kim simmonds

In 1979, when I was 11, my step sister married a guy I liked a lot. He understood me. We had what I would now call an intuitive understanding of one another. We’d speak in code to each other and know what the encrypted messages meant without their having to be explicitly defined. It’s rare when you have that kind of connection with another person. Like me, he was sarcastic and cynical, back before being these things became a  commonplace and grating  schtick. He was 15 years older than me, and I looked up to him.  I wanted to be around him all the time, wanted to fully absorb the validation he gave me and that I didn’t get from my peers, my family, my school… He really grasped who I was and what made me tick. My father couldn’t stand him, and the feeling was mutual. I often felt torn between the two of them.  One of the things I realize now as an adult is that my step brother-in-law attempted to de-legitimize my dad. Recognizing this has removed a lot of his glow from my memories.  He’d say stuff about my dad, heap ridicule on him, and generally throw gasoline on the fiery anger I felt as it became increasingly apparent to me that my parents, in many ways, didn’t understand what was going on with me.  Of course, all teenagers feel this way.  But you just don’t trash a kid’s parents to gain the upper hand. It doesn’t matter how justified the kid’s disaffection might seem.  It’s not something mature adults should do to kids. At the same time, I’d also feel really uncomfortable when my dad would say bad things about him. I’m not sure why my dad disliked him so much. Maybe he felt put out because the two of us had grown so close. I know my dad didn’t like the way he was a workaholic, and the way he was so feverishly committed to making tons and tons of money. It was the dawn of the 80s. But, really, you could have much worse problems than your daughter marrying a guy with aspirations to be rich. And it seems kind of unfair because both my parents were very heavily invested in their own careers and farmed out a lot of the work involved in raising my sister and me.  As with everything in life, I’m sure the antipathy between the two of them had both proximate and deeper causes.  …One of the things my step brother-in-law and me bonded over is music.  He was a child of the 60s and knew all manner of arcane rock ‘n roll esoterica. He introduced me to music that nobody else in my hemisphere knew about, bands like Bloodwyn Pig, Coliseum and Blue Cheer. He played drums and worshipped Neil Peart and Ginger Baker. We saw Rush several times together.  I look at his taste now and it’s obvious that he was partial to heavy-duty Progressive-ish stuff. I outgrew this type of music a long time ago, but I can’t deny its formative impact on me.  One of the groups he made me aware of was Savoy Brown, featuring a couple guys who later formed Foghat, as well as the great Kim Simmonds on guitar.  In some ways Kim Simmonds was just your typical pasty British guy from the 60s who’d absorbed black American blues. And he never attained the stature of Clapton, Beck, Page, or even slightly lesser-known guys like Peter Green and Peter Frampton. But Simmonds had some pretty sharp blues chops.  I think the reason he never got wide recognition is that he’s just too wedded to blues purism. When it comes to blues-oriented rock, most people (I think) are like me, they want it to be mostly rock with some moderate blues accents.  When it’s the other way around, the music loses its accessibility to most listeners, who really just want pleasing song structures and catchy melodies. It’s for this reason that Foghat, Grand Funk Railroad, ZZ Top, and Humble Pie earned Gold Records while Savoy Brown labored in relative obscurity. But setting aside my reservations about blues purism, especially the blues purism of white guys from England, I remain a fan of Kim Simmonds’ guitar playing. It has a slashing knife-like quality that rings pleasantly in your ears, even if you know it would have been much better served with a few more hooks.  Hearing him play now is bittersweet.  It takes me back to a period of insatiable musical discovery, and I remember my step brother-in-law and how much I loved him.  He and my stepsister ended up getting divorced about ten years into their marriage. I saw him ten years after they split up.  It was good to see him, but by then I understood that he’d done some bad things in the influence he had on me.  But he did a lot of good things, too, one of which was making me aware of Kim Simmonds...