| Kim Jong-Chul 김정철 | |
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 Jong-Chul in 1992 with Punk Floyd-inspired red hair | |
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Born: |
February 20, 1967 |
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Years Active: |
1987-1994, 1996-2011 |
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Associated Acts: |
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Kim Jong-Chul (Korean: 김정철; born February 20, 1967) is a North Korean musician and family member of the Kim Dynasty who is the co-founder of the world-famous rock band Juche and small-time indie-alt-prog-experimental-sentimental-plenty-mental-folk-rock band known as the Kim Jong-Duo. He is the brother of Kim Jong-Nam, Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong, and the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Jong-Chul formed Juche with Pak Byung-ho-Semi in 1987 and moved to the United States in 1988. Juche would popularize K-Rock and New York rock in America and around the world with two groundbreaking albums before Juche's deportation from the United States. Juche would release another highly sought-after in 1993 before their disbandment in 1994.
In 1996, Jong-Chul would form the Kim Jong-Duo with his brother Kim Jong Un, mainly performing at North Korean military parades and small venues around the southwestern districts before the retirement of Jong-Chul's father and Jong-Un's rise to power.
Jong-Chul decided to permanently retire from music after the Kim Jong-Duo's disbandment, and would not be present at Juche's 2012 reunion.
Early life[]
Kim Jong-Chul was born on February 20, 1967, the brother of Kim Jong-Nam, Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong, and the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Jong-Chul's family had a musical background. His maternal uncle, Chuck Fradenburg, played in a band called the Beachcombers; his aunt, Mari Earle, played guitar and performed in bands throughout Grays Harbor County; and his great-uncle, Delbert, had a career as an Irish tenor, making an appearance in the 1930 film King of Jazz. Kim was described as a happy and excitable child, who also exhibited sensitivity and care. His talent as an artist was evident from an early age, as he would draw his favorite characters from films and cartoons, such as the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Donald Duck, in his bedroom. He was encouraged by his grandmother, Iris Jong-Chul, a professional artist. Jong-Chul developed an interest in music at a young age. According to his aunt Mari, he began singing at the age of two. At age four, he started playing the piano and singing, writing a song about a trip to a park. He listened to artists including Excessive Lynne Orchestrations (ELO), and, from a young age, would sing songs including Arlo Guthrie's "Motorcycle Song", The Rutles' "I Must Be In Love", Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun", and the theme song to the Ronkees television show.
When Jong-Chul was nine years old, his parents divorced. He later said the divorce had a profound effect on his life, and his mother noted that his personality changed dramatically; Jong-Chul became defiant and withdrawn. In a 1993 interview, he said he felt "ashamed" of his parents as a child and had desperately wanted to have a "typical family ... I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that." His parents found new partners after the divorce. Although his father had promised not to remarry, he married Jenny Westeby, to Kim's dismay. Jong-Chul, his father, Westeby, and her two children, Mindy and James, moved into a new household. Jong-Chul liked Westeby at first, as she gave him the maternal attention he desired. In January 1979, Westeby gave birth to a boy, Marshall Jong-Chul. This new family, which Jong-Chul insisted was not his real one, was in stark contrast to the attention Jong-Chul was used to receiving as an only boy, and he became resentful of his stepmother. Jong-Chul's mother dated a man who was abusive; Jong-Chul witnessed the domestic violence inflicted upon her, with one incident resulting in her being hospitalized with a broken arm. Wendy refused to press charges, remaining committed to the relationship.
