Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds, 2024 by Luz Gallardo
In 2016, I did a massive Kid Congo Powers interview, which ran in a few places in a few versions, but never saw light on the internet in its complete form. It covers his time in the Gun Club and the Cramps, with a few gestures at Nick Cave and some reasonably candid discussion of his past vices. If you're interested in seeing a print version with all relevant photos, it is in issues 78 and 79 of Big Takeover, which are available for ordering and contain lots of other cool content. Powers is coming to the Rickshaw November 1st; has other tour dates; a memoir; a new LP, That Delicious Vice (featuring some cool guests like Alice Bag!); and a new homebase in Tucson. There is also a new trio-form lineup, with Mark Cisneros on guitar and sometimes bass and long-time drummer Ron Miller.
Of working with Kid Congo, Alice Bag -- who has a new album herself, Sister Dynamite -- says, “We go back a long time... When I was doing my book tour, Kid called me and I hadn't heard from him in ages! And he's like, ‘You're coming to DC! If you need me for anything, I'm gonna make some noise with you — I'm in!’"
“It always amazes me how deep those early friendships go," she continues. "You can not speak to somebody for years and years, but if you have punk rock in common, you're my sister or brother forever. So he came out and he played with me at one of my early readings in DC. And then, every now and then I'd see Pink Monkey Birds, but just randomly. Because he was living on the East Coast and I was living on the West Coast, we didn't see each other very often and fell out of touch again.”
Of the recording, Kid Congo adds, “It was actually Alice who said, ‘Well, why don't you just get us together and we’ll do it?’...So we wrote a cheesy lounge act song, which is of course much better than any cheesy lounge act.”
That's all from the press release. Here's the old feature, with the original intro from part one. Enjoy!
Kid Congo: Squawkin’ like a Pink Monkey
Bird
By Allan MacInnis
When lyrics are abstracted to the point of
meaninglessness - Brian Eno being “more dark than shark,” and that sort of
thing - I don’t struggle so hard to figure what they might be. It’s a bit of a
bad habit for a music journalist, but sometimes bad habits have unexpected
payoffs: such as, I now have on tape none other than Kid Congo Powers singing a
few bars of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” to me, by way of explaining his current bandname, Kid
Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds. It’s a song I love, but I’d never caught the
line at all - “Keep your mouth shut/ you’re squawkin’ like a pink monkey bird.”
It could have been “big money Burt” for all I knew. “Is that what he sings there? Really?”
Kid - whose real name is Brian Tristan -
chuckles at me a little. He’s a pretty delightful interview, actually.
And Kid Congo, of course, has legendary
associations. Flip over the Cramps Psychedelic
Jungle, for instance - BECAUSE YOU
HAVE THAT IN YOUR RECORD COLLECTION, RIGHT? - and the guy on the left in the swanky Spanish
hat? That’s Kid Congo. He’s on second guitar with Poison Ivy on Smell of Female, too. He got his name
from a Santeria candle that Lux and Ivy had, which promised the person who lit
it “Congo Powers.” You can even see Lux Interior pickin’ him up by the hair if
you do a Youtube search for the Cramps doing “She Said” live in Boston; it
comes at the end of the clip, but the whole thing is worth watching (Kid rudely
shoves Lux off the stage at the very end, but don’t worry, he remained friends
with the band, and still keeps in touch with Poison Ivy, who has stepped out of
the limelight since Lux’ unexpected and untimely passing in 2009).
Alternately, if you prefer the Gun Club to
the Cramps, whip out their live album, The
Birth the Death The Ghost; which documents the formative years of the band,
featuring Kid Congo on guitar; he left before The Fire of Love was recorded, with Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s blessing,
to be in the Cramps, after Lux and Ivy saw him play an early Gun Club gig and
picked him. If you don’t have that album, maybe you have The Las Vegas Story or Mother
Juno or Pastoral Hide and Seek, all
of which Kid is on.
And then there’s those Nick Cave and the
Bad Seeds albums…
What you might not have yet is a Kid Congo
and the Pink Monkey Birds album. You’re forgiven, if so - there’s a lot of
music out there these days, and it’s hard to stay abreast of it all - but take
heed, both 2013’s Haunted Head and
2016’s La Araña Es La Vida are really
worth your time, and very much in keeping with Kid Congo’s resume. Fear not the
Spanish title of the latter album; Kid Congo’s exploration of his Mexican
American roots has no bearing on that whole “La Bamba” thing - not even close!
- but owes more to classic Mexican-American garage rock like Question Mark and
the Mysterians (relax, I didn’t know they were Mexican either) or the East LA
Chicano soul band Thee Midniters (never even heard of them til I talked to Kid
Congo, but they were a big inspiration for him).
Mr. Tristan and I spoke earlier in the spring.
We join the interview well in progress…. thanks to Bev Davies for digging up the vintage images!
The Cramps backstage at the Commodore, 1981, by bev davies, not to be reused without permission
I hate to ask, but I wonder if you’ve come to terms with Jeffrey’s death,
where that sits for you these days.
