Sunday, November 26, 2017

The Crazy and Contemplative World of King Khan



The world of King Khan, and all of the music that goes along with it, is a crazy and complex one, one which fuses a long list of musical genres and a live show that’s often a mixture of madcap zaniness and serious social commentary.

We don’t mind telling you that King Khan’s music was one of the biggest inspirations to starting Garagerocktopia. The 2013 album Idle No More is still one of our very favorites around here and we listen to it all the time, but rest assured, there’s a whole lot more King Khan to explore.



By all appearances a down-to-Earth kind of guy, Khan illuminated various parts of his crazy universe in an interview that ranged from laugh-out-loud hilarious to deeply thought provoking. He also told some riotous stories about run-ins with other bands we also like, that, sadly, we had to agree to keep off-record. And we didn’t even get to his legendary run-in with Lindsay Lohan or off-the-charts craziness with the Black Lips.

It’s pretty much become cliché to say that the artist about whom you’re reading in reality deserves a book or documentary film, but in King Khan’s case, it couldn’t be truer. In the meantime, we’ll do our best to get you up to speed.

The basics: Arish Khan hails from Montreal, the son of a college professor who got a front-row seat to all manner of art and thought, much of which remains part and parcel of his various endeavors today.

By the mid-90’s he was playing bass in the Montreal-based garage/punk band the Spaceshits, whose luxurious oddness is still a feature of Khan’s music. By the middle of the last decade, Khan departed the band, moved to Berlin and has since involved himself mostly with two musical entities.

One is the BBQ Show, an outfit he leads with former Spaceshits bandmate Mark Sultan. The other is the Shrines, a full-blown homage to early rock, classic soul and ‘60s-‘70s R&B. 

Superficially, the BBQ show often leans more to the surreal and experimental, while the Shrines often revel in pedal-to-the-metal joyfulness, but be advised -- this is a massive oversimplification. Most importantly of all, both are most worthy of your time to check out, and you should do so as soon as possible.

Khan gave Garagerocktopia a sort of Cliff Notes explanation of the two bands.

“What we do together is travel this terrain together that we both love, from doo wop to punk,” explains Khan about the BBQ Show, talking by telephone from his home in Berlin. “The formula doesn’t deviate much. We conjure up spirits like we’re in a trance. We’ve seen and done so much insane stuff. We’re just following the long tradition of rock and roll but making our own thing out of it.”

Khan’s other marquee band is the Shrines, unapologetic in its reverence of classic American soul
groups like the Isley Brothers, though like the BBQ Show, shows utter contempt for any kind of stylistic restriction.

“When I was 21 I left my band and moved to Germany. I had a vision,” recalls Khan. “ This time it was highly influenced by James Brown and all of the old soul and rhythm and blues artists. Also around that time, Sun Ra became a huge influence to me. It was like my first religious experience in music – I felt like I had opened a door of music that I hadn’t seen before.”

Khan has just released Murderburgers, amazingly enough the first solo album in his 20-plus years as a rock and roller. As one might expect, the album is a stylistic smorgasbord, ranging from straight-up garage rock to country music to cha-cha inflected blues.

Songs like “Discreate Disguise,” “It’s a Lie” and “Born in ‘77” would fit comfortably into anybody’s garage-rock playlist, with their subdued but catchy-as-all-heck riffs. On the other hand, “It’s Just Begun” flirts with a Dylan-esque classic country sound.

For those looking for moodier fare, there’s the dirge-like “Desert Mile.” And “Winter Weather” conjures up the spirit of late-‘60s Stax soul, complete with a guitar riff that sounds like Steve Cropper’s orphan child. The album also contains a stripped down, slightly slowed-down remake of “Born to Die,” a good second view of one of our very favorite King Khan jams. In short, there’s a lot of great stuff on the album.

While Murderburgers also has its uplifting, even funny moments, the album was recorded against the backdrop of a time in Khan’s life that was a little more somber.

“The album was recorded five years ago in Oakland,” Khan explained. “I had just lost one friend to cancer and had another one who was diagnosed with it. And then there was the studio we were holed up in. It had a burger place across the street, which was also a hangout to a lot of really hardcore gangsters.”

“The title refers, really, to the industrialization of murder, whether it’s feeding people food that’s like poison, or the way we pollute the air, it makes me think about people I’ve lost to cancer in just the last few years. I think it’s a revenge that Mother Nature is taking. And if you notice the cover, you see the oil refinery in the background, and the picture of me as an evil Ronald McDonald.”

“You have to laugh at the truth, otherwise it threatens your spirit and you end up crumbled in a ball.”

