition syndrome. There’s no hope. I tried to acquire a guitar jus the other day, but I was unsuccessful.
Oh. Really, what was it?
I was trying to get a little Martin acoustic, but it didn’t happen. Another time.
Well, you do have a couple connections with Martin folks. (Steve went to high school with Dick Boak, an extraordinary luthier and graphics artist, and one of the creative geniuses at Martin Guitars.)
Yeah, I do. But it’s just gotta be the right thing, I certainly have enough instruments.
I’ve heard it said you never really have enough, but…
No, I’ve got the stuff I wanted, you know. I’ve got a Strat I like, I’ve got a Telecaster I like. I got a couple of decent steels, you know, I’ve a nice acoustic. I’ve got an L-7, a Gibson L-7 that’s fun to play. I love playing my Vega acoustic. I’ve got my baritone Ukulele – I like that a lot. I’ve got my square-neck Regal – I like that a lot. And then there’s miscellaneous electric guitars that have been collected over the years, both the Explorers, and a couple of different things. But it’s not a ton of guitars. There’s maybe a dozen really fine instruments I couldn’t pass up because they specifically pointed my playing in a certain direction. And then there’s a pile of stuff that kind of half-works, and then there’s some parts. There’s probably 20-something all together. It’s not like some guys’ collections, it’s just the stuff I’ve gathered along the way that was too good to let go.
A little while ago, you came out with a couple of tunes where you pulled out an octave mandolin.
Yeah.
What can you tell us about that? Is this from the American tradition of mandolins, or [something else]?
I have no idea. [Shrugs and laughs.] It’s a Trinity College Octave Mandolin. I think that’s what it is. I believe you can spot them in Lark of the Morning catalogue. They’ve got all kinds of cool stuff. You ever go to Lark in the Morning?
No!
You never, did!? Oh, man, they’ve got a website! Go to lark-in-the-morning. They’ve got everything – every kind of drum, every kind of stringed instrument, every kind of harp, oud, from all over the world. All kinds of cool stuff. And, it’s relatively affordable, although maybe not of the highest quality custom-made-instrument quality, but the shit’s great. That particular instrument [the octave mandolin] was a gift to me from Henry Kaiser, and I believe it was a gift to him from David Lindley. I don’t think anybody could figure out how to keep the thing on their lap. It’s shaped like a friggin’ teardrop! It slides right off [lets an imaginary mandolin slide off of his lap]! “Here, you play this!” “Okay.” [Laughs.]
So, it’s double-course [strings in close pairs], like a mandolin, you know, 4 double courses?
Yeah.
Do you use any particular tunings? Is it like the top of a guitar kind of thing, or are you doing fifths?
It’s like the top of the guitar sometimes, sometimes I tune it modally, you know, DGAD, or something analogous to that. I like playing it just around the house tuned in fifths, but I’m not keen enough with that tuning to just hop on stage and voice-lead along with the band. It’s so backwards, that fifths thing, but it’s beautiful, beautiful sounding.
In terms of new gear, I know last time we talked on the phone you said something scary things, like the word Laney. We were talking about these big English valve amps. Why do you find them so interesting?
I’ve got amps that I like to play at home that aren’t anything like the amp that I play live, I usually play a Dumble or a Two-Rock, something along those lines, 2 6L6’s and generally a little biased towards the clean sound, that kind of thing. But I’ve got some amps at home, I have a Marshall, a 50-watt Marshall I love, and a 100-watt Laney, which just stops time. It’s so good! I’ve played some plexi-Marshalls, the Laney just kills every plexi-Marshall I’ve ever played. Once you turn it up, you can turn it up and set it anywhere. You can turn anything. You can turn everything off and turn the presence up and it still sounds good. It’s bizarre. It’s a bizarre amplifier. It really sounds good!
Now, who was Laney associated with? What bands used them?
Black Sabbath!
Oh, that was the Black Sabbath amp!
Yeah, I think they saw some use in Jethro Tull at some point, too.
Martin Barre…
But there were a bunch of those bands, Jethro Tull and the Who, and Black Sabbath, Of course I was a huge Black Sabbath fan when I was a kid. I love that sound, so it’s neat to have the Laney. So I’ve got the Laney, and a Marshall and A Hi-Watt to basically cover my childhood Jones for the screaming electric guitar sound. I just can’t bring myself to do it on stage, it’s too juvenile. [Laughs.] You know, it’s not like the stuff that I’m doing is so freaking sophisticated in the first place, but I could just go right back to…[pauses]
Standing in front of the cabinet and making your pant’s legs rattle [Laughs.]
Yeah, standing in front of a Marshall with a wah-wah and some humbuckers!
I remember that! I kept that old 8 X 10 Marshall cabinet [of yours] for a while.
