Careering with Cowboy Nation
Some radical ideas from Chip and Tony Kinman on the eve of Stagecoach - Coachella's spin-off fest s
By Cole Coonce
Back in the last days of dinosaurs roaming the earth and during the foaming crest of the first wave of new wave, Chip and Tony Kinman, two lanky teenagers from Oceanside, put down their Mott the Hoople records and started a CCCP-centric punk-rock band, the Dils. They put out some seven-inch singles ("I Hate the Rich," "Class War") and had a cameo in the first Cheech and Chong movie.
Three decades later, not long before their appearance at Stagecoach - Coachella's country-music spin-off, debuting May 5-6 at the Empire Polo Field - the Kinmans' musical endeavors are filed under the nom de guerre Cowboy Nation, a musical act whose spirit and ethos speak of lonely existential moments spent around a campfire, drinking bitter coffee out of a rusty cup, and contemplating the resumption of an exhaustive cattle drive in the morning.
One night in a year between the Dils and Cowboy Nation, Chip and Tony are on an empty interstate highway somewhere between Coalinga and Buttonwillow. They make and pass time in an aging commuter cargo van purchased a decade before with lucre from record-label advances and publishing royalties, which trickled in from their then-previous stint as Rank and File. RAF was a once-popular honky-tonk quartet that charted with a couple of nifty shit-kicker tunes. ("Amanda Ruth" and "Coyote" are perhaps the most memorable.) Later, musical historians will cite the Kinmans' Rank and File as the pioneers of what is now called "alt-country," a subgenre amply represented at the impending Stagecoach.
Anyhoo, Chip and Tony have rejiggered genres again, by hitching their musical horses at the trading post of career change, where they swapped their spurs and saddles for distortion boxes, Echoplexes, and drum machines. Motoring through the San Joaquin Valley, having just finished a Left Coast tour sharing a bill with the Jesus and Mary Chain, they are no longer the Dils nor Rank and File, but are now known as Blackbird - named, not in reference to the Paul McCartney ditty, but in homage to the pet name of the SR-71, a sexy, stealth hypersonic Cold War spy plane. (Which is appropriate, as they sound a lot more like spinning turbine blades of a jet engine than a Beatles ballad.) In the van, the topic of conversation is "change," specifically as applied to the Kinmans' own career arc and the Last Days of Rank and File.
Chip Kinman, thin, blond, Spicoli-immaculate guitar-slingin' urban beach bum, talks of the inherent risk/reward ratio when shedding one's musical skin. He speaks of how stunned the punks were when the brothers changed into country & Western musicians, and how things were good for a couple of years, what with records charting reasonably well, international tours, and critical and popular acclaim as the more open-minded punk rockers began giving props to Chip and Tony's attempt to establish themselves as troubadours in the Great American tradition of proper Honky Tonk music, as laid down by Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell, and Tom T. Hall, et al.
Then, as the band blew through a couple of key members (among them Alejandro Escovedo and Junior Brown, both of whom are heading combos at Stagecoach), things got as sour as the stomach of a cowpoke who chowed down on a few too many rattlesnake fritters.
Chip says, "We'd get to a gig - say, in Lincoln, Nebraska, or somewhere - and we'd pull up to the club, and there would be fewer cars in the parking lot than there was during sound check."
It is suggested that Rank and File was of its time only for a moment, but was also ahead of its time - and behind it, too.
Chip is having none of this space-time shifting, zeitgeist-banging nonsense. "I was right then, and I am right now," he says.
.............................................
And maybe Chip was right about being right then and right now. And maybe he is right again, now. Because somehow, by hook and by crook, the musical fashions have dovetailed with the Bros. Kinman. Again. This time as Cowboy Nation.
Tony, the taller, more brooding basso profundo Kinman, isn't so sure. During a recent chat, when asked about Cowboy Nation's relationship to what is being staged at Stagecoach, he responded, "Cowboy Nation doesn't fit into the current country scene at all." (Emphasis his.)
Why not?
"The current country scene consists of large platinum-selling stadium acts of varying quality and acts either on the way up or on the way down within this
corporate scheme." ? 28
I ask him to differentiate Cowboy Nation from his old alma matter, Rank and File, as well as the rest of the Stagecoach lineup (George Strait, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, Earl Scruggs, the Drive-By Truckers, and two dozen others - many, though not all, of whom seem to fit Kinman's portrayal), and he becomes uncharacteristically laconic.
"Discussion of 'musical content' is pointless," he says tersely.
When pressed, however, he relents, and points out that the lines have been drawn between his "cowboy" music and the contemporary country scene.
"Musically and thematically, Cowboy Nation is an extremely distilled version of Rank and File," he says. "The music is minimalist, and the theme is cowboy-slash-Western. No snare drum, mandolin, steel guitar, trucker hat, or redneck shit. No country crap, whether alt or stadium."
Wow. I ask why this reaction to the country scene, when he and Chip - along with Alejandro and Brown - were rather integral to keeping it "in the mix," so to speak. He responds, "Rank and File labored to bring forth the alt-country scene in 1981, and then, exhausted, left it to others to effect completion." A bittersweet accomplishment apparently, as he elaborates: "And what a mistake that was for the world."
Hmmm ... and, to borrow a phrase, "mistakes were made," it seems. But how, exactly? I ask Tony to sum up the taxonomy of his career - the hows and whys and aesthetic segues from the Dils to Rank and File to Blackbird to Cowboy Nation to ... ?
"Chip and Al and I started Rank and File to play country music in a different way, bringing punk-rock aesthetics and passion into the sound," he recounts. "We did well, for a while, inventing alt-country along the way, and fell apart in time for Blackbird to take flight as a drum-machine-driven, distortion-wave pile of mess - the most fun band I was ever in. This led, logically, to Cowboy Nation."
What? How? (The mind boggles.)
"The common thread has been honesty and a pretty simple approach to what we're about," Tony ascertains. "Perhaps you can't be one without the other: honest and simple! The sounds change, but we don't. We don't give a shit, and we never will."
Such artistic defiance is certainly the old-school punk-rock ethos (not to mention the outlaw-country one), as practiced by the Dils and their comrades. And if punk rock laid down a foundation for those of us who either contemplate or chose to stick to our guns, and if Rank and File begat sundry acts of the alt-country persuasion (which, again, is a "mistake" according to Kinman), what will Cowboy Nation's legacy be, Tony?
"Cowboy Nation nails our theses to the door and may start a reformation," Tony surmises. "Who knows? Who cares?"
His brother is even less concerned with legacy issues. "It's all good," Chip concludes.
Published: 04/26/2007
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