Lipstick Frankenstein.
Lipstick Frankenstein.
Recently, I made a trip to New Orleans for the annual Popular Culture Association conference to present a paper on Joan Jett and the guitar called, "Joan Jett Rocks!: The Electric Guitar as Deviant Signifier." Joan Jett has been a fascination of mine for quite some time, and so I was thrilled to find out that Kim Fowley--the co-founder, manager, and producer of The Runaways, Joan Jett's first band--was going to be the guest of honor at the conference.
I managed to contact Kim Fowley through Gary Burns--one of the conference organizers--and spent a good two hours talking to Fowley on the phone before I left for the conference. Of course, my main interest in Fowley has to do with The Runaways and Joan Jett. He made it clear to me on the phone, though, that what he didn't want to do was another interview about The Runaways.
"Ya' know, I'd like to talk to you, but I don't want to do another schtick about The Runaways....That story is so overdone!"
During the course of that initial telephone conversation, the topic came around to lesbian music. Fowley proposed a title for this piece: "Kim Fowley, Lipstick Frankenstein: The Missing Link Between Edith Head and Susie Bright." So, I have him to thank for the great title!
We met for a couple of hours in Fowley's office in New Orleans, which is hidden away in a law office, of all places! The law office location, I didn't expect. Fowley's office walls are covered with gold and platinum records--including those by KISS, Alice Cooper, Helen Reddy, and Poison. His office itself is like a museum, a living monument to the lanky guy in combat boots and a black t-shirt who greets me warmly.
"Well, my hair is almost as short as yours!" he exclaims as I enter the office (my head is shaved).
Kim Fowley is, indeed, everything I expected him to be: a genius, an egomaniac, a twisted son-of-a-bitch, a pain-in-the-ass. However, he's also a lot more than that, too. He's funny, charismatic, and very engaging. What caught me most off-guard, though, was his generosity. After the interview, Fowley and I spent some time listening to some music, and he gave me several CDs, along with some information about another music conference that he thought I might find interesting. He's also very generous with his time--had I wanted to stay and talk for several more hours, I'm sure he'd have been happy to do that. So....surprisingly, he's kind of a nice guy (which I really didn't expect!).
As I left the office, he said to me: "Well, now you can say you've met Joan Jett's daddy! Yes, I founded The Runaways and guarded their virtue and virginity throughout the whole thing!"
Yeah, right. He and I both had a good laugh about that one!
The interview began with me reading a portion of a recent article about Fowley. As per his instructions, I read the following into my tape recorder. As you'll see, he is currently enamoured with Britney Spears....:
The voice proclaiming Britney's godhood does not come from some starry-eyed teen, but to a 60 year-old man named Kim Fowley. A music-business veteran whose bulging resume stretches all the way back to "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles, Fowley knows a thing or two about women in pop music. . . .
He produced "Popsicles and Icicles" by the Murmaids in the 60s, Helen "I Am Woman" Reddy in the 70s, and mentored The Runaways, the original teen girl band that launched the gender-busting careers of rockers Joan Jett and Lita Ford.
"It's like Darwin's chart, where you see man evolve from a lower species," he explains. "Using Elvis as a starting point of the rock'n'roll chart, you follow it through the Beatles and David Bowie until it becomes more and more feminine. Then you turn another page, and suddenly a woman is standing there. This is where we are now."
"Look at country music. Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain are selling the records, not Garth Brooks. In adult contemporary, it's the Lilith-Fair women selling the records. Women are beginning to turn the tide in hip-hop. In pop music, Britney and Christina Aguilera have left the Backstreet Boys in the dust. Except for in certain fringe areas of what passes as rock'n'roll, there is no form of popular music in the 21st century so far where women don't dominate men."
One might expect the publisher of ROCKRGRL, a magazine celebrating women in popular music to embrace Fowley's analysis. But, [Publisher/Editor-In-Chief] Carla DeSantis isn't so sure.
"I'm really ambivalent about Britney," she says from her office in Seattle. "Rock'n'roll has always been about rebellion, but this isn't rock, it's bubble-gum pop. And I find the idea of sexualizing these very young girls to be a dangerous thing. As a parent, I was offended by the photos that accompanied the Rolling Stone cover story on her last year. It's bad enough when they make a young girl look so sexually advanced, but then placing that suggestively dressed young girl in the poses of a child half her age was way over the line. I'm still wondering what the heck 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' means. I'm not sure I want my kid running around singing that."
