On The Art Of Being Yourself

16 January 2015 | 10:18 am | Steve Bell

"I let myself do it in public and make some mistakes here and there, and do a lot of projects that ... involved learning things"

More Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds More Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds

Given the incredible background and pedigree of American underground guitar legend Kid Congo Powers, it’s no real surprise that when The Music tracks him down he’s ensconced behind the counter of a record store in his adopted Washington DC. This is, after all, the man who’s been synonymous with underground rock’n’roll for his entire adult life, spending lengthy stints as a guitarist in The Gun Club, The Cramps and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds as well as too many other smaller bands and projects to mention. Music is in his blood, so of course it makes sense that he earns extra scratch in a record shop during his downtime.

“I’m in a record store [in DC] – I work here one day a week and I forgot that it was my day to work,” he chuckles. “It’s a cool store – all vinyl – and we have all kinds of good stuff. I make virtually no money because I spend it all back on getting records, but it keeps me out of trouble and gets me out of the house and connected to the record community.”

These days (when not behind the counter) Powers can be most commonly found out the front of his current outfit Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, the four-piece concocting a bizarre (in the best sense) amalgam of swampy garage, Chicano rock, pysch and soul. They’ve produced four increasingly great albums – the most recent being 2013’s Haunted Head – and are now embarking on their first ever Australian sojourn. Powers, naturally, is no stranger to these shores, but is still pumped to be making the long trek southwards.

“Oh yeah, I’m really excited about that for certain. It’s been too long, although it’s the first time for Pink Monkey Birds so I’m excited to bring it to the Australian folk. I’ve been there a few times with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and we went with The Gun Club in about ’83, I think it was. So maybe I’ll see a different Australia this time – I think last time was the late ‘80s and it was horrible! The worst possible experience!”  he guffaws. “No, it was great. It was wild and woolly, especially in the early ‘80s on that first time with The Gun Club. I met lots of wild people, including the teenage Tex Perkins and so many others who at the time came to see us – it was a really good, welcoming audience.

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The Gun Club.

"It was a pretty crazy situation when The Gun Club came – half the band didn’t show up, and I got a phone call from [frontman] Jeffrey Lee Pierce going, ‘Okay, the band didn’t show up – can you come to Australia? Tonight?’ I’d just been relieved of my duties with The Cramps, so I was, like, ‘Why not?’ and I ended up staying with Jeffrey for many, many years after that so it was a fortuitous trip as well.”

But let’s remain in the present before returning to the past. Powers has been with The Pink Monkey Birds for a while now, and he attests that he and his bandmates are not only having a great time but also developing a special rapport.

The only time we get together is to make music, so we’re always happy to see each other and happy to play music together.

“I’ve been with the bassist, Kiki Solis, and the drummer, Ron Miller, since 2005-2006, so we’re a very stable band,” he tells. “We’ve had a couple of different guitarists, the latest being Mark Cisneros, and we’ve just finished recording a new album with Mark. He’s brought a whole new flavour to the proceedings as well, and that’s always good and fresh, but Kiki and Ron and I have been together a long time now and know each other so well.

"One of the things that’s been really good is that we all live in different states – we all live really far away from each other – so the only time we get together is to make music, so we’re always happy to see each other and happy to play music together, and we’re not in each other’s day-to-day lives or anything, like a lot of bands are. That’s what I’m putting our longevity down to – my track record before that was two years and I’m gone!”

Surely that distance proves both a blessing and a curse though?

“Yeah, it’s a little expensive and a little lonely but it’s also worked out good – they’re great and they bring so much to it, and they’ve given me a really good life. They’re much younger than I am so they have different viewpoints to things, although they completely understand the aesthetic and spirit of everything that’s going on, being fans of the bands that I were in before, and also having their own interests that I’m interested in. They keep me from being an ‘oldies act’,” he laughs. “I’ve seen that happen to other people my age. Although I really don’t think that would have happened.”

Powers becoming an anachronism is definitely an unlikely outcome at best. As with most of his projects, KC&TPMB use the music of yesteryear as a template but seem always to be pushing forwards with their creative tendencies, rather than concentrating on the past and resting on his laurels.

“We’ve always done that – so has every band I’ve been in,” Powers concurs. “Any good band uses the archetypes, it just depends on what you want to do with it. For me, the idea is always creating a new language out of it – not so much updating it, more just using it as a template to say things in a different way. And also to bring it into now and what’s going on with us; whatever freaky idea that you are feeling at the time can go into it, and there’s always a lot of freaky ideas going on. But yeah, the idea is not to be nostalgic about it and not to be a ‘roots snob’ about it, because I think that’s a big bore, to be snobby about your roots. I think you should take them and use them for what they’re meant to be done with, which is influence you and find your own voice to make your own kind of noise.”

