interview by Alex Zander
Kim Fowley owns the most impressive resume in rock n’ roll. There is no denying that
the man is a living legend. He literally has the Midas touch when it comes to turning art
into gold. At sixty-three years, the man wants the women of the world to know he is a
sexual dynamo, and when it comes down to an interview he stresses that he is literally
the king of filth, sleaze, and perversion.
Kim Fowley and Alex Zander Hollywood CA 2002
I met Fowley while in Hollywood in the fall of 2002. I didn’t know what to make of the
guy. He ran through a list of rock n’ roll references, claiming to have been a major part
of them all that my cynical manner easily passed off as bullshit. That was for about 10
minutes when my friends in the industry confirmed that he indeed somehow managed to
do everything he claimed. He did invent The Runaways. He did write tunes for KISS,
Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, Van Halen, Wayne Newton, Steppenwolf, Nirvana, Manfred
Mann, and the list goes on and on. It is truly unbelievable. You know that song, “Alley
Oop?” That was Kim Fowley.
Alex Zander, Romell Regulacion of RAZED IN BLACK and Kim Fowley Hollywood CA 2002
Kim is still a consultant / independent contractor and has an open door policy for
anyone interested in acquiring his services for product evaluation and presentation to
the Hollywood-based music entertainment complex.
KISS with Fowley: Kim co-wrote two KISS classic songs, “King of the Night Time World” and “Do You Love Me.”
He currently excels at and offers 15 Professional Entrainment Skills, including:
Consultant, Promotion, Publicist, Speaker, and Actor (Not to mention Singer/Songwriter,
Producer, and Sexual Deviant). Fowley is responsible for more gold and platinum
records than anyone I’m aware of, and I have a pretty healthy knowledge of the
business that I’ve been drafted into. Fowley is a genius and Fowley is a freak, a freak
for you dirty girls. In all of our conversations he continues to stress he is willing and able
to take on any young filthy moral-less female of the speechless.
MK ULTRA Magazine cover which featured this KIM FOWLEY Interview
Alex Zander: When we made acquaintance it was at the Cleopatra Ten Year Anniversary
party and I’d like to know, what was it about an event like that brought somebody with
your track record to a show of that genre?
Kim Fowley: I worship the Goth Goddess and Dracula’s daughter, Satan’s sister and
they all were there and I realized that sexually it would be a real opportunity to connect,
so I journeyed from the edge of the desert with bodyguard, chauffeur and we got there
with the sole intent of seducing and corrupting as many women as possible, which we
succeeded in doing, I might add.
AZ: And is there something about the gothic girls, the vampire girls, that you find more
attractive than the average girl walking down the L.A. strip?
KF: Well, I can’t get a hard on in the dark. I have to have light to see the anguish on the
faces of the girls I crave. And the type of reptile prince that I am, the girl who is already
soiled really goes for what my program is as opposed to the girl on the street who wants
to fuck Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise.
AZ: And what is your program?
KF: My program is, I am the mirror. I am the expander and I am the extender of the
females need for her orgasm, not for mine. And I’m an enabler of many women to feel
free about themselves. A lot of my girlfriends are lesbians. I am often the only man
who’s intimate with women who normally wouldn’t deal with men at all in a sexual way.
AZ: Now at this particular party, did you find that there were a lot of women who played
the part and, in other words, looked that way for play, but didn’t actually…
KF: Well, there are always poseurs and there’s always the suburban bitch who shows
up, either Hollywood or New York or Chicago or London or Berlin, trying to give the
illusion to herself, her friends, and to strangers, that she’s ready to suck you into the
vortex of death, otherwise known as a dirty pussy, and a lot of them go home and wash
it off and go to work at Wal-Mart the next day and they don’t want to have sex with
anybody. Like some men who aren’t gay, go in drag, it’s a similar thing. They don’t go to
gay clubs and they have wives and daughters, but they dress up in garters and lace and
stuff, such and such. And there are women who do the same thing for the same
reasons.
Kim Fowley and The Runaways
AZ: And your program as far as what you want to do for women, has it been that way
since the 1960’s?
KF: No, its been that way since the 40’s. I’m sixty-three years old. I had my first serious
relationship when i was eleven years old and my girlfriend was twenty-seven. I learned
then it wasn’t what I was interested in, it was what they needed, If you can figure out
what women need on their own terms without forcing yourself on her that’s the trick. So
you align and consolidate what you need as a man and you bring it into their need area,
you deliver and then you have them for life anytime you want.
AZ: What kind of influence did your parents being in show business have to do with your
lifestyle as an 11-year-old?
KF: I have ten sets of parents. My father had eight wives, my mother had two husbands.
By the time I was nineteen I had ten sets of parents, fourteen grade schools, four high
schools, three universities, and two colleges. Pneumonia nine times and Polio twice. I
was exhausted when I entered the rock n’ roll arena, because I had an opium addict
father, a drug abuse and alcohol abuse mother and I was the lookout man when I first
met my dad out of the foster home when I was placed there during the war; when my
mother ran off with a rich guy and hoped my dad would die, which he didn’t in the war.
My first twenty-four hours with my dad, who was the movie director in Singing In The
Rain. I remember I was the lookout when he went and scored opium. I didn’t do drugs
like other guys, because I had drug addict or alcohol obsessive parents. When your
parents are extreme, you generally go the other direction, just like a lot of guys who are
junkies have a mom and dad who are Pentecostal or Methodist or something. They
restrict and I wasn’t restricted, I was let in on the decadence. I was allowed to be the
boy in the room full of opium addicts or alcoholics or morons and geniuses and gang-
bangs and seduction, death threats, I got to ride shotgun from the first grade all the way
up to senior in high school with these creatures of the night.
