King of Skeptics: An Interview with JONATHAN KING (1981)

© Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 1981/2022
Images from the Internet unless indicated

One afternoon while sitting and chatting in her Times Square office with former National Publicity Director for Sire Records Janis Schacht, about life and the Ramones, she suggested I might be interested in interviewing a local-based, London-bred acerbic talk radio host, Jonathan King. This is the same, Jonathan King, it turns out, who had the hit in the 1960s with “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” a treacly yet enjoyable pop number. Sure, why not?

It seems his career had actually been much more expansive than I had imagined. When I told her I was impressed, she looked at me hard and explained that King did not like people who just liked him solely based on the criteria that they like his music. I decided to take a more offensive tone rather than defensive or placating one when we talked.

I grabbed video editor Alan Abramowitz. As it turns out, having Alan along worked out well, because it seemed Alan, being young and blond, was just Jonathan’s type. Alan, being the straight blade innocent that he was, had no idea of Jonathan’s flirtation, especially before and after the interview proper. It was quite amusing to watch the dynamics of the situation. It also put Jonathan in a playful enough mood to have fun during the interview.

Yes, I am totally aware of what Jonathan King has been accused and do not condone it, though he insists on his innocence. However, this interview took place decades before his arrest, and concerns interesting aspects of the music industry, so I believe it has merit in publication

This interview was published in FFanzeen, No 7, dated 1981.

King of Skeptics: An Interview with Jonathan King

I wanna catch phrase
I wanna start a craze
I wanna gimmick
I wanna hit
I’m just a poor boy
With a song and a smile
And not just another
Shallow entertainer
– Neil Innes (d. 2019)

 There is no doubt that Jonathan King knows what he wants and, more importantly, knows how to get it. His past is a perfect example of that. While at Cambridge, he had his first hit record, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” in 1965. Since then, under a variety of names, he has had hit after hit on the charts in England – if not as an artist, then as a producer, having introduced such groups as 10cc, Genesis, the Bay City Rollers, and the original theater production of The Rocky Horror Show.

Despite all his success in England, King has never “made it” here in America, but he is determined to break this market. Since coming over last year, he was offered the temporary job as DJ on WMCA-AM, a talk-oriented show featuring guests and call-ins. And from this stepping stone, he hopes to take over the musical direction of a FM station and create a monster success. And if anyone can do it, as past experience has shown, Jonathan King can.

But the question is, is King part of the solution or the problem? His idea of a New Wave station utilizes a commercial format, playing the same records over and over, much as Top-40 stations do now. Whether this is good or bad is a debatable point – but most likely it is commercially viable.

The following interview took place at the old UK Records headquarters in midtown Manhattan in December 1980. Though the interview spanned a mere half-hour, more was said than during an average hour-long discussion. King knows his mind and speaks it very quickly, often embroidering his points considerably.

Jonathan King [glancing at the cover of an issue of FFanzeen] “Rock and roll with integrity?” But I have no integrity whatsoever. What am I doing in this place? I would be in the “no integrity section”
FFanzeen: Okay, I’ll be in the back.
King: I’d prefer the front cover, please. I’m prettier than all these people

FFanzeen: Not Ronnie Spector.
King: Ronnie Spector. Oh, well. Anyway, yes, right. [FF stammers over question, King turns to Alan] He can’t ask the questions cos he’s gazing at me with such love and admiration, never having met anyone so intellectually and physically beautiful in his life before; his eyes are gazing at me.

FFanzeen: I still prefer Ronnie Spector.
King: Don’t worry. Phil Spector felt the same way.

FFanzeen: “Una Paloma Blanca” is really a miserable song.
King: Awful

FFanzeen: But it was a big hit for you in England. Did you record it simply because you knew you’d make a lot of money from it?
King: No, it’s really hard to explain – or it should be hard to explain. There are creative buzzes of various kinds, and I get a great buzz creating something which is commercial and appeals to a lot of people, and which people like. Therefore, I got a great creative buzz out of making a record which had come up and flopped in England, improved it commercially, and producing a final product which was a large hit. One of the biggest hits of the year in Britain. I do get great enjoyment. You don’t have to only get enjoyment in the music business by creating something marvelous. You can get it from promoting something, from marketing something, from selling something, in various different ways, and it gave me a great creative buzz to make a hit record out of “Una Paloma Blanca,” although I never liked it myself as a piece of product.

FFanzeen: What’s the story on Blue Swede and your “Hooked on a Feeling.” 
King: Well, “Hooked on a Feeling” was a record I did like. I had a hit with it in England and around Europe and, as you know, Blue Swede did steal it, made an almost identical copy [you remember: “Oogha-chaga, oogha-chaga in 1974 – RBF, 1981], and had a Number One here in America, simply because my record was not promoted and marketed here. [My version] came out on London Records which, then, was virtually the equivalent of a morgue, as far as records were concerned, went on to remain the same, unfortunately, and therefore killed a number of my acts and bands. But I think it got lost for that one reason. The Blue Swede record came out on Capitol, which was run by Al Coury (d. 2013), who now runs RSO Records and got that complete marketing and promotion treatment. In a way, it was flashing to me, because it showed me that I did make the right record in the first place; it just got lost.

FFanzeen: A lot of your songs can be considered “novelty records.” Don’t you ever want to be taken seriously?
King: I never want to be taken seriously. I never take anyone else seriously, either. There’s no point in taking anything seriously, when we can all be wiped out by a meteor landing on the Earth three seconds after somebody has read this article. So, I don’t believe in taking things seriously at all. I believe in having a lot of fun. I’ve done certain things that one could take seriously if one wanted to, ranging from discovering Genesis, or The Rocky Horror Show, or 10cc, or any of the other more creative bands I’ve discovered, to some of my more creative recordings, like “Hooked on a Feeling” or “Satisfaction” by Bubblerock, which is one of my better records. No, I don’t expect people to sit down and start essays in The New York Times about the brilliance of my musical metabolism; I don’t want that at all. I just want people to buy my records in bulk, have fun, like the bands I find, like the artists I discover – and I don’t take life seriously at any time. The moment you start doing that, you’re open for unhappiness.

FFanzeen: Why don’t you perform live?
King: I performed live sporadically, until I had my first hit [“Everyone’s Gone to the Moon – RBF, 1981], and I never really liked it. I felt uneasy on stage. I’m not a performer. My greatest talent in the music industry is probably as a producer. I know how to find, discover, nurture and create hit records, bands, and acts probably better than anyone else in the world. And, he said modestly, I really like doing that. Now, I had my first hit, and I had to make a decision: do I want to become a performer? Now, all performers are cunts. I have a little sign hung above my bed saying, “All Artists are Cunts.” In fact, I had dinner with Rod Steward and Britt Eklund, and spent the entire meal saying how all artists were cunts. It took Rod the whole meal to realize that all the analogies I was illustrating this argument with were coming from the way he was treating Mercury/Phonogram. He finally discovered that I was basically insulting him – during the sweet course. Rod, being a Scotsman, is shrewd enough to realize he’s better off if he has his meal first, before he leaves. He got up, stormed out of the restaurant and didn’t speak to me for a year. Well, Britt and I had a good giggle about his uptightness. I put in a few good insults at her as well. I said to her, “Oh, Britt, isn’t it wonderful? You’re so lucky. What a coincidence that every man in your life has had so much money.” That made Rod giggle. Anyway, all artists being cunts, I decided I wasn’t going to be an artist. I was already a cunt. I didn’t want to make myself more of one. To be a good performer, and to be an artist, you really have to have an inflated opinion of yourself. You have to project over-the-top mannerisms, style, gestures, and everything. I could have done it. I could have learned to do it. If I’d wanted to be a rock star, in the mid-‘60s, I could have slaved away at the boards. I have enough imagination to create an incredible stage show. Genesis has a lot to thank me for their stage ideas. I’m sure I could have become a rock star. How boring. Can you imagine being a rock star? Can you imagine anything more tedious and stupid? Far more nicer for me, who has had the chance to be a rock star, many times over, and every time to have rejected it. Isn’t that much cooler? Elvis Costello can’t claim that.

