(Kim Fowley died earlier this week but rock nyc enjoyed one last viewing of the legendary LA rock and roll mastermind at a 2013 book signing. Our own legendary LA rock and roll mastermind Alyson Camus was confused by the whole thing, and we post the story here -rnyc)
Kim Fowley is such a weird character, I didn’t know much about him but his appearance at La Luz de Jesus, the bookstore and art gallery on Sunset Boulevard, was announced as a unique event on Saturday night, and it triggered my curiosity. I went there around 7 pm and left after 9 pm, and I still don’t know exactly what I have witnessed: more than two hours of non-stop Fowley talking and singing (lots of singing), 2 hours of sex jokes, memories about people I had never heard about, 2-hours of people shouting at him names of more or less famous celebrities,… it was a surreal experience that I have watched like a total alien who had landed on another planet, right in the middle of Hollywood underground culture.
Fowley is an old guy now, sitting in a wheelchair, but still talking about rock’ n’ roll upper and lesser gods, narrating his memories with improvised songs sung the Dylan or Springsteen way (among many others), telling a lot of dirty sex jokes, about his future young wife or his penis — that was removed? I am not sure but he said so when asked about his greatest/weirdest sexual experience. Flanked by two dark-hair young women, his ‘future wife’ and his nurse, Lady Satan, he read excerpts from his book ‘Lord of Garbage’, most of the time singing them while accompanied by someone on a kurzweil synth. He was calling up all kinds of people who had showed up for the reading/signing, asking them to do some duet with him, either to promote their band (everybody seems to be in an band in Los Angeles), or their book (again everybody is a writer?) or whatever people wanted to do. It was a loose set of impro, with Fowley asking every 15 minutes what time it was (the signing was supposed to start at 9:30 pm) as if he was a grumpy old man asking what time was the soup served in his retirement home. There was sure a contrast between his frail appearance and his dirty wax poetic language which often sounded like long diarrheas of a dying man (he used that term a few times).
Was that really the record producer/singer/songwriter/musician/film maker who managed the Runaways back in the days? No doubt about it! Listening to him and his non-stop flow of words, you could have imagined this guy doing about anything, touching elbows with the greatest but staying weird enough to be at the edge of mainstream culture. He looked like a cross between John Waters and Kenneth Anger, this kind of iconoclastic and colorful character who rarely exists anymore these days.
A woman next to me said she was the ex-roommate of Scott Anderson, the Runaways’ road manager, another one, who looked in her 70s despite her black leather hard-rock hot look, shouted at him ‘do you remember me?’ and all evening long, it was this kind of camaraderie-gathering, with its lot of inside jokes. He made about everyone sing, some random tall woman picked in the crowd, inviting people to get in the front with ‘You are not going to have a hard-on if you don’t see me’, asking the most offensive and funny question to people, ‘You are well-dressed, are you a criminal?’ he said to an elegant man. He seemed to know everyone, or to have known everyone, from an LA weekly columnist who was there, to the legendary trashy-big-boobs Angelyne who made a brief apparition, to Phil Spector, who still owns him money apparently, and the band Poison, which wasn’t there but owns him their moniker. Some crazy 2-hour, although I still feel very confused about the whole thing.