....
Kim Fowley agrees that five might be a tad too young to enlist in the Britney brigade, but otherwise insists that she's not one inch ahead of her peer group.
"Her navel," he proclaims, "is merely the latest version of Elvis Presley's swiveling hips. Her audience is teenage girls, and Britney is her audience in the same way that Jerry Garcia was his audience when he stood up there onstage."
But, cultural provocateur that he is, Fowley can't resist a flamboyant analogue: "If Madonna was the cheeseburger version of Marilyn Monroe, then Britney Spears is the cheeseburger version of Brigitte Bardot. I see Britney as having a long career as a film star, and I bet she makes better movies than Elvis." --Detroit News, Ben Edmonds.
Krista May (KM): Well, I guess my first question is....I've got your title here: "Kim Fowley, Lipstick Frankenstein: The Missing Link Between Edith Head and Susie Bright."
Kim Fowley (KF): You got it.
KM: Why Edith Head and Susie Bright?
KF: Edith Head picked me up hitchhiking in 1959, and I was able to allow myself to be taught by her how to dress. How to walk-and-talk and chew gum at the same time, ha-ha. But she had an antique Cadillac convertible and her ever-present sunglasses, and she used to drive me around and was sort of like a surrogate mother for awhile...awhile meaning two or three months.
And when I went to work for Doris Day at the age of 19 and-a-half and her husband, the late Marty Melcher, in their music publishing and record-production company, I knew how to dress, I knew how to act. I had a real crash course in how a young man, meaning a 19 year-old boy, is supposed to act around a bunch of 40 to 70 year-olds who were in and out of there.
I had an actor, an actress, and step-grandfather relatives in show business who never encouraged me to fit in. I was just one of the kids of multiple marriages standing around, so you know what that's like...like Tori Amos lyrics, she hides upstairs and masturbates to Led Zeppelin records when the family's having Christmas dinner downstairs, you know.
Douglas Fowley and Underground Animal.
So, in my case, I had a father who had eight wives, and a mother who had two husbands. And, my step-grandfather was Rudolph Friml, who wrote Indian Love Call and Rosemarie for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, who were the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of light opera, otherwise known as operettas, in the 30s. And, then, Leo Friml, son of Rudolph Friml, was my stepfather. And my own father, Douglas Fowley, played the movie director in Singing in the Rain, with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. He also played Walt in Cat-women of the Moon, which is a good cult thing, and he was Doc Holliday in "Wyatt Earp" on ABC network. He made over 300 movies...everyone from Bing Crosby and John Wayne.
In and out of our home was everybody from Brian Donleavly to Robert Mitchum to Herb Jeffries, the first black singing cowboy. And then, Gilbert Roland and Anthony Quinn were friends of my dad, so I grew up in that kind of an atmosphere.
And my mother was one of the two cigarette girls in The Big Sleep, Shelby Payne, with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. She was an Adrian Model and also a Goldwyn Girl with Samuel Goldwyn...which was the equivalent of a more elegant Playboy model or bimbo.
Edith Head: Kim Fowley's "surrogate mother."
A total of eight marriages of the father, two marriages of the mother. I got a great education in slime and sleaze, sex and sin...stupidity in Hollywood, California. And I was either prepared for--or by fate of birth or by accident or intimidation--came into the music industry where I currently battle each day.
I'm sixty now. It's been forty-one years of throat-to-groin battling--you just saw me do it on the phone here. Where people don't like to pay the minimum amount, let alone the full amount, on items where money is owed. So, you have to get focused on collecting your money.
My office is within a legal firm. I have two daddy-lawyer figures--father-figure lawyers--who are my beneficiaries in my will, and I have three other lawyers in the office. We exchange pleasantries. And every day, five days a week, I battle for money. I'm real good at it. And I get paid, generally, something for my efforts and those of my clients....
[At this point the phone rings, and we stop the interview for awhile while Kim continues his "battle" with an independent record company that had begun earlier in the day. At his request, I turn off the tape recorder. He clearly enjoys, in a rather perverse way, this battling with record company executives...]
KM: Okay...we're back on now.
KF: Oh-h....I have a hard-on now! [We both laugh.]
Okay....what I'm trying to say is that, if you look at "Entertainment Tonight", you'll find all kind of Don Johnson, multiple children with Melanie Griffith, multiple children with all other kinds of people...you see all these kids who don't look like each other, or who do look like each other, with multiple parents, standing around. You know, eight-year-old guy with braces...I mean, Mel Gibson's child. Y'know, you're this kid, and you see the industry through your parents talking around the dinner table about what happened at the studio that day, or you visit them on the set, and you see all this shit....