FFanzeen: Have you produced or recorded anything lately?
King: Not much. Towards the end of 1979, as a favor to a very dear friend of mine, Sir Edward Lewis (d. 1980), who is the chairman/founder of Decca-London Records, I have gone back to Decca as sort of the boss, to revive this dead corpse of a record company, which I did. And we got a lot of records back on the chart. I had “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues on the charts for the third time in the Top 10, and a variety of other hits on Decca. And, in fact, again, by the end of the year. Decca was again one of the most successful companies in Britain. The reason for this is because Sir Edward was selling the record company to Polygram, who did in fact buy it, and he wanted to sell them something that was a positive, active, successful entity, as opposed to a flop. It worked very well. He sold the company, and the new company immediately approached me and asked if I would be interested in running Phonogram/Mercury and Decca. A lot of other record companies in Britain asked if I would be interested in running their companies in England, and even in America. Sums of money were mentioned, ranging to the top offer of $750,000 a year. And I looked at myself in the mirror – especially parts of my anatomy, the most interesting little bits I can observe – and I said, “Jonathan, do you really want to be a record executive? Here you are, just into your early thirties. I don’t want to do something that will keep me going for another ten years, wearing suits and ties. I would prefer to relax. Fortunately, I have earned enough money through the bands that I’ve been associated with over the years to be able to do whatever I want. What would I like to do?” And I decided I would like to come to America and live in my apartment/office, which I’ve had for ten years now in New York, and do two things: one, cover the presidential election, because presidential politics in America fascinates me, as do politics in England – I find them very interesting, and two, broaden my perspective out of just the music world, but also break into the American market because, as you know, in England, I am a fairly well-known personality from fifteen years of doing a variety of things. In America, apart from “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” fifteen years ago when I was a little seventeen-year-old teenybopper, nobody knows me and remembers me, right? So, it’s a whole new virgin market and a difficult market to break. And I’ve decided I’d try and do that, so I came over here to do weekly reports on the election, called “The King of New York,” which goes out Saturday afternoons on the BBC in Britain, and has about six or seven million listeners. I still do that column. Then, while I was here, I was offered a guest slot on WMCA-AM, “New York’s finest news and conversation station,” and they got good reactions, phones went, letters poured in, so they asked if I would do the 10 to 12 morning show on a regular basis for a while, and I thought about it and decided, yes, why not? Because my other ambition has been, for a while, to try and shake the bland, boring, tedious American radio station back into shape again. And I think I’m probably the only person who can do it, cos I’m young enough to know what the (new) music’s about, yet old enough to have had the experience and success in the industry to have built up a good reputation, so people don’t look at me as a lunatic. So, bearing that in mind, I’m still trying to do that. I’ve got three FM stations on the boil at the moment. I’m trying desperately to get one of them to allow me to move in and program a New Wave radio station for young people who like to hear that new sound younger bands are making; people like the Police, B-52s, Elvis Costello (and) a variety of artists that are around. Playing that all the time, instead of what I call “Dinosaur Rock,” which WPLJ or WNEW play, or disco, which is fine if you’re into disco, but not at all fine if you’re not, or any other music formats around you which are very limited or specialist. My thinking is that the 1980s AM radio is going to become more and more talk-oriented. And FM radio is going to widen out and appeal to a broader spectrum of the community. How nobody has ever done this before I really cannot understand. It’s such a yawning gap in the marketplace, you would think anybody with any brains would cater to that area, right?

FFanzeen: WPIX did that for a little while.
King: No, they didn’t, you see. This is one of the two reasons why there is no New Wave radio in New York,: one is because New Wave radio is thought to appeal to the twelve to twenty-five-year-olds who, according to demographics, no longer have much buying power apart from pimple creams, right? I happen to think that’s wrong. I happen to think that, a) the audience has more buying power than people think, and b) New Wave radio would not only appeal to that segment of the community, but would also appeal to a lot of people in their late twenties and early thirties. And I think a lot of parents whose kids would be setting their dial to a New Wave station would like what they heard and leave it turned to that. So, that’s one point. The second, WPIX sort of tried a New Wave format, but when I say sort of, it was a disaster. I listened to it quite regularly. They would play any new record that came out, especially if it was on a little label. Now, I know the music business. If a record is on a little label, it’s got a fair chance of being a real piece of shit, because if it’s not good enough for the big labels and has to crawl out of a little label, it usually is bad. And indeed, much of the records WPIX used to play were ghastly. Now, they had the advantage that one record in twenty was great, and you wouldn’t hear it anywhere else, but the other nineteen were such rubbish, it was presented in a neo-mid’60s progressive laid-back amateur fashion. So, what happens? Nobody listens. You see a tiny little minority listenership, but the figures dropped way down, because it was presented so badly. They said it was New Wave – it wasn’t New Wave radio. It was just amateur mess radio; you cannot run a radio station like that. And so, everybody thought as you do [do I? – RBF, 1981] that WPIX was New Wave radio, it didn’t work, therefore New Wave radio doesn’t work. They’re thinking wrong. New Wave can work marvelously, but only if the very best is played. If it’s presented well, if certain things are encouraged, and if people put their money where their mouth is and back the people they really believe in. You see, it’s easy to play PIX format: play everything, and then be able to say, “We were the first to play ‘Money’ by the Flying Lizards. Admittedly, we only played it once every five days because we play so many records, but we were the first.” Well, that’s bullshit. You don’t do things like that. There’s only a handful of good records at any given time. You play that handful and they’re damned good records, you break new bands, new artists. I can program a New Wave station with about forty or fifty record companies didn’t know ought to be singles, great New Wave singles, marvelous oldies by people like the Sex Pistols and the Boomtown Rats [oldies? – RBF, 1981] that never saw the light of day, and it would be a hell of a good radio station, and it wouldn’t be a mess. WPIX was a mess.

FFanzeen: By doing that, wouldn’t you be guilty of doing the same thing that WPLJ is doing, just programming the same things over and over?
King: Well, PLJ programs that same thing over and over, but they program Dinosaur Rock over and over again. They would put in a Police track or B-52s or something – Talking Heads – to keep people happy. But ninety percent of their format is Zeppelin, Sabbath, and all the various Pink Floyds, all people who are considerably older than I am, and the same old music churns out – and when you hear “Stairway to Heaven” every three minutes, you think, “God, here it goes again, I can’t believe it.” PLJ, ABC and the NBCs are Top 40 formatted. Okay, what I would be doing, in a way, is Top 40 New Wave format. But that’s different because Top 40 doesn’t exist anymore. Top 40 used to be marvelous in the mid-‘60s. Now we’re split into specialist groups so, as a result, there are records that will be major big hit records that we may not want to hear. I think a tight-formatted New Wave station playing new records, bands that are not heard anywhere else in the city, and repeating them a lot so you can hear them enough to really get into them, would do enormously well. But you need that control. There’s no point in saying that people who want the sort of PIX format back are basically the failed rock musicians who, with their second-rate band, knew they had a vague chance of having their record played somewhere at some time cos PIX had such an open format with nobody listening as a result. But they would play anyone, so Fred Nerle and the Scroggs from down in Greenwich Village would be sure that their second-rate piece of rubbish will b played on WPIX, so they could champion PIX. The listeners didn’t champion it. The listeners thought it was a pain in the ass. The protest that was made when it came off was like somebody making a slight fart in Staten Island. I mean, it really had no impact when it left the scene because, although it was doing some good things, it was a mess But to run a good New Wave station you’ve got to find somebody who actually knows what he’s talking about from a New Wave level, cos you can’t go by any of the sales. Any little individual group can hike the sales in one shop by getting their mother, father, and friends to go in and buy it. There is no way they can find out. The phone would be ringing by friends of a band calling in. The only way you can virtually guarantee success if the guy picking the music has hellishly good ears. Now, according to the latest ratings, my ears are worth $750,000 a year. That’s what the record companies are prepared to pay me for the use of my ears in running their companies. With these kinds of ears, you know you’ve got something that is pretty invaluable, and with a little bit of luck, somebody in the radio world is going to pick up on that idea and say, “Hey!” Plus, when the ratings come up on my WMCA show and they see that I’ve slaughtered all the opposition on AM, they will be very keen to get me on FM.

