Download: Moon Duo “Mazes”

(from Mazes out now on Sacred Bones)

Wooden Shjips guitarist and singer Ripley Johnson assembled Moon Duo (with keyboardist Sanae Yanada and samples pried from a bunch of primitive drum machines) to channel even more powerful drones and tones from the forbidden zone of rock ‘n’ roll. Moon Duo will play the Echo on Tuesday. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is the ‘J’ in ‘Wooden Shjips’ from a typo on the back of a Crosby, Stills and Nash live record? Or is it because people should always have a ‘J’ in the middle of listening to those records?
Ripley Johnson (guitar): Absolutely not! Those are both really funny. A ‘J’ in the middle? No one ever said that before!
What is your favorite place to visit in Morocco?
My favorite place to visit there is Fez. Fez is a medieval walled city—about a million people inside the walls. Completely nuts. There is a modern part outside it, but the old part is massive. And you literally can’t drive a car into it. So everything goes in on donkey carts or people’s backs. I highly recommend it. I’ve only been once and I stayed in a—like a guest house. These old houses they restore. They’re fantastic. It’s such a closed society. You never see people’s houses. It’s just a door, and walls everywhere. But if you get beyond the door—if you can—there’s fantastic courtyards in these houses, and they’re quite beautiful.
What’s the most isolated you ever felt on planet Earth? Out in the Moroccan desert?
The most isolated I ever felt was in Joshua Tree walking around there. Until a plane flies over. You can feel like you’re the last person on earth and you see a place in the sky and brings you back.
What effect does that environment have on you?
It gives you a sense of how small you really are. I’m into that whole existential experience. I’m not a thrill-seeker. Some people jump out of airplanes to feel alive. Being in places like that makes me feel alive and causes me to think about the big picture.
Wayne McGuire wrote that the drone in the Velvet Underground’s music is an expression of a kind of existential ‘death drive.’ Is there a connection between that music and the experience of isolation?
What I find interesting about the Velvet Underground—lemme go off on a tangent! In New York, the Velvet Underground are considered this art-rock band. And I could see how you might think the songs are this kind of ritualistic thing. But if you read some of their interviews, they talk about being outside of New York and playing sock-hops. In the late ‘60s going to high school gyms and people are dancing. Even in ’67 and ’68, maybe people aren’t as hip in these smaller towns—they just wanted to dance. And they would play ‘Sister Ray’ and people would dance. That to me is the key to the repetition and drone. You hear it in dance music, you hear it in early rock ‘n’ roll—then I think rock ‘n’ roll lost some of that in the ‘70s. It got a little wanky. But to me, the Velvet Underground were a great dance band. And they’ve said that in interviews. I think that’s missed a lot. That’s how I respond to that stuff.
Kim Fowley said, ‘They shut off the heat of the beat.’ Same concept?
I did meet Kim Fowley once. He’s a funny guy. Is he writing a book? He really should be. Anyway—I don’t know why that happened. Some people blame cocaine. People got all self-centered and self-focused and you do a bunch of coke and think you can do anything, and people got really into the virtuosic kind of thing. But not everyone—there’s always stuff going on beneath the surface.
If the ‘60s were acid and pot and ‘70s and ‘80s were coke, what chemical substance controls American society today?
Meth? I don’t know? Caffeine? Sugar? People are addicted to food these days, it seems. I don’t know what the kids are doing. It’s hard to say.
You said that you thought Johnny Thunders was the best thing that ever came out of New York—what’s the best thing that ever came out of L.A.?
I really like Wallace Berman. He did an art magazine and was tied into the avant-garde scene—I’m no expert; I just have a book by him that’s amazing—and he was one of these guys in the underground art scene in L.A. in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He was a polymath. He did everything. He did photography, he did any kind of thing he could get his hands on and knew every artist. He was one of these inspiring figures. When I think of L.A., I think of him and of these people that are sort of working in the underground there. When I think of L.A., I think of the underbelly. There always seems to be like really interesting things you can discover about L.A. that don’t get exposed very often. I’ve just started getting into L.A. noir fiction. Ross McDonald, Raymond Chandler—I’ve started reading him obsessively.
Who’s the most Chandlerian character you’ve met recently?
I don’t run in interesting enough circles! I don’t know any tough guys or tough chicks.
What is the most awe-inspiring African rock reissue you own?
My favorite is the Chrissy Zeppy Tembo—My Ancestors. I think he may have been the drummer in Witch. These are things—you buy the reissue and don’t get around to reading the insert cuz you just get obsessive about listening to it. All of that stuff, it’s just so good. I love a lot of the afrobeat and afrofunk stuff—the Nigerian stuff, and even highlife stuff—but this zamrock stuff isn’t funky. It’s just rock bands from Africa. Really amazing songwriting and guitar playing.
What kind of beneficial health effects are there to playing repetitive rock ‘n’ roll music?
I’d hope there’s some stress relief.
Like a hot tub for the mind?
Something to take your mind off your troubles. I listen to a lot of music when I’m driving and it allows me to zone out for a while. There are benefits to not thinking about things—that’s the goal. Maybe not while you’re driving! But I tend to have crazy ideas when I’m driving, and get inspired by that. Sometimes things will pop into my head. I’m constantly taking notes or sometimes I dictate to someone else in the car.
Which of those crazy ideas is most exciting for you now?
We’re talking about doing a tour 12” in October and we’re gonna do this Halloween thing—this came up while I was driving! But we’ll do a variety of custom t-shirts for the tour, and we’ll each have a custom t-shirt we can wear on tour. I’m really into tour gear right now. Like I make handmade t-shirts and take them on tour and wear them every day. It’s a consistency thing. Every day I’m wearing a similar thing. Right now I’m into shapes. White t-shirts with geometric patterns. Triangles and circles.
Doesn’t that come out in the wash? Or is that not an issue on tour?
We do the wash every once in a while, but you just got to get it on thick! Just do layers! I’ve been talking about this record a lot in interviews and now we have to do it—it’ll probably be more instrumental, but maybe we’ll do a cover. ‘The Monster Mash’ or something. We wanna do something spookier. I think of it as a soundtrack to a Halloween party, or if you had kids trick-or-treating in your neighborhood, you could crank it on your porch.
A soundtrack to a guy pretending he’s a stuffed dummy but then he jumps up and freaks out a bunch of six-year-olds?
Exactly! There was a house that everyone was afraid of in my neighborhood growing up. This really dark gothic stone house overgrown with ivy.
How many people in American suburbs have been denied the gothic creepiness of childhood?
The suburbs are scary in their own way! The Stepford Wives kind of thing. I find that sort of conformity incredibly creepy. I think it’s gotten worse, actually. Some of the older suburbs are somewhat interesting. You can find certain neighborhoods—weird subdivisions that were the precursors to the suburbs. Like in Oakland, one were like Disney made it and the lampposts are all the sames—like ‘50s-style art deco. But today things have gotten cheaper and worse. I don’t these McMansions are gonna last very song. They don’t seem made very well. But I like the idea of some of these modular homes—these prefabs. Some designers are making really interesting prefab homes that you can pretty much plop down anywhere. They’re designed smart and low-impact. I have a small dream to buy some land in the desert and plop one of these boxes down.
Fort Ripley? What do you think you’d look like when you came back to town once every three months for supplies?
Probably exactly the same! I already look like that. We’ve talked about going to Detroit and doing that. It’s not a blank canvas, but it’s a place where the American city can be re-imagined. Like suburb-type communities with mass transit. In suburbs and exurbs, everything looks the same. If they let people go crazy and be individual, I think you could have really cool neighborhoods. Like gated communities—my parents live in this retirement community in Florida and there are rules. Your bushes have to be trimmed a certain way. To fulfill this idea of how a neighborhood should be. That’s scary to me.
What do the security guards at this gated community think of you?
If your family lives there, it’s fun to be the freak who comes to visit cuz it throws things off a little bit. I haven’t started golfing yet, but I kind of want to.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS MOON DUO WITH CRYSTAL ANTLERS AND XU XU FANG ON TUE., APR. 12, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $10-$12 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. MOON DUO’S MAZES IS OUT NOW ON SACRED BONES. VISIT MOON DUO AT MOONDUO.ORG.

