There’s no question that Kid Congo Powers is hitting his stride these days. Both of his most recent albums with his band the Pink Monkey Birds – 2013’s Haunted Head, and 2016’sLa Araña Es La Vida (which translates as “the spider is the life”) – are terrific: swaggering, slithering, and sexy garage Americana, with a switchblade in its boot and a bulge in its pants.
But when you’re talking to someone who has played in the Cramps, the Gun Club, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, it takes a while to get around to his solo output. It makes you wonder if he ever resents his own past for hogging the attention.
Reached by phone from his home base in Washington, DC, Kid Congo – real name Brian Tristan – laughs agreeably at the question. “...Do I get jealous of my past? No! There’s actually a lot of people who don’t care about the past that much, because they’ve found me along the way,” he tells Westender.
Besides, there’s continuity between what he was doing in the Cramps and the Gun Club and his current output.
“The work has been laid out and I’m just continuing the work, that’s the way I look at it,” he says. “It’s pretty foundational, seminal work, because there was not really a psychedelic rockabilly band before the Cramps, and there wasn’t really a punk blues band before the Gun Club.”
Kid Congo began his friendship with (now departed) Gun Club leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce at a 1979 Pere Ubu concert in Los Angeles. Pierce almost immediately suggested they form a band, and Kid Congo assented, even though he couldn’t play an instrument. Rough live recordings of his tenure in the Gun Club, early on, exist on the album The Birth, The Death, The Ghost, recorded at various venues in Los Angeles circa 1980.
Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach of the Cramps were in attendance at at least one of the shows documented.
“Dave Alvin from the Blasters said Lux was taking notes, and trying to hide his cassette player under his coat,” says Kid Congo.
When the Cramps invited Kid Congo to join – somewhat stunning the young man – he left the then-unknown Gun Club with Pierce’s blessing. He would rejoin a few years later, but it’s a point of curiosity whether he feels like he missed out by not being on the Gun Club’s first, classic recording, 1981’s The Fire of Love.
“No, because I’d just made Psychedelic Jungle with the Cramps!” he laughs. “But I’m sure there was a twang of regret, because I’d played on many of those songs before.”
He even co-wrote one of them, “For the Love of Ivy.”
If Kid Congo learned how to play guitar from Jeffrey Lee Pierce, what did he get, specifically, from Cramps lead guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach?
“She taught me how to play guitar better,” he answers. “She introduced me to a fuzz pedal. She was quite patient and good at teaching and she knew just what to do; I was young and ready for molding, and she knew how to sculpt me.”
The Cramps also brought discipline to Kid Congo’s “expressionistic” playing, so that it “wasn’t noise or artiness or something, it was actually part of the music.”
So how did it feel sharing the stage with Lux when he was in wild man mode?
“Well, I didn’t have a concern for my safety or anything,” Kid Congo responds, explaining that he was mostly in the moment, focused on his own playing and presence on stage. As for Lux, “he was a daredevil – he was absolutely magical. I saw many incredible feats where I thought, I don’t know how this man is alive or unhurt. Or sued by people, for ripping people’s clothes off, or arrested like Jim Morrison...”
For his own part, Kid Congo has been “knocked down, tied up by the legs with the mike cord and dragged around... one time, when Lux was kicking his heels, jumping off the drum riser, he kicked me in the head and I went flying back. But then I just charged him with my guitar!”
Kid Congo left the Cramps amicably, when they were engaged in a long spell of relative non-productivity, during a lawsuit with IRS Records. Pierce called him from Australia, where the Gun Club were supposed to be touring.
“He’d had a fallout with the band and half the band didn’t get on the airplane. He was in Australia with Patricia [Morrison] and no one else, and he needed to save the tour. So they imported me.”
As part of his carrying the work forward, Kid Congo promises his May 7th set at the Rickshaw Theatre will feature at least one song by the Gun Club or the Cramps. No doubt he will also play several songs from 2016’s La Araña Es La Vida, an album that pays homage to the classic Mexican-American garage rock and R&B of Kid Congo’s youth.
The title track was inspired by Kid Congo’s research into Teotihuacan, a spider deity at a pyramid site in Mexico City.
“She was a complete dreamer and a hallucination-making psychedelic goddess,” he explains. “She guarded the underworld and the pyramid, and she sprouted hallucinatory morning glories from her head. And I thought, y’know, it’s kind of my duty to do the same thing? I felt kinship with her, because it’s my idea that I should have psychedelic ideas that are guarding music, underground music, and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s my duty to have hallucinations and bring them to people and make sure that music is still good and safe and guarded. And if I think of it, that’s the work of the bands I’ve been in, and been influenced and trained by.”
Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds
Garage psych legend plays the Rickshaw Theatre with his current band on May 7 with special guests Strange Things, the Vicious Cycle MC, and the Ford Pier Vengance Trio. Doors at 8pm.
