Clang & Clatter

Recently, I was scrounging around down in the vaults for cool King’s X videos to share with you guys, and I came across the following Rolling Stone article written by David Fricke, which ran in issue #598 on February 21, 1991. Not one just to spring things on you with no context, I started researching the article, and in doing so, I encountered several rec.music.artists.kings-x Usenet posts (yep, I’m old-school, baby!) from guitarist/vocalist Ty Tabor discussing the article and the circumstances surrounding the interview.

As I hinted in the previous video post, “It’s Love” was the biggest hit for King’s X at the time of its release. What I didn’t mention was that the song peaked at #6 in Billboard’s Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and was one of the quickest rising singles in terms of airplay at the time. At one point, the strength of the track helped sell around 25,000 records during a 15-day period. And then the sales mysteriously fell off drastically, just as radio was beginning to pay attention. Based on my intel, the band (or at least Ty) partially blames the Rolling Stone piece (though not author Fricke, per se) for their lack of success right at the point they were poised for stardom.

Ty states there was an “almost abrupt stop in sales and radio support imediately [sic] after the RS article” and “we’ve never been told that a station won’t play the record because they don’t like it. this would be easier to accept! instead we’re told they won’t play us because we are a ‘God band’.”

According to Ty, the band spent a couple of days with Fricke talking about the usual topics, music and their influences among them, but never about religion. King’s X had already decided amongst themselves not to talk about religion with the press because their comments were too often edited poorly or misrepresented, instead opting to discuss spiritual matters in person or in a forum where any misunderstandings could be clarified. As their time with Fricke wrapped up, Doug grabbed a bite to eat with the interviewer. Ty elaborates:

david , according to doug, started talking about some of his past spiritual experiences. doug, thinking that the “interview” was over told david some of his beliefs (at the time). this was probably a 40 minute meal after spending two days with him. when we got the rolling stone article it was ONLY about those 40 minutes. we saw our rising sales and popularity dive to a screaching [sic] halt instantly over night. like flipping a switch… we have lived with the “Christian Band” curse ever since that article. now if we get a mention in US or People, it’s “The Christian Band King’s X” which we have never called ourselves and are in fact not.

Whether this article is the true reason of the band’s cool reception at radio stations is up for debate, but it does seem that once they were dubbed a “Christian band” (although Fricke explicitly states in the article that they are not), it became a death sentence and made it almost impossible for them to achieve commercial success. You can be a “spiritual” band (e.g., U2), but you can’t mention God, Jesus, and Christianity as many times as the guys did in this article and continue to get played on the radio.

But Ty holds no ill will toward Fricke or Rolling Stone:

however, i have to always believe that things happen for a reason whether we understand or not. that’s how i live anyway. i don’t blaim [sic] david fricky [sic] or have any resentment toward him. he was a fan of the band and was good enough to cover us at all.

Had everything gone well for King’s X during the Faith Hope Love era, we might never have been given albums like the dark King’s X or the gritty Dogman releases. I think King’s X is a better band for having struggled over the years, although I wish they had received the recognition—and by extension the financial compensation—they deserve.

So in a way, I’m glad Fricke’s Rolling Stone article changed the way the music industry viewed King’s X. It seems that every time a band I love succeeds commercially, things go downhill pretty quickly (e.g., U2 … again). I’m thankful that King’s X has continued to fight the good fight over the years and make music that I love, as Ty aptly sums up in one of his posts:

when all is said and done, we’re just happy to still be making records. we love to do that.

Enjoy!

“I read the Bible. I know what he did. Man, the guy was cool!”

Doug Pinnick is talking excitedly in a Dallas restaurant and stabbing a fork emphatically into his steak ‘n’ shrimp combo platter, setting off a noisy chain reaction of clinking and clanging by the multiple zippers on his leather jacket and the half dozen or so thin silver bracelets on each wrist.

“Here he is, sitting with the worst people in the world,” Pinnick continues, ignoring the curious stares coming from adjacent tables, “all the ones that nobody else would touch or come close to. Here he is, talking to them. And he’s not telling them to get their lives together. ‘Don’t feel guilty’ - that’s basically what he said.

