It's hard to describe the elation that I feel sometimes when I'm researching a story. When I think I really know the act that I'm writing about, I'm often pleasantly surprised to find fun facts that I previously ignored. When I write about a relatively obscure act, I often worry that I will not find enough threads to make the story interesting. Then I begin searching - and I find a wealth of material that could support more than one story. I don't usually mention my sources (perhaps I should, but there's usually a lot of them and... when I finish my story, I'm always in a hurry to upload it,) but I want to thank all of those lovely blog writers that came before me and gave me so much material to work with. Without further ado, here's today's story.
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| The Mumps |
Today's story is rather unusual in that this time we don't have one storyline, as is customary, but there are two main storylines and a few secondary ones as well. So, I'll have to think of a way to structure this piece in order to make it work. Hmmm...
I have found that it's better to start writing and fine-tune it as I go. So, let's begin with Lance Loud...
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| Lance Loud |
You'd be justified to think that reality TV began with Big Brother in 1999 in the Netherlands. In fact, it began in 1973 when PBS aired An American Family in the US.
An American Family was a 12-episode documentary that aired early 1973, edited down from about 300 hours of raw footage, filmed from May 30 through December 31, 1971. It was originally intended as a chronicle of the daily life of the Louds, an upper-middle-class family in Santa Barbara, California but ended up documenting the break-up of the family via the separation and subsequent divorce of parents Bill and Pat Loud.
The star of the show turned out to be the eldest son, Alanson Russell "Lance" Loud, born June 26, 1951. With his cheeky charm, extravagant self-expression and a confidence that belied his 20 years of age, Lance, who was also openly gay, made a riveting impression on American audiences during their first exposure to a reality television series.
The series had many admirers, and the Louds appeared on television talk shows with Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, and Phil Donahue. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said the series was ''as important a moment in the history of human thought as the invention of the novel.''
As Lance's childhood friend and later bandmate Kristian Hoffman (who also appeared on An American Family, said:
"In the mythos of this show, Lance became the first gay person on screen. If you revisit the show you notice he never comes out. I have said this many times before, but we didn't dress like gay people. We dressed like rock stars. Lance came out on Dick Cavett right afterward. He was a national icon for a gay person who was articulate, charismatic, and unafraid. Over the course of our lives, so many people have come up to Lance and said, 'You gave me the opportunity to come out to my parents.' Other people came out to him, like Ann Magnuson whom I still work with, said, 'Lance, I believed in you so much. You are the reason I moved to New York and believed I could become an artist.'"
This is Lance Loud's coming out interview with Dick Cavett:
Lance began a correspondence with Andy Warhol when he was 13 or 14. Lance started writing to him and then Andy started writing back. One night he got a phone call and it was Andy. At one time, Lance was going to run away and go to New York. He got downtown in Santa Barbara and he called Andy, and Andy talked him out of it. He came home and waited a few more years!
Lance finally moved to New York City in 1971, when he was 20. He took his childhood friend, Kristian Hoffman, with him. As Kristian told queermusicheritage.com:
"I went to high school with Lance Loud. And so we were best friends in high school and we were in the same art class and we were really excited about music. We were into The Kinks and Velvet Underground and all these other records that were actually fairly obscure at the time they came out, and only came into prominence sort of later on with a high critical regard. And so we were obsessed with music and then I was going to go to art school, and I went to art school for about two months and I hated it, so Lance said, 'let's just move to New York.' And we moved to New York and saw the New York Dolls and just decided, well, we can do that. We actually did have a high school band, but it was kind of a joke band that we did with Lance and his brothers. So we were always into playing and making fools of ourselves, but it was really the New York Dolls that completely inspired us to just go ahead and make a real band and write all our own songs and get out there and do it."
"The name of the band was picked in a ridiculous way. We just made a list of names and it's funny because lots of the names went on to be names of relatively famous bands. And I don't know why we decided to use The Mumps. It just sounded funny, I guess. You know it's been sort of a millstone and an albatross and also an inspiration. We wanted something that was catchy and short. You know we were picking it before punk had established itself in New York. It was maybe a year and a half before Television's first gig, around 1974 or something, so it was pretty early to pick a name that people would think was weird and might make them upset."
