Kip Winger on ’90s Backlash and Apologies from Metallica, Mike Judge: ‘It was bad. It was really bad.’

Photo: Kip Winger | By Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | Denver born and raised, the hair-metal heartthrob says the hate he got “fueled my engines to not let it end this way. I can’t be this guy in history” So, he reinvented himself as a Grammy-nominated classical composer.

“There was a turning point in my band where I made a fatal mistake, which was my second album. We were misrepresented on that record. Two things: I should have waited to put that record out. And I should have just done an album cover of us in blue jeans. That’s what I should have done. And then the music would’ve spoken louder than the image.”

So says Kip Winger of his eponymous band behind hits like the now-politically-incorrect “Seventeen” and perhaps too-prophetically-titled “Headed for a Heartbreak,” as he looks back on his long-haired, short-lived heyday chronicled in the new Paramount+ docuseries, I Wanna Rock: The ’80s Metal Dream.

The bass-playing heartthrob was one of the most accomplished and sophisticated musicians of “hair-metal” genre, having studied the works of composers like Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky since he was 16 years old. (A self-described “total theory geek,” his pre-stardom former boss, Alice Cooper, actually used to call him “the ‘briefcase rocker,’ because when everybody’d be partying on the tour bus, I’d be working on a score.”) Winger, now 62, has even reinvented himself in recent years as a Grammy-nominated classical artist. But being the pinup boy of ’80s metal also made him the era’s punching bag, especially when he became the target — in the latter case, literally — of both Beavis & Butt-Head and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich.

“I’m not gonna lie to you: I was a total ham,” Winger tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I loved the theater of that time. I dug the glam, because I was a Paul Stanley protégé — that was what a ‘rock star’ meant to me. So, I hammed it up. I did all the pictures and all that [teen idol] stuff, and I was very competitive about it all. And it bit me in the ass.”

Winger elaborates, “It was the irony of my whole existence, because my focus has always been the music and being a good musician. Like, one thing I will say about ‘Seventeen’ is if you take away the lyrics… you know, a lot of cover bands try to play people’s music, and you will never find a band that can cover ‘Seventeen’ and play it correctly. It’s a very, very difficult song to perform. It’s got a lot of tricky stuff going on from a musical point of view. And so, it was tragic, like: ‘Wow, how could I end up in this position, being the one out of all of these [’80s hair-metal] guys that can orchestrate for an orchestra?’ It was bad. It was really bad.”
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“I was never in the cool club. I don’t feel like I’ll ever make it into the cool club. I don’t feel like I’m a rock star, and I never really did,” Kip confesses. And in a way, that actually makes him cooler than any Beavis & Butt-Head-approved hard rock darling. Reflecting on his “late-in-life” symphonic success, he says with a smile, “I feel like I couldn’t have been vindicated in a better way.”
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Read the whole interview here:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/kip-winger-90s-backlash-metallica-mike-judge-232651140.html

Photo: Kip Winger | https://www.facebook.com/KipWingerOfficial/