SOUNDTRACK: KING’S X-Live Love in London (2010).
King’s X released their most recent studio album (XV) in 2008. It’s been over 11 years since that album came out, but King’s X still tours pretty much all of the time. They could stand to mix up their setlists a bit from time to time, but they still sound quite good.
This concert was recorded on January 22nd, 2009 at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, London, not long after XV came out. As such, there’s five songs from that album. I actually thought that XV was a pretty great record and these songs hold up quite well with the rest of them.
This show starts, as pretty much all shows do since 1998 with “Groove Machine.” The opening of “Welcome to the Groove Machine” is a pretty terrific way to introduce everyone to the show. There’s a slightly extended drum solo in the middle of the song, but nothing too crazy.
It’s followed by a new song, “Alright.” It features some noisy, squeaky guitars from Ty and is really catchy in it’s simplicity: “one day, (one day) it’s gonna be, (it’s gonna be) alright, (alright) alright, (alright).” It’s a great singalong.
They quickly jump back to a popular older song, the quiet “Pleiades” although Ty’s vocals sound a little rough on it. Back to the new record with “Move,” a suitably heavy song, although “What is This?” from the debut sounds much heavier. You can tell that the band has played this song a lot because dUg is taking liberties with the lyrics: “make you look so fucking foolish.” And lots of screaming. Ty’s guitar solo is pretty epic.
Then they play two songs in a row from the King’s X album. Up first is the quieter, grooving “Lost in Germany.” Then comes the hugely popular “Black Flag.”
There’s a slightly lengthy bass intro as the band sets up for the new, absolutely rocking song “Pray,” in which dUg once again grapples with religion. This is another great chanting sing along.
The crowd is excited for the older hit “Dogman” with some more noisy guitars from Ty. dUg also makes his first reference to pot: after the line “give me a skinny or give me a fat,” he says “I smoke em fat.”
Then there’s two new songs in a row, yet another great sing-along” Go Tell Somebody.” It’s a rollicking song that sums up the King’s X ethos pretty well: “if you like what you hear, go tell somebody.” It leads into the quieter, Jerry Gaskill-sung “Julie” a nice song to his wife. That’s it for new songs as they head back to older albums from here on out.
The first one is the only song from Ear Candy, the rocking “Looking for Love.” It’s interesting when Ty plays his solo how much the rest of the sound goes away–its just bass and drums while Ty totally wails–a rather long solo for a 4 minute song. The crowd goes crazy for “Summerland” and you can hear them all singing along to the final verse including the slight pause before it resumes. The crowd is incredibly important at a King;s X show and it is a bit of a shame that the crowd is mixed out of this recording (I assume it’s a sound board and therefore hard to include the crowd). But it’s really great to hear them sing along. Apparently there is also a lot of chanting and such that is edited out for the CD, which makes sense, but is a bit of a bummer if you want to really capture the energy of the show. At one point dUg even says, “I’ve been listening to you sing all night and its alright.”
They end the set with a rousing 12 minute “Over My Head.” The extended part comes in the middle, of course. The song slows down, the crowd starts clapping, and Ty plays a really impressive solo–just wailing around for almost 3 minutes. Then it’s dUg’s turn. “Welcome to the first church of rock n roll.” He talks about the importance of music, “Music got me through a lot of hard times.” In almost every show he tells a different anecdote. This time he says, “My aunt told me … its a terrible thing for a man to do the thing he don’t wanna do for the rest of his life. I decided I’m gonna make fucking music.” The audience then sings the chorus pretty much through to the end of the song.
Then it’s time for the encore. (The encore breaks are not evident on the CD).
dUg says, “This is gonna be a long encore.” It starts with two songs from Faith Hope Love. “It’s Love” was probably their biggest hit. The song sounds great, although truthfully their impeccable harmonies sound a little tired here. It segues perfectly in to “We Were Born to Be Loved” one of the great show enders. This version runs to about six minutes with some extended moments and that awesomely complex ending sequence.