But they never, ever say while you're logging all this time--which in my case is from 1946 to 1959, in that thirteen-year period from being a six and-a-half year-old up to being nineteen--no one ever said, "This is my child. My child is going to be a big deal in the media and entertainment business"....And, "Come, son, sit at the table while I score opium or valium." Or, "While I fuck someone's wife, you can sit there and wipe the cum off the sheets." You don't get that education!
And, certainly, when you're nineteen and-a-half, and you suddenly have to show up in an office with the equivalent of Madonna married to the equivalent of David Geffen, and you've always been [told], "Shut up, sit with the other kids at the end of the room and eat (and you're eight years-old), and don't look at her tits!" And then, suddenly you're supposed to jump in there and not bump into the furniture, you know!?
So, my own father and mother had underappreciated my beauty and charm and brilliance. My mother had given me away to the foster home system in '41 or '42. My dad rescued me from that system in '46. I saw my mother a handful of times--the last time I saw her was thirty-three years ago. And I didn't see my father from '59 to '84, that was twenty-five years.
And he abandoned me in a hotel room...no, that's right, a hospital room. I was a polio victim, and he didn't want to be seen with a cripple walking down the street. And [stretching out his arms], you see these arms? These are a crippled person's arms....Look! This is deformity! I mean, who wants a deformed child?! Well, nowadays, you could fuck a deformed child, and you could be exotic to all of your friends on Fire Island. But, in the 1950s, if your child didn't look like Ed Cookie Burns lend-me-your-comb, or Clark Gable, or Marilyn Monroe, then you were a freak, you know!
So, I was taller than my parents, I was uglier than my parents, and I was crippled. And, so...the mother didn't know I was crippled, but the father did. Crippled, ugly child, nine-inch cock and all, showing up with no education and no skills and no anything, to take on the world of a Jewish mafia of reality, who certainly didn't see me as Irving Thalberg.
Well, they sure got it wrong because...in the forty-one years that I have been doing the push-and-shove in the music industry, 102 million records sold...56 gold, 26 platinum...8 times number 1 in Billboard. In the last thousand years, I've sold a lot of records! When you're totally unwanted, unloved, underappreciated, and un-everything, all you have is what you create and what you find. And with no encouragement, you get out there with cloak and dagger. It's hard enough to get the opportunity...and then it's hard enough to do the work...and then it's hard enough to present the work...and then it's hard enough to interact with the people you're doing the work with. And then it's equally difficult to collect the money at the other end the first time...and then, when multiple years go by, to get it again. And then people go out of business...and people aren't cooperating...and people are being horrifying. And then after they do all of that, you still have to pay your bills because no one waits for bills!
Outlaw Superman.
And it's a business--it's like everybody in Auschwitz had to go collect war reparation money from the people who killed them, and then they had to negotiate each wound of their body with their executioners. And then negotiate a payment plan....So, after you go through all this pain to do the music, and--this is with the small companies--then you've gotta go through all of this agony to collect. And I do the agony every day, so it's sport to me. It's a turn-on sexually to me to be able to go to battle for the sheer joy of battling. And, if nothing happens, well...nothing was happening anyway, so you're not out anything. And maybe next time you battle for money, you'll collect because you're in good practice. Because every day, you're fighting for your right to party, financially, and the rest of the time you do music.
I was young and naive, and I wanted music to change the world, and I wanted to make a difference, and I didn't. And all I am is a guy who's done a lotta music work, which some people like! And, so, I'm glad that they enjoy it, and now getting paid for that is one of the issues. And sometimes I get paid, and sometimes I don't. And that's just how it is!
Keep going!
KM: Okay....What about Susie Bright?
KF: Susie Bright...Susie Bright understands grotesque, animalistic, pagan, love-goddess intimacy, for many years now....So, I appreciate that level of carnal knowledge. The idolatry of women...the idolatry of Amazonian goddesses...the idolatry of fist-fucking...the idolatry of pierced labia...the idolatry of golden showers...the idolatry of gang-bang...the idolatry of all that is perpetuated in various aspects and elements of her activities. Although maybe she doesn't see it that way, I just think that women are so much more interesting sexually than men. That somebody has to be the Hugh Hefner of women's sexuality--it might as well be Susie Bright!! [Much laughter from both of us....] There it is...there's a quote!