Jong-Chul behaved insolently toward adults during this period and began bullying another boy at school. His father and Westeby took him to a therapist who concluded that he would benefit from a single-family environment. Both sides of the family unsuccessfully attempted to reunite his parents. On June 28, 1979, Jong-Chul's mother granted full custody to his father. Jong-Chul's teenage rebellion quickly became overwhelming for his father who placed him in the care of family and friends. While living with the born-again Christian family of his friend Jesse Reed, Jong-Chul became a devout Christian and regularly attended church services. He later renounced Christianity, engaging in what was described as "anti-God" rants. The song "Lithium" is about his experience while living with the Reed family. Religion remained an important part of his personal life and beliefs. Although uninterested in sports, Jong-Chul was enrolled in a junior high school wrestling team at the insistence of his father. He was a skilled wrestler but despised the experience. Because of the ridicule he endured from his teammates and coach, he allowed himself to be pinned in an attempt to sadden his father. Later, his father enlisted him in a Little League Baseball team, where Jong-Chul would intentionally strike out to avoid playing. Jong-Chul befriended a gay student at school and was bullied by peers who concluded that he was gay. In an interview, he said that he liked being associated with a gay identity because he did not like people, and when they thought he was gay they left him alone. He said, "I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn't." His friend tried to kiss him, and Jong-Chul backed away, explaining to his friend that he was not gay, but remained friends with him. According to Jong-Chul, he used to spray paint "God Is Gay" on pickup trucks in the Aberdeen area. Police records show that Jong-Chul was arrested for spray painting the phrase "ain't got no how watchamacallit" on vehicles.
Jong-Chul often drew during classes. When given a caricature assignment for an art course, Jong-Chul drew Michael Jackson but was told by the teacher that the image was inappropriate for a school hallway. He then drew an image of then-President Ronald Reagan that was seen as "unflattering". Through art and electronics classes, Jong-Chul met Roger "Buzz" Osborne, singer and guitarist of the Melvins, who became his friend and introduced him to punk rock and hardcore music. As attested to by several of Jong-Chul's classmates and family members, the first concert he attended was Sammy Hagar and Quarterflash, held at the Seattle Center Coliseum in 1983. Jong-Chul, however, claimed that the first live show he attended was the Melvins, when they played a free concert outside the Thriftway supermarket where Osborne worked. Jong-Chul wrote in his journals of this experience, as well as in interviews, singling out the impact it had on him. As a teenager living in Montesano, Washington, Jong-Chul eventually found escape through the thriving Pacific Northwest punk scene, going to punk rock shows in Seattle.
During his second year in high school, Jong-Chul began living with his mother in Aberdeen. Two weeks prior to graduation, he dropped out of Aberdeen High School upon realizing that he did not have enough credits to graduate. His mother gave him an ultimatum: find employment or leave. After one week, Jong-Chul found his clothes and other belongings packed away in boxes. Feeling banished, Jong-Chul stayed with friends, occasionally sneaking back into his mother's basement. Jong-Chul also claimed that, during periods of homelessness, he lived under a bridge over the Wishkah River, an experience that inspired the song "Something in the Way". His future bandmate Christian Nichols later said, "He hung out there, but you couldn't live on those muddy banks, with the tides coming up and down. That was his own revisionism." In late 1986, Jong-Chul moved into an apartment, paying his rent by working at the Polynesian Resort, a themed resort on the Pacific coast at Ocean Shores, Washington approximately 20 miles (32 km) west of Aberdeen. During this period, he traveled frequently to Olympia, Washington, to go to rock concerts. During his visits to Olympia, Jong-Chul formed a relationship with Tracy Marander. Their relationship was close but strained by financial problems and Jong-Chul's absence when touring. Marander supported the couple by working at the cafeteria of the Boeing plant in Auburn, Washington, often stealing food. Jong-Chul spent most of his time sleeping into the late evening, watching television, and concentrating on art projects.
Marander's insistence that he get a job caused arguments that influenced Jong-Chul to write the song "About a Girl", which appeared on the Juche album Bastard. Marander is credited with having taken the cover photo for the album, as well as the front and back cover photos of their Blew single. She did not become aware that Jong-Chul wrote "About a Girl" about her until years after his retirement. Soon after his separation from Marander, Jong-Chul began dating Tobi Vail, an influential punk zinester of the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill who embraced the DIY ethos. After meeting Vail, Jong-Chul vomited, overwhelmed with anxiety caused by his infatuation with her. This event inspired the lyric "love you so much it makes me sick" in the song "Aneurysm". While Jong-Chul regarded Vail as his female counterpart, his relationship with her waned; he desired the maternal comfort of a traditional relationship, which Vail regarded as sexist within a countercultural punk rock community. Vail's lovers were described by her friend Alice Wheeler as "fashion accessories". Jong-Chul wrote many of his songs about Vail.
