There’s a veteran rock act that emerged from Houston, one with style and staying power that’s literally both little and old.
Just don’t confuse it with “that little ol’ band from Texas.” Because while ZZ Top was a force through the 1970s after coming out of the southeastern Lone Star State hub, that trio fell prey to 1980s video trappings and has become a caricature tribute act to itself despite vocalist/guitarist Billy Gibbons’ estimable talent and leadership.
The other trio is King’s X (www.kingsxrocks.com), a band that’s consistently chosen creativity, and not necessarily commerce, ever since its 1988 debut Out of the Silent Planet (Megaforce). Vocalist/bassist Doug Pinnick, guitarist/vocalist Ty Tabor and drummer/vocalist Jerry Gaskill haven’t headlined stadium shows in the process, but their non-sellout trajectory has made them cult heroes to musicians from all genres. They have fans in grunge acts from Pearl Jam (whose bassist, Jeff Ament, credited the trio with inventing that subgenre), Alice in Chains and Soundgarden to the funk, prog-rock and metal of Faith No More, Dream Theater and Pantera.
Even jazz and fusion players appreciate King’s X, because musicians recognize like minds who play to their multiple strengths. Like Beatles-inspired three-part vocal harmonies, arguably the most powerful component of this formidable power trio. Making things more muscular are its frequent use of drop-D tunings, and Pinnick’s mammoth tones on four and 12-string basses.
King’s X’s vocal topography often hinges on the African-American bassist’s gospel-inspired lead singing, spiritual lyrics, and those choir-like harmonies. Combine those with Tabor’s searing solos and the trio’s lock-step rhythmic foundation, and you get what’s been described as progressive metal: a grunge-adjacent blend of prog and metallic rock, pop, funk, gospel, and soul music that will be on display when King’s X plays at the Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday, Nov. 13.
On paper, and in the minds of many musicians, that formula equates to legendary status because of the trio’s ahead-of-its-time alternate tunings, introspective lyrics, use of both common 4/4 and uneven time signatures, and one of the darkest rock sounds since 1970s King Crimson. In reality, though, King’s X has never broken into FM radio the way U2 — a pop/rock group with more flowery Christian underpinnings — did starting in the 1980s. This trio’s originality, in the round-hole business side of music, became a trade-off in which King’s X remains a uniquely square peg.
Pinnick, however, is used to being a square peg and seems to have no regrets. The upside to being a tall, Black, rail-thin, left-handed lead-singing bassist in a band variously misconceived as metal or Christian, especially after announcing publicly that he was gay in 1998, can be that you have almost no reason to care what anyone else thinks.
The singing bassist has overcome racism and homophobia within the music industry, the Deep South and beyond. But while being interviewed by Zoom from Los Angeles, where he’s lived for the past 15 years, he appears content. With his rack of basses in the background, and a shaved head rather than the rooster hairdos of King’s X past, Pinnick looks a generation younger than his 75 years.
“The good things that have come out of our career are as good as having zillions of followers and millions of dollars,” he says. “There’s a loyal following of people who love what we do. It might not be on a huge scale, but we have our own scale. I eventually came to the conclusion that this was exactly the way the universe wanted it, and I’m OK with that. It’s taught me a lot about myself, and about how to be a better person. I never got into music to be rich anyway.”
The trio of songwriting musicians first emerged from Springfield, Missouri, as legitimate Christian players who were leaning further away from what they saw as the limitations of the religion’s music scene, and even the religion itself. Pinnick and Gaskill were already working together when they met the Mississippi-born Tabor, who’d traveled to Springfield to attend the private Christian school Evangel University.
Their connections to the Christian label Star Song Records drew the three to relocate to its home base of Houston in 1985, where early experience included backing Christian singer/songwriter Morgan Cryer. It was also where they met future manager and producer Sam Taylor, whose credits included ZZ Top videos.
It was Taylor who convinced a trio formerly known as The Edge, and Sneak Preview, between 1979 and 1985 to call itself King’s X, and who had production credits on its first four albums. Those included the conceptual Gretchen Goes To Nebraska (1989), Faith Hope Love (1990) and King’s X, the band’s 1992 debut on the famed label Atlantic Records.