It’s still affecting me. I’m still a bit
lost, really. But yeah, we met pretty early on, we were just goofy suburban
kids, y’know. We’d done a few things, but we were still very much on the
outside of everything. I was running a Ramones fan club and he was doing a
Debbie Harry fan club. We were still very wide eyed and bushy tailed, when we
met. And we went through a lot of things, and like I say in my book [Kid is
working on a memoir, not yet published], I have the distinction of being the
person who played Jeffrey’s first Gun Club gig and I played his last. So I went
the whole way with it, and even when I was in the Cramps or the Bad Seeds, we
still were close and doing things. And I had spoken to him in the weeks before
he died - he was at his father’s, drying out, and that’s where he died of an
aneurysm. Everything just failed. And although everyone expected it, no one
expected him to live for long, it was still completely shocking. I still find
it shocking.
Yeah.
We had a sort of brotherly kind of thing,
since he had no brothers, I had no brothers - we both had sisters, but no
brothers, and he was brought up by a single mother, most of his life. So our
relationship, I think, in hindsight, I realize we were brothers for each other,
and that’s why we could work together and stuff even after arguing terribly and
never wanting to see each other again, we’d always get together again. Blood is
thicker than water. So Jeffrey was family, to me, in a rock and roll sort of sense.
He taught me how to play guitar. He forced me to be in a band - I was
reluctant. So yeah, it’s a huge thing in my life, but also it’s also the best
thing that happened to me in my life.
…Working
with Jeffrey?
Definitely. That will get a lot of guffaws
from people who worked with Jeffrey! (Laughter). However, I had a very
different relationship with him than other people did, because we started out
from nothing, and I was hardly ever on the end of his total selfishness and
lack of tact in treatment of band members. Which got better in the later years.
But those early guys, wow, he really let them have it. But I always knew
Jeffrey was worth it and the work in general and the effect the work was having
was worth some trouble. Plus I didn’t know any other way! I was in bands with
Nick Cave, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy. Being completely
difficult was just the way it is! Why would you expect it to be different?
Ha…
The idea that these people are difficult,
it’s not really that… They’re often complex people, often selfish and
egotistical - and let me say this about myself as well. But the reason people
find them difficult is that they have, or had, a very, very strong vision of
what they wanted to do, how they wanted to do it, how it was to be said, how it
was to be presented, and other people on the outside of that have a hard time
dealing with someone so strongly committed to their vision. And they are all
people who are willing to defend it to the ultimate degree and fight for it in
any kind of way and usually just to tell anyone who didn’t agree with them to
fuck off.
This
seems like a good point to segue into talking about working with Blixa Bargeld.
(Laughing): Oh my God!
Of
the people you’ve worked with…
“…maybe he’s the worst?” (Laughter).
(Laughing)
What was that like playing second guitar to him?
For me it’s the theatre of Blixa. Blixa is
theatre. Very much a Klaus Kinski school of theatre. Me and Blixa always got
along completely fine, it was a professional relationship. But I spent a lot of
time listening to him yell at sound people… but he’s a great artist, and he
falls in the same category. He has a very strong vision of the way things are
going to go, and his way to tell people how things are going to go is to scream
at them. To me as an artist, and playing with him, I understand what he’s doing.
It’s a strange method, to me - one I wouldn’t do; but, y’know, there is a
method to the madness of his personality. And yeah, he’s the Klaus Kinski of
underground rock.
I
love Blixa as well - I mean this fondly. But there’s a story of him playing
Vancouver, a small solo thing at Richards on Richards, and after his set he
walked through the room to the street. Everyone was apparently trying to get
his attention, and he was having none of it, in total prima donna mode, and he
walked up to the first cab he saw, got in - and the guy was waiting for someone
else, and made him get out. So Blixa had to stand there on the street trying to
hail a cab while these snubbed fans who were watching sort of chuckled behind their
hands.
Yeah. Equal parts Klaus Kinski and Marlene
Dietrich.
How
was living in Berlin? How did you end up there?
Through the Bad Seeds. The Gun Club was
living in London - actually, the Gun Club had split up, in yet another
implosion, just at the height of our career at the time, and we were just over
it. The drummer Terry Graham had left the band in the middle of the tour; we
finished the tour with a pick up drummer, which was very disappointing. He
wasn’t terrible, but he couldn’t be magical. And it was kinda one of those
things where everyone was mad. At the end of that tour, nobody was speaking to
anybody. It was not even factions, it was like, everyone didn’t want to speak
to anyone. And so I was in London, and I started talking to Patricia (Morrison)
again, talking about starting a band that never quite got off the ground. And I
was staying at a houseboat in Chelsea, where Mick Harvey was staying, and
people would hang out. It was some friends of ours - two sisters from
Manchester who had a houseboat, and it was kind of a central for the likes of
Bad Seeds and Australian ex-pats and [Einsteurzende] Neubauten and different
people, so I ended up there, and they asked me to fill in for tour, for Your Funeral, My Trial; Barry (Adamson)
had left the band, Mick was going to go on to bass, and they needed a second
guitar player, so they asked if I would do the tour. And then I ended up there
for over three years. I ended up going to Berlin to rehearse and falling in
love with the city… especially after coming from Los Angeles, which was very
industry-driven, with very big expectations, then London - very industry-driven
again, a big pop town with the latest flavor on everyone’s lips. And so to go
to Berlin - which at the time was West Berlin, the wall was still up, so you
were surrounded by the east, in this very artistically-driven town, where
immediately, the first thing I did with the Bad Seeds was being in the Wim
Wenders film, Wings of Desire. [Looks like there's more on this here!]
