HIP THERAPY MUSIC

West coast punk pioneer Chip Kinman is an icon. Growing up in North County San Diego, in 1977 he and brother Tony created the Dils, a legendary and influential mainstay of the punk scene, whose left-leaning and politically charged lyrics affect punk rock to this day. Always evolving, the brothers brought a we-don’t-need-no-stinking-rules attitude to their next band, the genre-bending and critically praised country-roots-rock outfit Rank and File. A noise band, a blues band and even a children’s album would follow in his ever-restless journey.

Tony passed in 2018, but Chip carried on the pair’s musical explorations. His new album, The Great Confrontation, released in late 2022 on In The Red Records, is a full-bodied embrace of electronic music. This two-disk set challenges everything you know about what “popular” music ought to be. It is bold, daring and fully original.

Influencing musicians from Eddie Van Halen (check Chip’s original pre-Franken-strat 70s era guitar) to the Everly Brothers to the Minutemen’s Mike Watt, Chip recently spent time with Hip Therapy Music as he prepared to leave for Mojo Nixon’s Outlaw Country West Cruise, a stellar and open-to-the-public sea-going reunion of some of the biggest names from California’s punk, cowpunk and country rock stages. He will be a guest performer with a variety of headlining bands, including The Long Ryders, and Rosie Flores.

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Chip Kinman: Hey, there you are!

Hip Therapy Music: How are you, sir? Thank you for your time!

Chip Kinman: Hey, no problem, I had to go to Target, that’s what came up. My wife needs a pair of shorts for the cruise!

Hip Therapy Music: Again, I’m even doubly grateful because I know you’re on the verge of a big cruise and getting prepared for stuff like that can  be a little crazy making, so thank you.

Chip Kinman: No problem, it’s my pleasure!

Hip Therapy Music: My hope is to talk to you a little bit about music that you like right now, and where you’re finding it. To get started, can you give me the thirty-second Chip Kinman bio? Who are  you, where have you been and what have you done?

Chip Kinman: (laughs) Yeah, I think I can do that in about thirty seconds (laughs). Well, I’m Chip Kinman and for about forty years I played music with my brother Tony. We started out and put our first record out in 1977. Of course when we played a little in high school, we did some covers and stuff that was seriously NOT popular in San Diego.

 I like to say we didn’t become punks, we were punks from the get-go. 

–Chip Kinman

We’re from Carlsbad. We did stuff like New York Dolls and David Bowie, some Buddy Holly, and then we formed the Dils, our punk rock band. Put out a few singles and then after that we said enough and formed a country band, Rank and File, and we put out three albums. And then we said enough and we formed a noise band, Blackbird, and again three albums – starting to notice a pattern here, three and out? And then we had enough of that and we decided to form Cowboy Nation…. and did three albums!

Since then I’ve had three bands of my own. I put out a record as Chip Kinman and PCH called My First Punk Rock Record which was a punk rock record for kids and I mean LITTLE kids. It’s like 14 songs in 11 minutes, very 70s punk. All backstrokes, all eighth notes, a really fun record, I really like that record. After that I did Ford Madox Ford, which I thought was gonna be my take on a blues band but ended up sounding like a glam band. And now I’m playing electronic music. 

Hip Therapy Music: I find that interesting – you call Blackbird a noise band?

Chip Kinman: We thought it was but in retrospect I look back at it and Tony and I couldn’t get away from writing a melody and writing a proper song with a middle bit and everything. We thought it was a noise band and maybe to our standards it was! (laughs). But you go back and listen to it and it, well, it just sounds like Chip and Tony. 

Hip Therapy Music: Yeah, “Big Train” (by Blackbird) is one of my favorite songs of yours.

Chip Kinman: I love that!

Hip Therapy Music: I came to it through Mike Watt’s version. It’s taken me a while to track it down. Blackbird music is hard to find!

Chip Kinman: Yeah, it sure is. Chris Ashford put out the first two records and after that the Scotti Brothers put out the third. They are hard to find. He (Ashford) rereleased “Big Train” a couple years ago, the single.  It’s a terrific record and it’s an indestructible song. In fact, we did it in Cowboy Nation so we did a cowboy version of it, Mike Watt did his version of it, John Serge and the Haymakers have just recorded it for their new album and they’re a country band. 

Hip Therapy Music: I just this morning found the original version of Blackbird’s”Big Train” on YouTube and I was…. wow! The original is so different from the covers!

I discovered Buddy Holly probably the same way a lot of kids discovered the Dils or Rank and File.

–Chip Kinman

Chip Kinman: Yeah, that’s a neat record. Someone made a video, that’s probably what you saw (it was). Also, Omnivore Records put out Sounds Like Music: A Chip and Tony Compilation that never got released, and there’s a lot of Blackbird stuff on it that I think is just terrific. Blackbird was a really fun band. I remember at the time Craig Lee wrote a review of our show at the Lingerie and said it was career suicide but it turned out to be really good!

