Steve Kilpatrick

(Former Creem Magazine writer/editor Rick Johnson examines Westside Crop Circles)

So, this one morning I'm lounging around in my usual frenzy of procrastination wondering if I can get away with calling into work flora again when the mail carrier drops off a small package. My long-awaited Rodeo Blooper Tape, I wondered, or maybe that oxycontin poultice from the AARP Pharmacy By Mail? Too small to be the re-engineered CPR mannequin I'd ordered from Taboo, damn it!

After checking to make sure the return address isn't the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, I open it to find a CD of all things. A CD, how playfully decadent! Included inside was a letter, the usual Xeroxed bio crap and -- get this -- a check made out to me! Now this is what I really call a message, Bullwinkle!

Little did I suspect it would, after a token five minute skip-listen, turn out to be this really cool album from a Michigan singer/guitarist charmingly naive enough to pre-pay an out of state writer. I was very moved. I think I felt something like a deaf man hearing a busy signal for the first time.

Steve " the K " (as he joshingly calls himself) makes truly rootsy free-ranging music with lyrics that vary from suicidal ideation to a cry for help. From what I hear, Steve's not really your typical good field/no hit musician with smoke in the cockpit and a corn appliance up his butt. After a checkered employment history that's included everything from narco-urologist to maverick worm-bed attendant, he's wound up pushing tote for the Teamsters by day and blasting through the local bar circuit by night, playing every three-chord classic in the four-chord songbook.

Though the K's idea of a big night is coming in third in a wet beret contest, the years of rock 'n' roll slavery have paid off bigtime in a major heap of melodies and vocal/guitar stylings that attempt to insult every genre out there, from rockabilly to country porn to angelic harmonizing from a guy old enough to own an inert complextion.

What I'm trying to say here is that Westside Crop Circles is one hell of an album, maybe even two hells. But don't just take my word for it, listem to what the critics have to say. After on-target comparisons to Roy Orbison, Tom Waits, The Residents, Brian Wilson, Chris Isaak, John Fahey and Andy Partridge (of the Partridge Family, I think) Jim Santo of Outersound.com tags Steve as "an artist who clearly doesn't give a fuck about commercial success." Cosmik Debris's Shaun Dale raves that our hero's "capabilities obviously exceed his judgement", while internationally acclaimed rock critic "GPR" of Ear Candy calls it "coherent".

So while you're ponying up a few bucks to send Steve the aforementioned K, let's take a quick cut-by-cut look at some killer sounds while I'm applying for the Disabled List retroactive to forever.

1. BROTHERS-IN-LAW: kicks things off in a cool, mid-tempo style that boasts the closest thing to a professional drum kit you'll hear percussion-wise. Steve's groovy first brother-in-law gets traded in for a humorless new model creepo who would rather live in a cat privacy tent and gets upset if our musical host crashes on his couch longer than 48 hours. The vocal moans like Roy Orbison locked in the trunk of the Batmobile but he lets his guitar do most of the complaining.

2: BRUNO: This EPA-registered clog-whomper features a sampled pit bull in the rhythm section and a vocal straight out of the itch-care aisle of your supermarket. Deftly avoiding a sing-songy approach, S.K. basically pronounces the crazy lyrics. Good idea, because trying to sing words like "something maybe a little more appropriate to the situation but nonetheless along the same line" could eventually lead to stress fractures of the larynx. And next time, dude, try sampling the other end of the dog.

3: BIGPLAN: My fave rave and the most instantly loveable number is "Bigplan," where an innocent-enough sounding accoustic guitar bit grows into an Amber Alert waiting to happen. The plan is to ladder-abduct a brain-damaged woman from her parents' house and hide out in the Arctic teaching her to read and write and count to ten. I am SO sure. The deadly-catchy "Car-o-line" chorus has been stuck in my brain for days, thankfully supplanting the dreaded "jaunty" version of "Five Weeks In A Balloon". Semi-true story! Then, stuck to the song's butt is this beautiful x-part harmony coda about the content's of his refrigerator. While the artiste himself insists there's "no sexual content, honest," you may want to catch him on his upcoming Unlawful Flight To Avoid Prosecution tour soon.

4: MULTI-GENERATIONAL: What begins as a fairly clinical sociological rant winds up a potential end-credit track for this season's Pimp My Improvised Explosive Device. Steve's lyrics contend he can maintain his cool (or his lukewarm, really) in a five generation household of Surreal Life rejects, while his strange psychic-ventriloquist vocal approach suggests a bad week in the Day Room.

