THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! The Greg Kihn Band, "The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em")

 This is not part of my book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1).

An infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Today, this is THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!

THE GREG KIHN BAND: The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)

Written by Greg Kihn and Steve Wright

Produced by Matthew King Kaufman

Single, Beserkley Records, 1981

A love that should have lasted years...didn't.

Pop music is a recognized haven for bruised and broken hearts. Our cherished playlists, our holy mixtapes, our favorite radio station, and our beloved record store are stacked as high as a lonely elephant's eye with breakup songs. Songs of redemption? Sure, maybe. But certainly songs of regret, songs of recrimination, songs of denial, songs of anger and confusion, and the occasional song of reluctant acceptance. The breakup song. We feel its majesty and sorrow. And we acknowledge its sting with a tear-stained whisper:

They don't write 'em like that anymore.

Greg Kihn was a folk music fan who became a pop star. Kihn was into music from the earliest of ages. And as a Baltimore teen in the '60s, his love of Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Andersen, the Kingston Trio and other artists within the folk realm inspired Kihn to get a guitar, learn to play the guitar, learn to write songs, and to sing and play the songs he wrote. The Beatles added an electric influence, particularly with their Revolver album in 1966.

Kihn himself remained mostly unplugged. He lugged his acoustic guitar around the coffeehouses of Baltimore and Washington, DC, and traveled with friends to play in Europe. He eventually went West, young man, and in the early '70s found himself settled (to the extent that a troubadour settles) in the Bay Area in California. 

In California, Matthew King Kaufman became Kihn's manager. By 1975, Kaufman's frustration with trying to get his clients signed to major labels led him start his own indie label: Beserkley Records. Beserkley had Kihn, Jonathan Richman, Earth Quake, the Rubinoos, and the Tyla Gang, the stars of the Beserkley galaxy. The label billed itself as "Home Of The Hits!"

The irony of that billing may or may not have been intentional. Hits were not immediately forthcoming for Beserkley.

Meanwhile, when a Berkeley nightclub told solo singer-songwriter Kihn he could probably secure a weekly gig at the club if only he had a band playing with him, Kihn lied in reply, "Hey, I got a band, and we're really good!" Kihn quickly--in TWO AND A HALF WEEKS!--turned this fiction into fact, recruiting bassist Steve Wright and drummer Larry Lynch to form the Greg Kihn Band. They played on Kihn's eponymous debut album in 1975, and added lead guitarist Dave Carpender in time for 1977's Greg Kihn Again.

That year of '77 brought Beserkley its first taste of commercial success, with a British hit in Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" (with Kihn on backing vocals), the Rubinoos' almost Top 40 (# 45) cover of Tommy James and the Shondells' "I Think We're Alone Now," and significant FM radio play for Kihn's cover of Bruce Springsteen's "For You." Beserkley's acts weren't punk in the sense that the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were punk, but the pop energy of the Beserkley acts appealed to punk fans like me, adding essential cachet and an aura of cool.

Jonathan Richman became legend. The Rubinoos became acclaimed underground pop heroes. 

The Greg Kihn Band had hits.

Not a lot of hits, granted: Three Billboard Top 40 singles, two Top 40 LPs. Their biggest smash pop 45 was "Jeopardy," a # 2 hit in 1983, an MTV fave rave that inspired a well-known "Weird Al" Yankovic parody version ("I Lost On Jeopardy"). "Jeopardy" was the Greg Kihn Band's commercial zenith; but their first hit--# 15 in 1981--will always be Greg Kihn's signature tune: "The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)."

"The Breakup Song" is hypnotic, irresistible, employing a guitar riff reminiscent of "Elevation," a song from CBGB's stalwarts Television's landmark 1977 debut album Marquee Moon. The Greg Kihn Band take that (perhaps unconscious) influence and shine it up to a dazzling gloss, making it more immediately accessible, more overtly pop, more inherently capable of annexing radio and its eager listeners.

The music hooks us. The storyline nails us, a familiar tale of a relationship that ended just an hour before, the singer's alone-in-a-crowd emotions seeking succor in the comfort of music in a public place, his inner ache mocked, consoled, or both by a repetitious mantra of Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh.

When I interviewed Greg Kihn in 1995, he talked a bit about "The Breakup Song:"

"I think I'm proudest of that out of all the hits that we had," said Kihn. "That's still the definitive Greg Kihn Band song.

'"We wrote it really fast. You know, my theory of songwriting is if you don't write it in one sitting then it's not that good. All the great stuff was written all at once. And I think we wrote that in fifteen minutes, and did it in one or two takes. That's the way great records are made. It's gotta start with the magic. 

"That song came together in the studio. I didn't have the lyrics finished. I was just singing uh-uh's in between every other line to stretch out the lyrics that I had. And I was gonna go in there and apologize to everybody, and when it was over they were all going, 'Hey, those are the deepest lyrics you've ever written, man!' Kihn recalled laughing. "And they just popped into my head! What's the message there? You know, you sit up all night writing lyrics, and the next day you come in and you're just going 'Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh,' and that's the hook."

That's the way magic works. Even in mourning, even in regret, the magic of art, creation, and love reminds us of why we live in the first place.

Greg Kihn left us on August 13th of 2024, succumbing to complications from Alzheimer's Disease. He was 75. He gave us a simply sublime collection of beguiling pop recordings, from "Hurts So Bad" (my second-favorite Kihn song) to "Testify" to "Sorry" to "Reunited" to "Madison Avenue Man" to "Jeopardy" to "Happy Man" to...oh, please, just investigate the Kihn catalog. If you have a heart, you will find something to love among his works. I love a lot of it.

And I love one specific song even more than all of the others.

Tonight, the jukebox plays a song I used to know. Some say they don't write 'em like that anymore. I'm not sure that's true...but Greg Kihn and his bandmate Steve Wright did write this one, and its greatness endures. A strange feeling in the atmosphere. Tears will dry. A glass will raise. Here's to what was, and to what can remain.

Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh.

In memory at least.

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My new book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) is now available; you can see details here. My 2023 book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones is also still available, courtesy of the good folks at Rare Bird Books. 

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