AZ: What was your first job in the entertainment business?
KF: My first job job the entertainment business was throwing outlaw parties. I had Polio
thru my junior and senior years in high school and I still have the disability, which you
didn’t notice, because [of] the brightly colored clothes, probably. I came out of a Polio
hospital with no place to live, my Dad had deserted me, my mother was long gone. So I
found kids in my high school who couldn’t get laid. We got them hookers and put them
in a hotel on a weekend when their parents would leave town and then we would get a
moving van to take all the furniture out of their house. We brought slot machines in, we
brought in an old bar, then we had bands play, then we had a food truck show up, we
would have our girlfriends bust the purses of all the girls in the party and we would have
our brothers outside stripping the cars. We had rock n’ roll going on. I knew how to be a
criminal aficionado and I knew how to make twelve hundred to two thousand dollars a
week doing this, my share, we would pay everyone else. Everyone got laid, everyone
got paid and I knew the music would work. I knew the kinds of music the kids at my
school would want to hear and see and we always had certain types of music that it
would work.
AZ: Where was it that you grew up?
KF: I grew up in West L.A., which is West Los Angeles, California. In my high school
was Ryan O’Neil, Jan and Dean and Beach Boys members, Sandra D., Nancy Sinatra,
and there were people who later went on to do music. We were all there, we were in an
outlaw car club culture. Very similar to what you seen in Rebel Without A Cause!.
AZ: Do you think that atmosphere contributed to success with you and the others artists
you mentioned?
KF: Well, you’re right, cause we were white people trying to be crazy and we needed
vehicles, like every white kid we went to black culture for inspiration. When I was in the
eight grade I read Iceberg Slim’s book, who was the influence for all the things, that Ice-
T and early rapper lyrics. He was the first black, post-war author who wrote about the
black experience, white pussy and how to control white women, how to deal with cock
and balls, power, dick and how a weaker man would pay for your girlfriend.
AZ: What about, as far as in the rock n’ roll business?
KF: It’s the same thing. Crime and rock n’ roll are the same thing. (pause for a few
seconds). When you look at politics or commercial entertainment it’s all based on the
same thing, it’s escapism, it’s celebrity, it’s dreams and power and darkness, its all
interchangeable. That’s why Ronald Reagan could be a president.
AZ: Do you think that Winona Ryder is sexier now that she’s involved in this scandal?
KF: I’d marry her. I would hope so. I hope she’s a junkie too. I would hope that she is
covered in piercings and tattoos and sleeps on a bed of nails. At least I would hope so.
AZ: That’s the answer I would have expected from you.
KF: Of course
AZ: Tell me what you are most well known for.
KF: I’m most well known for being disturbing…instead of saying Kim Fowley qualified
musical professional, which is really all I am. There is always the disclaimer, weird,
strange, different, radical, some kind of sidebar is always tossed in. Just like if a girl has
forty inch tits, you would have to mention it in some way. With me, you mention my
height, my age, my creepiness, which is supposed to diminish maybe, confuse, or
titillate my basic talent.
AZ: Well, the same can be said of Andy Warhol.
KF: Artist, film star, songwriter, a record producer, a music publisher, a deal maker, you
know it’s boring, tedious work. It’s just like being a football coach or private detective, it’s
grueling stuff and there’s a lot of resentment and hatred that goes along with it, with
both the public and the industry and the artists themselves. Just like Malcolm McLaren
or any Barry Gordy type of person, if you put who’s in the background, he’s never as
beloved as Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise might be or Julia Roberts, who don’t get criticism.
Even OJ Simpson doesn’t get criticism, but those of us who are extreme people, we
don’t get the greatness and the recognition, we get the grudge, “oh yeah, you had hits”
well I’ve sold 102 million records, and in 1997, 1996 I’m turning units in Billboard in four
different county’s charts.
AZ: Since what year was it. ‘96?
KF: Between ’96 and 2001, just in that recent time. In that five year period I charted
thirty times. And why? Well I’m musically skilled, I’m electronically skilled, I’m a
copyright scholar, I’m a person who is educated, a person who understands how to do
music business. my day job, dude. So, that’s really what I make money doing. Although,
when I lived in New Orleans, I was down there for a sexual sabbatical. I was down there
for black pussy. I was there for lesbian strippers. I was there for the Anne Rice voodoo
zombie culture. I was there for Mardi Gras and all the versions of Mardi Gras and as
many local festivals and celebrations. I would start at 11pm at night and I turn in at 7am
in the morning. I would sleep all day. I lived at the French Quarter, I was Mr. X, that was
my name. I didn’t say I was Kim Fowley with a hundred and two million records behind
me in that five year period that I charted thirty times. I never told anybody down there
what I did. When I was awake I would mail out music and collect money and the rest of
the time I would go crazy. I mean, I wouldn’t go crazy, but you would think I was going
crazy, because all I did was extend that year in high school, that summer of school
when you rule and then you never rule again. You know, you just buy beer for
everybody. You were a senior in a high school and then you realized you were a piece
of shit if you go to college, or a piece of shit if you start working at a factory or
something, but that summer you’re the golden boy, you know what I’m trying to say?
