So much art depends on a lightning flash of inspiration—just being in the right frame of mind at the right moment and receiving what the universe has to offer.
Greg Kihn tells the story of writing (with his frequent songwriting partner, bassist Steve Wright) the Top Five single he’d been chasing for the better part of a decade:
“I’ll always remember the day in 1983 when he [Wright] dropped by my house to show his new toy, a new-fangled battery-powered Casio keyboard with a built-in drum machine. It had a cheesy clavinet sound and Steve played me a riff he just wrote. I heard the now infamous riff from ‘Jeopardy.’ What happened next was magic. I spontaneously started singing ‘Our love’s in jeopardy, baby, whoo-who-hoo.’ That song wrote itself in about 15 minutes. It was as if the song was floating around in the air and we just snatched it up.”
– as quoted in Ultimate Classic Rock, January 17, 2017
Before we get deeper into it, though, a quick recap. After battling their way up through the San Francisco Bay Area club scene and scoring a top 15 hit with “The Breakup Song” from 1981’s Rockihnroll, the Greg Kihn Band issued a solid follow-up in 1982’s Kihntinued. Not long after, Kihn decided to make the first lineup change—other than adding people—in the band’s history, replacing longtime lead guitarist Dave Carpender with Greg Douglass, another Bay Area guy, with credits including Van Morrison and the Steve Miller Band.
Douglass was different from Carpender in two significant ways. First, he hadn’t come up with the band like Carpender had, playing tiny clubs and doing record store appearances with Kihn (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Wright (bass, vocals), Larry Lynch (drums, vocals) and later addition Gary Phillips (keys, vocals). And second, their playing styles were distinctly different; where Carpender played free, with fire and exuberance, Douglass was more of a technician, clean and precise. He also favored slide, a new color in the GKB palette.
The chart potential of “Jeopardy” was apparent from the start and it became the lead single and kickoff cut for the album. The lyric is classic Kihn in the sense that there isn’t a lot to it, but man do the hooks and harmonies and arrangement max out the song’s potential. At the same time, it was an outlier for the band in putting keyboards front and center, though Douglass does fire off a tight, aggressive solo at the bridge.
From that promising beginning, things quickly get patchy. “Fascination” has abundant drive and intensity, but the lyric is an unsolved word jumble. “Tear That City Down,” the slide-decorated shuffle that would become the album’s second single, features a bubbly bass line and pleasant jangle, but Kihn’s lead vocal has more reverb than substance. By contrast, the stripped-down, appealing “Talkin’ To Myself” finds Kihn in a pensive mood. For the sake of further contrast, the Buddy Holly acolytes follow with the one real rave-up on the album, the propulsive “Can’t Love Them All,” with Douglass finally cutting loose a bit.
Side Two of the original vinyl opens with another standard Kihn move—a classic cover. This time the pick is Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces,” which in this arrangement tests both ends of Kihn’s vocal range. It also goes on a bit, albeit buoyed by the frontman’s enthusiasm. Next up, “Someday” is a poppy number that turns up both the keyboards and the hooks and probably should have been a single. Then Lynch gets something of a showcase on his one co-write with Kihn on this album; “Curious” features a strong rhythm track and steady push on an old-school rocker.
The tail end of the album trails off a bit. “How Long” is angsty and downbeat; there’s an abundance of silky Douglass guitar, but the sound is more Steely Dan than Buddy Holly. Closer “Love Never Fails” offers a strange concoction, a jumpy bass line over moody keys, with guitar more of a rhythm instrument, as Kihn speak-sings a vague fable about resilience.
Kihnspiracy is a solid album, and an important one in Kihn’s catalog, but not a great one. Like its cover, it has a dark energy about it, and while there are moments here, overall Kihnspiracy is neither as energetic nor as charming as Rockihnroll and Kihntinued. That said, “Jeopardy” was exactly what the band had been looking for, an undeniable earworm of a Top Five hit that kept them on the road all across the country for the length and breadth of 1983. The Greg Kihn Band would release one more album before things began to spin apart.