Cover Story: What makes Kenny Crucial?

Few people can honestly recall the first time they saw him. It might have been circa 1995, on one of those MJQ nights when the club was still in the basement of the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Maybe it was as far back as the late ’80s, when legendary DJ Bobby Bridges was in the booth at Weekends. It could have been when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played the Echo Lounge in 2003, or perhaps it was two years later across the Atlantic, when the Foo Fighters performed at Leeds.

Any of those occasions, and countless others, could have been your first introduction to Kenny Crucial. But it’s more likely that your memory goes back only so far, and Kenny goes back further.</
No, people can’t really say when they first saw him. They can only definitively recall when they became aware of his presence. Because he’s been there all along, standing front-row at nearly every worthwhile indie-rock show to pass through Atlanta – and many of those across the country and overseas – for two decades.</
Alex Weiss, whose company, OK Productions, books a significant number of the indie-rock bands that come to town, says he first noticed Kenny when his name kept popping up on the will-call list at the now defunct Echo Lounge. “Then I would see him at almost every show I went to,” Weiss says. “I guess it’s not really the place to be unless you see him in the audience.”</
“When I first moved here, every concert I went to he was in the front row,” recalls Jonathan Whiteside, who plays keyboards and guitar for the band Spectralux.</
Alex Adan, a local photographer who shoots a lot of indie shows, says he started noticing Kenny five years ago when Adan was a student at Georgia State University. “He kind of sticks out,” Adan says. “When I went to concerts with friends, we’d see him, and they’d be like, ‘Hey, there’s that guy again.’”</
Almost from the beginning, his presence was portentous. When two major indie-rock bands play the same night, you realize you’ve picked the right one when you spot Kenny in the crowd. If you’re in a local band, you know you don’t suck once he starts coming to your shows. When he starts to pump his fist in the air, you might have a shot at making it.</
And so, somehow, Kenny Crucial has become Atlanta’s benchmark for taste, a barometer for the highest quality DJs, the smartest indie, the best parties, the grittiest rock ‘n’ roll. If you go out at all, you’ve probably seen him: a ruddy-faced giant, imposing but mild-mannered (aside from the moment when the music gets the better of him, and he starts to dance like a maniac), friendly to all, but almost always traveling solo.</
The weird thing is, lots of people go to lots of shows. But few stand out like Kenny Crucial does. And none has achieved his cult-like status. Kenny Crucial is an Atlanta icon. The question is: Why?</
Despite being one of the most recognized faces in local nightlife, few people know anything of substance about Kenny Crucial: where he lives, what his real name is, where he came from, what he does to make a living, how he became so ... crucial. Nor do they have a clue what his intent might be in being everywhere all the time.</
“As much as I see the guy, I don’t really know much about him,” says Marc Crifasi, ex-music director for WRAS-FM (88.5) and a former manager at Criminal Records. “The guy is really an enigma. But I guess that is the point.”</
Everybody knows Kenny Crucial. And nobody knows Kenny Crucial.</
If you were describing him for the first time, you’d almost certainly start with his height. Kenny Crucial is tall. And because he’s typically in the front row when you first notice him, he seems even taller.</
Then there’s his hair, which fluctuates from close-cropped (at the time of this story) to a frizzy, slightly thinning and ink-black halo. That’s usually the second thing you notice: that wild mop lit up by the stage lights, perched atop a hulking frame.</
Next, there’s his uniform. With a few exceptions, Kenny will be found in a solid-colored T-shirt (typically gray or navy), blue jeans, black shoes and, when it’s really chilly, a dark zip-up jacket.</
Finally, there’s Kenny’s remarkable face. It’s filled with twists and turns, the surface made more interesting by the winding contours, the imperfections more flawed in contrast to his shockingly blue eyes. He’s obviously a good bit older than the majority of people who hang out in the clubs he frequents. And he’s clearly not interested in following their fashion trends.</
Basically, Kenny does not scream cool. And yet, to be on speaking terms with him is to have risen a notch in the social hierarchy of the city’s indie scenesters. As one woman posted on a MySpace.com blog: “I guess I must need to start hanging out with Kenny Crucial more. Maybe I’ll earn some more ‘cool points.’”</
