KEVIN BORICH
By Ian McFarlane
Thanks to Kevin Borich
This article was originally published in RHYTHMS magazine (Issue #307 Sept/Oct 2021)
Kevin Borich is one of our greatest musical champions. The indefatigable master guitarist has weathered all sorts of challenges – including surviving cancer in the late 2000s – and is still raring to go!
It’s a Saturday afternoon in May and I’m down at my local watering hole in rural Victoria. I’m sitting next to legendary guitarist KEVIN BORICH, and I’m struggling to hear him speak. Not that there’s too much extraneous noise going on, it’s just that he can barely talk above a hoarse whisper. His road crew is busy setting up the equipment and he’s due to hit the stage in a couple of hours to sing and play a gig.
In between COVID lockdowns, he’s been on tour with the Kevin Borich Express, the current line-up being KB, John Carson (drums) and Chris Gilbert (bass). Gilbert, in particular, is concerned about Borich’s resilience in the face of possibly having to pull the gig at the last minute. Rest assured, after he’s mentally and physically prepared himself for the task, KB and his sterling rhythm section take to the stage for two fine sets.
The crowd is small, in comparison to past glories – I guess you takes what you can in these times – but every person there is thrilled to see one of our very best players up so close. There’s no issue with KB’s playing ability, but what about his vocals? He’s swigging straight Manuka Honey from a pot to sooth the vocal chords and he makes it through the night, possibly a little worse for wear, but triumphant.
The set list incorporates the likes of ‘Lonely One’, ‘Soapboxbitchinblues’ and ‘Rollin’ & Tumblin’’ in the acoustic set, then ‘The Place’, ‘Heart Starter’, ‘Gonna See My Baby Tonight’ ‘Goin’ Downtown’ and more in the electric set... with maximum slide the order of the night. I’ve seen KB play so many times over the years – going back to the La De Das at Festival Hall in 1974 as an impressionable 14 year old – and his performances never fail to impress me.
To try and explore his career authoritatively is a difficult task, there’s so much to cover. A couple of weeks later, I catch up with KB over the phone. We jump around all over the place in our conversation so here is a semblance of the Kevin Borich story.
It was great to see you guys play recently at my local watering hole. You got to do a tour in May. I think everyone was just champing at the bit to go and see bands play live again. You were really struggling with your voice, how did you go with the show at Archie’s Creek?
That was tough but somehow I won the crowd and they really enjoyed it. I was so eager to play I didn’t think about the match fitness. It was four shows in a row. I don’t do that much anymore, no one does; three if you got the weekend. It shocked me and the thing I forgot about the week before I did 2,000 kms to play a Newcastle gig and I hadn’t fully recovered from that drive. Then driving down to Melbourne, I thought ‘what a fuckin’ idiot’ but because the gigs were there I thought ‘what a blast! Let’s go, let’s do it!’.
You’ve got a great rhythm section, John Carson (drums) and Chris Gilbert (bass).
Yeah, they’re great. Chris plays the upright bass too which is really something.
How do you pick the songs? You’ve got so many songs in your own repertoire, plus all the blues tracks you can pick from. You did ‘Rollin ’ and Tumblin’’, you could have done ‘Little Red Rooster’, ‘Stormy Monday’...
Well I pick the ones that go over well, and then I try and introduce new ones as I go along. If you start playing covers, you slip one of your own in to try and test the waters. So now I do 98% all my own stuff. Obviously you pick the ones that work but you can’t keep doing that all the time, so then you try and introduce other ones with a similar feel basically. You can do that when you’ve got regular gigs. It’s all a shambles at the moment, there’s no regularity of work. ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’ is great because of that ompah-ompah feel and so I just have to write something else with that feel. I’ve done ‘Little Red Rooster’ a lot.
Would you consider revisiting some of the older La De Das songs? People love to hear ‘Gonna See My Baby Tonight’, which you still play. The one I really love is ‘Morning, Good Morning’ and also your version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’. Would you consider revisiting them?