That last great American summer? I extended it for a whole life and I lived that way. As
a matter of fact, I’m going to be moving back to Europe. I’m leaving California, I’m going
to go overseas again and go back to being a sexual pig and just make gluttony of it all…
AZ: Sixty-three and you still perform, correct?
KF: Sexually or musically?
AZ: Let’s talk musically this time.
KF: Yes, I have several albums coming out. It’s all on my website. I have a total of eight.
I’m going to tell you after I answer the first part. The record is called The West Is The
Best or Five Days Without Sleep. I don’t know which title we’re going to use, but in that
situation, that’s myself and a bunch of desert rats out here in the desert with this kind of
heroin-serial killer-slow fuck-moan-cowbell-driven delta music. Then I have another
record coming out doing a totally different style that comes out in March. It’s like a
Tommy James and the Shondells record on a modern live; Like ZZ Top “Tush” meets
Ministry “Jesus Built My Hot Rod.”
AZ: They show you ten times on VH-1 where you say Nikki Sixx was dressed for MTV
before there was MTV.
KF: Right, well I’ve done two other specials for them. Bad Girls of Rock n’ Roll. I was on
camera, I’m on camera on the Alan Freed. You know, the man who coined the term rock
n’ roll? I’m also a featured commentator on the Sonny Bono tribute on the E! Channel,
and when John Phillips died I commented on that on Court TV. I’m also a movie actor.
I’m in a new movie at Sundance this year called End of the Century.
AZ: So, we can see that at all the independent movie houses soon, right?
KF: Apparently, I don’t know how much of me they use, but I sang four songs and I was
an actor in it. You never know at those things how much film was taken out with you in
it. I’m in another movie with David Bowie, Keanu Reeves and Cher called Mayor of the
Sunset Strip, which is a documentary. I have a book coming out, the working title
is…well, it changes all the time, the other day it was called “Monster Man Faces the
Lord of Garbage,” some days it’s called “Villain,” some days it’s called “Confessions of a
rock n’ roll Mad Man” and some days it’s called the “Book of Blood.” I don’t really know
what they’re going to end up calling it, but those are the titles that are floating
around.They won’t let me tell any rock ’n roll stories. They want filth and horror from me,
and garbage. They don’t want any celebrity or rock n’ roll stuff, they want the really bad
stuff I’ve been involved in. I was a professional soldier, Polio and all. I have to talk about
being in the Army and the Air Force. A lot of guys in the 50’s, young men needed to go
down there, run around in Jeeps, fuck native women and blow up bridges and stuff, so
that’s all in there; war stories and stuff during the war over Yugoslavia and all that. I had
the number one record during, I don’t know what they call that war, some people called
it the Serbian War, the Bosnia War, whatever the damn thing was called. We made an
album that was under a phony name and it was a take off on Bill Clinton and Monica
Lewinsky. Remember that Kennedy album that came out before The Beatles, that first
family album where they imitated the Kennedy’s? They had actors pretending to be the
Kennedy’s.
AZ: That’s way before my time.
KF: Well, it was the number one album before Thriller. It held the record of most albums
before Thriller came along and it was a light-hearted thing. We had an Elvis guy
pretending to be Bill Clinton singing about running a motorcycle gang if he would have
left office. Monica Lewinsky joining a group like The Spice Girls and stuff. It was fun and
we did it in New Orleans. Somehow it got over there and it became the number one
record. The radio station tat won the MTV freedom award, MTV Europe Freedom
Award, because during the war they played music-wise; the young kids wanted
freedom, wanted democracy, they would play all this radical music while bombs were
flying around and our album was number one there. So when I moved to Vienna, I was
brought down to sing there under the name Vultures In The Sky. I sang under the name
Canine Unit. I kind of sound like Bob Hope. I don’t know if I was entertaining the troops,
I was entertaining the girls there, it was pretty interesting. Somebody asked me if I
wanted a gig as a soldier there and I said, “no, I’ll have the gig as the visiting rock star.”
Kim Fowley and Thomas Thorn of The Electric Hellfire Club Hollywood CA 2002
AZ: I want to ask about when you do hypnosis, you do different kinds of things in a
performance. So say that I book you here or someone can book you in any other city,
what is it you will do?
KF: I’m my own opening act. I’m my own top-of-the-bill and I’m my own supporting act. I
come on stage, if I have my own musicians I do about thirty types pf music because I
used to be a demo singer. That means I can do folk rock. I can do country rock, I can do
pop, I can do delta blues, I can do country, I can do honky-tonk, I can do funk. Secondly,
whatever town I go into, I go in a day or two early and I figure out what’s going on in that
town and I wrote songs that improvise about that town and it’s issues. So if I came to
Chicago I would come and sing about Chicago. Or I would sing about the suburbs of
Chicago, or the drugs, the death and the horror of Chicago, or the beauty of Chicago. I
lived in Illinois anyway. I lived in Woodridge, out by Downers Grove.
AZ: And when was that?
KF: In ’85 – ’86, when the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl.
AZ: Yeah, the Super Bowl Shuffle
KF: My hair turned gray there, I didn’t have gray hair until I moved to Chicago. The
winter did it, I’m not a winter guy.
AZ: What type of things have happened during your performances that might be out of
the norm for say like a Henry Rollins or a jazz ensemble?