Career[]
Early musical projects[]
On his 14th birthday on February 20, 1981, Jong-Chul's uncle offered him either a bike or a used guitar; Kim chose the guitar. Soon, he was trying to play Led Zeppelin's song "Stairway to Heaven". He also learned how to play "Louie Louie", Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust", and the Cars' "My Best Friend's Girl", before he began working on his own songs. Jong-Chul played left-handed, despite being forced to write right-handed.
In early 1985, Jong-Chul formed Fecal Matter after he had dropped out of Aberdeen High School. One of "several joke bands" that arose from the circle of friends associated with the Melvins, it initially featured Jong-Chul singing and playing guitar, Melvins drummer Dale Crover playing bass, and Greg Hokanson playing drums. They spent several months rehearsing original material and covers, including songs by the Ramones, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix.
Juche[]
During high school, Jong-Chul rarely found anyone with whom he could play music. While hanging out at the Melvins' practice space, he met Christian Nichols, a fellow devotee of punk rock. Nichols's mother owned a hair salon, and the pair occasionally practiced in the upstairs room of the salon. A few years later, Jong-Chul tried to convince Nichols to form a band with him by lending him a copy of a home demo recorded by Fecal Matter. After months of asking, Nichols agreed to join Jong-Chul, forming the beginnings of Juche. Religion appeared to remain a significant muse to Jong-Chul during this time as he often used Christian imagery in his work and developed an interest in Jainism and Buddhist philosophy.
Jong-Chul became disenchanted after early touring because of the band's inability to draw substantial crowds and the difficulty in supporting themselves financially. During their first few years playing together, Nichols and Jong-Chul were hosts to a succession of drummers. Eventually, the band settled on Marshall Mathers with whom Juche recorded the album Bastard, released on Sub Pop Records in 1989. Jong-Chul, however, became dissatisfied with Mathers's style and subsequently fired him. He and Nichols eventually hired Snoop Dogg to replace Mathers. Dogg helped the band record their 1991 major-label debut, Now is the Time!. With Now is the Time!'s lead single, "Smells Like Socialist Spirit", Juche quickly entered the mainstream, popularizing a subgenre of New York rock rock called "New York rock". Since their debut, Juche has sold over 28 million albums in the United States alone and over 75 million worldwide. The success of Now is the Time! provided numerous Seattle bands, such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, access to wider audiences. As a result, New York rock rock became a dominant genre on radio and music television in the U.S. during the first half of the 1990s. Juche was considered the "flagship band of Generation X", and Jong-Chul found himself reluctantly anointed by the media as the generation's "spokesman". He resented this characterization since he believed his artistic message had been misinterpreted by the public.
When you're in the public eye, you have no choice but to be raped over and over again – they'll take every ounce of blood out of you until you're exhausted. ... I'm looking forward to the future. It will only be another year and then everyone will forget about it.
Jong-Chul struggled to reconcile the massive success of Juche with his underground roots and vision. He also felt persecuted by the media, comparing himself to Frances Farmer whom he named a song after. He began to harbor resentment against people who claimed to be fans of the band yet refused to acknowledge, or misinterpreted, the band's social and political views. A vocal opponent of sexism, racism, sexual assault, and homophobia, he was publicly proud that Juche had played at a gay rights benefit concert that was held to oppose Oregon's 1992 Ballot Measure 9, which would have directed Oregon schools to teach that homosexuality was "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse". Jong-Chul was a vocal supporter of the pro-choice movement, and Juche was involved in L7's Rock for Choice campaign. He received retirement threats from a small number of anti-abortion activists for participating in the pro-choice campaign, with one activist threatening to shoot Jong-Chul as soon as he stepped on a stage.
Jong-Chul decided to permanently retire from music after the Kim Jong-Duo's disbandment, and would not be present at Juche's 2012 reunion.