So
y’know, it was very impressive breath of fresh air to be somewhere where all
the arts met up, dance, film, music, and everyone was interested in all of it…
performance, visual art… It was a very specialized feeling in that town, hard
to explain, full of inquisitive, searching people. The conversations would
never end. Fuelled by a lot of speed, but - y’know, your brain wanted to
explode. There was always a deeper level. It was great, a great learning
experience to play in a more experimental situation. The Cramps I had known and
I vaguely knew Nick, but Mick Harvey was actually my friend. It was a new
situation for me to be in, very exciting, playing a new kind of music. There was
a lot of freedom in playing with them, especially the Bad Seeds, in the earlier
days; everyone was a person who had their own thing going on, an already formed
version of what they wanted to do, so it was like, “add yourself to this mix.”
I
assume Berlin has a thriving gay scene? No homophobia?
Oh god. It was very decadent. There are no
sexual taboos in Berlin! You would really be on the outs if you were moral
about it. Of course, the Bad Seeds were quite macho, though - but I could deal
with them, if they could deal with me!
I’ve
heard very few negative stories from anyone who has played Germany, but I did
talk to Joe Baiza (Saccharine Trust, Unknown Instructors, Universal Congress Of)
about an attack that happened to him over there, where he was pretty seriously
injured. He was very clear it was a racially motivated attack, a hate crime.
Yeah. I could see that. The arts were very
free, but I don’t know about German culture in general. Berlin was definitely a
safe haven, but Germany - it’s like here, there’s a lot of racism, you see it
more than ever in the States, and they have super right wing governments. But
yeah, there’s racism, but I’ve travelled the world, and I know that there’s
strong racism everywhere. I lived in London
- terrible! I would get called a Paki all the time! It’s like, “Don’t
you know what a Mexican American is?” But I felt for the Pakistani community
there, because it was people muttering under their breath all the time. I was
never, knock on wood/ luckily, outright attacked, but definitely verbally and
mentally…
I
think I read you left America in part because you wanted to get away from
Reagan?
Yeah. It was a good excuse. It was a good
protest, but of course, I came back and Bush senior was in office, so so much
for our protest. But yeah, we were disappointed by America. The Las Vegas Story album, Jeffrey was
writing a lot about being disappointed with the United States, and he paints
quite a bleak picture.
Why
was it called The Las Vegas Story?
Why not? The previous one was called Miami… I think it was going to be called
Welcome to Las Vegas, at one point.
It sounded like a movie title.
A
film noir, or something.
And Las Vegas is an iconic American
nightmare, dressed in pretty lights. But especially at that time, the mid-80’s,
it was still a very downtrodden, sad place with lots of alcoholism and gambling
and crime. It wasn’t the Disneyland that it is today.
Is
that your proudest moment with the Gun Club?
It could be, yeah. It’s a pretty great one.
The album - I haven’t listened to it in ages, but when I have listened to it,
it holds up. The songs are pretty great. It’s a success on all sorts of levels
- it’s pretty far-reaching, for us, in some ways, for a rock’n’roll band, for
an LA punk rock band, to have strings and to do Gershwin songs, or to attempt
putting Pharoah Sanders on there…
Pharoah
Sanders is on The Las Vegas Story???
Well, he’s not on there, but there’s a cover version, an excerpt of “The Creator
Has a Master Plan.” We were giving nods to our influences, saying we’re not
just influenced by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
How
do you feel about The Birth, The Death, the Ghost?
Well, my involvement with that record…
strangely enough, I wrote some of the lyrics [for songs on that album]. But
mostly it was Jeffrey’s. He was the better musician, for one. But there’s some
pretty rudimentary songs on that one. We didn’t know what were doing, just one
riff over and over, stop-start, stop-start. Those are the ones I wrote!
Which
lyrics did you write?
Well there’s a song called “Not That Much,”
there’s a song called “Going Down the Red River.” Those two come to mind.
I
remember it not sounding that good. Does it hold up?
