Punk trailblazer Chip Kinman keeps surprising
The Dils co-founder turns to electronic soundscapes with `The Great Confrontation'
Founded by two brothers who played hard and fast music with in-your-face political songs like “I Hate the Rich” and “Class War,” The Dils were at the forefront of the West Coast punk movement of the late 1970s.
Brothers Tony and Chip Kinman and their Dils bandmates played rambunctious shows alongside The Germs, The Zeros and The Clash before the siblings moved on to other genres as Rank and File and Blackbird.
Now, Chip Kinman, 64, a restless artistic soul who has always aimed to do what he wants musically no matter how unexpected, turns to the synthesizer for his new album, “The Great Confrontation.”
It's perhaps the most unexpected musical direction for Chip Kinman, and possibly a move that's as punk as it gets.
“This is what I do. And what's the point of being Chip Kinman if I can't make a record like that?” said the Burbank resident during a phone interview. “It certainly is a great confrontation musically. It will confront you.”
Released this month, the 11-track electronic music album is the latest twist in a career that has spanned genres from punk to country and industrial to the blues.
“I'm keeping in the ethic that I brought to my music starting in the '70s. It was something different, something that pushes music and pushes art and pushes my interest in it forward. I've never seen any reason to make music if you weren't doing that,” he said.
Not that weird
Chip Kinman is not looking to dethrone EDM stars like Kaskade or Diplo; his new album explores experimental electronic music and is full of moody and dark ambient soundscapes. There's no singing, just words spoken here and there.
“I think it's very challenging. I think it's a deep listen and it pays to listen to it from beginning to end because it will take you somewhere. After you listen to it a couple of times, it's simply not going to sound that weird,” Chip Kinman said.
The album was released on In the Red Records, a 30-year-old Los Angeles-based label founded by punk and garage rock music fan Larry Hardy and home to acts like The Linda Lindas, Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall.
Hardy signed Chip Kinman to his label just before the pandemic. As a fan of his music and aware of his unpredictable musical nature, Hardy gave the veteran musician carte blanche on the project. Still, Hardy says he hadn't expected the sound he got.
“Oh yeah, the record surprised me,” Hardy said. “But I love the record and I think it's really cool. It's not what I thought he was going to do but that's pretty awesome. If you look at his career, he was always changing things up from one project to the next, and I think this one happens to be a really radical change.
“To him that was very punk,” Hardy said. “And I agree.”
Not a creature of habit
Raised in Carlsbad, Chip Kinman and his brother Tony, who died of cancer in 2018, formed The Dils in 1976 shortly after graduating from Carlsbad High School.
While they started as a cover band playing songs by the New York Dolls and The Who, the brothers quickly began writing their own music with an unapologetic leftist slant.
“At the time, I was a teenage communist. We brought a political awareness to the scene,” Chip Kinman said.
The brothers moved to San Francisco in 1977 before relocating to Los Angeles, where they would become one of the leading bands in the city's rising punk movement before disbanding The Dils after five years.
“We felt like we had already done our `louder, faster, shorter' thing, so we thought about how we could expand this. We were always looking for something artistically challenging and forward moving,” he said.
Gone country
The brothers decided to go country and moved to Austin, Texas, to form their next band, Rank and File, which combined their punk spirit with country music to help spark a genre known as cowpunk.
“That was kind of the pattern of our musical career. We would take pretty radical zigs and zags,” Chip Kinman said.
That lasted until about 1987, when they decided to try industrial music as Blackbird, which was a loud musical assault featuring the brothers and a drum machine. In the '90s, they returned to a country sound with Cowboy Nation, which took them into the new millennium.
“We were done with Blackbird, we said everything we set out to say with that band. And I forget what exactly inspired us to play cowboy music but we figured we could do it. We figured we had something to say,” he said.
The final project the brothers worked on before Tony Kinman's death was a blues-oriented band called Ford Madox Ford that formed in 2017. Tony Kinman served as a producer of the band's album “This American Blues.”
“It's been tough because we were always cheek by jowl with everything we did, and we always bounced ideas off each other, and it's been a little rough,” Chip Kinman said, referring to the loss of his brother.
Yet he says Tony was an inspiration for the new album, which came together after Hardy saw Chip Kinman perform with a reformed version of The Dils as a tribute to Tony Kinman just before the pandemic began.
“He asked me if I wanted to put on a record and said I could do anything I want,” Chip Kinman recalled.
“I told him, `I think I want to make an electronic record,' and he said, `Great, keep it weird,' ” he said with a laugh.
“So I did.”
“I'm keeping in the ethic that I brought to my music starting in the '70s. It was something different, something that pushes music and pushes art and pushes my interest in it forward. I've never seen any reason to make music if you weren't doing that.”
— Chip Kinman, 64