Interview: Kid Congo Powers
September 24th, 2009 by Chad Radford in Music news
KID CONGO POWERS, née Brian Tristan, holds a musical pedigree that boasts a lifetime spent frequenting as guitarist for sultry punkish acts the Cramps, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and the Gun Club. Now fronting a new band, dubbed the Pink Monkey Birds (featuring drummer Ron Miller and bassist Kiki Solis), Powers’ latest album, Dracula Boots, marries haunted gymnasium sounds, funk and ’60s Chicano rock, possessed by a supernatural south-of-the-border flair that’s as alluring as it is dangerous. These songs fill the air with a sparse and spooky garage/lounge sound, and when he speaks, it’s like talking with Vincent Price.
Chad Radford: I read on Wikipedia that you were the president of the Ramones fan club in 1976 when you were 16 years old. Is that true?
Kid Congo Powers: Yes, that’s very true. I was a teenage fan. This was at a time when people who were into the Ramones numbered in the hundreds, really. It was when their first album came out and there were a bunch of fans in Los Angeles — a tribe of weird misfits that were into them, like something you would see as a crowd scene in Mad Magazine. There were hippies, young punk rockers and kids with the bowl haircuts and polka-dot shirts, hangovers from the glam era. It was a disparate group of people who were attracted to them. Stooges fans, and whatever. So the Ramones would come and play their circuit of small clubs and I kept seeing the same people at these clubs so I thought ‘I’ve got it! I’ll start a newsletter!’ I collected self-addressed stamped envelopes from everyone, because there was no internet back then. I made a Xeroxed fanzine with news and stuff and mailed it out.
The Ramones’ manager Danny Fields, and the publicist at the record company were all really clued into the idea that this was going to work if they talked to the kids; the fanatics. They knew that it was a grass roots thing, so they were really cooperative. Whatever news I needed, they were happy to give me and they dealt with me like I was a major distributor of records, so it was a really cool time.
Did you get to hang out with the band?
Oh yeah, that was really the first time when there was no line between the bands and their fans. They were hanging out before they played and they were meeting people and asking where to go buy used records, or where were the swap meets and thrift stores, and if they could get a ride there. It was the first time that pop stars weren’t shielded from the audience.
Atlanta acts the Subsonics and Derek Lyn Plastic open. $10-$12. 9 p.m. Star Bar, 437 Moreland Ave. 404-681-9018. www.starbaratlanta.com.
Talk about a great time to grow up in Los Angeles — that was the Dangerhouse era.
Yep, and there were plenty of dangerous things to get into. At the time you were just doing whatever you were doing and you knew that something special was going on that started with a few people and grew into something more. It’s only recently that people have really started connecting the dots. Everyone was in their secluded little pockets. Even though you knew everybody you didn’t know what other pockets of people were doing, but you would meet up at shows and things like that. There were so many good bands, like the Zeros, who were really one of the first ones out there doing it. I hear they’re playing some shows again and I would love to go see them.
You’re touring around as well, with a new album, called Dracula Boots.
Yeah, we’re stomping around in our boots.
You can hear the telltale sound of some of your older work on the album, but there’s something different going on with these songs — it’s almost like a soul album.
The record I made before this one was Philosophy and Underwear and I made that when I was living in New York. Since I was a kid listening to the Ramones, and even before that with the New York Dolls and Andy Warhol’s Factory, my fascination with New York existed by the time I was 14 years old. I finally ended up making my way there and living there for 12 years. The record before that Philosphy and Underwear was called Solo Cholo, and that really was a culmination of my fascinations with New York, where I referenced Lou Reed and no wave or scuzz rock or whatever. The first time I went to New York I saw the Cramps. It was 1978, maybe ‘77, and I saw them at CBGBs with James Chance and the Contortions. Everything in my life after that was completely up for reevaluation.
I’ve been working on a book about it over the last few years, kind of about some of the things that I have seen and done in my life, and that was very crazy road trip that I went on with 5 boys and girls.
So I eventually moved out of New York and I felt like I had made my New York statement. The night before I left the Cramps played on the last tour that they did, and when I was watching them it felt so incredible. I saw them 20 years ago and it was so incredible then, and it was still just as incredible. Three chords and a style that a million people have adopted, but no one could do it like the Cramps. I met up with Lux and Ivy after the show and I hadn’t seen them in many years. It connected me to that spirit, or idea and remembering what it was like when I played with them. I was only 21 when I played with the Cramps, and seeing them again gave me this zap of electricity. So I wanted to investigate it again and I realized what the magic was. It wasn’t what they were playing, it was how they were playing it. And I had recently started playing with the musicians that I’m playing with now.
