Recently, acclaimed Funny Money/ex-Kix vocalist Steve Whiteman was kind enough to take a break from his decidedly hectic schedule to speak with us regarding, among many other things, the release of the group’s latest effort Stick It!…

Todd: How was Funny Money formed?

Steve Whiteman: “Funny Money started about a year after the break up of Kix. I was at a fundraiser in the Baltimore area and another local musician approached me and asked me what I was doing. …His name was Billy Andrews, a really good guitarist from the area. He was actually going to try out for Kix towards our demise as a replacement for Brian. …He came up to me and was talking and kinda invited himself up to my house. He wanted to see what I was writing and what I was up to. When he heard some of the material that I had written, he said ‘…I think we can put a band around this…’ and it sorta got my juices flowin’. He went out and found some musicians, I found a guitar player, we started rehearsin’ and I liked what I heard…”

Todd: What can you tell us about the new record?

Steve: “It’s called Stick It!, which kinda stems from my autograph. When Kix used to do in-store (appearances), I used to hate ‘em because people would always say ‘…sign my shirt, sing my breast, sign my head…’ After a while, they’d say ‘…sign something special for me…’. I ran out of things that were special, so I just started drawing this stick man. You could call it a self-portrait. I’ve been drawing it for years and I thought it would be a cool little logo to attach to this album. …You can take it any way you want to. You stick in your I-Pod, you can stick it up your ass or you can just look at the little stick man and just stick it, ya know? There are various meanings. …Anyway you use it, it works.”

Todd: How do you feel the music Funny Money creates compares to the music you recorded with Kix?

Steve: “Well, initially, on all of the previous Funny Money records, I did all of the writing. I guess I enjoyed it a first because it was the first time in my life I had been able to write without someone breathing down my neck telling me that it was wasn’t any good or changing it all around. …But I wasn’t as strong of a songwriter as someone like Donnie Purnell, so I needed help, but wasn’t getting much from the other boys that I had in the band at the time. So when the old guys in the band decided to leave me, I recruited some new guys. I got Mark Schenker on bass and I got Jimmy Chalfant from Kix in the band…and for the first time, it’s a total collaboration. Everyone contributed. It’s obviously the best Funny Money record, but it also rivals any of the Kix records as well. I’m pretty damn proud of it…as everybody is. We did it all in house with Pro Tools, but the kicker is that out of the blue I got an E-Mail from (acclaimed producer) Beau Hill. He left his office number and I gave him a call. We talked for a while and I told him what was up. I told him we were doin’ a new CD and we were using Pro Tools. He said ‘…why don’t you send it to me? I’m trying to learn how to use Pro Tools and I’ll mix it for ya…’ So between Mark and Beau goin’ back and forth, Beau mixed the record and Mark taught him how to use Pro Tools (laughs). We got a great sounding record that was all done in house.”

Todd: What are you current touring plans for Funny Money?

Steve: “I wouldn’t call it touring with us. We’re weekend warriors. We go out about one night a week in the regional area of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginities, Washington DC. We go out and play maybe twenty rooms a year and go back out maybe every three or four months. That’s our work schedule, but…if for any reason this record found an audience and people wanted us to come to their town because they wanted to hear the new Funny Money stuff, we would probably be there in a heartbeat. I refuse to take it on the road and shove it down the throats of people who don’t know us or care (laughs).”

Todd: What type of set list are you working with?

Steve: “We do between twenty two and twenty four songs a night when we play. I’d say about twelve of them are Kix songs and the rest are from Funny Money. …Because we go into the same rooms over and over, we try to mix it up. It may be fairly obvious, but every once in while we’ll dig up something. We recently added “Poison” from the first record and “She Dropped Me The Bomb” from Blow My Fuse. Every once it a while we’ll just shake it up. They wanna hear “Don’t Close Your Eyes”, “Cold Blood” and “Blow My Fuse”. Those are the staple songs of Kix… We realize that we have to play those songs. It would be like the Stones not playing “Satisfaction”. My job is to make them happy, so as sick as I am of playing the Kix stuff, I know that’s what the crowd wants, so that’s what it’s all about.”

Todd: What ultimately led to the demise of Kix?

Steve: “It really wasn’t one thing in particular. It was a sign of the times with the invasion of the Seattle music and record companies not paying much attention to the genre of music that we were playin’. We just felt like there was a new party in town and we weren’t invited. We found that the clubs were paying less money for bands like us and it got to the point where we couldn’t even support ourselves anymore. The business pretty much kicked us out (laughs).”

Todd: Wow…I guess I always assumed it was directly related to the group’s contract with Atlantic Records…

Steve: “Well, we did have a rotten deal, but that never affected our popularity and out ability to go out and make money. When that got jeopardized and that got threatened, that’s when we realized… And it wasn’t just our band. It was Ratt, Cinderella…all the bands that were huge in the ’80’s and early ’90’s just got flushed down the toilet. …It was almost humorous to like bands like us. We were literally blackballed.”

Todd: Where you initially optimistic when the group signed to CMC International for the release of Show Business?

