Originally published November 10, 2005
by Jedd Beaudoin

BACK IN THE DAY (BUT NOT THAT FAR BACK): Mike Coykendall and Ron Smith perform as Klyde Konnor.

GOSH, KIRBY'S LOOKED DIFFERENT: Klyde Konnor circa long enough ago that anyone conceived the night of the show could now get a driver's licence.

Klyde Konnor, one of the best loved local bands of the '80s, will play a special one-off show this Saturday, Nov. 12 at John Barleycorn's.
     A native of Norwich, guitarist/vocalist Mike Coykendall (pronounced kirk-en-dahl) had assembled KK by 1984 when he mailed a demo tape to KMUW's long-defunct After Midnight. Needing a name for the project he thought of a neighbor named Clyde Connor, altered the spelling and waited for After Midnight DJs to pick up demo. And they did.
     Come '85 or '86 (memories get hazy) the band was invited to play an annual bash. When the drummer couldn't make it Coykendall brought in Cameron Gourley, who would remain behind the drum kit and add an integral element to the group's three-part harmonies until its dissolution in 1991.
     Fascinated by former Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett's solo material and as capable of writing a catchy pop song as an acid-soaked freak out replete with spine-shifting harmonies, Coykendall didn't know of too many other musicians like himself, ones that were as fascinated by the underground British psychedelia of the late '60s or writing material that complemented the burgeoning paisley underground movement that had brought acts such as Robyn Hitchcock, the Dream Syndicate and Green on Red to the edge of the edge of the national frame.
     But some time in late '86 or early '87 Coykendall met Ron Smith who who would solidify the classic Konnor lineup. Trained as a saxophonist, Smith had toured and recorded with dance bands in his teens, though he eventually picked up guitar and studied under Jerry Hahn at Wichita State. He'd found time to form his own band but having gone through a rapid succession of bassists he wasn't sure he'd ever truly get the project off the ground. At the urging of Klyde Konnor's manager and a KMUW DJ, Coykendall and Smith met up and the rest is the rest of the story.
     "The first time we got together we played through this huge list of Syd Barrett tunes and I don't think that either one of us ever thought that we'd find someone in Wichita who we could sit down and play those songs with," Smith recalled. "That was a nice surprise."
     Smith played his first Konnor gig in the summer of '87 and by then Coykendall had begun to detect a difference in band operations.
     "Ron is a very strong personality," Coykendall said, speaking from his favorite breakfast spot in his new hometown of Portland, Ore., "and we saw eye to eye on a lot of things, but I think that I had to share the band with Ron a little bit more. He had real definite ideas about what we should and shouldn't do."
     Not that the Gourley/Smith/Coykendall partnership immediately soared. Coykendall recalled 1987 as a year of retooling, refining, perhaps even perfecting what he and Gourley had established in their time together.
     "That first year was kind of a transition," he said. "We went through a lot of changes and I think it took us that amount of time to really get our footing and be strong. But we came back stronger than what we had been before that."
     One area that the trio needed to improve upon was its live performances. Klyde Konnor could draw a decent-sized crowd, although it didn't always know what to do with it.
     "We had a gig at the Coyote Club once," Smith recalled, "where we finally filled the dance floor with this nice up-tempo number. Now, I'd played saxophone in a lot of dance bands and we had songs with dance repeats in them — once you get the floor full of people you keep them out there, keep 'em dancing. We could have done that with this particular song but that night we finished the song the way it was supposed to finish and I looked at the song list and saw that the next thing was just a dirge. Instead of skipping it and going to the next fast one, we played the dirge. Art Busch, the owner, was livid with us at the end of the set. I think that we realized that we needed up-tempo tunes if we were going to play those kind of gigs."
     Klyde Konnor was exceptionally prolific — amassing a body of somewhere around 300 songs by the end of its run and releasing a series of cassettes that included Hypnopotamus, When Worlds Klyde and Wallpaper. The group paralleled the likes of the Beatles and Hüsker Dü not just in terms of output but also in terms of rapid evolution. Coykendall, Gourley and Smith found the studio a comfortable environment in which to experiment and often wrote and recorded material which incorporated the studio as a kind of instrument in and of itself.
     "There were songs on those records that we never performed live and we'd also have songs that we'd been playing at shows that we liked and the fans seemed to like and we'd try to record those pretty honestly," Coykendall said. "We moved pretty fast."
     Although there was an awareness that the band might make it out of the city, Coykendall said that that hope had pretty much faded by 1991.
     "I knew better. We'd go out of town and play to five people, and I didn't want to spend all of this time on the road, having to work in front of audiences like that. At least not at the end."
     "I think we thought it might happen for a time," Smith said. "But we knew that it would mean leaving."
     Smith had two children by then and Gourley was newly married, which complicated roadwork, although not the working relationship between the three, which continued to deepen. (So much so that the partnership gave birth to Tangle Brains, a side project for the group's more experimental material.)
     By 1991 Coykendall had wed his girlfriend Jill McClelland (who would join him in the Old Joe Clarks) and quickly saw his job at a savings and loan begin to evaporate in the wake of a major S&L scandal. Eyeing a decent severance package and a little cash from unemployment he opted to leave Wichita and head for San Francisco.
     "I didn't picture myself ever getting out of there otherwise, as a musician," he said. "Maybe we could have broken out if we'd been able to tour and we could have but we didn't have a lot of money and our lives got complicated. We'd go up to Lawrence and play a show to five people, which was pretty tough. My psyche was fragile. I needed to grow up and San Francisco was good for me."
     He left for San Francisco, then Portland and in the last 14 years has enjoyed success as a studio musician, producer, engineer and, now, a solo artist with the release of his recent Hello Hello Hello. Smith has remained in Wichita for most of that time as well. In aftermath of Klyde Konnor he formed the now-defunct Nervous Pudding, went back to college, then graduate school and today works as a stage musician at Cabaret Old Town.
     Both agree that the band ended at the right time. "There's something to be said for going out on top," said Coykendall, who added that Saturday night's show (which will include John Eizell, formerly of Scroat Belly, on drums) came about largely because he and Smith have fun performing those old songs. For a generation of Wichitans who've gone on to form their own bands, write their own songs and make their own records, there's probably no harm in reliving the joy of songs such as "Bubble" and "Welfare Hotel" all over again.
     And for the generation that missed out? Here's your chance.