"I had my shot, but I was young. I'll never know what I done wrong." - Kenn Kweder, "Words and Dreams"
"I first saw him in 1977, he's playing the Chestnut Hall. There were about 500 people there. He was wearing a white suit with white shoes, and I thought it was the greatest rock band, rock show, that I'd ever seen." - Paul Ryan, owner of Smokey Joe's, on seeing Kenn Kweder and the Secret kidds
"Somebody once said to me downtown, 'Life is simple, it's certain motherfuckers that make it complicated." - Kenn Kweder
One time, 15 or 20 years ago, Kenn Kweder, a local musician, was walking home from a gig at the Philly Cookbook up in the Northeast. Not too many people had shown up that night, so Kweder found himself without a ride home.
Anyway, he was walking, and it started to rain. Kenny was in his cups a bit -- who's going to do a whole gig without a couple drinks? He didn't want to get any wetter, so he climbed into the first car that had an unlocked door. He did this a lot back then, sleeping in whatever open car or covered porch was handy.
He crawled in the car, a cop car at the Police Administration Building on Eighth Street. Next thing he knew, he was getting booked for disorderly conduct and assaulting a police officer "with my face." They both had to go to the hospital, Kenny with a broken nose and the cop with a split hand.
"I just remember getting in the car with my guitar and then waking up in the police station," Kenny said. "Apparently, [the cops] were trying to get in, and I was holding the door shut, and that made 'em pretty mad."
This is a story about rock and roll.
It's 1968. Kenn Kweder is 16 years old -- not yet the stringy-haired, youthful-looking, black-clad 50-year-old who plays Smoke's on Tuesday nights -- a student at West Catholic High School at 45th and Chestnut. He's sitting at home in Southwest Philadelphia, learning how to play the guitar by watching public television. Up until now, he's wanted to be a basketball player, but he knows he's not tall enough. The guitar seems like a reasonable alternative.
Once he gets a little better at it, Kweder's going to take the guitar out to the railroad tracks and basketball courts in Southwest Philly and play for his buddies and other people in the neighborhood. At night, he'll climb the chain link fence, stand on the basketball rim and play the same traditional folk song over and over.
Kweder meets a guy named Billy Schied, a reclusive songwriter who encourages the young folkie to start writing his own songs. Schied was a character, a guy who would rent out his living room as a polling place for 25 bucks. Kweder calls him one of "the great showmen of all time... if you could get him out."
"We're in the kitchen, and he's like Frank Sinatra, holding court with a bunch of neighborhood people," Kweder said. "And he's unbelievable."
Influenced by Schied, Kweder amped up his performances at the folk clubs he was now playing on a regular basis. He'd play tug-of-war with the audience, he'd throw firecrackers into the crowd, he'd wrestle women onstage.
"That just wasn't what you did," Kweder said. "Back then people were very conservative. I'll never be invited to play the [Philadelphia] Folk Festival, because I pissed certain people off way back when."
The conservative folks who thought Kweder's performances were over the top probably weren't any happier with what he did next. He plastered 2,000 Kenn Kweder posters all over the city.
"It was just my name, the word 'Folk' and a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot in the gut," Kweder said.
He put them up everywhere, at all the major subway stops, at City Hall, on abandoned cars, on the windows of posh men's clothing stores downtown, on all the trolley lines.
"We had moving billboards all over the city," he says. "We used Carnation Instant Milk as an adhesive. It's just impossible to get that shit off."
Still, Kweder had to take a day job. He was a social worker for a year and a half because, even though he was, as he put it, "defacing the city," he wasn't getting gigs.
"Then Artie, my friend, said, 'You've gotta play,'" Kweder says. "So we put together this band, the Secret Kidds. We put up 5,000 posters all over the city. We'd had these posters up six months, and we finally booked a gig."
Oh, man, what a gig.
*
The gig was on St. Patrick's Day, 1974, at a bar at 44th and Spruce. It's called Kelliann's now, but back then it was The Tavern. The place was packed. Kenn Kweder and the Secret Kidds hadn't recorded a single note, hadn't ever played in public, but people showed up because they wanted to know what in the hell those posters were about.
"I'd go into the subway, and I'd see these posters of Lee Harvey Oswald and triangles with sines and cosines from algebra," said Mike McGrath, host of You Bet your Garden on radio station WHYY and a longtime Kweder friend and fan.
"Nobody knew what it was," Kweder says. "Some thought it was an independent film, some people thought it was some kind of JFK conspiracy, because of the Oswald picture.
"Nobody could really play, but there was a great, beautiful thing about [that show]. There wasn't punk yet, but some people considered it punk."
Maybe the attitudes of Kweder and his band were punk, and the sounds at that first Secret Kidds show most certainly were rough around the edges. But over the years Kweder has developed a body of work that retains a melodic sensibility that just isn't found in punk, even as it bounces between irreverence and sincerity.