FFanzeen: Your born name is Kenneth, but you record as Jonathan and use many other pseudonyms. Why?
King: Well, there was a very good reason for that. I decided that if I put out three records by Jonathan King, people would listen to all three, decide with was the best, play it, and I would have one hit, even if all three were potential hits. If I put out three records under different names and nobody knew they were me, and people thought the records were better than any other around, they’d play all three and I’d have three simultaneous hits, make much more money, and be all over the charts. So, that was the reason I did it, and it works. Three times in 1971, I had three simultaneous Top 30 records under various different names, so it was a great way of doing things. I reached the point where, in 1972, any new artist at all who came out, people thought it was Jonathan King. You couldn’t be an artist without people saying, “Are you really Jonathan King? When I launched 10cc, one of the great problems we had to overcome was getting people to realize that 10cc were actually a real bunch of four individual musicians, and not me under another name. Especially since I thought up the name, and it was a very “Jonathan King” sort of name.

FFanzeen: Do you have any new artists, like New Wave artists, that you are getting ready to produce, or that you want to produce?
King: No, I don’t really want to get into the production end of the music thing just yet at all. I mean, the basic situation is I want to make myself known in America, and I’m going about it on a certain route. And the route I’m using at the moment is talk radio, with TV appearances, which are being booked up because of the talk radio success, and so on. Now, it may well be that the next stage, hopefully, is that I will succeed in getting an FM radio station, and if I do, then I will turn it into a success. I’ve told everyone that I guarantee that within six months, it’ll be the Number One station in the country. And I have no doubt that I would be. People were saying the same thing about the disco format when WKTU started up, and it did, indeed, go on to do exactly that, because the time was right, or “The Tide is High,” as Blondie would say.

FFanzeen: Would you like to go into a bit of detail about the format of your AM radio show?
King: The talk show is very simple, basically. It runs the gamut between serious things like heroin addiction, abortion, capital punishment, and so on, and the lighter subjects like heroin addiction, abortion, and capital punishment. I interviewed Dusty Springfield (d. 1999), and I was hoping Bowie (d. 2016) was going to come on, but he never did. John Lennon was due on the week after his death (1980). Unfortunately, he had to cancel. It ranges from one end of the scale to another. The only common denominator is if it bores me, I stop the discussion. And if it bores me, it will probably bore the listeners. I’m finding we’ve been getting the most enormous amount of young listeners now, a really large amount of college kids and teenagers. How, I don’t know, since most of them are at school or at college when the show is on. We have phone calls; we have interviews on every topic under the sun. I mention things that have happened in the world and my thoughts on them, and usually send them off a bit with a light ribbing. It’s all good fun. Like yesterday, the whole show was devoted to a discussion on the lack of New Wave radio on FM. And I must say that I’ve had letters since, cos I thought we really shouldn’t get into the topic because it was a talk show, and essentially listened to by people who don’t want to listen to music. That was yesterday, and this morning I had three letters which said, “Please don’t say that, we all love music and we love good talk, and the reason we’re listening to you on WMCA is because it’s impossible to hear good music on the radio at the moment. And rather than listen to crap, we’re listening to good talk, and we would love a good New Wave station,” which is a marvelous thing. I really do believe that that is true. I think the ‘80s will see a lot of people listening to a variety of things. Given my own choice, I would listen to some personalities on talk radio and then switch to a good music radio station to hear music. And I wouldn’t stay on one or the other all the time. I’d bounce.

FFanzeen: You’ve said that people are like sheep, and you don’t like people who immediately like you without knowing anything about you.
King: Right, That’s why I’ve never gone out of my way to get fans.

FFanzeen: Yet you produce this pabulum-type of music to suit that very group. Isn’t that contradictory?
King: No. As I’ve said, it gives me a creative buzz to be able to sell things to large quantities of people. If the people want to be stupid enough to like me as a person rather than the records, then that’s their fault. There’s nothing against people liking the record. Because they have different tastes than me does not make them inferior human beings. I consider them inferior as human beings when they’re foolish enough to like somebody they’ve never met, and never spoken to, and don’t know anything about, just on the basis of the music that they like. I mean, if you were to tell me that you think Paul McCartney is a fantastic guy, although you never met him, because he makes such nice records, I’d say you were an idiot. And likewise, anyone who would say the same about Jonathan King. And even when somebody meets me, they would realize that, as anybody with sense does, that there is no black and white. Nobody’s perfect, and that I’m part good and part bad.

FFanzeen: You’ve said that you like everything that you’ve done so far. At the same time, you refer to yourself as cynical.
King: I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ve done anything of great earth-shattering depth. I mean, even if I’d written plays to the worth of William Shakespeare, or novels to the worth of Charles Dickens, and I was satisfied with my artistic abilities, I still wouldn’t fool myself. I’m cynical. They say, “The cynic is the true lover of humanity.” Somebody else said, and I think it was Oscar Wilde, “A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” My answer is that everything has a price and nothing has any value. Which, I think, is the true cynical answer to give. We’re here, and we won’t be here tomorrow. There’s no point in overdramatizing everything. My interpretation of a cynic is one who sees life as it is, not as they would like it to be, or as others would like it to be, but as, in reality, it is. That applies to people who believe in extremely weird things like God, or the Devil, or any kind of various lifestyles other people follow. I would use the word cynic without any of the derogatory implications it has. To me, basically, I’m cynical. A total cynic. I’m probably the most cynical person you would ever meet. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being cynical. To me, being cynical is being sensible.

FFanzeen: What you’ve said is almost word for word the opposite of what Cervantes said [in Man of La Mancha], that the maddest thing you can do is see life as it is, and not as it should be.
King: But then, there aren’t many windmills around here.

Having met and talked with Jonathan King, I liked him. Yes, he was cynical and used his opinion like a straight-razor, but he was also straightforward and direct, and firmly believed in his convictions. I also think that his convictions were (and are) what was wrong with the music industry: namely the bottom line is more important than the value of the music. His total lack of regard for independent music was shocking to me, but then again, considering his “place” in the history of the music industry, it is hardly surprising. Did there really need to be a disco version of “Una Paloma Blanca”? Did there really need to be an “oogha-chaga” version of “Hooked on a Feeling”?

Another statement he made I find questionable is that only the best New Wave music would be played. And just what is the totally subjective “best”? And who would be the person or persons who would decide that? Gatekeeping theory states that one or few choose what the majority will know, but a subtext is the question of whether the chooser would be an independent thinker or a cog in the machine. The fin de sicle has shown, I believe, that independent thought in the music industry – especially radio broadcast such as it is in the age of the Internet – is dead. Demographics numbers and polls speak louder than even program directors. The disk jockey has been reduced to mere personality and no longer has a say in the output. These days, you’d have a better chance of finding a religious station than any kind of new music on-air.

FFuture FFile reprinted from FFanzeen Magazine, Part 1 [1981-83]

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2021

Images from the Internet, unless indicated

One of the reasons I started my print fanzine in 1977, was to help publicize the unknown bands that I was going to see in the clubs that did not get enough notice. In the early 1980s, I started a column called “FFuture FFile,” which were short blurbs about new and up-and-comers, so the musicians could use it for publicity. They were written by different authors. Below, I have reprinted the musicians or bands in alphabetical order (rather than chronologically, and by first name if a single artist), who wrote it, and in which year/issue, the piece was published. Even though they had varying levels of success, they all deserved some notice. On occasion, I will add an update at the end of the particular pieces. Where I can, I will attach a photo and/or video.