I had one just up until a little while ago, it really looked good and it sounded really nice when you played it really quietly, but when you turned it up it turned into a giant rectangular kazoo.
But that was desirable when I was a kid!
Yeah, it was neat when I was a kid but it crossed over from basically just playing music into full-on speaker distortion-edge-yowl-cone-cry whatever they call it. Just all at once, very abruptly transitioned from the clean sound to full crapola. I know people still use them. Carlos uses one, I know Stevie Ray Vaughn used one. I don’t know what the hell they use them for.
So you think for now though, at least with the current situation, you’ll stay with your current rig that you are using on stage now? You’ve got the Two Rocks and the Dumbles.
I’m trying to change it. I’m trying to get something that’s a little easier to deal with. I mean, the philosophy for the whole thing has changed quite a bit, really. While the gear hasn’t changed much, the philosophy of its use has. I’m trying to have like my default mode on the thing, where it sorta sounds best. What I go back to to sound good, to be the lower dynamic, the clean pretty stuff. For a while – so I could get it to work – it was always over the top. To always work, it was over the top, but it worked. So now, I like the way it sounds, maybe it gets lost in the mix or something, but somebody must have a microphone somewhere they can turn up if they need to.
Well, everything is digital now, you can always fix it. [Laughs.]
I wish! I wish I were so digitally easily fixable!
Okay, just going back to the tour for a minute, you’ve had the recent move back to Pennsylvania, and you’ve got your Big Red Barn.
I’ve got my Big Red Barn.
So how are you coming along with “studio-izing” the Big Red Barn?
There’s a room in it that’s finished. You know, I looked at my tiny stash of money, and my giant stash of space, and chopped off a corner and said “this is where I’m starting. Starting in this corner.” I have a room sufficient to rehearse the band in, and keep some gear, and stick a couch, and a TV. Sit down and relax. There’s a bookshelf, it’s good.
You mentioned earlier – and I was surprised to hear this – that it’s really been difficult to rehearse the band until you got this place.
Yeah, it was impossible. Guys all over the country and basically you’ve got to go to New York, because half the band’s in NewYork. So, you gotta fly people in, get hotels, get rent-a-cars, you gotta rent studio space, you put your guitar in your bag on your back and you grab your pile of pedals, and take the elevator up to the eleventeeth floor, plug into some rented gear and you’re on the clock. So you drink your coffee and you practice real quick, whatever you’re gonna do, and get the hell out, and, that’s not it. That doesn’t work. Well, it works a little bit. But that’s not pre-production.
Well, it’s been pretty good, but this really is a whole new era in terms of getting to prepare more, thinking some things through more, isn’t it?
Well just for me, so I can play my guitar, and hear what I’m doing, and make my adjustments, so I’m doing my best with what I’ve got. It’s hard enough doing it anyway. Imagine doing it with your stuff all spread out, staying at somebody’s house, sitting in some hotel room. It’s difficult. A lot of the current sonic direction that I’ve taken came out of spending a week in the barn playing with my gear, going “What do I need? What do I need? What do I need? What do I got? What sounds good?” Then I finally assembled a little pile that really sounded neat doing something. It wasn’t the big rock and roll thing, but, man it was sounding good. So I said, “that’s it, let’s go!”
Along with the place, you have a new bassist touring with you this time around.
Arne “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”
And it is “ArnEE?” There was some confusion about whether this is some exotic name that should be pronounced Arneh, or Orn? I’ve heard all sorts of questions about this.
It might be Ernie, for all I know. [Laughs.] I keep saying ArnEE and nobody has corrected me yet, so…
So it’s probably okay, or he’s just used to people mispronouncing it.
I’ll ask him.
Tell us a little bit about Arne, in terms of his contribution to the band. Has he had much opportunity in terms of rehearsal yet?
We’re still on a fairly steep learning curve in terms of putting existing stuff together. I think that the greater creative contributions are going to come, when we’ve, you know, taken the current book [the current songlist] to exhaustion, and then we’ll start seeing who has ideas on how we take those parts of it that work, a specific dynamic or something, you know. You’ve got something that’s fast and loud and in a major key, and you’re tired of playing it. You need to replace it, but you don’t replace it with a minor jazz waltz. You still need something that serves that purpose energetically in the set. I think along the way here, things will start metamorphosing into other things.
It occurred to me, as I was looking at your setlists, how challenging it would be to step into something like this [referring to the band’s material]. Some of the subtle aspects, the funny time signatures – not everybody can just walk in and count to 13 regularly – it’s not a skill that’s that widespread out there.
It’s not the counting to 13 that’s the hard part, it’s the going from 4/4 to 7/8. You are going along, and it’s like, I’ve gotta your going, 1…2…3…4 and then you have to go 1234567 [counts very quickly]! There’s lots of bands that play in odd time signatures, but it’s more like dropping a beat or adding a beat – but some of these [SKB’s] compositions that go over the bar lines, with these odd meters and figures, you gotta play them a lot before they are internalized.