KF: Well, I’ve had my cock sucked on stage by a stripper, the fire department guy came
through doing a fire inspection and there’s my cock in a chick’s mouth. I then got
banned from L.A, city and then they let me play six months later, I showed up in a gold
Elvis suit with a Ku Klux Klan black hood on and got a gay guy to fuck a lesbian on
stage. That caused my record to be burned in the street by the manager of Licorice
Pizza in protest of my offensive stage show. So it’s beyond what Genitorturers do. This
is 1968 and she wasn’t doing that in 1968, she was doing her stuff.
AZ: Do you encourage audience participation?
KF: Well, I put twenty-five to thirty people on stage with me. I bring people from the
audience up. Other singers are invited. If there are ant politicians who want to talk about
anything, or activists that need a platform, I go to the bathroom or make a phone call
and I turn the stage or the band over to them. Let them do their thing, I’ll come back,
and if the audience wants me to, I’ll continue. Sometimes girls show their tits,
sometimes men show their cocks, sometimes gay people talk about their relationships.
I’ve had cripples come up there and show their artificial limbs. I’ve had drug dealers in
European countries advertise what they were selling in the bathroom on stage. It’s
provocative, it’s horrifying, and normally the people that would heckle me or would want
to fight, I invite them onstage so they can participate too. Of course each city and each
state all have laws so if someone brings me to Chicago I’d say, “okay, what’s the legal
framework here?’ Also, because I’m a professional, you can only do so many things and
there are restrictions everywhere when you do things in public, so if society said you
can’t mention chocolate, or you can’t talk about vegetables on stage, then I don’t go into
those areas. That’s a metaphor example. I find out what I can get away with. I attempt
to get away with stand if I can’t get away with anything, then I know how to rock. So if
we can’t be provocative and we can’t be revolutionary or dangerous, then we’ll just be a
bunch of jerk offs playing. The people can dance and bang their heads, that’s the worst
thing that will happen in one of my shows, is that you might throw up outside and feel
good about it. You might fuck that night, you might fall in love with your only wife that
night and meet her for the first time. You might form a band after seeing me, because if
a 63-year-old man can get up there and tear the place apart and change the world, then
anything is possible.
Kim Fowley and Jason Charles Miller (then of GODHEAD) Hollywood CA 2002
AZ: The one thing we deal a lot with are girl bands, and you are more or less the
godfather of that. Tell me about The Runaways, why did you decide to pick who you did
and how did you know that it would work?
KF: I knew it would work because of the Amazon culture. If you go back to Greek
Mythology, you see Venus and Goddesses of love and lust, enlightenment and Eve as
in Adam and Eve. Evil was introduced in the Garden of Eden, when Adam was given an
apple by Eve, the snakes and all that, so I always knew pussy was subversive. So if it’s
true that women brought down mankind from the very beginning, then they should
continue to do it. That’s when the friction between men and women with the first man
and woman. Secondly, during history here have been female heroes, Joan of Ark, Tokyo
Rose and various characters in religion, everything from the Virgin Mary to Mother
Theresa, and in terms of goodness and in terms of evil as in Delilah. You have the
Madonna shore contest tug-of-war in Western culture. You have total repression of
women in other cultures. You have women outliving men. Women drive men into an
early grave and dance on it with a 19-year-old boy from down the street. Women have
power called female energy. Even the Civil War, they had all-women bands, did you
know that? Men were off fighting, so women would entertain them, did music when the
men were away. There have been female bands before. What there hasn’t been before
is women playing rock n’ roll who were under the age of consent, which meant
underage girls. I had girls, I didn’t have women, I had girls 15 and 16 up there playing in
The Runaways when the group first came out. Those weren’t fabricated ages, they were
real; 13-year-old girls, 15-year-old singers and 16-year-old guitar players. That was also
the year that we had a female assassin you to kill Gerald Ford and the Governor of
Kentucky was a woman. There were women boxers and baseball players emerging as
sports figures. So men were getting more and more feminine. New York Dolls had only
been a couple years before The Runaways. The men were getting more feminine,
women were getting stronger, so there was a combustion on a Darwinian level. All of
the sudden it evolved into The Runaways.
AZ: But there’s a big difference between The Runaways and the GTOs, but The Runaways had a hit.
KF: Well that’s because Kim Fowley co-wrote. Frank Zappa, who I sang with on the
Mothers of Invention, my names on the first album, Frank wasn’t a hit writer, he didn’t
know how to write a hit song. Kim Fowley had hits, you can go on my website. Instead
of running down all my greatest hits, if you want to know what they are, look at the
website. Okay, so I was writing for KISS at the time. I already had “Do You Love Me”
and “King Of The Nighttime World” which I co-wrote on the KISS album, Destroyer. I
was co-writing a song with Alice Cooper called “Escape” on Welcome To My
Nightmare, so I was already a genius songwriter.
When I met Kim in L.A. we played a game. I would bring up a name or a subject and he
would give me a comment on it. I found the exchange do interesting that I decided to
make it part of this interview. Though the topics may not be of interest to the reader,
they are topics that are relevant to the producers of MK ULTRA and some represent the
MK ULTRA lifestyle. Some are out of sheer pop-culture curiosity.
AZ: Charles Manson.
KF: No outlet for his music skills
AZ: …elaborate a little.
KF: He didn’t have a record deal, so he found another way of getting his message
across,
AZ: Reality television.
KF: I think that American Idol and The Bachelor are wonderful, because it’s real
people being stupid on television and that’s entertaining.
AZ: Michael Jackson.
