Renaissance Man

WWU’s Gary McKinney is able to blend his alter egos of author and musician into his job in the office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

He’s been in at least one band almost continually since he was 16, and with three published novels to his credit, he still says he has the burning desire to write the Great American Novel.

No one can say WWU’s Gary McKinney, a research analyst in the VPUE’s office, is not a well-rounded person.

“I’ve always had these creative outlets – music and writing – since I was very young. I took my first piano lesson when I was 10, and have always just loved writing,” McKinney said.

Although he has been at WWU for 20 years – more if you count part-time stints such as his gig as the University’s first male telephone operator in 1988 and ‘89 – McKinney still has a youthful enthusiasm for his job that is obvious.“Bob Thorndike hired me a long time ago, and he told me, ‘I want a writer who can put statistics into everyday terms, not a statistician who will compile numbers into words. I need somebody who can come in here and ask dumb questions and just write.’ I told him the job sounded like it had been written just for me, because there are very few people better at asking dumb questions than I am,” he said. “Joe Trimble took over the office around 1991, and after I proved to him, too, that I could write the way he wanted, he sent me to some stats classes so I could actually get some context about what I was writing about.”

He’s been from Tuscon to Tucumcari …

McKinney’s long voyage to WWU started in his hometown of Raymond, in Southwest Washington. Almost immediately after graduating from high school in 1967, he knew that he wanted a career in music, and he played in a number of bands as he worked toward his associate’s a degree at a local community college.

Academics at that time, he admits, was a secondary focus.

“I got a call in 1969 from the college asking me if I had picked up my cap and gown. ‘What for?” I asked. ‘Because you’re graduating this weekend,’ they told me … I had no idea,” he said.

McKinney spent the next few years taking more classes (“I just loved learning stuff, I guess”) and playing music. Finally, in 1973, he decided to devote himself full time toward music and started a seven-year stretch where he was almost constantly on the road with his band, Kid Chrysler and the Cruisers.

“We played all over the Northwest, including Alaska, also played a lot in the Midwest. Played all over Western Canada, too. Six nights a week, lounges and taverns. For three years my only address was our booking agent’s, who’d send our mail to us at the next club we’d be playing. We worked 50 weeks a year,” he said.

“We were so road-hardened that once after our last set at a club in Winnipeg, we drove out in a snow storm in order to get all the way back to Boise for our next gig. It was after 2 a.m., and we drove due south because we wanted to get back on an American freeway,” he said. “When we got to the U.S. Border in Portal, North Dakota, we had to knock on the glass of the customs inspector’s window ‘cause the guy was fast asleep. Bleary-eyed, he said, ‘Don’t you fellas know there’s a blizzard out? Nobody’s passed through here in six hours.’ Those bands, man, they gotta get to the next gig. Otherwise they’re homeless.”

As the 1970s morphed into the 1980s, McKinney once again got serious about his education, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English/Creative Writing from Cal State Northridge that included a year abroad with his wife in England.

“Who wouldn’t want to study English Lit in England?” he said. “Of course, once I got there, all they wanted to teach me about was Russians.”

His goal at that time was to stay in the Los Angles area and compose music for TV and movies, but before long he found himself back in his home state, in grad school at WWU working toward his master’s degree, also in Creative Writing.

What a long, strange trip it’s been

McKinney recalled a day on campus at WWU sometime in the mid-1980s when the English Department’s Mark Sherman let it be known he was in a desperate search to find a keyboard player for his band, The Mighty Chameleons, for the weekend – even though they didn’t have a keyboard.

McKinney, who plays keyboards, guitar, harmonica, and sings, volunteered, thus launching him into his first Bellingham gig.

“We scrounged up an old Vox Continental keyboard that had three keys missing … but we got it done,” said.

That lone gig with The Mighty Chameleons morphed into a long-standing role with local stalwarts The Chryslers, who only finally hung up their instruments as a unit about a year ago.

“Kids and responsibilities finally took their toll on The Chryslers, but it was a great run,” he said.

In the meantime, McKinney has spent more time working on his pet project and current band, Fritz and the Freeloaders, which plays a lot of McKinney’s original songs as well as an eclectic set list from a varied array of artists.

“We play what we want to play, not what we’re expected to play. We play stuff we really like … I think we were all tired of just being tied to Classic Rock. I mean, I’ve been playing those Classic Rock songs since they were new releases – shows you how old I am,” he said.

Paperback writer

As he progressed through his self-proclaimed total of “around 350 college credits” and years of playing music on the road, always in the background was McKinney’s love of writing, a fascination that showed itself in dozens of short stories and writing projects.

Finally, he opened his own publishing house in 2001, Kearney Street Books, which has a mission of publishing books by and about musicians.

Through Kearney Street, he published his first novel, “If You Want to Get to Heaven,” in 2001, and followed that up with 2003’s “Choosing.”

“Each of those books were very much drawing on personal experiences, and after ‘Choosing,’ I realized, well, OK, that about does it for that,” he said. “I had basically used up all my life’s experiences and needed to get to work creating some new ones for my next book.”

After taking a few years off from writing, McKinney published his third novel, “Slipknot,” through Kearney Street in 2007.

“It’s been a real success, and the characters in it are going to be the basis for a series I’m going to keep working on,” he said.

“Slipknot, “ McKinney’s first mystery, details the adventures of Gavin Pruitt, a Deadhead sheriff in a rural Willapa County town eerily similar to McKinney’s own home town of Raymond.

When basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton, a renowned Deadhead, read McKinney’s book and loved it, McKinney sent him a tie-dyed Kearney Street Books T-shirt.

“He sent me back of picture of him wearing it, and we’ve kind of become pen pals since then … he’s a great guy,” McKinney said.

Following a brief hiatus after the book’s release, McKinney is once again hard at work on the further adventures of Gavin Pruitt in the sequel to “Slipknot,” which he hopes to complete next year, and of finding bright new talent to showcase with Kearney Street.

Either way, McKinney says he’ll keep playing music, keep writing stories and keep turning statistics into words that people can understand.

“It’s been a great 20 years – I feel lucky to be here, and wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.

Spoken like a true Renaissance man.

Gary McKinney’s five favorite bandnames (of bands he’s been in)

• The Mighty Chameleons
• Kid Chrysler and the Cruisers
• A Purple (a high school band of his; they refused to have a name that began with “The” so they used “A” instead, to sound different)
• Boss Tweed (another high school band. Named after the Tammany Hall political leader; “We just thought it sounded cool”)
• Zoot Rudy (the precursor to Fritz and the Freeloaders; named after a sticker ATUS’s Dave Lowe put on a friend’s printer)

Five favorite albums:

• Workingman’s Dead, The Grateful Dead
• Forever Changes, Love
• Avalon, Roxy Music
• After Bathing at Baxter’s, Jefferson Airplane
• Nevermind, Nirvana

Five favorite books:

• Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
• Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
• Nobody’s Angel, Thomas McGuane
• “Anything by Flannery O’Connor”