They [other bands] often sound like they are in odd meters, it’s like they’re saying, “Hey, let’s play in an odd meter. Let’s do something clever.” I think the one aspect about the material you are doing right now is that it isn’t immediately obvious that you’re playing in an unusual meter, but then I’ll start counting the measures, and think, “oh, yeah, this is in 9.” Or, like you said, a slower 4/4 and all of the sudden you are counting quickly to 7.
Yeah, for 2 bars, yeah, that hurts. That hurts my head. [Laughs.]
So Arne is hanging in there.
He’s actually doing a great job, and I really think that just his basic approach to the sound of the thing and his musicianship is a step in the right direction for the overall sound of the band. He’s a big warm player. He’s a big warm guy.
We never finished talking about your projects. You have Arne, and the studio, and some time and space now. So, when this tour is through, you talked about maybe doing an acoustic recording. What about upcoming releases for the entire band?
That’s just going to have to co shortly after. The first stuff, I think it just makes sense to get the recording going in house, to not try anything too ambitious at first, that’s all. We’ll get there. We’ll bite off more than we can chew sooner than we think. I’m convinced of that! “Wheeee, here we go! Oh, no!” [Laughs]
Any side projects going on? I know you have this long-lived love of (ooooh, that was good alliteration!)
Nice!
But I know you have this love of kind of rootsier blues stuff, sort of straight ahead…
You know, at some point, I’ll get there. At some point, I’ll get there. Because, it’s like I said, with having the Laney in the house, I really want to play some of that music, and it’s not really what I normally do. I think most of my audience would be horrified if I just came out slamming through a bunch of blues-rock tunes – suddenly like Molly Hatchet or something like that. There’s guys that do that shit and make it happen all the time, like Warren Haynes, plays the great big rock tone all the time, and makes it work. And I like it too, but not enough to try and make a living doing it. But I do want to make a nice electric blues record. That first Johnny Winter – the Progressive Blues Experiment. I love that, that’s so good. I’d love to do something like that some day.
Speaking of influences, I somehow ended up doing this long piece on your early days…
Ouch!
…when I knew you all too well. [Laughs.]
[Laughter]
Obviously when you get a bit of notoriety, people start speculating who you might have listened to, and this has probably been discussed a number of times, but I do remember you mentioning the Johnny Winter. I also remember guys like Buchanon in particular being real important.
I love Roy Buchanon. His stuff is just so good.
You had a little brush with greatness with him, didn’t you? Years and years ago. Didn’t you lend him your Vibrolux?
No, I didn’t lend him my Vibrolux. There was a very near brush with greatness where I woke up, my sister shaking me, I’m passed out on the couch with some giant hangover after being up on the mountain drinking all night, I’m coming out of that…
Now you’re like, what 17?
Yeah, some alcoholic haze, my little sister going, [in high-pitched voice] “Roy Buchanon called you, Roy Buchanon called you. He wants your amp.” I’m, like, “Whuh? Whuh? Oh, no!” It was so stupid. But he came to town and he didn’t have an amp. He was playing down there at the Roxy [in Northampton, PA]. I guess he was just going to get a Twin or something, and they probably took him some silverfront master-volume Twin with 2 EV’s, you know those old EV’s, or some horrible thing like that, and he played one note and said, “Anybody in town got a Vibrolux?” And they musta went, “Kimock’s got one.” And they couldn’t find me because I was out getting fucked up like an idiot.
That’s right, you had an old blackface [Fender Vibrolux].
Yes, I did.
Whatever happened to that amp?
Sold. To pay the rent. Long, long time ago.
Okay. Buchanon. And we talked about Winter. Obviously, in all the years that have come and gone since then, you’ve listened to a wide variety of things, and I know you’ve had a particular love of East Indian music, of Hindustani and Carnatic music.
Yep.
You mentioned somebody that you were listening to recently, and played me a little recording. It was somebody playing a Stratocaster and it was Carnatic, and I was very perplexed listening to it.
I wish I’d brought that with me.
Listening to Srinivas on the mandolin is as far as I’ve got [with carnatic music].
Well, there’s just a hundred of those guys. There’s a thousand of them, and they are just tearing it up on all the western instruments. The sounds, the technique, the approach, it’s just to die for. It’s so good and it’s completely off the screen here in the States, the cultural cesspool of the earth, the United Sates, a commercial bunch of bullshit everywhere you go. Sorry, started to get political there, that could be a very long conversation
We don’t want to go there [Laughs]. So, when you listen to these folks, is it sort of an inspirational thing, do you try to cop licks, see if it fits at all?