“And that’s all we’re saying - ‘Don’t feel bad about what you’re doing,’” Pinnick declares, peering intently through the shaggy overhang of his jet black mohawk. “The hardest thing about living in this world is feeling good about yourself.”

The “he” Pinnick’s referring to is, of course, the He, Jesus Christ. The “we” is King’s X, the biracial hard-rock trio from Houston whose critically applauded blend of muscular progressive metal, Beatlesque vocal sunshine, AOR melodic savvy and utopian optimism is making chart waves via ‘It’s Love’, the breakout track from the group’s third LP, “Faith Hope Love by King’s X”. And Pinnick, the band’s outspoken black bassist and lead singer, is explaining how he, guitarist Ty Tabor and drummer Jerry Gaskill weathered ten years of writing, gigging, recording and, for long periods, starving together - and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible. That is, reconciling their own devout Christian beliefs - and attendant missionary responsibilities - with the baser thrills of rock & roll, the wordly temptations of pop stardom and the harsh realities of both the secular and Christian music industries. Not to mention the contradictory expectations of their rapidly growing audience, composed largely of equally devout metalheads whose idea of a new messiah is more likely to be Danzig or Slayer.

“This is what we’re supposed to be doing,” Pinnick insists, “what they’re all supposed to be doing,” taking a poke at his more puritanical brethren. “Being themselves in the world. Feeling the friction. We come out and play, we feel one way, maybe the crowd feels another. But we rub against each other, we understand and learn. And we disappear after that. But still, something happens.”

That something can be simple air-guitar nirvana. Later that night, at the City Limits, a heavy-metal watering hole in suburban Dallas, King’s X roasts a capacity crowd with repeated bazooka blasts of what Pinnick likes to call “the pound”, an appropriate euphemism for the explosive compound of thundering hard-rock classicism, wily hooks, speed-metal zoom and startlingly soulful vocal interplay. Flashes of the band’s disparate influences - early Rush, U2, Sixties Brit pop, progressive soul, no-nonsense thrash - whiz by, shoehorned into rib-rattling, sing-along torpedoes. One minute, the band is driving head bangers into fits of spasmodic ecstasy with the staccato James Brown-cum- Metallica time changes of ‘We Were Born To Be Loved’. The next, Pinnick, Tabor and Gaskill are executing the delicate stair-step harmonies of ‘I’ll Never Get Tired Of You’ with the cathedral elegance of the Beatles on “Abbey Road”.

It’s easy to miss the message amid the top-drawer mayhem like ‘Power of Love’, a buzz-bomb pledge of spiritual allegiance from the band’s 1988 debut, “Out Of The Silent Planet”, or the frenetic hallelujah ‘Moanjam’ (“I sing this song/This one’s for you/You’re the story….You’re the glory”), which roars like Van Halen at Bad Brains speed. There’s more epic spirit than specific doctrine in Pinnick’s gritty, robust singing; imagine Bono speaking in R&B-gospel tongues (particularly that of Sly Stone). And over three albums, King’s X has mentioned its savior only once by name in a song, the pulverizing ‘Over My Head’ from the 1989 LP “Gretchen Goes To Nebraska”. Even then, it was only in passing - “Music music/I hear music….Oh Lord/Music over my head.”

But that is because King’s X is not a Christian band, “playing the game of using the right words here and there,” as Ty Tabor brusquely puts it. Rather, the members of King’s X argue, they are simply a band of Christians, less interested in parroting dogma than in celebrating life and blowing minds. And so what if the devil has all the best tunes?

“I like a lot of bands whose lyrics or lifestyle I might question,” Pinnick says without apology. “Like Black Sabbath. The core of a lot our music is Black Sabbath. Yeah, the guy’s talking about Satan and stuff. But that’s just what he’s singing about. Hopefully, that’s what we get across, that we just play music.”