KM: Well, why [are you so interested in] lesbian music, then?
Susie Bright: "The Hugh Hefner of women's sexuality."
KF: You mean, why have I made lesbian music?
KM: Yeah. And why are you so fascinated by it?
KF: I saw the Marx Brothers' movie in '49 [Love Happy], which featured Marion Hutton and her all-girl band. And in that movie, Marion Hutton, who's an Eva Braun version of Veronica Lake cum Carole Landis, gets up there and leads a band of women, who were right out of Fredericks of Hollywood, in evening gowns, playing music. And it's an all-girl orchestra...that was during World War II, black-and-white television. And I sat there and looked at it probably the same way that boys looked at the Beatles on the "Ed Sullivan Show"....So I saw that and went, "Oh. That's nice."
And then, coupled with having a mother who was beautiful--who was in movies and a model, and who I did live with for one year (my seventh to eighth-grade life) and also her family mythology before and afterwards--I got a real glimpse of the faking of a really beautiful woman.
I remember her standing there when she told me, in '46, that I couldn't live with her and her husband--she had just found her second husband--and she gave this dialogue: "So-rry...he doesn't want you to be in the family he wishes to start with me. I'm sure your father, if he's not dead will find you. Nothing personal!" And she delivered this in a purple jumpsuit made of leather...
KM: Wow!
KF: ...driving a Lincoln Continental convertible, which she backlit the "fuck you" standing against a Malibu sunset with platinum blond hair with the right jewelry! I realized I was being rejected so that her husband could have prettier children, but the theatrics of the "fuck you" and the abandonment for the second time--the first time I was just dropped off there, the second time was the "sorry-I'm-going-to-leave-you" there.
Well, so you have a mother who based her whole life on being physically beautiful. And when she finally died, as recently as three weeks ago at the time of this interview, in an old-folks home--described by the lady who answers the phone there as "a cot, three meals, and a pot", meaning three meals a day, a cot to sleep on, and a pot of coffee a day. And she gets to die in whatever that is--trailer park version of an old folks home/nut house/hospital/Taj Mahal/God-knows-what. I said [to the woman who answers the phone], "Well, what's she like up there? I haven't seen her in thirty-two years."
"Well," [she said], "blah, blah, blah...."
I said, "Oh, sounds like Madonna!" If you added forty years to Madonna, and you stuck Madonna in a bed pan and wheelchair spot, she'd be a diva!
And one of the problems with beautiful women, at least from this era we're talking about--you know, the fabulous forties, World War II era, onwards into the 50s, they all were astounding looking, noir, diva-goddesses....I mean, the Marlene Dietrichs of the world had already set the look...I mean, Heddy Lamar and all those people, never thought they'd be old pussy! And then, when you have one of those people for a mother, your cock is removed from your male, baby body like in Bible times, where they would smite the genitals of the babies so they wouldn't have a redeemer child born....
And then you go to work for Doris Day, whose one of the great divas, and you're not supposed to eventually realize, when you're in your mid-thirties, that wait a minute! Rock-n-roll and popular music is a male contact sport. And the only people that are good at it are lesbians! Because they have balls, and they wear their balls on their chest!
And there's a long list....It starts with Frances Faye. And then weaves in-and-out of Marlene Dietrich...maybe Billie Holiday...and, God knows, we know about Ma Rainey--she was butch! And you had the femme goddesses. I mean, look at Dusty Springfield...I mean, c'mon! That was astounding--in person, voice, and looking! Those people weren't pushovers, and they're out there kicking ass, and Melissa Etheridge is Marlene Dietrich. C'mon...let's face it! Marlene Dietrich fucks...no, really, it's Joan Jett fucks Bruce Springsteen, and this is their daughter, and her name is Melissa Etheridge! Oh, well, Joan herself is the daughter of Keith Richard and John Lennon! So, there are all kinds of possibilities!
So, I felt that I didn't go looking for gay women to work with, but I found that gay women were able to weather the storm of male resentment, male indifference, male hatred, male denial about women of any lifestyle choice pursu[ing] any musical career that wasn't producer-manipulated. Here we had all the pretty girls--the Supremes, the Phil Spector groups, the girl doo-wop groups were all there nicely outfitted. Men wrote the songs, men produced the records, men managed it. And it all changed.
