ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JUNE 9, 1989
By Steve Newton
Kevn Kinney is the lead vocalist, chief songwriter, and coguitarist for Atlanta, Georgia’s Drivin’ n’ Cryin’, but he’s as surprised as anyone that he’s even ended up in a band.
As he explained to me from Oklahoma City last week, Kinney was the odd man out in a musical family from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“The only person who wasn’t musical was me,” says the 28-year-old tunesmith. “I was gonna be a bowling champion. It wasn’t till I became an angst-ridden teenager that I decided I should try to play a tune.”
Kinney got his start in music in a punk-inspired combo called the Prosecutors, which gained some local fame in Milwaukee. In 1982 he moved southward to Atlanta, where he worked on a construction crew for three years before joining forces with another transplanted midwesterner, Minneapolis-born bassist Tim Nielsen. The two just got together to play some country songs in a friend’s basement.
“We’d both been in bands where it’s like, ‘This band does this kind of music’, and any song you would do would go in the band machine and come out sounding like the ‘band’. So we were havin’ fun just doing songs that sounded like songs–where the songs took the personality over the ‘the band’. So we followed that idea, and played around Atlanta and became a minor hit.”
Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ released its 1986 debut album, Scarred But Smarter, on Atlanta’s independent 688 label, and became somewhat of an underground and alternative fave (a recent Rolling Stone poll of college-radio programmers found the band in the top 10 of American groups most likely to succeed in 1989).
Former Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ roadie Jeff Sullivan graduated to the band’s drum set just in time for the recording of its second album, Whisper Tames the Lion, in the fall of ’87. The current lineup was solidified when former R.E.M. guitar technician and occasional second guitarist Buren Fowler joined up to play on the band’s latest album, Mystery Road.
Now signed to the heavyweight Island Records label, D n’ C is taking its wide-ranging blend of musical styles to the people on a tour that includes only one Canadian date–this Tuesday (June 13) at the Town Pump.
On the new album the band covers everything from folksy county to punkish raunch, and if you like the rootsy, guitar-based feel of a band like Blue Rodeo, the local date by Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ should definitely be penciled in on your calendar.
Kinney’s band has toured with the Georgia Satellites and last year backed up the Church on a European road trip. The Mystery Road tour started at the end of March, and will carry on till June. Kinney explains that being on the road has its good and bad sides.
“I like being on the road,” he says. “I like looking at things and meeting new people and drivin’ around, listening to John Denver and Bob Dylan. But besides that, I’ve got a wife and two-year-old, and I miss them.”
Kinney’s strong family ties led him to get his brother Mikel Kinney to play “mountain” fiddle on Mystery Road‘s barnyard-style opener “Aint’ it Strange”. And he also used a painting of his grandmother’s from 1963 for the LP’s cover art.
“I didn’t even know the painting existed,” says Kinney. “My mother got remarried this year, and I just went up to the old house to look around. I was looking through some boxes, and I found this painting. So we took two slides of the painting, and then just flipped them over and stuck ’em together, so it looks kind of like a reflection.”
In closing I asked the one-“i”-ed Kevn Kinney about the story behind the unusual spelling of his first name.
“I just took the “i” out when I was a little punk rocker,” he says, “and never bothered to put it back in. It had too many vowels anyway.”
To hear the full audio of my 1989 interview with Kevn Kinney subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 350 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with:
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