And so, on the surface, there’s both Kenny-as-crucial-music-fan and Kenny-as-crucial-status-symbol. Of course, there’s another Kenny, too – the Kenny who masterminded this whole affair. To get closer to figuring him out, you must peel back the many layers: a seemingly silent and self-content indie buff who happens to get noticed; a guy whose mere presence can signify a band’s success (this is as far as most people typically go); a struggling artist who’s toiling to create something as great as the music he endorses; and, surprisingly enough, a clever manipulator who places himself in your line of sight as part of a calculated plan. But even if you get this far, you still haven’t fully unraveled the mystery.</
Another thing you might notice about Kenny: He does not drink. You won’t see him with a beer. You won’t even see him with a water bottle, not at any of the blazing-hot music festivals where he pilgrimages, from Coachella in Palm Springs to Pitchfork in Chicago to Leeds in England. He doesn’t even drink coffee – or anything – when he agrees to meet on three occasions for coffee.</
All this contributes to the enigma. Kenny Crucial is friendly, engaging, hyperintelligent. But he’s not like the rest of us. In fact, none of the people whom he suggested I contact could give any explanation as to why he goes out so much, or even what his life might entail outside the realm of smoky bars. In fact, few of those people had ever seen him outside a smoky bar.</
It’s almost as if, outside the club, Kenny Crucial doesn’t exist.</
About a year or two ago, Adan, the photographer, took the leap that not everyone who crosses paths with Kenny Crucial is able to take. He struck up a conversation, and then a friendship. And yet Adan admits, “Even though I know him, he’s still mysterious.”</
Not long after they met, Adan realized that for years, he had possessed something of Kenny’s. It was from when Adan was DJing at WRAS-FM, Georgia State’s well-regarded college radio station. He’d pulled it from the CD junk bin. Despite the album’s amateurish packaging, he gave it a listen. And he thought it was pretty good.</
On the cover was a rather vampish-looking singer. A couple of years passed before Adan would meet Kenny Crucial – and realize that he’d known a little bit about him all along.</
The band is called Mack Messiah. It’s not Kenny’s first band. Two-Way Mirror preceded it. Before Two-Way Mirror, there was Marseilles Red. And years earlier, while doing his master’s work at the University of Illinois, Kenny formed his first band.</
“It was a really interesting experience,” he says. “It was like 13 people.”</
“What was it called?” I asked.</
“It was called Crucial.”</
But when I tried to find out whether that was where his name came from, he wouldn’t say.</
A month later, I tried rephrasing the question: “Do you not want people to know that Kenny Crucial is not your real name?”</
“This is my name,” he said plainly. “It’s not an ID check. Obviously, you’re doing what you do. It could easily be found. I’m not worried about that.”</
Another of my inquiries, in regard to a year he spent abroad in France working on his master’s thesis, was met with similar ambiguity.</
“What year was this?” I asked.</
“Um ...”</
“Circa?”</
“Awhile ago.”</
Again, I later tried to find out if, as with his name, he didn’t want people to know the truth about his age.</
“Yeah,” he replied. But it wasn’t as simple as that. “I think it’s also this thing, this theme we’re talking about. There is definitely something about age in this scene. There’s something about an illusion of youth. Part of it is a delusion of youth. But on the other hand, why should you be honest in this situation? Why can’t you keep some illusions?”</
The theme we’d been discussing had to do with the evolution of club life in Atlanta, and how Kenny has trolled that scene in search of patterns. He believes they’re the same societal patterns – a sort of hierarchy of cool – that governed French courtiers (as evidenced in French literature) in the 17th and 18th centuries. The historic French model for the hierarchy of cool was, in fact, the subject of Kenny’s 1994 doctoral thesis.</
Yes, that’s Dr. Crucial to you.</
I was able to confirm that Kenny’s thesis had been published and that, yes, he holds a doctorate degree from the University of Illinois. He also has taught composition, literature and philosophy, for a collective 15 years, at Georgia State University, Kennesaw State University, Georgia Perimeter College and other schools. (On a website that ranks professors, several students described him as the best teacher they’ve had. “We watched a bunch of movies, even had field trips,” one student gushed. “If you want a fun class with no deadlines take him,” stated another. “He doesn’t take role either.”)</
