Out from behind the counter
The gorgeous art deco lobby of Burbank Water and Power is scarcely a spot one would expect to run into one of the legends of West Coast punk rock, but if you’ve ever gone in to pay a bill, chances are good you already have.
Longtime Burbank resident and BWP employee Chip Kinman, who, with his brother Tony, co-founded the Dils, one of the earliest, most notorious, influential and politically charged bands in California’s intense punk conflagration, can often be found working behind the marble counter.
Formed in 1976, the Dils’ brief, intense life span produced a handful of classic songs — “I Hate the Rich,” “Class War,” “You’re Not Blank” — but the perpetually creative, restless brothers broke it up in 1980 to form their equally influential country band Rank & File, which set the entire tone of today’s Americana movement.
Subsequent iterations included the wild, industrial noise of Blackbird and Western-themed Cowboy Nation, but neither sibling has been active in music since the turn of the century.
When Kinman debuts his new band with the enigmatic moniker Ford Madox Ford, at the Echo in Los Angeles on Sunday, Oct. 4, it will be the first time he has performed publicly in 12 years. “It was just time,” Kinman said. “I got married, raised a family, needed to increase my bottom line. So having done all of that, it was time. This is what I do, this I have always done since I was a young man.”
“We’ve been working on the band for a little over a year. I never stopped playing guitar, I’d play it around the house but for this I sort of took a cue from martial arts. The martial arts masters periodically will go back to do white-belt training, so I went to Guitar Center and bought a ‘How to Play Guitar’ book. Did the whole thing, I did every page, exactly what it said, and that was really fun to do: ‘Put your finger here.’”
Both Kinmans have a well established reputation for tending somewhat to prankster iconoclasm — legend holds that someone in the Dils camp actually set deejay Rodney Bingenheimer’s hair on fire at the Whisky a Go Go one night — so when asked directly what his new band’s style is, the answer at first sounded like a gag.
“It’s blues, yeah, the blues,” Kinman said. “I am not being facetious. I was not facetious about playing country music, or cowboy music or punk. Clearly, I don’t sing like Howlin’ Wolf, I am not from Chicago or Mississippi, but it is blues and it is my own take on it. Really my thought process was ‘What haven’t I done?’ And it’s not jammy trippy hippy or heavy drums and distortion blues. It is a new sound.”
Making new sounds has always been the Kinman prime directive, and the Dils got quite a bit of notice during their short run, even extending to the big screen (with a snippet of a live Dils Whisky performance included in Cheech & Chong’s “Up in Smoke”) and into mainstream hard rock: Eddie Van Halen lifted his trademark ‘striped guitar’ décor from Chip’s original design, a random series of electrical tape he scored across the instrument; AC/DC famously tried to get into a Dils show but wound up getting run off by some angry bottle throwing punks after refusing to pay the $2 admission fee. (Drummer John Silvers witnessed it: “They were saying ‘We’re AC/DC, right? We’re here to see the ... Dils, right?’ and the kid at the door says ‘Screw you, man. You pay $2 like everyone else!’”)
When they transformed into the country-music-fixated Rank & File, the brothers’ austere traditionalist atmospherics attracted a lot of attention, and no less a pair of roots royals than the Everly Brothers recorded one of the band’s original songs.
“I am always attracted to the origin of things. That turns me on. The people in the middle not so much, but the beginnings, yes,” Kinman said. “In blues, I really like the outside stuff, like Howlin’ Wolf and Hubert Sumlin’s guitar, definitely. Some of that is just so out there, I listen to it and can’t imagine what they were thinking or doing when they recorded it. It’s so crazy and I like that.”
All the songs in Ford Madox Ford are original, written with his brother, Tony, and son, Giuliano, aka Dewey Peek of the Katellas.
Kinman said plans are to begin recording after the Echoplex show with the rest of his band: S. Sam Aguero on drums, Matt Litell on bass. “Tony is not a performing member, but he will record with us and produce the songs.”
With his brother’s formidable writing skills and his son’s equally high-impact talent — the Katellas are a flabbergastingly capable, straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll band that completely smokes any competitors — Ford Madox Ford rate as an extremely enticing prospect.
“This is not a boutique band. We play really loud,” Kinman said. “And it is definitely not about ‘keeping the blues alive.’ I went to a big blues show recently and kept hearing that. The blues is not going down the drain by any means, there’s no need for that kind of talk. We are planning on doing everything, recording, touring, winning a Grammy. So that’s the plan — Best Blues album Grammy 2016!”
Who: Ford Madox Ford, with the Pagans, the Subtitles
Where: The Echoplex, 1822 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles (the Echoplex is located below the Echo; enter through the alley at 1154 Glendale Blvd.)
When: Sunday, Oct. 4, 7 p.m.
Cost: $13
More info: (213) 413-8200, theecho.com
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JONNY WHITESIDE is a veteran music journalist based in Burbank and author of “Ramblin’ Rose: the Life & Career of Rose Maddox” and “Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story.”