Kenny Budd, lead singer of The Exam in 1985

By GREGG KIRK

From 1983 to sometime in 1986, Kenny Budd and I were best friends, bandmates and co-songwriters for a Delaware band you probably never heard of called The Exam. So it saddens me to report that Kenny passed away on Thursday, August 25, 2022 of an undisclosed cause. After decades of not hearing from one another, he and I connected on Facebook in July of last year, but sadly we never took the time to talk to each other by phone.

I first met Kenny in late 1983 while I was in my senior year at the University of Delaware. I had just written my first real song called “Library of Pain” that a drummer friend of mine and I recorded in his garage. We recorded the instruments first and were so happy with the results we realized we needed to find someone to record the vocals to the lyrics I had written. We put an ad in the only local entertainment magazine, Fine Times, and I think we only got one serious reply.

A guy named Benny answered the audition, and when we recorded his vocal parts, they fit into the song pretty well. We began talking about putting a full band together, and he mentioned he had a friend named Kenny who played bass. We met Kenny a few weeks later and began to make plans to start rehearsing.

In the meantime, something strange happened. Even though I had written every aspect (i.e. music, riffs, and lyrics) of the “Library of Pain” song, we gave Benny a copy of it because we figured he was now in the band. But within a month, the drummer and I heard Benny call into a very well-known advice show on the Philly radio station WMMR called “Ask Anita,” hosted by Anita Gevinson. During the show, Benny confided that he had just sent a demo tape to Geffen Records and well-known A&R rep John Kalodner had already responded and said he liked the one song, but he wanted to hear more. Benny told Anita that he had just met some local band members who had helped him record “his” song, but he wanted to ditch them and he wondered what he should do.

We couldn’t believe our ears, and even though Benny hadn’t mentioned anyone by name, we recognized his voice. It didn’t take long to fire him and to move Kenny from bass to lead vocals and to enlist his friend David to play bass. Both Kenny and David had the new wave look down with an added edge of heavy metal style mixed in. In a matter of days I adopted the style as well, and we instantly developed a cohesive band look without even trying. But we had no songs and some supposed interest from a big record label. I celebrated by blowing off most of my classes the week I found out. In my 21-year old mind, I figured I was weeks away from becoming rich and famous.

We named our band The Exam for no good reason other than most bands at the time were calling themselves “The” and then something else… i.e. The Alarm, The Fall, and even The The. U2 went so far as to have a guitar player simply named “The Edge.” It seemed the way to go at the time.

I went on a songwriting tear and came up with eight new tunes and Kenny brought in two old tunes from his former band that we gave a new wave flare to. He and I co-wrote a song called “Tragic Hero” that seemed to stand out from the rest. We took it and another song I had written called “Mental Photograph” to the Warehouse Studios in Philadelphia. It was a full-blown commercial studio with an hourly rate of $125/hr. which was inconceivable to me at the time.

Kenny made the arrangements to talk to the studio manager named Mal, and we all went to the Warehouse to negotiate with them to hopefully reduce their rates to something we could afford. While waiting in the lobby area I met a really nice guy who was smoking weed and looking at magazines who chatted me up after we were given the studio tour. Apropos of nothing, he offered that “this studio is legit and these guys are really great.” I remember thinking, “who the hell is THIS guy and why should we care what he thinks?” After he left, I picked up one of the magazines he was looking at, which seemed to be from Japan. It showed concert shots from a band I was vaguely aware of called Bon Jovi. I recognized shots of the guy I had just been talking with behind the keyboards, playing to thousands of people. Hmmmmm.

Studio manager Mal offered us a package rate for two songs that we could actually afford, and he assigned us a sound engineer named Marc. We scheduled time to come in the following week and were told we would have to work around the schedule of the band Bon Jovi who were being produced by Lance Quinn and Obie O’Brien. That weekend while on his way to the Jersey shore, Mal died in a car wreck.

