Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
Bay Area music icon Greg Kihn, hitmaker of 'Jeopardy' and 'The Break Up Song,' dies at 75
Greg Kihn, the rock singer-songwriter who scored hits with “Jeopardy” and “The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)” and helped define an era of power pop in the 1980s, died Tuesday at age 75, his family said in a statement. The cause of death was complications from Alzheimer's disease.
With the Greg Kihn Band, the singer reached No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1981 with "The Breakup Song," and reached even greater heights in 1983 with "Jeopardy," which reached No. 2 on the national chart and became an early staple of the nascent MTV. The latter song remains part of the public consciousness not only for its own enduring earworm qualities, but also for a popular "Weird Al" Yankovic parody, "I Lost on Jeopardy."
Kihn was part of the Beserkley Records stable of artists who emerged from the Bay Area in the mid-1970s. In 1976, he released his first song as a solo artist on the influential compilation "Beserkley Chartbusters Vol. 1," alongside label mates Jonathan Richman, the Rubinoos and Earth Quake.
