null Skip to main content

KIM FOWLEY

fowley-festival.jpg

KIM VINCENT FOWLEY (1939-2015) was an American record producer, impresario, songwriter, musician, film maker, and radio actor. He has been described as "one of the most colorful characters in the annals of rock & roll" and as "a shadowy cult figure well outside the margins of the mainstream." Kim likes to say that he was “hatched on the cracked concrete of cruel California,” and indeed he was. Now, for the first time ever, the music business legend lays bare his beginnings with Hollywood parents who passed him back and forth like a bad script. Kim learned to talk and reckon before he was out of rubber pants, and quickly discovered that he would have to make his own path in spite of the parental shortcomings. He was addicted to words and music at an early age, and wrote verse throughout his life, effectively organizing his ideas and emotions into a unique rhythmic shorthand. In the first of a three volume “hip pocket paperback” series, Kim Fowley recalls his early days as an unwanted child, as a polio victim (twice), as a teenage hoodlum, as a young cat in the California rock n’ roll scene, and as… a poet.

Before beat was Beat, Kim Fowley was onto word warpage beyond compare. He took in Big Sur and Venice Beach and Eric Nord and Thelonius Monk, hardly knowing that he was ahead of the hepcat curve. Kim Fowley has never gone with a trend. He has always trod his own path, although his is one well-drizzled with every name in the music and show biz pantheon. His first record as producer was the iconic "Charge" by The Renegades, which led to a number of small label efforts, capped, in 1960, with Alley Oop by the Hollywood Argyles, which went to #1 in the charts. In 1961 he co-produced "Like, Long Hair" for Paul Revere and the Raiders. All of his personal stories and poems written in the days re recounts, are told in LORD OF GARBAGE, including his involvements with records such as Nut Rocker by B. Bumble and the Stingers, Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow by the Rivingtons, Popsicles and Icicles by the Murmaids and artists like Cat Stevens, Them, Slade, Soft Machine, Frank Zappa, the Mamas and the Mamas, and Skip and Flip. Beyond the dizzying assortment of names and records, is revealed not only the maker and shaker in the music biz, but a poet who dissected these daily chapters with a neat selection of word pictures that drive in the heart of the man and the matter. He is hugely missed.

 

Find out more on KIM FOWLEY at KICKSBOOKS.COM!

 

Also pick up Garbage Perfume