More on Kim Fowley

Here's an excerpt about Kim Fowley from Evelyn McDonnell's book Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways. It fleshes out his Dickensian childhood as well as a formative encounter with music biz hucksterism:


Kim’s mother married again, to musical arranger William Friml. Kim received his first music-biz lesson by listening through the walls as his stepfather worked with musicians to craft hits and careers. It was an education not in musical inspiration, talent development, and the frisson of collaboration, but in shrewd packaging and manipulation—the worst mass-culture nightmare of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school.

“The client would come in and these guys would figure out ways around their inabilities to sing and play and perform, and at the end of it they had a package and would make thousands of dollars a week,” he recalls. “That’s when I learned how to record attitude and arrange attitude, as opposed to actually having musical talent. The Runaways, for example, as a group were not great. They had strengths and weaknesses individually, and I was always aware of what they couldn’t do musically, and I would hide that from the audience, and then I would play on the things they could do… I learned at a young age that not everybody who walks in the doors is Caruso or somebody who’s going to be Al Jolson and stop the show every night. Some of these people don’t deserve to be on a stage, they don’t deserve to be on an album cover, but they have pretty faces, or they can dance, or they can do something else, and then suddenly, it becomes product...

And these two quotes portray him a pre-rock type, perhaps born a bit too early, more comfortable in a world where songwriting duties were atomized instead of clustered in the singer-songwriter:

But despite its volume, Fowley’s portfolio is incoherent, random, inconclusive—a testament to valuing quantity over quality. “He must have had twenty misses for every hit, if not thirty or forty,” says Cliff Burnstein, who did early record promotion for the Runaways, then became one of the top managers in the music business. “His hits came out of a more freewheeling era of pop, which had changed radically by the 70s.”

In 1974 Fowley recognized the New York Dolls’ androgynous appeal and decided Los Angeles needed its own idols of raunch and roll. So he assembled the Hollywood Stars: five male, long-haired rockers, including sometime Flaming Groovie Terry Rae and future Runaways songwriter Mark Anthony. At the time, the singer-songwriters of the Foothills—Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King—dominated the California music scene. Manufacturing a glam band was a way to counteract the troubadour tradition and put power back in the hands of producers and publishers, of hustlers like Kim.

Kim Fowley (1939-2015)

By the time he was fifteen, Kim Fowley, who died Thursday from bladder cancer at the age of 75, knew what he wanted to do with his life. The son of actors Douglas Fowley (the apoplectic director in Singin' in the Rain) and Shelby Payne, he had an unstable childhood bouncing around foster homes after his parents divorced. But Payne later married pianist/arranger William Friml, son of ASCAP co-founder Rudolph Friml, and young Fowley found himself surrounded by film and music industry types in the 1950s who kept tossing around the name Paul Gregory, a producer/agent who helmed greatest film of all time candidate The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Gregory was the type of character who rose to prominence with the decline of the old Hollywood studio system in the post-WWII years when long-term contracts gave way to putting together self-incorporated talent into package deals. A greater emphasis was placed on the hustle and with a heat generator like Gregory as his inspiration, Kim Fowley embarked on a career as the archetypal rock 'n' roll hustler.

To grasp the breadth of his hustle, one need only learn that he was associated with both Helen Reddy and GG Allin. His CV reads like a target riddled with many, many desperate attempts to hit a bullseye. He would latch onto an act either on their way up (The Runaways) or on their way down (The Byrds). But only very early in his career did he get the timing right producing The Hollywood Argyles' "Alley Oop," a US number one in 1960, The Murmaids' "Popsicles and Icicles," and B. Bumble and the Stingers' incredible "Nut Rocker," a boogie woogie version of "The Nutcracker Suite" on which Fowley took songwriting credit. When those pension plans dried up, he launched one of the most dumbfounding recording careers in rock 'n' roll history.

It was really more a negative image of a recording career. Here was this thing over there called rock 'n' roll or psychedelia or glam or punk or new wave and Fowley would fire off a cheap, cynical exploitation of it in order to generate any sort of buzz. "The Trip," a decent-sized hit in 1965, established his m.o. -  a monologue rambling about something mock-transgressive while a band dribbled on anonymously in the background. As teens in the 1980s, my Gen X friends and I adored "The Trip" and Outrageous which we heard as chinks in the Boomer armor, blatant attempts to con the counterculture into buying back bits of itself. But Fowley was capable of real songs such as "Bubble Gum" from Outrageous, later covered by Sonic Youth, and the late 1970s über-catchy power pop nugget "Motorboat." When Kiss went meta on Destroyer, naturally they turned to Fowley for two hilarious snapshots of the rock star grind - "King of the Night Time World" and "Do You Love Me?" And he was hustling right up to the very end, providing several songs for Ariel Pink' 2014 album pom pom. Too bad there's no copyright in lighting lighters at concerts, a practice Fowley was said to have initiated for the Plastic Ono Band at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in 1969.

Kim Fowley was sleaze incarnate, a skeevy rock 'n' roll lizard perpetually slithering his way to the next big thing. For a taste of his grotesqueries, read the epic Ugly Things interview (finally made available here) on an empty stomach. But we're unsettled by Fowley because he lays bare the mechanisms of the capitalist treadmill. We're all hustlers to a certain extent. And now that we're all becoming self-incorporated free agents, Kim Fowley's anti-career has the feel of a premonition about it.