Photo (c) RBF

Boy’s Life

By Robert Barry Francos

Issue 8; 1981

When they first started playing out in February 1980, Boy’s Life were too young to be patrons in most of the bars they played. They named themselves after the offical Boy Scout magazine, and used to appear on stage in Scout uniforms. Well, they’ve matured over the almost two yeas and no long wear uniforms, but their initial excitement is still present. This Boston-based (Malden, actually) band didn’t make much of a mark in New York until they opened for Stiff Little Fingers at the Peppermint Lounge. At first, the audience wasn’t impressed with these young guys and showed them such by (quite tackily) throwing cherries at them. But by the time Robert Weiner (drums), Joe McCormack (bass), Neal Sugarman (sax), and John Surette (lead singer and guitar) were ending their act, the audience gave them a rousing cheer – in fact, to bring them back for an encore. They surprised all. While up in Boston this last Memorial Day, I got a chance to see Boy’s Life at the Rat, in their natural habitat (i.e., Boston) and quite honestly, New York has no idea how exciting this band can be. We’ve never seen them at their best, even when they opened for Echo & the Bunnymen at the Ritz in October. Their influences are obvious: Clash, Jam and Pistols; and not obvious: Beatles, Who, and Kinks. With a few independent records to their name, they have been listed as one of the top unsigned bands in the country by a number of top music mags. Boy’s Life is constantly growing, and their popularity increases as well. Their latest single, “Two Doors Down” and “I Found Her” is now available.

[John Surette has been in bands such as the Deniros and the Ex-Girlfriends, and appears in on-stage rock operas in the Boston area. – RBF, 2021]

Photo (c) RBF

The Corpsicles

By Julia Masi

Issue 9; 1982

Over the oversized graphic of a menacing-looking popsicle, the Corpsicles – Philip Freeze, vocals and guitar; Luke Warm, bass, and Mike Leary, drums – knock out a sound that they call “straight-drivin’-through-New York stuff.” They’re reminiscent of the Ramones and the Heartbreakers at their best, with the essence of hardcore and a strong aura of originality that lets their tongue-in-cheek style put them in a class all their own. Right now, Philip writes all the songs, like “Sex with You,” “Poison Blood,” “Confusion,” and “Don’t Judge Me,” and dedicates them to the depressed, the mentally ill, and vampires. “The whole Corpsicles idea,” Philip explains, “is that you have to be an individual. And people that are individuals are sort of repressed. I like people that are off the wall. It’s good to be a little mentally ill.” He describes the band as a sort of free arrangement. I like to get out there and give it all I have. It’s this expression; if everyone expresses themselves to the fullest, it’s just this energy. As long as I see progress, I’m happy. You really have to stick it out. I just want to have a good time playing. We try. We like a lot of different types of music. But this what we do.” And they do it well.

The Cosmopolitans

By Stacy Mantel and Alan Abramowitz

Issue 7; 1981

“A lot of music that people are dancing to is depressing. Today, people are in a horrible depression,” says Jamie Sims, vocalist and songwriter for the Cosmopolitans. And her prescription for rock’n’roll health is to “present an idea of a party rather than a serious thing.” They proved this with their single “How to Keep Your Husband Happy” b/w “Wild Moose Party,” on Shake Records. A hit with Vassar coeds among others, “Husband Happy” epitomizes this sentiment; that parody, fun, and rock’n’roll can co-exist. Jamie got the idea from an early ‘60s Debbie Drake record that Nel Moore (co-lead vocalist, who doubles on metal pot and baton) gave her, which lists ways to keep the hubby hooked. “I didn’t make them up, they’re real,” says Jamie. “It was so ridiculous. I had to do something.” The Cosmopolitans are Jamie and Nel, lead vocals; David Itch, guitar; Evan “Funk” Davies on drums (and host of WNYU’s New Afternoon show); and Fran Kowalski on keyboards. Jamie and Nel had a modest start in rock’n’roll as go-go girls for the dBs and the Fleshtones, and they plan to give dancing lessons at upcoming gigs. However, it may be difficult to dance instead of watching two girls in pink fringy min-skirts bopping about, but Jamie isn’t really bothered: “I just pretend it’s a party, and not everyone’s gonna dance.” So be prepared to learn the Frug, Jerk, Fly, et. al.

The Donny Fury Band

By Stacy Mantel

Issue 7; 1981

The Donny Fury Band is a lively mix of crazies who also happen to have fun with electronic guitars and such. If, perchance, you are able to catch the multi-colored, leather-clad quartet at the local haunt, you will be entertained in a fashion not unknown to us. The group tries its best to bring audience participation to a peak; Donny offers the mic to a frenetic-looking individual right near the stage or dives in and hunts for one of the congregation. “We do whatever strikes our fancy,” Donny states. DFB includes one Cee Cee on vocals (who also manages CBGBs); Donny Fury (who also has his own recording studio where they produced their single, “Plastic Man” b/w “Wild West”) is the guitarist; along with Pat Dime on drums and Jeff Hosang on bass. They create a sound which Cee Cee describes as “very pop and vocal-oriented with importance place on harmonies. “We’re not just a band to listen to, we’re a visual stage show, as well.” One of their songs features Donny on slide guitar, using a vibrator; and when that isn’t available, he’ll use a big, bright banana, instead. Did I hear someone whisper “phallic”?

Fats Deacon and the Dumbwaiters

By Stacy Mantel

Issue 7; 1981

“Rock’n’roll got so far away, it was hard to communicate with it,” says Fats Deacon, front man and keyboardist for Fats Deacon and the Dumbwaiters, one of the more thrilling rock’n’roll bands to hit the scene in years. “Everything’s been done (in music) so now everyone just wants to enjoy it.” There’s something real and human about the gimmickless Dumbwaiters. Their songs are about kids in the streets and real-life melodrama/mediocrity. Their single, “Two by Four” b/w “American Boy,” on Songshop Records, is a prime example of Deacon’s desire to “touch the audience and relate to them.” Fats, who describes his music as “American,” says “We’re a mixture between Meat Loaf and Little Richard; very powered rock’n’roll, but not shallow.” He claims that rock’n’roll got away from the audiences, and that synthesizers took the human feel out of it. As well as “cleaning up” rock’n’roll by singing songs about reality vs. fantasy, the group features Addle Murray on tenor sax. Her horn blows everyone away. Ex-MC5 and Gang War member Wayne Kramer returns on guitar, with Denny Reynolds on bass and Joey Bones on drums. Fats, whose influences include Jerry Lee Lewis, Sly and the Family Stone, and Springsteen, could comment for hours on the history of rock’n’roll’s racial segregation, and will fascinate anyone who inquires with this talented musician. If you wander into a club one night and hear them, you will probably be hooked.

Fred’s Band

By Lisle McKenty

Issue 7; 1981

After many tries, Columbia University has finally produced a band with more than just pretensions to rock’n’roll. It’s Fred’s Band, the “rockingest, boppingest hep cats,” claims one of their fans. Unlike various predecessors, this band has, and is, fun. Fred’s Band is led by Maximilian Dietshe on lead guitar, in fierce competition with rhythm guitarist Danny Ferrira. The vocals are handled with care and cunning by Steve Szilagyi, who double-threats on bass. This trio is backed-up by drummer Bob Wolf. Or maybe it’s them who back him up. Their tunes run half original and half covers. Their covers – from “Blue Suede Shoes” to some risky Beatles, all come off, well, sincerely. No matter how many times you heard them before, they’ll move your feet. But they are hardly a cover band. Their original tunes are well-crafted and show their idiom inside-out. In particular, “Lanky Frankie” and “Rockabilly Girlfriend” stand out. Fred’s Band is a rockabilly dance band, something you – and they – can never forget.

[At some point after this, Lisle was married for a while to Danny. – RBF, 2021]

Photo (c) RBF

Jo Marshall

By Robert Barry Francos

Issue 8; 1981

“Whaddya say we go down to CBGBs and catch the act tonight?”

“Whoz playin’?”

“Jo Marshall.”

“Never heard of ‘im. Who is he?”

“Not ‘he,” schmuck, she.”

“She!? I don’t know…she’s got a guy’s name.”

“A guy she sure ain’t. Trust me on that.”

“Cute, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. Nice bod and weird eyes. Nice-weird.”

