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| Featured Altco Recordings artist - Kern Richards |
“I did one-night stands in old motels; I did overnights for vagrancy; a trespasser on common ground; an exile searching for a vacancy.
“From L.A. streets to Illinois roads he was leaving
constantly to find the road his heart could feel but his eyes just
couldn’t see. He left a trail of notes behind, they all said ten more
miles and you’ll be fine. Man, you can leave your past behind, just ten
more miles and you’ll be fine.” – verses from Kern Richards’ song, “10 More Miles,” re-released in February by 2014 by the folks at ALTCO Recordings.
Ten more miles and you’ll be fine, you can’t leave your
past behind. Those two thoughts set the tone for the music of Kern
Richards and for many of our lives. It’s not just a concept for a song.
It’s how we live and how we have to live, how humanity as a whole must
think and act in order to keep wading through the decades. It’s just…the
truth.
And truth makes the music that lasts, that echoes through
the ages, and finding that vein of brutal reality is the lynchpin of
real art in whatever form it may take. It rings especially true in
America where the ethos of the road forms so much of our cultural
fabric. That’s why Richards’ music hits especially hard for those who
call the road home, be they truckers, bikers, musicians and those of us
who don’t seem able to just settle in one space and call it home.
Under The Piano To Those West Coast Highways
Richards grew up in Garden Grove, Calif., in Orange County
right up against Long Beach. Like so many of us who love
Americana/Muddy Roots music, his childhood was a protracted period of
varied musical influences. His early listening was sandwiched between
sitting under a piano while his concert-level pianist mother played
classical music and hearing Johnny Cash on the radio controlled by his
father.
“Dad grew up in a town called Camp Six in Wyoming in the
oil fields,” recalls Richards. “The oil companies would plant a town
where they had wells but it was all wood frame houses they could put up
and tear down quickly. He grew up listening to Hank Williams, Sr.
“I guess that’s how I developed, going back and forth
between hearing classic country on the radio and listening to my mom
practice. She was a highly talented pianist on track to go to Juilliard
but stopped to have a family. I was drawn to her music. I would sit
under the piano and ask her to play songs and I think that put music
into my subconscious. My parents also had a collection of folk music
albums that I’d play the hell out of, like The Clancy Brothers. I still
have a lot of their stuff and I’m an amalgamation of all those kinds of
music: classical, country and folk.”
He played his first show at a local old folks home with
his brother and sister when he was nine years old, his pay a Coke bought
for he and his siblings by the nuns who ran the place and it just grew
from there. “I started playing in about 1980 with a hardcore Orange
County punk band, Pig Children, and did that for several years,” says
Richards. “I didn’t have a lot of creative input into that band and,
when I left, I spent a few years processing what I was actually going to
do and then I started playing at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood,
one of the regular stops for country players on the West Coast and just
started branching out from there. I started writing shortly after that.”
From Doing It On His Own To Hearing What Others Had To Say
Richards released his most recent album, ‘Anywhere But
Home,’ about two years ago and then ALTCO Recordings, an offshoot of
Rusty Knuckles founded by Stevie Tombstone, re-released the album in
February, 2014. That re-release was more than rehashing older material,
it was the first time in his career that Richards relinquished some
control over his songs and learned how to accept feedback from his
producer and other musicians. “The new direction was getting other
people involved,” says Richards. “For a long time, I didn’t have anybody
else in on the process, so to have someone tell me to change things
here and there, it wasn’t easy. For a long time I didn’t do well with
other people and wasn’t very easy to work with. Finally, I realized I
needed to have more people involved and, though I maintained most of the
control, I had to learn to let go and listen to feedback. I ended up
with 95 percent of what I wanted but a certain amount needed to change
if I was going to play well with others.
“Before that, it was a completely closed circle and I
spent about two months with them getting in my ear and they presented me
with the bad news that I wasn’t playing in time and it really pissed me
off. I wanted to punch somebody and couldn’t figure out who to punch. I
was sure they were wrong and I listened to it over and over and over.
“It kept bugging me: why would three different guys all
tell me I’m not playing in time? Then, one day, it clicked,” says
Richards. “I had been sleeping with a metronome under my pillow to get a
sense of solid timing. I kept listening and listening and then, one
day, I realized I’m not playing in time. I’m playing all over the
fucking place. And then my playing got a lot better, including my
ability to hear and play with other people. I was doing something so
singular that if I was playing solo and needed to speed up I would just
speed up for effect or to get a point across.
“I realized I could still do that playing solo but I had
to tighten the reins and, eventually, I went in and re-recorded my
guitar tracks,” he says, looking back and realizing he surrendered to
that process and chose those specific people to give him a hard time for
a reason. “I deliberately chose all people who were better than me in
hopes that I would get better and it’s made me work a lot harder.”
Still, his inner musician was there from the start. “You can fix the
technical stuff, you can’t fix boring,” he says, rightly so.
As far as classifying his music, Richards defaults to
calling it Americana, “which is kinda tough because all genres end up
getting consumed within that. I always thought of it as folk music but
Stevie [Tombstone] calls it country. It really is a mix of everything
I’ve listened to: classical, folk, country and blues. I was telling
somebody not too long ago that I do folk music and they asked if I know
anything by Peter, Paul and Mary, but that’s not what I do. Nowadays,
everything is so fractured it’s hard to come up with a definition of
what I do so I kinda like to default to Americana but I got punk in what
I do,” says Richards, who has stayed true to his inner voices (and
demons), and garnered a loyal following for that reason. “People that
listen to me seem to hang on, I see them again and again. People that
come in and don’t listen, I don’t have that much luck with those
people,” says Richards. “I’ve had a lot of support building slowly. Like
I said, the people that take the time to listen seem to stay interested
and I appreciate the hell out of that.”
Next Step: More Collaboration & The Road
Those pivotal steps in his musical evolution completed,
Richards now plans to play around the country as much as possible and to
start working on new material, including possibly collaborating with
Tombstone. “I don’t cover a lot of people but I cover ‘Kevlar Heart’ and
started that before I knew who Stevie was and somehow got a copy of his
album, ‘7:30 A.M.’ I had, maybe five years ago, went to Stevie’s show
and had gotten a copy of a demo from Tex of Tex and the Horse Heads. It
had become one of my favorite albums to listen to and I started talking
to Stevie about it and it turned out he had produced the album.
“We didn’t see each other for a while after that, then he
came out and did a California tour and I set up one of his shows, then
didn’t hear from him again for several months. He hits me up in November
of 2013 and says, ‘Hey, I got this new record company I’m putting
together and I want you on it.’ So, after all the bashing my head
against the wall, this turned out to be really easy. It just came about
because he liked what he heard at the show and I guess he was scouting
out people for his new label, so pretty much he called and that was it.”
As far as touring, Richards is working on a bottom-to-top
West Coast tour from L.A. to Canada. “I’m not stopping, I’m not going to
quit. I’m not worried about filling a space. It’s just something I do
and have always done.” And here’s hoping he keeps on doing just that for
a long time to come.
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| Kern Richards featured on MoonRunners |