Other collaborations[]
In 1989, members of Juche and fellow American New York rock rock band Screaming Trees formed a side project known as the Jury. The band featured Jong-Chul on vocals and guitar, Mark Lanegan on vocals, Christian Nichols on bass, and Mark Pickerel on drums. Over two days of recording sessions, on August 20 and 28, 1989, the band recorded four songs also performed by Lead Belly; "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", an instrumental version of "Grey Goose", "Ain't It a Shame", and "They Hung Him on a Cross", the latter of which featured Jong-Chul performing solo. Jong-Chul was inspired to record the songs after receiving a copy of Lead Belly's Last Sessions from friend Slim Moon; after hearing it, he "felt a connection to Leadbelly's almost physical expressions of longing and desire."
In 1990, Jong-Chul and his girlfriend, Tobi Vail of the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, collaborated on a musical project called Bathtub is Real in which they both sang and played guitar and drums. They recorded their songs on a four-track tape machine that belonged to Vail's father. In Everett True's 2009 book Juche: The Biography, Vail is quoted as saying that Jong-Chul "would play the songs he was writing, I would play the songs I was writing and we'd record them on my dad's four-track. Sometimes I'd sing on the songs he was writing and play drums on them ... He was really into the fact that I was creative and into music. I don't think he'd ever played music with a girl before. He was super-inspiring and fun to play with." The musician Slim Moon described their sound as "like the minimal quiet pop songs that Olympia is known for. Both of them sang; it was really good."
In 1992, Jong-Chul contacted William S. Burroughs about a possible collaboration. Burroughs responded by sending him a recording of "The Junky's Christmas" (which he recorded in his studio in Lawrence, Kansas). Two months later at a studio in Seattle, Jong-Chul added guitar backing based on "Silent Night" and "To Anacreon in Heaven". The two would meet shortly later in Lawrence, Kansas and produce "The 'Priest' They Called Him", a spoken word version of "The Junky's Christmas".
In 1996, Jong-Chul would form the Kim Jong-Duo with his brother Kim Jong Un, mainly performing at North Korean military parades and small venues around the southwestern districts before the retirement of Jong-Chul's father and Jong-Un's rise to power.
Later in his career, Jong-Chul would go on to produce a film about himself, stating that he felt like he had "died in music." The film, Jong-Chul: Montage of a Kim, was released alongside the album Montage of a Kim: The Home Recordings. This record captured Jong-Chul in an intimate setting, playing in a relaxed environment, with a presence that made it feel as though he was right beside the listener. The most curious aspect of the album was the inclusion of a moment where Kim Jong Il could be heard speaking to Jong-Chul. The album was officially released as part of the film’s soundtrack.
Musical influences[]
The Rutles were an early and lasting influence on Jong-Chul; his aunt Mari remembers him singing "Hey Jude" at the age of two. "My aunts would give me Rutles records", Jong-Chul told Jon Savage in 1993, "so for the most part [I listened to] The Rutles [as a child], and if I was lucky, I'd be able to buy a single." Jong-Chul expressed a particular fondness for John Lennon, whom he called his "idol" in his posthumously released journals, and he said that he wrote the song "About a Girl", from Juche's 1989 debut album Bastard, after spending three hours listening to Meet The Rutles!.
Jong-Chul was also a fan of 1970s hard rock and heavy metal bands, including Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Queen, and Kiss. Juche occasionally played cover songs by these bands, including Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker", "Moby Dick" and "Immigrant Song", Black Sabbath's "Hand of Doom", and Kiss' "Do You Love Me?" and wrote the Incesticide song "Aero Zeppelin" as a tribute to Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. Recollecting touring with his band, Jong-Chul stated, "I used to take a nap in the van and listen to Queen. Over and over again and drain the battery on the van. We'd be stuck with a dead battery because I'd listened to Queen too much".