“The spiritual aspect that people always tie to us includes everything,” Jerry Gaskill contends. “It includes that Saturday-night-party thing.”

Their one-two punch of candid spirituality and exploratory hard-rock verve has paid off handsomely outside the Christian corral. The band’s three albums have sold nearly 300,000 copies combined (half of those by “Faith Hope Love” alone); Gary Waldman, vice-president of the band’s label, Megaforce Worldwide, estimates that only five to ten percent of those sales have been within the Christian community. With ‘It’s Love’, which went Top Ten in AOR airplay, King’s X has been sharing needle time with heavy-metal elders like AC/DC and ZZ Top. Some of the band’s most vocal fans are, in fact, other musicians, such as Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, who often applauds King’s X in his own interviews.

The group’s enthusiasm for heathen noise has also gotten King’s X into trouble with fans on the fundamentalist side of the fence. Not too long ago, Doug Pinnick was buttonholed by a young man handing out religious antirock tracts in front of the Summit Arena, in Houston, where Pinnick was going to catch a thrash-metal spectacular featuring Judas Priest, Megadeth and Testament. The guy, who also happened to be a King’s X fan, was outraged that Pinnick would even think of attending such a satanic ritual.

“I tried to talk him down,” Pinnick says, shaking his head sadly. “He didn’t understand. Because I had shattered his dreams. And I don’t want to do that to anybody.

“Rock & roll is very important in my life. But the most important thing is to give people things they need, like love and attention. We all need that friendly handshake or hug. That’s what keeps us going, and that’s what I want King’s X to represent. I want people to be able to put one of our records on and feel like ‘Yeah, I can deal with today.’”

Doug Pinnick was in his late teens before he was introduced to the healing properties of heavy music. Born in Joliet, Illinois, “the illegitimate child of an illegitimate granddaughter,” Pinnick was raised by his great-grandmother, a strict Baptist who had “the Pentecostal holiness attitude, where everything was wrong. Except sitting at home and reading your Bible all day and going to prayer meetings.” His great-grandmother didn’t get a television until he was twelve.

In high school, Pinnick fell in love with Motown and, when he got to college, Led Zeppelin. “I finally realized I could be myself,” he says. “I have a deep basic faith. I really do believe. But it’s not something somebody taught me or ingrained into me. I realized that there was a way of life in it that could work for me.”

It took Pinnick, now forty, several years before he found that way of life with King’s X. He lived for a time in a Christian community in Florida, handing out pamphlets on the street and staging religious pop concerts that, most of the time, barely drew flies. Bored and frustrated, Pinnick returned to Joliet and formed an evangelical art-rock band that generated a large local following, out of which he actually founded his own church, the Shiloh Fellowship. “It was like a hippie-community thing,” Pinnick says. “We got a pastor - he was really cool, he was at Woodstock. The church grew, and I felt really good about it. But then it got to the point where, again, I started seeing ‘the box’. I had to move on, because these people weren’t. So I said a prayer: ‘Lord, open the doors and I am out of here.’”

God answered his prayer - sort of. In 1979, Pinnick got an offer to move to Springfield, Missouri, and join a re-formed version the popular Christian band Petra. That lineup, which included New Jersey emigre Jerry Gaskill, broke up a month after Pinnick arrived.

The seeds of King’s X were sown a year later, when Pinnick and Gaskill - who had found employment as the rhythm section with Christian-rock guitar hero Phil Keaggy - met Ty Tabor, a guitarist (and serious Keaggy fan) from Pearl, Mississippi. Along with a short-lived second guitarist, Dan McCollom, they formed a group called the Edge and embarked on a long career of playing Midwest bars for peanuts.

“The first several years, we were constantly concerned with being original,” says the thirty-year-old Tabor. “But the thing is, we only ended up copying other original people.”

One group, not surprisingly, was U2. Pinnick says the Edge was gigging long before he’d ever heard of U2, but he clearly remembers the day he bought U2’s second album, “October”, took it home and dropped the needle on the opening track, ‘Gloria’.

