OG west coast punk pioneer Chip Kinman has covered a lot of musical territory. 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. Accordingly, 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 (Ford Madox Ford) and even a children’s album would follow in his ever-restless journey.
His new album, TheGreat 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.
Chip recently spent time with Hip Therapy Music as he prepared to leave for Mojo Nixon’sOutlaw Country West Cruise, a stellar, sea-going reunion of some of the biggest names from California’s punk, cowpunk and country rock stages. He will perform with a variety of headlining bands, including The Long Ryders and Rosie Flores.
In part two of our three-part chat (part one here), he shares which of his and brother Tony’s bands was his favorite, how “legitimate” the old cowboy music scene really was, what music he’s listening to, and the value of improv and experimentation in taking audiences on long journeys within a single song.
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HIP THERAPY MUSIC: I’ve been to a few club shows recently. A while ago a band called Dime Box Band pulled out “Amanda Ruth.” They introduced it by saying, “This is a Chip and Tony song!” and then went right into it. I thought, hey, that’s cool!
CHIP KINMAN: A lot of bands cover our songs, you know, like “Big Train” of course is oft-covered, “Amanda Ruth,” a lot of bands do that. It’s really kind of gratifying. “Class War,” of course, so many punk rock bands do “Class War.” So it’s kind of gratifying. And if they can pull it off, it’s pretty cool, because some of those songs aren’t as easy to play as you might think.
I just heard from the Long Ryders. They want me to sing with them on this cruise. And they said, “Oh, well, we’re gonna TRY to figure out “Amanda Ruth,” and if not that, then you can just sing “White Lightning.” I said, “Amanda Ruth”is trickier than you think, so let’s just do “White Lightning!”
HOMAGE: Opening for the Dream Syndicate in Los Angeles weeks before Covid set in, Dime Box Band takes a swing at a “Tony and Chip song” and pull it off pretty well. Wasn’t able to get the phone out fast enough to capture their heart-felt intro.
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: And didn’t the Everly Brothers cover one of your songs?
CHIP KINMAN: They covered “Amanda Ruth.” They sure did. Now, I know you didn’t ask this question, but I’ll go ahead and tell you mine and Tony’s favorite band, hands down of all of our bands, was Cowboy Nation… and those records are really good.
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: What was it in particular about Cowboy Nation that clicked for you so much?
CHIP KINMAN: First of all, it was just the intimacy of making those records. I can remember sitting around with Tony, and, gosh, what are we going to do? Because we only wanted to approach something when we figured we had something to say musically, and do something we wouldn’t be embarrassed about.
“Basically, most of the cowboy acts out there were like a Roy Rogers movie, and we were like a John Ford movie.”
— Chip Kinman
We’re not going to form a reggae band or something, right? That would just be stupid and it would suck. But we thought, well, we already did country music, so we’re not going to do that again. What about cowboy music? Another brilliant career move!
So we worked up a couple standards, “Old Paint” and that sort of thing, and then we wrote our own songs, and, you know, we got a record deal – made three albums. And those records… I don’t know if you’ve heard them, but they’re really good. And the songs are really good. They really take you somewhere.
And it was fun to be on the cowboy scene, which is super bizarre, you know? It’s even as bizarre as the electronic music scene. It’s full of gatekeepers, it’s full of pretenders… And then we came along and they were going, “Wait a minute, you guys aren’t cowboys!” Well, I don’t think you are either…
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: Yeah, you call them on it!
CHIP KINMAN: Yeah, we call them on it. Basically, most of the cowboy acts out there were like a Roy Rogers movie, and we were like a John Ford movie. You had Tony just laying it down. They were just really fun, fun records. We’d go to his apartment every morning, drink coffee and hit “record.” It was really fun.
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: So what are you listening to these days? What’s on in the car when you drive? What’s on at home if you turn on the music?
CHIP KINMAN: In the car, it’s usually KXLU and whatever they have to offer, I’ll be listening to that. I usually don’t listen to rock stations or anything like that. As far as old stuff I’m listening to, I’m listening to a lot of old electronic music, because that’s the stuff that I really like – the weirder, the better.
That George Harrison electronic record I think is terrific. There’s a compilation record called “Electronic Music: It Started Here.” It has stuff from the 50s all the way up to the 60s. That’s a terrific record. Been going back the first two Roxy Music records, Eno, you know, that sort of thing and, of course, Kraftwerk.
What I’m listening to now I didn’t listen to so much before I made The Great Confrontation, but I’m listening to it now because I really have a task ahead of me for my next record, I’m going to make another electronic record. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Ralph and Florian record, the one with the caution cone on the cover, and then after that, they put out Radioactivity. I have to make that leap.
The Ralph and Florian record is what you would call experimental but on Radioactivity they really brought it home with a great focus. I have to make that leap, to dig down, to find that melody. I have to find that thing that’s going to make my next record really something. So there’s that.
MAKING THE BIG LEAP:David Javalosa and Chip Kinman celebrating their guerrilla/pop-up show in the precarious moments just before security raided the scene. (October 28, 2022; Burbank, CA.)
And recently, I started something interesting… you know, the press is kind of weird these days. There’s not a lot of it like there used to be. So I started reaching out to some of my friends who I knew were putting out records, saying, “Hey, you send me your record, I’ll send you my record.”