As an academic, Kenny finds bars and nightclubs fascinating. And it’s his belief that the study of nightlife requires active participation. He says that without total immersion, the academic view of the underground can be simplistic, even condescending. Take a recent Modern Language Association meeting he attended in Philadelphia: “Someone attacked the idea of the culture by saying, ‘These people want to pretend they’re hip. They create this hierarchy based on who’s the hippest or who’s the coolest, but there’s really nothing to it.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, there is something to it. You just don’t get it.’”</
Nightlife is a rich part of our culture, and a relatively unexplored one – unless you’re Dr. Crucial, in which case you’ll be capturing, obsessively, what the rest of us are too drunk to remember.</
When Kenny Crucial chooses not to live by his given name or reveal his actual age, it partly has to do with his belief that everything is up for interpretation. Just as a novelist who controls his fictional world sifts through details to separate the irrelevant from the meaningful, an individual in the real world can choose to be portrayed in a certain way, too. Identity, essentially, is what you make it.</
When Kenny absorbs the culture of nightlife, he keeps that idea in mind. But he doesn’t want to demystify the language of the clubs for the sake of academic study. Rather, he’s chosen to weave the language into novel after novel. So far, he’s written 12 of them, all unpublished.</
Kenny blurs the identities of the characters in his novels in much the same way he blurs his own identity. Take the protagonist in his experimental book SAMSFAM, whom Kenny describes in the intro as follows:

“We know him so well. We hardly know him at all. From what we can glean ... we can know more of him. More or less! We don’t know his name. ... [T]hat gives him a reality separate from the stories of which he is a part. And he is no more than a part of a story.”</
Kenny has written two experimental novels. He describes SAMSFAM as a reflection on the 2003 death of his father, who held a Ph.D. from Brown University and taught at the University of Illinois and Mercer University in Macon. “The character is approaching his death, but lives in a fantasy,” Kenny says. “Why should he go back to the reality? Why should he have to deal with his death? It’s just as good to step into this creation.”</
His other experimental novel, The Knotted Ribbon, is split into four parts – and describes the same intersection of events from four different points of view. In the movie version of the novel, different actors would play the same role, and different characters would repeat each other’s lines.</
Another thing that’s likely to catch readers off guard is that the language of the novels is sexual. Intensely sexual. When asked whether he’s concerned about people’s reactions to passages such as, “She is bleeding wild and just going out of her skin. ‘Come on shake me.’ And the rocking continues. ‘I just need a good fuck,’” he seems unfazed. Sex, after all, is an integral part of the language of nightlife. “Honestly,” he says, “I’m not worried about it.”</
His other 10 books, with titles such as Hey, Indie Kid, Hurry Before It’s Done and Benny, Pool Boy Lost, are sexual in a different way. All were written last year (no, that’s not a misprint) and were inspired by a romance novelist whom Kenny met at a Kings of Leon show. He thought he might find a way to bankroll his lifestyle by writing romance – or, as he calls them, “popular” – novels.</
So far, he’s been mistaken. The books haven’t made him any money. In fact, for the past few years, he’s been living off savings and credit cards.</
But he’s not deterred. For more than a decade, Kenny’s been at work on a novel called EA, a work that he thinks is his finest. He’s 700 pages in, he says, with about 250 to go.</
It’s taken that long to write because he’s been working on other things. Among them: going out seven nights a week, and trying to be a rock star.</
Early on, when Kenny was a graduate student in Champagne, Ill., he found that his academic life was somewhat at odds with his desire to spend every night at a bar or a club. So he started looking for a way to merge the two worlds. “This experience is so wasted, so contradictory to my studies,” he remembers thinking. “But I’m so committed to it, so I’ve got to draw something from it.”</
