I FIND MISSING PERSONS

I FIND MISSING PERSONS

FEATURES

John Mendelssohn

The germ of the union that would one day become countless hundreds of thousands of fans’ favorite new New Wavoid attraction of 1983 wriggled into being one afternoon in the late ’70s when a curvaceous cutie called Dale strutted onto a soundstage somewhere in America to say howdy to her old buddy Frank Zappa. “Everybody in the band and crew,” recalls Terry Bozzio, who was then the drummer in the former, “was going, ‘Oh, my God— what a beautiful woman.” She hung around and watched me play, and apparently was as infatuated with me as I was with her, ’cause later that night...blahde-blah. And a couple of years after that we were married.”

Slightly thereafter, when the newlyweds would display themselves in public with their close personal friend Warren Cuccurullo, “people would go, ‘Hey, you guys in a band? You look like you are. Blah-deblah,”’ Cuccurullo had become a Bozzio buddy through the Zappa band. “He never missed a gig of Frank’s within 500 miles of New York City,” Terry marvels. “He’d know little changes in arrangements almost before the band did. When I heard a tape of him playing the guitar, I thought to myself, ‘Hey, this kid’s going to be great some day.’ ”

While Terry was on his final tour as a member of the famous progressive rock combo U.K., the Cuccurullo boy and Dale began work on a song called “I Like Boys.” When Terry got home and heard it, he exclaimed, “This is incredible. This is what /wantto do.”

Before we get carried away, we ought to note that Terry’s the nicest guy in show business, a fellow of such largesse and personability that he gladly divulged his dad’s coveted recipe for pesto sauce to the man from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such even before the two of them had established what seasoned journalists often refer to as “a rapport.” Pesto is that for which Genoa, whence the Bozzio clan sprang, is most celebrated gastronomically.

Once having written a few tunes together, the three young people resolved to acquire a recording contract—but not before shining on such illustrious prospective employers as Journey, Asia, Zappa, and Jethro Tull to pursue their own muse. Terry recalls that they thought, “With our backgrounds? No problem!” particularly after they got Ken Scott, the illustrious Ken Scott, to manage and produce them. But every record company in America, or at least all those they went to, spumed them. “The last place we got turned down was Bomp,” Terry reveals. “I called them up and said, ‘Hi, I’m Terry Bozzio. I’ve played with Zappa and U.K., and now I’ve got this great new band. I’d like to come in and play you some of our stuff.’ They said, To tell you the truth, Terry, if it’s anything at all like what you’ve done in the past, we aren’t interested.’ I swore on my hands and knees that it wasn’t. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Please! Wait! It’s real modern and real commercial, real pop and blah-de-blah.’ Eventually they offered us a typical point deal, but no advance, and no budget to go in and make the album.

*‘At that point, I said, ‘Fuck all these assholes.’ ”

But his brave bride refused to let the grpup’s spirits droop. “She got us into the frame of mind where we could really think positively,” he explains. “She reads a lot of those books, and now we all do.”

“I’ve proven to myself in my own experiences that what you think can become tangible,” Dale affirms, citing Atkinson’s Mind Power as a particular influence. “It stems from my brother, who’s a lot older than me, so I guess it just fell on to my shoulders.”

That Mrs. Bozzio’s is a most distinctive mode of self-expression became manifest to the man from America’s only rock ’n’ rojl magazine that bills itself as such only moments after he started the conversational ball rolling by asking about her tour-postponing bout with pneumonia. “I’d been working without a break for three years,” she said, “so I think I deserved to get pneumonia.” ' '

But back to our story. Having been told by every record company they went to that their songs would get no radio airplay, and then having said, “Fuck you. You’re all \X/et,” the Persons borrowed $3000 from Warren’s father, who, “as a typical Italian, believes in and lives for his kids,” and pressed their own EP. Thanks to the fact that they were able to persuade no fewer than 22 stations around the country to play it, it sold 10,000 copies—more than enough to inspire Capitol Records to say, “Gosh,” and re-release it bearing the logo that had earlier adorned Beatles and Knack product. Perhaps their biggest break 'was getting it placed in heavy rotation at KROQ, the much-intimated FM station to which one listens in Los Angeles if he has an implacable longing to hear the likes of “Teenage Enema Nurse” and not-particularly-notable Iggy Pop album tracks nine times a day, and can’t receive the infinitly superior KXLU, the superb but feeble-signalled station of a nearby Catholic university.

By and by, the EP, comprising songs that all of America’s record companies had ( agreed would get no airplay, became the biggest selling EP by a new act in history. Whereupon the group had only to survive the fierce antipathy of the critics, who generally concur that they’re a cynical attempt by slumming progressive hotshots to exploit the less discriminating sectors of the new wave audience by having the otherwise talentless Dale make a spectacle / of her tits in almost precisely the same way that the woeful Wendy Williams does.

As might be anticipated, Terry gets more than a little exercised when confronted with such charges. The first one he takes on is that he and the other boys in the band are slumming. “We were tired of what we’d done before,” he explains, “and tired of achieving the results that we had

"Everybody obviously wants to show off what they have. --Dale Bozzlo"

before-reaching only those of higher intellect, or at least trying to be the hotshot showoff drummer—putting as much garbage in every bar as J could, and

destroying other people’s music. Aside from fast, or violent, or loud, the average person couldn’t really understand any of it. It was like speaking Japanese to someone who didn’t understand it.

