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Kip Winger
Interview
by Kara Uhrlen |
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Although there have been rumors of a Winger reunion, Kip Winger says that he is
really on the path that he wants to be on. Since he is driven by personal and
musical growth he really "can't think of a reason to do it," even with the rest
of the band pushing for it.
"Rock stardom and all that stuff like that was never like my main M.O., my main
M.O. is musical growth, and if I become a rock star in the process, great! If it
doesn't happen 'cause my shit is too 'out there' and people don't get it fine.
I'm not financially insecure anymore either so I don't have to sit there and get
on the latest Poison tour just to make money, which is what a lot of them are
doing…"
Winger adds that should he reunite with the band, it would simply be because he
likes playing with those guys, but there would be a few stipulations. He says,
"I wouldn't do just a tour, it would have to be an album, and the album would
have to beat Pull. To actually put the time and energy into an album that would
be better than Pull would be a hell of a lot of work, because I took that band
really seriously, way more seriously than people took us. If you go back and
listen to the records, you can hear it."
He also explained that he'd have to have a vision of what the album was. "God
would have to beam into me what I was doing and what the album actually sounded
like because usually when I start a project like that, I already know what the
album sounds like before I start it."
"Rainbow is where we were going. 'In the Heart of the Young,' that song, and
'Rainbow in the Rose' -- If I was going to do a new album, it would be almost
like - I can't imagine even not making it conceptual -- musically it would have
to go in that direction. I mean, I'd write some pop songs for it, but the band
is too good to just do ten pop songs, we'd have to do f*cking a night at the
opera or something."
In retrospect, Winger says that what the band became and was always trying to be
was Pull (Atlantic). For that album, he and guitarist Reb Beach wrote the record
and then everybody played on it. And though Paul Taylor was a great songwriter,
his style would be harder to work into a new Winger album, because Winger is not
what they were when we did songs like "Miles Away," which he says was actually
ten years old by the time it was released.
He says that Taylor was a strong force in the beginning, because he was in Alice
Cooper with Winger and the two had teamed up with Cooper drummer Ken Mary (House
of Lords) to form a band which eventually led to the formation of Winger along
with Beach and Dixie Dregs drummer Rod Morgenstein. But, Taylor later had parted
with the band because "he started to move on and we were like kind of in a
different mode and he was sick of touring and didn't want to do it." In his
absence, John Roth had toured with the band, and consequently, Winger says that
his incarnation of the band live would have to include all five members. Yet, he
stresses that he and Beach were really the force behind the band.
"The band was our songs and his guitar playing and my singing, that's really
what the band was all about. And then you add the next thing down on the ladder
which was Rod's drumming, which was very unique and musical, kind of progressive
rock."
After the band stopped making records several years ago, Winger embarked on a
solo career, which brought him back to his early influences, namely, Peter
Gabriel, early Duran Duran, and other early pop stuff that came out of England
that was "really kind of groovy and beat oriented."
"I was just going more for what I've always been influenced by, European music,"
and "the heavy metal thing only clicked in for me when I was growing up."
"I was really into Black Sabbath, but heavy guitars can really be very limiting,
it's a great frequency and it's great fun to listen to but on the other hand,
musically you can do a lot more without it. I was just returning to my roots and
going forward with the string writing trying to merge what I thought, when I was
a kid, made up good albums…I grew up on bands that had a lot of diversity - any
of the seventies bands, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Aerosmith -- any of those
bands -- an album was really an album. That's where my orientation comes from."
Before Winger, he had actually started out as a solo artist, but "just didn't
get a record deal." During that time, he wrote about 57 songs, including "In
Heart of the Young" which originally was much more like some of those eighties
bands like Tears for Fears, but eventually it became a Winger song that they
just rocked out more.
Had his career taken flight as a solo artist, he believes that it would have
changed things a lot, because the music would have been much more along the
lines of "Depeche Mode meets Gabriel." However, he says that the ultimate task
he has always been aiming at is writing orchestral music, and that's what he is
doing more and more now.
After his solo debut, This Conversation Seems Like a Dream (Domo), was released
in February of 1997, Winger toured in support of the album with his acoustic
guitar, doing about 110 shows in the U.S., Europe and Japan, with thirty-some
shows in Europe alone. He had a great response from acoustic shows, and says
that while the tour was stressful, he was playing very well by the end and that
made it a lot of fun.
"Our band was known to musicians, and a lot of musicians showed up to see me
play - watching trying to figure out how I'm playing - we were like the 'hair
band' Dream Theater -- That is why it's the great irony that we ended up on that
geeky guy's shirt on Beavis & Butthead, because Metallica couldn't play what we
play, they couldn't do it, they literally - technically couldn't do it. And I'll
f*cking challenge those chumps to that any day of the week that they couldn't go
back and play our shit, but we could play theirs with our hands tied behind our
back. And so, I was a little t'd off about that, but in the end, none of that
shit matters…"
As a result of his tour, Winger released an acoustic album including songs from
both his solo effort and from Winger. In Europe it is called Made By Hand
(Domo), in Japan it is called Another Way (Domo), and in the U.S. it is called
Down Incognito (Cleopatra). And now, his latest effort, Songs from the Ocean
Floor serves as the "obvious" follow-up to This Conversation Seems Like a Dream.
Winger explains that he really had to dig into the depths of himself to get this
album and it is almost like a concept album really. He stresses that "You can't
just listen to it once and get it, its kind of like you have to listen to it and
by the third and fourth time your gonna wake up hearing it in your head -- it
takes a while -- its challenging."
When asked to explain the album, Winger said, "Oh f*ck I can't describe it, it's
the answer to Conversation, it's a little more in your face, its not as
mysterious but its much more personal and I mean, come on I wrote it during the
hardest time in anyone's life…I had to take a dive into myself so far to
actually make this album. Its the pinnacle of facing yourself, for me, but in
the end I think people can relate to it."
Though there is no definite release date, Winger says that it should be
available towards the end of August, once the artwork and packaging has been
finalized, but in the meantime, fans can listen to sound bites on his site at
http://www.kipwinger.com.
Eventually, the album will be distributed in Europe, Japan, and the United
States, but the initial release will only be available through his Web site.
"It's a little bit more like I want to give this to the people that are really
into it first -- I don't have a lot of desire to be like Bon Jovi or something
like that, I really want to concentrate on the music."
He explains, "If I was going to get Sony records to give me a million dollars
for it, I would do that and go on tour and all that stuff. Major labels they're
not into me at all because the name is like - all they can remember is what I've
done, so I don't even want to deal with that. I don't want to have anything to
do with going, 'But, I'm this now'. I don't want to try to sell myself on that
level…I'd rather have ten thousand people really understand what I'm doing than
ten million people buying my sh!t because it's the fad of the month."
Though there is hope for a tour in the near future, Winger says that his main
objective is to get this album out first, "I've got a lot of interviews to do -
probably a couple months of press - I'd like to tour, but again, to tour my
music now would take a bigger band."
Homepage:
http://www.kipwinger.com |
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