photo credit: ALEX FINE

Kweder’s No Quitter

Philly’s rock ’n’ roll messiah makes his “115th comeback!”

by Brian McManus

Kenn Kweder wants you to shut the fuck up. He knows this is a rock ’n’ roll show, but he wants to read some Shakespeare. You won’t listen? Well that’s why America is going to hell.

So starts the new DVD A Million Light Years of Kenn Kweder Pandemonium Live, where Kweder is onstage at Walsh’s having one of his classic meltdowns, one that over the years might see him rough up an audience member or, you know, pull a military sword on Rolling Stone scribe David Fricke. It’s Kweder in all his ham-it-up glory, Philly’s “rock ’n’ roll messiah” gone apeshit.

“I don’t even remember being onstage when I was doing that,” Kweder says over the phone from his home in Port Richmond. “But I do remember I was never allowed back in that place. There are people who still haven’t forgiven me for a few of my outbursts onstage. I like seeing people cut loose onstage, but some people … eh, it’s not their thing.”

Pandemonium is a grainy romp down memory lane with Kweder doing his thing—cutting loose and living it up. Rare clips of Kweder ruling the TLA, Bijou Cafe, JC Dobbs, Tin Angel, Penn’s Landing and the Palladium span three and a half decades as he hopscotches through genres—New Wave, fat slices of rock, thin slivers of punk and a healthy dollop of alt-country before that term even existed—and giving fans what could be considered the visual equivalent of his 2002 55-song opus Kwederology Vol. I and II.

Kweder’s canon is as storied as it is diverse. Lyrics range from imagining a world where doctors prescribe heroin to praising 7-foot-7 former Sixer from Sudan Manute Bol. And Pandemonium touches on a good deal of it.

“Some of the DVD is embarrassing, but I dig that. It’s not glorified, developed or polished. It’s loopy, sprawling … it’s an existential kaleidoscope of my career,” Kweder reflects. “I figured, what the fuck, I’ve got all this video of Kenn Kweder performing live just lying in my closet. I thought something could be done with it.”

Raised in Southwest Philly, Kweder came up in a live-show era in Philly when local acts were frowned upon. They didn’t bring money or audiences to clubs. No one cared to see them. Clubs didn’t care to book them.

Undeterred by this (spurred by it, in fact), Kweder sought to bring a renaissance to Philly’s live local music scene. He walked into clubs with a boatload of ego, convinced owners to let him take the stage and began building a rep and, along with it, a substantial audience.

Soon major labels began calling, and Kweder—never willing to step off his stubborn artistic stoop and compromise his act for fame (even when that word meant something)—ignored their siren song.

“They wanted me to dumb down my lyrics, and fire my band. Imagine that. I was raised Catholic. Fire my band who came up with me in my mom’s basement? I never even considered it,” Kweder says, regretting nothing.

Through it all, Kweder kept gigging around Philly, and on Pandemonium his wardrobe and music styles change often as the decades roll by, but his wild unpredictability and uproarious stage show remain constant. Whether falling onstage with a bottle of red wine in his hand, or quietly strumming an acoustic, there’s a kind of mystic know-how at work on the DVD’s performances—a confident swagger only performers who’ve spent countless hours in the live-show trenches can develop.

“There’s something about the stage. I feel at home up there. I’m never nervous,” says Kweder.

Elsewhere on the DVD you’ll find an odd and unexplained clip of a show called Exercize With Kweder wherein Philly’s messiah works out on a rowing machine with a cigarette in his mouth while two women in half-shirts stand behind him running their fingers through his hair. Also included are parts of a drop-dead hilarious profile of Kweder and his excellent band the Secret Kidds on a television show called Evening Magazine from 1978.

“I just think I was blessed with an understanding a lot of people aren’t blessed with,” a fresh-faced and arrogant Kweder attests on the video. “Einstein was blessed with an understanding of science. I was blessed with an understanding of writing very good songs.”

“I still feel that way,” Kweder says. “I grew up a child of the ’60s, and I still believe in those principles. Do what the fuck you wanna do, and do it to the best of your ability.”

Kweder, now 55, plans on doing what the fuck he wants to do until he’s physically unable. “Marcel Marceau just died, right, and I remember he had a quote. It was something like, ‘Never stop. ’Cause when you stop, you die.’ I believe that, so every day I’m on the phone trying to convince some club owner or show booker to let me play and take a crowd on a magic carpet ride.”

Kweder pauses, a lightbulb goes off and he laughs, “Convincing club owners is part of the performance. It’s half my job. We should film my phone calls to them, make that a fucking DVD.”

Kenn Kweder’s DVD release party is Fri., Sept. 28, 7pm and 10:30pm. $12. Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St. 215.928.0770. www.tinangel.com