Steve: “We were really naive in hoping that a smaller label would pay more attention. We believed in ourselves and in our music and we realized that it was probably our last chance to go out and make a band. I think we were probably their guinea pigs and didn’t know how to battle the new music with our music. It didn’t really have a chance and it wasn’t really their fault. Our type of music had already been flushed. …They were out there kinda pickin’ up the scraps that were left behind by other labels. They had good intentions of keeping this music alive by keeping good artists in the limelight, but it failed miserably.”

Todd: In hindsight, how do you feel about the material on Show Business?

Steve: “You know what? It really wasn’t our strongest album. When I go back and listen to it, there are three or four songs on it that I’d say that I like. …It was at the end of our good writing period (laughs). Donnie was obviously the key writer in the band. I think at that point the was just searching for new ideas, but he just wasn’t able to come up with anymore original stuff after he’d been doing it for so many years. We also went through a major tragedy during the recording of that album. His parents were in a massive car accident and he was away from us for most of the time. The whole thing of us signing to CMC and doing everything in house by ourselves without having a real producer or engineer involved…the record really didn’t have a chance.”

Todd: Was the decision to do everything in house primarily fueled by the group’s financial situation?

Steve: “Whenever we made a record, except for the Midnite Dynamite record, we pretty much just went back into the studio and re-did our demos. We felt confident that we didn’t need that outside help unless we were getting a producer who was a songwriter hands-on guy like a Beau Hill who really did do that and made some great changes to our music. I can’t give Tom Werman too much credit. I think he pretty much re-did our demo. …Why should we pay someone eighty or ninety thousand dollars and give them points when all we have to do is make our demos sound really good in the first place?”

Todd: When you were out touring arenas with groups like Britny Fox, did you have any inkling that the good times weren’t going to last?

Steve: “We never ever really got confident in what we were doing because we struggled for so long to get there. Although we got our record deal fairly quick, it didn’t have that much impact on our career. We never really felt comfortable… We were opening in arenas, not opening, so we knew we still had a long way to go. Unfortunately, the Blow My Fuse tour was the beginning of the end (laughs). We just didn’t know it. We had high hopes for the Hot Wire album, but that’s when we realized there was a new sound in town and ours didn’t sound like that.”

Todd: What has prevented you from touring with Kix on a national level?

Steve: “We just take the big money that’s to be made in our regional Baltimore, Washington DC and Pennsylvania area. We go out once a year, play about four or five rooms and we all go home with our pockets full of money. And we love that because these local fans are the ones that kept us alive all those years when no one gave a shit who we were. We really do feel it’s a honor to be able to get up in front of these people and give them a show once a year. To take it out on the road…realistically, out hearts aren’t in it. If we were getting back together as Kix and we’re writing new material as Kix and were trying to promote the band…the cost of being out on the road…just so we can make two or three thousand dollars a night just doesn’t interest me.”

Todd: How would you respond if you were offered the opening slot on the annual Poison tour?

Steve: “I’ve already gotten that call (laughs).”

Todd: Really?

Steve: “I’ve gotten offers to do some openings for them, but I would never do that. …But now that Funny Money has a CD that I’m really proud of, if the offer came in, I wouldn’t shoot it down.”

Todd: So there will never be a full-fledged Kix reunion? You have to admit it’s what the fans want…

Steve: “I really don’t see it happening. Donnie Purnell hasn’t spoken to me in ten years and that’s the way he prefers it. …The Funny Money project is near and dear to be and I love everyone in the band. I feel real strong about it and I feel this new record that we’re about to put out is a strong as any Kix record ever made. I’m pretty content where I’m at and I know Ronnie Younkins is content with his Blues Vultures project and Brian has Rhino Bucket. We’ve all moved on and we know that realistically Kix in our area is still a nice big cash cow, so we take advantage of that. We entertain the home fans and go about what we truly love, which is our own projects.”

Todd: What caused your relationship with Donnie to deteriorate?

Steve: “…When Kix broke up and I started Funny Money, I went out with the full intention of playing the new material that I had wrote and the new material that I was writing along with some covers. But to be honest, the crowds that were coming out were so disappointed that they weren’t hearing any Kix material, I was having trouble getting the band booked. I had to relent and start playing Kix material and when Donnie got wind of that, he just washed his hands of me and hasn’t spoken to me since. I haven’t spoken to him personally, but the things that I hear that come from him are very negative and very typical Donnie. When you’re on Donnie’s shit list, you’re on there forever.”

Todd: Man…that’s pretty harsh…

Steve: “Yeah, I agree. He was not an easy guy to work with, to be honest. How we managed to survive eighteen years…it still blows my mind. He was a control freak and everything had to go through him, by him and everything had to be written by him…every word, every note. I guess we felt we were still in the best position to be musicians to get out in front of a lot of people, but in our hearts we would have loved to have been somewhere else. …We we’re great actors. We got up onstage and put on great shows, but when we were together, we weren’t very happy.”

Todd: Does Donnie own the rights to the name Kix?