KF: Michael Jackson needs to make a gut-bucket funk record and he’ll be fine.
AZ: Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
KF: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, who would I marry? Brittney Spears. Who would
I have sport fucking with? Christina Aguilera.
AZ: Edie Sedgwick.
KF: Was the star of a movie called Ciao Manhattan that Kim Fowley produced and co-
wrote a song on the soundtrack.
AZ: Ralph Sonny Barger.
KF: Yeah, good writer. I like his book.
AZ: Howard Stern.
KF: Overrated. I like the dirty girls he has on there, but he’s too unkind and he’s not a
nice person to a lot of the people who go on that show. I think the dirty pussy part is
fine, but a lot of those people are really mutilated unnecessarily by him.
AZ: Johnny Cash.
KF: Johnny Cash at selling records was God.
AZ: Rick Rubin.
KF: Rick Rubin makes really goof records.
AZ: Marilyn Manson.
KF: There’s a picture of Marilyn Manson and Kim Fowley on my website and I spent
part of an afternoon with him watching him rehearse with his band. Marilyn Manson is
the Gene Simmons school of rock n’ roll strategy.
AZ: Anton LaVey.
KF: There’s a good writer. I met his daughter Zena, what a beautiful girl she is. She was
getting a to go order at Denny’s in Hollywood in the late 80’s and she was really good
looking at the time.
AZ: The first Woodstock.
KF: People got laid at both Woodstocks, the first and the third, the second one was too
much mud.
AZ: The final Woodstock.
KF: Yeah, a lot of filth there. Disorder is cool.
AZ: Nikki Sixx.
KF: Nikki Sixx has a brain.
AZ: Timothy Leary.
KF: He was a charming guy and I was just as intimidating, smart, and charismatic as he
was.
AZ: The Tubes.
KF: Fee Waybill is a good front man and choreographer.
AZ: LSD.
KF: Was the name of a song by the band called The Midnighters. When little Willy G
got thrown in jail I sang for him on a Midnighter’s album as a substitute singer on two
tracks.
AZ: Heroin.
KF: Heroin is the whole reason for The Velvet Underground existing. As Keith
Richards once said, “I never has a cold as long as I was on heroin.” You don’t get head
colds when you’re on heroin.
AZ: Gene Simmons.
KF: Gene Simmons is the General Douglas McArthur of rock n’ roll.
AZ: Bill Clinton.
KF: Bill Clinton, one half JFK, and one half Elvis.
AZ: George Bush, Jr.
KF: George Bush, Jr., I’m glad he’s my president. He’s exactly the president we need
right now. Although in the perfect world, John McCain would have been president with
Jesse Ventura as Vice President. I like to remind George W. Bush that we do have
atomic bombs and why doesn’t he use it? Everybody will straighten up for another 50
years. I mean, I remember when General McArthur, the Gene Simmons of the military
said in 1945, “If we keep the land war going, this war won’t be over until 1949 and
200,000 service men are going to die. But if we drop the bomb on Japan, the war will be
over in three days.” Good, let’s drop the bomb on Japan.
AZ: I think they killed less people at Pearl Harbor and we did more. They killed more
and did worse in New York than we could, just drop it on that mother fucker.
KF: Right. So, imagine where we would be right now a a country if Ralph Nader was
president. They would be having [a] love in on the left bank and serving macrobiotic
food.
AZ: And they would be dropping bombs on us.
KF: Yeah, use the fucking bomb because they’re going to use it. Get on with it so we
can have some good war records. Some band can show up and have dog tags that
glow in the dark on the stage, get up there and sing about the war. “War Pigs,” like
Black Sabbath, the whole album, like that kind of stuff on a modern level would be
good.
AZ: Jim Morrison.
KF: Best white rock n’ roll entertainer ever on stage. Better than Jagger or Elvis. God
onstage, period. God.
AZ: Larry Flynt.
KF: Hustler, I love that magazine. I love Barely Legal, that’s my bible. Those women
are all from central Europe, most of them. You know those naked chicks in there? Which
is another reason I’m going to Austria in April.
AZ: Since we’re on the subject of women, I have the Vanity Fair, November 2002,
which you are all over.
KF: I’m in two November issues. There’s been three music issues in the history of
Vanity Fair and I’ve done all three of them.
AZ: The reason I have this is for you. I’m looking and I want you to think about this;
Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Lopez, Sheryl Crow, Debbie Harry, Shirley Manson, Alicia Keys,
Norah Jones, Eve, and Nelly Furtado. Which one would you like to see do an eight page
Hustler spread over all the other ones?
KF: Gwen Stefani.
AZ: Which one would you prefer to take to bed?
KF: Shirley Manson. But I would listen to Norah Jones’ music while I was eating Shirley
Manson.
AZ: Okay, back to two more subjects, the Columbine shootings. What do you say about
that?
KF: rock n’ roll.
AZ: Goth related?
KF: No, everybody in high school is mutilated. If you were a jock, a cheerleader, or a
student body president, you’re mutilated by your parents. If you’re some nerd that never
gets laid and never gets invited to parties, then you suffer that way. In the in-between
everybody’s confused. Those guys had outlet needs, they didn’t express themselves.
So mass murder became their from of expression. That was an art piece from my point
of view, that was necessary from where they were conjunctively in the pain machine.