Whatever it was, it was new and exciting. Over the next four years, Kenn Kweder and the Secret Kidds would play sold out shows to raucous crowds all over the city.
"He was so compelling," says Bill Eib, Kweder's former manager. "You kind of lost your sense of proportion: 'This is great, the Beatles are great. The Beatles are famous, he should be famous.'"
"I'd been seeing his posters for three years and I thought, 'This guy's no smaller than the Rolling Stones; they don't have posters on every bus in the city,'" says Veck, Kweder's friend, photographer and sometime producer.
The Secret Kidds were hot. They could play the now-defunct Bijou Cafe -- a rock club at the corner of Broad and Lombard streets that held more than 1,000 people -- and sell it out four nights in a row.
"You know they have those arenas now where there's not a bad seat?" McGrath says. "There wasn't a good seat at the Bijou. It was unbelievably packed. I was up front, I didn't know Kenny at all at that point, but I had to be up front."
Kweder was a ball of energy on stage. Fueled by any number of chemicals -- some legal, some not -- Kweder ran back and forth, yelling at the audience, drawing his sword (yes, his sword) and waving it around. Kweder's act was punk in the sense that it was profanity-laden and always on the edge of careening out of control.
"Early on, he probably alienated every club owner in the greater Philadelphia area," said Kweder's friend, Alfred Maschiocchi. "He had gigs at some pretty prestigious venues, and he'd play there for a little bit and never again. So-and-so would be pissed off because of language he used, or he caused a riot or something."
Kweder and his band were a hot opening act in Philly and the surrounding area. One time down the shore at Wildwood, they opened for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and got called back for an encore. They opened for the Ramones at Houston Hall. They opened for Patti Smith, Cheap Trick and Elvis Costello, too. They were being good future rock stars, paying their dues before the inevitable big break.
"In '77, '78, everybody associated with the band in any way, shape or form thought that the band was going to make it big on the national scene," says Bill Schoening, who is now the play-by-play man for the San Antonio Spurs, but at one point held the record for "consecutive Secret Kidds shows attended," at 66.
As far as anyone was concerned, there was no reason to think that Kweder and the Kidds weren't going to hit the jackpot and turn out multiple platinum records.
Except they didn't.
*
In the late '70s, I became very famous in Philadelphia," Kweder says. "Then there was a crash and burn."
In 1978, 10 years after he picked up a guitar, Kweder owned the local music scene. Every place he played was packed, and record companies were coming to see him. One night, a guy named Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records, came down to see Kweder and the Secret Kidds play at The Hot Club on 20th and South, and that was where things came to a head.
"Clive Davis... fell in love with him, the way everyone does," Eib, the former manager, says. "They went out and had some drinks... and Clive said, 'I'd really like it if you had a hit single,' and Kenny thought every song he had was a hit single, and it pretty much ended right there."
Kweder's take on the whole thing: "[Davis] was like, 'I want you to write a nonsensical pop song,' and I was into saving the world and stuff. He wanted 'love,' 'moon, June, spoon' stuff."
Davis went back to New York without Kweder's signature on a record contract. Kweder has still never signed with a major label.
"I think it's because he wouldn't compromise," says Maschiocchi. "I think he wanted it on his own terms or not at all."
Maybe this is hard for some people to swallow today, with the image-driven music industry the way it is. Look at it this way: the record guys wanted to smooth out the edges, sure. But they also wanted Kweder to fire his band. Kweder had a problem with firing guys who were more sophisticated players than he was, not to mention that it would just be plain wrong.
"If I were to surrender who I was to get to the big time, and then still didn't make it, I would've given up my soul," Kweder says. "But I didn't, and life got very bad for a while."
*
By the end of 1979, Kweder was "a leper" in the local musical community. No one wanted to touch him.
"Everybody thought I was going to be the next big thing," Kweder says. "And when that didn't happen, I guess some people were disappointed."
People may have been disappointed, but more and more club owners were just pissed off -- they no longer wanted to tolerate the increasingly wild shows. There was a series of "embarrassing episodes," as Kweder put it. At several establishments, he was not only banned from ever playing there again, he was also banned from entering even as a customer. As success receded farther out of his grasp, Kweder grew more and more depressed.
"I must have blacked out 300 out of 365 days of the year in '79, '80, '81... '82," Kweder said. "I was immensely broken-hearted. I'd thought the world was going to be a more logical place."
Shortly after the crash, Kweder stumbled into The Main Point, in Bryn Mawr, for an interview. The interviewer asked Kweder to tell him about the various incarnations of the Secret Kidds.
"The first one was without bifocals," Kweder said. "The second had bifocals, the third said, 'Fuck the bifocals' and the fourth said, 'Bifocals are important, but you need a subsidiary to the bifocals.'"
