Hill's rock star reminisces about rocky past

Posted 6/26/19

Kenn is seen playing earlier this year outside of Winnie’s Restaurant on Main Street in Manayunk, where he plays regularly. (Photo by Carolyn Miller)[/caption] by Len Lear If you are of a certain …

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Hill's rock star reminisces about rocky past

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Kenn is seen playing earlier this year outside of Winnie’s Restaurant on Main Street in Manayunk, where he plays regularly. (Photo by Carolyn Miller)[/caption]

by Len Lear

If you are of a certain age and were into rock music in the 1970s, you must remember the name Kenn Kweder, who many people in the music world were predicting would be the Next Big Thing.

Kweder, now “67 going on 167 years old” and a Chestnut Hill resident for the last two years, seemingly had it all – good looks, a terrific song writer, guitar chops, an electrifying, mercurial stage presence and a bad boy, iconoclastic Mick Jagger-ish persona. Some of the 200-plus songs he wrote, such as “Man on the Moon,” “Crackhead,” “Marco Polo” and “Back on You,” seemed headed for Top-10 hit lists.

Kweder worked and performed with a virtual Who's Who of rock stars, including Bruce Springsteen, Cheap Trick, AC/DC, the Ramones, Elvis Costello, Patty Smith, The J. Geils Band, The Kinks, Kris Kristofferson, Eric Burdon, of The Animals, The Stray Cats, Bette Midler (not a rock singer but a boldface name) “and so many others I can’t remember at this point today.”

In March 2016, there was even a 105-minute documentary about Kweder's career, “Adventures of a Secret Kidd: The Mass Hallucination of Kenn Kweder,” by filmmaker John Hutelmyer, that had its world premiere in two screenings at International House in University City.

According to an article in the Philadelphia Daily News at the time, the film “details his childhood, including a mother with an outsize personality and a lifelong regret of not pursuing a show business career; his early days as a Rittenhouse Square busker; his mid- to late-'70s run as the city's most buzzed-about rocker (backed by several generations of the explosive Secret Kidds); and his still-thriving, decades-long career as a journeyman performer grinding out a living with gigs five or more nights a week at area taprooms and cafes.”

By the way, Kweder, who has “lived in practically every zip code of Philadelphia, like a rolling stone, has always liked Chestnut Hill, and now I am living here and really love it! It’s got everything I need within walking distance, plus there is a huge number of musicians/artists living here! I feel quite at home.”

Kweder’s five-decade career has been recognized with the Delaware Valley Music Poll Award, WMMR’s Street Beat Award and Best Album of the Year from the Philadelphia Music Foundation.

Rock Journalist and WHYY radio host Mike McGrath has said, “You can’t graduate from Wharton School without showing the bruises of a night out at Smokey Joe’s. Tuesdays have become the biggest music night in Philly. Students show up at midnight and get crazy with Kweder.”

Kenn, who estimates he has played about 7,000 gigs in his half-century career, is seen here recently at The Living Room Venue in Ardmore. (Photo by Carolyn Miller)

Anyone who has seen Kweder live has had a rockin' good time, riotous, exhausting, dazzling. So if he had it all, why is he not a household name everywhere instead of just certain Philly households?

“These guys from Manhattan wanted me to dumb down my songs and fire the band,” said Kweder in an earlier interview. “I couldn’t do it. I’m from Southwest Philly, and loyalty means a lot.” (Legend has it that he angered Arista Records executives by his arrogant attitude, reaching all the way up to president Clive Davis.)

“When I go onstage I transform into something else. I’ll summon the spirits of Shakespeare, Judy Garland, Frank Zappa and Roger Miller. I’m like a present-day witch doctor. I want to heal people.”

Kweder grew up in Southwest Philly and attended West Catholic High School in West Philly, where he “was a crazy neighborhood basketball player!” He worked for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and was at one point in charge of the food stamp department in his neighborhood.

But one day in 1975, “I decided to quit my food stamp job and went full-time into music. I decided I did not want to take orders from anyone anymore. I went full fledged into the music world without any backup plan! I still have no backup plan and am proud of it! No 401(k) plan for this boy!”

Pierre Robert, long-time deejay at WMMR-FM, gave Kweder the tag “the Bard of South Street,” and it stuck. At the time, he was living on South Street and “was always writing poetry in every bar that existed back then on South Street. I wrote poetry at the bars for friends, bartenders and strangers. I obsessively wrote poetry on all the walls inside the bars.”

Kweder, who insists he has played “about 7000 gigs so far in this lifetime,” became a driver for the gravel-voiced Tom Waits after quitting his government job. “The funny thing is that after working with him for half a year driving him everywhere, I got fired for drinking. Fired by Tom Waits for drinking!”

When Kweder began looking for work as a musician, he came up with a handful of nothing, so he put into motion what he calls guerrilla marketing.

“I found out that word-of-mouth gets you gigs, but no gigs get you NO word of mouth. It’s the Catch-22 of starting off in music. So one day I came up with the idea of filling the city with 10,000 posters, using Carnation milk as an adhesive because it is about 10 times stronger than wallpaper paste.

“My early band and I glued 10,000 posters all over the city. After a while the clubs gave up refusing me work and agreed to hire me as a performer. My strategy worked! They figured if I had posters on every square foot of the city I must be somebody! I have continue that exaggerated carnival approach till today.”

TO BE CONTINUED. For more information about Kweder, visit KennKweder.com. You can reach Len Lear at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com

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