BOP SHOP RECORDS presents BILL KIRCHEN'S HONKY TONK CHRISTMAS SHOW Friday December 7th - 8pm
Lovin' Cup Brews & Bistro
300 Park Point Drive Off Jefferson Rd near RIT $18 advance $20 at the door
Tickets available at Lovin' Cup & Bop Shop
Bill Kirchen has become widely known for the trademark big-rig guitar riffs that powered the Commander Cody hit “Hot Rod Lincoln” into the Top 10 in 1972. Since 1993, he has recorded seven critically acclaimed albums of his own that have made him one of the musical elder statesmen of today’s Americana music, which in truth was pioneered by acts like Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen back in the ‘70s.
Kirchen has appeared on record and stage with a who’s who of musical talents that includes Lowe, Doug Sahm, Ralph Stanley, Gene Vincent, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Hornsby, Hoyt Axton and fellow six-string heroes Link Wray and Danny Gatton. At the recent Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, Bill played guitar with Elvis Costello, who named his band for the event the Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods after Bill’s upcoming release, and featured Bill singing the title song. Kirchen was nominated for a 2001 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance for his song “Poultry in Motion” and inducted the next year into the Washington (D.C.) Area Music Association Hall of Fame alongside John Phillip Sousa and Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. He has lectured at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the 1998 International Conference on Elvis Presley in Memphis, and is featured in the TNN special Yesterday and Today: Honky-Tonk & Western Swing.
The Dieselbilly king is especially known for exhilarating live performances at festivals and venues across North America and Europe. The tour de force of every Kirchen show is his extended rendition of “Hot Rod Lincoln” on which “like an impassioned preacher in a souped-up convertible,” as Washington City Paper describes it, he cites the guitar styles of such six-string giants as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins and Jimi Hendrix, while also referencing riffs by everyone from Merle Haggard to the Rolling Stones to Flatt & Scruggs to the Sex Pistols.
All it takes is a spin of Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods or a night with Bill Kirchen as he tears the roof off any place he appears to agree with what the Austin American-Statesman says: “Bill Kirchen rules. It’s just that simple.”