Kenny moved from Champagne to Atlanta in the mid-’80s, thinking the move would be good for his band. He was getting ready to work on his Ph.D. at that point, and would eventually take a job teaching English composition at Georgia State. By night, he hung out religiously at Weekends and Rio, the clubs of note at the time. He danced conspicuously, identified the players (RuPaul among them), ingratiated himself, and eventually landed a few coveted late-night DJ gigs. He is remembered as one of the best DJs of the era.</
All the while, he listened for pieces of conversations – “abstract conversations without necessarily a reference,” he says, “conversations in search of people” – that worked their way into his experimental novels.</
It’s not just the conversations that show up; the toil of searching for them is addressed, too. In SAMSFAM, he writes:</
“This is a conversation looking for speakers. ... A desire to escape what is being said.</
“I need to hear the words. For me it is life or death. The only way that I can come to life.</
“To hear the words in all their clarity.</
“– Are you talking to me?</
“Words that are disembodied and drifting through the room.</
“– We have something to say to you. This is what we expect. Are you going to write this down?”</
Kenny watched who came and went from the clubs, literally and figuratively, as they moved up and down the hierarchy of cool. By the early ’90s, he was taking detailed inventory of the different types of scenesters by creating individual symbols for them. The VIP types who made the scene what it was got one symbol. The hangers-on who needed the scene to define their identity got another. The peripheral types who merely played along had their own designation. People who intensely represented any of those types got a star. Those who embodied it completely were marked with an “H.”</
Every night, Kenny would go home and chart the ebbs and flows of the different types of club-goers. He admits he might have been overdoing it.</
“It was almost like an excuse in a way,” he says, “an excuse for going out, like you were getting something out of it.”</
But he really was getting something out of it. Not only did he lift traits from the people he tracked and use them to humanize the characters in his novels, but there was another perk, too. As time went on, Kenny needed to develop more symbols, because the old ones would fade from the scene. “I would find that what has been cool has changed,” he says. Thus Kenny always had a handle on who, arguably, was the coolest person in the room. And almost by default, he knew which bands were the coolest in the music scene, too.</
“I always thought you’re on the right track if you’re a musician in Atlanta and he comes to see you play,” says Whiteside, the guitarist for Spectralux. “I’d been asking him to come see Spectralux for a long time.”</
Whiteside says he was surprised to find that Kenny knew his band’s schedule by heart – including shows Whiteside himself wasn’t aware of. And yet Whiteside was disappointed when, time and time again, Kenny wouldn’t show.</
Then, when the band played the Drunken Unicorn in December, Kenny walked in.</
“All of the other guys in the band were like, ‘Oh, man. Kenny’s here.’ I was like, ‘I told you he’d come eventually. You gotta give him time.’” He adds with a laugh, “There must not have been anything else going on that night.”</
Ironically, while Kenny’s mere presence can be enough to cement a band’s perception of success, he’s had a harder time finding success of his own.</
In the fall of 2005, Whiteside and a friend went to Manchester, England, on a sort of drunken pilgrimage to honor the city’s musical significance. They considered Manchester a mecca for the indie-rock and DJ scenes they followed, and they had researched the local bars and clubs where they wanted to hang out.</
On their last night there, they were walking through a dark and strange part of town, looking for a drink, or perhaps some food. Then, Whiteside felt someone grab him from behind. Even in your hometown, that can be alarming. “I turned around,” he says, “and then I was even more freaked out, because it was Kenny.”</
They stood there on the street, comparing the bars and clubs where they’d hung out in town. Kenny had been to all the places Whiteside had researched. “And he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m playing there tomorrow night.’”</
Adan, who found Kenny’s CD in the junk bin, says he’s a little perplexed as to why Kenny’s band, Mack Messiah, doesn’t play more – and doesn’t seek more assistance from the bands he so diligently follows. “Usually people that are in bands will go see other people in bands to support them,” Adan says. “So since Kenny supports all these artists, I’m sure they’d come out to his shows. I think it’s just procrastination, like with all of us.”</