Download: Hunx and His Punx “Lovers Lane”

(from Too Young To Be In Love out now on Hardly Art)

Hunx blew out of the desert right into the hearts of millions of teenagers everywhere, hyphenating years of admirably trashy Rip Off-style rock ‘n’ roll with his world-famous stint as one of the four heads of Gravy Train!!!! His new record on Hardly Art is all Kim Fowley-cum-Phil Spector teenage tragedy rock and it sounds like Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos looks. He speaks now while naked on Valentine’s Day. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Where did you get the world’s tiniest leather-daddy jacket?
There’s this store down the street from my store called the Antique Center—it’s owned by this crazy man whose father owned the junk store and he died, and he grew up there and it’s his life. I go there sometimes on break or when I’m bored, and I just saw it like, ‘Oh my God, I need that.’ His mom just gave it to me! I priced it at $50 because I feel anyone who wants to spend $50 on that is a really cool person and deserves it more than I do. But it wouldn’t even fit on a dick. Maybe a baby dick. Like a small … man’s penis.
Like midget size?
Midgets could have a big one. You never know.
What animal print best shows off your manhood?
Leopard print! I’m over zebra. I’ve done all the animal prints. I think I’m one of the only men who wears animal print. It’s a girl thing. I like getting it at thrift stores. I wore my Frederick’s of Hollywood one-piece underwear set all the time until someone stole it in Paris, and I just bought this silky men’s underwear at a thrift store the other day and I was wondering—is it gross to buy underwear from a thrift store? But I always do it. I usually wash ’em. I don’t wanna have scabies again. If you wash stuff, it’s OK. I had scabies for six months but I don’t know where it came from. I had to do this toxic treatment like nine times. It can cause brain damage.
What’s the most pleasurable way you ever damaged your brain?
Probably huffing Lysol. I think I wanted something else, but that’s all I had. That was just like … being a crazy teen. I’ve just done spray paint, Lysol, whippits and that spray cleaner stuff—that’s the best! The lens cleaner’s what got me started. I don’t do it anymore, but every time I see a duster I kinda wanna huff it. It’s probably how an alcoholic feels when they see a bottle of whiskey.
What’s your best broken addiction?
Shopping? That’s up there. Doing pills and shopping at the same time. I’d take a bunch of painkillers and go to the drug store and walk around for hours and spend like $100 on stuff I didn’t need.
What’s the best present your high self ever got your sober self?
A tiger statue. I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ If you have money to spend, it’s better to go shopping when you’re high, but if you’re poor it’s not a good idea.
Are you at your sexual peak now?
I’m on my third sexual peak.
What’s a sexual valley like?
That’s me being a weird celibate person for months on end. Then I think sex is disgusting. I had it in December and was like, ‘I’m never gonna have sex again!’ and I was totally grossed out by it. Then in January I had sex with like eight people.
Who broke the sex ban?
This footslave guy. He rubbed my feet for like an hour. He’s my only footslave but I think they usually go for a long time. It was a dream situation. The first time was in my bedroom but then I started going to his house because he had a flat screen TV. I’d make him do my laundry and stuff and watch something really stupid like ‘Desperate Housewives’ or ‘American Idol.’
Mozart had a song called ‘Lick My Ass.’ Are you as dirty as Mozart?
No, he didn’t! It’s called ‘Lick My Ass’? He wanted his ass to get licked?
He also was into people shitting in his bed.
Wow—that’s cool. I’m not into shitting. I wrote this song called ‘I Vant to Suck Your Cock’ and the other side is gonna be called ‘Monster Mouth.’ So take that, Mozart!
What is the fastest way to your heart?
Candy. A lot.
How much would it take to purchase you?
They gotta look cute, too. But I like sour candy.
If you had to die at the climax of a party you had organized, how and when would you want to go?
I always thought it’d be cool if my best friend kinda … killed me out of nowhere. Like I didn’t even know there was drama and they reached over and stabbed me. To death. It just seems like a surprise.
You’re so cheerful—you like candy and surprises!
I just think it sounds cool. I don’t wanna think about dying a slow painful death or killing myself, so it’d be cool if my friend just reached over and killed me.
Where if anywhere would you be uncomfortable showing your dick?
Anywhere my mom is, even though she’s already seen it—internet lurker! She was like, ‘Are you a porn star?’ I just told her it was for art. And that I couldn’t control it being on the internet and she got over it. I didn’t think she’d actually really care, but she kind of did. I had to like really keep my Facebook on lockdown cuz I have 2,000 friends and most of ’em are people I don’t know, so once in a while someone would tag a naked photo of me and I’d have to rush to a computer to untag it in hopes that my mom wouldn’t see it. But I just saw her and she told me she’s over Facebook, so I’m relieved.
Can we expect an explosion of naked photos now?
Now it’s on—tag away, people. I actually used to have this strange obsession of taking naked pictures of myself. This is before cell phones. I had this camera with this really shitty remote and I would set up scenes of me with like giant stuffed animals, and I’d get a boner and take a million photos and I made this little binder of them.