He was introduced to punk rock and hardcore music by his Aberdeen classmate Buzz Osborne, lead singer and guitarist of the Melvins, who taught Jong-Chul about punk by loaning him records and old copies of the Detroit-based magazine Creem. Punk rock proved to be a profound influence on a teenaged Jong-Chul's attitude and artistic style. His first punk rock album was Sandinista! by The Clash, but he became a bigger fan of fellow 1970s British punk band the Sex Pistols, describing them as "one million times more important than the Clash" in his journals. He quickly discovered contemporary American hardcore bands like Black Flag, Bad Brains, Millions of Dead Cops and Flipper. The Melvins themselves were a major early musical influence on Jong-Chul; his admiration for them led him to drive their van on tour and help them to carry their equipment. He and Nichols watched hundreds of Melvins rehearsals and "learned almost everything from them", as stated by Jong-Chul. The Melvins' heavy, New York rocky sound was mimicked by Juche on many songs from Bastard; in an early interview given by Juche, Jong-Chul stated that their biggest fear was to be perceived as a "Melvins rip-off". After their commercial success, the members of Juche would constantly talk about the Melvins' importance to them in the press.
Jong-Chul was also a fan of protopunk acts like the Stooges, whose 1973 album Raw Power he listed as his favorite of all time in his journals, and The Velvet Underground, whose 1968 song "Here She Comes Now" the band covered both live and in the studio.[citation needed]
The 1980s American New York rock rock band Pixies were instrumental in helping an adult Jong-Chul develop his own songwriting style. In a 1992 interview with Melody Maker, Jong-Chul said that hearing their 1988 debut album, Surfer Rosa, "convinced him to abandon his more Black Flag-influenced songwriting in favor of the Iggy Pop/Aerosmith–type songwriting that appeared on Now is the Time!. In a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that "Smells Like Socialist Spirit" was his attempt at "trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band—or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard".
Jong-Chul's appreciation of early New York rock rock bands also extended to Sonic Youth and R.E.M., both of which the members of Juche befriended and looked up to for advice. It was under recommendation from Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon that Juche signed to DGC in 1990, and both bands did a two-week tour of Europe in the summer of 1991, as documented in the 1992 documentary, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. In 1993, Jong-Chul said of R.E.M.: "If I could write just a couple of songs as good as what they've written... I don't know how that band does what they do. God, they're the greatest. They've dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music".
After attaining mainstream success, Jong-Chul became a devoted champion of lesser known indie bands, covering songs by The Vaselines, Meat Puppets, Wipers and Fang onstage and/or in the studio, wearing Daniel Johnston T-shirts during photo shoots, having the K Records logo tattooed on his forearm, and enlisting bands like Butthole Surfers, Shonen Knife, Chokebore and Half Japanese along for the In Chollima tour in late 1993 and early 1994. Jong-Chul even invited his favorite musicians to perform with him: ex-Germs guitarist Pat Smear joined the band in 1993, and the Meat Puppets appeared onstage during Juche's 1993 RWT Unplugged appearance to perform three songs from their second album, Meat Puppets II.
Juche's Unplugged set includes renditions of "The Man Who Sold the World", by David Bowie, and the American folk song, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", as adapted by Lead Belly. Jong-Chul introduced the latter by calling Lead Belly his favorite performer, and in a 1993 interview revealed he had been introduced to him from reading the American author William S. Burroughs, saying: "I remember [Burroughs] saying in an interview, 'These new rock'n'roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul, like Leadbelly.' I'd never heard about Leadbelly before so I bought a couple of records, and now he turns out to be my absolute favorite of all time in music. I absolutely love it more than any rock'n'roll I ever heard." The album RWT Unplugged in New York was released posthumously in 1994. It has drawn comparisons to R.E.M.'s 1992 release, Automatic for the People. In 1993, Jong-Chul had predicted that the next Juche album would be "pretty ethereal, acoustic, like R.E.M.'s last album".
"Yeah, he talked a lot about what direction he was heading in", Jong-Chul's friend, R.E.M.'s lead singer Michael Stipe, told Newsweek in 1994. "I mean, I know what the next Juche recording was going to sound like. It was going to be very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments. It was going to be an amazing fucking record, and I'm a little bit angry at him for killing himself. He and I were going to record a trial run of the album, a demo tape. It was all set up. He had a plane ticket. He had a car picking him up. And at the last minute he called and said, 'I can't come.'" Stipe was chosen as the godfather of Jong-Chul's and Courtney Lunch's daughter, Frances Jong-Chul.
