The Professor Rocks

What an angle: He can rock and read, too!

Not that there aren’t a few other functionally literate singer/songwriters around, but not many can match John Kilzer’s status doing the quick jump from the front of the classroom to the stage of the ballroom.

The last job on Kilzer’s resume before he cut his recent Geffen Records debut LP--the album-rock radio hit “Memory in the Making”--was a long-running gig as an English professor at Memphis State University.

Hence, an extremely commercial, mainstream rock album free of literary affectations, with only the occasional use of rhymes like “your picture / an inviolate fixture” to tip the listener that maybe we’re not dealing with Poison here.

Before earning his master’s degree in literature at Memphis State, this tall drink of Tennessee water got into the school on a basketball scholarship. Between games, his pal Teeny Hodges (who wrote and played guitar on Al Green hits such as “Take Me to the River”) helped teach him guitar, and eventually Kilzer formed a band to play clubs, using pseudonyms so his coach wouldn’t find out.

Kilzer’s sudden realization that he wasn’t good enough to make the pros veered him toward a more literary course. Meanwhile, the moonlighting continued. “I’d teach five days a week and play four nights a week--sometimes play at three in the morning at a motorcycle bar, then get home at five and have to go teach a class at 7. Sometimes I felt like I was really losing touch with what the hell I was doing. That went on three years.”

Given his background, Kilzer hasn’t been accused of being too bookish, effete or intellectual thus far. If anything, he’s been tagged as a heartland rocker. “I think if you have a raspy voice and you’re a new artist, the first thing to come to mind probably is Bryan Adams or John Cougar or somebody like that. I’ve always liked Adams, I don’t have anything against him at all--but as far as lyrics are concerned, I think we’re going in different directions.” Inviolately different, you might say.