When the Runaways appeared as girls, not women--women to me are people over eighteen, and girls are people under eighteen--showed up and sang about their struggle as teenage girls and my lyrics often were used. And I'm a fairly decent, liberated male...even though I'm a chauvinist pig piece-of-shit when it comes to any naked woman in any public place, I'm as horrifying as any Johnny Cash and any country video would be of all the guys standing around in those....
[Here, phone rings again, and I turn off the tape recorder.]
KF: Okay...let's go!
KM: Okay...you played a couple of things for me the other day by Zrazy....
KF: Would you like an album?
KM: Sure! You played "Beautiful Boy" and "Come Out, Everybody," I believe....
KF: Yes...Keep talking while I look for it.
KM: What struck me most about those songs was that one thing I've noticed about the most popular lesbian music is that you've got a more pop-ish thing in lesbian music--something like "Come Out, Everybody", which is anthemic....
KF: Right....
KM: ...and the other side of that is that you see a lot of dyke bands being more hardcore, in-your-face rock-n-roll, which sounds more like "Beautiful Boy"....
KF: Well, what I saw in the Zrazy record--and in them at that time--was a female Pet Shop Boys.
KM: Oh, okay....
KF: And the Pet Shop Boys' American manager...he actually had the label that put the record out in America, so I guessed that one right. And this was the record it ["Come Out, Everybody"] came out on originally....[handing me the CD] Why don't you bark into that thing [the tape recorder] who some of the people are on the CD?
KM: Okay....
KF: You might recognize some of the names....
KM: Ani diFranco...Fred Schneider...Pansy Division....
KF: Seems pretty gay-friendly to me!
KM: Oh, yeah....Phranc...
KF: Right, so that's how they [Zrazy] were introduced [in the U.S.]. That's where the guy at the record company found "Come Out, Everybody".
KM: Oh, okay....
KF: Yeah, that's where he found it, and then he went from there. That's the genealogy of it all....Here they are! [pulling out the Zrazy CD].
KM: Ah....thanks!
Zrazy: "Female Pet Shop Boys."
KF: [Pointing to his name on the CD credits.] And my name is [here]....various things I did [on the CD]. They have all who wrote what, who did what stuff. You know, we battled over who did what. My contention was that I produced or co-produced. Their [Zrazy's] contention was that I mixed and they produced. But I did the co-writing for the song I co-produced. But then, I think that's lesbian, feminist, female-type resentment to a male being a part of this. It's like I can be a white person on a black record: What did the white guy do?! Well, he did the part that sounded black. Oh, what did the guy do?! He did the part that sounds like super-lesbian, love-goddess 2000! Oh...you know, it's collaboration, and it's hard to say who did what to who and all of that. And maybe they're not even lesbians! Maybe they're housewives with kids pretending to be whatever they pretend to be or not....I don't know who's a lesbian--maybe I'm a lesbian, and maybe they're heterosexual women! Who knows?! [We laugh.] I had good surgery, didn't I??
KM: Yeah! Who knows?
[Laughter continues.]
KF: Yeah....but, anyway, you be the judge....
KM: Are Zrazy American?
KF: They're from Ireland. I met them when I went to Ireland in '85.
KM: What is lesbian music like in Ireland?
KF: Zrazy is lesbian music in Ireland. Zrazy is lesbian music in Europe. Zrazy is the future of female music everywhere. I mean, the girls are geniuses! They're just a bit difficult to do business with.
KM: Oh....Like everyone else!
KF: Like everyone else! We had a good, creative interaction and a bad financial reward because....but the work. I think they did better than I did on the deal. But the work still stands up, and I have enough credits [on the CD] to indicate that I was there doing stuff.
KM: What about gay male music? Something like Pansy Division, for example....
KF: I don't know anything about that. I think Boy George is God. I think Pet Shop Boys are God. I think Freddie Mercury was God. There is no other gay male music but those guys. I don't understand or know about the other ones. I don't really have any other information. I just know that the music of those three artists is great. I mean, who knows who's gay or straight or whatever? But if they were gay, they were good! Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood: God!! I met him....He has an album out on his own label. And he is a very brilliant guy and gave me some information I needed to know about the British music business. Very smart. He's very active about collecting his money, too. My hero for collecting money from British record companies and publishers. He gave me some real good insights....
I like to cry when I hear music. And I have a good cry when I hear Boy George and Queen and the Pet Shop boys...and Zrazy, too. [Pause] Keep going! C'mon!