You and Shannon wrote the new album, but do you miss just having songs delivered to you by people who are all begging to write for you?
I really do like it in a way. It’s a cool thing people don’t do anymore unless they’re huge stars. Like teen stars or pop stars. I’m really into it, actually. I’m still kind of doing that here and there—with Fred Schneider. I didn’t even get a lot of grief for it. I just recorded another album alone and played all the instruments, and I feel like people are like, ‘Whoa—you can play guitar? And drums?’ I feel like they don’t realize that about me. I think it’s slightly like a gay guy thing. As in how guys kind of back in the day … I don’t know if it’s like that anymore, but you know how people were like, ‘Oh, girls can’t do things.’ Like, ‘He can’t play! He just dresses crazy and acts nuts.’ But I can do it!
What else are you great at?
Being funny. I like comedy but I feel like everyone I know who’s a stand-up comedian can’t carry a normal conversation. They’re just always practicing. Like trying out their routine while I’m trying to tell them something important, and they’re like on stage. I don’t wanna be like that. Sometimes on stage I can’t stop talking.
I heard you were rolling on the ground begging people to piss on you.
That is most likely a true story. The worst is if I get really high before a show, cuz then I was like lying on the ground begging my band to slow down. My friend was like, ‘I went to your show and I couldn’t see you the whole time cuz you were lying on the ground.’
Why don’t you travel with like a nice lawn chair to lounge on?
Good idea alert!
Or a piano you could roll around on?
Oh my god—that’d be like when I’m older.
How will you re-invent yourself after rock ‘n’ roll?
I don’t really think about when I’m older. I’m just gonna stay young.
Can we take a moment to acknowledge Michelle Santamaria who is now playing in your band? Michelle, who L.A. loved in the Pinkz and Bitchschool and Loli & the Chones?
Isn’t Michelle so great? Her guitar playing kills me. It made me cry. When we were recording, some of the songs were really sad. I don’t know what happened. I just got really into singing about sad stuff. I’m not trying to make people cry, but I don’t know. After so long, you wanna sing about something kind of serious.
‘Blow Me Away’ is about your father’s suicide, isn’t it?
Yeah, that’s about my dad. I feel like if you love someone and they die, the nicest thing you can do is write a song for them. Just to help me get over something—or I don’t know. It just feels really respectful.
Is it true you wake up in the middle of the night and do demos of sad songs you don’t remember in the morning?
Yes—that’s what I recorded an album of. One’s called ‘Say Goodbye Before You Leave.’ It’s about Jay Reatard. I was so bummed. Another is ‘When You’re Gone.’ They’re just stuff like that. Well, just a couple are really sad. A lot are just really pop. This solo thing might be all sad songs.
Did you ever think of doing like the plaster-caster thing and selling collectible Hunx dildos?
I really wanted to sell whips! When we were on tour with Jay and Nobunny, Nobunny had this little whip and I stole it and I’d whip everybody. I woke up one day with a whip in my handbag like, ‘What happened last night?’ Actually, I’m really tame in my life now unless I’m on tour.
What’s the scariest state?
I almost got murdered for being gay at a Dairy Queen in the middle of Texas. Somewhere between Denton and Austin. We just got in the van and sped away and then Brontes got a blow-job at the next truck stop. But me and Heather wouldn’t even get out of the van! That definitely put everyone’s spirits back in check. We were on tour with our friends V.I.P.—an all-gay rap group, and our roadie would wear like onesies, and everywhere we went V.I.P. would put on a show and start singing and dancing. … It was actually two fathers and two sons, the people who wanted to beat us up.
A father-son attack team?
A double father-son attack team!
Two generations of assholes!
It was crazy! And Brontes and Bear from V.I.P. are all Southern and they want to fight back, so they start talking all this shit to them. I high-tailed it out of there! I’m not into violence at all. It freaks me out. You don’t know if they have guns.
What’s the opposite of this? The most romantic experience in Texas?
What happened at the next truck stop. I don’t know if it’s really that romantic. Walking through the soda aisle and some trucker grabs your butt—it’s kind of sexy.
Have you ever picked someone up that quickly and confidently?
It probably didn’t work out for me. I kind of wait to be preyed on. I like to lure ’em in.
Do you have Hunx groupies? Now that you were in Italian Vogue?
I don’t know if I’d call them groupies. Sometimes there’s a couple gay guys like lingering around. But not always. I’ve seen two give each other the eye—like, ‘Back off!’ I love it. ‘Guys, please! There’s only one of me!’ Actually I like to leave and give them nothing. Believe it or not, I’m kind of picky.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS HUNX AND HIS PUNX WITH BLEACHED PLUS LIVE MEXICAN WRESTLING ON SAT., JUNE 18, AT NOMAD GALLERY, 1993 BLAKE AVE., FROGTOWN. 7 PM / $10 / 18+. GET TICKETS HERE! (NOTE: SHOW HAS BEEN MOVED FROM SHOW CAVE!) HUNX AND HIS PUNX’ TOO YOUNG TO BE IN LOVE IS OUT NOW ON HARDLY ART. VISIT HUNX AND HIS PUNX AT MYSPACE.COM/HUNXSOLO.