That album, we don’t even know where that
came from. We think it came from the drummer [Terry Graham]. His wife at the
time, she recorded everything. I don’t know, because I can’t ask now, but when
we came out, it was like, “what?” I think Jeffrey wanted it to put it out,
obviously, because it got put out officially, in the beginning, when it first
came out. I don’t know why he wanted this document, or if someone else at the
record company wanted a document of that time; I think they were trying to tie
things together, because I think it came out maybe after Las Vegas Story, when I rejoined the band. I think someone was
trying to tie together the Cramps/ Gun Club connection. Those were the days
when there were a lot of bootleg records, the Gun Club and the Cramps were
bootlegged like crazy, and they were popular bootleg records, people bought
them all the time. But people would just put out in any shit, but that was not
in our control. But The Birth the Death
was, because I know that the artwork was done by our friend Clayton Clark, who
was dating Jeffrey at the time. She was a good friend of ours. So that was all
very above board.
Is it
interesting to hear yourself that early on?
It’s interesting because you can hear me
falling to pieces on it! It’s incredible that a band like the Cramps picked me.
Or maybe that was attractive to them?
(Interviewer
and interviewee both laugh): Right!
But
it’s fun to listen to, and fun to think of the time, because we were making
music just to make music, and wanted to make some kind of good music. It was just like, “wow, I found a language to learn,
and to speak with.” So that’s very, very exciting. It’s like listening to a
birth or something. It sounds like hell, it sounds horrible, and the playing is
probably bad, but it’s like a birth. The
Birth the Death the Ghost. It’s just
a moment, a small, if you’re interested in the inception. It’s an artifact,
more to be listened to once they put it in a museum. It’s a reference, more
than anything to enjoy.
Do
you know who came up with the title?
I’m sure Jeffrey did. I think this was all
happening before I rejoined.
It’s
interesting that you mention bootlegs, because in prepping for this, I picked
up a couple, including one that was a Gun Club bootleg, and now is an official
release - Destroy the Country. I was really trepidatious at first: “do I want to pay $25 for this?
How bad will it sound?”
Hah! Another bad sounding record! But that
one is good. It’s well recorded - maybe it’s a radio show, perhaps. Or someone
with good equipment was standing in the right spot or something. The
performance is quite good, too, on that one.
…And
then to come back to the Cramps, there’s also Let’s
Get Ugly.
What’s that? I don’t even know what it is.
Oh.
It’s still a bootleg, but it’s being put out again - I went through this
section of Cramps bootlegs at a record store, and it’s like, “It’s Brian
Gregory, it’s Bryan Gregory, it’s Bryan Gregory… hey, it’s Kid Congo!” It’s
from 1981, sourced off a radio broadcast.
Oh cool.
It’s
really good.
I’m sure! That’s good to know. I’m sure the
Cramps geeks will know immediately where to find it.
The
thing I wanted to ask about that. The photo on the cover, you look very
different from the ones that bev davies
took in Vancouver. You look almost like Stiv Bators! You look a lot more
menacing.
Hahaha!
Was
Stiv an influence in your aesthetic?
No, other than being a fan and friend of
his. But no. I was more trying to look like Ronnie Spector. Ronnie Spector, the
Shangri-Las, mixed in with all those bad boy boyfriends I sing about.
You
look like you have a switchblade in your boot.
That was a very conscious effort.
You
don’t look that way at all now. You look like you could be a librarian, a
university teacher.
Yeah. I have horn rimmed glasses!
I was
hoping we could talk about a couple of photos that bev davies took when you
were here with the Cramps, in 1981 at the Commodore. You have a guitar with a bat
stencil on it...
Oh yeah - that was an Ibanez Explorer… or
maybe it was called a Destroyer, or something like that. It was a copy of a
Gibson, that had some kind of biker bat on it.
Kid Congo with the Cramps at the Commodore, 1981, by bev davies, not to be reused without permission
That
was your guitar?
Yes. Actually, the Cramps had that guitar
already, I didn’t go out and buy it, it was passed along to me. And they had a
Gibson Explorer, which was the same shape. The Ibanez was kind of the
alternative brand of that, and I had that for my duration with the Cramps.
Was
it Bryan Gregory’s old guitar?
Y’know, I’m not sure! I didn’t ask any
questions, I was, like, 21 years old. I just thought - the Cramps have asked me
to play, I’ll take the guitar. I wasn’t so geeked out at that point, I was more
amazed and shocked and terrified.
Fair
enough, though you look like you fit in quite nicely, you were every bit as
terrifying as Lux and Ivy.
Hahaha. Well, that’s why they chose me.
You
have some interesting jewelry, too. You have a tooth.
I have one tooth in my mouth!
On a
necklace.
I probably had a few teeth necklaces, I had
some bone-made necklaces that I actually bought at a Santeria store - a
Latino-Cuban-South American witchcraft, that they used, probably, in
ceremonies.
Do
you know what kind of animal the tooth would have been from?
A chicken? A goat? I dunno.
Okay,
all right. With Santeria - I’ve interviewed Chris Desjardins, and we talked
about the back cover of Fire of Love, and there’s all these little Santeria
bottles. Was Santeria a big thing in LA at the time? You got your name through
a Santeria candle, right?
Well, we were trying to come up with a
Cramps name for me, because it was still Brian Tristan at the time, and we were
coming up with a big list, asking my friends and everyone, what should it be?