They were being mutilated by the pain of high school society. If you turn on television for
twenty-four hours and you are a young person today, if you’re not Brad Pitt and Jennifer
Aniston, then you don’t count in our society. In a Brad Bitt and Britney Spears world,
nobody has a chance to fit in and excel, so if you look at the brutality of where we are as
culture, either youth culture, war culture, or Western culture, you’ve got to be a person
you would normally despise, just to survive in it. Kim Fowley learned how to
compromise with adults, I’ve learned how to put my game face on. I go out and do
business, I avoid my need for dirty pussy or my need to be a disruptive presence in the
culture. I’ve learned how to be [a] middle-class businessman and say, “thank you, sir,”
“yes ma’am,” and “get the fuck out and go to the bank.” Loads of people don’t learn that
and so they get stuck in alcoholism, being serial killers, being victims, or being
mediocre. They don’t know how to be divine within their own madness and horror. They
don’t know how to harness their big tits and big cocks and go out there to piss and shit
on the world at their leisure. They don’t know how to avoid capture. I have learned how
to be invisible and larger than life. I recommend it to everybody who’s on fire, so you
don’t end up being a victim of Columbine because both of the two guys who did all the
killing and everyone they killed were victims. The people who survived were victims that
year and other schools were victims. Everybody wants calm, piece of shit, farts, eat
greasy cheeseburgers and have a good time, but the culture we’re in doesn’t allow too
many of them to do that. Some of us destroy ourselves and others because we are so
torn up by our own hormones that we cannot stand it. I’m not justifying it, I’m only
sympathizing with all concerned. That it’s a shame, it’s keeping up with the Joneses. It’s
the same that you’re hating on, which you hate about the mainstream, I hate about high
school. It’s the same thing. Isn’t high school mainstream castrated society?
AZ: It’s the worst time.
KF: It is and so what I do, as a person who lives in many cultures, I speak other
languages, I live in other countries, I live in other cities, I have a closet full of costumes,
I have blue suits, I have black pimp clothes, I have drag queen pearls, I have Doc
Martin boots, I have rubber tennis shoes, I have clothes for every occasion and I switch
in-and-out of roles, so I can survive.
AZ: There’s nothing wrong with that, but some people feel locked into what society tells
them they have to be and that’s not what it’s all about.
KF: The guys who were in Columbine didn’t live long enough to learn it, those lessons.
AZ: Some people think if you’re a “gothic” person you don’t dare go put on a suit and tie
and go make some money. “That” could be your costume.
KF: Right. When I read your magazine I say, “well, I wonder wh
o reads this?”Do people
who jack off read it? Do people who shoot heroin read it? I bet you people who don’t
want Julia Roberts as their wife, they read it, because they want dirty pussy or they
want dirty cock depending on their preference. As William Burroughs once said, “All
they have is cock and pussy, too bad we don’t have variations of it.” But SheDevilVixen,
now there’s sexy, I think she’s sensational.
AZ: I thought you’d like that. What is your comment on organized religion?
KF: Yvette Lera should be the Pope of it. We need Yvette as the sexual female Jesus
because if we worshipped her kind it would make more sense than somebody who may
or may not been god 2,000 years ago. All the gods that are current are about 2,000
years old and we normally use that to fill the void, so we must worship it. We need to
worship Yvette Lera.
Yvette Lera and Kim Fowley would eventually meet in Hollywood CA
AZ: So I noticed you’re a fan of some of the girls on the website.
KF: Yes.
AZ: Any in particular?
KF: They all should worship my cock and my big balls. It’s something that they crave
and they should. If any of them are interested [they] should send me an email and I
would entertain them in my desert palace.
AZ: Is Kim Fowley still interested in consulting, producing, and writing for girl bands?
KF: I’m a mercenary. There’s two kinds of musicians I deal with; bands who pay me to
do the things they cannot do themselves, and then there are the others who can’t pay
me anything, but they allow me to own and control them. So I do the investing and do
the dictating. Not everybody can handle making me a mercenary or allowing me to be
the slave master. Those are the only two ways I deal with music.
AZ: Who do you like now?
KF: I like The Murderdolls, I think they’re a little early in the sequence. I think that
they’re maybe a year-and-a-half early.
AZ: What advice do you have for aspiring rock stars?
KF: Girls don’t want to fuck men, girls like boyish men or feminine men. When you look
at the big sex symbols, most of these guys are feminine men, from Elvis, to Jagger, to
Justin Timberlake, he’s very feminine.
AZ: Where do you get Elvis?
KF: Elvis was a feminine man if you look carefully.
AZ: At men at the time?
KF: At the time he was. He wasn’t exactly Charles Bronson was he?
AZ: So you think in his movies, a pretty boy beating up people, that he really couldn’t
have done that?
KF: Well, Im sure he did it but still, he wasn’t a traditional 50’s male. 50’s men looked
like James Dean, they didn’t look like Elvis. There’s only two kinds of guys that get laid:
the pretty boys get laid because they’re feminine and girls, I think, have a propensity to
be gay. If you look at girls they’re always hugging each other, they’re always going
shopping together, they’re always kissing each other, and that behavior is standard in
society. Women can make each other come.
(Photos by Brad Elterman/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic)
AZ: How come it’s okay, that’s okay but…
KF: Wait, wait. Women can make themselves come, they don’t need a man to make
them come. They can make themselves come and they can make each other come. A
feminine man, that doesn’t mean a fag, but if he has feminine qualities women like that,
that’s number one. Number two, the rapist guy, the guy like Lemmy or Freddy, what was
Freddy’s name on Elm Street?