That’s usually my DJ criterion for music – is it likely to incite a riot or an orgy, either one will do. You gotta feel something.

Does Powers mainly listen to older music for personal relaxation or does he delve into contemporary waters as well?

“I listen to a lot of older music still,” he admits. “I listen to a lot of ‘60s soul music – I actually DJ a bit and do a lot of ’45 hunting. I have a lot of friends in that community – who are not snobs either – but we listen to everything, obviously a lot of blues. I’m interested in the feeling of the record – the sound or feeling of the record is more important than when it was made or what label it was on. I’m a terrible DJ person because I don’t really care about the record label number or what exact studio it was made at – I’m just more interested in whether it makes me feel anything, and whether when DJing if it’s likely to incite a riot. That’s usually my DJ criterion for music – is it likely to incite a riot or an orgy, either one will do. You gotta feel something.”

Kid Congo’s affinity with cool music extends way back before he joined The Gun Club (for the first time) in 1979. As early as 1976 he was president of the LA chapter of the Ramones fan club, helping da bruddahs gain a foothold on the west coast – was he always drawn to cool outsider rock’n’roll?

“Yes, since I can remember,” he reflects. “I’ve been writing a memoir so I’ve been going back and thinking about this a lot, and luckily I was the youngest in my family and had older sisters who loved rock’n’roll so I grew up with their records. My older sister was into Blue Moon by the The Marcels and Who Wears Short Shorts? [1957 single Short Shorts by the Royal Teens] and things like that – the first words I said were, ‘Hey man, dig that crazy chick’! But I really did grow up with that kind of music, and novelty records made me happy and made me laugh. My sisters tell me that I used to know the records by the record label, and I was as much hypnotised by the song as I was by the record label spinning around.

I didn’t realise that that craziness is a super-great expression of a way of life and a way of living.

“So it was pretty easy, and a little later when I was a pre-teen I would start to notice all my cousins and my sisters again getting ready to go out to concerts and dances with live bands – whether they be local bands, or this Chicano East LA band called Thee Midniters who were very popular and played a lot of dances locally – and I remember my cousins and my sisters getting ready to go out and being really incredibly excited about this event, and I’m eight years old, thinking, ‘I don’t know what Thee Midniters is but I know that it’s something really exciting and I really want to be a part of that, I want to find out what it is’. So for me it was always chasing something that was exciting and that was going to make people excited, so any kind of milieu was very attractive to me.

"At a very young age I heard Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath and stuff like that and it was all so otherworldly, and I thought it was humourous that Hendrix could make his guitar sound like a UFO taking off – I took it a bit more seriously later in life, but when I was young it was, like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy!’ I didn’t realise that that craziness is a super-great expression of a way of life and a way of living – that language of speaking to people through music.

“That was my introduction of listening to stuff, and then I had other teenage neighbours who were in bands and who were artists and into underground comics – R. Crumb and things like that – and also Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention. I’m super-young – just barely a teenager – so that stuff turned me onto the underground and taught me to seek things underground. I knew that there was an alternative to whatever mainstream things were going on, and that was always attractive to me – it was like the holy grail of what I was looking for. So when I started to take matters into my own hands and getting into glam rock and T-Rex and those things, it was a real path – it was pretty clear. Writing this book, I’m seeing a real clear path and a trajectory for me to follow, and it did start pretty young. My milieu was cut out very early. I was afraid of Santa Claus – he made me cry – but I loved Frankenstein.”

It’s fantastic that Powers is committing his memoirs to paper given the extraordinary life he’s led – it should be a fascinating read, chock-full of anecdotes and adventures.

“I hope so,” he smiles. “The first one’s about my coming of age and my Los Angeles life, childhood up until 1984 when The Gun Club moved to Europe – down and out in Europe is a whole other book. But to me it was very fascinating to look into what made me the way I am, and how I made choices and what influenced me to make these choices. I didn’t know when I started what it would be, but I figured if I write this book it will tell me something and it has informed me about lots about myself. Hopefully I’ll finish it! I’ve been writing for many years, and I’ve turned in the first draft. They’ve already sent it back saying, ‘We know there’s more!’”

Powers made his name on the six-string but these days is fronting The Pink Monkey Birds; has his experience playing alongside frontmen such as Jeffrey Lee Pierce in The Gun Club, Lux Interior in The Cramps and Nick Cave with The Bad Seeds influenced his new role?

I had to learn that it’s all about being yourself. 

