Kid Congo: Always Looking for a New Kind of Kick 

Look up “lifer” and there’s 100 percent certainty that the stylish punk rock mug of Kid Congo Powers will be staring you down. 

The legendary Mexican-American, east of East L.A. born and bred guitarist has had music as his life blood running through his veins from literally day one – or dang close to it. Prick up your ears, for instance, to the groovy stomp of “Ese Vicio Delicioso” a white-hot track off Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds killer new record, That Delicious Vice. Powers runs through the gamut of his musical education, the thrill of putting needle to wax and knowing what he wanted to do at a mere three-years-old and ultimately discovering “Jimi and Janis.” The rest, as they say, is history. 

A teenaged Powers went on to help spearhead the L.A. punk scene, learned guitar on the way at the urging of pals like Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Lydia Lunch, joined The Gun Club (with Pierce), The Cramps and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Since then, the Chicano singer, songwriter, guitarist, fashionista and queer icon has led his group, The Pink Monkey Birds (as well as myriad other projects) through a bunch of garage-punk essentials that have cemented his legacy of a diehard punk through and through. 

 

VIDEO: Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds feat. Alice Bag “Wicked World”

This trajectory continues on That Delicious Vice, a literal desert-sizzling record (it was recorded in sweltering Tucson, Arizona) that features a pared-down version of the Pink Monkey Birds but with the added bonus of Powers’ fellow longtime L.A. punk miscreant Alice Bag in the mix, guesting on a bunch of the tracks and killing it in the process. Powers is also on quite a roll. That Delicious Vice arrives hot on the heels of his successful memoir, Some New Kind Of Kick, from 2022.  

Rock & Roll Globe had the pleasure of Zooming with Powers from his patio in the desert to talk how That Delicious Vice and his memoir link up, collaborating with Alice Bag and more.          

 

First off, your new record strikes me as sort of an unofficial companion to your memoir from last year, Some New Kind Of Kick, in a way. 

I could see that, definitely. It’s a continuation. There’s a lot of stories that I took from the book to be song lyrics, some at the urging of, actually Alice Bag, who guested with us. She was, like, “Well, why don’t you just sing about that?” She’s very good at that but I’m very much like, “Okay, I wrote the book, it’s in the past, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I wrote that book so I don’t have to answer any more questions blah blah blah! I don’t mind talking about it but I never thought “Oh! Lyrics that pertain to that.” So it was very nice to do and it made me write some things that were very simple and not in my overcomplicated way. I always go about things and they don’t end up complicated on paper or in music but in my mind (laughs). They go through a lot of machinations so that was very welcome and it adds a different way of storytelling. Now I’ve learned a different way of storytelling!

 

So you employed a completely new approach to That Delicious Vice as opposed to previous records?

Some of it, yeah. There’s a lot of themes; I use a lot of themes of “as we get older, people who passed away in recent times”– and sometimes longer than recent. That has always been a good subject to me because it’s paid tribute to them, for one, but it also helps me make sense of what happened because I’m always trying to grab at and write down, like, “What was the essence of these people that, to me, made them magical people?” You know, they were mostly just my friends and they were magical to their friends. It’s important to me to capture that. It comes in images, it comes in words, it comes in different ways, abstract, some of it is composites of several different people and some things are very specific. That’s a theme of lyric writing, I guess it’s tribute, really, to people I love and things I love. There’s a lot of things I love–other musics, films, books, whatever. But people the most. 

 

Do you see the writing of this new record as an extension of the memoir? It sounds like it.

In a way, yeah, because I was able to call on these themes that I’d studied very closely and gone through with a fine-tooth comb and obsessed about…a lot over ten years of writing. Gotta get something more out of it! But mostly it is just becoming a better writer for me and learning that just straight storytelling could be good because I work a lot in images and it becomes a bit obtuse, which I like. I like the collage of images–it’s like experimental film or something. It’s beautiful to look at but to make your own story up of what it’s about, which is what all lyrics are. 

Were you all done writing Some New Kind Of Kick then you started That Delicious Vice?

Oh, yeah, because the book had been done for a while, or the process of it coming in is never quick. But these are just recurring themes and things that stuck out to me and seemed to be able to speak to some contemporary and present truths in my life and in people’s lives I know. A story like “Ese Vicio Delicioso”: It’s a story where I’m a kid, I love music, I love these people, these people are cool. And that is kind of the story of the whole book. Actually, the title “Ese Vicio Delicioso” is a Spanish translation to the book that’s got translated into Spanish. That’s the title of it – That Delicious Vice. “Some New Kind Of Kick” didn’t make any sense translated into Spanish (laughs). 

 

That song “Ese Vicio Delicioso” on the new record is very autobiographical. You tell your story from being a kid and discovering music, hearing Jimi and Janis…

So, it’s a little journey. It’s like a ballad; it’s like a gunfighter ballot (laughing).

 

Alice Bag is all over That Delicious Vice. She duets with you on the record’s killer first single “Wicked World.” 

