Whether you call it hard rock, heavy metal, cock rock, hair metal, melodic rock, pop-metal, AOR, glam or sleaze, this is the place to find out what became of your favorite 80's rock bands.
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Whether you call it hard rock, heavy metal, cock rock, hair metal, melodic rock, pop-metal, AOR, glam or sleaze, this is the place to find out what became of your favorite 80's rock bands. |
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KIX: THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT: Metal Forces Magazine, October 1988 By Kelv Hellrazer "Be very very quiet. It's woman season. I'm woman hunting. Everytime I go woman hunting it always blows up in my face. I never really get the things I want. I'm not expecting a pity party or anything I just need a girl to be nice to me every now and then. I'm a nice guy, I bath. Just last night I had it all ready. The girl that walked out on me New Years Eve, well she came back last night. She said I don't have to go home tonight. I said alright. So I bought again a case of cold cold Heineken. And then I had in the van a big bottle of Jack, Daniels. Not the little ones, the big ones. I always carry a stash 'cos yer never know. I had two left - two ludes - for the girl of my dreams. Now again she drinks my beer, she drinks my whisky, she does my quaalude. Five 0 'clock comes. Oh I feel sick. I gotta go home now. Then she threw up all over the floor. I said Freeze! Freeze! Go outside and do that. I don't need this. I'll go down to the Geisha House where it's free. Quit throwing up. Don't tell me 'no' tell me 'Yeah Yeah Yeah: And she threw up all over the floor all over again." (Taken from "Yeah Yeah Yeah" KIX - "Kix" Atlantic) The above quote tells the tale. It's about time someone printed it. The ultimate rap taken from "Yeah Yeah Yeah", a track from the first KIX album in 1981. Yeah, 19 fucking 81 the first KIX LP came out, around about the same time as CRUE appeared. Brian Forsythe had the biggest hair in the world even in '81 and Stuart Whiteman was killing Vince Ned in the vocal department. This was glam sleaze, call it what you will, in 1981, not 1988. CRUE went onto mega-stardom and KIX went on to make two fab LP's only to be horribly ignored. Let's go right back to the '81 debut. The band were a cross between AC/DC, HANOI and AEROSMITH. Donnie Purnell made his debut on the songwriting. His songs, even if slightly bizarre at times, always have the ultimate catchy choruses. In fact that debut had enough catchy choruses to fill the next five CINDERELLA LP's, from the AC/DC style killer rock of "Atomic Bombs" and "Kix Are For Kids" to the bizarre wacky pop of "Heartache" and "Contrary Mary". Anyway, the debut failed to capture the public's eye despite selling well amongst KIX's loyal fans. LP number two, "Cool Kids", and the band are forced into a more commercial sound in an attempt to sell more records. It's 1983, Brian Forsythe's hair is even bigger. The band do covers of Holly Knights "Burning Love" an olde SPIDER tune and Nick Gilder's "Body Talk" mixed with their own catchy pop like "Love Pollution". Again KIX pull it off with style, and are still streets ahead of most. But again, no promotion and LP no. 2 fails to break the band. It's a return to basics on "Midnite Dynamite", and Tom Keifer's still in diapers. The third LP has another big producer in the form of Beau Hill. Up to this point It's their finest moment, with killers like "Cold Shower", "Bang Bang", "She's Walking Away", "Cry Baby" and many more. The album sees the return of guitarist Ronnie (10/10) Younkins to the fold. He left the band before "Cool Kids" to be replaced by Brad Divens, now fronting WRATHCHILD (the U.S. version) who are also signed to Atlantic. Again a lack of promotion saw a killer album disappear, despite interesting videos for "Cold Shower" and "Midnite Dynamite". Also KIX's first English interview appears in this very magazine in the same year by my ole buddy and ex-MF scribe Dave Shaw, a life long KIX-ite. It's 1988 and KIX - Donnie Purnell (bass), Steve Whiteman (vocals), Brian Forsyth (guitars), Jimmy Chalfont (drums) and Ronnie Younkins (guitars) - have a new LP waiting in the wings entitled "Blow My Fuse". This is gonna be the big one for the guys. I feel guilty enough for not giving KIX enough press in the past, but this time I'm gonna do my best to try and push this band who've opened so many doors for other groups. I'm sorry, although I like TIGERTAILZ, LIXX, TRIXX, QUIREBOYS and DOGS D'AMOUR neither of these can really be mentioned in the same breath as KIX. Ask Pepsi Tate how good this band is? Ask Bret Michaels? With such masterpieces as "No Rings Around Rosie", "Red Light, Green Light TNT", "Don't Close Your Eyes" and "Blow My Fuse" KIX have got to be the U.S.'s best kept secret. I recently spoke to vocalist Steve Whiteman. "Wow man, I'm completely burnt out, we just shot our video today for "Cold Blood". Video making is not easy. There's more money going into this band than ever before. The record company is finally showing interest In us after three LP's. They're determined to break us this time." So tell me about the record? "Well it's called "Blow My Fuse" it's got ten new cuts that we have worked damned hard on. We've been in L.A. since April 19th. We did pre-production with Tom Werman. We went into the studio with him, Duane Baron and John Purdell. These guys co-produced and Tom was executive producer. The album turned out real good. I mean, this one Is a real KIX album. There wasn't a load of outside help this time or people saying you need to do this or you need to do that. It was pretty much our album. Those guys just let us have it and they were great to work with. It's in the same vain as "Midnite Dynamite". It's got the same energy and the big choruses are there. There's a couple of real smokers on it. "Don't Close Your Eyes" is the ballad. We re-cut "No Rings Around Rosie". We released a teaser