KID CREOLE’S CIRCUITOUS SAFARI

The history of lynching should be taught before Columbus in American schools; how, after Emancipation, something like 200 black men per year were tortured to death on suspicion of having slept with white women, it took one black female journalist several years of lecturing and writing about this outrage and the psychological aberrations which engendered it to stop the madness: moral pressure from Europe, where Ida B. Wells pled the case against Southern lynch mobs, forced domestic authorities to stem the bloody tide.

Recognition of these title bits of hidden and conveniently forgotten history inform the music and stage show of Kid Creole And The Coconuts, a world of erudite imagination where Hollywood glamour collides with sordid reality. When bandleader/composer August Darnell shares his stage with three pretty blonde chorines he tags as ''innocent, but not so innocent," it would help his audience enormously to remember Ida B. Wells and the strangely tantilizing aura of sex and death that hangs over this allegorical King Kong and his three Fay Wrays, with a menace that goes beyond the Freudian.

Fans will remember August Darnell from his days with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, where his lyrics matched tone-for-tone the eerie sophistication of Stony Browder's big-band disco rock. Launched by the hit single "Cherchez La Femme," they careened on to release two more LPs after their eponymous debut: Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Meets King Penett (RCA) and Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Goes To Washington (Elektra); both of which examined several kinky aspects of optimism in the face of a degenerated American Dream. The members of the fiveman Savannah Band were black and Latin—and with Darnell as conversant with Harlem Renaissance literature as with Shakespeare, it seemed natural that he would write songs like "Hard Times (Working Class Hero)" and "Once There Was A Colored Girl" that perceived modem city life as gilt-edged tragedy.

When the Savannah Band broke up, Darnell and vibesman Andy "Sugar Coated" Hernandez floated off into a number of intermediary projects, taking flyby-night disco production deals from small companies that surprisingly resulted in many a durable dance classic. "There But For The Grace Of God Go I," a disco-protest tune by the jazz funk ensemble Machine, was one, "Jungle Love" by the parvenu chanteuse Cristina another. Things went on this way until Cristina's boyfriend Michael Zilkha, owner of Ze records, offered the duo status as in-house production team. Thereupon was born Kid Creole And The Coconuts, a gradual amalgamation of Ze house musicians and selected guest stars who were shaped in the image of Darnell's cinematic ambitions.

The band began performing in New York's new wave club circuit, offering the spectacle of a drummer and female bassist in pith-helmets, several girls in leopard skins, all gyrating to music that was sometimes salsa, sometimes reggae, sometimes rock or Broadway pop, and often all of the above. They released an album in 1980, Off The Coast Of Me, and swiftly gained a’cult audience of slightly different demographics than those who'd loved the Savannah Band. Partly due to August Darnell's habitual modified zoot suits and ready genial wit, the group became a critical favorite, recipient of beaucoup free press. They released another album, the magnificently obscure Fresh Fruit In Foreign Places, and suddenly big time entrepreneurs like Joseph Popp were sniffing around this close-to-15-man ensemble, who had dared to release a concept album in four languages and conceived as a Broadway vehicle. With the third LP, it suddenly became obvious thot Europe would make stars of an unfashionably intelligent black man and his multiracial cast of "characters" before America would. So Chris Blackwell of Island Records took Tropical Gangsters and Kid Creole to Europe in '82, with a major campaign to make them famous, while the same album (titled Wise Guy for the States on Sire/Ze) all but sank into oblivion in their country of origin.

Now, August Darnell, aka Kid Creole, and many other alter egos, continues to craft idiosyncratic songs, with exotic Caribbean or Latin arrangements and rock instrumentation. He is accepted (although misinterpreted, as his style is intrinsically American on every level of plurality) in Europe to the extent where he can mount a four-month SRO tour there in '83, but has yet to crack the American charts. But as Europe gradually hands him the financial security to take more risks and buy more support, a U.S. breakthrough can only be around the corner.