DISTRO HAS BEGUN!

SIDE A

LACO$TE by Daiana Feuer
HANNI EL KHATIB by Lainna Fader
DEATH by Kristina Benson
GANG OF FOUR by Lainna Fader
TEEBS by Kristina Benson
OFF! by Chris Ziegler
TOM TOM CLUB by Daiana Feuer
FORT KING by Dan Collins
LUIS & THE WILDFIRES by Lainna Fader
MY DRY WET MESS by Lainna Fader
BEST COAST by Dan Collins
WANDA JACKSON by Daiana Feuer
WHITE FENCE by Daniel Clodfelter
THE MELVINS by Chris Ziegler
WINO by Chris Ziegler
NOBUNNY by Drew Denny
HANDSOME FAMILY by Daiana Feuer
THE TRASHMEN by Dan Collins

SIDE B

ALBUM REVIEWS  edited by Dan Collins
THE INTERPRETER: CHAD BROWN by Lainna Fader
THE INTERPRETER: JULIA HOLTER by Drew Denny

COMICS edited by Tom Child

ART edited by Drew Denny
ALL THIS AND NOTHING by Drew Denny

BOOKS edited by Nikki Bazar
JON SAVAGE by Ron Garmon
BOOK AND ZINE REVIEWS

FILM edited by Lainna Fader
THE INTERPRETER: STRANGELOOP by Lainna Fader
ALLISON ANDERS + KURT VOSS by Lainna Fader

L.A. WISDOM w/ Kim Fowley and Ruthann Friedman edited by Daiana Feuer

POSTER:
Photography by Ramon Felix
Design by Jun Ohnuki
Letting by Champoyhate

SPECIAL THANKS to Annette Badalian and Shane Carpenter for helping us so much!

Cherie Currie’s Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway, the book on which the recently-released The Runaways movie is based, is one of the most depressingly sordid memoirs I’ve encountered since surreptitiously reading Go Ask Alice in the eighth grade. Reading more like torture porn than a new addition to the prosopography of a famous all-girl rock ‘n’ roll band, the book consists primarily of detached and detailed recitals of traumas that include parental abandonment, rape at the age of 14, constant verbal abuse from manager Kim Fowley, a descent into drug addiction, battles with an eating disorder, and being abducted, raped and tortured by a deranged fan. Sections of the book that actually address Currie’s experience as a Runaway are the few passages in which Currie seems to connect with the material: the exhilaration of a good performance, grueling summer rehearsals in trailers that smelled of dog shit, disappointment at her failure to earn Fowley’s approval. The Runaways had a willingness to self-objectify that contributed to their success, but this same tendency gave fodder to the discourse used by their manager and the media to control, shame and discredit them as musicians. As Currie tells it, she was constantly reminded that she would be unmarketable if she didn’t overtly position herself as a sexual object, but was then (like the rest of the Runaways) made more famous for her sex appeal as a result. The Runaways did indeed achieve suc- cess uncharacteristic of women rock musicians of their day, but they did so on male terms, and the ground they broke—though certainly substantial—had enduring implications for female artists who also explicitly catered to normative standards of beauty. The reader who can wade through Currie’s saga of abuse, rape and abandonment to find the story beneath the story will find a tale of the music industry and gender roles circa 1970-something that seems eerily current.

—Kristina Benson

NEON ANGEL: MEMOIR OF A RUNAWAY OUT NOW ON IT BOOKS.