promo 12" a couple of weeks ago of the song "She Dropped Me The Bomb". It's like the No.1 HM song on all the metal stations at the moment and It's getting a lot of attention. So like it's a massive KIX attack 'cos you had "No Rings Around Rosie" on the soundtrack to "Johnny B.Goode", then you got this promo 12" and now we're gonna be releasing our single "Cold Blood"." How do you think the band has progressed from the first LP to this one? "I think we're louder and stiffer now. I wanna talk some more on the LP (Yeah, so shut up and stop interrupting Kelv - Ed.). It kicks off with "Red Light, Green Light TNT", which is kind of a smoker. It's cool because it doesn't really have your giant chorus in it. It's different sounding than yer standard verse beat, section chorus. That's what we like about "...Rosie", it doesn't really have that standard thing either. We come from the school of the seventies and songs back then didn't have those big giant choruses in them. ""Get It While It's Hot" is next, that's a possible single too, the record company is real ecstatic about that. Then there's "No Rings Around Rosie", the ballad "Don't Close Your Eyes" and then there's the teaser track "She Dropped Me The Bomb". Side two opens with "Cold Blood" the single and the video, the second track is "Piece Of The Pie". "Boomerang" is next and we must have wrote that track about seven years ago. After all this time we decided to put it on this album 'cos it's a smoker. The title track follows that and finally we close with "Dirty Boys" which is a real heavy affair." So when will you be playing out live? "Well, we just got done rehearsing and we got ourselves a whole new stage show. First we're gonna play in L.A. we'll be doing The Roxy and the Country Club. Afterwards we're going up to San Francisco. We're gonna saturate this area as much as we can until the LP comes out, and then we're gonna tour across the country, until we see how the album is doing out of the box. Hopefully, it will do real well and then we will go out on a major tour. We're gonna play our way home to Maryland where we're from. There's also talk of us coming to the UK, that looks like being in January If it happens, but it all depends on the touring situation here. "At the moment, we're playing in L.A., we played with TAZ the other week. It looks like we are finally starting to take off on the L.A. circuit. So now it's not a lot of difference out here to us playing back home. We are now popular on the club circuit from L.A. to Florida to North Carolina." What bands do you like in L.A.? "Well, we saw a real good band the other day. I think they were called LITTLE CEASERS, they wrote good songs and they looked real good. I would imagine they will be signed real soon. The style has changed since we came out here the first time. Everybody then was looking like Glam city. Now they all look like GUNS N'ROSES. I guess they all follow the trend. Whatever s big is what they all wanna become. I myself am influenced by Robert Plant, Alice Cooper and Mark Farner. Steve Tyler and Mick Jagger are in there as well." I tell Steve about there being an interest in the early KIX LP's since GUNS N'ROSES made it. It's gonna be weird if KIX make it now because it's gonna look like they're a new band. "Well, we've been going now close on ten years. If this LP takes off I can see "Midnite Dynamite" starting off again as well. That really was a cool album and it should have done better than it did. I think the main problem before was that we never had proper management. Now we've got Mark Puma who broke TWISTED SISTER, so there should be no problems this time. As far as our second album goes, that was weird for us, they were trying to change our direction, this was at the time back in '83 when radio completely sucked. They wanted us to go on the radio, so they made us do all this dumb material. This was our manager, producer and our record company. We had a major fight and we lost. We had to make that album for them, but it didn't work. Atlantic picked up the option on the new album because we have a big regional following. They're making money but they're not killing." I would have thought that with videos for "Midnite Dynamite" and "Cold Shower", had MTV played them more, then the third LP would have taken off big time. "MTV played the "...Dynamite" video as a favour. We made that video ourself, we spent five thousand dollars and hired a crew that did it for nothing - it was just a chance for them to get their work on MTV. We did the video at a college called St.Marys in Maryland. It was real funny 'cos we were doing a show that night, so we charged people to come in and be part of our video. The kids wound up paying for the video. It worked out great because we did get on MTV, it was only played for six weeks, but it helped keep the band's name alive." Tell me about playing live? How does the band work live? "We play a lot of stuff from the first, third and the fourth LP's. I don't think we do anything from the second album. Off the first LP we do "Poison", "Atomic Bombs" and "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" featuring the full rap (see intro). That rap was off a live tape that I took to shop the band. When we got signed they insisted we keep the original rap. So when we went in the studio we wrote it all down and added the crowd later." How did you come to do the "Johnny B. Goode" soundtrack? "It was through Atlantic's A&R department and a guy called Richard Steinberg. He phoned us up and told us about the soundtrack and as we hadn't released anything for a while it would be great for us to get us out there. We jumped on it. It was one of those newer songs we had written and we just threw it on there and everybody loved it. The movie sucks. I heard it's a piece of shit." So there you have it, I urge you not to let his band die. Go out and grab "Blow Your Fuse" and see some real KIX arse rock! 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