The band’s early reviews were highly positive, especially in the British press. When King’s X made its U.K. debut at the Marquee Club in 1988, the acclaimed London venue was mobbed. And the above-mentioned grunge band members-turned-fans brought people out in droves in Seattle.
The buzz made sense. All three King’s X members could be, and at various times are, lead singers in a trio that harmonizes too well to be metal, yet sounds too darkly ominous to be Christian rock. But perhaps there’s a reason Pinnick rhymes with cynic, since he understands why his approach doesn’t always resonate with audiences, including the largely Caucasian male crowds that frequent King’s X shows.
“I think some listeners can be racist without necessarily being prejudicial,” says Pinnick. “White kids don’t generally want to hear Black folks singing about any Black people stuff, even though they might like hearing rappers rap about it. In rock bands, front men need to have something iconic that the masses want. What I have isn’t quite that. I sing about truth, issues, society and consequences; things I’ve learned that I think could help us. But I get why most people don’t want to hear that [stuff].”
One such example could be the song “Over My Head.” A track from Gretchen Goes To Nebraska, and expounded upon in the lengthy live version recorded at Woodstock ’94 that’s included on the 1997 compilation Best of King’s X, it features Pinnick autobiographically testifying about being raised in Illinois by his great-grandmother in a devoutly religious environment; one in which her strict love of God usurps her love for him, making him feel repressed and confused.
“I get it,” he says. “If I was a single parent who had to get up at 4 a.m., get kids ready for school, get them to day care and pick them up later, all while working a day job I don’t enjoy where I’m not making enough money, I might just want to be entertained rather than hearing someone sing about religion, abuse or depression.”
In 1991, on tour in support of Faith Hope Love, King’s X opened for the popular Black rock quartet Living Colour at the Sunrise Musical Theater. That group was still riding high off of its anthemic, Grammy-winning hit “Cult of Personality,” from its debut album Vivid a few years earlier. But by the middle of King’s X’s set, when Tabor mimicked air raid sirens on Faith Hope Love’s propulsive track “Moanjam,” the show had been stolen from the headlining act.
Influenced by Allan Holdsworth, Brian May and Alex Lifeson, the fiery guitarist’s approach also ranges between Jimi Hendrix’s chording and David Gilmour’s tasteful note choices to Steve Vai’s histrionics. It’s a fusion of techniques comparable to that of Michael Schenker, whose 1970s work with UFO displayed both a guitarist and a hard-to-pigeonhole heavy rock group that likewise deserved wider recognition.
Other Faith Hope Love highlights from that show included the John, Paul and George harmonies of “It’s Love” and Gaskill’s thunderous, repetitive, John Bonham-like fills on the insistent “We Were Born To Be Loved.”
“What I see in them is observation of truths in life, like love, peace and redemption,” says Andre Boucher, bassist/vocalist for Stuart-based Christian rock trio Called.
“Of course, these would only exist in the presence of a force of good, and by contrast, that which is absent of good. Due to the positive and spiritual leanings in their songs, the machine tried to brand them as Christian, which they didn’t want for business purposes. And then Doug came out of the closet, which put some ice between them and that machine.”
“Growing up near Chicago,” Pinnick says, “then going to Missouri and Texas, most people’s attitudes and some of the racism that came with them were similar.”
His eyes then widen.
“But if that subject comes up, even now, I hear people say, ‘Doug’s gay? I didn’t know that.’ Most people still don’t know. Nobody really seems to care, which is awesome. But in the Christian music world, yeah, they had a problem with it, of course. I’m not going to condemn them, though. I know there are a lot of Christians out there who don’t have a problem with it either.”
By 1993, King’s X decided that the often-overbearing Taylor hadn’t accurately captured its natural heaviness. Enlisting producer Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Black Crowes) certainly upped that quotient on Dogman (1994). Its title track opened the disc with a vocal-and-instrumental downbeat that likely blew out some speakers, and the album ended with a raucous live cover of Hendrix’s “Manic Depression.”
