Kennedy Greenrod might never have had a musical career were it not for his older sisters–or more specifically his sisters’ boyfriends. “The first music I was really exposed to as a kid was Elvis Presley,” he says. “I remember my family went on holiday to Morocco and my sister met this French teddy boy, with whom she had a brief affair, and he really turned me on to rockabilly and early rock ‘n’ roll.” Years later, after his family had emigrated from England to the U.S., another sister’s boyfriend handed him a guitar and taught him his first chords. In short order he fell in love with the idea of writing songs.
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A wiry six foot four, Greenrod performs under the name the Thin Man, lending his rolling basso voice to narrative tunes that balance eloquent melancholy with sly drollery and barbed wit. (By day he works for a contractor and delivers the Reader.) Greasy Heart, the third Thin Man album, came out last month on the local Contraphonic label, and Greenrod and his band will celebrate its release at Schubas this Friday. Like his past efforts, the new disc has a junk-shop goth aesthetic and a wagonload of skewed carnival sounds, but it also draws on the anglicized R & B and country of fellow Englishmen like Ian Dury, Graham Parker, and Wreckless Eric.
Greenrod moved north to the Bay Area to attend UC Berkeley in 1984, and began playing and singing in a handful of local bands–most notably a noisy surrealist outfit called Erasergun. Later he drummed with the Vulvettes, a primitive art-punk group that still has a cult following–last year they reunited in San Francisco for a one-off show to celebrate the posthumous release of This Is the Science We Believe In on the A Frames’ Dragnet label.
Its long gestation period notwithstanding, Greasy Heart sounds loose and fresh. The diminished emphasis on noirish ambience and sideshow imagery helps the band display its range. “If I trust the musicians, I like to see what happens when the songs are out of my hands and in theirs,” says Greenrod. “This particular album is more of a rock ‘n’ roll record as a result. That naturally made sense with this lineup. . . . I like that each of the albums feel different.”
The Thin Man, Clyde Federal, Dorian Taj