AZ: Oh, Freddy Kruger.
KF: A lot of girls jacked off to Freddy Kruger. For every girl that wants to fuck Brad Pitt,
another wants to fuck Freddy Kruger because [of] the rape fantasy that all women claim
that they don’t have. I think they do have it sometimes. They want to be overwhelmed
and overpowered by cock, riding them and gagging [on] them. They want to be thrown
out of cars, they want to be jacked off on, they want food thrown at them, they want to
be told they’re bad girls and they don’t have a daddy and older guys like me get all the
daddy bitches who need daddies to spank them and overwhelm them, I don’t qualify to
pretty boys, so I have to come in there on the grotesque tip, I’m an ugly old guy and I’m
getting laid just like the young, pretty boy guys, they’re getting laid. Then there’s the tiny
guys who get laid too, if they play the “lovable little guy” thing. Then the big fat guys can
get laid because they can, a lot of chicks like fat. Even bald guys can get laid, guys in
glasses can get laid as a geek-fetish thing. I think guys who don’t get laid are the ones
who don’t think they can get laid. They’re not bringing anything to the pussy table
anyway, they just want to take a whore home, roll over and go to sleep. They’re not
concerned about the girls need to come, so they’re not going to get laid at all because
they’re that you call in prostitution, tricks. Those are guys who can’t express themselves
sexually or sensually. They don’t have any intimacy skills.
AZ: Whores?
KF: Yeah, I think whores are cool because at least you know they’re up front about it.
AZ: They’re providing a service.
KF: Sure and put it this way, if you go to Amsterdam they have a section of the city
that’s a red light district. If you had a red light district in every state of the United States
and all the money went into city tax, you’d have no crime, rape or any of that stuff.
Everybody could go there, get off and have a good time in a restricted area. You could
have supervised doctors and no one would have the clap and all that stuff. So, if i’m
elected, I promise to have a red light district in every chapel, city, and state. Of course
I’ll never be elected because I’m not going to run, but in Europe they have that. They
have districts, like in Tijuana there’s a lot of business over in Mexico.
AZ: What I want to ask about is the serious musician who reads MK ULTRA because
he wants to read the interviews, he wants to know about the music and at the same
time, wants to break into the music business without selling out.
KF: Tell him to go fuck himself because if he lives at home with mom and dad the he’s
not selling out. He can do the music that he loves, he can do it in his bedroom in front of
a mirror, then he and his high school friends can form a band and they can play at a
party. That’s great, but as soon as he moves out of his mom and dad’s house, has to
get a job, find other guys somewhere and form a band, then he’s a business man; then
he’s in show business, he’s in [the] music business, he’s got to play by the rules.
Whatever those rules are for whatever type he aspires to play, within each one of sub-
cultures and sub-genres, there’s definite rules and engagements, procedures, and
instruction. He has to go along with that or he’s not going to participate. This is like
going in the Army or joining the football team, there are formulas and battle plans that
you can adapt to. Even criminals have, who are successful, do it with a plan. You have
to be organized in your thinking to be successful at anything. So I have no sympathy for
people who can’t think. If you want to play music, play it. If you want to make a living
doing music, learn how the business works. You too can have a career that lasts forever
after you’re dead, your shit will still sell. When I die I’m going to have a telephone built in
my coffin so I call up everybody who reads MK ULTRA and find out how they’re doing.
AZ: And what’s the thing you want to be most remembered for if you had your choice?
KF: Nothing. I didn’t do anything that was that interesting. Remember the Kim Fowley
curse, Kim Fowley’s personality got in the way of Kim Fowley’s musical talent. If you
analyze all the songs I wrote, published, produced, financed, sponsored, enabled, and
expanded, it’s really rather remarkable the people I worked with. That in itself is
wonderful, but then if you read interviews like this you want to throw up or jack off, one
or the other; or shoot up, drop out or snuff out because here’s the guy who should be
more of a gentleman, should be tolerant, who’s ragging on all of these icons and
conceptual realities and dismisses them as just necessities, shouldn’t provoke ulcers,
drug or alcohol abuse – you’re stupid. Just pay your tax, mind your own business and do
as many horrible things as you can. But in the context of living in a civilized society, it’s
not hard to be wonderful, clever and horrible even. I’m not very intelligent, I’m not very
talented, I’m not very pretty, I’m not very nice and all I am is an example that if I can
make a living doing this garbage, anybody can. I had D’s in high school, I never
graduated from high school because I was caught selling alcohol in the twelfth grade to
ninth graders in the junior high down the road. They gave me a choice of the Army or
jail and I took the Army, even though I had a disability, they took me anyway. So I went
to college in-and-out, you know I was a bad kid with a high IQ which I squandered. I
guess I’m an educated thug or I’m a guy who probably should be dead in jail or in a
mental hospital. I shouldn’t be on television, on the charts with records coming out and
getting laid at 63 years of age on my own terms.
The Top Ten BEST Ideas Kim Fowley had for titles of this interview
1) Lord of Garbage
2) The Satan Confessions
3) White Pimp Cretin vs. the Bacteria Girls
4) Dog Finger – Scumbags & Jelly-Jelly Nights
5) Man-Boy Lesbian Needs Your Filth
6) Enema Girl: Are You the Bride of Frankenstein?