Hip Therapy Music: And I also just found the Blackbird version of “Waiting for the Man.”

Chip Kinman: Oh yeah! That’s the B-side…

Hip Therapy Music: …and that was awesome too! That’s a two-fisted single right there!

Chip Kinman: It’s a pretty good record. I feel pretty good. Out of ALL records Tony and I put out or I put out by myself, there’s a dud song here or there but there was only one major misstep and that was the third Rank and File record… and bless Tony’s heart, he went along with it. I wanted to “hard rock” this band up a little… probably not the best idea but there were some good songs.

Hip Therapy Music: Rank and File stuff was a little hard to find for a while too…

Chip Kinman: Yeah, I think Warner Brothers put out The Slash Years and there was a rerelease of Sundown a couple of years ago so that’s pretty good… Sundown’s a classic. 

Hip Therapy Music: So what was it, when you were a kid, what was it that made you pick up a guitar in the first place? What was your first spark to get into music?

Chip Kinman: It was classic, being in a band with Tony all these years, the first spark was Tony went out and got a bass so I told my parents, hey, he got a bass, I want a guitar… (laughs). So my father took me to the PX at Camp Pendleton and bought me a Teisco guitar and a little Alamo amp. And Tony had a Teisco bass.

I plugged it in and it made noise and that’s all I cared about. I ended up smashing that because I started getting into the Who. Who’s Next was the first album I ever bought and I thought hey, they smash their gear, cool, I’m gonna smash my guitar. So I smashed it, it became unplayable, so I got an acoustic guitar and it wasn’t so much fun. You couldn’t make a lot of noise so you had to learn some chords. So that’s what got me into playing, but I was always around music.

We have an older brother, Charles, and he was of the age where, during the British Invasion, he was old enough to buy records, ya know? I wasn’t, back in 1964. I was 7 so I kind of didn’t give a crap about records but I knew the songs because he bought the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Dave Clark Five and all that kind of stuff, and later the Doors. And he was actually pretty adventurous. He was into Kraftwerk and Bob Marley before anybody that I knew was. He went to see Bob Marley in San Diego and he encouraged me to go, so I went and it was cool!

“We played for about as long as we did the other day, about 15 minutes, before we got shut down.” 

– Chip Kinman

Hip Therapy Music:  So that’s your older brother, Charles? Wow, he had some ears too.

Chip Kinman: He did, he just didn’t play. He was adventurous though. First concert I ever went to was David Bowie and the Ziqqy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars Tour at Long Beach just before they put out Aladdin Sane. I went to that show with Charles as well. 

Hip Therapy Music: Well thank goodness for Charles – he turned you on to some great stuff

Chip Kinman: Yeah, he did, actually I turned him on to Bowie because I was just a Who fanatic. From Carlsbad I used to walk to a record store in Leucadia called The Rock Garden run by some hippies and I would look for Who albums because I was trying to complete a collection and I didn’t have The Who Sell Out, I didn’t have Magic Bus, and I was looking for them.

I was in the record store one day in 1972 and a new shipment of records came in and the guy behind the counter put out this record and said, “Look, this guy must be a fag!” I looked up and it was The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust. So I said, “Why don’t you put that on? It looks interesting.” So he did, he put on side two. “Hang On To Yourself,” “Suffragette City,” and I went “I’ll buy it!” 

Hip Therapy Music: That’s Carlsbad in the early 70’s? 

Chip Kinman: Yes.

Hip Therapy Music: I’ve spent time in North County San Diego and for a beach community I know that area can be pretty conservative. 

Chip Kinman: It is.

Hip Therapy Music: It’s interesting that even then, you were fighting – even subconsciously – fighting the conservatism and going for what you liked. 

Chip Kinman: Well, certainly we were, and certainly we were different for that part of town and California. I mean, NOOOOO one in Carlsbad listened to David Bowie until, like, David Live came out. And after that, we were into the New York Dolls, and Slade and all those bands. Heck, the first band I ever saw in a nightclub was the New York Dolls. 

Hip Therapy Music: Damn, you’ve seen some folks… I’m impressed!

Chip Kinman: Well, we come by it honestly! I like to say we didn’t become punks, we were punks from the get-go. 

Hip Therapy Music: Did you and Tony ever try to consciously emulate someone in your music? When you got into bands, did you ever say, “Hey, let’s do something that sounds like Bowie so we can figure out how he does it?”

