Greg Kihn, Who Scored Hits With ‘Jeopardy’ and ‘The Breakup Song,’ Dead at 75

Eighties hitmaker Greg Kihn, best remembered for his early MTV-era smashes “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em)” and “Jeopardy,” died Tuesday at age 75. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease.

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Kihn started his career as a folksy singer-songwriter in his hometown of Baltimore, but moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s where he formed the Greg Kihn Band alongside guitarist Robbie Dunbar, bassist Steve Wright, and drummer Larry Lynch. They released five albums on the indie label Beserkley Records that attracted little public attraction despite strong reviews and their reputation as a killer live act.

“The rap is, why hasn’t Greg Kihn made it yet,” he asked Rolling Stone in 1980. “I don’t know and I don’t care….I’ve given up worrying about ascending to the throne. That’s the kind of nonmusical thing that could hold a band back. Right now, though, I’d like a crack at AM [radio].”

That crack came the following year when “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em),” written by Kihn and Wright, reached Number 15 on the Hot 100. “I never really finished the lyrics to ‘The Breakup Song,” Kihn told Rolling Stone in 1983. “The ah ah ah ‘s in the song were just filler – I intended to write words later. Then I played it for the band, and they said, ‘Wow, those are the deepest words you ever wrote.’ I tried to be cool and act like I’d planned it, but in reality, I had no idea. It took me three weeks to write a song about that. Now it takes five minutes.”

The success of the song landed the group slots opening up for the Rolling Stones and Journey. And two years later, Kihn scored an even bigger hit with “Jeopardy,” the kickoff song to the Greg Kihn’s Band’s 1983 LP Kihnspiracy. It reached Number Two on the Hot 100, held out of the top spot by Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

“Sometimes it seems that you pull a song out of the air, and that’s what happened with ‘Jeopardy, ‘ Kihn wrote decades later on his website. “It was as if the song was floating around in the atmosphere and I just snatched it up. I started singing ‘our love’s in Jeopardy, whoo-whoo-whoo.’ It was completely spontaneous. Steve looked at me and we both realized what we’d done.”

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But even though he now had a video in heavy rotation on MTV, Kihn said he never felt like a genuine star. “I’d love to have hair like A Flock of Seagulls, but I could never spend all day combing it, man,” he told Rolling Stone in 1983. “I can just be myself, and they pay me for it. There’s no real trip. We just are.”

A year after “Jeopardy” hit, “Weird Al” Yankovic honored it with the parody “I Lost on Jeopardy.” Kihn himself cameos in the video as the driver of the car that takes Yankovic away after he loses on the game show.

Topping the success of “Jeopardy” proved impossible, though the group’s 1985 single “Lucky” did reach Number 30 on the Hot 100. In the years that followed, Kihn continued to tour and record on a smaller scale. In 1996, he took a job as a disc jockey on the San Francisco classic rock station KUFX. He also released a series of horror novels and short stories.

He also played the 1980s nostalgia circuit at casinos and state fairs until health issues sidelined him in 2019. He never once left the stage without playing “Jeopardy” and “The Breakup Song.”

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