Kim Fowley on display....
KM: Okay....What kinds of things are you working on now? Any lesbian or gay bands you're working with now?
KF: I have the final Kim Fowley album. I have a lot of stuff out there with singers.... I mean, Kim Fowley does fifteen different jobs! Let's see if I can list them by memory: I'm a record producer; a music arranger; I'm a songwriter; publisher; production company; I'm a consultant; I'm a publicist; I've done promotion; I've done management; I've done agency; I've done video directing; video editing; album design; graphics; oh, and I sang on records--that's fourteen! And, fifteen...I've performed as a backup singer and noise-maker, banging into things! Oh, and then I forgot, I do soundtracks for movies, too....
KM: That's right. Didn't you do Detroit Rock City recently?
KF: Yeah, well, I've done twenty-five movies of various [types]. I can't remember all of it--it's a forty-one year career! But I've been in film: I'm a writer; a publisher; a producer, arranger, and supervisor of soundtracks. As an actor, you'll see me in the new David Bowie/Cher movie, which is a documentary. Brian Wilson is in it; Brooke Shields is in it; Oasis are in it; Alice Cooper is in it. It's all about musical Hollywood as seen through the eyes of Rodney Bingenheimer--punk rock, pop rock, and everything else. And so, I'm on VH-1 on "The Alan Freed Show", a tribute to him. He was one of my mentors after I left Doris Day and before I had my first number one record, "Alley Oop", which I co-produced with Gary Paxton and the Hollywood Argyles. And then, Sonny Bono, the first guy to ever give me an appointment when I was a junior in high school.....I was riding my bike to his office, where he was A&R at Specialty Records on Sunset Boulevard....on his tribute, I was on that....that was on BBC this year.
I've just been back a few months from Ireland, where I live part of the time. I live in New Orleans part of the time. I live in ten cities...and I live in multiple countries, too. I have versions of this place [his office] all over the world. People, friends and enemies alike. That was Detroit on the phone earlier...I spend some of my time there.
KM: What was the phone call from Detroit about?
KF: There's a group called The Go, who are on Sub Pop. They recorded one of my songs called "Bubblegum," which Sonic Youth, among others, have recorded. And then, a girl did it, too, from England--a dance record. The only female artist who ever had a dance record on Creation Records, which is quite an achievement. [Shuffling through some CDs...] Oh, man....This one right here [holding up the CD]: One Two Parker. She did "Bubblegum," which is also covered by The Go and Sonic Youth...and it was also covered by me...I mean, I did it originally.
As far as what specific female project I'm working on: I don't have one. The next girl group to do a song, that I know of, is Slumber Party, an all-girl band from Detroit, who got signed to Kill Rock Stars...they got signed to that label. And I'm writing songs with them. I named them...that [Slumber Party] was the name I had in my mind. I mean, those songs are done. I don't know! Remember what's happened to me...thirty-eight American cities, twenty-two overseas countries, forty-one years later...tons of stuff!
And what I like doing now is songwriting....I'm actually a wonderfully, musically, gifted and talented person. I actually am a good record producer, songwriter, and image-builder, and all that stuff. But I'm so burned out by bad people, bad work habits, bad business deals, bad attitudes, that the least amount of exposure is just...here's a song, enjoy it! And then the song comes out and the record sells, and you get money for the rest of your life, and you're not there for all the battles, and all of the drama, and all of the disappointment, and all of the in-fighting. The songwriter is the least involved in the stress of the music industry...in hindsight, if I knew that, I just would've been a songwriter, period! And never done anything else. Let other people be record producer and performer. And I wouldn't have had that fifteen-some-odd job description! I'd just be a guy who wrote songs, and no one ever saw him.
But because I have an outgoing personality and flair about me, my ego lured me into other areas, which caused me not to be as creative. I shouldn't be a traffic policeman or an auditor of royalties or a repo man of my own work! I mean, that's not why you go into this stuff! And you might say, "Well, why aren't you having the lawyers do it?" Well, when the lawyers do it, it's &$150-&$200 an hour, and when I do it, it's my own time. And, of course, we beat each other up like two dogs, and eventually a piece of paper will come from the other side, and I run it by the lawyers, and then the lawyers--and they weren't there for all of the juice and the blood and the crap--and they say two or three great sentences....And, well, here's what you've got, and here's a correction, and take it or don't take it, or whatever. And, there you are! And so, people like me usually don't do it as long as I've done it. They generally o.d., or quit, or go off somewhere....
KM: I'm pretty amazed that you still do this [battling] every day....
KF: I do it! I mean, you didn't hear the other side of the phone call! This guy was going on and on, and I never weakened once, did I?!
KM: No. Huh-uh.
KF: And I just kept sitting there because I knew they'd keep calling. Because, see...look behind you. See all that?
KM: [Turning around to look at all of the gold and platinum records on the wall...] Uh-huh...
KF: That's my income. I get money every day from all over the world that I don't have to fight for. And these people may decide, "We're not going to pay you anything!" Okay....Then don't! And then I just keep collecting from everyplace else. And then, one day, when everybody's bored....well, let's tie up their business just for the sheer joy of it. And then, give me a hundred grand to go collect three dollars! Let's have some fun here....And then we go and have fun with it. Oh, I shouldn't be saying that on the record....[We both laugh.] But, it's kind of like that.
KM: It's kind of like a performance, but one that you're highly invested in....
KF: Well, if they don't pay, they don't pay, and if they do, then they do! If I don't collect, I don't collect, and if I do, then I do! I get threatened all the time by other people, the same way that I might seem threatening to them, and I have other people threaten me. And then everybody hurts everybody....Sometimes they hurt you, and sometimes they don't.
They can only kill you once! I've been dead, in my mind, since 1983...I was in a car wreck, and I've never been the same since. I'm quieter now. Yeah! Well, one wreck was when a steel thing fell on my head in the loading part of a recording studio. Then, right after that, I had another car wreck...so, two head injuries back-to-back. And I was out of it for awhile. I never get mad any more. Did you notice I didn't get mad on the phone?
KM: Yeah.
KF: I don't know how to get mad. There's a missing wire....I can't get mad. I'm irritating, and obnoxious, and horrible! But I never get mad...ever. [Pause.] Keep going....You're not being provocative yet! C'mon! You haven't gotten the "fuck you" in there. You haven't gotten the final orgasm.... Give me the real conclusion to this provocative article. Most people won't talk to you the way I'll talk to you. Ask me a George W. Bush's mother question....like, "Do you shoot heroin? Do you fuck dead dogs?"
KM: What's interesting to me about you is...that I see you performing a role, and I see you as manipulating positions of power very well....
KF: Here....Let me make it simple for you. I am an incomplete human being who has x-amount of skills....And, at this stage of my life, I try to connect as many of those skills as possible when I do a job that's professional....and it's part of doing it. I'm not interested in fulfilling myself, changing the world, making people happy, making people sad, making people cry. All this is is a job. And, when you go, and I putter in my office, and I get some more numbers from them [the record company], and I putter some more in my office...and I'll go to a couple of clubs tonight to say hello and goodbye...and I go home, and I go to sleep alone. Because a great word that describes me...people always say, "Well, is he straight? Is he gay? Is he rich? Is he poor? Is he old? Is he young? Is he crazy? Is he sane? Is he doomed? Is he immortal?"
The answer to all of that is one word: empty. How was I able to write all these songs, produce all these records, and do all these show business skills for all these various people? I was so empty as a human that I had enough room in my life to have all these people walk through it creatively. And when you're producing someone or writing with someone, they have issues and agendas that become part of that for the period of time that you're working with them. It's like if you're in the emergency room, you're concerned with those emergencies, and then the next night it's another set of emergencies and tragedies. And after awhile, you get blunted by it. And after awhile, all the tragedies become one great emptiness.
And finally, I see eternity as empty, too. I think before your birth, during your life, and afterwards, it's all empty. It's total emptiness the whole time. And that sums me up. I'm really empty.
What's the worst day? Christmas! I can't do any business! I can't do any creating! I can't go anywhere and see anything because everyone's having Christmas with the family. And my family turned on me at birth, basically. So, I have none of that. I have no Frank Capra element, other than my lyric writing. So, I'm just an empty person. People paint their masterpieces on my canvas, and it's a fairly large canvas--it stretches from the physical, to art to commerce, and back again. I use sensitivity and sensibility as a weapon, just like I use everything else as a weapon. I use everything as a weapon...to get from one minute to the next....to survive.
And, if you think, at a certain point in your life, you don't have to do it anymore...that's when you lose it all. I'm having a telephone built into my casket to call back and see how everybody's doing! [KM laughs.] You bet....you'll hear from me again!
KM: I believe that, actually!
KF: Yep!