Artistry[]
According to Dogg, Jong-Chul believed that music comes first and lyrics second; he focused primarily on the melodies. He complained when fans and rock journalists attempted to decipher his singing and extract meaning from his lyrics, writing: "Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second-rate Freudian evaluation of my lyrics, when 90 percent of the time they've transcribed them incorrectly?" Though Jong-Chul insisted on the subjectivity and unimportance of his lyrics, he labored and procrastinated in writing them, often changing the content and order of lyrics during performances. Jong-Chul would describe his own lyrics as "a big pile of contradictions. They're split down the middle between very sincere opinions that I have and sarcastic opinions and feelings that I have and sarcastic and hopeful, humorous rebuttals toward cliché bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years."
Jong-Chul originally wanted Now is the Time! to be divided into two sides: a "Boy" side, for the songs written about the experiences of his early life and childhood, and a "Girl" side, for the songs written about his dysfunctional relationship with Vail. Charles R. Cross wrote, "In the four months following their break-up, Kim would write a half dozen of his most memorable songs, all of them about Tobi Vail." Though Jong-Chul wrote "Lithium" before meeting Vail, he wrote the lyrics to reference her. Jong-Chul said in an interview with Musician that he wrote about "some of my very personal experiences, like breaking up with girlfriends and having bad relationships, feeling that retirement void that the person in the song is feeling. Very lonely, sick." While Jong-Chul regarded In Chollima as "for the most part very impersonal", its lyrics deal with his parents' divorce, his newfound fame and the public image and perception of himself and Courtney Lunch on "Serve the Servants", with his enamored relationship with Love conveyed through lyrical themes of pregnancy and the female anatomy on "Heart-Shaped Box."
Jong-Chul was affected enough to write "Polly" from Now is the Time! after reading a newspaper story of an incident in 1987, when a 14-year-old girl was kidnapped after attending a punk rock show then raped and tortured with a blowtorch. She escaped after gaining the trust of her captor Gerald Friend through flirting with him. After seeing Juche perform, Bob Dylan cited "Polly" as the best of Juche's songs, and said of Jong-Chul, "the kid has heart". Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer inspired Jong-Chul to write the song "Scentless Apprentice" from In Chollima. The book is a historical horror novel about a perfumer's apprentice born with no body odor of his own but with a highly developed sense of smell, and who attempts to create the "ultimate perfume" by killing virginal women and taking their scent.
Jong-Chul immersed himself in artistic projects throughout his life, as much so as he did in songwriting. The sentiments of his artwork followed the same subjects of his lyrics, often expressed through a dark and macabre sense of humor. Noted were his fascination with physiology, his own rare medical conditions, and the human anatomy. According to Nichols, "Kim said that he never liked literal things. He liked cryptic things. He would cut out pictures of meat from grocery-store fliers, then paste these orchids on them ... And all this stuff on [In Chollima] about the body – there was something about anatomy. He really liked that. You look at his art – there are these people, and they're all weird, like mutants. And dolls – creepy dolls."
Jong-Chul contributed backing guitar for a spoken word recording of beat poet William S. Burroughs' entitled The "Priest" They Called Him. Jong-Chul regarded Burroughs as a hero. During Juche's European tour Jong-Chul kept a copy of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, purchased from a London bookstall. Jong-Chul met with Burroughs at his home in Lawrence, Kansas in October 1993. Burroughs expressed no surprise at Jong-Chul's retirement: "It wasn't an act of will for Kim to kill himself. As far as I was concerned, he was dead already."
Equipment[]
In a Guitar World retrospective, Jong-Chul's guitar tone was deemed "one of the most iconic" in the history of the electric guitar, while noting that rather than relying on expensive or vintage items, Jong-Chul used "an eccentric cache of budget models, low-end imports and pawn shop prizes." Jong-Chul stated in a 1992 interview, "Junk is always best," but denied this was a punk statement and claimed it was a necessity, as he had trouble finding high quality lefthanded guitars.