"We considered the music we were making as essential, like it was fast and loud and yet it was highly crafted and literate and funny and clever and like all of the bands we followed, from The Kinks to The Sparks to The Stooges to The Beatles, through everyone, we thought we were in that tradition. And then when we finally decided to play out we opened for Cherry Vanilla at Trudy Heller's. That was our first gig ever, and David Bowie was actually in the audience, cause Lance knew David Bowie's drug dealer. But that didn't really lead to anything, because it was an audience that was more attuned to The Manhattan Transfer, and it was only when we found our way to CBGB's… we got a following pretty quickly but punk didn't gel as a movement right away, and also when it did gel we weren't considered as essential as one might think, even though we were founders of it, I mean."
"There really were, legitimately there was The Mumps, Blondie, The Ramones, and Television basically were the bands that were playing CBGB's, and so we did sort of invent that scene, but it soon became hardened into factions, and we were kind of a little too pop to be hip, or something. And then people were a little bit suspicious of Lance because he was famous. You know, you have to remember that An American Family was actually a really big deal, and so people thought he'd come into the Lower East Side to try to pretend he was hip instead of actually being hip, and having come there from another small town, just like everybody else that was there. Everyone there was a transplant who obsessed with The Velvet Underground and wanted to get into The Factory and so they moved and found cheap rent in the East Village. And they were part of that scene but it wasn't really very welcoming once it started to explode. All I can say is there were factions. So there wasn't warmth there at first, but then the scene sort of expanded and made room for everybody and it turned out that we could get enough of a following that we could be headliners and we could sell out Max's or CBGB's three nights in a row, regularly, and so it ended up being more camaraderie afterwards, but in the beginning there was jostling and discomfort and at first it wasn't really very friendly that way."
The other members of the Mumps were Rob Duprey, Jay Dee Daugherty, and Aaron Kiley. Kiley and Daugherty were replaced with Kevin Kiely and John Earl (JED) Dennis. Shortly thereafter Dennis was replaced by Paul Rutner.
The Mumps' first single (in 1977) was Crocodile Tears coupled with I Like To Be Clean. Here you can listen to both of them, one after the other:
In the liner notes for I Like To Be Clean, Lance Loud wrote that before safe sex there was Kristian Hoffman. What does Kristian say about it?:
"It is weird because it is sort of about that. I mean, I was very neurotic about sexuality and there was a whole bunch of things like I felt like even though we were gay, and even though it was sort of… like Lance was out as gay, but he had never said he was gay. And here we were in this highly competitive scene with a whole bunch of straight people, so I just said, if someone asks you if you're gay, just lie about it, and you know I was kind of saying it jokingly, but it was also like it would be a good career move and would keep the mystery going. And then it was the beginning of the spread of herpes and yet there was all this swinging and indiscriminate sex going on. So I used that as a springboard to get to… basically, it's about a fear of intimacy, and what I like to do when I write songs is I like to start with a little idea and then by the end of the song it extrapolates until it covers everything in the world. And so I am pretty pompous for trying to write short, succinct songs that are fairly clever and rhyme." Here's I Like To Be Clean, on its own:
This is Crocodile Tears, on its own, but it's geo-blocked for me. I guess some of you will be able to listen to it here:
Here are some other delicious cuts that were never released until the 21st century. This is Did You Get The Girl?:
... This is Just Look, Don't Touch:
... And this is Scream and Scream Again:
Now, here are some geo-blocked youtube videos, which, hopefully, many of you will have access to. This is their second single, Rock & Roll This Rock & Roll That (1978):
Two songs were on the B-side. There was the fun (and quite gay) song, Muscleboys:
... the other song was Fatal Charm:
In spite of the two independently produced 45 records they released, both of whom were well-received, they failed to secure a contract with a major record label. Did Kristian think the gayness of the band played into its success?:
"Oh, I think it completely prevented us from being successful. I think that time and time again opportunities came up and I think that if there were decisions to be made in our favor, and if there was somebody else that they could favor at that moment, they would favor the straight people. There's a point in case, The Dickies. Our manager, who was managing us first, also managed The Dickies, and A&M was going to sign one punk band, and they put us and The Dickies up, and they went with The Dickies. Now, I could be completely imagining this, but we had been around longer than The Dickies, we were more established on both coasts than The Dickies. I think they wrote fantastic songs and I think they put out great records, so this isn't anything against them, but I definitely think one of the reasons we weren't signed was because we were the band with the fag."