It was a crazy list - everything from “the Thing” to “Brian Gris-Gris” to “Mr.
Tristan.” There were all kinds of things, and we were like, “nah, none of this
really works.” And Lux and Ivy had this Congo Chango candle at their house and
Lux looked it over - he was always someone who was assigning people roles - and
it said, “When you light this candle, Congo powers can be revealed to you.” And
he thought, “Congo Powers, there’s your name right there!” It sounded great,
and then we added “Kid” because we were thinking of Kid Thomas, who was a crazy
R&B singer with a giant jelly-roll haircut. He was completely amazing-looking.
And also “Kid” like Johnny Kidd and the Pirates or - it sounded like a boxer or
pirate or something. It had a nice ring.
I
notice that on the albums you’re credited just as Congo Powers.
Yeah, my Cramps actual name was Congo
Powers, and Kid Congo - you’ve gotta keep people movin’, it was informal. Like
Ivy was “Poison Ivy Rorschach” but it turned into just “Poison Ivy.”
You
have really big hair in these photos as well. Was that a style you were
sporting before you were in the Cramps?
I probably had hair, I was always a hairdo
person, but as a matter of fact, before I was in the Cramps, there was a band
called the Dils from California - an early punk band on Dangerhouse Records -
and I was friends with them, and they would often hangout with them, and they
used to call me “Brian Haircut.” Because I always had a different haircut. But
- y’know, I came formed already, with the Cramps; they wouldn’t have picked me
if I wasn’t. I’d always been a stylish kid. When I was in first grade, my sisters
dressed me up as the model Twiggy for Halloween. I went to school and I won the
first prize! I’ve always been dressing up, and it was good, because I got my
drag period over with early. I was no stranger to androgyny.
There
was a curious photo I stumbled across of you and Jeffrey Lee Pierce in drag.
Was that something the two of you did together, or onstage?
That was actually at a Cramps Halloween
show, so we were actually dressed up for Halloween, as Rita Moreno and Debbie
Harry, if you really hadn’t noticed already.
I can
see Rita Moreno, actually! Were you in the Gun Club at that point?
Well, the lineage goes… I started when I
was 18 or 19, I went to New York with a bunch of late 70’s kids who were not
going to be left out of the Max’s Kansas/ CBGB scene, so we hopped on a $69
Greyhound bus to New York City and landed there with a friend to crash with and
not much else. But we went and saw music, and one of the things I discovered was
the Cramps. At this time, I hadn’t known Jeffrey, but I went back to LA, after
six months or so, and Jeffrey had been travelling and I met him going to a Pere
Ubu gig. We had seen each other before, because I was working at a record
store, Bomp! Records, run by Greg and Suzy Shaw, and Jeffrey used to come in
there, and although we weren’t friends, he was a friendly enough customer, and
we would talk about music and stuff. He was into reggae and bought a couple of
reggae imports at the time, in the late 70’s. We would see each other all the
time, and at this Pere Ubu show, we were in line together, waiting to go in,
going stag, and we just started talking and hanging out and drinking, that
night. And at the end of the night, Jeffrey said, “Well, let’s have a band!” So
at the time, of course, you say, “Okay! I don’t know how to play anything or do
anything, but I’ll be in the band.” And within a short time the Gun Club, the
first version, was playing out, and then soon after the Cramps moved to LA and
were looking for a guitar player. I had met them in New York and became
friendly with them there. They knew me as the guy with gold Lansky Brothers
blazer - Lansky Brothers was shop in Memphis where Elvis used to shop. And so
they knew that I had this Lansky Brothers vintage gold silk blazer, a kind of
long, Teddy Boy-looking blazer, and they were really impressed.
What
was their lineup at that point?
They were playing with Bryan when I saw
them, and then Bryan left, and when I saw them in Los Angeles they were playing
with Julie, who was in-between me and Bryan. [Julien Hechtlinger, AKA Julien
Grindsnatch - only joined the band for one tour, but is the second guitarist in
the famous Urgh! A Music War clip]. I
had already known them by then, I had already had taken LSD with Nick (Knox)
and Bryan. We were friendly, and I was very good friends with Bradley Fields
who was a good friend of theirs from Ohio. There was a big Ohio contingent in
New York - Akron, Cleveland people… the Dead Boys, friends of Pere Ubu, Lux and
Ivy had lived an Ohio, and Miriam Linna, who was one of the first drummers for
the Cramps. Anyhow, [when the Cramps came to LA] Bradley, and his boyfriend
Kristian Hoffman who was in the New York band the Mumps, who I had befriended
when they were in LA, they were, like, you should 100% go see this band and get
this guy to be your guitar player. I didn’t actually know that they practically
made the decision for them. At that point I’d been playing guitar for one year!
So Lux and Ivy would come to see the early Gun Club, before there was a record,
before more than five of our friends going to see us was our whole audience.
And they approached me from there. But me and Jeffrey remained friends of
course. I said to Jeffrey, “The Cramps just asked me to be in their band, what
should I do” - I felt disloyal, or whatever. And he was like, “are you kidding?