So the idea for the record came about when I had been listening to a lot of a radio show called Intoxica Radio – you can hear it online. It’s all completely retarded — ’50s and ’60s rock and roll. So I thought it would be really great to make a psychedelic album with beatnik poetry! Everyone else liked the idea so we made Dracula Boots.
Also, the drummer Ron Miller bought and lives in an old high school in Harveyville , Kansas and we recorded there.
How in the world did you guys end up in Harveyville, Kansas?
I know! Kansas isn’t the place for me — it’s a conservative horror. The drummer lives in this high school, and it’s like a mansion. There’s a theater and a stage and a huge front lawn with a playground. The kitchen is the size of a cafeteria, and there’s a gymnasium with a basketball court. I really liked the idea of recording in a gymnasium that was built in the 1940s. We wouldn’t even have to put reverb on the record. It was perfect because they had just recently had this prom-themed party there, so it was still all decorated like a prom. We recorded on the stage in the gym and it was too perfect. It felt like one of those old record covers with the band’s photo and they’re playing a high school dance, you know?
We did a version of the song “Found a Peanut” by thee Midnighters, who were a Chicano band in LA in the ’60s. I remember my sister used to go to dances to see them. When I was a kid I remember her and my cousins getting really excited to go and see thee Midnighters. I had no idea what that was at the time. Years later when I actually heard them I realized what their excitement was about. It must have been an incredibly fun time.
Tell me about the song “La Llarona.”
We weren’t expecting that one to come out as well as it did. It just kind of happened from out of nowhere.
What does it mean?
It’s actually an old folk tale. Ron and Kiki hipped me to it. Kiki is from El Paso and the Rio Grande is right there between Mexico and El Paso. La Larona is a legend where people see the ghost of a woman who walks along the banks of the river. There are a couple of different versions of the story. One is that she married an aristocratic man, and he left her for another woman. She became so despondent that she drowned her children and killed herself. Since then she’s been in constant remorse and to this day people still have sightings of her walking along the Rio Grande. Sometimes she turns into a beautiful woman and seduces men, and other times she turns into an ugly old hag. But everyone around there believes that it’s true.
What took you to D.C.?
I wanted to be closer to the Bush administration.
I know that you are lying.
[Laughs] Yeah, I am. My partner, my boyfriend got a job here. He got a job at the Smithsonian Modern Art Museum. I had been living in New York and I made my New York statement record. I had a couple of friends here and I really wanted to start writing this book and I thought I will never do it in New York. An opportunity came up and I was all for it. I like changing. I’ve lived in a lot of different places: I lived in L.A., New York, I lived in Europe for 6 years, I lived in Berlin. I’ve traveled a lot. The good thing is it gives you a clean slate every time you move.
So nobody knows how guilty you are…
Right!, and you forget how guilty you really are when you move somewhere new. It’s always a good thing for inspiration. It’s always a struggle, and I didn’t know a lot of people here so I thought it would be good to be alone.
It’s a book that needs to be written.
Yeah it’s coming along. I’ve been working on it for a couple of years. There’s no title yet. I’m going to let that be the last thing that comes along. That’s how I work with my music as well. I don’t like to pigeonhole it. There’s an interview with me online that’s kind of a giant overview of the whole thing. I was interviewed for three days straight, and I thought oh great, I can just fill in the blanks and we’ll have the book written! But you’re writer, you know that things don’t always happen that way. I also want it to be really great, so I went to school and took some writing courses. It’s taking shape but I can see that it’s going to be unusual, fun and rhythmic, like a lot of my music, so if you’re familiar with that, you’ll know the style.
You’ve been in a lot of bands that are seemingly disparate, but there is a common thread that runs through them.
There definitely is. They all have to be somewhat sexy, and have a sense of humor about them and they all have a literary thing going on. Lyrics are important to me, and there has to be a rawness about the band. There has to be something perverse going on as well, and there has to be some real life. … Fire and life, with a healthy respect for life.
(Photo courtesy 23 Publicity)
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