"And I do think that we were marginalized by that, whether it was spoken or unspoken. I really believe it damaged us. I don't believe it was an open market and I don't believe people were without prejudice. Oh, I have one more thing to say about that while I blabber on. The other way to look at is like you say Jayne County established him/herself as a gay artist, but that was the hook, and we weren't aiming to be a gay novelty act. We wanted to write songs that would be compared to all the great masters of pop rock, so that was our ambition. We didn't want to be ghettoized by a gay novelty quirk. And I adore Jayne County, but I think, you know, there's a difference."
... Back to the Mumps' geo-blocked videos, here's the cabaret-sounding Before The Accident:
This the energetic Brain Massage:
What does Kristian Hoffman think is his best song:
"Oh, I love 'em all. One of the most embarrassing things about me is that I actually… I tried to go back and look my songs and go 'I wish I hadn't written that' and 'God, that's embarrassing.' And there are a few, but I'm, I'm happy with all those songs. The Awkward Age I think is a fantastic song. I'm happy with that song. I'm happy with how succinct it is. I think the melody's great. I've said this before in interviews, but Alan Betrock, who was a really great rock historian, said 'you must have stolen that from The Idle Race.' And I thought, like God, that is the biggest compliment in the world." Here's The Awkward Age:
Kristian Hoffman's comment on the song Dutch Boy:
"Ah, Dutch Boy is actually… it's very early, it's when we're still thinking that we could be The Kinks and Sparks and have super Beatle-ly melodies, so we did have a lot of things that required a whole lot of harmonies, and although that was one of the things that was perceived as being this really Out, homosexual song about being in love with this boy, it was actually… I had written it about the lead singer of The Marbles. And The Marbles were these, these really nice… they were great guys but they were straight, white, had every advantage, were from an upper-middle-class home. They were very gifted. They could all really play and sing, but it was just one of those things. I was looking at them and was thinking, it's all so easy for white, straight people. And so actually it was kind of a put down of that sort of bubble that they lived in, where even if they were concerned with liberal issues it would never really affect them, and they could look at it from a distance and then things would come to them easily. As it turned out, they never got signed either, so they were a little too pop for the scene as well, but when this was happening I was just sort of using them as an instigator for my thoughts about what it meant to be white and straight and have the road paved before you where - if you were of any other race or gender preference or anything - everything would be much more difficult." This is Dutch Boy:
... This is another good pop song, called S.O.S.:
... And this is Gimme Gimme:
If you have a Deezer account, you can listen to all of the above - and more - here:
If you don't, you can start one. It's easy and it's free.
We know about Kristian and Lance being gay, but tell us, Kristian, were any other members of the band gay?:
"At first, no, but later on we were really very good friends with this band called Orchestra Luna and they had a really great songwriter at the head of that band named Ricky Kinscherf, and he is gay and out and he had a propensity for dating beautiful young things, and I think there was this beautiful young thing he couldn't get from Exeter, New Hampshire, named Kevin Kiely, and Kevin Kiely became the longest lasting bass player in The Mumps and he was gay as well, and he was also absolutely gorgeous and really nice and very talented."
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| Kevin Kiely |
I probably should have a separate story for Ricky Kinscherf, but since today is the day of multiple storylines, I'm going to do a short presentation here for the musician who was born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1945, studied at Yale University and resides in Boston, Mass.