They come back out for encore 2 and play the lovely “Goldilox.” The big difference this time is that the crowd sings the entire song! Quite well, in fact. dUg doesn’t sing anything and Ty only plays loud between verses. It’s pretty cool. They stay with the debut album for one more song, “Visions” which returns to the heaviness but keeps the harmonies. The end part really takes off with some wild soloing from Ty as dUg and Jerry jam out together. It’s a wonderfully wild ending and seems like it could easily end the show. But the band isn’t quite done yet.
There’s one more encore break before they come back with the wild “Moanjam.” The harmonies seem to have completely lost them by this time, but musically the song is outstanding. Just a terrific jam that rocks out.
King’s X is a fantastic live band. And, yes, they are getting older and don’t sound as amazing as they once did, but the energy and musicianship is still top-notch, even almost ten years after this release.
[READ: February 2019] King’s X: The Oral History
Even though I love music, I don’t read a ton of books about musicians. I kind of don’t care all that much about most of them. I want to see and hear you play, but I don’t have that much curiosity about your history.
But some bands defy the tropes of rock, and their story can often be interesting.
I’ve been a fan of King’s X for decades and while I knew some things about them, it turns out I didn’t really know all that much. And it was fun to read this book which is constructed of quotes from the band and the people who were around them.
Most of the people interviewed are huge fans of the band and can’t understand why they were never more successful (a common question). I also had no idea there was such acrimony between the band and their original unofficial fourth member, Sam Taylor (who does not make an appearance in the book).
Perhaps the biggest surprise to me was to find out that Doug (dUg) Pinnick is 68 years old! That certainly explains why his voice doesn’t sound superlative live anymore. And fair play to him. He sounds amazing for 68. He is otherwise ageless, that guy. dUg had a pretty rough upbringing–and he didn’t get a bass until he was 23!
Jerry Gaskill has had two heart attacks (!) and is from South NJ (and now lives near Asbury Park–wow, imagine running into him). He started a band with his dad and his brother when he was 7 years old (Jerry & The Knights). And they played out at weddings and parties. How fun is that?
Ty Tabor is the baby at 58. Ty learned guitar from a babysitter and has been playing ever since. He and others keep referring to Phil Keaggy. I had never heard of him and was surprised at Ty’s reverence. Well, Keaggy is an adult Christian musician so clearly I’d never have heard of him. I listened to a track or two but just couldn’t get past the Christianness of it to really appreciate the music.
This book runs through the history of King’s X. It’s interesting that there’s more information about their earlier more popular years and so much less about their middle years. I realize that the middle years are less popular but that’s kind of the period I’m most interested in. But I guess since they were less popular, there’s less opinion about them.
Each chapter is set up with a band member (or someone else) giving their version of things. Prato doesn’t really add his own ideas. So “Beginnings” is told by Doug, Jerry and Ty and their early exposure to music.
Chapter 2 is about how they met and started playing music together. This story is also told by those three. Then we learn of their pre-King’s X bands The Edge (which they changed once U2 started to take off) and Sneak Preview (from The Edge they became Sneak Preview–they changed their look and name and flopped hard. People hated the name!). There were nights where they played to three people who were ignoring them. Ty tells a hilariously juvenile story of being mad at the crowd for ignoring them, so he got a digital delay and made a fart sound in it and every time it looped to the fart sound he faced his butt at them. They never noticed.
They moved to Houston to be the backing band for an artist Morgan Cryar. They had an album on StarSong, a Christian label. After doing that, Ty said he would never write another formulaic song again. King’s X was not a Christian band and they knew the pitfalls of being perceived as one. It was while in Texas that they met Sam Taylor–th video producer for ZZ Top.
The guys all admit that they never liked the name King’s X. Doug: “I never liked the name–ever, ever, ever.” Sam suggested it… maybe his brother was in a band with that name?
Sam sent a demo to Megaforce in 1987 and they signed Kings X (Jon and Marsha Zazula talk about how much they love the band). Eddie Trunk (who worked at Megaforce) is included in the book well–he is a mega-fan. As is Charlie Benanate from Anthrax.
