Kip Winger recalls how the ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ television show hurt Winger’s career early on

Kip Winger recalls how the ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ television show hurt Winger’s career early on

Winger frontman Kip Winger was recently interviewed by Canada’s The Metal Voice. Kip Winger was promoting Winger‘s upcoming new studio album Seven, which will be released via Frontiers Music Srl on May 5, 2023.

Back in the 1990s, Beavis and Butt-Head‘s geeky neighbour Stewart was often seen wearing a Winger t-shirt and he was routinely mocked by the television show’s two main characters. In terms of how Beavis and Butt-Head impacted the band, Kip Winger opined (as provided by The Metal Voice with slight edits):

“For example, we’ll take White Zombie, Beavis and Butt-Head were like ‘Oh, White Zombie‘s cool’ and then White Zombie went triple platinum, like overnight. It was the biggest show in MTV history so a lot of people benefited from Beavis and Butt-Head but we were like the on the shirt of the geeky guy who represented it sucked. There’s a lot of other bands that might have been better suited for that role. I did speak to Mike Judge [creator] through e-mail at one point and he was just kind of like ‘It just happened to stick’. I think it hurt a lot of the bands like us and you have to also add in the aspect of Metallica throwing darts at my poster. So that came first and I think it inadvertently chose us because of that. Mike Judge said it was just luck of the draw, bad timing.

As far as the ’80s goes, I don’t think that the ’80s would have survived much longer anyway. Eighties music had run its course and we came a little too late. I tell this story a lot. I moved out to New Mexico, we lost our record deal, our publishing — everything was gone. Then my first wife passed away in a car wreck and I was totally in oblivion and that’s when I decided to write and to start studying classical music for real. I’d always wanted to write orchestral music and never felt like it was within my reach and I thought you know what, I’m just gonna go for it and I had the time because I couldn’t get arrested. I mean there were no gigs to be had, for years. The only gig that I did during that time on my first solo record was Porter’s Bookstore at 4:00 p.m in the afternoon playing to 10 people after a year before headlining to 8,000-10,000 people.”

You can read other excerpts of the interview with Kip Winger via The Metal Voice‘s website and/or listen to the interview below: