Beautiful Creatures:

If I had my choice of any musician to interview for the Modern Pea Pod's Halloween issue, Brian Tristan (a.k.a. Kid Congo Powers) would be near the top of that list. As a founding member of the Gun Club, and the lead guitarist during key periods for both the Cramps and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, Kid Congo was one of the architects for gothic, roots-infused rock and roll - a favorite late-October genre around the MPP World Headquarters if ever there was one. But it's important to note, our interest in Kid Congo is far from just seasonal. He's an innovative and versatile guitarist, as well as one of the great sidemen in alternative rock and a blossoming solo artist in his own right: this year saw the release of Philosophy and Underwear, his debut full-length with longtime backing band the Pink Monkey Birds.

We had the opportunity to talk to Kid Congo by phone as he and the Pink Monkey Birds were about to embark on their first-ever national tour. We discussed his impressive musical history, as well as his current projects and his continuing unease with the music industry at large. Yes, folks, Kid Congo is still underground. And neither he nor we would have it any other way.

Modern Pea Pod: All right, well why don't we start with the Gun Club?

Kid Congo Powers: Sounds good...that's where I started, too.

MPP: That was, if I'm not mistaken, your first real band, and also the first band to really tap into the blues/punk/country hybrid. I mean you had the Cramps before that...

KCP: Yeah, but the Cramps were more rockabilly and psychedelic focused. We got a lot of ideas from the Cramps, though. And there was a lot of other music going on, like James Chance, who was taking soul and jazz and James Brown, and stripping it down and turning it upside down. What the Cramps were doing with rockabilly and James Chance was doing with funk, we did that with country and blues; just mix it together and shake it up. So that's what all three bands had in common, that reconstruction of music, even though it was different styles.

Also, punk at that time was against any kind of conformity. It was a reaction against conformed music, that sort of music of the early '70s: prog rock, Yes, Chicago...it just wasn't cutting it for youth music anymore. And the late '70s was a strange time. You were living in this liberal political climate, but then on the other hand there was Vietnam and, you know, economic depression. So the only thing to make sense of everything was to destroy it and reconfigure it. It was kind of a normal thing to be so transgressive.


MPP: But at the same time, you guys were doing this before there were any established genres for roots-influenced punk music, like psychobilly, etc.

KCP: Oh, no, there was no such thing - it was us against them. It was kind of an exciting time, actually, because there was no template for it; bands were just taking the basic foundations of rockabilly, blues, country, and turning it into the essence of what it was. I mean, rockabilly in particular was having a resurgence of popularity at the time. You had teddy boy punks, and then the Cramps mixed it up with B-movie culture and psychedelia, and just completely freaking out. (laughs) So that was really exciting and scary, and it was something else. It was a huge influence on [Gun Club founder] Jeffrey Lee Pierce. We just said, "Those are our people. They're speaking our language." But the Gun Club was much freakier, and very proud of it.

There wasn't the idea of making it, though, or success, or that anybody was actually going to listen. We didn't see any opportunity - everybody started at ground zero. There was no MTV, or a psychobilly or cowpunk genre to find an audience. I mean the early days of the Gun Club, we'd be playing to five of our very good friends or girlfriends. That was all of our audience. And by the time the Gun Club found any kind of success, I'd already left.

MPP: Now you left very early on in the Gun Club's career...were you there for the recording of Fire of Love, or did you leave before that?

KCP: I left about ten minutes before they recorded it, and got headhunted by the Cramps. (laughs) When I joined them, Jeffrey was like, "Please do it, we're playing to five people!" The Cramps were big rock stars to us: they had a record out, they went on tour. It felt like a huge opportunity, like, what 20-year-old, barely playing guitar person could even join a band like that?

But I was there for most of the writing of Fire of Love and I was there for that formative period before the album, and so I still really feel a part of it, even though my actual guitar playing wasn't a part of it.

MPP: Now a lot of the roots influence in the Gun Club is often attributed to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, but you were there from the beginning too; you started the band with him. So were you aware of this kind of traditional American music at the time, or was that all Jeffrey's influence?

KCP: I'd say I wasn't really aware of it at the time. There was actually a tape which Jeffrey gave to me and the other musicians, and that's actually what he used to teach me to play guitar: open-E tuning, with a slide, like a blues player. So there was a Bo Diddley record, some old murder ballads, Howlin' Wolf, "Tombstone Blues" by Bob Dylan, and some stuff by the Slits...country, blues and punk. Thats how I learned to play guitar. And at the same time, we were also influenced by No Wave bands like the Contortions, so that sort of seeped into the music as well.

Actually, our influences came from all over the place; when me and Jeffrey met, what we bonded on was that we both traveled a lot. So we were both into the bands from New York, like Television, Blondie and the Ramones; Jeffrey had even traveled to Jamaica and done some writing about the reggae scene for Slash magazine. And we were both just huge fans of music. In fact, we were both fan club presidents: I was president of the Ramones fan club, and Jeffrey was president of the Blondie fan club. (laughs) We were big record collectors - we used to meet a lot at record swap meets. Scouring the record stores was a big deal, in search of the golden prize of whatever obscure, amazing record you could find.

MPP: I talked to David Thomas from Pere Ubu a couple weeks ago, and it's interesting because he said the same thing: everybody in Pere Ubu was either a record store manager, or a huge record collector, or both. It seems like something has been lost in that area, nowadays.

KCP: Well, now everything is accessible on the computer. If they want to search for something obscure, kids can not even leave their bedrooms and have the world at their touch. Back then you'd have other record collectors mailing away; you'd actually have people who were your pen pals, and if you wanted to hear something from England or whatever you'd have to write letters to them. You could get on the bus to New York from LA not really knowing what was going to happen, but knowing that you had to go and see what was happening. They were very different times. That was the underground, that was your tribe, searching for books, records, art, whatever...fun and kicks. (laughs) The thirst for knowledge was a really big deal for us.


MPP: You mentioned that when you joined the Cramps, you could still barely play the guitar. How did you manage to get into this established band?

KCP: Uh, blowjobs? (laughs) No, actually I'd been befriended by them on a trip to New York, before I even started playing music. So I was friends with them, and they knew I had a gold blazer from Lansky Brothers in Memphis, where Elvis got his clothes. After [original guitarist] Brian Gregory left, they remembered me as the guy with the gold Lansky Brothers blazer, and basically they just asked me to join the band. It intimidated me because it was a totally different style than I was used to...I remember thinking, how am I ever gonna learn a 12-bar blues? (laughs) But I quickly learned that it's not how easy the chords were, but how you played them - that was harder.

MPP: Your stay in the Cramps was pretty short - basically just Psychedelic Jungle in 1981 and then Smell of Female in '84 - and you joined when they'd already had an album out and sort of established a sound. At the same time, though, there's a definite difference between Psychedelic Jungle and Songs the Lord Taught Us. Would you say you had any influence on this change in sound, or was it already there before you came along?

KCP: I like to think I contributed. I mean they were definitely trying for something else, and some of the songs had existed already from the days of Brian Gregory. "Don't Eat Stuff Off the Sidewalk," "Jungle Hop" - those were songs I remembered from their live show, before I even joined the band. So I felt I had to rise to the occasion. Brian Gregory was so iconic, he was really one of the major faces of the Cramps, and his sound was so important too - that fuzz sound. So I took the parts I liked, and I tried to make it even slower and dirtier. And that was how I played; I kind of faked it to make it. It ended up a lot more psychedelic than a, you know, burn down the house rockabilly, rock 'til you drop kinda thing.

It's funny, though, that was actually the first time I played a fuzz pedal. The Gun Club didn't really use any effects, I just plugged my guitar straight into the amp and played. So I actually had to learn how to turn on the pedal! (laughs) Because I was so young, all of these people were like my teachers. And the fact that it was learning as I go, learning in public, that was cool because you had to deliver. So I learned fast what to do, how to look, how to hang on a whammy bar. Also, a lot of my guitar style came out of those days - especially playing more atmospheric stuff, instead of straight-up chords and riffs. The thing I learned from both of those bands was to play around what was going on, in and out of sounds, around the singer, more than just riffing around like most rock guitarists do.

MPP: And after the Cramps, you actually ended up rejoining the Gun Club.

KCP: Yeah. It was a cool time for the Gun Club, actually, probably our most popular time. Patricia Morrison was in the band; she ended up playing in Sisters of Mercy and the Damned, and she actually married [Damned lead singer] Dave Vanian. And I ended up relocating to London - Jeffrey and Patricia and I all did - because the Gun Club had always done better over in England anyway.

MPP: It seems like that's always the case for American rock music these days, especially if it has any kind of roots or Americana influence; it always goes over better in England than in the States. Why do you think that is?

KCP: Well, it's always been kind of the law of nature, I guess. The Cramps had to go there to become popular at home, Jimi Hendrix...even Gene Vincent. Somehow, for whatever cultural reason, if you have any different sort of sound you catch on in England first. There's just a different audience for it, I guess - I've tried to figure it out, but I can't. Nor do I want to, actually. It's kind of fun, keeping it a mystery.


KCP: But I moved to Berlin after living in London for a while, and that's when I started playing with Nick [Cave]. That was an incredible time. It was still before the wall had come down, and so West Berlin was just this sort of burg in the middle of Eastern Europe. And everything came together there: visual art, theater, music, both rock and classical. I got to do more experimenting with cross-cultural sounds in Berlin, and there was also a lot more opportunity there, financially speaking; they had arts council funding for projects, which is something that never really happened in the United States. They tried with the National Endowment for the Arts in the '80s, but then there was that big deal with the performance artists [the so-called NEA Four, whose applications for grants were infamously vetoed by Bush-appointed NEA chairman John E. Frohnmayer], and arts funding in America just went out the window. So it was very refreshing, coming from the political climate in America at the time, to get that kind of opportunity.