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| Rick Berlin |
Ricky achieved much of his early success with Orchestra Luna, whose eponymous debut was released on Epic Records in 1974. Orchestra Luna, co-produced by Rupert Holmes, captured many of the dramatic eccentricities that made the band a renowned live act, particularly on (You Gotta Have) Heart (a cover of the Damn Yankees tune). That year, WBCN started an annual tradition of playing this particular cut for the Boston Red Sox on the baseball team's opening day. Here it is:
This is Orchestra Luna in 1974 with But One:
This is Orchestra Luna again and Boy Scout Camp:
Ricky himself is prefacing the youtube video of Orchestra Luna's Doris Dreams:
"Orchestra Luna was one unusual band. If nothing else OL was innocent of the industry. We just made it up from nothing + did whatever we thought would be true or funny or kinda nuts. It was rare + beautiful + as my first band, perhaps, my best. Doris Dreams was based on the names of absurd hair rinses that I found in the Ritz Carlton beauty salon I was asked to wallpaper + paint. 'Frivolous Fawn, White Mink, Chocolate Kiss', etc. Peter Barrett was amazingly able to string a storyline together for the piece which in total, live, lasted easily 12-14 minutes. We played Doris at Frank Zappa's 10th anniversary. When it was over, Frank rushed the stage + lifted Randy (our guitar player) into his arms. (Randy's short.) The song was choreographed by Barry Keating + recorded for Epic by Ruppert Holmes."
After the dissolution of Orchestra Luna, Ricky Kinscherf changed his name to Rick Berlin, because:
"No one could spell, pronounce or remember Kinscherf. Plus I had the exact same name as my dad and grandfather. Enough already. I was reading Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (completely sober) and I swear the word Berlin telescoped in front of my eyes like a 3D CGI moment. That was it. I went to ‘BCN (back then in the Pru Tower). Oedipus was interviewing Bob Geldof. I asked Oedi what he thought? He was down. Got his imprimatur. Friends started calling my mom Mrs. Berlin. Irving Berlin was fake as well."
In the early 80s, Rick formed the band Berlin Airlift. This is them, with the song Over The Hill:
From 1985-89 Rick's band was Rick Berlin–The Movie and in 1987 he won Songwriter of the Year from the Boston Music Award for his song Rock and Roll Romance. Here is a live version of Rock and Roll Romance, preceded by Set Up, by Berlin with The Nickel & Dime Band:
Here is Rick Berlin as a solo artist, with Michiko:
This is Rick Berlin (solo again) with Your Light Is On:
This is Love on a Wire:
This is Buddha:
And finally from Rick, this is Underground:
Back to Kristian Hoffman. The man had a long and fruitful career that went beyond the Mumps. Let's now spend some time with Kristian.
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| Kristian Hoffman |
In Kristian's career, there were always overlaps. He didn't just stop doing one thing and start another. While still in The Mumps, among other projects, he was writing songs for Klaus Nomi. So let's take a side journey to that world, and from another world is probably a good description for Klaus. I have already presented Nomi, here, but let's examine his career through Kristian Hoffman's point of view.
"I met Klaus Nomi at this thing called the New Wave Vaudeville Show. It first started with the Monster Movie Club… Ann Magnuson ran Club 57, which was the club in the basement of a little church, 57, St Mark's Place, and then they decided to start a show called New Wave Vaudeville. They thought one thing about the new wave was that a lot of the bands and the acts were horrible, but you can stand three minutes of anything. They put out a big ad all over the East Village that said we want Nazis, slaves, and freaks, and a whole bunch of people answered the call. And I personally was friends with them already, so I was going to be in it anyway. But they got, like a singing dog and a bunch of acts did crazy things. Lance got up and sang ASPCA to the tune of the Village People singing YMCA. But they also got Klaus and Ann Magnuson, who I've worked with for, you know, 30 years since, was directing it. He auditioned for her standing on a snow bank, and just sang some a cappella opera. And so he came out there and sang the aria from Samson and Delilah."
This is Klaus Nomi's 1978 debut at New Wave Vaudeville, Irving Plaza (NYC):
"And at the New Wave Vaudeville Show, the audience was just flabbergasted and dumbfounded and didn't know what to think, cause he was so realized. There wasn't anything unformed about him. His voice was totally incredible and everyone thought that he was lipsyncing to some old 78. They just couldn't believe he was really singing that way. And after that Anya Phillips, who was managing The Contortions at the time, which I was in, she just called me up the next day and said 'you should make a band for that Klaus Nomi.' So I just called him up and said, 'can I make a band for you?' And he said 'Okay.' And that's just how fast everything worked then. You just would run into someone on the street, and it would just turn into some fantastic adventure."