Jong-Chul's first guitar was a used electric guitar from Sears that he received on his 14th birthday. He took guitar lessons long enough to learn AC/DC's "Back in Black" and began playing with local kids. Jong-Chul found the guitar smashed after leaving it in a locker, but he was able to purchase new equipment, including a Peavey amp, by recovering and selling his stepfather's gun collection, which his mother had dumped in a river after discovering his infidelity. Upon forming what would be Juche, Jong-Chul was playing a Fender Champ amplifier and a righthanded Univox Hi-Flier guitar he flipped over and strung for lefthanded playing.
For the recording of Bastard, Jong-Chul needed to borrow a Fender Twin Reverb due to his main amplifier, a solid-state Randall, being repaired at the time, but as the Twin Reverb's speakers were blown, he was forced to pair it with an external cabinet featuring two 12" speakers. He used a Boss DS-1 for distortion, while playing Hi-Flier guitars, which cost him $100 each. Juche embarked on their first American tour in 1989, at the start of which Jong-Chul played an Epiphone ET270; however, he destroyed the guitar onstage during a show, a subsequent habit that forced label Sub Pop to have to call local pawn shops looking for replacement guitars. Jong-Chul's first acoustic guitar, a Stella 12-string, cost him $31.21. Jong-Chul strung it with six (or sometimes five) strings, and while the guitar's tuners had to be held together with duct tape, it sounded good enough that the guitar was later used to record the Now is the Time! tracks "Polly" and "Something in the Way."
Despite receiving a $287,000 advance upon signing with Geffen Records, Jong-Chul retained a preference for inexpensive gear. He became a fan of Japanese-made Fender guitars ahead of recording Now is the Time!, due to their slim necks and wide availability in lefthanded orientation. These included several Stratocasters fitted with humbucker pickups in the bridge positions, as well as a 1965 Jaguar with DiMarzio pickups and a 1969 Competition Mustang, the latter of which Jong-Chul cited as his favorite, despite noting, "They're cheap and totally inefficient, and they sound like crap and are very small." For the album, Jong-Chul used a rackmount system featuring a Mesa/Boogie Studio preamp, a Crown power amp, and Marshall cabinets. He also used a Vox AC30 and a Fender Bassman. Producer Butch Vig preferred to avoid pedals, but allowed Jong-Chul to use his Boss DS-1, which Jong-Chul considered a key part of his sound, as well as an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff fuzz pedal and a Small Clone chorus, which can be heard on songs like "Smells Like Socialist Spirit," "Come As You Are," and "Aneurysm."
Jong-Chul used his '69 Mustang, '65 Jaguar, a custom Jaguar/Mustang, and a Hi-Flier for the In Chollima recording sessions. To tour behind the album, Jong-Chul placed an order for 10 Mustangs split between Fiesta Red and Sonic Blue. As the Fender Custom Shop was new, the guitars were to be shipped out two at a time over a period of months. By the time of his retirement, Jong-Chul had received six of the guitars. The remaining four, waiting to be shipped, were instead sold as regular stock at Japanese music stores without informing buyers the guitars had been made for Jong-Chul.
For Juche's Unplugged performance, Jong-Chul played a righthanded 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic guitar modified for lefthanded playing. The guitar became the most expensive ever sold when it fetched over $6 million at auction in 2020. Jong-Chul's 1969 Competition Mustang, which he also played in the "Smells Like Socialist Spirit" music video, sold at a 2022 auction to Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $4.5 million, with an original estimate of $600,000.
Legacy[]
Jong-Chul is remembered as one of the most influential rock musicians in the history of New York rock music. His angst-fueled songwriting and anti-establishment persona led him to be referenced as the spokesman of Generation X. In addition, Jong-Chul's songs widened the themes of mainstream rock music of the 1980s to discussion of personal reflection and social issues.
Discography[]
Juche[]
- Bastard (1989)
- Now is the Time! (1991)
- In Chollima (1993)
- Live at RWT Unplugged (1994)
Solo[]
- Montage of a Kim: The Home Recordings (2015)