“Here Bono was singing in Latin this beautiful text, ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’,” Pinnick says. “And I thought, ‘That dog! He got away with it.’ He did it in an artistic way. That was the day U2 changed my mind about a lot of things and encouraged me. Because if they could do it, we could do it.”

Nevertheless, Pinnick confesses, “on the early demos, you could always tell where I stole from.” ‘King’, which was later recorded for “Out of the Silent Planet”, “sounded exactly like a Bow Wow Wow song,” he says. “‘Shot Of Love’ sounded like a Yes tune. We did it a couple of times that way, and it just fell apart.”

The bond that kept the band from falling apart was its mutual faith - and mutual distrust of organized Christianity, in and out of the music business. “We hit it head-on,” says Gaskill, 32, “the whole Christian world- versus-the-devil thing, saying you couldn’t do this or be that.” Gaskill and Tabor had both dropped out of Evangel College, a Christian university in Springfield. “I left the school very angry at the hypocrisy there,” Tabor says sharply. And Pinnick was just tired of singing for the converted; King’s X, he says rather proudly, has never performed on the Christian concert circuit.

“I get so disgusted when I see these T-shirts with MEGALIFE and it looks like MEGADETH,” Pinnick says. “I’m going, ‘Do something original! If you Christians do something original, maybe people would respect you. But all you do is take everything you see that’s successful, and then you turn it around and want to tell people, “This is real.” This is bullshit.’

“When we started, I said, ‘I want to form a band with people who believe the same way I do, who just want to play rock & roll - period.’ That’s all I wanted. And as a result, maybe we could make a statement in a meaningful way. Not that the band hinges on the success of people getting turned onto what we say but that we can be free to be who we are, without being ashamed or ridiculed for it.

“Because Christianity is ridiculed. I don’t want to say, ‘I believe a certain way’ and then have people go, ‘Oh, man, get outta here, he’s a Christian.’ I’d prefer they just go, ‘Hey, he’s a Christian, they believe that way, and it’s cool, because they stuck to what they believed in.’”

The group’s diligence was eventually rewarded but only after they lost another second guitarist, changed their name (regrettably) to Sneak Preview and released an independent LP which they’d all much rather forget. In 1985 the band moved to Houston - originally at the behest of two local Christian-music entrepreneurs who soon flaked out - and met Sam Taylor, a fellow believer, musician and former ZZ Top management associate who agreed to work with them.

Taylor subsequently became the band’s manager, record producer and video director. Indeed, he’s literally the fourth member of the band. “I don’t have a management agreement or production deal,” Taylor says. “I’m a four-way partner. That’s the way they wanted it.” Taylor also came up with the name King’s X - originally the name of “the cool band in town when I was in high school,” he says. “I guess I was waxing philosophical at the time too, thinking about the relationship between God and Christianity, and that we have a mark on us.”

It was Taylor’s idea, more recently, to underscore that mark by including an unusually explicit reference to the band’s Christianity in the credits of “Faith Hope Love”: a lengthy excerpt from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, in the New Testament, which reads, in part, “Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.”

“I’m glad it’s in there,” Pinnick says. “Because it’s not a statement from the Bible to me. It’s a statement about life. We’ve lost sight of what really is.”

“As corny as this may sound, it’s like the Michael Jackson song: You gotta deal with the man in the mirror,” Tabor explains. “If you do that, that’s your little part of changing the world. Because you’re in the world. We write about people dealing with themselves, not going out to change others.”

“You’ve got to feel the love in you heart,” Pinnick says. “You’ve got to recognize what love is, you’ve got to understand it. How am I going to love God, something I can’t even see, when I don’t even know what love is? This is the quest.

“Jesus says if you just love your neighbor as yourself, you do well. And I just want to be able to do well.”

We play so loud that the amps couldn’t take it. — Dee Dee Ramone, End of the Century: Story of the Ramones

Premier Guitar has a nice writeup on the gear used by the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash in their latest issue. Probably not any earth-shattering revelations here, but an interesting read nonetheless.