You might remember Kip Winger as the guy who sang about banging 17-year-old girls as frontman for the late-’80s metal band Winger.
While most of his hair-metal pals can be found these days whining about how hard it is to get stripper girlfriends once you’re fat and broke, 50-year-old Winger has aged with amazing grace.
For nearly two decades, he’s been studying composition and writing classical music, including pieces for the San Francisco Ballet. That’s what brought him to Oberlin College last week, where he spent three days rehearsing and recording his latest piece for the ballet Conversations With Nijinsky, which scholars confirm is not at all about nailing chicks. Helping Winger was an orchestra of 60 students from the college’s music conservatory.
“I’ve worked with professional orchestras before, and they really had an edge on the energy,” Winger says of the Oberlin students. “They were eager to do it well, and it sounded very fresh.”
Winger found the students receptive to his project, possibly because they had not even been born by the time his band was the punch line of daily jokes on Beavis and Butt-head. “The tone is that this is a cool place to be and study,” he says. “And judging by the level of musicianship, I’d have to say whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it right.”
Sleep well, gentle Oberlin: Kip Winger approves of you.
This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2012.
Kip Winger is sincere in his love of classical music and composition. He has taken enormous steps to educate himself with compositional training, and spent years of his life cultivating a compositional style that is being taken seriously by such professional institutions as the San Francisco Ballet and Oberlin Conservatory. I find this “article” snide and condescending, especially the last line. In the face of defeat and ridicule, Kip Winger has managed to redefine himself as a purveyor of a musical genre that is thought of as metal’s polar opposite. Pop culture critics could try a 180 themselves by writing an educated, articulate, and thoughtful piece, rather than spewing this kind of snarky, wanna-be journalism.
He was definitely worth the wait to be in the same room with, let alone have the chance to meet and give hugs!!! Was happy no matter how old he was at the time, he will always be worth it…..he has worked truly hard throughout his life of love and loss….win or lose….I will forever adore this man 🙂
Amy~Battle Creek, MI
I have a hard time reading Pantsios’ music stuff. She’s the same genius that predicted Shaun Cassidy would be bigger than Bruce Springsteen, and actually asserted with a straight face that rock radio stations played Led Zeppelin ballads, so it made no sense that ballads of Barbra Streisand weren’t played on those radio stations, too. Some of the very dumbest stuff I have ever read in the Plain Dealer, and that’s taking into account the Plain Dealer has had a lot of dumb stuff.