Kim Fowley

The son of a television actor and nephew of the renowned Friml, a star of Broadway music halls in the first half of the twentieth century, Kim Vincent Fowley, born in '39, is the great, eccentric, scatterbrained importer of novelty into rock music. During his apprenticeship, towards the end of the '50s, he fell in with a certain Phil Spector (then a guitarist) in the short-lived Sleepwalkers. As with Spector, who was later completely swept up in his production style that eventually became an international koinè, Fowley too attained the status of producer, or rather of talent-spotter. More than his colleague's maximalist method, Fowley was interested in artists with high entertainment potential, an entertainment fed by non-sense gags, random onomatopoeia, buffoonery and even idiocy, a taste for caricature. So, between 1960 and '62, out came the Hollywood Argyles, the Rivingtons (forebears of the stuttering "Surfin Bird" by the Trashmen), the Marmaids, the Stingers, all sponsored by him, but also invented out of thin air as mere aliases of Fowley himself. Fowley's creative and production logic ran openly against the grain of — or offered a hilarious critique of — the ways of beat music and manufactured commercial groups. Already this first stretch of his life and career is really a first chapter of his delirious total work.

After playing on and producing other people's tracks (he would even show up on the legendary "Freak Out" by Frank Zappa), Fowley wasted no more time and in 1967 recorded his first album, "Love Is Alive and Well", a small but intensely pointed satire of the psychedelic world. Shortly after, a "Born to Be Wild" also came out, with which he put some order — obviously twisting the arrangement completely — among his various singles circulating on 45 rpm at the time.

But above all, Kim Fowley had in mind a concept of the all-encompassing work of art, one that would also absorb his very existence. Always fascinated by orgiastic rituals, bacchanals and the decadent gatherings of the Epicureans — a spirit he hadn't yet managed to express in full — the elusive, uncategorizable proto-dandy Fowley thus created his unrepeatable masterstroke, "Outrageous".

"Outrageous" is not only a superb and repellent showcase of his abilities, but also, and above all, a powerful catalogue of his inner world and his vision of the stereotypes — even the most alternative and significant ones — of the artistic culture of his time. Three examples are the most immediate proof of this: "Animal Man", a meeting of solemn San Francisco Bay Area acid-rock, a rowdy gang of improvisers, and a nonchalant (and lascivious) showman. "Inner Space Discovery", first a stammering, limping horror fable, then a dissonant, cacophonous novelty tune with dotted rhythm and sparse anti-rhythmic drumming, then even a cosmic hallucination. "Barefoot Country Boy" is pure rockabilly parody, perfectly Chuck Berry-esque, over which he lays a stream of consciousness interspersed with burps and phlegm. Equally original is the pompous, shamanic "Bubble Gum", which links back to "Animal Man" to attack the blues with a curiously catchy refrain (fittingly bubblegum-like), muted at first — where he still shows off his interpretive genius — and then driven by a pounding rhythm.

"Wild Fire", one of the peaks of the ceremony, is a piece as obscure as it is captivating, with a lounge-blues backing and a vomited, broken, disjointed spoken delivery that doesn't quite know what to say and insists madly on single words, machine-gunning them out, pushing his backing musicians to increase both speed and, above all, temperature (he explicitly demands this of the instruments during the track), until it all collapses breathlessly into a surreal ending.

"Hide And Seek" (instrumental) and "Chinese Water Torture" (vocal, with Fowley doing his own grotesque impression of Oriental speech over just a few background effects) together form a double prelude to the garage skit of "Nightrider", with the performer writhing through barks, moans, hawking, strangled screams, a frontman's delirium disgusting enough to make the likes of Mick Jagger, Van Morrison and Ray Davies blush.

As excessive as it already is, Fowley then unleashes the nightmare of "Medley", the monster track (a "monster" in every sense) that runs riot for 15 minutes on side two, one of the great tours de force of arcane — and paroxysmal — rock of any era. At first ("Up") it's an acid-tripper's reading, over a backdrop of hallucinogenic effects venturing into a mysterious void, almost testing out the instruments, before he takes charge of the whole saraband, working himself up like a man possessed. By now in full showman mode, in the second movement, "Caught In The Middle", the instruments hang back warily, almost frightened, awaiting his command; then they turn thunderous for an instant only to immediately shatter into dissonance and electronic echoes, until the showman is left alone in another dimension, one he has no trouble calling "hell".

But his one concern is to keep the show going: his sheer force ("louder"!) summons the instruments back, until this lost Jim Morrison leads his own "The End" to explosive new transfigurations, once again pulverizing everything, collapsing, gasping for breath. When at last he asks his band for a "funeral march" he practically tries to devour it whole. Finally ("Down") he revives it in ever deeper, more infernal psychedelic abysses, in a diminishing orgasm of distortion foam, a pirouetting organ and chaotic refractions of echo and electronics. One of the most adventurous and pyrotechnic moments in all of psychedelia.

Just as the Beatles' "Her Majesty" closes out the suite on side two of "Abbey Road", in the same way this prodigious "Medley" is followed by a short track, "California Hayride", in which Fowley gives one last demonstration of his unbridled technique: his voice alone, split into its freest, most Dadaist self, once again swallowed up by psychedelic reverb.

A record that attracts and intimidates in equal measure, the way an intrusive, hyper-charismatic entertainer might: a perfect — and hyperrealistic — snapshot of his apocalyptic yet exhausting, thunderous yet petulant, cajoling yet arrogant, hilarious yet repugnant spirit. Under the aegis of Lenny Bruce, and like the great showmen and great charlatan preachers you wish would never stop while at the same time can't wait to be rid of: sticky and repellent, he stages the irresistible sense of mass horror and obscenity. The arrangement benefits from invaluable help (Marty Cerf, the album's writer, and also Mars Bonfire's guitar), but the future influences are staggering: the great creative frontmen, Captain Beefheart above all, but also his disciple Jonathan Richman (the impromptu Modern Lovers), the Runaways, another of his direct creations; and then, indirectly, Malcolm McLaren, the next great schemer, god of the impromptu band par excellence (Sex Pistols). There's even a hint of tongue-in-cheek apocalypse in the liner notes (written by Fowley himself): "Let's be born again. Let's go out of our minds to get back in. We have all died, haven't we?". Remastered and reissued on 180-gram vinyl in 2012 (with two "hilarious" radio spots as bonus tracks), and compiled on the double anthology "Wildfire" (2013), alongside the follow-up "Good Clean Fun" (1969).

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23/06/2013