"Yeah, the first thing I did, the very first thing was to say you need to sing Lightning Strikes, cause you've got this operatic range and so why not put it to use in reinterpreting a pop song that will really exploit your range. And so, then I thought, well, you've got to have some original material. First I wrote The Nomi Song, which was sort of like an easy joke on his name, 'do you Nomi now,' but I also wanted… I really thought that Klaus was so fully formed that he needed to announce himself and what his intentions were in a pop format, and I just kind of threw that one out, like you're going to be shocked when you see me."
Here's Lightning Strikes:
Here's The Nomi Song:
"But then I thought, well, that doesn't really say anything about who he is or what message he's delivering… you really did have the sense that the whole world could end at any moment, and so he was very much an advocate of since the future is so unstable we need to be as artistically crazy and out there and fulfilled as we possibly can, at every moment of our life, cause there might not be another one." So Kristian wrote what was probably Nomi's most popular tune, Total Eclipse:
"After The Fall was actually intended as a sequel. It was sort of like here's Total Eclipse, in retrospect it seemed kind of cheerless, and so I wanted to say after the fall, in a weird way was kind of my John Lennon song. I was saying love will win, no matter what happens, so no matter what happens we'll be together and we can build something. But I did think of him… I thought you can't be too portentous, or pretentious or anthemic for Klaus, you know. It's like his voice… however heavy the message is that might weigh a lesser talent down, his voice will make it soar. So I did think… I say to use Bowie as a cue, but he really was. I thought like we can be as big in concept as Ziggy and get away with it because here's a personality and concept that's so huge that it will envelop it and lift it. Everything that I may say about these songs may sound incredibly pretentious, but I felt free to be pretentious because I knew that he could salvage it and make it fly."
But then things went south: "Klaus wanted to be like a cross between Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra or something, you know, but on his own terms as an outer space alien who sang in falsetto. But he believed in himself that this was what was going to happen, and the record company told him that it was going to happen. They said 'we're going to make you the star you always dreamed of being.' And then the record company would pressure him and pressure him and say 'but you can't get there with these people.' So in one sense, he fell for their line, but in another sense, there was a lot of fear. It was like… there weren't that many people making it out of the East Village that were of his ilk, you know, as crazy as he was, as outsidery as he was, and so he was the one who was going to make it."
"So I think he felt a lot of pressure to make it then or not at all, and they fed into that paranoia, and he didn't really have any guile. I don't think he ever did anything cruel or malicious, but he did leave us in his wake, and his management and record company were not only manipulative, but they were downright liars and crooks. And they were horrible to Klaus, too, they weren't just horrible to us. They literally worked him to death. When they saw that he was falling ill, although they didn't know what it was at the time, they said 'you better keep touring,' because they thought that he might be too sick to make it to the next tour, so they wanted to milk every last dime out of him. They were equal opportunity horrible people."
Hoffman was cheated of his publishing rights to these songs, so he missed out on a lot of money that was rightfully his. He finally got the publishing rights back, twenty years after the songs had been released. Then, in 2002, the group Rosenstolz had a hit song in Germany with a cover of Total Eclipse, featuring Marc Almond on vocals.
"Ah, should I bite the hand that feeds me? But I was very excited that someone was going to cover it after I got my publishing back, and they did it completely without any promotion. They just decided to do it out of the blue. And I actually like their disco version of it, but I adore Marc Almond. I think he has one of the greatest voices of all time. If I had a tenor that I could work with, as opposed to the countertenor that Klaus was, I would love to write a song for Marc Almond to sing. I love The Stars We Are, that album is just amazing. So when I heard his kind of rote reading of the song, which I felt like it… it sounded to me like he came into the studio, spent five minutes there, and then left, and didn't concentrate on the song. The artist in me was kind of disappointed because my expectations were so high. I had no idea it was going to happen. It was like a gift from heaven, and like I have nothing but high regard for him, but I thought that there was going to be some magic there that didn't happen. On the other hand, it paid for me to have my roof replaced. So that was exciting, and disappointing at the same time."