“Yeah, and I bet she can’t sing worth a shit and no one notices ‘cause of her looks.”

“Bullshit. And I can prove it: look-it, first time she went into a studio, a fan of hers did backup. You know who that was? Joey Ramone. Yeah, and Elvis wrote a song called ‘Mighty Man’ for her.”

“Didn’t he die?”

“No, asshole. I mean Costello.”

“So did I.”

“Anyways, she went over to England and did some recording at Nick Lowe’s studio. Hey, and are you ready for this; she uses a steel-petal guitar in her band. Only it don’t sound nothing like some shit-kicker band. They really do some great kickass rock’n’roll. There’s Ed Bierley on petal-steel, Jerry Mitnick on bass, Carl Nelchloss on lead guitar and David Rosenberg on drums, and they’re great. Songs are great, too. My fave’s ‘Stop Looking at Her.’”

“Whadda we waitin’ for?”

[I had heard that Jo passed away, but have not found any information on it online. – RBF, 2021]

On Tour with 3-D [1980]

Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen, 1980

Introduction by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2020

Images from the Internet

This article / interview was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #5, dated August/September 1980. It was written by the Managing Editor of the magazine, Julia Masi.

The band 3-D had a couple of hits, two albums, and even played on “Saturday Night Live” (hosted by Steve Martin). Despite the protestations in the interview below, they were very New Wave, as we understand it in hindsight.

Since the break-up, lead singer Rick Zivic opened up his own recording studio in New York, and is fronting the Rockin’ Red White and Blues Band. For Ted Wender, he joined with Zivic in 1989 and created a production company that specializes in videos for commercials, television programs and industrial companies. Ted also formed the group Jazzmatik, and created MusiCan, a philanthropic organization to help kids with music programs in indigent neighborhood public schools. Keiv Ginsberg’s other claim to fame is that he played guitar for the Blues Brothers, including on their albums (which may explain how they got to play on "SNL"). Producer and bassist Nick Stevens has worked with many artists over the years, including Impulse Manslaughter. – RBF, 2020

“The basic premise of the group is that we’re songwriters and we’re evolving. We don’t write one type of song. We write about a lot of different things. We’re a band with a lot of visual ideas,” says Rick Zivic, winsome, brown-eyed lead singer and lyricist of 3-D. The group is best known for the songs “X-Ray Eyes,” “All Night Television” and “Telephone Number,” which reflect that philosophy.

3-D includes keyboard player Ted Wender, drummer Mike Find, guitarist Keiv Ginsberg, and Nick Stevens on bass, all native New Yorkers. Zivic hails from Pittsburgh. Recently, 3-D returned to New York City after completing a 40-date national tour with the J. Geils Band, to do a very successful spot on “Saturday Night Live,” and work on their second album for Polydor Records.

Zivic seemed relaxed and ambitious as he sat in a spacious white room of the band’s Greenwich Village loft and recounted stories from the road. Touring is nothing new for 3-D. They’ve been on the road before with the Fabulous Poodles, the Romantics, and Mitch Ryder. But this was the first time they experienced a backlash from the audience over the band’s visual image:

“Because of the way we looked, not necessarily because of the music, people immediately associated us as either being from England or being New Wave. In certain markets we found that there is still an on-going battle between the New Wave thing and the old wave thing, which is, to me, a little bit bullshit, because New Wave means nothing to me – old wave means nothing to me. It’s just that if you play rock’n’roll, there’s different variations of it. We got encores. It was unbelievable. Detroit was the same way. They’re the two roughest rock’n’roll markets in the world to hit, and they loved us.

“Initially, when we started the tour, we played Providence. This was our first experience hearing and seeing the Geils crowd. And it was 10,000 of them, and they were gonzo-Geils people. We came out to do our set and all of a sudden it was like a war zone. Nickels being thrown up (on stage). Quarters being heated with their lighters and thrown up. Bottles and every type of debris coming up. I did a jump and in mid-air saw a coin come up and hit me right below the eye. For 2-1/2-3 weeks, I had this incredible black eye.”

Despite the unfriendly welcome they received, 3-D was undaunted by the crowd. “I just finished the set and left the stage. I said, ‘Fuck you,’ which was really stupid. It was very new for us. At that point, I should have gotten the hell out of there.”

The band stuck it out and was well received on their next few gigs. Once they got to know the Geils crowd, they started to re-evaluate their set. Much of 3-D’s material borders on a new sound, “But to get a lot of the gonzo mentality you wanna power-drive them,” he smiled, “so we started trimming out some of the things that give people time enough to react and maybe obliterate us.”

Their precautions were in vain. In Tampa, someone threw a bottle of Jack Daniels on stage. It hit Nick Stevens in the face, but luckily bounced off him before it cracked on the floor. Zivic decided to fight back with his audience. “I started to get like a mad dog,” he recalled, but the more he answered back and singled out his hecklers, the better they liked it. Their record company even received fan mail about it, but Rick tends to be naturally nonchalant, and isn’t ready to reembrace a stage personality. “You’re here to play music and it’s like tripe. Out of 10,000 people, there are just 100 people who are rowdy about it.”

Most of the bands who have toured with J. Geils have left the tour early, but nothing could make 3-D throw in the towel. Not even the festival seating at a concert in Oakland. “There are no seats,” Zivic explained, “and the kids stood in front of the stage, all the way back. And they’re either belligerent, or they’re gone. At this point, you had to be a gladiator to go out there.”

The tour ended in Providence and the band was a little leery about going back there. They had gotten used to the favorable receptions they got in most of the South, Texas, the West Coast and especially by Geils’ hometown of Boston. “I had this incredible phobia about Providence the night we came back. It was such an accomplishment. We had started at the point we were totally naïve, to the point of just saying, ‘We’re gonna rock, and we’re here to rock, and if you wanna get into it, great. If not, go fuck yourselves and get outta here’.”

The band is already looking forward to their next tour when they hope to include some video work into their show. “We had a big plan on ‘X-Ray Eyes’ and ‘All Night Television’ to do two videos on the new material. But we’re definitely doing a 3-D film for the next tour.” He speculated, “I think 3-D’s a thing we have to do ‘cause it’s definitely a thing of the future. And I think we should be the first ones to get into it.”

An Interview with CHINGA CHAVIN [1979]

An Interview with Chinga Chavin

Text by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 1979/2020
Live image by Robert Barry Francos 
Other images from the Internet

This interview with Country Porn lead singer Chinga Chavin and the introduction has never been published before. FFanzeen printed an article about Chavin back in 1977, written by Western New York scholar Lincoln D. Kirk, in FFanzeen #2 (which will make it to this blog eventually). At the time of the interview, Chinga Chavin had released two albums, Country Porn and Jet Lag. Years later, he also released Live and Politically Erect, which I have not yet heard as of this publishing.

I don’t remember exactly how I connected to him, but I did the interview in the office of his advertising company in 1979 in promotion for Jet Lag; I had the opportunity to see him play at the Lone Star Café in New York City, and may have approached him then. It was a kind of Country-punk-boogie show even a punk rocker like myself could love, or maybe because of it. Note that this was years before country punk bands like Rank and File and Uncle Fucker.

When reading this again in retrospect, there are some attitudes by myself and Chinga that I find cringeworthy when it comes to discussing certain sexual details, gender bias, or racist terms (inherent or blatant). It’s important to see this in the context of 1979 when I was still a young’n. The wording of my questions are different than ones I would ask today, for certain. My apologies in advance. – RBF, 2020.

 

Chinga on the left (photo by RBF)

El Paso, Texas, and across the bridge is Juarez, Mexico, the most infamous of all border towns due to its open carnality and perversions in the mid-1950s to mid-’60s. Whatever you wanted was there for a price – and not an expensive one, at that. Sex, drugs, anything.

In this environment grew a not-so-quiet boy named Nick Chavin. By his early teens, he was well indoctrinated into the ways of Juarez, a short distance from where he lived. After hanging out in this town for a few years, he developed his nickname: “Chinga,” which is a Mexican slang word for fuck. Thus was born Chinga Chavin.

