Huckleberry milkshakes, Homer Simpson and Libby

BH: Talk to me about this program, You’ve been working with the kids to write a song, how’s it going?

JK: It’s good. We’re good. We’ve got the melody and chorus written. We’ve just got to write two verses and we’ve got two hours to do that. We did a big lyrical free-association exercise with them yesterday.

BH: And you played the care center today?

JK: Yes we did.

BH: What else are you doing while you’re in town?

JK: We played the Libby Lodge of Love yesterday.

BH: Talk to me about how you got started. I read your biography, saw the awards and such, but what’s the real story?

JK: I made all that stuff up. You better fake it ‘til you make it. I get a bunch of quotes and take them all completely out of context.

No, I started playing in high school, but I played the keys and was kind of mediocre. I didn’t sing at all. My buddy Jason was the singer. We were called the Brutal Poodles, it was questionable. I got my first guitar for graduation from high school, my parents agreed to pay for half the guitar, up to $200.

After high school I went into the Navy for five years.

While I was in I started writing. I took my guitar out to sea and started writing songs. My buddies would get drunk and go the bar and come back, “Kingham you gotta go sing at this place, they let anybody grab the mic and sing.” So, I got  the nerve up to do a song at an open mic night and started singing.

BH: What did you do in the Navy?

JK: I was a nuclear power plant operator. I was Homer Simpson on an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln.

BH: So you have a degree in nuclear engineering?

JK:  No, that’s a funny story in itself. My recruiter told me that once I got out I’d be a few credits away, I’d just need a few humanities credits. So when I got out I started applying and trying to get transfer credits, but all of my schooling was classified so they wouldn’t let any of the schools look at the curriculum. The two schools I looked at offered me 12 credits total, 4 of which were PE. Instead of being 12 credits away, I was 12 credits in.

So I said to hell with this, I’ll take my GI Bill money and go study whatever I want. I went to community college and studied history of art and philosophy and then took a couple of semesters of welding. I haven’t done anything with nuclear engineering or chemistry since then.

I had started playing open mics while I was living in Seattle. I actually won a few of those awards while I was still in the Navy. I made my first record while I was in the Navy.

The week I got out of the Navy I did my first tour with my buddy Evan. We went from Seattle to central California and then back up. We drove my F150, which is the worst touring vehicle you could ever drive, got like 12 miles to the gallon. We joked and called it the six-dollar tour because when we came back we had both made about six dollars. But hey, we didn’t lose money.

BH: What year was that?

JK: Late 1997, early 1998. Little two week tour down the west coast and we came back with six bucks. It was awesome. I remember one of the places we stopped, it was in Stockton or Modesto or somewhere like that. We showed up with our guitars and they said, “I didn’t know we were having live music. I’ve been telling everyone who called that we didn’t have live music tonight.”

I’ll never forget, the guy asked if we’d like to charge a cover. My partner Evan’s like, “yeah, at least $3. I don’t think $3 is too much to ask for unexpected music, do you?”

You have to pay those dues. I think a lot of kids today think “I’m going to go on American Idol or the Voice and instantly become a superstar. The trouble is there’s just so many of those shows and it lasts for like a second. A half a million views on YouTube doesn’t translate to anything. They have a minute of fame. If you don’t already have something going on it’s really hard to capitalize on it.

There’s just really no substitute for going out and paying your dues.

BH: You’ve shared the stage with some pretty big names, Joan Osborn, Michael McDonald, you’ve been touring with Toad The Wet Sprocket.

JK: I’ve been playing with Toad for about five years now. I toured with Glen, the lead singer, for like 12 years. I toured with him the whole time he was solo. I’m actually going out for a week with him after I get back from this. Doing five or six shows in the Midwest.

We were out with the Counting Crows all this summer, 2014. I think we did 60 shows with the Counting Crows.

BH: What’s it like to play with people like that?

JK: It’s a totally different thing. I enjoy both. This summer was all big sheds with three to five thousand people. It’s a totally different experience than coming to Libby.

BH: You go from that to playing the Libby Care Center. No judgment call, but certainly a big change of pace.

JK: Yeah, I think it takes the whole spectrum. Also, I feel like you get way more connection with people when you do this. You go play the Greek Theatre in LA and it’s pretty impersonal. This is way more, you get to come to a community, meet people. You deal with questionable characters like Gary and eat huckleberry milkshakes at the Libby Café.

BH: Now Ryan, what do you do?

RS: I’ve been following John around since the late 1990s. I’ve been playing keyboards and co-writing with him for like 15 years now and having a blast.

JK: I met him at the Michael McDonald concert. He came up to me in the booth and said “Hey man, I play keyboards.” He bought 10 CDs to give out to his friends. You never know about people after a show, but he came to a couple more shows and we became friends.

He invited me to his house for New Years and offered to play, and sometimes people offer to play and they, you know, just aren’t any good. So I went to his place and he was jamming with another buddy. He had his stuff set up in his basement and was just destroying it. So we started playing together.

BH: So you’re back here in the roots, in the community, working with the kids. Why do you do this part? You can obviously make a living playing the big shows with the big names, but you sign up with the Montana Arts Council to spend a week in Libby and Eureka, why?

JK: I love it. I love going into a community, especially some place like Libby where you get something three or four times a year. I grew up in a small farm town, we didn’t get any artists coming through, so to be able to come into a community and work with the kids, to be able to have an impact and hope they can take something away from it. Even if they don’t ever become professionals, they’ll sound better in the shower and in traffic when they’re singing.

We did one of these in a little community outside Cleveland and we had this kid, just a wild child at the workshop. The last day we had the concert and he played the totally wrong thing. At first I was put off, “what is this kid doing?” Then I went to talk to him after the show, he just breaks down and starts crying. It turns out his brother was in the hospital after a suicide attempt, but all we’d seen was this kid acting out. But I got to talk to him, and figured out why.

For us to be able to go in and connect, to have an impact for even a minute, that’s why we do it. Hopefully what we do it positive.