I’d do ‘Morning, Good Morning’ but ‘Watchtower’ I played it so often at the time... it’s a great one to get people up to jam because you can get other people up to take a lead and that’s what usually happens. I’d pull it out if I was doing something special with someone. But that just takes up time for something of my own. When I was doing a lot of Hendrix stuff I got canned for doing that, a Hendrix copier. I thought ‘bugger that I’ll leave that behind’ because they kind of find a way to pick at you.
People do still want to hear you.
Well, I’m still breaking through, it’s a really tough cocoon. I’m trying to get out of this cocoon. I’ve got an antenna out, that’s why you’re talking to me. But I’ve been around that long there’s not that many of my age still doing it. I must be one of the oldest. Someone like Mossy, he’s a bit younger. So really I’m the old dude, I’m the dinosaur!
Tell me about your new album, which you’ve been working on steadily for some time. Will it be out by September or October?
Well, it’s been on drip feed. We tried to do a song every couple of months, a new single with somebody different each time. That sounded like a good idea but then COVID came along and then we had to stall releasing stuff because everyone’s in a pickle. Things have slowly settled down because it’s become the norm. Next song will come out in October. It’s already done, the flip’s done and then I’ve got about four or five other people already recorded. The idea is to get the highest profile person last. It’s somebody pretty famous so that will turn heads because everyone’s sick of me. You know what it’s like, ‘ah, not you again Kev, you’ve been around for so long’ (laughs).
I’ve got a song called ‘Down In The Bunker’, that’s a good one. Also a new version of ‘Soapboxbitchinblues’, which was originally on Totem. I played the National on that and I had Doc Spann on harp and that’s a beautiful version. About a year later the bank tried to do a shifty on me so I thought I’ll do a heavy metal version of that, really saying I’m angry. So who do I get to sing it? The lyric is ‘I’m angry’, I’ll get Angry Anderson to sing it!
You released ‘Call A Friend’ with Russell Morris last year. That’s a great song.
Yeah, it was really timely. The roadie thing was going on and I was thinking of doing this album. A lot of roadies and other people are doing it tough and they need to talk to each other. I was thinking ‘who am I going to ask to do this?’. To break the ice, like the lyrics go, so it turned it into a more detailed thing than I started off thinking. The way it grew as far as meaning and being related to the current situation, it turned out to be quite strong.
I think Russell was the perfect person to do that with, it really struck a chord. Russell is one of those guys who’s been able to reinvented himself, so the two of you together was a fantastic combination. Did you know Russell from back in the day?
Well, he was always a Melbourne guy and I was a Sydney guy so we wouldn’t have been that close at the time. I’ve got a great story that points out Russell’s humanity. I went to LA in the late ’70s, alone, just to go and see what was going on. Michael Chugg was managing me at the time and he gave me a list of about four people over there, Aussies. So I rung them all and the only one who turned up was Russell in his BMW and he drove me all around LA (laughs). He was just that sort of guy. When I asked him he said ‘sure, no worries Kev’, no big deal.
Now that he’s moved up to the Gold Coast, I just went down there. I had the track finished and my vocals were on so we cut his vocals in among my vocals and it was just done in his lounge room. I just watched him go through the song and put his vocals on, over a few takes. It just showed his talent of how he gets into a song. It was quite neat to watch.
So the title is Duets?
Yeah, it’s just gonna be called The Duets Album. That explains everything. We’ll follow up with another album because we’ve been recording as much as we can. I’ve found an engineer / producer right near me, 10 minutes away, Nick O’Donnell. I’m up in the hills and I had all this gear because my guy was from Brisbane and he moved to Melbourne. There I was stuck with all this great equipment, a manual in my hand and it just didn’t work did it! I went to the local computer shop and I was telling my woes to the guy at the counter and he said ‘why don’t you give a couple of tracks to Nick, he’s a musician and he fixes computers, so he knows all about that stuff’. So I got the two tracks back and it sounded fantastic and I went ‘hallelujah!’ (laughs). We’ve been working ever since; he comes over every week and we put down another track, or work on what we did last week. So it’s just growing and growing. I come up with so many bits so to have another person to go ‘well, why don’t you do that one and maybe this one’. Arranging stuff really has helped me immensely because I get a bit bored with myself trying to do things, so bouncing off is really fantastic.
