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Kane & Able
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Keiran Kane returns with Kevin Welch and Fats Kaplan. By Brian Wise
Kieran Kane chuckles knowingly when I ask him what he thinks about the hugely successful Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album, Raising Sand, which featured two Everly Brothers songs.
Twenty-two years ago, almost another life, Kane was involved in The O’Kanes - a duo with Jamie O’Hara that evoked memories of Don and Phil in a different musical setting. Their three albums released between 1986 and 1990 were beautifully crafted and packed with songs that, while redolent of a forgone era, were distinctively their own sound.
For a while, they might have been considered part of the New Country push that also featured Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam. These days, they’d call it alt.country.
Singer/songwriter Kane was born in Queens, NY, in 1949 and by age nine was drumming in his older brother's rock band. In his teens he turned his attention to bluegrass and folk and by 21 had relocated to Los Angeles, where he worked as a songwriter and session guitarist, meeting and hanging around with members of Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band (the progenitors of country rock).
In the late '70s, Kane moved on to Nashville, wrote two Top Ten country singles – ‘You're the Best’ and ‘It's Who You Love’ – and teamed with O'Hara to form the O'Kanes in 1985.
After the duo split in 1990 Kane pursued a solo career before eventually forming the Dead Reckoning label with fellow singer/songwriters Kevin Welch, Tammy Rogers and Harry Stinson. (You can find at least one O’Kanes album for sale on the Dead Reckoning website).
For the past decade Kane has been touring and recording with Welch, later adding Fats Kaplan to the mix, while also releasing several solo albums. The latest KWK projects include their self-titled album of 2007 (featuring Kieran's son, Lucas Kane, on drums), Lost John Dean in 2006 and 2004’s You Can’t Save Everybody.
“That was a long time ago,” he responds when I ask him what he thinks about the Plant/Krauss collaboration. “I must admit when I listened to their record…….which I thought was really quiet good, I thought they did a really great job. We played a festival [Hardly Strictly Bluegrass] with them in San Francisco in October and their live show was really great. I have a lot of good friends in the band with them - Buddy Miller and people like that.
“But after I heard the first record I kind of went, ‘Well, if they do another one I have a lot of songs to pitch! They basically could do an album of O’Kane’s material. I think it would work really well.”
“When I was 18 years old I was living in Boston,” he recalls, “and I was a big bluegrass fan but the earliest things I was listening to when I was young were the black Chess Records sides – Bo Diddley, Little Walter – and trying to find some way to join Merle Haggard and Bo Diddley. It seems odd but they are not that far apart. If you listen to the Alison/Robert album there is as much Bo Diddley in there as there is Everly Brothers or Delmore Brothers.”
Kane reveals that Miller has been doing some recordings with Plant while they have been on the road, using a portable studio and setting up back stage and at various venues. He says that Miller is ‘quite excited’ about he results.
Kane recalls that he also met Robert Plant at the Americana Conference in Nashville last year.
“He was really quite a lovely man, very gracious,” says Kane. “He could have been something else and he wasn’t he was really very much part of what was going on. Even in that very short time you had a sense that he was just a regular guy, just really cares about music.”
I ask Kane if he was carrying around a compilation of his songs that he could have quietly handed to Plant?
“No, no, no,” he laughs. “I wouldn’t do that to him.”
Kane has been living in Nashville for many years and, while he says he doesn’t go out to venues too much, he says that there is always a lot of music around.
“There is a very high mark for musicians in town,” he explains, “so even people who are club players, just working venues in town, the quality is really quite high. Pretty much any night of the week there are a lot of clubs in town and there is music going all the time.
“There’s a lot of songwriters too. If you live in Los Angeles every waiter or waitress you run into is pretty much an actor. In Nashville, every waiter or waitress you run into is a songwriter. It’s very similar in that way. There’s really a lot going on all the time.”
I tell Kane that when I was in Nashville last year I had been surprised to find pedal steel legend Paul Franklin playing with the Time Jumpers at the Station Inn.
“It’s amazing really,” agrees Kane. “I think the community is pretty accepting of lots of different take son things. There is a delineation between the country music business – in that sense it is like a factory town – but there is this whole other scene that blends into that. I think they mesh pretty well.”
While my distant relative Chubby Wise (a member of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys) has his name on the plaque outside The Ryman, unfortunately, none of his musical ability was passed on to my side of the family. However, if I was a songwriter, Kane convinces me that I should be heading for Nashville.
“There’s a lot of publishers in town and they are always looking for songs,” he says. “There are guys that knock out the hits pretty regularly but if a good song comes a long people listen to it. The thing about it is though is that the standard is quite high and you really have to have your acts together – but if you do there are a lot of outlets for it. There are a lot of outlets for new writers who come to town because there are a lot of songwriter nights. From that there is a lot of networking going on and one thing leads to another.”
Kane is busy preparing a new solo album for its release and says that he will have copies for sale during the KKW tour of Australia. For the time being, it will be an exclusive release for the Australian tour.
“I have just cut about six sides,” he says. “I went into the studio with my son Lucas - I don’t make a move without him anymore – and Deanna Varagona, who has played with Lambchop for years and lost of other people. I also used Richard Bennett on electric guitar. He has been in Mark Knopfler’s band for a quite a while now and he goes back to playing with Neil Diamond.”
“I had a bunch of songs I’d been working on and had an idea of a different sound,” he continues, adding that all the songs were written on banjo. The mix of instruments sounds intriguing.
“I’m really digging the way it turned out,” enthuses Kane. “As I always do, it’s live off he floor like a band playing – no fixes, no overdubs, no nothing. It’s really been a lot of fun.”
“It’s kind of cool,” her continues, “because none of the instruments are working in the same tonal range. So each instrument is able to really occupy its own space without masking any of the tonal ranges of the other instruments. So you can really hear everything really clearly. I’m quite excited about it. I really liked the way it turned out. I think I am going to cut some more sides and turn it into an album at some point. But I really wanted to have some new work to bring over for this tour.”
Kane says that he will be bringing over a few hundred copies of the EP over with him, so you best get in quick if you go see the KWK show. Fats Kaplan might also have a new disc to bring over with him as well. (“it really sounds great,” says Kane). In the meantime, work on a new KWK album is in the future, after the tour.
“We had talked about going in and working on a new record but it just didn’t seem like it was coming together,” he explains. “So I thought, I’ll just do this now. I imagine that sometime in the next year we will get KWK back in the studio. But quite honestly, although the Kane Welch Kaplan record will be almost two years old when we get there we haven’t really toured that record in Australia. So it will be relatively new in terms of performing it.”
Kane Welch & Kaplan will be touring Australia this month.
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