WAS (Not Was) IS (Not Is) GOOD! (Not Good!)

WAS (Not Was) IS (Not Is) GOOD! (Not Good!)

by

John Neilson

I'm on the phone with Donald Was (nee Fagenson), who with partner David Was (not Weiss) forms the core of the Detroit nouveau funque ensemble, Was (Not Was). The purpose of my call is to set up an interview, but this is proving to be difficult, as Donald obviously has other things on his mind.

"What we're thinking of doing," he's telling me, "is going gut to get some footage for a video we're working on. We want to go to this supermarket, see, with a porta-pack and some saxophones—we'll just storm in and shove these saxes linddr people's noses in the aisles and the camera will be running and hopefully we'll get these great looks of REAL FEAR on their faces..."

x I finally get the appointment set up, but that night I have the strangest dreams...

It's a sunny. Saturday afternoon, and I'm finally talking with Donald and David in the lobby of Detroit's glittering come-hither to jettsetters everywhere, the Renaissance Center. Both are in their late 20's, curlyhaired, and very white (a fact which may come as a surprise to those familiar only with their music). Donald is gulping down coffee to counteract the effects of working in the studio all night with ZE Records labelmate Cristina (they were recording material for a—ready for this?—ZE Christmas LP). We're talking about the origins of Was (Not Was), which stretch back to their junior high days in the early 60V.

"If you go back and listen to the stuff we did when we were twelve, it's easy to understand how it got, from that point to what we're doing now,-' Donald explains. "We used to have a little Lafayette sound-on-sound machine, and we'd just keep bouncing tracks back and forth..."

These days they have 24 tracks to play with instead of two, and they can draw upon the talents of scores of well-known (and not-so-well-known) Detroit musicians to help flesh out their ideas. People like trumpeter Marcus Belgrave and ex-MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, to name but two. The result is a unique funk brew that sounds like what you'd get if you turned George Clinton's whole crew loose in the studio under the direction of Frank Zappa...

"We actually MET HIM!" Donald exclaims, eyes bright with the memory. "A little-known Detroit fact: Zappa was on Robin Seymour's Swingin' Time before Freak Out came out, and it was like nothing you ever saw before. I was going to California with a friend of mine, and happened to run into him at the airport the next day, and my friend went up to him and asked 'Are you guys with the Fade-Outs?' (he didn't catch the freak part). And Zappa goes 'yeahhh...'

"And then when we were in California we spotted the album, and it was definitely a revelation, especially since we started taking drugs about the same time. (Imitates a young adolescent hopelessly overwhelmed by the cosmic significance of "Help, I'm A Rock.")"

Fast-forward a dozen years or so. Donald—the more musically oriented of the two—has worked his way up from the Lafayette two-track to stints at various recording studios around the Motor City, including the Sound Suite, where the LP was recordedDavid, on the other hand, is a writer, currently living out on the . west coast and writing jazz reviews for the Los Angeles Herald.

"When Donald called me—life-long buddy now separated by 3,000 miles—it was in the name of retrieving those lost glories before we turned around and the watch said '40 Years.'" David was obviously open to the notion of making music instead of just reporting it, and all of the songs on the Was (Not Was) LP were subsequently written over those same longdistance phone lines.

"We won't say what company's satellite we were using," he murmurs conspiratorialy.

A single ("Wheel Me Out") was recorded and sent to ZE Records and this nette^l them a multi-album deal with a sideline producing some of ZE's other artists (a Cristina album, the,Christmas LP, etc.)

"It seem^ like it's snowballing," David says.

Surprisingly enough, they have found their greatest support so far amongst black teenagers—kids who've absorbed the Funkadelic/Gap Band funk trip and who are ready for something new. The irony of this is not lost on Donald.

"It's a weird thing," he admits. "Growing up in Detroit, on CKLW every other record was a Motown record, our high school was 50/50 white and black, and we would hang out with the black kids (if for no other reason than we were getting high with them, and the white kids weren't into getting high so much) .'' Thinks for a second.

"It's just what we DO. I couldn't do a Rush album—those aren't my roots. THAT would be unnatural for me!"

"I believe," David offers, "that kids ever since the 50's—the Beat Thing—have found that there's something spikier, better, 'across the tracks.' Soul music, spirit music, something that was gone out. of white middle-class culture. And we're guilty of that. We've found a better brew. "

"What I might add," Donald says, "is that we wrote the last song on the album, 'Go Now,' with RoaBanks, who's the leader of the Dramatics, and he heard the song finished for the first time and he said, 'Boy, you guys sure made that a WHITE song!'

"So the other side of the coin is that to black listeners, it may not be black music at all. We seem to be on some sort of middle ground. I don't think we're appropriating black music—all of the things that we have absorbed in our lives have been coming out as something new."

The interview over, the three of us shoot the breeze for a while and goon at all of the people wandering around the RenCen. I mention that there's been some sort of barbershop quartet convention in town, and that I'm surprised that we haven't seen any of them yet.

Donald turns to David as I bid them goodbye.

"What we could do," he's saying excitedly, "is get some saxophones, and just rush up to these barbershop quartets and shove the saxes up under their noses and the camera will be running, and..

Stay tuned for more details. W