Going back to the late ’70s, when you did a lot of overseas touring with the Kevin Borich Express, in the US and Europe. Did you find people were accepting of you in that environment?
Unbelievably so, that’s what was so good about going away at that time. I came back heaps in debt but mentally it did me great because people were asking me, ‘where’s all your music, where can we get it?’. I was getting good reactions, after they’d heard it three or four times. Some of the big shows if they didn’t know you, you’d get stuff thrown at you. I turned them round and they were getting into it. That was good for me because it wasn’t just Australian audiences, it was people who didn’t know my history but they were genuinely loving what I was doing. Even though there was no great commercial breakthrough, it was a breakthrough in my mind.
When I was 18, one of the very first big outdoor gigs I went to was Rockarena at Calder Park Raceway, with Santana and Fleetwood Mac. Tell me about jamming with Carlos Santana?
Yeah, that was pretty amazing for me, when you think about it. I didn’t know that was going to happen. We’d done the Sydney show the week before and he must have heard me but there was no contact there. I was watching from side stage at Calder Raceway. I’m watching him and a roadie grabbed me and said ‘Carlos wants you on’. I’m going ‘wow, really?’. So I’m getting shoved over to the other side of the stage near where he was, and the roadie plonked one of his guitars over me and plugs it in and there you are. So the drum solo was going on which was a good time for the swap over. Then I turned around and when Carlos made it obvious I was gonna play, the crowd went nuts! They were acknowledging a local.
I wasn’t on for long but it was long enough to really spark the audience because the music that was going on was amazing anyway, that was the icing on the cake. I was just starting to get into it and something happened to the amp, my sound started dying down. I don’t know if that’s a trick they do when they’ve got someone up to jam, if the guy is gonna go on for too long they just turn the amp down, get the hook out, turn down the volume. Who knows? He pointed to me and he motioned ‘go for it’ and I played some of these lines, quite unusual, and he just jumped on with the harmonies and I thought ‘wow, this guy knows what he’s doing’. It just showed how much of a good musician he was because he heard me, not just what you can do with a blues scale. It wasn’t for long.
I didn’t get to talk to Carlos there. Funnily enough he came through later and he had Buddy Miles playing drums with him and they got me up again at the Entertainment Centre. That was the closest I ever got to Hendrix, with Buddy. Two steps removed, six degrees of separation.
Did you enjoy playing with Joe Walsh when he came out to Australia to tour with The Party Boys?
It was amazing, fantastically beautiful because he’s such a character. We’d started rehearsals and Joe rings me up and says (adopts Texan accent), ‘hey Kevin, you got a couch?’. I was living in Bondi then and I had a spare couch. Playing ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ with him was great. He’d showed me what he wanted to do. I’ve listened to a lot of his stuff but he showed me a few things that I hadn’t caught on to properly. Later on he came out and did a gig with me in Taree. Down the track after that he came and visited us here. He’d just done this 50th anniversary gig in London and he flew out and stayed with me in the ‘Joe Walsh Suite’ in my studio.
I wanted to mention and commiserate with you on the recent passing of Ronnie Peel, such an important part of the La De Das.
Yeah he was, a wonderful character and a real great supportive dude to have in the band. He had his own persona, Ronnie was great, a great bottom end bass player, he put a great bed on the sound which is what you want from a bass player. I first met him in New Zealand when he was in The Pleazers, the Australian Pleazers. There was also an NZ Pleasers. They had two singers and we saw them at the Galaxy club, a great venue with two stages. One band would play one end and then they’d change over to the other band up the other end. I’d see Ray Columbus and the Invaders, the ‘She’s A Mod’ guy, and they had two great guitar players, two different styles. It was educational to go and see them. Then you’d see Max Merritt and the Meteors on the other stage, a sensational band.
