NEWS
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Jun 02, 2010
A Rock Star Reinvents Himself
Vanderbilt University Feature by Jim Patterson
A rock star reinvents himself with the help of Blair professor Michael Kurek
There's still a remnant of the cocky rock star in Kip Winger, a soft-spoken musician who scaled the heights of pop-metal stardom in the 1980s only to find himself on the wrong end of a massive sea change in popular music.
"They all took shots at me, dude," Winger said with a slight sneer during an interview at Vanderbilt's Blair School of Music. "For some reason they liked picking on me. (But) I'll take any of them on in an acoustic performance with no Pro Tools."
Despite criticism from everyone from Joe Elliott of Def Leppard to cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-Head, Kip Winger has no need for studio tricks that use technology to disguise performance flaws.
"His music has a transcendent spirit to it," said Michael Kurek, a prominent composer and associate professor of composition at Blair. "Kip Winger is a real musician with a unique voice."
With Kurek's help, Winger has found new musical life in orchestral music, debuting his composition "Ghosts" as part of a ballet with the San Francisco Ballet earlier this year. The San Francisco Examiner said that "Ghosts" was "fascinating, engrossing and fulfilling" and described Winger's score as "dramatic and lyrical, Sibelius-meets-Stravinsky music."
The son of two jazz musicians, Winger said he wanted to write orchestral music all through the reign of Winger as a pop-metal act with hits including "Seventeen" "Headed for a Heartbreak" and "Miles Away."
"I would put little breadcrumbs on my rock albums," he said. "I put a string quartet on the front of this song called 'Hungry' on my first record. On each record there would be something where I was trying to push the envelope further in that direction. It's really all I listen to. It's all I heard for years and years."
In the 1990s, the sudden popularity of grunge rock rendered bands like Winger passe' virtually overnight.
"I was the guy at the scene of the crime," Winger said ruefully. "I was John Travolta when disco sucked all of a sudden."
Sales and concert revenues dropped dramatically for Winger, and the band went on hiatus. Kip Winger was still famous - but as a punch line for those who now disdained the pop-metal era. In a Metallica video, the group's drummer was shown throwing darts at a photograph of Winger.
"That's why they call it show biz, right?" Kip Winger said with a shrug. "I spent my whole life trying to be a good musician and all of a sudden I'm the guy that represents everything that sucks."
"It's kind of a bummer. But on the other hand, it really forced me to do what I wanted to do."
After a few years living in Santa Fe, N.M., and some solo albums, Kip Winger moved to Nashville and began getting more serious about orchestral music. He attended a performance at Blair of music written by Kurek.
"I was sitting in Ingram Hall listening to this piece, and I was thinking, 'Who wrote this music?' I figured they must be dead, because it was so good. I guess Michael took a bow or something, and I just walked up to him and said, 'That was bad-ass.'"
Winger was impressed enough to enroll at Blair and take a composition course from Kurek, whose teaching technique was "revelatory."
"When I take a lesson from Michael, he really doesn't focus on the minutia," Winger said. "He's more likely to show me why a piece works or doesn't work. Every lesson I take from him, he pulls me out of the dungeon and helps me write myself out of the conundrum I'm in at the time."
After their first lesson, Winger and Kurek went out for martinis. "We became fast buddies after that," Winger said.
Kurek had no previous knowledge of the band Winger.
"During the years when they were huge, I was immersed in writing my own catalog," he said.
Kurek, who started his own musical career as a drummer in a garage band, soon checked out the work of Winger. He found it much better than its reputation.
"I thought it was a cut above the normal schlock you sometimes hear in the commercial music industry," Kurek said. "What he has done in classical work has borne that out. I think that a unique musical spirit is going to manifest itself in whatever style it is using."
Kurek is intrigued by Winger's orchestral niche, which he describes as "post-Debussy, early 20th-century style."
"Sometimes it's informed by his rock stuff, because there'll be a gritty bass line or something," Kurek said. Winger said one of his goals is to get the orchestra to "rock out a little more."
Curiously, the rock world has come around to at least a grudging respect for the band, which has re-formed and is successfully recording and touring again.
"Singing that music is really difficult now, because I'm almost ready to be put out to pasture," Winger said. "It's like glorified screaming."
For IV, the band's 2006 album and first in more than a decade, Kip Winger incorporated some of the orchestral lessons he'd been learning. The result was an album that fellow musicians loved, but one that was puzzling to hardcore Winger fans. For Karma in 2009, the band returned to a hard-rocking style and has rebounded as a concert attraction.
"I used to try and get it all in there, but now I've completely separated it, which is better for each of them," Winger said. "The rock music is more simple and riff-orientated, more to the point. I get my more complex musical ideas out doing the orchestral stuff."
In the long term, Kip Winger has managed to have the best of both worlds. His rock career appears set to continue as long as he desires and on his own terms. And his life as an orchestral music composer is just beginning.
"If I kept having hits, the machine wants you to make the same song over and over and over again," he said. "Artistically, you don't get anywhere. For me, that would be sudden death. The money would be great, but that's the only thing that would be great.
"To be honest with you, I just want to take more lessons with Michael and finish this piece I'm working on now," Winger said. "It's a much bigger idea than I have the skill for, so I'm trying to chip through it."
"With the help of Michael and Blair, everything turned out fine," Winger said. "Now, I'm really an orchestral music guy who used to do metal music."
photo by Steve Green
Posted 06/01/10