“Now er’re taking our cue from composers like Satie, who had tons of chops and could have written thick symphonies, but who chose instead to write simple little piano pieces with three notes that could make you cry just as much as all of Beethoven’s fury.

“And no one tells Dale what to do. Obviously, I tell her what notes to sing in the songs I’ve written, but otherwise she takes orders from no one. She’s always been sexy—always been the sort of woman who attracts attention, whether she’s walking into a club or a 7-11.

“We are calculating in our approach to the business end of things. We know that a pretty girl sells the car and the package of cigarettes, and we have a product to sell too. Just like a flower attracts a bee with its scent, we have Dale, with her free-thinking sexual outlook and Playboy Bunny background. But she never wears anything she could be arrested for on a public beach, and we don’t think it’s in bad taste.

“And you’ve got to keep in mind that all the things they say about Dale—that she’s flaunting her sexuality and can’t sing—they said about Elvis, too.”

The man from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such agrees that such things were indeed said about Elvis, but notes that they were said by people who thought Bing Crosby, say, was what pop music should have been all about. On the other hand, many of those who’ve deplored Dale in print positively adore the likes of X and the Blasters and Talking Heads.

Dale snorts derisively at the mention of the woeful Ms. Williams, and her alleged influence on her own stagewear. “That’s totally ridiculous,” she notes, “’cause I’m not wearing black leather. I’m wearing plexiglas. And we were out playing the streets long before I ever heard of Wendy O. Williams. And it was done well before her, beginning with Mae West and Ike & Tina Turner and Marilyn Monroe 25 years ago. Sex symbols will always be here, until eternity.”

Syntactically, Dale, comes across like Casey Stengel and Grade Allen reincarnate, but with a proclivity for the use—or, actually, misuse—of the word aspect that’s all her own, and every bit as rampant as her husband’s for blah-de-blah. “Everybody obviously wants to show off what

they have,” she asserts, “and I don’t think that what I wear is any worse than people walking around on the main streets wearing just black leather pants with jock

"We have aproduct to sell. -Terry Bozzio"

straps underneath to protrude their penis.

“When we first tried to put out our record, no one would pay any attention to us. But once we put it out on vinyl and put a girl [herself] on the cover, then they paid attention, ‘cause probably everybody in the record industry is male-oriented and as soon as you get somebody who looks pretty with tits and ass on the cover they open their eyes. Then people started saying, “ ‘Wow, this music is really great,’ because thqy had something to relate it to. When people get past my tits they see that I can sing and that we have redlly incredible music and the things that are going on musically aren’t happening with any other musical band in this time of music right here in earth.”

If you haven’t yet got the impression that Betty Friedan, say, is unlikely to suggest that Dale join her for a couple of beers, wait until you get a bad of her response “that any woman in this day and age, unless she’s totally into the feminist aspect, is a sexual object ’cause that’s been instilled in the humanitarian aspects of living and life. The woman is the wife and mother, and the man has to pooch the woman to present the child. So in that factory, the woman has to cook and clean and raise the J children. Woman is always going to be looked at in the light of the maid or the servant for the man. And you hope to God you’ll be a pretty one, ’cause if you’re lacking in those aspects, it’s even probably twice as hard. So I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I will always try to keep up and look my best. If that brings me into being a sex object, then more power to me.”

Dale has a provocative answer to the question of why critics hate her group so vehemently. “If they can’t pooch me by the end of the night, they become hostile. But obviously that’s their problem. I mean, I don’t know, you know? To me, critics are really uptight. Probably they wouldn’t be so critical if they could play a musical instrument and see what it really takes to sit down 24 hours a day and have to write music and put a package together and present it and wrap it up in a bow.” Harsh words, the man from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such thinks to himself, from one whose own musical expertise extends no farther than the second or third page of Lene Lovich’s How To Sing New Wave.

Terry jumps back into the conversational fray with both feet. “When we started this whole thing,” he points out, “KROQ was a little shit underground station, and everybody told us that we’d never get anywhere. We just did what we believed in. We’re not bullshit. We’re not Contrived. I believe in Missing Persons 1,000 percent!”

He considers his interrogator’s refutation of his Elvis/Dale analogy, and argues, “You don’t hear Talking Heads on the radio, but our album was the second most added record in America when it came out. They just don’t know how to hit on that tone that we hit on. We make no bones about wanting to be accessible and successful.

“They call us a cross between Blondie TURN TO PAGE 57 and the Plasmatics. Well, Dale’s had blonde hair all her life. When we first went around to record companies, they told us that, since we were bound to be compared to Blondie, they’d only consider us if Dale dyed her hair black and we changed the name of the group to Joan of Arc. But we wouldn’t. We did what we wanted to do, and we made it work. If people want to hate us for that, that’s their privilege.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 22

“I really don’t care what the critics say. As far as I’m concerned, they’re impotent —dogs without teeth. In the old days, on Broadway >or something, but nowadays nothing that anybody writes in a newspaper is going to influence people that much, not as long as TV and radio are exposing us to people face to face. We go directly to the people!”

“But so,” the man from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such notes, “did Mussolini.”

“Yeah,” Terry acknowledges, “but cure we really doing something evil? I believe 100 percent in Missing Persons. We have done right. We are good musicians, combined with somebody new and fresh. We’ve stuck it out and we’ll continue to stick it out. They’ll all come around when we’re giant.”

He offers no explanation of his 900 percent drop in conviction over the course of five paragraphs.

Blah-de-blah. ^