Download: Kim Fowley “Kim Vincent Fowley”

(from the “Kim Vincent Fowley” / “21st Century Youth” 7″ out in May on Black Thoughts)

Bringing up the second half of L.A. RECORD’s rock-em, sock-em marathon interview with the voluble raconteur and rock ‘n’ roll legend would be a fate worse than Leon Spinks for many. Tall, flamboyant of dress, profane as James Joyce and possessed of a legend that rolls out before him like the fog at Dracula’s feet, Fowley is a man for whom literally everybody in the L.A. scene has a pre-set opinion. I happily cultivate a weakness for the monstrous, and discovered—to my delight—that the producer/composer/arranger/performer’s legend isn’t half so kinked-up as his back catalog. I dare any musically inclined bystander to swallow Fowley’s two Norton comps—One Man’s Garbage and Another Man’s Gold—then chase them down with the 2003 Ace Records retrospective compilation, Impossible But True, and not compare the dose to Randy Newman, George Clinton or even Vivaldi. His gifts for genre mimicry, satire, surrealism and being in the right place at the right time only barely effaced by a Rabelaisian personal rep that forms about 9/10ths of the Tinseltown gossip. He’s lately gone into personalized filmmaking on a Roger Corman/Ed Wood level, with results you’ll hear all about. There seemed nothing strange to me about his digs, certainly. Fowley’s lair is a poster-studded Fairfax District bachelor pad—a place of contemplation and assignation cunningly designed to loosen inhibitions and take its occupants far from the workday. At 70, Fowley is limber enough to fold his legs into carpet yoga for long periods while fielding snotty questions from an odd-looking man who’s just walked in snuffling off the Red Line. We knew each other slightly from the scene and jousting in the public prints, and I whiled away the moments before not listening to a deal-closing confab he was having with a prospective piece of out-of-town ass. Again, it was a scene many men know by heart and we were deep into a colloquy about older vs. younger women when I switched on the recorder and held it aloft so he could see the light. This interview by Ron Garmon.

