Interview: Kid Congo Powers

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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.-