MPP: Obviously you moved around a lot in the '80s, both physically around the world and from band to band. Would you say that the changes in musical projects came out of this sort of constant travel?

KCP: Oh, definitely so - even from when I was a kid, I was travelling to go towards music. My attitude at the time was, if I wanted to be in London, then it sounded like a good idea. If I wanted to be in Berlin, then that sounded like a good idea; I'd never been there before, so I went. And I find that moving is a really good way for reinvention for me. Actually I lived the last ten years in New York, and I just moved to Washington, DC because my partner got a job here, but also because I wanted to write a book. And I needed a change of scenery to write the book, because I'm such a workaholic in New York that there's no time for me to reflect on anything! Also, the last record [Philosophy and Underwear, with the Pink Monkey Birds] was so New York, I just feel like I can't make another one.

MPP: Why don't we talk about the new album?

KCP: It's just a very New York rock record, all New York musicians; it feels like the '70s Lou Reed solo records to me, like Sally Can't Dance or Transformer, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith's Horses, the Ramones' first album... All that music that you immediately identify with New York, where you heard the albums and felt like you were there, from the mid-'70s until modern times, really. I know I was immediately intrigued when I was a teenager and I heard the music coming out of New York City...it's really no surprise I ended up living there.


MPP: This is the first album you've released with the Pink Monkey Birds, but you've been playing with them for quite some time, correct?

KCP: Yeah, it's been simmering - I've kind of been waiting to see what would happen to it. One thing about having a pedigree like mine is that you're supposed to instantly go to the next thing and have it instantly be brilliant. But especially as a band, a lot of the time that isn't the case! So when we started I was just coming out of [New York garage/noise/Americana supergroup] the Knoxville Girls and [post-Gun Club Sally Norvell collaboration] Congo Norvell, and it was kind of a weird hybrid of that. But it's changed over the years, different people have come and gone, and now we're left with this very New York rock kind of album. We're experimenting with using electronics, too...and just the fact that I opened my mouth on it, that makes it something different than what I've done in the past.

Guitar players are always forbidden to speak; it's not allowed. And I don't sing like Jeffrey Lee Pierce or Nick Cave or Lux Interior - I'm more like a narrator. So I'm doing a lot of that, more spoken word than singing. But it's dangerous for a guitar player to make a solo record. I mean, is anybody listening to Keith Richards' solo album anymore? Or Bill Wyman's? Or Slash? (laughs) It's like, I love him as a guitar player, but god forbid he'd ever try to sing!

MPP: So this is your first time as a frontman?

KCP: On a whole album, yes. I've done projects, like with the Knoxville Girls, I sang lead on a couple of tracks. The other record we're releasing in tandem with this one, it's called Solo Cholo, and it's a compilation of my solo work over many, many years...starting with the Fur Bible, which is a gothic rock band I had in 1985 with Patricia Morrison. Actually now when I listen to it, it's not quite so gothic, but that's what we were going for at the time. And then there's different stuff I recorded and released, collaborations, things like that. We made this compilation to answer the question that will inevitably come up with Philosophy and Underwear, which is "how did you come to this?" And the answer is that it's been coming all along. People always ask me, what have I been doing for the last ten years? Well, this.

But I've chosen to go that way of not being involved with the music industry, and still staying underground. I like having a specialized, select audience. And I have a big distaste for the music industry at large...I still think it's a horrible thing.

MPP: If anything, it's probably worse than it used to be.

KCP: It probably is, but I'm so outside of it, I don't even know. I'm so outside it...maybe I'm in it. (laughs)


MPP: As someone who's had more experience as a sideman, who's more famous as a sideman, how does it feel to be fronting a band for once? Do you prefer one or the other?

KCP: It's just another thing I'm doing. I like being a sideman; if somebody really good asked me to play with them, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I'm a musician, and what I do is make music in whatever form is inspiring to me. I'm in a good position, I can choose whether I want to do it or not. That's the oddball way I do things.

But I have a reputation for working with difficult people, I think. People like the Cramps and the Gun Club, or Nick Cave, have an unwavering vision of what they're doing. And it's difficult for the music industry, or for journalists - anyone who refuses to compromise can be viewed as difficult. But while they might be seeing these monsters, for someone like me, they're just strong artists. I don't mind working with monsters; they might be monsters, but they're beautiful creatures as well.

Kid Congo Powers will be touring North America with the Pink Monkey Birds through early November; for details and specific dates, check his tour page. Philosophy and Underwear and Solo Cholo are both out now. He is also currently at work on a memoir, which he says will look at "how music has changed in the underground, and what has happened to music in that time. It's going to be a sociological study...and gossip!"

Official Site
Buy Philosophy and Underwear and Solo Cholo from New York Night Train Recordings
See Also: Everything about Kid Congo Powers you could ever possibly want to know...and more.