Whiteside’s not so sure: “Anybody with the wherewithal to show up in a city like Manchester with a guitar and no backing musicians and go around to music shops and ask people if they know any drummers because you have a show tomorrow night and then rehearse it and actually play? That’s crazy. But he does it.”</
Unlike most of Atlanta, Whiteside has seen Mack Messiah play in recent years, at the small (and now closed) Westside club the Library. The show was not publicized. It was on an off-night. There were about eight people there.</
Kenny took the stage wearing a headset and carrying a wireless guitar, which allowed him to perform unfettered, wherever the spirit led him. Whiteside found Mack Messiah’s songs to be reminiscent of T. Rex and early Bowie. “It was like a stadium-quality performance, just giving it all he’s got,” Whiteside recalls of Kenny. “It was a totally different person than the guy in the front row.”</
Why, then, was Mack Messiah not playing the venues Kenny frequents, such as the Earl, the Drunken Unicorn or Lenny’s, opening for one of the bigger local bands that have had the pleasure of his regular attendance at its shows? “He may not have the confidence to really want to do that,” Whitehead says. “Because I’m sure he could. He could just be really protective about what he does.”</
Kenny has another explanation. “I’m not pushing it right now,” he says. “At a certain point it was very critical. During the trips to England, I was pursuing the band, getting the band recorded, trying to get shows. I think I sort of hit a wall, partially with just the idea of funding all this. I think I’ve lost some of that commitment right now.”</
But it wasn’t just money.</
“I went to a certain place,” he says, “And I thought that it would open more doors than it did. I made alliances early on, four or five years ago. And they didn’t pan out. People who I supported didn’t come to my support when I needed that. I’m going to be performing shows soon, but I haven’t resolved how soon.”</
As much recognition as Kenny Crucial gets for merely being there, he doesn’t seem to get much credit for the reason for him being there. Kenny Crucial supports the scene for all that it is. But the support he gets in return is more conditional.</
Seeking affirmation from the scenesters can be overwhelming, he says. It can also be a trap. Because as much as you crave their approval, they’re a fickle bunch. Kenny says you can sit around all day convincing yourself, “This is the year that they’re going to love me.” But if that love doesn’t come, you risk losing your will.</
“That’s a killer,” he says. “I’m coming up against these walls. I don’t let them get me down. But they’re there.”</
By several measures, Kenny Crucial is a failure. He is an unemployed academic (he hasn’t taught for nearly two years), an unpublished novelist, and a nonpracticing musician in a town that has scant love for practicing ones.</
But there’s a difference between him and them. Kenny has gone to great, deliberate lengths to be seen. He’s a legend, if only in our own minds. And he worked his way in there without an invitation.</
“He’s not the kind of person who’s going to wait at the back door of the club to get an autograph,” says Whiteside, who points out that Kenny was the guest of the band Razorlight at the 2005 Leeds Festival. “Famous people, musicians, kind of migrate to him. He was hanging out, at the side of the stage, all-access, at one of the biggest music festivals in the world. How do you do that?”</
You do that by cultivating an image. And Kenny cultivates his so carefully that he has managed to draw people in – yet keep certain mysteries intact.</
What is that image, exactly? Is it the portrait of a talented artist waiting to be discovered? Is it an overthinking academic looking for something that doesn’t exist, bound by his obsessions and coddled by the scene? Or is he simply someone who’s trying to get noticed in a world that only stops to look – and seldom pauses long enough to figure out what’s actually going on?</
Kenny Crucial has been called a “local legend,” an “enigma” and an “icon.” Figuring out his place in the indie scene is fairly simple. But finding out why he, of all people, holds that particular place is another matter.</
“It’s obviously a quality of trying to do something active,” he says.</
But a lot of people try to do something active. A lot of people go out to the same bars, the same clubs, the same shows. Some of them do it with the hope of being seen, of being noticed. Even if Kenny is trying to be noticed, it still doesn’t explain why it’s happening to the extent that it is.</
“I don’t think I’m trying to do it,” Kenny Crucial says. And with that, he offers the best explanation he can without spoiling the mystery: “It’s not something I’m trying to do. It’s something that I’m succeeding at doing.”