Some New Kind Of Kick by Kid Congo Powers

One-time guitarist in The Gun Club. The Cramps and The Bad Seeds reveals the healing, and damaging effects, of rock ‘n’ roll.

In August 1979, standing in line at the Whisky A Go Go to see Pere Ubu, the 20-year-old president of the West Coast branch of the Ramones fan club met the 21-year-old president of the Blondie fan club. The former, Brian Tristan, was considering a future in musical journalism, until he met the latter, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, in that line, and was persuaded to form a band with him. Brian Tristan would later be renamed Kid Congo Powers by Lux Interior, and play with three of the most important bands of the 80s: The Gun Club, The Cramps and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

Some New Kind Of Kick is an entertaining, funny, illuminating, and at times harrowing story from a man who was slap bang centre of the 80s alternative scene. He tells the story in such a self-effacing manner that, at times, you feel, like those other musicians around him who saw something special in him, like shaking him and saying: ‘Do you know how great you are!’.

Powers was born into a Mexican American family in La Puente, California. Early on he was drawn to the odder side of life. His sister worked at the Mattel factory and would give the rejected toy cars to her brother, who gleefully smashed them into each other in his own demonic demolition derby. There were two drive-in movie theatres in La Puente, one showing wholesome films, the other not so much, and it was to the latter he was drawn, with its crazed take on the world and its psyched out soundtracks. He loved Frankenstein’s monster, but not Santa Claus. And at school, he found himself attracted to a teacher he nicknamed Coach Short Shorts. As a Latin Mexican gay in the 60s and 70s, he was always going to feel like a misfit.

Where he found himself was through music, and Powers’ book is an illuminating insight on how rock ‘n’ roll can save, but also destroy.

His nascent forays into rock music begin with Frank Zappa and, of course, Bowie, who was a magnet and an inspiration to any sexually experimenting teenager. Powers began hanging out in seedy nightclubs frequented by low life and high life, and devouring as much music as he could. When he gives his first blow job to a stranger who picks him up, it’s the fear of being caught that is the biggest turn on. And then he buys the debut Ramones album and he “dropped the needle onto the vinyl, and started laughing hysterically, jumping up and down on the bed, because the music was something else, a pure adrenalin rush of exhilaration.” The Ramones were the band that changed a lot of lives and Powers not only formed the West Coast fan club but began to hang out with the band when they toured California. They nicknamed him The Prez.

But just as Powers was finding himself, tragedy struck. His cousin Theresa, who had been an early confidante, is killed on a night out with a friend. They had both been shot in the head. There was no motive and remains unsolved. It was a tragedy that he struggled to come to terms with for the rest of his life. One thing that comes across in the book is his strong family. His parents supported and loved him throughout his career. In many ways, the autobiography is bookended by death, with Theresa at the beginning and his father and Jeffrey Lee Pierce at the end.

Following the death of Theresa, he throws himself into the hedonistic lifestyle of punk (taking a trip to London in 1977 and hanging out at the Vortex) where his sexuality is accepted, and drugs become available to him. He first takes heroin after seeing the final Sex Pistols gig in San Francisco. At that early stage of drug use he saw heroin as “a release, of inhibitions and euphoria, an elegant method to strip away everything that came between the ego and the will, allowing (me) to move through the world unencumbered by emotion and anxiety”. But by the early 80s, after a tour with the Gun Club across Europe which was conducted in a “fog of opiates, the drugs would no longer be fun, they become a chore”. There then follows the years of being controlled by drugs and trying to escape them. Detoxing with Pierce in Mexico; back on drugs in Paris after 3 years clean; a junkie in Berlin; getting clean and a burst of energy. Then his father dies and he relapses; gets himself clean and Pierce dies and he returns to heroin before finally getting clean in 1997. Powers descriptions of his drug use are neither glamorising nor warnings, he tells it as he feels it and is all the more powerful for that.

Many will come to the book for insights into the three great and important bands that Powers has played with, and he doesn’t disappoint.

It is Lydia Lunch, who he is living with in New York, who gives him his first guitar lesson, exhorting him to play with her. When he says, “But I don’t know how to play electric guitar,” she retorts, “You think I do!” Pierce then carries on the lessons when Powers joins the band that will become the Gun Club.

Powers will leave The Gun Club before they record their classic Fire Of Love album, but will drift in and out of the band over the years, recording LA Story (with the ghost of Jim Morrison haunting the studio and Stevie Nicks wandering in and out), Mother Juno and Pastoral Hide and Seek. Jeffrey Lee Pierce comes across, not surprisingly,  as a troubled genius, and very difficult to work with and to get close to. But he and Powers clearly had a bond that remained strong from that first meeting, where something drew them to each other, and the raw grief Powers feels at his friend’s death is palpable.

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Cramps existed in their own enclosed universe, where you were either one of them or against them. Powers is asked into the band to replace Bryan Gregory. His audition consists of Poison Ivy asking him what he would sacrifice to be in The Cramps? When he asks if they mean would he quit The Gun Club, or relocate? She says no, would you sacrifice something like a finger, would he cut his finger off to be in The Cramps? Agreeing that he would, he was in the band, but luckily he wasn’t called upon to sacrifice any body parts. But he did have to sacrifice his name and get a ‘Cramps’ name. It was Lux Interior who came up with Kid Congo Powers, a mix of Kid Thomas (an obscure rhythm and blues piano player) and the words inscribed on a votive candle: When you light this candle, Congo powers will be revealed to you. Powers gives interesting insights into the recording of Psychedelic Jungle, which was as much ritual as songwriting and for this reviewer at least, a description of how Lux Interior achieved the crazed vocal to She Said was achieved.

In the Bad Seeds, Powers finds similar darkness to that conveyed by The Gun Club and The Cramps, but with Nick Cave’s outsider take on American blues and country music. Things get dark in Berlin as he sinks into a heroin haze and AIDS takes hold around the world. Powers finds the Bad Seeds very macho, though never aggressively so and his being gay wasn’t a problem, but from what he says it seems as though he never really felt at home there. But he is, rightfully, proud of the work he did on The Good Son and he made firm friends in Mick Harvey and the late Anita Lane

Swirling around all these moments of alternative rock history are beautiful little vignettes, often when he is between bands and trying to make money, which includes taking Siouxsie Sioux to Disneyland, playing (almost) naked with The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, packing t-shirts in a sweatshop and seeing his own face adorning a Cramps one, witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall and trying to sell a jacket to Bruce Springsteen.

Some New Kind Of Kick reveals Kid Congo Powers to be a self-effacing, troubled hero, who found himself in rock and roll and, perhaps because of his own self-doubts, became one of the coolest cats on the scene. He played on some of the greatest records in the 1980s but seems to doubt his importance.

Brian Tristan comes across as a really nice guy. Kid Congo Powers as one of the coolest.

You can order the book at Omnubus here:

All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Twitter, Instagram and WordPress

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