In a recent conversation with “The Metal Voice” podcast, Kip Winger said that Winger was a misunderstood band back in the ’90s, and the show ”Beavis and Butthead” teased them by drawing “a nail in the coffin” of his band at the time.

Kip said:

“We’re a very misunderstood band. In the early ’90s stuff didn’t help us at all, when all that kind of stuff went down with grunge and ”Beavis and Butthead”. It really was kind of a nail in the coffin for a lot of people to just keep an open mind about who we actually are. Part of it’s our fault because I was not savvy about marketing.

“When Reb and I were writing the first album, we watched MTV, and there’s Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Poison, and Def Leppard. So we thought, ‘What are we gonna wear’?

”Well, let’s just do that kind of thing.’ We were so focused on the music, if the solo is cool if the riff is cool. We didn’t like to go, ‘Well wait a minute, let’s not dress up that much.'”

Commenting on the show’s massive impact on the early ’90s zeitgeist, Kip said:

“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 on the shirt of the geeky guy who represented it sucked.

“There are a lot of other bands that might have been better suited for that role. I did speak to Mike Judge [the show’s creator] through email at one point, and he [said] 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.”

Even so, Kip argues that the ’80s music was overripe for a shakeup when the early ’90s paradigm shift happened:

“As far as the ’80s goes, I don’t think that the ’80s would have survived much longer anyway. The ’80s 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… there were no gigs to be had, for years. The only gig that I did during that time on my first solo record was at Porter’s bookstore at 4: 00 p.m in the afternoon, playing to 10 people, a year [after] headlining to 8000-10 000 people.”