Despite the depravity of his youth, he grew up and became, of all things, an English Teacher. Together with his knowledge of the English and Spanish languages and their slang, he added his musical influences of rock’n’roll. Eventually, he quit his schoolwork for the fame and fortune of the stage.

Chinga formed a band, Country Porn, which he fronted. Becoming quite popular in areas of the Southwest and California, he put out an album, titled after the band, Country Porn, sponsored by Penthouse, which sold it through ads in the magazine. On it were such diverse cuts as “Cum Stains on My Pillow (Where Your Sweet Head Used to Lay,” “Four A.M. Jump,” “First Piece O’ Ass Blues,” “Cum Unto Jesus,” “Tit Stop Rock,” and his most famous song, “Asshole from El Paso” [Editor’s Note: the latter was co-written with Chavin’s college roommate, singer and mystery novelist Kinky Friedman – 2020]. Along with this track, his trademark is his guitar, which is made out of a toilet seat.

And now there is his new album, Jet Lag. It is new in both style and song. Some of the songs include “$49 Divorce,” “Hard Love,” “Mechanical Man,” “One More Ride,” and the only cut that sounds anything like the previous album, “Jailbait” [Editor’s Note: at the time, this was a surprisingly common theme, with examples being The Marbles’ “Jailbait” and The Gizmos’ “Jailbait Janet” – 2020.]

I interviewed Chinga Chavin at the beginning of the Autumn of 1979, the day after his first New York appearance. The show was at a Country & Western club on Fifth Avenue in the Village called The Lone Star Café. The audience was enthusiastic and included the likes of Al Goldstein [d. 2013], editor of Screw magazine, and family. It was enjoyed by all.

Chinga is not overly tall, but he is very thin, with a large-ish nose, a mole on his cheek, shoulder-length hair, and a not-too-pronounced Texan accent (due to living in California for so long). His wit is sharp and is a fun person with whom to talk.

The following is the transcript of the time I spent with him, proving him to be one of the few unpretentious musicians I have met. As many times as he as been interviewed and God knows how often he’s had to answer some of the questions I asked, he was enthusiastic – and that made it a lot easier.

* * *

FFanzeen: What’s one of your sets like?
Chinga Chavin: The second set has the finale of “Cum Unto Jesus,” from the Country Porn album, along with “4 A.M. Jump” and a stripping nun. It turns from a nun’s habit to a punk rock outfit. It’s all leather with her breasts sticking out. It’s the erotic environment of Catholicism: I think Catholicism is naturally erotic. Catholicism is the S&M branch of Christianity. That’s part of the whole monologue I do, setting (“Cum Unto Jesus”) up. The sets are hot.

FF: Do you sell out most places you play?
Chinga: In California, yeah. Last week I played my first East Coast performance with Vassar Clements [d. 2005], and it was sold out. I opened for Vassar and they shot the shit out of us. They popped our hemorrhoids. That band is very Christian. The Lone Star Café was reasonably sold out since they wouldn’t let any more people in after the first show. It will take me a while in Manhattan to develop that word of mouth. It depends on where I play. I wouldn’t sell out a 3500 coliseum. Up to five or six hundred seats, I probably could. When I develop a word of mouth type thing and have played a few months in an area or club, that’s when I really start packing people in, because without the massive airplay – even though Jet Lag is an airplayable record – I can’t sell out in the same traditional manner. It has to be word of mouth. It was in New York on WNEW-FM’s playlist, but I didn’t get the promo push since I am not on any major label. Word of mouth is the only thing I have going for me.

FF: Do your audiences come to see the singer, the songs, or the girls?
Chinga: I’d say the singer and the songs, because I’ve worked without women. A year or a year-and-a-half ago was the first time I started working with women. Okay, the answer to that question: the songs and the idea of using the girls in that way comes from me. So, I think it’s sort of the whole demented approach I use for the stage set. Like, once I used a mannequin on stage. I’ll eat live chickens. I’ll do crazy things on stage. That’s the main catch. I don’t just do a straight set. There are going to be some people coming for the girls, but I use skin in a one-hour show in the last 120 seconds. That’s two minutes of skin in a one-hour show. I mean, I really don’t think it applies to that. Here in Manhattan, you can go see a topless show, or see anything you want, but for five bucks at the door and another five or ten for drinks for two minutes of skin, well, if I thought that were true. I’d leave show business and throw 30 women on stage.

FF: Because of your set, is there any place you’ve been afraid to play?
Chinga: Last week with Vassar Clements, I had serious misgivings. He’s an ex-Klansman and a strong Christian. Yeah, the Palomino Club, I’ve been afraid to play in Los Angeles. It’s getting a little more rock’n’roll there now. I’ve played army bases, service man’s clubs; sex is sort of a common surrogate that cuts through a lot of things. It’s hard to find some place that’s devoid of sex, unless it’s a nunnery or something like that. I’d have a real hard time playing the Vatican. Yeah, the Vatican. It started with a fear of Mexicans, what with using the name “Chinga” and the whole Chicano thing, but Chicanos loved the set. Texans are bananas. I have played in Texas and I usually play at conventions – and they go bananas. There’s a corporation called BWM, Inc. – Blue Water Maintenance, Incorporated – that cleans oil pipelines and refineries, who put on conventions with the oil companies twice a year, and they have us there. We do “Asshole from El Paso” 15 times. Texans are as reasonably chauvinistic about Texas, as I am, having lived there some years. Since a lot of the songs deal with Texas, they love it. The thing I fear more is that since I use some religious stuff in the show, I get more of the people on the religious things. Occasionally, there’ll be a guy with veins popping and he’ll walk out, but basically, in the early days of my shows when I was in a bar band and someone was coming in that bar, and they heard we were Country Porn and they knew we were playing there, with “Dry Humping” and “Cum Stains on my Pillow,” when he was giving his money he knew what he was coming to see. I mean, he’s either bought the record or read about us, so it’s like, we have to live up to his expectations. I play to a following. It’s not massive, but it’s a following. They come specifically to see this thing called Country Porn. That is, unless they mis-read it as Country Prune, or Prawn or Country Prone, that type thing. It would be like going to see Deep Throat and being offended by the sex.

FF: Do you ever get hostile audiences?
Chinga: I know what it’s like to have a hostile audience. Like last night, during the second set, I got some real good response on “Catholic Girls.” During the first set, they were pretty good, but there was one line they didn’t laugh on: “Pornography is just technology’s contribution to jerking off.” I couldn’t believe it . I never knew a West Coast audience not to go bananas over that. And there was no recognition. They just didn’t understand what I was trying to say: that without media, this thing called pornography would not exist. But, I mean, even the thing that the courts call “pornography” is media’s and technology’s slotting in to whacking off. The first caveman that wacked off from a drawing on the wall as opposed to in his mind, I mean, that was it. There is no such thing called pornography. What there is, is masturbation. And that’s why I added sensuality; that’s why I added that rap. And then they started laughing when I said that guys don’t have to apologize to the palm of their hand for cumming too quick.

FF: George Carlin [d. 2008] has a whole bit about masturbation – you know, don’t tell your right hand you’re doing it with your left. It’s called “Teenage Masturbation.” It’s on the Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo album.
Chinga: Oh, no. I didn’t know that. I gotta check some dates ‘cause I played with George Carlin in San Quentin. There’s an article about it in the San Quentin News. That was quite a few years ago and I did that rap. I wonder if that son-of-a-bitch ripped me off. Goddamn! I thought that approach was unique. The line of rap that I go at is psychological. Like, the idea that all connotations that deal with reproduction and excrement are bad. You don’t mind being called an ankle.

FF: Who made up the line the announcer said, that you “put the cunt back in country”?
Chinga: I did. I didn’t like the way the announcer said I was coming on stage for the second time – get it? – a second time. I can make love up to once a night, that’s it. Next question.

FF: Out of pure curiosity, do your friends refer to you as “Nick” or as “Chinga”?
Chinga: Chinga.