The day we came in to record, the entire studio staff was still experiencing grief from the loss of their close friend Mal. None of us had been in a big league studio before so we were pretty star struck by the experience and overwhelmed at our musical choices. We added keyboards to songs that were never intended to have them, and we added electronic drums (which were a new and trendy thing at the time) on top of live drums. Our sound engineer Marc warned us against what he called “24-track madness.” He said it seemed to happen to bands that were used to the restrictions of 4 or 8 track recording to suddenly go wild and try to fill every one of the 24 available tracks. He wasn’t wrong.

It took us from January to April of 1985 to record two songs, which seems ridiculous to me now. But we were wedged in between Bon Jovi sessions and were sometimes only scheduled for a few hours at a time.

Many times we passed the band members in the hall or found artifacts left after their sessions like a poloroid shot of Jon Bon Jovi with his finger up his nose, holding a sign that said “The No Pussy Tour.” We even found a leftover lyric sheet that we very cruelly made fun of even though we didn’t have a leg to stand on ourselves. When we asked Marc what Bon Jovi was calling their next album, he told us the working title was 7800° Fahrenheit. When we asked him why, he said “Apparently, that’s the temperature that melts rock.” At the same moment, all of our band members doubled over with laughter.

7800° Fahrenheit would spend 104 weeks on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum in 1987. When we finished our single “Tragic Hero” b/w “Mental Photograph” and sent it to John Kalodner of Geffen Records, his response was “the lyrics are trite and the music is trendy. I’ll pass.”

We did manage to get some local airplay, especially on Bob Bowersox‘s FT² show on radio station WSTW in Delaware, and it apparently had an impact. We began to see people singing along to the songs when we played local shows from Atlantic City to Philadelphia.

During our shows, Kenny came up with the brilliant idea of bringing a poloroid camera into the audience during the performance of “Mental Photograph.” This usually happened during the middle, extended guitar solo, and he would take shots of audience members and give them the photo as a souvenir. Sometimes he was actually asked to autograph them. Very often, he would take them of us, the band members, and I’ve managed to find a few of them I still have with handwritten captions on them. Yes, we went a little crazy with the eyeliner, hairspray, and scarves!

This was the height of any notoriety we would achieve. But one of the things that helped to take down the band was the meeting of a young woman who lived in Center City Philly who claimed to have connections with MTV. She also had friends with the local cable station that filmed the Philadelphia Flyers hockey games, and she somehow bamboozled them to come film us at Blondie’s nightclub in Atlantic City. We advertised it on the radio as a video-shooting party and it was a fairly large production. The entire cable crew showed up in 18-wheeler trucks and brought in cameras you’d see on a TV film set. They recorded us playing the songs from our single and told us things looked great from the footage they had shot. Then they asked us to pay for it before we could receive our copy. Our friend declined to pay and because the band had no money the whole thing became a huge waste of everyone’s time. Not long after this incident I decided to leave the band.

Before I did leave, all of the characters mentioned above… Benny the former lead singer, Linda the young woman from Philly and the rest of the Exam spent an unforgettable night hanging out with many of the band members who played Live Aid at JFK Stadium in 1985. Read all about that here >>>

A few years later, I auditioned for Robert Hazard‘s reforming of his band and I began playing with him for a few months before starting my own band where I was the lead singer and lead guitarist. You can read more about that here >>>

I ended up losing touch with Kenny after all of this. He had made it clear he didn’t want anything to do with me after I quit the band. I understood. We had acted like brothers for three straight years. It had gotten competitive at times, and we both found ways to bruise each other’s egos. But he had a musical vision that he wanted to continue to pursue, and I felt the need to move on to pursue my own.

In 1994 when I was running Big Shout Magazine, Kenny came to our Taste of Wilmington Food & Music Festival on Market Street Mall in the September of that year. Out of the five thousand people who attended, Kenny emerged out of the shadows to say hello, and it felt like no time had passed between us.

When the festival shut down, Kenny and I walked back to the Big Shout offices to have a few beers and we reminisced on old times for the first time in ten years. Even though we seemed to reconcile things between us, I could see that something had happened that had kept Kenny from pursuing his musical dreams with the same force he and I had pursued them together.

For a brief time, Kenny Budd was a rock star and he lived the rock star life. I miss him today and want more people to know about him. That’s why I put together these words so that people won’t forget some of the impact he had on Delaware music.