The education of Kid
The Gun Club, The Cramps, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds – Kid Congo Powers played in all three. He’s heading to New Zealand with his own band, the Pink Monkey Birds, and talks music, fashion, and psychedelic spiders with Grant Smithies.
It’s 3am, and Kid Congo Powers has just come off stage. Another night, another country, another show, but this one went particularly well.
‘‘I just got back here a few minutes ago and had a shower,’’ he says, his accent nasal and Californian, with an undertone of slightly sleazy camaraderie, as if he’s just delivered a dirty joke.
‘‘The crowd went nuts! Now I’m looking out my hotel window across a moonlit canal in Amsterdam. I can’t complain.’’
I imagine him in immaculately tailored pyjamas and some sort of embroidered smoking jacket, damp hair combed neatly into place, just so.
Powers is a stylish cat. To him, rock’n’roll is as much a visual art form as a sonic one. Even when he’s alone at 3am, he likes to look good.
‘‘A really big part of music is presentation, you know? When I saw people like The Rolling Stones as a kid, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the way they looked was a huge part of their appeal, so why would I just wear jeans and a T-shirt on stage?’’
He pauses so I have a few moments to contemplate the sartorial horror. ‘‘For me, a band is an entire piece of work. Music, fashion, artwork – you use all these things to create your own world and your own language. It’s that entire world that people respond to, not just how you sound. Some people want to join you in that world you’ve created, and others wanna run in the opposite direction.’’
Now 57, Kid Congo Powers (Brian Tristan) currently heads a lean and punchy outfit called The Pink Monkey Birds.
Their sound is raw, garish, tremendously exciting – a place where garage punk and primal 50s rock’n’roll collide with flashes of wigged-out psychedelia and Latin music – and you better believe The Pink Monkey Birds look good, too.
Theirs is a world well worth visiting, and you get that opportunity when they play in Wellington and Auckland early next month.
But Powers has musical pedigree to burn, having played guitar in not one but three cult bands during post-punk’s golden late 70s to late 80s stretch.
He co-founded LA punk-blues act The Gun Club in 1979, before joining The Cramps in the early 80s, then put in many years with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, joining in 1986.
These were three of underground rock’s most influential bands, each with a reputation for drug-addled debauchery and a strong sense of style.
A key influence cited by The White Stripes, The Pixies, and many more, The Gun Club had a Southern Gothic voodoo junkie thing going on. A riot of leather, stacked heels, and fishnets, The Cramps mashed together lacerating rockabilly riffs with lurid imagery borrowed from trashy 50s horror/sci fi/porno flicks. The Bad Seeds, meanwhile, favoured dark, damaged ballads and crisply tailored black suits.
‘‘To be honest, I think I kinda got those jobs because of how I looked, as much as how I played! You know your tribe when you see them, right? You can tell if you’re gonna get on with somebody sometimes by the way they dress. They may look like a sleazebag, but you know right away if they’re the right kind of sleazebag … ‘‘.
In April this year, Vogue magazine ran a profile on Powers, celebrating his role as a punk fashion icon. Powers talked about growing up in a traditional Mexican-American household in the east LA suburb of La Puente. Money was tight, so he bought satin and taffeta and made his own suits (‘‘Chairman Mao mandarin jackets, bell-bottom pants, with lightning bolts sewn on’’) on his mother’s sewing machine.
His ‘‘fashion gateway drug’’ was David Bowie. Here was a visually striking musician who pretended to be an alien and played with gender in his fashion choices, on stage and off. For a confused teenager still finding his identity, it was life changing.
‘‘I grew up beset by feelings of otherness, you know? I was born in the United States and raised speaking English, but the wider culture treated me like an immigrant. And I was a gay teenager who barely knew what being gay was. And then here was this hedonistic, androgynous rock star saying he was a space alien, which was the clincher for me. It couldn’t have been more perfect. When you’re a 15-year-old who’s questioning his sexuality and starting to experiment with drugs and alcohol, everything in your body and mind feels strange, so of course you feel like an alien! I had a complete and immediate sense of identification with that. And it didn’t hurt that his music was great, too.’’
Powers became obsessed with more raucous and transgressive fringes of rock music, regularly taking ‘‘completely hellish’’ threeday bus trips to New York to see the bands he loved: Dead Boys, The Heartbreakers, The Cramps, James Chance, and The Contortions.
It took a nudge from a friend – future Gun Club singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce – to realise he might be able to play music himself. They met at a Pere Ubu show in the mid 70s, two teenage music obsessives thrown together by a shared interest in punk. Powers was president of the LA chapter of the Ramones fan club at the time, while Pierce ran the Blondie fan club.
‘‘Yeah, we both felt the same way, like, oh, thank god for punk rock coming along, to give all us misfits something to rally around! And Jeffrey quite literally made me play. He shoved a guitar in my hands and said ‘Here, tune this to an open E chord, hold your finger over the fret, and strum. This is how blues players play. Here’s a slide, now get started.’ Jeffrey got me listening to Son House, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Hound Dog Taylor. It was a tumultuous voyage of discovery for me.’’
What he didn’t have in technical ability, Powers made up for with imagination and adventurousness.
‘‘My playing was super impressionistic. I’d think, Ok, I wanna sound like a bowling ball falling from a third-storey window onto a plate of corrugated steel, then I’d work out how to get that