We knew each other from the earliest of L.A. punk, The Masque, she was in The Bags, one of the first punk bands. Through the years, we were friendly but not really close. Actually, when her book came out, Violence Girl, she had a memoir some years ago, I got in touch with her again because she was coming through D.C. where I was living at the time so we reacquainted ourselves and became friends. I really admired her book so much and  her stance as a feminist and Chicana and able to really just simply lay out the truth and to condense this period of time into a real amazing story–it was very inspirational to me. I had already started at my first scribbling of my book so it was really a great thing for me to read. We realized that we have so many parallels that our lives take together being Mexican-American and we both identify as queer and both come from the original punk scene, which was a very open…we know that first version of L.A. punk was so open-minded and so vast of different styles and different people, like a lot of women, a lot of queer people and a lot of people who just had great ideas. Musical proficiency wasn’t really the key but having a great idea was your ticket in and just the tribal-ness of finding people who consider themselves and not in the mainstream. And we both ended up on In The Red Records; Larry Hardy puts out both of our solo work. 

 

How did Alice wind up working on That Delicious Vice with you at the end of day?

So he (Larry Hardy) got a call one day from a television show who wanted to know if either me or Alice would want to write a song in Spanish for this TV show about a resort in Mexico. So they wanted a cheesy resort song. So we went back and forth saying, “Oh, no, you do it. Oh, no, you do it.” Finally, we just thought, Oh, wow. We should just maybe do it together.” And they said, “Okay, that sounds good to us.” So we made a duo. Alice was living in Mexico City at the time and she’s actually back there now. So, we gave them the song then when they were filming the episode. They said, “Well, why don’t you come and be in the episode?” That gave us some time together to hang out and we were like, “We should do more.”  It just so happened she moved back to Arizona and I just thought, “Oh, we’re making a new Pink Monkey Birds record. It would be great if you came.” So she said, “Why don’t we write a song together again?” I said, “That’ll be great!” Then two days later, she sent me a song which was “Wicked World”–a very different version of it. Then she just gave it to us to reimagine it in our style. So, she came down (from Phoenix) to record and then we were like, “Why don’t you do this song?” and “This could use some backing vocals?” She was very game to collaborate. She’s a great person, a great artist with lots of energy, very infectious, very right on and very intense. We actually did have some shows where she guested live and people were like, “Oh my god, she’s so intense!” You should have seen her when she was twenty (laughs)! She’s at sixty now. You should have seen that. Wow. Actually, she’s the just the same. That doesn’t turn off.

 

Do you recall first meeting Alice in L.A. in the early punk days? 

I knew her from just seeing The Bags at The Masque. The punk rock scene was like fifty people and not more. So everyone was well aware of the other people. We actually were on a TV show because we lived in Hollywood and The Dickies were going to be on this TV show called C.P.O. Sharkey, which was the Don Rickles sitcom and they were going to play in a punk rock club. They needed pogo dancers, so actually me and Alice are in that, our first TV debut in ‘77, ‘78. 

 

VIDEO: C.P.O. Sharkey first episode

Wow!

But we didn’t become fast friends or collaborators and, actually, I ended up with The Gun Club, which started after The Bags and ended up with the rhythm section of The Bags. Rob Ritter and Terry Graham, who played with Jeffrey (Lee Pierce) on the first album, played with me before I left for The Cramps. Then later, Patricia Morrison, who was the other bass player, she joined The Gun Club and so I played with her for many years. So I’ve been with all The Bags! I’ve had them all. Funny how that works out.

 

You mentioned Alice’s book earlier. Did Violence Girl inspire you to write your own memoir or that was a done deal already?

I had decided but she wrote her book very publicly. I think she wrote a lot of it by blogging and asking people what they were interested in and this and that so that was great. I didn’t take that route because I’m more in my head, more than out. But it did inspire me and I ended up going to lots of writer’s workshops and different things just to see if there was a story there beyond “Punk rock guy who was in these bands and met Nick Cave” (laughing). Is there more of a story there? But I learned that there was a story about the times about youth, about self-discovery and transgressions. 

 

Back to the new album. That Delicious Vice was done as a trio with a bunch of songs done with Alice Bag. How did it come about that the lineup was pared down?

Well, the bass player decided to leave the band (laughs). 

There was a choice to either replace him or to go on as a three-piece. We had a few times done the three-piece  through fifteen or longer years, you know blend together. Sometimes Kiki (Solis) couldn’t make it and and we did

do the trio. We knew it could be done but we hadn’t made a record that way. Luckily, Mark Cisneros, the guitar player, is a multi-instrumentalist and is in ninety bands. He got a Bass VI, which is a six-string bass, the one Carol Kaye used to play. So we thought, “It’s like a guitar and a bass” and then he plays guitar. We were very much harkening back to the Cramps setup, which was two guitars, drums and a singer. We thought, “That’s entirely doable.” It’s all rhythm-based things with that kind of lineup and we have been really exploring a lot more space in the songs and stretching things out, being experimental and creating “soundy-songs” rather than “songy-songs.” So there’s all of the above and we were really excited to do that because we were able to make music that was a challenge for us but also a new avenue to go down which is always important after a long time…to spread your wings.

 

That Delicious Vice has a really minimal sound. Lots of space and the songs groove. It has a vibe. 

