Kip Winger Says He Understands Why Metallica, Others Joked About Him

Winger frontman Kip Winger says he believes he understands how he and his band came to be the butt of so many jokes and of so much abuse over the years.

The singer and bassist has talked in the past about how he and his band arrived a few years too late. Winger's musical ability was often overshadowed by its look and by the fact that Kip's biggest musical influences weren't rock bands. 

"I can certainly see why it happened," Kip told TeamRock of the bullying. "I had a background in ballet and theatre and I was quite flamboyant [on stage]. I was intentionally trying to put a muso-type band around a David Lee Roth or Paul Stanley-style frontman, and nobody really saw that." 

Winger's easily lampoon-able stage persona and the way he cited classical masters as influences instead of Led Zeppelin or Mötörhead rubbed plenty of his contemporaries the wrong way. 

Metallicthrew darts at a photo of Kip while recording The Black Album in 1990 (watch footage of that below). And then there's Beavis & Butthead, which taunted the band for years.

A lot of successful musicians look back on their careers and talk about being at the right place at the right time.

Whether it was The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, U2 or Nirvana, any massively successful band owes at least a portion of its success to good timing.

If you could create an equation that measured musical quality and timing, Winger might have the biggest disparity of any artist in history.

Winger is one of the most ridiculed bands of all-time. Yet anyone who actually dives into the band's catalog will find a group with all the technical ability and song craft of an all-time great rock band...but with all the pop culture timing of Axl Rose at Montreal's Olympic Stadium.  

Winger first hit the charts in 1988, just as the glam rock movement was reaching critical mass. The band was a prog rock outfit at heart with a knack for writing pop hooks, outfitted in all the tight pants and teased-up hair that was the uniform of the day.

Winger released its second album just as glam rock collapsed in on itself and the industry fled towards grunge, leaving Winger looking and sounding very out of touch.

In the end, it's all gravy. Winger has stuck together through all these years, putting out high-quality albums. And Kip has been celebrated as a solo artist and classical composer.  

"I got a Grammy recommendation for my classical record (Conversations With Nijinsky, 2016), and to me that sets things straight," Kip told TeamRock.

The singer also co-wrote a musical called Get Jack, a musical centered around the victims of the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.

"We call it a musical thriller because it's sung-through, like Les Mes, so it's not a typical musical," he told Q104.3 New York's "Out of the Box" with Jonathan Clarke last fall. "It's almost like an opera, but it's kind of falling in-between."

He says the cast includes five lead women singers and three men. 

"We really immortalize the women in this. They go back to get vengeance on Jack, and the Devil wants his soul. We're really happy with it."


Photo: Getty Images


Sponsored Content

Sponsored Content