For now, Khan hasn’t announced a tour to support Murderburgers. At this point in the interview, Khan shares a lot of thoughts less about rock and roll and good times to more serious issues in the world.

He talked about a world that, as he sees it, is currently facing serious challenges, from compromised food systems, to environmental problems, to the rise of authoritarian-leaning figures in parts of the world otherwise known for strong democracies.

“I’m taking a break from touring,” Khan said. “When I look at the world right now, I don’t want to just get on stage and entertain. I want to observe the world in a more meditative way.”

And Khan is doing that in a number of ways. Last year, he worked on the soundtrack of the film The Invaders, a documentary about a group – named after a ‘60s Sci-Fi TV series -- involved in the Civil Rights struggles of that decade. Directed by Pritchard Smith, the film was well-regarded by both critics and fans of independent cinema.

The Invaders is basically the untold story of a black power group who were just fed up with what was going on at the time,” said Khan. “Martin Luther King was so impressed by them he asked them to be part of his Poor People’s campaign. He wanted them to unite under the umbrella of non-violence. That was a scary thought to J. Edgar Hoover.”

“I brought in John E. Smith into the film. He had been through so much – the Civil Rights struggle, the Vietnam War, many things, and despite all of that, he still has a very positive attitude towards the world. Despite all he’s seen, he still has hope to give.”

A fair chunk of the interview is also devoted to the Black Power movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Organizations like the Black Panther Party remain controversial to some in the United States. But the movement encouraged and inspired action and activism in the U.S. and across the world, such as India’s Dalit Panthers, who fought the discrimination of so-called “untouchables” in India’s caste system.

The ideals of the Panthers and the Black Power movement reverberated powerfully with Khan, the son of Indian immigrants growing up in French-Canadian Montreal.

“My dad moved to Canada in the early ‘60s and was a professor at a university, so we saw the Civil Right movement first hand,” Khan recalled. “As I grew up, I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and I basked in the Black Power movement, especially the musical part of it.”

In late 2015, Khan – inspired by dreams – created the Black Power Tarot, along with Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and Belfast-based artist Michael Eaton.The set of cards represents
the likes of Richard Pryor, Etta James, Little Richard, Howlin’ Wolf  and other African-American figures who found, encouraged or represented higher levels of enlightenment and knowledge.

He has also done something many rockers would find enviable – worked with his teenage daughter Saba Lou on her album, Planet Enigma, a collection of stripped down folk-rock released earlier this year that might be a good cool-down after King Khan’s freneticism.

Khan said that these other projects should not be seen as separate from his rock and roll. In the King Khan universe, they all work as one.

“I’m a complex ball of fun. Some of these exhibitions are serious, but they still celebrate rock and roll,” Khan explained. “The show, whether it’s the BBQ Show, or the Shrines, is still the show. It’s still a wild explosion of emotions like happiness and anger, which is what people expect. But it’s also important for us to address the problems of intolerance all over the world. Artists can help. The Beatles, for example, refused to play places where artists were segregated.”

“We can fuel revolution. Art and music are the greatest ways to unite people.”

Canada has contributed more than its fair share of rock and roll to the world, and garage rock is no exception. We’ve often sung the praises of bands like the Haunted and the Ugly Ducklings here. If you like your garage rock en francais, You absolutely must check out the legendary Quebecois rockers Les Hou-Lops.  We have also profiled one of Vancouver’s best, Bad Beats, on this very blog.

But, as Bad Beats leader Adam Payne explained to us, making it as a garage-rock band in Canada can be rough, where the fans are a little spread out and where, like the U.S., garage rock is still pretty much a smallish cult. It was for these reasons that Khan, no North America hater by any means, relocated to Berlin.

“We had toured all over Canada and the states,” said Khan,  “but the reason we left was just that we fell in love with Europe, especially Spain, which is another level of rock and roll pleasure. They treat you so much better than anywhere in North America. They just really love rock and roll. It felt like everything that rock and roll was supposed to be.”

The last three decades have been good ones for the professor’s son from Montreal. He is, by any reasonable reckoning, a standard-bearer of the current generation of garage-rockers. And Khan gave exactly zero indication he was about to let up any time soon.


“I’m really proud of all the music we’ve done,” Khan said. “I’ve had a blast, raised a family, raised some consciousness and I still get to keep doing this. And the wild antics are not over, either.”





Here at Garagerocktopia, we're always looking for cool bands and awesome garage rock related stuff to report on. We have reason to believe that a fair number of regular readers here are musicians themselves. Please feel free to send us your music and information. We won't guarantee a write-up, but some we've had some very awesome artist step up. Email us or you can visit our Facebook page.

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