Chip Kinman: The only people we tried to emulate were, probably, the Who, because Tony really liked John Entwhistle and I got Pete Townsend. I couldn’t play guitar like Eric Clapton but I could approximate Pete Townsend! And…. Buddy Holly. And I discovered Buddy Holly probably the same way a lot of kids discovered the Dils or Rank and File. I was reading about the Beatles, listening to the Beatles, and they got their name from Buddy Holly’s Crickets… well, who the hell’s Buddy Holly?

I got that Holly MCA compilation and I put that on and I went, “Oh my God!” It was just really good! And I figured that that was…. obtainable. I could probably write a song like that. I couldn’t write Quadrophenia or anything like that, but I could probably write something like a Buddy Holly song. In fact, the first song Tony ever wrote, which ended up on a Rank And File record, is like a hard Buddy Holly cop. But mostly, no, we didn’t.

The way I would write a lot of songs is I would learn a song as best as I could, but I didn’t have the ears like Tony had. I’d say, “Hey Tony, I figured out the riff for Day Tripper!” and I’d play it and he’d say, well, that’s great but you’re missing like four notes. OOOkaaayy. I would learn a song and I would learn it kind of wrong, just because I didn’t have the ear Tony did, and I went, well, it’s my own song now, I’ll just write a song using these chords. 

Hip Therapy Music: I’ve done that, too, with writing. Maybe it’s not quite there, but what it is is still ok….

Chip Kinman: Exactly! Who was it, Picasso? Said good artists borrow but great artists steal (laughs)…. so, I’ll take it!

I’m a fire-breathing punk rocker, but I’ll tell you what, it was great to be on American Bandstand. It was great to be on Solid Gold. It was great to be on Austin City Limits.

– Chip Kinman

Hip Therapy Music: So, with so many bands and so much musical history, and no one plans for success, it just sort of happens and you look back and realize you have some success, what happened that you actually hoped would happen? And flipside, what happened that you completely didn’t expect?

Chip Kinman: Well, I didn’t think I’d be making records when I’m 65, yeah, what I’m doing now. I didn’t think at all that was in my future. When we were in the Dils, our first band, even the thought of making an album was just so foreign. We could manage a single but an album? I…. don’t know about that. And it’s funny, as much as things change they still stay the same. The show you were at the other day… for your readers, there’s a synthesizer convention here in Burbank, and needless to say, I wasn’t invited. And so I thought, well, you know what? I’m gonna invite myself.

I got together with David Javelosa from Los Microwaves, and we pull up the truck with our gear in the back of it, and park in front of the convention and just started blasting till we got shut down. The very first Dils show we ever played was the same thing. We were in Carlsbad. There’s a park there called Holiday Park. We’re at a gazebo and there’s an outlet and I plugged in a radio. There’s electricity! So I said, “Come on, Tony, let’s go!” So Tony, myself and Andre Algover – Buddy Hate, who’s on “I Hate The Rich” – we set up and we just started playing in this gazebo in this park in Carlsbad, in 1977. We played for about as long as we did the other day, about 15 minutes, before we got shut down. 

Hip Therapy Music: I figured that wasn’t your first shutdown.

Chip Kinman: It was kind of fun!  You know, there’s been so many highlights along the way. One thing, okay, I’m a fire breathing punk rocker, but I’ll tell you what, it was great to be on American Bandstand. It was great to be on Solid Gold. It was great to be on Austin City Limits. It’s great to be on all those shows, because my parents saw them and they went, “Okay, okay, this is good. Yeah, you’re doing something.” And so that was really great. Major disappointments? There’s really not many. I really only have one regret. I wish we would have kept the Sundown band together a little bit longer. An overarching answer to that question is I feel like I have made it. I’m Chip Kidman. I still get to put out records. People know who I am.

In fact, I was in a barber shop today, and there’s this older gentleman getting his haircut. And I was telling my barber that I’m going on the Outlaw Country Cruise. And that guy next to me perks up and goes, “Oh, who’s playing that?” I started reeling off some of the bands that are playing. “Oh, I know all those bands, yes!” He asked if I was performing. I said yeah. half a dozen of of those bands have asked me to sit in, so as it turns out, I’m going to. Then he goes, “Oh, what band were you in?” I said, well, I was in Rank And File. Then he just, like, lost it. “Oh, my God. I lived in San Francisco in 1978 – I used to go see The Dils all the time! I used to go see…”  Like, wow!

This really respectable gentleman just kind of fanboyed on me! So I feel like I’ve made it.

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In part two of this three-part interview, Chip tells which of all of his bands is his favorite, how the old cowboy music scene has in common with the current electronic music scene and what new songs and artists he’s listening to. This isn’t the first time punk pioneer Chip Kinman has graced the pages of Hip Therapy Music. Read Ford Madox Ford’s Meaningful History.

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Close your eyes. Open your mind. Trust your ears.