A few words about Kim Fowley— I saw him just a few weeks ago. My friend Ginger Suzuki and I went to visit him, both knowing it was probably the last chance we’d have to bask in his greatness. He was so sickly in appearance, but Kim was always kind of sickly in appearance, overly tall, under weight, gaunt face, so this was nothing so strikingly different. But now he was reluctantly confined to his bed with his beloved Kara taking care of him. He had lost color and weight he couldn’t afford to lose, but still, right there on his bed beside him was his trusty legal-sized yellow notepad where he had scribbled an album song order for some unknown band or Hollywood Boulevard troubadour he had no doubt just discovered. Time was standing still. So many times I had watched Kim sit on the floor in his Hollywood apartment—he never sat in chairs, and scribble out album titles and potential song orders for my future album. When I first met him he devised his master plan for my success. First he suggested, with a straight face, that I change my name to “Charles Hollywood”, and record an emotional album entitled “Love Letters Never Sent”. I’m not so sure about Mr. Hollywood, but the idea behind the album was right on. He would tell me, “Right now you’re too young to be Barry Manilow, but when you turn 28 it will be time for you to do this kind of album.” As usual, Kim was way ahead of his time. In 4 days I will release the album he thought I always should have done. As so many have said, it’s an impossible task to portray Kim in a few words, or in any words—you just had to be there. He had his own language, sometimes bizarre and inappropriate to outsiders, yet comforting and hilarious to those in the know. Every day Kim would sit on his apartment floor and go through his Rolodex to “troll for money”. Really this just meant periodic check-ins with everyone he had ever met in the industry to let them know he was still vital. When he’d get to my name, usually around 11PM, we’d be on the phone for hours as he rattled off his latest credits. But this wasn’t just a manic frenzy from some egomaniacal Hollywood wannabe— everything he claimed to have done, he really did, and was still doing until the end. This wasn’t Kim bragging or hustling, even though it came off as such, no, he was educating. He was imparting wisdom gained through a lifetime at ground zero of every phase and fad music passed through. This was Kim telling his friends that no matter how crappy the music business was, there was reason to be optimistic, there was always a way to make things happen, if you never give up and keep hustling. Although Kim may have claimed to be the world’s greatest hustler, too many took that the wrong way. He wasn’t the typical showbiz hustler who needs to scam people to survive. No, hustling to Kim meant to work every angle, to never give up, to think not just outside the box, but outside the galaxy. And to never, ever take no for an answer. Couple that with his innate ability to spot or nurture talent where others couldn’t, and more accurately than hustler, Kim Fowley was quite simply the Nostradamus of Rock ’n Roll. As a young kid in L.A. trying to navigate a frustrating and ridiculous music industry, he became my mentor, my employer, a collaborator, a personal advisor, and yeah at times even a zany father figure. As he would do for all his friends, he would take hours telling me what I should do to reinvent myself. He didn’t have to do that. I never made him much money, but he wanted to see his friends have success. He taught me about the REAL music business with such insider tips as, “Kyle, don’t ever ask about the 10% off the top that the labels take. It’s for the mafia”. He taught me about publishing, promotion, how to draw a crowd, how to work a room, and some things I can’t mention in a family-friendly post. I draw upon these lessons nearly every day while “going through my Rolodex”. Kim was incredibly misunderstood, but only by those who didn’t take the time to understand him. He took a lot of crap from the suits. The bigwigs in the industry usually didn’t take him very seriously or worse would mock him. Oh sometimes that was his own doing, he could go off on odd tangents and confirm their incorrect beliefs that he was a loon. But he wasn’t a loon at all. His brain just fired much faster than theirs; he was seeing the future and was way ahead of the suits— they just couldn’t keep up. And more often than not, at the end of the day, he was proven right—right about so many huge acts that he had worked with, usually before they enjoyed success. Many of those acts forgot about his contribution to their success, we never did. I was speaking with my lifelong friend and former bandmate Jonathan Daniel shortly after news came in about Kim. We realized that were it not for Kim who knows if we would still be doing what we’re doing. Before we met him we would draw maybe five people to a Candy show. Then Kim saw us at maybe our 2nd show ever, at Madame Wong’s West in L.A. After the show he took us out to Canter’s on Fairfax and told us about how we could be the next matinee idols. He held court nonstop until sunrise. I learned more from that night than I have in all my years in music. The next day Kim had us over to his apartment on Hayworth in Hollywood to hip us on how to bring more people to our next show which would be at the world famous Troubadour. He took out his infamous Rolodex and told us to call every single person in it, which was about 500 people, some with the oddest names, “Motorcycle John”—who was not to be confused with “Montreal John”! When we arrived at the Troubadour there was a line around the block. We had sold it out. Yes, even Motorcycle John was there. From drawing five to selling out the Troub, Kim had launched our careers. He then took us into a studio to cut our first demos. I was struggling with singing a vocal. I just didn’t have the right mindset. Kim promptly went outside onto Ventura Blvd. and returned with a young blonde who had happened to be walking by. He placed her in the corner of the studio, whispered something in