Kim Fowley: I mean, lookit me. I’m balling two 20-somethings in a row. I’m 70 years old and I don’t think I’ve dated anybody over 30 since I was 17 and a sex worker. Women over 30 have to pay to play. Unless they haven’t had a baby, I’ll give ’em a shot, but the baby ruins everything. The baby brings cottage cheese and custard and Jello after the fact, but let’s not talk of such things. What happens when you give birth to a boring child—ah-ha, karma!—and the husband leaves and you’re stuck with something for eighteen years that you wouldn’t even talk to on the subway? Let’s get on with this.
How did you come to get a bullet in your hide?
Kim Fowley: I was an Army Air Force genius after Korea and before Vietnam and I got shot here and there through the years and some of the bullet fragments stay in for a while. It’s not wise to go after them due to inner body chemistry, so when they start escaping, it’s time to have them removed. It’s happened before. You could get a facial peel—it’s the same thing. I was a hero—an activated National Guardsman who showed up and did his patriotic duty. I was good too, I didn’t die. I can’t wait for the revolution and people whine, ‘We have to start all over on a Red Dawn level!’ I kind of know what to do. I can remember being all excited by the Northridge earthquake. I was like, ‘Yeah! Woo-hoo!’ And during the L.A. riots? Oh, yeah!
I imagine you’d see this town for what it really is at such moments.
Kim Fowley: Or our country. It’s Blade Runner.
I know. How much longer till the revolution?
Kim Fowley: The revolution hasn’t been here for a while.
When did it start going down the tubes?
Kim Fowley: Well, it began for England in the time of Churchill and Anthony Eden and they lost India and the Commonwealth dissolved. For America, it started the day Elvis died.
Well, yeah! What happens after your god bloats and dies in front of your face?
Kim Fowley: Right. That was a bad day.
So this current downturn—
Kim Fowley: I love it.
—might be the end?
Kim Fowley: Oh, no. We’re not that lucky. The downturn is great for people like me and I’ll tell you why—we are people of the 20th century because of the skills we learned and perfected then. There is no outlet for us anymore. Not that there isn’t work—there is work, but it’s packaged in a different bottle. A person with 20th-century skills and expectations isn’t going to get anywhere in the job market. An employer has nothing to go on. The whole 20th century has been outsourced and what we were taught no longer counts, unless you give it a new haircut and a new container I.D. and reappear in an adjacent reality named the 21st century. I’ve been back here in L.A. since April 1. I used to live in the California desert and come here two days, three days a week, and now it’s full-time. I’ve done ten movies, seven books and six albums I’ve contributed to. Never mind the movies—I’ve been paid to do various things by people and I don’t ask anybody for work. I showed up and did all that stuff and work around the clock. It’s 9-ish now—you’ll be done by 1 or 2 and around 3 or 4 my lyricist translation gig starts. People who want English translations of lyrics and not in BBC but in Hollywood English. They play their stuff over the phone and I give them a translation—listen to their meter and they go and phonetically sing it. Then around 6, that goes away. I wake at 11 and have a New York, then a California day then I have a nightlife and then I come back and have a European day. I have Australia-Asian-New Zealand days as well, and so on—wearing various hats ranging from producer, arranger, publisher, songwriter, translator, dealmaker, consultant, filmmaker and then music for other people’s movies. Different time zones, different sets of people. And I have no manager and no booking agent. I have five attorneys and four accountants worldwide chasing the cash flow around. I’ve had a lifetime income since I was 23-and-a-half years old and I’m 70 now. So before JFK was assassinated or the Beatles began to have hits in the U.S.A., I had a lifetime income established working from ’59 to ’63. By ’64, I had it for sure. Every since then it’s been for fun. You’re sitting now in what L.A. RECORD described as ‘a 1950s, downtrodden, shabby apartment’ and I would call that right. I don’t put value in where I live and I don’t drive a car. I’m not interested in materialism at all. I do all this conceptual chess-playing for the sheer joy of upsetting my enemies. They say men are at the height of their powers at age 27, but those guys don’t work as hard as I did this year or do as many gigs. My lifetime job record on my site hasn’t even been updated for 2009 yet.
To find a metaphor for your discography, one would have to go outside music to something like John Carradine’s film career—a long tumult of notable titles and complete obscurities that couldn’t have been done just for money.
Kim Fowley: I use art as a weapon and business as a kind of deadline. ‘Oh, you want it on that basis. Fine, here it is.’ I give it to them, they pay me, I’m gone. I don’t have the great opera, the great book, the great masterpiece to ram up someone’s ass. I give my public what my competitors are forgetting to give my public. I give them what they want even though no one else but me hears that need. You give the people the idea, they grab it and enjoy it even though you might get it wrong. Even if you don’t give them exactly what they want, you are the only one giving them anything close to it. Therefore, the stuff that you put out is always gonna get used.
The singles you did in the 1960s, for example, seem perfectly slotted to the national sense of humor as expressed in Mad magazine and elsewhere.
Kim Fowley: I was against everything the 1960s stood for. I wasn’t into drugs, hippie culture or alternative anything.
You satirized hippies extensively.
Kim Fowley: I got a flock of hippie bitches. When they started growing the hair outta their arms and legs, I kinda started passing on those. The organic ones, those I couldn’t stand, but the confused ones are certainly fun. Just like with goth bitches now and the fetish girls now swear allegiance to Bettie Page and Ed Hardy and all those guys can do no wrong.
Back in my youth, it was scribbling weird poetry and the whole leftover Jim Morrison thing.
Kim Fowley: Jim Morrison was the best white rock performer of anybody who ever tried it. Somebody had to be the best and it was him. Jackie Wilson was possibly the best black performer. But Jim Morrison? My-my, that guy could control an audience—he could do big rooms and small rooms and go on for hours. He was tremendous and a real artist. A lotta these people today scream about art because they don’t have what it takes to become a good hack. You can’t write ‘Wooly Bully,’ so you think you’re an artist.
I’d think any artist would be proud to sign ‘Wooly Bully’!
Kim Fowley: That’s a great record, but you have to dismiss it. I’d rather hear ‘Wooly Bully’ than Curved Air.
Well, that’s stacking the deck! Curved Air was wretched. Listening to such an enormous amount of your music today put me in mind of something Neil Innes told me last year on the death of melody and the three-minute song.
Kim Fowley: The Bonzo Dog Band guy. I recorded with them.
They did a hilarious cover of ‘Alley Oop.’
Kim Fowley: They recorded on my Good Clean Fun album too. You know what Leon Russell said when I played him Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello records? He said, ‘It’s not gonna last because it’s not Jewish and it’s not black.’ So therefore it doesn’t count.
Another brave leap into history’s dark!
Kim Fowley: But he was right. Don’t bring George Gershwin anywhere near this stuff.
I bring up Innes because his incredible gift for melodic pop satire rivals and seems clearly inspired by your own.