7) Reptile King of Darkness
8) Secrets of the Most Horrible Human Being in the
History of Underground Music
9) Donkey Dirt Boy Wants You
10) Pain Is Half the Pleasure
Kim Fowley dies at 75; music producer created, managed the Runaways
The Fowley’s Kara Wright and Kim Fowley
By Randy Lewis LA TIMES Jan. 16, 2015 5:11 PM PT
Kim Fowley, the mercurial and eccentric music producer and Svengali who created and managed the all-female rock group the Runaways in the 1970s, died Thursday after a long battle with bladder cancer. He was 75.
Fowley’s longtime friend, author-historian Harvey Kubernik, confirmed his death.
Fowley had been periodically posting updates from his bed on his Facebook page, many featuring his wife, Kara Wright. Last year Fowley moved from the hospital to the Los Angeles home of Runaways founding member Cherie Currie, who told Billboard in September that after consulting with Wright about his health, “We agreed a change of environment was what he needed. It’s draining, yes, but I’ll always step up. It’s who I am.”
“I love Kim. I really do,” she said at that time. “After everything I went through as a kid with him, I ended up becoming a mom and realized it was difficult for a man in his 30s to deal with five teenage girls. He’s a friend I admire who needed help, and I could be there for him.”
He subsequently moved with Wright, whom he married in September, to a residence in West Hollywood, where he died.
Fowley’s memoir, “Lord of Garbage,” was published in 2013, and Times book critic David L. Ulin wrote that it “may be the weirdest rock ‘n’ roll autobiography since … well, I can’t think of what.”
Fowley was at least as colorful as any of the musicians he worked with going back to the 1960s in L.A., where a vibrant rock music scene attracted many of the most creative and most idiosyncratic characters imaginable.
“Kim Fowley is a big loss to me,” Steve Van Zandt, guitarist of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and host of Sirius XM satellite radio’s channel Little Steven’s Underground Garage, said in a statement Thursday. “A good friend. One of a kind. He’d been everywhere, done everything, knew everybody.
“He was working in the Underground Garage until last week,” Van Zandt said. “We should all have as full a life. I wanted DJs that could tell stories first person. He was the ultimate realization of that concept. Rock Gypsy DNA. Reinventing himself whenever he felt restless. Which was always. One of the great characters of all time. Irreplaceable.”
Fowley, born July 21, 1939, in Los Angeles to actor-parents Douglas Fowley and Shelby Payne, scored his first chart success producing the 1960 single “Cherry Pie” for Gary Paxton and Skip Battin, aka Skip & Flip. Fowley continued working with Paxton when they created the Hollywood Argyles band, which charted a No. 1 hit, also in 1960, with the song “Alley Oop.”
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The man known for his pasty white skin, pale blue eyes and slicked back hair — punk rock godfather Iggy Pop once described him as looking “physically frail, a lot like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein”— became a regular at clubs on the Sunset Strip as music exploded and continued to evolve over the next several decades.
He went on to write or produce songs for a range of musicians, including the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, Gene Vincent, Helen Reddy and Warren Zevon. He also recorded a string of solo albums under his own name.
Fowley traveled to England early on to check into the British rock scene that was igniting but hadn’t yet invaded the U.S.
“One of the first who smelt something going on in ’63 and came to England,” Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ first producer and manager, said Thursday. He praised Fowley as “a leader of that American brigade and a forever part of American music.”
Fowley turned up in September 1969 to introduce John Lennon’s solo appearance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Festival, less than seven months before the Beatles formally disbanded. It was the public debut of the Plastic Ono Band, which became Lennon’s primary musical outlet after the Beatles.
In the mid-’70s, Fowley gathered a group of five teenage girls and created a then-rare example of an all-female punk-rock band in which all of the members played the instruments and sang.
Although initially viewed as a novelty, the Runaways included three future solo rock stars in Currie, Joan Jett and Lita Ford, thanks to Fowley’s eye and ear for young talent.
He praised some parts of Floria Sigismondi’s 2010 feature film “The Runaways” but complained about being painted as a villain. “It was a nighttime soap opera, with some rock music in it,” he said in 2012. “It was not, not, NOT, in bold letters, it was not the Runaways’ story.”
A 2012 documentary called “The Sunset Strip” again put the spotlight on Fowley, who summed up the scene he relished, saying, “The Sunset Strip is a civilization for the brokenhearted, the mistreated, the overlooked, the underloved and the doomed.”
Although he never abandoned his passion for music, he shifted his focus from recordings to film later in life, making movies such as 2011’s “Black Room Doom” about an all-female band using that name and delving into their sexual appetites as they played out in L.A. fetish clubs. Fowley touted his film as “a female ‘Spinal Tap’ on a female ‘Jackass’ level.”
Fowley also often boasted that he would do things others feared to attempt.
“One of my secrets, throughout this career that I’ve had,” he told The Times in 2012 at a Hollywood strip-mall recording studio where he was working at the time, “is [that] the word ‘no’ does not exist in my vocabulary.”
Fowley, who often referred to himself by name, remained a revered figure as a songwriter, co-writing several songs on L.A. musician Ariel Pink’s 2014 album, “Pom Pom.”
Fowley remained a controversial figure because of his relationships with adoring — and sometimes less-than-adoring — young women, which created rocky times during his mentoring of the Runaways and other aspiring musicians who came his way in their wake.
“I’m a horrible human being with a heart of gold,” he said in 2012. “I’m the worst, horrifying but lovely. I’m a bad guy who does nice things.”
Fowley is survived by Wright.