5: ADJUSTMENTS: I hate to just come right out and describe a melody as "really pretty" without voluntarily applying for chemical castration, but "Adjustments" is that: an almost impossibly sweet tune the composer himself describes as a "lullaby about plastic titty nipples." Imagine a Smiley Smile-era Brian Wilson crooning about "phony nips" over a stack-o-track of TV epiphany tinkles and accoustic guitar and you've got it.

6: CONJUGAL VISIT: This is one of K-boy's songs with a surprise ending. Not a Twilight Zone flying-saucer-to-the-dinner-table kind of deal, but still. He's all "gotta perm this nosehair" and prep bribes for the guards in a very snappy post-Surfabilly kind of way for a babe with "lips like jelly donuts" when you suddenly realize she's the prisoner and he's the conjugee! Gasp! Yeah, right-- we'll see what tune he's singing when Caroline's folks press charges.

7: WORRIED MIND: It opens as a likely Beach Boys acid-period outtake, but grows into a stark examination of the ultimate human tragedy. That's right, God has ripped off Steve's television because "He says I watch too much HBO." That Kilpatrick can turn such primordial misery into a holiday ranking right up there with Towel Amnesty Day should leave us all praying that Steve's talent can someday be harnessed for peaceful purposes.

8: SMELL THAT RAINBOW: A nice minute-long instrumental that's a cross between lyrical guitar flourish and museum-quality Hendrix nitrogen waterfall rumble, this track should carry a May Poison Livestock sticker instead of a theft surveillance tag.

9: ME & OPRAH,MY PAJAMAS AND THE PAIN: This wacky, slightly sprung waltz came closest to generating airplay on Westside's first pressing. Critics were alternately baffled and corn-fused. While the previously quoted J. Santos dismissed it as a mere "country music parody," widely admired BEA Entertainment correspondent J.D. Philyaw termed it the work of "an anti-social couch potato with an Oprah fetish." Even R. Christgau's Consumers Guide gave it an Incomplete. Back in his surprise mode, Steverino catalogs his various sufferings and his "search for ways to try to block the pain" (the usual booze-dope-Jesus progression) when from out of nowhere comes a throaty recitation that sounds like a near-death blues singer with a dugout towel in his mouth. Eat your heart out, Rod Serling!

10:ROUGH & TOUGH: Here's yet another latecoming shocker. You think at first it's in the mom-and-poppy vein of that other song about plastic nips (look it up yourself--I've got credit for time served). Then it turns out she's an 80-year-old captive in a hospice. So where's your ladder now, big guy?

11: ME & THE BANK: The most inescapable hook of the disc belongs to this airy-dairy peek at things grown-ups reportedly think about. Too bad the term "wistful" has been trashed by entire generations of singer-songwriters who think they're the pooparoo because they can whine for the cycle. But hey-- we've still got pensive, doleful, disconsolate and woebegone! Forget all that. Me like song, you like song too.

12: OLD-PEOPLE HOURS: It starts off with a niblet of Brill Building melody that I can't quite remember without sending chagrin-sniffing dogs off to uncover my Spector Box from the piles of Bose Wave Thermometers, hardcover dinghy tow ratings and parakeet training records in my junk room. It quickly develops into a fingerlickin' good fingerlicker espousing good old bathroom humor. As if there were another kind!

13: THE LONELY TONIGHT: Deceptive Motown chords open a frankly happy-sounding Caribbean tweeter about, oh, you know, doom 'n' stuff. When you realize the guy's singing "I couldn't gundown, outrun or rubdown a broken soul" over the mondo-pinata music, you'll want to speed dial the National Strategic Medicine Stockpile. The poor guy tries everything, including dynamite, Spanish Fly, a fifth of Old Spitoon, "small game full of holes" and--this is almost too cruel--professional wrestling. The police report will still read failure to increase speed to avoid a ballad.

Well, there you have it folks. Please believe me when I tell you sincerely from the bottom of my heart that Westside Crop Circles is my absolute, all-time fave--(ring, ring--oh, sorry Steve, the bank says your check bounced--)

Steve Kilpatrick deserves life imprisonment as roadie for a party-boat DJ. And you can keep your Mardi Gras tickets, wise guy.

copyright 9-11-05
by Rick Johnson