Kim Fowley: Oh, I’m a music genius, no question. Did you hear the Rhino set?
Today? No. Just the two Nortons and the Ace.
Kim Fowley: I’m on a package called Where the Action Is. ‘Underground Lady’ is on there. ‘To Die Alone’ by Bush—which is a record I co-wrote and produced back in ’66 for a group from the Inland Empire. Went number one out there. Then October Country performing ‘My Girlfriend is a Witch,’ which I co-published. Those are on that, then this stuff here. I have new recordings I’ve done, including two in particular I’ve donated to Black Thoughts called ‘Kim Vincent Fowley,’ which is about me done in a sort of Buddy Holly & the Crickets approach. The other is ‘21st Century Youth,’ which is my message to the youth of today plus a drummer.
You don’t see the end of melody and all future records being produced by mindless electronic pulsations or whatever?
Kim Fowley: The best unsigned band I’ve heard this year is from Chattanooga, TN, and they’re called Moonlight Bride. They’re an all-male group and they combine all the mid-’60s stuff—they go all the way from Thunderclap Newman to the Move, then they have all this isolation out in the Great Smoky Mountains and reaching out to England and California and New York metaphysically and they’re all under 25. They’re really good. Their lawyer, Ben McLane, came over and said, ‘Listen to this.’ Holy God, they invented themselves! There’s no co-writing or stolen riffs or nothing. They just figured it out themselves. Just when you think it’s over, someone shows up from where they’re not supposed to be.
You were in the L.A. rock ‘n’ roll underground from close to the very beginning in the late 1950s.
Kim Fowley: It started with Co-Existence Bagel Shop in 1957 and Eric Nord was the leader. When they were chased out, they moved to San Francisco and became the basis of City Lights—the Ferlinghetti shop—which was to become the Beat capital of the West Coast. They passed through Big Sur at Nepenthe and kept going. But in ’57, I was out of a polio hospital and fucking old women on a Lord Byron level with a cane and I remember going to Venice and dragging these ancient bitches.
As Byron said of Shelley—you left your wits in Venice.
Kim Fowley: That was before Morrison was invented in ’65 and I was there in ’57. Back then it was Beat poetry, i.e. Rod McKuen-type people with their black turtlenecks and bongos. It was a whole lot of postwar angst. Allen Ginsberg had yet to reach Venice.
Did you ever see Lord Buckley perform?
Kim Fowley: I remember Jim Dixon told me about him, but I missed him. I was chained to the cage of high school.
By the way, I intend to test your theory about ‘Bodacious’ by U.S. Rockets being the perfect song to get ‘dirty bitches to shake their asses.’
Kim Fowley: I went to a Vegas event and a bunch of strippers got up and danced to it.
Speaking of the Norton liner notes, you are correct. Frank Zappa is derivative.
Kim Fowley: Frank was like Jeff Lynne. Jeff Lynne listened to a whole lot of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘‘I Am the Walrus’ and George Martin-era Beatle records and recycled it brilliantly for ELO, and Zappa did his doo-wop, and John Cage and Dada and went through all the avant-garde movements and likely went through everything and put the elements together on his stuff. I sang with credit on ‘Help, I’m a Rock’ and other songs. They recently released a lot of Kim and Frank stuff as outtakes on the estate-sanctioned CD reissue of Freak Out. He said, ‘You’re my Brian Jones and I want you to be in the band.’ I should have taken him up on it for two more albums after that. I would’ve been Zappa-anointed for my own weird stuff. I said to Frank, ‘With all due respect, I’ve had hits.’ I wasn’t interested. I went to England in ’66 instead. Zappa is like Nick Drake or that other Nick, the Australia poet—Nick Cave—and Elvis Costello. They’re easily digestible to the peripheral quasi-intellectuals who always name-check them. They look at Lou Reed, who was pretty original, and call that ‘alternative’ and don’t go any deeper. Those people have interesting moments, but they aren’t astounding. I think Pet Shop Boys and Johnnie Ray are the kings of sad music. If you wanna good cry, forget Hank Williams. Same as with Wilson Pickett, who was better than Otis Redding on stage because he wore red suits and he had the best clothes, man, and he would get up there and get the fat chicks to dance with him, although Otis could’ve been, might’ve been a better singer and writer. I met Zelma Redding and she heard me sing and she said, ‘Otis would understand you.’
How did you get into moviemaking? There’s one titled Satan of Silverlake. There’s an idea!
Kim Fowley: Part of it was shot in Hollywood and part in Holland. I brought some of the props from here over with me and played with some actors and actresses there and there’s a dream sequence and I come back to Hollywood via Atlanta and I end up at Lenora Claire’s party, who is the queen of Hollywood at night these days. The movie ends with Jackie Tripod, a physically challenged miniature goddess in a traveling freak show based out of Austin, and she comes in and karate chops a brick in half then the movie ends. I’ll give you a copy.
I think I’ve seen Jackie Tripod perform before. How much of the L.A. scene do you see any more?
Kim Fowley: I go to Fetish Nation. I go to Bondage Ball and Club Hell, which are all God and then the various offshoots of all that. I like the girls who participate in that culture because they’re really dirty and I like dirty things. In order to get a hard-on I have to fuck with some kind of light on, whether in the pavement or the mud. This dark stuff doesn’t work for me, I like to see who I’m with. I want to see anguish in their faces. So I dress up like one of the characters in my movies. I’m Dollboy in Dollboy on YouTube, I’m Satan of Silverlake in Satan of Silverlake on YouTube, Trailer Parks on Fire, where I play a Jeff Foxworthy version of hillbilly grampaw on YouTube. I’m Sexual Frankenstein on YouTube. I play Rod Steiger in Golden Road to Nowhere. I have my own acting troupe and what I did was I went back to night school to learn digital marketing from Jon Reiss, who’s out of CalArts. Instead of going through the studios, I put scenes from my movies up on MySpace or YouTube and see what kind of response I’d get and finish the movie from the chatter.
Had Roger Corman only had this …
Kim Fowley: I worked at AIP when he was there. I was A&R guy and head of the music division for a few hours a day because the boss couldn’t get out of bed from drinking. That was where I learned about drive-in theaters, that whole process.
That was the place to learn of such things.
Kim Fowley: We’d start with a title and have eight days to film it. And they’d go out, crank out some shit and it always worked. I never saw any of the footage and they never heard any of the music, but stupidity is an art form everyone but me disregards. Simplicity is very good. People yell ‘Kafka!’ and point all that French existential shit at you. The whole Beat thing was based on riffing off Neal Cassady, who couldn’t write at all. He was everybody’s muse and these great writers sucked off his energy and his aura and put it on the printed page and came off as ‘outlaws’ when all they were doing was recycling one guy and how he lived. Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane weren’t criminals but they were different from Ben Hecht and Damon Runyon.
The latter were both newspaper guys who hung around gangsters, instead of quasi-cops and outlaws who hung around criminals.
Kim Fowley: There’s no difference between cops and outlaws.
There’s a major difference between a cop and a journalist, though. The cop will certainly let you know.
Kim Fowley: The difference is not getting caught.
What do you think the Baby Boom’s great legacy will be?