Now there’s a huge point with me! When I like music, when I enjoy it, I just enjoy it. The couple of times I took music I enjoyed and tried to learn it, it ruined it for me. I was like, that sucks, I can’t do this, I hate this. I was just stealing my own joy, trying to take it when it’s right there. You just listen to it, and it’s speaking to your heart, and you are digging it. Just dig it! And just have it be part of your consciousness, and if it comes out later, great. Or if you decide you want to study it later, great, study it.
But don’t…I just don’t do that with music. I like the guitar, and I like studying the guitar, and I like learning things about music, and everything like that. When I can learn about them, but to just take somebody else’s thing, and go figure out how to do that and that will be my thing, I don’t think that’s the point. I think expression is the point. I think self-expression is the point and part of getting to the self-expression is allowing yourself to enjoy. So you can enjoy taking it in and enjoy putting it out, and you can do some homework on the side. But, for the most part, the stuff that I really, really, really, really, really like I really, really, really, really don’t play. And in the meantime I express myself on the instrument using the feeling I get from that sort of music as a point of reference for what feels good, but not micro-managed down to the note level. I don’t think you can improvise that way, anyway.
It’s almost like an absorption thing, isn’t it? I mean you get immersed in Hindustani music, and, I know for myself, a little trill or an ornament comes out [while playing later]. It isn’t really like the turn of the century when they had the “stage Irish.” They would come out and pretend to have Irish accents, and it would feel almost like that if I came out and said I was going to do [a Hindustani thing].
[Nods in agreement.] On the other hand, our music, and our hearing, and what we can take in is language-based. A lot. I think. I mean, you played with a guy, Ken Zuckerman, incredible sarod player, and an old roommate of Frank Goodman’s, by the way.
So that’s the connection there! I see. [Referring to an earlier conversation in which we discovered that we both knew Zuckerman from entirely independent contexts.]
He [Ken] was a student at Ali Akbar College when we got to California, and he would come and play, and hang around the house. And now Ken is the head of the Ali Akbar College in Switzerland. Fabulous sarod player. Could just play it really well. But you could listen, especially to the stuff he played earlier on, and you could tell that the guy spoke English. You could hear it, the phraseology. You can’t escape making phrases in your head that follow your linguistic thing. And then you listen to some of this other stuff, the Dagar Brothers or whatever they call them, the vocal music, you listen to the phrases or something, and you know this is coming from a different language. It’s a different language! The people, their brains are wired [differently], and they’ve got a cultural preconditioning for different kinds of cadences, different kinds of resolutions, different kinds of stuff, you know.
The meaning is different, too. The cultural context of music is different.
It’s totally different. Especially for cultures as different as Indian classical music and American pop. There’s not a lot of crossover. There is just very little design philosophy borrowed from the one and applied to the other. They are different forms, different art entirely. God bless George Harrison, bless his immortal soul, for bringing some of that to America by way of the Beatles and Ravi Shankar. Not like the Beatles didn’t trash a lot of decent American music along the way, because they did. But they also brought a lot of stuff. And I think the best they brought for me was, giving an association with Ravi Shankar’s music. And Ali Akbar Khan.
Well, listen, you’ve been struggling to write this set list.
Not really.
It continues to be blank.
They look just like this until I’m ready to go on. [Laughs.]
Any last thoughts about the tour? Things we haven’t covered that you might want to talk about? The context here is that this is kinda the “mid-tour interview.”
My last thought, my mid-thought and my last thought and my first thought is:
Our cultural preconditioning here in America – musically, artistically, and in terms of our society, everything like that. We’re so in it, it’s hard to see. I just urge everybody to check out the rest of the world. Check out the rest of the world’s music. And use that as a mirror, you know. See the world, and then see yourself. And then see America the way the rest of the world sees us. And let’s do something about it before it’s too late. Because there’s some dangerous madman out there with weapons of mass destruction, man, and it ain’t Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein, man, he’s a junkyard dog. W. is a frickin’ nuclear bomb. There’s no comparison in how dangerous they are. So please, people, get up off you butts and vote! Look around and wake up and smell the coffee!
Yeah, there’s more than us out there.
There’s a lot of beautiful stuff out there in the world that our tax dollars are threatening. So let’s do our best to make it a beautiful world. Wake up a little bit. That’s all.
Some fine thoughts.
How’s that? How’s that for a parting shot?
More information about Steve Kimock Band, including the current tour schedule and ticket information, can be found at kimock.com. Mike Babyak has been a student and friend of Steve Kimock since their late teens. He is a clinical psychologist on the faculty at Duke University Medical Center. Mike also plays in his own jazz and blues act,Triple Fret, in the Durham, NC area. Special thanks go to Arielle Phares and Charlie Miller for recording this interview, and to Chris Borne for doing the initial transcription.
Photos courtesy of Norman Sands.