FF: What happened when you were supposed to be signed with Motown and they signed Pat Boone instead?
Chinga: Oh, that was years ago. Motown, unbeknownst to me, in those days, was just using my titles and staff. They needed publicity. They wanted a few random notes so they used me. I don’t think they ever really seriously considered signing Country Porn. Not since Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Wife.”

FF: How about when you played at a prison and got locked in overnight?
Chinga: Well, I wasn’t actually locked in. We were just detained there for a while. What happened was I brought in these North Beach strippers, my own side of Sodom and Gomorrah, and they were wearing tops that were see-through, and I got a little carried away and ripped it off one of them. These guys started fighting for a better view and a small riot started. It wasn’t because of what was happening on stage, but this mass fight started. Then there was an investigation and we had to fill out a lot of forms. It took quite a few hours. We just thought we might not be leaving for a while. I have a review of the show at San Quentin that said it went real good.

FF: Have you ever been arrested?
Chinga: I was arrested for indecent exposure in Haywood. This is a couple of years ago. Haywood, California. I used to go on, in those days, in Bermuda shorts that were cut-offs, cowboy boots, and a raincoat or trench coat. It looked like I was naked underneath it so they grabbed me. It was only after taking off my clothes that they could see that I actually wasn’t indecent. I thought it was sort of a paradox situation. Removing clothes to show you’re not indecent.

FF: What’s some of your upcoming unrecorded songs?
Chinga: “Remedial Dancing for Whites.” It’s a comedy disco concept. We did one tape of it already. The music stops with a percussion break, and I say, “Alright we’re all gonna learn to clap right on the beat. We’re going back to basic remedial rhythm.” “I got a Ph.D. in Sociology to clap? Whaddya mean, like this?” “No Debbie, turn your hands over the other way and clap.” Then there’s this spastic arhythmic clapping.

FF: Sounds good.
Chinga: It goes right after the white dancer. I’m becoming sort of a New Wave artist, which is sort of a joke because, my Country Porn album, that’s punk; I mean that pre-dates punk by years. I always considered myself a lot more outrageous. My engineer, who coproduced the album, Ed Stasium, did the Ramones and Talking Heads. The Jet Lag album is pretty New Wave in sound.

FF: Country Porn was basically a mail-order album. Can you buy Jet Lag in the stores?
Chinga: It’s in stores. It’s in New York right now. We set up CP Records, an independent record distributor. You can buy it in Korvettes or Sam Goodys. The first album’s in 49 states. The only state we’re not in is New York. It’s in Alabama, but not New York. I can’t find a major distributor in New York to take Country Porn.

FF: That’s surprising.
Chinga: Yeah. Well, the big distributors like Alpha and Malbern are the main honchos. We got Jet Lag, but we haven’t got Country Porn in New York yet.

FF: I have seen it in some stores in New York, but it sold for list price of $8.95.
Chinga: It does not lose anything off the list price when it hits the used record stores.

FF: How is Jet Lag different from Country Porn in sound?
Chinga: The first album was a humorous look at human sexuality. It’s very innocent and very humorous. Of course, it cannot be played on the radio. [Jet Lag] is look at relationships, a breakdown; from “Jailbait” to “$49 Divorce.” Jet Lag, of course, can be played on the radio. There are no X-rated lyrics though. The first album was fun and no airplay, and the second, treacherous, convoluted – all the airplay you want. The second one’s the obscene album. I had to go obscene to get straight radio play.

FF: The first album was recorded at Quadrophonic Studios in Nashville. Jet Lag, too?
Chinga: No, I did the one with Don Oriolo. I started in Fur Studios in San Francisco and then we finished it in Media (Sound Studios), in New York. I really recorded it in New York.

FF: Is your present Country Porn band new?
Chinga: I brought one guy out. I’m what you might call a bi-coastal band. I have an East Coast band and a West Coast band. John Erokan, my co-writer and guitarist, he and I are the common denominator. Like, I’ll play both East and West Coast gigs with him.

FF: Is the old album getting any airplay?
Chinga: The new album is. The old one gets airplay on certain occasions. A very, very progressive station, and WBCN is playing “Dry Humping” now in Boston. A disc jockey decided to play suicide by playing Country Porn and leaving his job that way.

FF: Oedipus [aka Edward Hyson]?
Chinga: Oedipus, right. He loved Country Porn. It never gets a lot. The new one is getting, though. Radio play is the name of the game.

FF: Are there other Country Porn songs not yet recorded?
Chinga: Yeah, some of them that did not make the album are “Feeling You, Feeling Me”; another song called “Feeling Pornographic Over You,” “Muff Divin’ Man,” “Sado-Masochistic Transvestite,” “Pin-Up Boy,” “Edna’s White Nigger Band,” “Groupie Therapy.” I probably wrote 50 Country Porn songs. “Pity the Lonely Pervert,” which used to be in the show, sounds like “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.” “Pity the Lonely Pervert” was one of my favorites. I wrote it as a straight song, no dirty words. Audience anxiety to that, man, is, well, they don’t know how to take that. You know, you can pity the coal miner, but this is pity the lonely pervert. I found the most effective thing I used to go off the stage with was with this.

FF: Yeah, the way I see it, is to have the girls sing the chorus and then you come back with the trench coat.
Chinga: That’s what I did. That was the whole bit. I really want to do Country Porn II. Another idea I had was the Country Porn Songbook. All music books are sold in music stores, right? I’ll get some photos of some girls and have music, and then pictures, or the song right over the pictures, and it’ll come out on the newsstand. The first songbook ever to make the newsstand. Is that a hot idea or not? I’m going to write some people about it.

FF: Have you ever confronted Merle Haggard [d. 2016]?
Chinga: Yeah, but it’s gonna sound a bit anticlimactic. When Kinky Friedman recorded “Asshole From El Paso,” lawsuits came in; not from Merle Haggard, but from Buck Owens [d. 2006]. You see, Buck Owens owns that song. Merle has no interest in it. We went over to Merle’s house in L.A., and we played “Asshole” for him and he loved it. He loved the shit out of it. But he said, “Hey, I don’t own it.” I’ll show you how treacherous the music business is. Buck gets every penny from that song. Merle Haggard would never have become Merle Haggard if he hadn’t sold out the interest of that song. Personally, I’d welcome a lawsuit.

FF: On the record it says “Buck Owens”?
Chinga: No, I claim it as my own.

FF: No, I don’t mean on your record, I mean on Merle’s.
Chinga: On his, it says that Merle Haggard wrote it, but the publishing company is Buck Owen’s publishing company. In other words, Owens doesn’t claim he wrote it, but anyone who writes a song can write away their writer’s royalty. Merle Haggard had to write away every penny to Buck Owens. Theoretically, I ripped his music and didn’t list his publishing company because I want that lawsuit. Buck Owens is scared and won’t sue Chinga Chavin, man, he won’t. He’d come out mangled if he sued Chinga Chavin. CBS backed down and took it off the record. They still call “Asshole from El Paso” Kinky’s record. Do we want to get sued by Buck Owens? Oh, we’d love it. In court, we’d do “Asshole from El Paso” in choir. I’d get on the wire service. Buck has an attorney, Larry Groene, whose job is nothing more than dealing with litigations suing people for rip-offs.

FF: Are you upset that credit for it always goes to Kinky?
Chinga: Yeah, Kinky fucked me. I mean, he was a college chum. I gave him the name Kinky when we were pledge brothers together.

FF: You were roommates?
Chinga: We were roommates in University of Texas together. I mean, he not only claims he wrote it on the Rolling Thunder Tour, but there’s a book called On the Road with Bob Dylan [Editor’s Note: written by Larry Sloman, with introduction by Kinky Friedman; the “Ratso” character in Friedman’s mystery novels is based on Sloman – 2020] and in it, it reprints “Asshole from El Paso,” and in the front of the book it says, “reprinted with permission of the author, Kinky Friedman.” We wrote to Bantam and Bantam said, “Hey, well, they told us they did it, and sorry, next pressing we’ll print a retraction.” I mean, to go so far as to tell Bantam Books that he wrote it. What am I supposed to do, sue Kinky? I mean, I can’t even prove damages.