The band talks extensively about recording Out of the Silent Planet and Gretchen Goes to Nebraska including track by track details and the resulting tours. The chapters are full of fans (Mick Mars, Billy Sheehan, Jeff Ament, Mike Portnoy, John Myung) talking about how much they loved each album
Things were getting bigger as they approached Faith Hope Love. Doug Seems to hate all of their early recording sessions. Sam Taylor added so many details and small pieces (which I love) but Doug especially felt the sessions were tedious and wasting too much time.
Their tour stories from this time are bad. They can’t seem to make any money. They keep being told that they are on the verge, but they never see success. A big interview with Rolling Stone is marred because its all about Christianity.
Then they find out that Sam Taylor was ripping them off. At the time of this writing, the guys and Sam do not speak–they had an understandably huge falling out. Jerry is the most generous about it. He says Sam helped them, motivated them and brought out the best in them… “but at one point, I realized there’s a lot of money going to Sam’s company…and we never saw it.” He was making like $30,000 a month and giving them like $300 a week. They say there were times when they couldn’t make rent. When they were eating ramen noodles. And yet Sam was driving a fancy car. When they confronted him about this, he quit.
Then came the King’s X album. Doug says most of their songs were nearly complete demos and the band just recorded them. They played on The Dennis Miller show [see here] the night of the Rodney King incident and they were pretty close to the incident–they could see the city on fire.
Ty said he was unhappy when they recorded Dogman. The band was really insecure for this album. The sound and vibe changed dramatically for this album. They did it on purpose–they wanted to stop imitating themselves.
Jeff Ament says King’s X are a band that baffles as to why they’re not bigger than they are. King’s X opened for Pearl Jam at seven shows in 1994. They played The Jon Stewart Show as well [see here].
Then they all cut their hair and made Ear Candy–they felt pressure to make singles for this album so they called it that. Around this time Doug came out as gay.
They were dropped from Atlantic and started having fun again. This is the era where there’s no all that much about them. In the earlier chapters, when they were buzz worthy, there was a lot of press about the. But in this era, they were almost forgotten, so there’s very little information. It also seems like some old school fans started to question them as well.
But they didn’t care, because they were finally having fun. Tapehead was fun to make. Doug also made a Poundhound album. They wanted to make music for themselves and without being attached to a major label, they all felt free to do what they wanted. Hence, Please Come Home… Mr Bulbous. About this title they said, “It doesn’t matter what we call it, so lets call it something completely ridiculous.” Doug says he’s proud of that album because it’s an experiment. He said let’s take our drop B guitars and drop them down to A and write an album of some of the most fucked up chord progressions we can come up with.
Manic Moonlight is controversial because of the drum loops. Old fans didn’t like it but new fans were really into it. They followed this one with Black Like Sunday a collection of songs they wrote before they were King’s X. Each on of these albums is given a track by track explanation from one or all of the guys in the band. Some albums have more information and some it seems like the guys have very little to say about them.
They also recorded a live album. The In Concert chapter talks to all kinds of people who have loved them live.
For Ogre Tones, they used produced Michael Wagener who complimented them on playing everything live and almos everything was a keeper. They say he was fun and funny but also meticulous. They also turned away from their more experimental stuff and returned to straight up rock and roll for this album.
Jerry says he felt like XV might be a kind of revival for King’s X but it turned out to be “just another King’s X record.” Ty feels like Doug and Jerry’s heads weren’t into the album as much.
There’s a chapter about Molken Music a label that specializes in King’s X-related music: demos, live recordings and solo material.
The final chapter looks at what they are doing today. They tour a lot, but Jerry says he doesn’t survive on King’s X music. He works for a company called MedForce. Doug says he makes money from side projects and guest appearances. Ty says he makes money from his Alien Beans studio. It also seems that there isn’t likely to be another new King’s X album.
The book ends with two questions for all of the participants in the book (and there are a lot more than I listed).
Why didn’t Kings X end up being huge?
and
Does their music hold up today?
The answer to the second one is universally Yes. The answer to the first one is a lot more complicated.
This book really isn’t for those unfamiliar with the band. It’s pretty in depth and for fans. Also, unlike a lot of band memoirs, there’s not a lot of crazy stories about these guys. No stories of groupies and drugs and near death experiences–just Jerry’s heart attacks (he’s doing much better). But if you like the band at all, read the book. And go tell somebody.
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