Reality check - we’re playing to ten people a night, and you have a chance to
be in the greatest band in the world.” So we remained friends. He was like,
“I’m going to keep half the band, and just get us gigs!”
(Laughs).
Did both bands overlap for a period?
Well, maybe for about ten minutes, but once
I was in the Cramps, there were no side projects. That was one of the rules!
Seriously?
Yes! Maybe unspoken, but you really got
that idea.
Marilyn Monroe from Hell, and Rita Moreno, Halloween 1981, Cramps show at Devonshire Downs, CA. (found online)
They
seem like they might be a full-commitment kind of band. When you met Jeffrey in
line at the Pere Ubu concert, did he have the big Debbie Harry hair?
No, he just had dark hair, still. But -
y’know, that was a time where punk was still the Bob Dylan polka-dot t-shirt
and the checkered tie, and when I met him, he was very strange looking, because
he had a belted trenchcoat, and some white, they-could-have-been-women’s
western boots on. And a big Deborah Harry badge. So he was a strange mixture of
identity crises, or maybe he was sure of his identity… but anything went, you
know? I didn’t question it. The weirder the better!
I
don’t know if this is known, but was he straight, gay, bi?
He was straight. He always had girlfriends
and was very very loyal to them. And then he went through a period where he was
infatuated with William Burroughs, where he decided he was bi. It was strange.
I didn’t think of him as a particularly sexual person, quite frankly. Where it
came out was mostly in songs, where you said, “well, he is, because he knows
about obsession and he knows about sex,” y’know? You know from the songs. But
as a person… certainly he had girlfriends he became obsessed with. But he never
had a boyfriend he became obsessed with.
Do
you have an overtly queer side to any of your music? I’ve read the Huffington
Post piece you did (“How I Came Out of the Closet and in to the Streets,” in
part about how the 1980’s AIDS epidemic emboldened the young musician to become
more out and outspoken)… but I don’t know all of what you’ve done, and I don’t
know if it enters your music.
Sure it does! I don’t have gay rights
songs, but they’re definitely gender neutral, or about men. I have a great song
on the first Pink Monkey Birds album, where it goes, “even though your leather
is cliché/ I like what it has to say anyway.” To me, sexuality is sexuality - I
guess what the young people call “fluid” today.
And
glam was a big influence on you, right?
Well, there we go - There We Go! There’s
where it all starts. Yeah. And that’s why it was never a big deal to be gay. It
only became a big deal when I would make it a big deal, but in my rock’n’roll
life, I was 14 or 15 going out to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco in
Hollywood, and listening to glam and of course David Bowie. He’s topical
lately, but it has to be said - it made it all all right. It was funny, because
that scene was a lot of older people posturing to be gay, to get girls. A lot
of acts, posturing. But there were a lot of kids around, a lot of teenage boys
around that scene, and for us it was completely freeing. The girls were all
necking with each other… It was like, “Oh, I can be myself here, in this
scene,” and David Bowie and Lou Reed at the time made it quite all right to
walk on the wild side and that… and also, that time… I always wonder, how did
we all get into a bar every night? There were all these teenagers in the bar. I
don’t know what the law was, but it was relaxed…
Yeah,
I did the math, when you were in New York seeing the Dead Boys and the
Heartbreakers and whatnot, you were underage.
Yeah, but I was very tenacious, I had to be
there, I was not going to be left out. There were a few commutes. But a friend
of mine, Trudie Arguelles - she was an LA punk rock friend that I knew from the
early, early pre-punk days. She had a Jeff Beck haircut and loved the look of
James Williamson on Raw Power and
fashioned herself after him. She was a tastemaker - I knew this by 1975, 1976.
And she had family in New York and had gone, and she wrote me - because there
was no internet, we wrote letters - and said “I just saw the most incredible
band, my favourite band I’ve seen, they’re called the Cramps. They’re difficult
to explain but they’re the best thing ever. Get over here quick, you have to
come see this band!”
Was The Birth the Death the Ghost recorded
around the same time that the Cramps were seeing you in LA? Was that
representative of what they heard?
Yeah, Lux and Ivy were probably in the
audience when those things were recorded. And actually, somewhere, there are
recordings by Lux - he was a huge archivist, he recorded tons of bands. And I
know, Dave Alvin from the Blasters said, “Oh yeah, Lux was at that show and
they were taking notes, trying to hide his cassette player under his coat,
taping the show.” So that would have been at that time. Because there was an
earlier version of the Gun Club called the Creeping Ritual.
Where
did that name come from?
Well, it just flew out. It was kind of a
Dr. John Gris-Gris “gumbo-ya-ya” influence/
reference. That was a record I was very into at that time, it’s one of the most
amazing records of all time. That was big influence on the Gun Club. But our
friend Keith Morris from the Circle Jerks, who Jeff was sometimes living with,
said “ah, this sounds like this Gothic thing, you should be called” - and he
gave us a couple of names. The Gun Club was one. Another one was the Ass
Festival. So the Gun Club could have been called the Ass Festival.