In 1981, as Klaus Nomi was releasing his first albums in Europe, Kristian had a band called The Swinging Madisons. "My idea of The Swinging Madisons was to do an act where I could sing Volare. That was about as far as it went. I loved Bobby Rydell's version of Volare and then I thought I should start a joke band, where I get to be the lead singer, cause I never get to be the lead singer. And then we did that and I wrote a bunch of very silly songs and that was another weird thing. It was a band that just started as a joke, and I had a couple members of The Mumps in it, and I made them all wear turbans the first time we played, and I just laid on the floor and screamed. And that band became very successful very fast and got a record contract after we were together less than three months, where The Mumps worked together for seven years and never had a record contract. So it was just a bizarre one of those things. I'd wanted a band that was just fun. I'd been in bands that were too angst-filled for too long, and I felt like we can get together and have a few laughs and dance around. And I can do kind of a cross between rockabilly, Bobby Rydell, and a little bit of soul, although if you've heard my music you know I have no soul."
They released a 5-song EP and Kristian's favorite song from that was My Mediocre Dream: "I think it was a really good, solid tip of the hat to Nuggets type 60s garage psychedelia. But it also, I still think the lyrics are pretty funny. I mean I was just watching TV late and somebody was talking about their dreams and I thought like, 'God, your dreams are so mediocre.' And then I felt like America's dream is mediocre. It's like, can't they aspire to anything better, and so I thought that was a funny title, and I still think it's pretty funny."
I couldn't find any youtube videos of The Swinging Madisons, but I have found Kristian's solo live version of My Mediocre Dream:
In the meantime, he moved back to L.A., mainly because "I was living with the drummer from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Bradley Field, and he and I had a very tempestuous seven-year relationship. It was at the end when he was a junkie and an alcoholic and he threatened to kill me. It didn't even occur to me to get therapy or fix this relationship in any way, I just told him I was going out for the night and I moved to L.A. without telling him." In the mid to late 80s, he was in a folk-parody band called Bleaker Street Incident.
"Ann (Magnuson) was so much fun, and she would come see The Mumps all the time, and we just thought she was so wonderful and smart and beautiful and talented, and so I just thought the time was right to do a folk parody band. So it was just another of those things, like calling Klaus, I called Ann and said 'don't you want to just do something,' and she said 'okay,' and I said, 'let's do a folk band,' and she said 'okay.' And so we decided to do it and she knew all the people that ran The Pyramid, so that sort of became my home away from home. And we played there all the time and just wrote a bunch of songs, and just played, and we came out to L.A. and played at a place called the Lhasa Club, and it was a minor sensation. I would say, you know, we could sell out a little folk club, and get a big article in the L.A. Times. It was like our media presence was a lot bigger than the band was. We did that band and it was really a lot of fun for a few years, and we actually got approached by Giorgio Moroder, which was bizarre. And he had us record a bunch of demos in his studio in Hollywood, and then he passed on us. But if that folk band had become another Donna Summer, that would have been very exciting."
This is the only youtube video that I have found of Kristian's collaboration with Ann Magnuson & Robert Mache, as the Bleaker Street Incident:
The act was together for three or four years. In the meantime, there's a long list of artists that he's performed with, written with, and played on their albums, like Lydia Lunch, El Vez, Dave Davies of the Kinks, Abby Davis, and Ann Magnuson. Then, in 1993, Kristian released his first solo album, called I Don't Love My Guru Anymore.
"I was in love with folk music, and I also was in love with the Left Banke, and you know, the idea of doing an album with lots and lots of strings and everything, at a time when nobody was interested in that, and it sounded like you would be shot if you did it. You know, now everybody's doing it, but back then it was like there was Pearl Jam and Nirvana and I decided to do an acoustic album that sounded like the Left Banke. But what really happened was that The Swinging Madisons had broken up, Bleaker Street Incident had broken up, Mumps was long gone, and Klaus was dead. I was here in L.A., I'd only moved here to be with The Swinging Madisons and I was here, even though I didn't like this town, I just sort of was living here and didn't know how to get out, and I thought, okay, I'm going to quit music. It's too painful and all my experiences in it had led to nothing. No matter how big you got, nothing good ever happens. And then I realized that even when I quit music I kept writing songs, and I kept writing these acoustic folk songs. And so it was actually a very low ebb in my musical career where I was struggling with ever being involved in music again. And then my manager came back into the picture and he said 'these are the best songs you've ever written. I can get these released if you just record an album.' And so I recorded an album of those songs that I was never going to record because they were all too sad and straight-forward. I thought they were kind of naked. I wasn't guarding myself the way I did in every other project, by making it silly or ironic, and that ended up being my first album. And that sort of started me out on my way to whatever I ended up being."