Kim Fowley: Old people complaining.
That’s every generation! What’s so special about the Boom?
Kim Fowley: They like Jan & Dean records.
What is the most fucked-up thing you ever saw at a Hollywood party?
Kim Fowley: I saw Ronald and Nancy Reagan show up to see Sparks play. When he was governor, Rodney Bingenheimer and I were standing at a Saturday matinee at some short-lived club I can’t remember the name—near the Troubadour. The fire marshal was only letting in a few at a time, so we were standing there and up comes the governor and his wife, no bodyguards. I asked what they wanted and they said, ‘We’ve come to see Sparks play!’
This was like what? 1972?
Kim Fowley: It was back when he was governor. I asked him who else he liked and he said, ‘The Beach Boys.’ You remember, when Dennis Wilson died, Reagan went on national television and eulogized him. Reagan and Nancy just showed up there, no photo-op, no nothing.
I’ll be fucked. That must’ve been one of those ‘Now I’ve seen everything’ moments.
Kim Fowley: I saw Don Henley show up with David Stewart from the Eurythmics to see the Bangles or Roger McGuinn to see the Runaways. I was a lyricist on five Byrds albums and suddenly here’s Roger up there studying everything.
What was the most fucked-up thing you ever saw at a London party?
Kim Fowley: It was Chris Curtis, the singing drummer for the Searchers, before the gay thing came out—before Lou, Iggy, Warhol, Max’s Kansas City, that whole androgyny thing that began to click in America from ’72 onwards. There he was in 1966 with male groupies jacking off on him while he’s eating grapes! I think it might have been at a Lionel Bart party.
Someone must’ve sent the kids from Oliver! home for milk and cookies …
Kim Fowley: That was kind of unexpected. Of course, in case Curtis is still alive and will sue, none of it happened. Maybe it was actors pretending to jack off, but those were real grapes.
Why do women like to be punished?
Kim Fowley: To pay for being castrating bitches. Why are they castrating bitches? Because men treat them like shit. See, there’s a civil war going on between men and women. It starts in America when baby boy and baby girl notice a difference in genitalia. Then they’re separated and Dad teaches little boy to play baseball and Mom teaches little girl how to bake cookies and they meet again when they’re 13 or 14. By this time, the boys are still throwing dirt clods at each other and the girls are masturbating to Brad Pitt and don’t want to deal with boys at all, but men and, on top of that, girls secretly have penile fear, a fear of the cock and penetration.The feminine men in all these boy groups throughout history are idolized by girls afraid of an unwanted cock, what one girl described as like fear of having garbage dumped in your driveway. The feminine males can get away with a lot because women don’t want Charles Bronson all the time. Once these femme guys get wise to what they can do, they are worse than any hyper-masculine stud in a leather bar. The whole male-female thing is what I call sexual segregation. I only deal with people as consumers of product and they’re all one mass. Like jelly.
A blob—all mouth and appetite.
Kim Fowley: I found out that all the free surfer pussy we used to get chased out of Huntington Beach trying to score would eventually come to Hollywood looking for white emaciated freaks like us. This still works in the club scene I still attend. The freakiest girls are all from 805, 714, 919. They come here and they want local cock. There’s always some family problem that causes them to overcompensate with slime like me.
So that’s where you ooze into the picture!
Kim Fowley: I would call myself a feminine man. Sort of this vampiresque, wizard, ancient, predatorial necessity—I listen and she tells me her lesbian lover doesn’t please her, my Magic Wand broke, there’s no money in porn now, my husband’s an asshole, my child is normal and now there’s you—meaning me. I say, ‘Well I can be your dad, your girlfriend and you all at the same time.’ And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I have a new theory that plain and unattractive women are the best sexual companions and turn into the best sexual fun you can have in a bedroom—better than a chick turning a trick. They’ll try anything because no one ever tells them they’re sexual beings. I learned this back when I was a sex worker back in the 1950s. I was a sexual surrogate for burn victims, handicapped women, a blind woman who has no eyeballs since birth who wants a penis in her mouth and no one will look her in the eye. I was part of the therapy. I would ask what they wanted to be touched that no one else would. Just like ordering off the menu at a restaurant. The requests were easy to live with because they knew what they wanted and any version of that will make them become addicted to it. The freedom of not being judged.
What do women really want, as Sigmund asked?
Kim Fowley: To be themselves.
Any last words you’d like to say on the Runaways?
Kim Fowley: In the mid-1970s, the culture needed girls with guitars. After the feminine man in lipstick—Bowie, T. Rex, Jobriath—well, you look from Piltdown Man to Cro-Magnon and other evolutions, and if you do that to rock ‘n’ roll, you have to turn the page after the feminine man and see a girl standing there. Eventually, the androgyny gets folded into a real woman or schoolgirls with guitars. Rebels who didn’t want to be lawyer’s wives or cowboys. I anticipated that. Then you had women in the news trying to kill people, like both assassination attempts on President Ford. Women in sports came along. All of a sudden, the Runaways came along—girls with guitars. The Fabulous Five, of course, self-destructed. But those girls, their secret was Kenny Ortega, now known as the director of High School Musical and the new Michael Jackson movie out right now. Well, Kim Fowley hired him to stage the Runaways’ stage act. When he was a dancer in the Tubes, I saw him in Norwalk and told him I wanted him to do it. Black groups like the Stylistics and the Drifters would have synchronized moves like that, but I wanted athleticism and girls with guitars. I paid him and they had the best stage show in the business—blowing Van Halen, Cheap Trick and Rush off stage because they put on a show as five girls. Then Kenny Ortega did Dirty Dancing and he’s better than Busby Berkeley ever was. I was ahead of my time on that. The movie’s coming and Michael Shannon plays me. He’s an Academy Award-nominated actor last year for Revolution Road and he looks similar to me and is almost as tall. I met him at Denny’s at Woodland Hills. Joan Jett brought Michael Shannon to meet me and I brought Christine Blood with me and the AP sent a photographer. [Kristen] Stewart and Shannon got to see how I interacted with Joan and I told them my secret for dealing with the Runaways because they were so young and their attention spans so limited, I couldn’t use long dialogues. What I did was every one of my twenty-eight personalities in short bursts—I was a clown, a coach, a drill instructor, I sold peanuts. I kept switching roles like a pitcher changes up in baseball. I had an actor dad and actress mom and I used all that to keep them entertained and off-balance. I turned to Mike Shannon and said, ‘The real Kim Fowley in real life does off-the-wall stuff that scares people and sometimes I have to do this in people’s offices.’ Mike is a method actor, I think, and not improv, but he does me pretty good. Christine had to tell him that in real life, Kim Fowley’s an asshole. There’s a difference between me interacting as a womanizer and me interacting with women in the business.

KIM FOWLEY’S ONE MAN’S TRASH AND ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE COMPILATIONS ARE OUT NOW ON NORTON. VISIT KIM FOWLEY AT KIMFOWLEY.NET OR MYSPACE.COM/REALKIMFOWLEY.