“In many ways the answer would be, ‘Yes, of course’, even though I don’t sing like any of those people,” he muses. “But all of them were very different and very similar kind of performers – the thing was that they were all people who were able to be themselves onstage, and that took a lot of work because I didn’t quite understand that at first. Obviously they’re very influential on me, and they’re all very magical kind of people that were different offstage a bit – really, I don’t know where that came from, but when they were onstage they were all super-magical. I had to learn that it’s all about being yourself.

"Seeing The Cramps many years after I was in them – actually on their last tour, I think it was 2006 and I hadn’t seen them for many years – but I went to go see them and I could not believe what I was seeing, it was so incredible and just so many miles ahead of any other band that I’d seen in years. I felt the same thing when I first saw them when I was really young, which was just disbelief. I just thought, ‘Wow, what is going on?’ It’s just the same three chords and it’s not anything crazily avant garde or incredibly challenging, it’s just them – it’s just them being themselves, completely free and with completely 100% free expression, and that what’s magic about it is how you play it. Then I just thought, ‘Okay, I’ve been a part of this and I know what this is’ – it just took me seeing it from the outside one more time to go, ‘Okay, just be yourself and be as pure as distillation of yourself as you can be and be relaxed about it and it will come’, and that was true.

A lot of the time there’s a lot of expectation too when you have a pedigree – like mine especially – to be immediately fully formed.

“It’s hard though – think about it, how many side people [make the transition to frontman]? Bill Wyman makes a solo album and everybody groans, or anyone; people just do not want the guitar player to be the singer – it’s just not going to happen – but luckily I was patient enough, because it took several years of practice to try it and do it, but it all worked out in the end. I was able to come to that place. A lot of the time there’s a lot of expectation too when you have a pedigree – like mine especially – to be immediately fully formed, and I let myself do it in public and make some mistakes here and there, and do a lot of projects that no one even knew about but which involved learning things. Some of it was very popular, and nothing was really met with bad reviews although some of it was more popular than others. But The Pink Monkey Birds has grown into its own, and people are very wowed by it now. When we made that first album with this line-up – the Dracula Boots (2009) album – it was very apparent that we’d hit something, some kind of original vein of doing what we’re doing. So it’s a long process, and I was able to go back to pretty much scratch (besides having my foot in the door with the name) and do it all over again.

“And I do take elements from all of the bands live – we do play The Gun Club and Cramps songs, and they’re mostly just nods to my past and a nod to my own roots and parts of those bands that influenced me. And also there’s no one else from those bands really playing live right now, so there’s no one else to play those songs – no one else connected in a direct way – that are active right now. To me that’s also a bit of preservation of the lineage. It’s enjoyable and it makes us happy and it makes everyone else happy. But it’s weird – it’s like any other cover version, you kind of have to make it your own.”

There’s plenty keeping Powers occupied in the present; as well as The Pink Monkey Birds, he’s also been involved in a loose side-project in DC whose membership includes Brendan Canty from Fugazi.

“Oh yeah, we haven’t played in a long time,” he tells. “It was more a party band – we got together to play [Fugazi frontman] Ian MacKaye’s 50th birthday party. Ian’s wife Amy asked me to play – she said, ‘Ian really likes your stuff so would you play?' – so I got a band together and asked Brendan to play and we played a few more times [after that]. It was really fun. But I do have another side project that I’m going to New York tomorrow to record with, and that’s with Mick Collins from The Dirtbombs. Me and Mick and Bob Bert – who was in Pussy Galore and early Sonic Youth – we have a thing called the Wolfmanhattan Project. We’ve made one single already and now we’re going to make another one. The first one was pretty garage-y but who knows what tomorrow’s session will bring?”

I never quite thought I would be a musician until Jeffrey asked me to be one.

How does Powers end up in the orbit of all these rock’n’roll icons, is it simply that he’s drawn to creative types?

“It’s a community – it’s my community and my peers and my tribe,” he ponders. “I think it started young – The Gun Club was the start of everything for me. That’s how I ended up in The Cramps; Lux and [guitarist Poison] Ivy came to see The Gun Club and poached me from their bosom, and things went from there. It’s a pretty good introduction. I’d only been playing guitar for one year when I joined The Cramps, so it was very much trial by fire and I had to learn quick to do it. But I’d been studying as a music fan for years – studying bands very closely – I was such an incredible uber-fan of music in general and went to gazillions of concerts from the age of fourteen onwards.

"I never quite thought I would be a musician until Jeffrey asked me to be one, but I always wanted to be involved in rock’n’roll. I thought I’d be a journalist probably or something.”