OLD SCHOOL: Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds play unreconstructed New York punk rock. |
The late 1970s were a time of ignition. Punk rock set a fuse that burned through every aspect of the arts, and through the lives of those who got close enough to see the sparks and smell the powder.On a hot night in an LA club, the life of Brian Tristan, a suburban Mexican-American kid who loved the heat of the new sounds and sights coming out of New York and shimmering across the country, instantly changed.
“Jeffrey Lee Pierce came up to me and said, ‘You should be in a band.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘I should be the singer. I’ll show you how to play guitar.’ ” And that was it. Tristan was reborn as Kid Congo Powers, a sly, laid-back master of slinky grooves and incendiary slide six-string, and Pierce and Powers started one of the most influential bands to emerge from the early punk scene: the Gun Club.
This Saturday, when Powers comes to the Middle East fronting his new band Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds, he’ll be toting nearly 30 years of edgy creativity along. Although Powers, an internationalist who now lives in Brooklyn but is preparing to relocate to DC, hasn’t ever cracked the mainstream, he’s worked in some of the most colorful and crucial corners of the rock-and-roll underground. His résumé includes not only the Gun Club — whose “For the Love of Ivy,” “She’s like Heroin to Me,” and “Sex Beat” are still played by torchbearers nightly and, occasionally, by Powers himself — but the Cramps, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Die Haut, and Congo Norvell.
It’s natural that he’s spent most of the last decade in New York City. When he was a teen riding the first waves of punk, New York was his North Star. Although he lived in Los Angeles, he formed a Ramones fan club, and whenever he and his ring of friends and pen pals could save up the $69 fare for a coast-to-coast Greyhound, they’d head to Mecca on the Hudson.
“We had no idea what we’d do when we got there, and we didn’t care,” he recounts over the phone. “That’s where the music and art were happening, and that’s where we wanted to be. I’d seen Patti Smith on her first tour and I was never quite the same after that.”
On his initial night in New York he went straight from the Port Authority to the Village Gate to hear Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers play an early show. “Then the whole audience marched down Bleecker Street to see the Dead Boys at CBGB’s. I thought, ‘This is good.’ ”
It’s still good today. Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds’ debut, Philosophy and Underwear (New York Night Train), is unreconstructed New York punk rock — the kind that Smith, Television, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, the Dead Boys, and Thunders used to make. It’s cool and creative. Slide guitars and tortured bent notes sail through tunes like “Richard Three” and the squalling “Black Bag” while Powers, who sounds like an earthier version of John Waters, sneers and purrs through his evocative lyrics. It’s free. Anything goes as Powers and co-guitarist Jack Martin rip through melodic conversational rants like “The Weather the War” or create textural soundscapes or toss around sharp skittering tones as if they were handfuls of gravel. And it’s got history. Sometimes the past is borrowed. “The History of French Cuisine” hews to the soulful, funky script of Memphis soul. And often that history belongs to Powers, whose licks reverberate with the lessons and sonic signatures of every band he’s played in.