Yet nothing from Dogman got substantial radio airplay, a recurring theme for a band that sounded like no one else in an industry where sound-alikes were increasingly courted by recording labels’ A&R men.
Subsequent albums were self-produced or employed various other sound engineers. Ear Candy (1996), the band’s final release for Atlantic, yielded the rocking concert favorite “Looking for Love;” Tape Head (1998), its first of several on the self-explanatory Metal Blade Records, another live fave in “Little Bit of Soul.”
The band’s ascendancy peaked through the grunge era of the 1990s. But in 2000, King’s X put on a banner headlining performance at the Culture Room in support of its Beatlesque album, Please Come Home…Mr. Bulbous. The Metal Blade recording’s songs like “She’s Gone Away” and “Marsh Mellow Field” perhaps most approximated what a harder-edged Fab Four might’ve sounded like.
Asked where King’s X might be most popular, Pinnick draws a blank.
“I don’t know where we’re popular,” he says with a laugh. “I think it’s practically about even everywhere, where there’s a pocket of people who love King’s X and nobody else cares. But we can play almost any club and fill it up with fans, which sometimes surprises us. We’ve played a club in Slovakia that was sold out and held about 200 people, and the crowd sang along and knew the words to every song.”
Four more albums were released between 2001 and 2008 as all three members participated in outside and solo projects. Fourteen years would pass before King’s X’s latest release, Three Sides of One (Inside Out, 2022). The main reasons for the delay were the obstacles that befell Gaskill, including heart attacks in 2012 and 2014, plus his New Jersey home being destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in-between.
The drummer’s approach is essential to King’s X, and what most takes the trio away from the metal subgenre instrumentally. He eschews stereotypical speed-cyclist cacophony, rather saving his thunder for appropriate spots and accentuating the band’s melodic gifts through his vocal harmonies and sparseness.
“Jerry thankfully hasn’t had any problems in years,” Pinnick says. “When you survive more than one heart attack, you usually need a pacemaker and might become an invalid, or your heart comes back better than it was. So I think his heart is stronger than ever now.”
As far as bass influences go, Pinnick paints a vivid picture of how he figured out how to combine rock, prog and funk, while playing through effects with a pick, into his own synthesis.
“Listening to soul music growing up, I was always attracted to the low end the bass occupied,” he says. “This was in the ’50s, when I was just buying singles, and I was always turning the bass up on my record player. But as a teenager in the Motown era, the bass got louder. Hearing James Jamerson, I was making up my own bass lines in my head, because I didn’t get a bass until I was 22.”
“Then I heard John Entwistle from The Who play the solos in ‘My Generation’ from ‘Live at Leeds,’ and I was like, ‘What is this?’ That tone! Chris Squire from Yes played ‘Roundabout’ with a pick, and I’d never heard anyone play like that because I’d only seen them use their fingers. It was complicated, melodic rock bass playing, but grooving like Jamerson or Larry Graham from Sly & the Family Stone. Chris was plucking strings with his thumb and the pick at the same time to create something new, so he’d taken a lot of stuff from all those other bassists and put it into this wonderful package. And I’ve stolen from him ever since.”
The bassist quotes Randy Newman regarding Southern California, where he moved to from Houston in 2010, and doesn’t count out at least one more King’s X recording with Tabor (now 64 years old) and Gaskill (67).
“I love L.A.,” he says. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else. It’s a place where you can be yourself without being judged, unlike almost everywhere else in the United States. I didn’t realize there was this paradise where people could live in peace. So I’m always writing songs, and I’m now mixing my new solo record. As for King’s X, we’ve been talking about recording. It’s hard, only because we all live in different parts of the country. But we’re talking about it, and excited about it.”
Clearly, in spite of the advancing age of all members, the supposed metal trio that became a cult rather than occult sensation isn’t coming to South Florida this month to retire.
If You Go
King’s X performs at the Culture Room, 3045 N. Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale.
When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 13
Tickets: $36-$72
Info: 954-564-1074, cultureroom.net