It's also been a haven for people who play and enjoy the Telecaster, too." Never mind it's a great Duke Ellington jazz town. "It turned out to be a very good move, it's such a fertile musical scene, I didn't even realize how deep it ran - it's the Bluegrass Capital of the World, you have to say, for a city, and it's the whole post-War hillbilly boom that produced Jimmy Dean and Roy Clark and Patsy Cline, all those people came from there. To his great surprise - and pleasure - he found the Capitol region to be a musical hotbed as well. area became available in 1986, and he and wife Louise moved their family there.
The Airmen broke up in the late '70's, but Kirchen continued to be a part of the legendary San Francisco Bay music scene until some family farm property in the Washington, D.C. The album also features guest appearances by friends and sidekicks from the Cody days like Bobby Black (pedal steel) and Blackie Farrell (rhythm guitar). The Michigan native's new record features Kirchen's regular trio Too Much Fun (from the title of another Commander Cody hit): Johnny Castle (bass) and Jack O'Dell (drums), which leads Kirchen to wryly speculate in the liner notes that he is "the Kitty Wells of Dieselbilly." I moved out to California for a while, looked around in the late '60's, and thought, 'Shoot, we could do something out here' and was able to convince the rest of the guys to join me out there in '69." "We started the Commander Cody Band in Michigan in the '60's.
"I did the 'Go West, young man' thing," says Kirchen, speaking from his motel room in Houston in the middle of a tour to celebrate the release of his new HighTone album "Tied To The Wheel," a collection of no-holds-barred trucker and honky-tonk tunes both old and new. The song's monologue-like vocal recounting of a drag race was by George "Commander Cody" Frayne, but for many, it was Kirchen's turbo-charged, full-tilt Telecaster boogie that stole the show and made the record an instant classic (again). One of the biggest surprises on the charts - both country and pop - of 1972 was a remake of Johnny Bond's 1960 roadhouse classic "Hot Rod Lincoln" by a previously obscure band that, as their name suggested, seemed to have appeared out of nowhere from the depths of space - Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
Lanky, bespectacled and now fiftysomething, Bill Kirchen looks a lot more like the shy, slightly absent-minded science teacher we all seem to have encountered somewhere along the way in junior high, and his slow, deep, folksy voice certainly doesn't suggest the presence of a country-rock legend, a certified Guitar God, but for more than 30 years now Kirchen has been as much an icon in his music - he calls it "Dieselbilly" - as Clapton and Santana have been in theirs.
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