Runnin' on diesel-billy fuel

Sunday News
Published: September 18, 2005
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

San Francisco at the zenith of the Haight-Ashbury years may seem an unlikely place for a country band to make its mark. But a group of motley players from Ann Arbor, Mich., three guitarists and a saxophonist, fit right into the freewheeling scene.

Taking a distorted version of serious honky-tonk mixed with a little Memphis soul, a little Bakersfield country and a lot of drug references, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen was one of the most popular touring acts in America in the late '60s and early '70s. Think Johnny Cash meets Big Brother and The Holding Company, or Frank Zappa sitting in with Buck Owens.

Essential to the band's success was a lanky guitar player named Bill Kirchen, whose firecracker tone and lighting-fast licks made him the envy of nearly every West Coast picker. Kirchen, who graduated from Ann Arbor High School in 1965 alongside future rock luminaries Iggy Pop and Bob Seger, started out as a classical trombonist. During the "folk scare" of the early '60s, he picked up guitar and banjo. After a brief foray into psychedelic freak-out music with a band called The Seventh Seal, Kirchen joined Cody just prior to the group's move to California. In the '80s, he played alongside, produced, and toured with iconic English country/New Waver Nick Lowe.

"But I still consider what I play today as a form of folk music, really," Kirchen said. Specifically, its called diesel-billy, a label Kirchen says he invented. For a sampling, check out "Tied to the Wheel" and "Raise Up a Ruckus," two recent titles released on roots- oriented label Hightone Records.

"If I start to curse, don't worry. It's just driving in the city," Kirchen quipped via cell phone. He apparently missed the exit for the beltway on this, the return trip from crashing the Philadelphia Folk Festival in late August. "I'd played it a few times before, so I just showed up."

Now, driving through Maryland, he's on familiar ground again. Kirchen based himself in the nation's capital for many years before moving to Austin, Texas, in 2001. "It's a great music town, as everyone knows, but it's hard to make a living there as a musician because there are so many good ones. It's a buyer's market." Thus Kirchen's 150 dates a year take him from Texas roadhouses to northern California honky-tonks to the hip nightclubs of New York City. A trip to Australia last year was wildly successful, and Kirchen heads to the U.K. for a set of dates at the end of October.

Kirchen and his band, Too Much Fun, play the family-friendly Blues Courtyard Concert Series at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 25, at Marion Court (East Orange and Marion streets). Power blues makers Bill Hector & The Fairlanes of New Jersey open the show at 2 p.m. Lancaster's own D.C. & Co., a big, horn-driven blues band, closes at 5 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the gate.

Commander Cody and his current lineup of the Airmen played the BlueSunday series Aug. 28. And though they missed each other by a month here in Lancaster, even after all these years their paths still cross. "How is the crusty old one?" Kirchen asked. "We play together about once a year or so at reunion gigs. Sometimes we'll team up for bigger shows."

Kirchen's latest release, "Dieselbilly Road Trip," is part of a series of 15 roots releases from the National Council of Traditional Arts and Hightone, currently on sale at Cracker Barrel restaurants nationwide. Other volumes include "Asleep at the Wheel," "Cephas & Wiggans" and "The Seldom Scene." It is "basically a cross-section of music that can be considered Americana. And I'm happy to have been included. It came out sounding really good," Kirchen said. Played on a beautifully battered Fender Telecaster with fast, nimble hands, Kirchen's signature sound is indeed synonymous with some of the best American music. Not only does he tackle country and blues classics, but the Lost Airmen repertoire gets regular revisits.

Kirchen's own live version of the old Commander Cody chestnut "Hot Rod Lincoln" has turned into a hilarious marathon-length tribute to the giants of rock, blues and country. "I started trying to imitate different car-horn sounds on the guitar," Kirchen explained. In the song, the singer is racing a Cadillac on a long stretch of Western highway. Other drivers move over to let him pass by as he cruises down the road at 110 mph.

"I made the sound of a Freightliner truck, a bus full of hippies, things like that." At one show, he grafted the famous opening riff from Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" onto the song without warning. "There was one night when, just to amuse ourselves, we started every song with that riff," he said. "After that it was off to the races man. We never planned it or discussed it, I would just drop someone's name and play the riff, and the guys would follow along."

In its current version, the song features musical-signature snippets of everyone from the Rolling Stones to Flatt & Scruggs, from Muddy Waters to the Sex Pistols. It is understandably a crowd- pleasing climax to just about every Bill Kirchen performance.

And that, Kirchen says, is what diesel-billy is all about. He'll play Lefty Frizell, Blackie Farell and follow with Bob Dylan or the Byrds. "That's the great thing about inventing your own genre; there is no competition, and you can include whatever you want in it."