Steve: “You know, I don’t know if he’s ever owned or patented that and that’s why we’re able to go out, the four of us go out with my bass player Mark Schenker, and we call it Kix. I don’t think to own that name…to copyright it or patent it is worth his time or money. …And from what I understand, he won’t even listen to the Kix records because my voice is on them (laughs). But you’d have to know the guy to understand, so don’t try because you never will.”

Todd: Is there any truth to the rumors that Donnie wanted you thrown out of the band?

Steve: “Oh, yeah. We would make up demos for songs to be considered for the album and send them off to the record company and our management to see if they felt we were on the right track. I would have between five and seven songs written and all of my songs would get left off the list. It pissed me off, so I called the record company and told them I at least wanted my songs to get heard… …Donny got wind of that and wanted to fire me (laughs). That’s the kind of crap we were up against. That’s the kind of stuff people don’t know.

Todd: Looking back, are you comfortable with the level of financial success Kix achieved?

Steve: “This band never made over five hundred dollars a week no matter how much money we generated. Obviously Blow My Fuse went platinum. We sat down with the record company after an eighteen month tour…and they told us ‘…well, boys, you’ve had a hell of a year and finally made a dent in the business. Now you’re only in debt a million dollars…’ I hit the table and thought ‘…what the hell am I doing here?’. In that eighteen months, we went out and created a lot of relationships with regional radio and really dug in to make an impact so that the next time we made a record, we could pick up the phone and call them. But then Atlantic switched us over to East/West (Records) and those contacts were all gone. The whole thing had to be started again. But we knew we were in a downward spiral… …I could drive myself nuts sitting around trying to figure out why we never got rich, but I don’t. I went into a career that I knew was risky and I generally enjoyed it. I have no regrets whatsoever. …I look at it as if I had a hell of a ride, my dreams came true and now I’ve moved on.”

Todd: Is Cool Kids really as bad as everyone says it is?

Steve: “It’s not very good. We were forced to use some outside material. …We tried to Rock it out the best we could, but when we would leave the studio, they would bring in these keyboard players we called the bearded dudes and they came in and sang all these pretty background vocals. They really tried to Pop us out. That was the label, our producer and our management at the time. They pretty much told us ‘…shut up, you’re doin’ this record, we’re payin’ for it…just shut up and do it…’ We didn’t have much of a choice. We went out smilin’ to promote that record, but deep down we all hated it. …They did all that with sole intent of getting a song on the radio. …Our material was never geared for the radio, ya know? Our material was geared from drunks at bars. After we went out and made the most limp dick record possible, our A&R guys comes at us with Def Leppard’s Pyromania and says ‘…here’s you’re competition…’ …We were just so devastated. But we went out and put our little happy faces on and promoted that piece of shit as best as we could (laughs).”

Todd: Is it just my imagination or did Kix really have a ton of songs with a reoccurring “bomb” theme?

Steve: “Yes, we had a lot of bomb records. …By the time we got to Show Business, we we’re still blowin’ shit up, but the theme was dead. It really was time to come up with some new ideas, but every other song title still had a “bomb” in it. …But a bog influence of Kix, obviously, was AC/DC and they had that whole energy theme and we tried to carry along with it. All of the themes with lightning, energy and bombs were intentional, but I think it ran it’s course after a while and we jus didn’t see the light (laughs).”

Todd: Musically, what are your influences?

Steve: “I have many influences. I started of as a kid loving the Beatles. The Beatles were what got me into music. I loved all that Pop stuff in the ’60’s and then got into harder stuff like Grand Funk, Deep Purple and stuff like that. I’m pretty open to anything. I love what they call Soul music. I love Stevie Wonder, James Brown and all that good stuff. I like just about everything, but once I got into stuff like Aerosmith and AC/DC, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin…those are probably my four main influences. When I write, and I reach into my catalog of references, I usually touch on one of those four.”

Todd: How did you become involved with giving singing lessons?

Steve: “People from other bands used to come to me because I was notorious for not loosing my voice. They would ask me what I would do. I was always smart enough to warm up and do things to prepare and protect myself before a show. When Kix broke up, I needed something to fall back on. It’s not like I was rich. I needed something immediately, so I thought I would try teaching. It’s something I’ve been doing for the last eleven years and it’s great because I can make my own schedule and I make pretty good money doing it. I do it when I feel like it and I stop when I wanna stop (laughs).”

Todd: At this point, is teaching your primary focus?

Steve: “It’s a combination between Funny Money and teaching that I make my living and support my family, so they’re both equally important to me.”

Stick It! (2006) **

Skin To Skin (2003) **

The Essentials (2002) *

Even Better…Live (2001) **

Back Again (1999) **

Funny Money (1998) **

Show Business (1995) *

Kix Live (1993) *

Hot Wire (1991) *

Blow My Fuse (1988) *

Midnite Dynamite (1985) *

Cool Kids (1983) *

Kix (1981) *

* as a member if Kix

** as a member of Funny Money

funnymoneyband.com