Ace photographer Perry Julien caught these shot of Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds at the Star Bar last Saturday night when the group came through Atlanta in support of their latest album, Dracula Boots.
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.
While the East Atlanta Icehouse has closed its doors until June when they hope to have acquired a license to sell booze, the doors will be open this Saturday night (April 18) for the much ballyhooed “Born to Thrill” tribute to fallen Cramps vocalist Lux Interior.
DANG DANG DANG is no longer on the bill and in their stead, Uncle Daddy & the Kissin’ Cousins will perform.
Uncle Daddy will also host a trivia game with questions about Lux Interior and, of course, the Cramps between bands. $10. Doors open at 9 p.m. East Atlanta Icehouse. 543 Flat Shoals Ave. 404-577-2073
Frontman and co-founder of the legendary American horror punk band the Cramps, Lux Interior died on Wed., Feb 4th, at the Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, California. Born Erick Lee Purkhiser, Lux Interior was 62 years old at the time of his death. According to a press release issued by his wife and Cramps guitarist Kristy “Poison Ivy Rorschach” Wallace, a pre-existing heart condition is attributed as the cause of death.
Lux Interior and Poison Ivy were married for over 37 years and moved the group from Los Angeles to Akron Ohio to New York City where they gained notoriety amidst the backdrop of the seminal CBGB’s punk scene of New York in the 1970s and ’80s.
The Cramps made their debut with their 1979 EP, Gravest Hits. Later albums, such as 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle, and their mid-career retrospective, Bad Music For Bad People are iconic albums in the punk rock lexicon. The group’s merger of horror and sci-fi imagery laced with punk, rockabilly and garge rock sounds is often imitated, but has never been rivaled.
The press release sent out by Poison Ivy goes on to say that “Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly.”