We put together some reviews on the socials, and I’ve run across some great, just, just terrific records. Some really surprising – The Crisis Actor record, it’s a punk rock record by Tony Knox. He’s a DJ at KXLU and it’s really terrific. Rude Dogs by Lovey-Dove. They sent me a record and it blew me away, too. I don’t know if you know them, but Azalea… that guy can sing! It’s a really terrific record.
David Javalosa… I knew him from Los Microwaves but I hadn’t spoken to him in 40 years. Ruby Ray, the punk rock photographer, had done the cover for his record, so I reached out to him, and it’s funny, because as I was composing an email to him, he’d sent me one saying, “Hey, we should exchange records,” and his record is terrific too! I’m looking at it right now.
Extended Organ Is a great record by Frederick Nielsen and Tom Rashawn. The band is called Extended Organ. The record is called Fine. And it’s right up my alley. It’s kind of a noise collage, one song per side, and it’s just terrific.
And Bruce Leisher from the LA Free Music Society just sent me a bunch of records that I’m diving into now. And so I’m listening to a lot of local stuff, and there’s a lot of great new stuff out there on In The Red Records. I really like Kid Congo’s new record. It’s not really new anymore. It came out a couple of months before mine did but it’s a great record.
It was really inspiring because there’s a long-form song on his record and I thought that’s pretty brave and pretty cool. And also, I like that long-form song on the last Dream Syndicate record, The Regulator.
“Before I ever did it publicly for the first time, I thought, “Oh my God, everyone’s just gonna leave,” but people lean into it. It’s pretty cool.”
— Chip Kinman
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: Long form is not easy to pull off, but that Dream Syndicate song was some of the most amazing music I’ve ever heard.
CHIP KINMAN: Those two songs inspired me and gave me a push to go, okay, I can do long-forms like side one of The Great Confrontation.
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: I saw Steve Wynn just before The Regulator came out, and he said, “We’ve got a new single coming out. It’s 17 minutes long.” And the whole place just cracked up.
CHIP KINMAN: It’s interesting… if you do it right, and if you deliver it correctly, what a crowd will tolerate. The show you saw, the electronic show in the parking lot lot, was the first time I’ve ever done a show with another person. David Javalosa. Usually I do it myself. I call the act “Electrical Parade,” and I open with 13 minutes of Disney’s Electrical Parade. I’m effing around with it and before I ever did it publicly for the first time, I thought, “Oh my God, everyone’s just gonna leave,” but people lean into it. It’s pretty cool.
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: What has surprised you most about what people like about your new music? Some people are going to say it’s too abstract, but I dug it. At times it had a great beat. It was going all kinds of places. And it was, at least to my relatively unfamiliar ear, massively improvisational.
CHIP KINMAN: Well, it was, that was totally improv. That’s the first time we played with a beat. Usually there’s no beat on my record. The rhythms usually carry either a pulse or a high-hat. I think there’s a high-hat and a kick drum on one song, but there’s no snare. And for this, just to make it really push forward, I got one of those new Roland drum machines. It’s a terrific little machine. I programmed in the “motorik” beat, you know, the krautrock beat. And I thought, okay, well, this would be cool to get everyone’s attention right away and we’ll just take off.
And David (Javalosa) taught me good lessons. I’ve never improvised with another electronic musician, and the first time we got together, I said, “Wow, David, you’re really good.” And he goes, “Just got to listen. Just got to listen to what the other guy’s doing.”
And of course, I know that… (laughs).
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: The basic rule of being in a band!
IMMEDIATE PAY-OFF: Chip’s final collaboration with his brother Tony was the band Ford Madox Ford, an outfit Chip refers to as “blues glam” but which still comes off as perfect for any rock station’s airwaves. This video for “Immediate Nico” was one of the outstanding tracks.
CHIP KINMAN: But I think what surprises me, as far as the album’s concerned, is it’s a bit of a tough nut, you know? I mean, some things are immediate, you know, you’ll get it. But a couple other things are just a little bit tougher but there’s a payoff for hanging in there.
It works best if you listen to it from beginning to end, because it’ll really take you somewhere. And it all makes sense. It’s hard to pull out a song and go, well, this is representative of the record, not that it’s all over the place, but it’s kind of tough to do that with that record.
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: Yeah, it came across to me as more like movements of a classical music piece, one long, continuous classical music piece.
CHIP KINMAN: So you know, back to what my next job is, is, okay, I’ve got to do something where you CAN pull something out and go, “Listen to this.” At the risk of sounding like an asshole, Ode to Joy. Pull it out of (Beethoven’s) ninth, it stands alone. Yeah, or Radioactivity, the song, you can pull it off the album and it stands alone. I’ve got to come up with that kind of record next. And it’s a challenge I’m really looking forward to.
HIP THERAPY MUSIC: Sometimes it’s the constraints that force things to be better. That’s what I’ve found.
CHIP KINMAN: Yeah, it almost always is and on that last record, I’ll probably do the same with the next record, because it really seemed to work. There’s plenty of constraints. If you open the album up, you’ll see there’s a tape recorder back there. That’s the same tape recorder that we bought to record the Cowboy Nation records on.
It’s an eight-track, half-inch, Tascam reel to reel, and I had eight tracks to work with. You know, the electronic record? No Pro Tools, no sequencing. I didn’t know how to do a sequencer! No nothing. It was like, what are you going to do with THIS box of tools? And it works out.
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In the final of this three-part interview, Chip talks about his preferred place for finding new music, the bands he thinks are unquestionably “on the cusp,” and the album brother Tony “dared him to live with” for 24 hours to convince Chip it was the best album in the world.
