Jason LeValley:
Well, I wanted to ask you about your radio show. What was that all about? It was a morning show, and you actually had to get up in the morning.

Greg Kihn:
I had to get up at four in the morning, which is brutal. And then I would drive to San Francisco. So it was like I had a 1 hour drive and the 04:00 a.m. It was brutal, but they were paying me a bunch of money. I remember the guy writing down, he goes, “Would you do it for this amount of money?” And he slid the little paper across the desk at me, and I looked down and I go, “Yeah, what time do you want me to get here? So it was like three or four times whatever I was making at seven to midnight. And I just jumped on it. And I did that for 18 years at KFOX radio. Of course, while I was there, it had been bought and sold many times: Clear Channel, Intercom, Cumulus, all these different various ownerships, and they moved it to San Francisco to a high rise up there, a penthouse suite of radio stations. And I was there for 18 years. And then the day that I got fired was the day I got inducted into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame. So go figure.

I had great ratings, everything, but I think they fired me because they were paying me too much money for too long, and I can totally understand that. Yeah, but you know what? It was great because I didn’t have time to do anything. And then suddenly, boom, I had tons of time. And so the first thing I did was make the album, and then I wrote two novels and then went out on the road, and now we’re back working on the second album. So it’s a lot of fun, and I just like having something to do. I need to chew on something.

“I had great ratings, everything, but I think they fired me because they were paying me too much money for too long.”

LeValley:
Right. So you’ve written a couple of books. The Wiki page says you’ve written four horror fiction novels.

Kihn:
Yeah. I don’t know. I wouldn’t call them horror. The first one was horror. Yes, that’s true. But most of the other ones I would just call strange. The last two books that I wrote were about The Beatles, and The Beatles were actually characters in the novel. They actually had their lines and everything. And it was really… I’ll tell you the story. You want to hear that? It’s real quick story.

LeValley:
Sure.

Kihn:
I was interviewing all of the remaining Beatles on the radio, like, Paul McCartney would come to town. And I’d interview Paul, like two or three times. I interviewed Ringo Starr, I interviewed Pete Best, the original drummer for The Beatles. And I asked them all the same question. I said, “Where did The Beatles get their music? Because there were no import shops. There were no places you could go and buy “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, let’s say. “Where did you get it?” And he goes, “Oh, that was our secret. We had a lot of friends that were merchant Marines, and they would bring records back from the States.” So they would float over to… this was all ships. They would go over to New York and Baltimore, which I was from, and they would come back to Liverpool with stacks of 45 rpm records. And a lot of those singles would find their way into flea markets and second hand shops and places like that, which is where the Beatles found it. And they knew a guy that knew a guy that could get the records, but they didn’t have any money because they were so poor, and they were just getting ready to go to Hamburg, and they needed this vast repertoire of songs.

So our guy lends them the songs, they become best friends. And he remains best friends with the Beatles through their entire lives. And in the end, he winds up saving their lives from an assassination attempt in the Philippines in ‘67.

LeValley:
That’s in the book?

Kihn:
Yeah, man.

LeValley:
Well, I’m going to have to check that out.

Kihn:
And I talked to Ringo about the death threats and the Philippine thing, and he said, man, “We were scared out of our wits. We thought that the shots were going to be coming from any direction. Usually they shoot people from roofs there, and they were afraid as they ran to the plane that they were going to be picked off by Marcos loyalists who had different bones to pick with the Beatles. But Ringo told me since then, “The last thing I remember was Brian Epstein (who was their manager at the time) yelling, ““Run, boys, run! Don’t walk! Run to the plane!”” And he said, “I don’t know if there were bullets flying around. I did. I just ran.” And that story got in my brain and became the germ… The name of the novel, by the way, is called Rubber Soul. And that was the idea for it. Interesting.

LeValley:
Yeah, I’m going to look for that and give it a read.

Kihn:
Oh, yeah. You got to read Rubber Soul. It’s completely unlike anything you’ll ever read again. It’s really neat.

LeValley:
It sounds like it. So you have your son playing lead guitar with you now?