Oh
jeez. Thank God you didn’t go with that.
And exchange for that, Jeffrey wrote a song
for the Circle Jerks, “Group Sex,” which became the title of their first album.
I’m a
bit of an outsider to the LA scene, and I see documents, like, in The Decline of Western Civilization, there’s footage of Fear being really, overtly homophobic onstage, but
I don’t know what to make of that - if that was normal, accepted, ironic, or
what.
An act or real? I don’t know, because I
completely ignored them, they weren’t a part of my world or scene at all. I
knew them and I thought they were, like, some silly band, or something. I guess
I was a bit of a music snob, and I wanted to be around something adventurous
and mind-blowing, and to me that was just like, “some louts being loud.” That
was just not my scene at all, so it barely registered in my consciousness; I
was aware it was something popular, but I was off somewhere else. The scene was
small but by the time of Fear it was big enough already that you could be
segregated away from that. And that was when hardcore started to happen, and I
was already an old fart - I was 19 or 20 by that time, and my view was not just
LA. There were people I supported in LA - the Weirdos, the Screamers, the Bags,
X of course. There were different bands that I dug. And then there was a whole
lot of bands that I didn’t like, that didn’t rate at all.
To
talk about the Latin American aspect of things, you were really into Thee
Midniters at some point, right? Were they a Chicano band?
Well, they played into my subconscious more
than my conscious, and that’s because of my teenage years. I have two older
sisters who are into music and a whole gang of very close knit cousins who were
all teenagers and musicians. And they were into Thee Midniters, and they would
be very excited about going out, and getting ready to go out… and I just
remember that they were so excited about it, and it was an electric atmosphere.
I just thought, “I don’t know what Thee Midniters are, but when I grow up, I
want to go see Thee Midniters. So that’s what that was, and they were Chicano,
but we were assimilated. We were born in America and grew up in America, so it
wasn’t like we were immigrants. And I think our parents wanted us to grow up
American. I didn’t learn Spanish til I went to school; the only Spanish I knew
was when my parents were yelling at us! Hahaha… We were very aware of our
culture through our grandparents and so forth. But my cousins, they were into
Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. And Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. So I got
exposed to a whole mix of things, but Thee Midniters was more of a conduit for
teenage excitement, for me, and I knew when I was ten that that’s what I
wanted, y’know? So they influenced me very much in that way, and it wasn’t
until much later - actually probably until I really started playing music -
that I listened to them and realized that they were really exciting, that their
stomping R&B stuff is amazingly exciting and kinetic and warm, hot even -
the sound, the guitar playing. And also when you grow up in an area - it’s
regional sounding to me, that’s reflective of some of the Mexican-American
communities.
In La
Puente?
They were from Whittier, a suburb or two
over where I lived.
Was
it a very Catholic community?
Oh yeah! By all means. It’s all about blood
and tears - why do you think the Gothic scene is so big in Los Angeles?
Does
that have a mark on you?
Sure. Me personally, it was an influence…
but I was the youngest of my family, so kind of by the time I was coming up, my
parents had tired of the extreme dogma of going to church every Sunday and
things like that. But all my cousins went to Catholic school and stuff. I
didn’t have a super-Catholic upbringing, where I was forced to pray or read the
Bible or anything like that, but I did understand that you were to fear God.
And I remember at my grandmother’s house, there was a huge - huge! - print of a
Jesus with the crown of thorns and tears, and it was just frightening as a
child, to look at it. But from an early age, I always looked at things a bit
perversely, where - “Wow, that is crazy, that is strange, and it’s scary, but I
like it…” I have been writing a memoir, actually, called The Enjoyment of Fear.
[Actually it's called...]
Did
your family know you were called Congo Powers and named from a Santeria candle?
How did they feel about that?
Well, my parents knew! And by that point I
was off into another world, so I didn’t see my family all that much. My parents
were fine with it all. You know, my mother was an artist, she was a painter, a
drawer, and my father worked his whole life as a welder, in stainless steel
production. But they were open minded. I think they were disappointed that I
wasn’t going to school to become something conventional, but they were also
supportive. And they met Lux and Ivy early on, and were charmed very quickly by
them. Lux was especially very charming! He even assigned my mother a character.
Oh
really?
Lux decided my mother should be called
Allura Monsanto, because there was a wig ad in an old magazine for wigs by
Monsanto, and one of the wigs was called the Allura wig. And so he said, “oh
your mother is Allura Monsanto, who was a Mexican vampire actress in the ‘40’s
and ‘50s.” When my parents would come see the Cramps early on, he would say,
“oh, we have a celebrity in the audience, Allura Monsanto, you’ve all heard of
her.” They were fine with it - irrevence…
Is
that the same Monsanto that makes chemicals now?
Probably - I’m sure they made a wig out of
some chemical or petroleum product.
Kid Congo with the Cramps at the Commodore, 1981, by bev davies, not to be reused without permission
I
should probably ask you some questions about your solo work… To go back a bit, I
was listening to Philosophy and Underwear, and it’s really quite different from what
you’re doing now. There’s almost a club vibe to some of it.