Yeah…that just like because we’re fortunate that as we’ve been going for the long haul and the music has become its own beast. We don’t really have to think about it much, because we know each other so well and so intuitively the way we play. We’ve always been very much a live band so we’re very much connect and groove on that level rather than a studio band would, and we could record live and get that feel. And, yeah, rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. It’s all slave to the rhythm. We’re slaves to the rhythm. In many ways we’re a dance band. 

You’re outside right now zooming in from the Tucson desert. Does living in that environment inform your music? 

I think living in the desert, the space of the desert, has an influence. We recorded here in Tucson the last couple of records and I think the guys came ready with that in mind. 

Mark grew up in the west in Los Angeles and Ron the drummer grew up part of the time in Las Cruces, New Mexico and in El Paso so they’re not strangers to desert. When they arrived here to record, they were like, “Oh, desert!” We’ll think desert. And it seeps into the music, just like very much the stuff I recorded in New York was very skronky New Yorky–my first records. Then a lot of the other records we did in Kansas and in the Midwest, that had a very Midwesty garage’y kind of vibe. So now we’re somewhere lost in a canyon (laughing). We’re traipsing around the cactuses, hills and mountains.

 

There’s definitely a desert-garage rock thing happening. The last track on the new record, the seventeen-minute “Murder of Sunrise” captures the desert in that jam.

Yeah, it’s a sound. Like everything, that song started out to be like, “Let’s make like a Barry White song.” I love Barry White. A director friend of mine in Germany is doing a special on the influence of Barry White and he’s coming to America to talk to different members of his band and people who were influenced by Barry White. And he said to me, “Will you represent the alternative, the underground influence of Barry White?” He said he remembered when the Pink Monkey Birds first first started in New York when I met him, he asked me what’s this new band going to be like?” and I said, “Well, it’s gonna be like Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen meet at a Barry White concert.”

(Laughing)

And I think we kind of stayed on that trajectory. That got me thinking and listening to a lot of Barry White to do research because they had me perform solo. I learned a bunch of wrong chords to one of the songs and I thought, “Well, this is great, all the chords are wrong so I’m not stealing it” and it turned into what it turned into. It was more like being lost in ecstasy at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Making your way down (laughs). 

 

The songs on That Delicious Vice sizzle like Barry White in the desert and they are very danceable, too. 

We recorded back in the summer and Tucson summer is a  brutal event altogether and very hot. You walk outside and you might get incinerated. It was definitely in the air. We are happy to take chances like that (like on “Murder of Sunrise”). Mark comes from a very big free jazz background himself; he’s a saxophone player as well so improvisation is not lost on him and actually a bit leading the way in that. It very much reminds me of the period of The Gun Club like The Las Vegas Story where we were listening to a lot of free jazz. Even on that record, we do a Pharaoh Sanders little bit of song and different things. This is always a language that speaks to me and to reinterpret it into rock music.

A lot of That Delicious Vice is also exploring your Chicano roots. The first song, the instrumental “East of East” seems to to be an inflection of that.  

I grew up in a suburb called the San Gabriel Valley, which is east of East L.A. The people who are in the San Gabriel Valley, like for me, everyone’s like, “Oh, you’re Chicano from East L.A.” and I’m like, I’m not technically from East L.A. I’m east of East L.A. There’s a book about the town there and, actually, Jeffrey Lee Pierce grew up in which was the next suburb over from where I lived. I lived in La Puente and he lived in El Monte. An academic person, a young man, wrote a book about that area and the book is entitled East of East. 

We’ve been doing this for a long time. Ever since the Pink Monkey Birds started, we’ve had a very strong template of like the stompin’ R & B songs of the east of East L.A. band Thee Midniters in the 60’s who were a Chicano garage band. They played all over and they had a hit with “Whittier Blvd.” and a hit record. They were Chicano and the pride of the area and the pride of many young Chicano kids in the late 60’s. I have older sisters and my cousins were into Thee Midniters. I would be just this little kid and they would be getting dressed to go out and they’d be listening to music and getting really excited about going out. I was like, “I don’t know what Thee Midniters is but I know it’s about excitement” and I wanted to be a part of that. Then a little bit later when I was more coherent about music, I’d listen to it and see exactly what they were excited about. But, also, they were very excited about the fact the fact that it was their own Chicano band. It was their people and their tribe, which is often a very unseen thing in American white-Anglo rock world. It struck a chord with me later in life. 

I actually spoke to Jimmy Espinoza, the bass player. He still runs Thee Midniters and I did an interview with him at this festival in New Orleans, The Ponderosa Stomp. We had a done a cover version of a record on one of their songs and they asked me to interview him. He was just great. He was just like “Oh, yeah, we’re trying to be like the Beatles.” They knew they were Chicano but that’s the thing, you make things and you don’t think about it. I’m not thinking of the cultural ramifications of what you’re doing; it’s what influences you. You use what you have in your life to make music and that is just one of the strong ones that we come from families that listen to Mexican music growing up. But, to me, when I was growing up that was old fogey’s music. I wanted to hear Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie, not that old Mexican music. But it seeps into what you do. It’s in your DNA and in your brain and you appreciate it later in life.