The classic track from the early La De Das was ‘How Is The Air Up There’. Then you changed with things like ‘Morning, Good Morning’. On to Rock And Roll Sandwich which I still think is one of the great albums, an absolute classic. Funky as all get out, with tracks like ‘The Place’, ‘To Get Enough’ and ‘Searchin’’.
That was my first three piece stuff with Ronnie and Keith Barber, a wonderful drummer. My first Express album I suppose, being a swap over from the four piece when Phil Key had left. I was doing more writing. It’s been successful.
That whole era and leading up to the Kevin Borich Express, you were playing that tough style of blues rock but it was also very commercial. You had the hits with the La De Das, ‘Too Pooped To Pop’ and ‘Honky Tonkin’’. Then you had a hit in the Celebration! era with ‘Goin’ Somewhere’, another classic song. My absolute fave KBE track is ‘Celebration!’. I love that, the way it changes up.
Thanks man. There’s a version I recorded at the Basement with my son Lucius on drums and Clayton Doley plays organ, he was in a band before us and I said ‘you wanna get up and play?’. We did ‘Celebration!’. Also Leo Sayer was in the crowd and we were doing an encore and Harry the bass player goes ‘Leo wants to get up’ and I was going ‘Leo De Castro?’. The great Maori singer who was incredible. So he goes ‘no, Leo Sayer’, so he got up. I tune a semi tone down and that usually kills half the harp players because they don’t have a flat harp but Leo had the right harp and he went for it. It was really fun. we did ‘You Got Me Running’ and ‘KB’s Boogie’ which is a real up-tempo one.
I also saw you at the Continental in the late ’90s when Lucius was playing and you had Ben Rosen on bass. You got Ross Wilson and Wendy Saddington up to sing. So you did the rocking blues stuff and Ross got up and you did the R&B stuff with him and then Wendy just did jazz blues fusion; it was a lovely night.
We only had an afternoon rehearsal and she’d just come off from being in the Hari Krishnas and it was her first performance. She hadn’t been singing for a long time and she was going ‘should I do it?’. She died a few years ago too. She was so unique, there was no one else who approached anywhere near how she sang, with the force of her voice. Janis Joplin had that thing but Wendy had her own style, not just like Janis.
Jumping back again to Rock And Roll Sandwich, what do you remember about recording it? The album credits say it was recorded live at the Doncaster Theatre?
Right, we’d gone into EMI studios and in those days the studios they didn’t really have any live reflection rooms and that’s half the battle. In those days they sucked everything up by dampening it and we set up and we heard it back and we said ‘that’s not us, we don’t sound like that’. We wanted to go to a place and put the beds down and put the vocals on later. We went to this place, a rock venue, called Greensleeves, somewhere in Sydney, the Doncaster Theatre. I can’t remember where it was (Ed note: formerly a cinema, in Kensington, City of Randwick). It had a high roof and we took a 16-track tape machine and there was a room off to the side of the stage and we miced everything up like playing a live set and we went right through our songs. I think the only one done in the studio was one I wrote on piano, ‘No Law Against Having Fun’.
You were such a great performance band in those days and you had Renée Geyer and Bobbi Marchini on backing vocals on the album.
Yeah, Renee was on Lonely One too and we did a whole album with her, Blues License. We did that mini album Shy Boys/Shy Girls and she was singing on that too. She’s an amazing singer. She’s a tough lady. I toured with her, in those days she never picked on us though. We almost came to blows one time but we worked that out. I’m writing a book at the moment and I’ve got a bit about that in it.
Tell me about your book; do you have a title yet?
Um, I’m still fishing for that. It’s gonna have ‘Without Prejudice’ underneath (laughs). I’ve just been jotting down my recollections and I’m starting to have trouble remembering things. I also went through radiation treatment for cancer and I must have done something wrong. I’ve now married an angel, Melissa, she’s a meditation and yoga teacher. She got me on the right path in about 2005 and she said you should do what I do, so I’ve been practising that since then. Being on the road takes it out of you so I’ve gotta get back into my routine.
For more on Kevin Borich, go to his website www.kevinborich.com.au