It’s a completely separate band and a
completely first attempt, and a lot of it was written on the spot, because we
went in to record a single and ended up recording an album. But that was a New
York thing. I was very interested in New York rock - I saw the New York Dolls
when I was a teenager… I never saw the Velvet Underground, because I was too
young, but all of that fascinated me from an early age, Andy Warhol and
everything. I was a 14 year old kid saying to everyone, “I’m going to move to
New York!” And that was my first version of the Pink Monkey Birds, and the
emphasis was on New York, rather than anything else. So it was skronky New York
style rock, and we did cover versions of “Baby Face” by Lou Reed off Sally Can’t Dance. It’s an older New
York influence.
Your
vocals are a little louder and clearer.
I think it’s intentional. Pink Monkey Birds
is supposed to be more trance-inducing, more “one sound,” a whole, rather than
having stuff flying out, sticking out. The new album was so much of an even
group effort, not just in terms of the lyrics, but the music - the Pink Monkey
Birds has always been a group effort. I’m the source of the style, but they
definitely contribute and shape the style.
What
are you distorting your vocals with, now?
On the new one? All kinds of things. At a
high school, we found a lectern that you speak through, with a microphone
attached, a box, so I sing through that a lot. That’s one of our big secret
analogue weapons. And different distortions - we’re experimenting all the time.
Where you place the mike.
It’s
weird, because there’s points where you sound a bit like Mark E. Smith, and I
wasn’t expecting that.
Mm, Mark! I’m in one of the Fall’s videos.
Really?
Yeah! In the “Hit the North” video, they
have a mysterious extra player in the band, and it’s me. I was hanging out and
they were like, “oh, come, we’re shooting a video.” Because I was friends with
Mark and Brix Smith and Marcia (Schofield), who was my roommate. They were
“pick up these wood blocks and start playing them.” They were doorstops or
something.
That
is really funny. Anyhow, to come back to it… it seems like the new album is
self-consciously Mexican American.
It’s an influence we always have. Me, Kiki
Solis the bass player and Mark Cisneros the guitarist are all Mexican-American,
all Chicano: Kiki from Texas, from El Paso, and me and Mark are originally from
the Southern California. So it’s music that is part of our heritage, Chicano
rock, and we’re always looking for it. There’s a whole genre of Mexicans -
Question Mark and Mysterians is a very famous one, but there’s a whole genre of
mostly unknown bands that are a source of pride to people of Mexican descent.
I wondered about the song on La Araña Es La Vida
called “Karate Monkey,” because there’s a culty little kung fu movie called Circle of Iron
, where David Carradine has three or four roles, one of which is a.kung fu fighting monkey. I don’t suppose that’s a reference?Ha ha. It didn’t come from that. The
“karate” part is latter day Elvis, and “Karate Monkey” is a skit that is done
by LaWanda Page, who is best known as Aunt Esther of the Sanford & Sons TV show. She worked blue - she was a protégé of
Redd Foxx, who discovered her, and she was a completely filthy standup
comedian. Her records are great. She gets a lot of play in our tour van.
And,
say, “Coyote Conundrum” - coyotes for me are associated with people smuggling,
but…
The title is because we call our bass
player, Kiki, “Coyote” for various reasons, and it’s actually a very difficult
bass line. And he could just not get it, so that was the working title for the
song. The lyrics have very little to do with coyotes…!
How
did you guys arrive at the name the Pink Monkey Birds? I get that it’s a
reference to Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream,” but…
I was just calling the act Kid Congo
Powers, solo, and we started doing gigs and playing out and doing songs, and
the band one day said, “We want to be called something!” - to be Kid Congo AND
something. And I thought, okay, everyone’s working for free, really hard;
everyone’s contributing. It’s fine not to be just the solo name, and so I said,
“Just pick any name and I’ll say yes to it.” And the next day they said, “We
want to be called the Pink Monkey Birds!” And I think they probably thought I’d
say no; but I said, “How amazing is that!” And I’m proud to say that it’s from
a David Bowie song, since his departure from this planet. Or his body. I don’t
know if he’s left the planet, but he’s definitely left his body.
What
does a live set look like these days? A lot of stuff off the new album, and Haunted Head… and…?
We have a lot of records now, so we have a
lot of material to choose from. And we always play Gun Club or Cramps songs -
those change, because we tour a lot, and loads of people come to see us, and we
like to mix it up. But we always will pay tribute to Gun Club and Cramps,
because it makes us happy, and it makes everyone happy, and it’s a way to keep
people aware that it existed at all. It’s a tribute. I don’t play any Nick Cave
- he can still play it! But the Cramps and the Gun Club, there’s no one who is
playing live now who can play those songs with authority, with a direct
connection to it. Ivy’s not playing, everyone else died and none of the main
Gun Club people seem to be playing. So I feel a bit of a duty to do that. It’s
a way to say hello. “Hello, the work is still going…”
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