“The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things…”  I told you how we fought valiantly to get the rights back on the original Beserkley recordings, I described the years of sweat and toil- I swear it made an afternoon at the DMV look like a day at the beach.  We (my manager Joel Turtle and I) put forth a mighty effort and low and behold we got our stuff back and the first thing we did was put of the “Best of Beserkely” compilation.  I said that we would release the albums one by one in chronological order, until the entire Greg Kihn catalogue was once again in print and vindication had been achieved.

Well, guess what?  It’s time to begin the beguine (Cole Porter reference!)

Today I started by releasing my very first album GREG KIHN.  The year was 1976 and I had just started putting the band together.  As a matter of fact, the band at that point was a work in progress.  We still hadn’t found a full time guitarist.  Robbie Dunbar from Earthquake was playing with us which created a little tension in the Beserkely family.  After all, Earthquake was the franchise back then.  This album contains some really interesting stuff.  ANY OTHER WOMAN was a taste of things to come and its full-bodied rock arrangement complete with guitar solo which would become the blueprint for GKB songs for the next decade.

Steve Wright and Larry Lynch were already locked in on bass and drums.  John Doukas, lead singer of Earthquake sang a duet with me on “He Will Break Your Heart.”  We recorded it at the old CBS studios on Folsom Street in San Francisco.  I remember how puny our equipment looked set up in the corner of the gymnasium-sized room.  It was intimidating but we didn’t care, we were just pumped to be in a real recording studio.  We got it for the cheapest rates after hours, so we worked all night.  Matt Kaufman produced.  Glen Kolodkin was the only one there who knew what he was doing.  Thank God he engineered it because no one else had a clue.

GREG KIHN is primitive, but that’s why I love it.  It has been out of print since the early Paleozoic Era.  The cover photo was shot in front of Rather Ripped Records in Berkeley where I worked at the counter with Gary Phillips (of Earthquake) for a day job.  In fact, I was on my break when we shot the cover!  We recorded the whole album in a few nights and mixed it in a matter of hours.  That’s rock and roll, man.  You had to be there.  It was great!

It will be followed by GREG KIHN AGAIN.