her ear, and then rolled tape telling me to try singing the vocal again. As soon as I began the girl started to disrobe and I cut a keeper vocal. Kim definitely knew how to get the best out of his singers! Soon I became Kim’s driver and personal assistant. I would do everything from his grocery shopping to cleaning the litter box of his Himalayan cat, Sunshine Kitty, to driving him to doctor appts and industry meetings. The stories I could tell of those times are endless. They could fill a book, but also probably get half of Hollywood arrested. Every day was like going to Rock n’ Roll College. I’d drive him around in whatever broken down jalopy I happened to have at the time. One image that keeps coming back to me happened one day after a meeting on Hollywood Blvd. My car, a tiny Fiat Spyder convertible, wouldn’t start. So Kim got out and started pushing the car with me steering it, trying to jump start it. The imagery is hilarious to this day. As he began to push, he looked at me and said, “Rock n’ roll teenage reality”. Classic! One afternoon Kim told us we were going to play a showcase performance for some industry people. He rented out a room on Melrose. I had only been playing guitar for about a week. We were certainly not ready for what he had set up. Suddenly, in through the door walked the most important executive in the history of the music business—Clive Davis! I could barely breathe. We proceeded to give it our best, but we were just too early. Clive passed, and was right to do so at the time. Kim was always early. But he knew. He saw what others didn’t or took too long to see. We signed a big record deal about a year later. The eternal optimist, Kim was always coming up with new ways to survive in the music business. His greatest innovation? Probably his “Dollar-A-Minute” music biz mentoring. Kids from Iowa or wherever would show up and literally pay him a dollar per minute—actually pulling dollar bills out of their pockets and placing them on his desk as they sat there, to get his critique on their usually dreadful songs, followed by his brutally honest take on their only possible path to the top of the charts. But what was so great about Kim was that he would give everyone hope that they too could have a hit, even the kid from Iowa with a dreadful song. Was it just a hustle to get the kids parents to pay Kim to produce his album? Maybe a bit, but he really did believe that anyone, absolutely anyone, with the right master plan, could have a hit. His self-proclaimed title as “The Duke of Dreams” was actually spot on. Over the years I did countless studio backing vocal sessions with Kim as he produced one campy act after another. From “Mommy & Mira”—a 30-something woman and her 10-year old daughter, to “Stoney Blue”, a temperamental perpetually tipsy Madonna sound-alike guy, to “The Cosmetics”—a vocal group made up of members whose individual genders escape me to this day, to an assembly line of Sunset Strip hair-rock bands, Kim’s stable had it all. We were paid $25 per song, and sometimes one song would take from 9PM ’til 4AM as Kim would meander about occasionally blurting out some profane, crazy demand, “This song needs more urine!” And somehow we knew exactly what he meant. Crazy brilliant. Through all the knocks he took— he had polio in his youth, teeth issues, industry setbacks, I never once heard Kim talk about giving up, never threaten to throw in the towel, never cynical or depressed. He bounced back better than anyone I’ve ever known. He treated every rejection letter, and there were reams of them, as a way to get more fired up. After a day where I had opened and read a big handful of rejects to him, he proclaimed with long lanky arms high in the air, “I’m like a chicken! They’ve cut off my head but I’m still dancing!!” Seeing and absorbing his resilience would carry me through some of my own tough times in this biz. When I ran into him in 1996 at the SXSW music festival in Austin, (wearing his trademark gargantuan bright yellow banana suit), I told him I was there to try just one more time. He pulled me aside and told me to forget about attending the industry panels and going to the concerts, but instead to go hang out in the Four Seasons hotel bar and “work the room”. He gave me an elevator speech—a 30-second pitch on why a suit should sign me. I wrote it down and went to work. A month later I had a major label record deal. As Ginger and I were preparing to leave a few weeks ago, from what I was pretty sure would be my last visit with Kim, I tried to make my goodbye un-heavy, I just tossed out a “See ya, Kim”. But do you think for a moment Kim Fowley would permit our last interaction to be without lasting meaning? Not a chance. With deep direct eye contact, he looked at me and almost uncharacteristically and with more emotion than I had ever seen in him, said something so simple, but so sweet. I think that after so many years of stops and starts in my career, all the near misses, all of which he had been aware of, he sensed that I was needing a pep talk to keep going. The room was dead quiet as he said, “Kyle, you’re great at what you do. Don’t stop. Keep singing. Keep writing. It’s what you were born to do. You’re going to get there.” There will never be another like Kim. He was unapologetically himself 24/7. Honest to a fault. Boundless energy, always seeking another project or the next big thing. But what many don’t know is that Kim only really wanted one thing. He spent his entire life searching for it. No, it wasn’t a hit, he had those. Not a gold record, his walls were covered with those. Not even fame or fortune, he had experienced all that. But one thing had eluded him. He wanted what we all want. He wanted true love. He wanted one person to spend his life with. And after decades of searching, he found her. If you asked Kim what his greatest achievement was, no question it was finding Kara. And that should give us all peace, knowing that he was so very happy at the end. -kv
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 20:55:11 +0000
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