"Odd Man Out is specifically a gay liberation song. The song was about people who may think they're being liberal, but really they're not, and really there isn't a seat at the table for gay people right now, and we're struggling with it, and we're doing better than we used to, but there still is a lot of work to be done. And I was good friends with Phranc, and Phranc is one of those people who… first of all, if she talks to you, you just feel like a light is being shined on you and you're warm, and you're in the company of the best person you've ever known. And then her songwriting is so strong that I felt so lucky to be her friend that I was hoping that she would be on the album in some way or the other, and she was. It was so exciting. I just adore her." It's another geo-blocked video. In fact, all of the album is geo-blocked for me. Here's hoping many of you get to listen to it:
Here's the title track, which is about "anybody in your life who's ever betrayed you - generic deprogramming material. There are vague references to David Bowie and Patti Smith, but it isn't that I don't love those people anymore. You just get to the point in your life where you feel, 'Boy, this just doesn't do it for me anymore.' You'll never be at that point again where you're so vulnerable that music comes and fills a void you thought nothing could fill. But that's what music did for me. I was hoping I could make somebody else cry in this lifetime, and I'm glad to say that I have."
... This is My Generation:
... And this is Garbage Turns To Gold:
In a review of his second solo album, Earthquake Weather
(1997) he was quoted as describing his musical sensibility as: "If Leonard Cohen and Lesley Gore had a baby, I would have been that baby."
This album is also geo-blocked for me, so I'm uploading youtube videos for the lucky ones. First, here's Lite Of The World:
... This is Man In A Hurry:
... And this is the title track:
In 2002 came an album of interesting collaborations, simply called &. "What inspired that album was a record that never happened. Belinda Carlisle was sort of a friend of mine, we're not close friends. She lives in France, but we've remained in vague touch over the years. And she used to just love it when The Swinging Madisons played You're Having My Baby - it was her favorite song, so I said 'let's do a single, let's do a duet singing Having My Baby,' and she said 'Sure,' and so I recorded the backing track to Having My Baby and she got laryngitis and she couldn't come to the session, and then she moved back to France and I never saw her again, so that never happened. And then my record company said, well, why don't you just do a whole album of duets, so it was kind of like a byproduct of a silly thing that never occurred, and it wasn't my idea at all. And I was kind of resenting it, cause I had all these songs ready for my third album, and then I was forced into this kind of concept of duets. But as it came to start recording them I realized it was really a gift. And then I threw out a lot of the songs and wrote new songs with people in mind."
My favorite duet is the one between Kristian & Rufus Wainwright, called Scarecrow. It's about Matthew Shepard, who was brutally murdered in 1998 for being gay. Thankfully, it's the only song from this album that isn't geo-blocked on youtube:
Here's Tender Even Then, featuring Maria McKee:
... And here's Madison Avenue, featuring El Vez:
Hoffman also acted in a few underground movies, like Rome '78, The Long Island Four, and Downtown 81. His last album (so far) is called Fop (2010). In this album, he felt less restricted at expressing his sexuality. "First of all, the cover - my father took that picture of me in a dress. My mother was an actress, and she had what she called a 'rainy day trunk' of discarded costumes from her various plays. We were encouraged to play, act, and make-believe. Her world seemed full of beguiling fantasy. On rainy days all the kids would just pick a costume out of the trunk and run around the house pretending we were old ladies from a Marx Brothers movie, or Gilligan's Island, or whatever we had seen on TV that afternoon. My dad took that picture of me, thinking it was cute, and even before I knew what 'gay' was, my incipient defensive self knew it was embarrassing - I could sense the condemnation to come - just this side of blackmail, really, and I never wanted anyone to see it. But now I want to embrace that person - that spirit of play-acting, role changing, and adventuring into outré areas of dress that are outlandish and provocative. It doesn't seem 'gay' to me anymore. It seems wonderfully playful and fanciful. It seems to have a spirit that should be celebrated. It may seem 'gay' to others. So, by that picture, I out myself as that person who is willing to take the risk of 'seeming' gay, and ultimately being found out to be gay."