FF: Do you ever see him?
Chinga: Yeah, he was there last night. We’re still real good friends. With Kink, it’s like, “Hey I don’t know how it happened.” Now that I’m around, he introduces me as the author of “Asshole from El Paso.” But he, in actuality, pulled a Milton Berle [d. 2002] on me. For me, “Asshole from El Paso” is a second-rate song and a first-rate parody. Like “Dry Humpin’” is a great rock’n’roll song, but not “Asshole.” From the very beginning, when everybody told me to write it up, I said, naw. I never believed in the song from the beginning. It’s a bitch. On the Rolling Thunder Tour, Dylan would do all his heavies, everyone would do their heavies, then Kinky would do “Asshole from El Paso” and upstage everything. I mean, that was done at every performance of the Rolling Thunder Tour, did you know that? And all those people think he wrote it.

FF: Do you consider yourself New Wave or Country?
Chinga: The Country Porn album isn’t really Country. It’s rock’n’roll. “4 A.M. Jump” and “Dry Humpin’” and “Head Boogie” are all straight rock. But the second album, stuff like “Mechanical Man” and “Ain’t No Mommy an’ Daddy No More” and “Jet Lag” are more New Wave. It’s really amazing that Oriolo was ahead of his time with that Jet Lag stuff. The man is a genius – an absolute genius.. The new band is Walter Thompson on drums, Jack Sonni with guitar, Michael Bart on bass, and my own co-writer and musical director and guitarist par excellence, John Erokan. Sweet Johnny Guitar is his stage name. Lyrics class with me, music class with him.

FF: Who were your influences?
Chinga: My influences? Real basic, primal rock’n’roll. I open the show with “Little White Middle Class Rock and Roll,” which is gonna be on our next album. Heavy Chuck Berry [d. 2017], heavy all the rockabilly people, a lot of Rhythm & Blues, Blues, and now I like the Rolling Stones, AC/DC. I like real, raw rock/rock’n’roll. I always sort of liked that, you know; real boogie-woogie type stuff. My comedy influences are Lord Buckley [d. 1960] and Lenny Bruce [d. 1966]. More Lord Buckley than anyone else. I can do a great version of “The Nazz.” Originally, I was interested in jazz for a while. But with rock’n’roll, I never really knew how primal it was in my life. Really thumping rock’n’roll. When I was growing up in El Paso, that was real Rockabilly country. Buddy Holly [d. 1959]-Last Picture Show type country. I really like screaming, loud music. I don’t like Country music. The parody of Country was always in my act. You’ll notice that sometimes I talk in a Western accent on stage. I used to do it a lot more. The kind of persona I developed was incarnate parody at the very beginning.

FF: Do you still visit Juarez?
Chinga: I was in El Paso about two years ago to visit and it changed a lot.

FF: In what ways?
Chinga: Well, it smells the same. El Paso has changed less, actually. El Paso is a few years behind the rest of the country. Juarez isn’t the fantastic bed of primal decadence it was when I was growing up there. It was a climate condition created by abject poverty from the largest border city in Mexico. It’s the third largest city in Mexico. Abject poverty suddenly infused with American dollars and two big military bases. What this does is form a perversion stew. I worked at the Club Conquistador as a bartender, in Juarez. Now it’s slicker and more commercialized with rats in the street and potholes. I remember once there was a big rain and I was there at about five in the morning, and I was ready to go home after a night’s work, and there were torrential rains. They have no kind of drainage system so the streets just flood. All the whores were walking down the street with their dresses pulled over their heads because of the waist-high waters. They didn’t want their dresses wet and there’s fuckin’ tits and cunts all over the place. All they wanted was to protect the dresses. It was so funny seeing 50-60 women walking down the street like that.

FF: I wanted to go to the Juarez of the 1950s.
Chinga: God, it was exciting, man. At age 14, you could go across and do anything. I mean, you could eat out a chick while also ass-fucking a goat. Whatever you want. You know, the Federales and cops come in and you give them a big smile and a dollar and everything’s fine. You have to understand Mexicans. What can get you locked up a Juarez jail and never heard from again is peeing on the streets real blatantly and then insulting a cop. Like, they’ve got a weird pride. Money won’t even buy that off. Money and being hostile will not buy you off a Mexican cop. They’ve got a lot of deep-seated hatred. It’s an official thing against the State of Mexico to pee in the middle of the street. The Juarez jail was something else.

FF: What was it like growing up in the Juarez of twenty years ago?
Chinga: Being young, the whole carnal aspect of it was so fucking great. My teenage years were my heavy drinking years. I don’t drink now, but I really got into it. I’m not talking about adulthood; I’m talking about the year after Bar Mitzvah time. That’s when it started. I mean, I could actually do it. I had hooker girlfriends at 15 or 16. Juarez and El Paso join up so I’d leave El Paso High School at lunchtime and drive over to Juarez, rip off a piece of ass, and have a plate of tacos for 20 cents. Then we’d go back to high school drunk; I mean the whole afternoon in high school, I was drunk on my ass. I was in the AZA [Aleph Zadik Aleph], a Jewish youth organization when I was 15, up until the time I brought my hooker girlfriend to a dance. She made a lot of money off those horny young boys. She must have turns 14 tricks. There was another great thing. The Mexican maids there for your house – your mommy’s maid – got about 50 cents an hour. That’s $4.00 for a whole day. We’re talking about in the early ‘60s, back in El Paso, with all the nice, horny little Jewish boys. The trick was to try to talk your mom into hiring a good-looking maid because when mommy was gone and the maid was there, the maid would fuck and it was bang-o city. So we were fucking each other’s maids, and everything. They would come over and they didn’t speak a word of English and it would be like, “Hey, Ira’s mom got a new maid, and she is so fuckin’ good looking.” So mom was paying the maid $4.00 and their sons were screwing her. We never even thought twice about that sort of shit. What we didn’t do was pay heavy attention to the average El Paso white girls, if you were hip then. There were straights, but we would abandon El Paso for Juarez. Our girlfriends, our friends, our contacts were all Mexican. I had this friend, Tommy Hernandez, from one of the very rich families in Mexico. He was vice president of a bank while in high school. I didn’t know him in grammar school, but in grammar school, a famous event happened in the fifth grade: Tommy Hernandez drove to school – himself – in his own Corvette. In the fifth grade! He was in the school yard burning rubber in the fifth grade. He had a valid Mexican driver’s license. These were the guys I hung out with in Juarez. If you killed someone by accident or even on purpose, it cost you 1,000 pesos, if you knew who to pay off.

FF: How much was that?
Chinga: I could get 40 pesos for a $5 bill. Everything was so fantastically corrupt. I used to get drunk and go to the bull fights. It was all tied together. I can’t explain it. It’s the same whirlpool that comes from the American dollar and abject poverty. It was just a spectacle. It may not be apocalypse now but it was apocalypse then. No one got hurt real bad, and so it was okay. If only those Jewish mothers knew that their kids were banging away at whores. And on the other hand, the maids were stealing socks. The whole poverty thing was amazing. I was shocking.

FF: Are you afraid of reaching the point where you are no longer shocking?
Chinga: No, I’m not. Being shocking has always been with me since I was a real little kid. It’s like hearing a mirror image of myself. When George Carlin stepped up, I thought, that’s what I’d be doing if I was doing stand-up. That kind of street jargon. Anyway, I was always a troublemaker/agitator type that shocked people. I worry more about the fact that I want to do that sometimes more than pursue the straight artistic integrity of a project. I worry on the other hand that I’m all shock value. I’m not worried about not being shocking. I worry about the fact that I really love to fucking do it. I love the feeling that the audience is a little bit frightened. Ever since my experience with the Cub Scouts, I’ve been very, very anti-authority and I like being a troublemaker. I was drummed out the Cub Scouts. Did you ever hear of anyone being drummed out? I forgot my parents’ signatures on the electives. I hate authority. That’s not to say I hate bondage or S&M!