"Define bifocals," the interviewer asked about 30 seconds later.
"A bifocal," Kweder said, "Is someone who can play a good guitar."
It seems that Kweder went around like that a lot at that time, sounding like he was stoned out of his mind.
"I don't remember [the interview]," Kweder said. "I clearly remember going to the state [liquor] store before that rap, though. I was with a girl named Annie Bones. She was a hot potato -- a go-go dancer from Seattle."
*
Kweder had lost his audience in Philadelphia, so in 1984, he went back to Europe, where he'd spent some time in his 20s.
"I thought I was going to make it big over there," Kweder said. "I didn't, but I was reinvigorated by the youth over there. I picked up a small audience."
Kweder came back in 1985 and started making music again, with the help of a local musician named Ben Vaughn. Vaughn was big on the Philadelphia college circuit at the time, and he produced Kweder's next couple of albums. Kweder hit the bar scene again with a succession of bands. He wasn't the hottest item in town anymore, but he had a loyal following.
Then, in 1989, came the Elvis show.
It was billed as "Kenn Kweder presents Elvis Presley at J.C. Dobbs'." Kweder spent six months preparing. He assembled an 18-piece band, including backup singers and a horn section, and he had a white, sequined jumpsuit -- think Elvis in his Aloha from Hawaii get-up -- custom made. He put 17 men on the security detail, which was headed up by Phillies relief pitcher and fan favorite Tug McGraw. Kweder grew out his sideburns and wouldn't answer to anything but "Elvis" for a few weeks before the show.
"He'd be walking down the street, and someone would yell 'Kenny!' and he wouldn't answer," Eib said. "You had to call him Elvis. He had the whole town whacked out with Elvis sightings for weeks."
Kweder and entourage rented out the same Holiday Inn rooms the King had used, under the same pseudonyms. Then, they put tin foil in the windows to keep the sunlight out just the way Elvis liked it.
The day of the show came, and Dobbs' was overflowing. You couldn't even get in the door. A giant searchlight swept across the sky outside Dobbs'. Elvis arrived in a train of limos and made his entrance, complete with chiffon scarves thrown to the audience.
"It was a really, really wild scene," Veck said. "It was 100 percent Elvis playing Dobbs."
"He channeled Elvis that night," said friend and former roommate Dion Lerman.
Kweder did only Elvis numbers -- except for one, "Kung Fu Fighting," which he thought Elvis always should have done. It was an Elvis show in every respect, except for the size of the venue.
"If you've been there you know that the stage is the size of the kitchen table," Lerman said. "The backup singers had their toes hanging off the edge of the stage, and the trombone players had to work their slides between the singers' heads."
At the end of the show, Elvis zipped offstage, into the limos and was probably at his suite at the Holiday Inn by the time the emcee did the "Elvis has left the building" schtick.
Later that night they had a big party. "And no one acknowledged that it was anyone other than Elvis," Veck said. "Every act Kenny's had has always had some kind of outrageousness to it. This was the only time that the outrageousness was the hook and gimmick all in one."
"It was one of those seminal moments in Philadelphia music," Bill Eib said. "These guys that put those names in the sidewalk on Broad Street, if they don't put him in there, I'm going to beat someone up."
*
Like any good performance art, the Elvis show was a one-time only thing. Since then, Kweder has retained his presence on the Philadelphia music scene, self-releasing albums and playing regularly around the city. He's retained more than a little of that rock star sensibility, too. Like the night caught on tape at the now-defunct Walsh's Tavern when a very drunk Kweder took the stage and asked people if it was "possible to shut up and listen to fucking Shakespeare."
In addition to his regular Tuesday-night Smoke's slot -- which is the kind of show he calls a "wallpaper gig," because he does mostly covers -- Kweder is gearing up for a show at the Tin Angel with the Men from WaWa to promote his new three-CD career retrospective, Kwederology, which was just favorably reviewed in Rolling Stone by music critic David Fricke, a transplanted Philadelphian who has been a Kweder fan for 25 years.
"I don't have any regrets," Kweder said. "When I was in my 20s, I thought it was inevitable that I'd be internationally famous. In my 30s, I still kind of thought that. And when I got to 40, it was like, you know what? I can walk out my front door in the morning, and I can still go play for people who want to hear me play."
But still, it's hard to wonder why it didn't work out. There seems to be no reason a rollicking song like "What Am I Talking About," or a clever bar tune like "Places" shouldn't have found an audience somewhere on rock radio. Whatever the reasons, Kweder and his fans and friends have made their peace with what could've been, but wasn't.
"I tell this to everybody who knows Kenny and likes Kenny," Eib said. "They always want to know how come this guy wasn't more successful? I try to explain to them that he is.... There's something to be said for being your own person.
"He's Kenn Kweder. Tell me who else you know who's him"