"The whole album embraces that concept: often, whether true or not, the 'fancy man' has been presumed to be gay, and therefore dismissible: 'light in the loafers,' 'half a man,' etc., and his concerns where thus thought of as the provenance of wispy irrelevant florists and hairdressers - a sort of eunuch slave class."
"I wanted to out myself as that fancy man - that fop - which was originally a pejorative term for a person too much concerned with the surface to have substance. I wanted to say in a dark era where art and intellect are suspect, surface is substance. The statement you make by being 'fancy' - excessive, opulent, over-orchestrated, flamboyant - is a revolutionary statement. Instead of hiding, you say, 'My comportment is my art.' In that sense, you come out. There are other approaches - pristine, elegant, minimalism. I love that. The punk squall railing against the establishment. I love that, too. But those are not the album I made. My slap in the face to the drabness of contemporary culture was to make an album where not only is there a sturdy framework of disciplined craft, but where artifice is the art. Everything will be as big and highly realized and crazy and unpredictable as possible, and celebrate excess through all the eras of music at which hopefully I have some small semblance of command."
"The fop, who has so often been ostracized by culture as shallow and marginal, who has been beaten and persecuted for being different, who has been cast as an irredeemable sexual predator without any evidence, who has been ignored or ridiculed, is outed on this album as a true revolutionary: one who dares to aspire - and perhaps fail - to display all that is florid, rapturous, opulent, all that is theatrical and passionate - which is so often dismissed as 'gay' - as a dizzying unapologetic psychedelic merging of sound, vision, and comportment through a world that would rather rob one of all color and texture. Fop describes the 'fancy man's' journey through that dark world. So Fop is not a sexually 'gay' album as such, but it embraces and celebrates what the world often dismisses as gay. The will to live is an 'event' in oneself."
Luckily, there are a few songs from this album that are available on youtube. This is the quirky I Can't Go There With You:
This is Hey Little Jesus - there is influence by the Cramps:
This is Out Of The Habit, with echoes of Brian Wilson and Elvis Costello:
Finally, this is Ready Or Not, a song that could belong in a musical:
If you want to listen to all of Fop on Deezer, catch it here:
When Lance Loud retired from music, he became a noted columnist for several magazines, including The Advocate, Details, Interview, and Creem. Through journalism and sheer force of personality, Loud remained active in many cultural scenes throughout most of his adult life, giving occasional lectures on the impact of An American Family on American society at colleges around the country. He also acted in a variety of independent films, including Amos Poe's Subway Rider (1981), where he starred with the likes of Robbie Coltrane, and the cult Inside Monkey Zetterland (1992), where he appeared amongst many other cameo roles of the L.A. set. He remained close to his family and volunteered in animal rescue organizations. He was particularly fond of cats, keeping 10 and persuading his mother and a sister, Michele, to take in strays, said his other sister, Delilah.
However, all was not great with Lance; he suffered from a 20-year addiction to crystal meth, as well as from HIV and hepatitis C. Days before he died in the Carl Bush Hospice he wrote for The Advocate about his imminent demise:
"I've been sent on a journey to places even bleach can't reach. For years I had told myself that all my unbridled drinking, drugging, and unsafe sex were going to lead exactly here. But I never really believed it."
On December 22, 2001, Lance Loud died of liver failure as a result of hepatitis C and a co-infection with HIV. He was 50 years old. A rendition of Over The Rainbow was sung by Loud's friend, Rufus Wainwright, while accompanied on piano by Wainwright's mother Kate McGarrigle.
Kristian Hoffman is alive and well and living with his partner, playwright Justin Tanner. Rick Berlin is also alive and well and involved in music. Klaus Nomi, as most of you probably know, was one of the first famous victims of AIDS; he died in 1983. I could find no details of what became of Kevin Kiely. It seems that he too is no longer alive...
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