THE DESIGNATED MOURNER

THE DESIGNATED MOURNER

Kid Congo is writing a song for everyone, eventually

Zachary Lipez

"As time marches on, people die around you. And that seems to be happening at an alarming speed that I’ve not experienced since the AIDs epidemic. Now it’s more that people are aging out,” Kid Congo Powers explains, resting at home in Tucson after a long birthday weekend at the Broad Museum in L.A., where he and fellow punk survivor Alice Bag performed. “This is one of my things I do. For whatever reason, I’m compelled to do it, to write about people who’ve recently left..."

Kid Congo has compulsions to spare. He has the Pink Monkey Birds. He has a new project with Alice Bag, based on the duo’s performance as lounge singers on the TV show The Resort. With the 2022 publication of Some New Kind of Kick, he sidelines as a memoirist. He, with his husband, raises two cats: Farooz (named after the Lebanese singer Fairouz, an international superstar perhaps best known in the West as the voice from El Yawm Ulliqa Ala Khashab, which Madonna threw on an Erotica track and tried to pass off as her own) and El Roi. He tours. Like a motherfucker, he tours, traveling to shows in Australia the way artists a third his age might make a jaunt from San Diego to Seattle and consider themselves real road dogs doing it.

Amidst all this, Powers answers a familiar calling. Drawing from dreams and stray scraps of paper, songs of exaltation are written, recorded, and performed, all in his role as designated mourner. Designated mourner is a term made up by Wallace Shawn for his play of the same name. Not to be confused with the professional mourners of ancient Rome, paid to parade whenever some third-rate Augustus kicked the buckestus. Powers’ role, as designated by his own psyche, is to publicly mourn both the dead and the worlds that disappear when everyone goes. How I’m applying the term isn’t entirely faithful to how Shawn used it (though hopefully he won’t send his goons after me). In this case, it’s a world defined less by geography than it is by the passions that brought the now gone into Powers’ orbit in the first place. It may be, as he says, a compulsion. Or maybe he’s scattered enough ashes and spent enough time in the margins to know that closure is a cope, and memorials are unevenly applied. Maybe he’s just good at missing his friends, set to the sound of Las Vegas grind guitars over a cumbia beat.

“It’s for me to try to capture, like, ‘How is it possible this person is not on earth anymore? This incredibly alive person is now dead. What were the elements that made him so alive?’”

The “him” referred to here is Howie Pyro, the D Generation bassist who died in 2022 from COVIDrelated pneumonia. Pyro is paid tribute to on “The Boy Had It All,” a chiming guitar freak-out, over a Chambers Brothers beat, that depicts the Lower East Side fixture as a sparkling debauchee surrounded by pop and trash detritus in this life, dancing in the next one as “he eats ice cream and says ‘oh wow.’”

“I turned him into a cartoon, which was not a stretch at all to do. It’s part homage, but also it’s an attempt to capture some kind of essence or magic that they have in life.” Lyrics celebrating a poster collection might not scan to the square world. But what some consider high praise doesn’t necessarily apply when the deceased was in a glam-punk band named after a Reagan Youth song. If Powers ran with the war criminal set, he’d have lyrics about “devoting one’s life to public service.” Social mores vary.

Kid Congo Powers (born Brian Tristan) came into the world one day after the Los Angeles pulp writer Raymond Chandler left it. Depending on whether one believes in mystical energy transference or that the early L.A. punk scene operated within a tradition that Chandler created, March 26, 1959, coming right before March 27, 1959, could be a coincidence. What happened next was a few years of the usual rigmarole (learning to tie shoelaces, puberty, discovering the Ramones), followed by a few years of slightly less usual rigmarole (Powers becoming president of L.A.'s first Ramones fan club, losing his mouth virginity to someone referred to in his memoir as “Mr. Big in the Pants,” appearing in an episode of the Don Rickles cop sitcom C.P.O. Sharkey). Eventually, Powers was encouraged to pick up the guitar by first Lydia Lunch and then Jeffery Lee Pierce. Which is like two separate Jesuses suggesting carpentry school. In certain lives, coincidence, calling, and pulp fiction shack up.

As a pivotal member of doom-blues innovators the Gun Club, swamp-rockers the Cramps, and Nick Cave’s band of louche pallbearers the Bad Seeds, Powers moved and shook on a number of definitive albums of the 1980s. But Powers’ influence, acknowledged by bands like the White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is not limited to music. As a gay Mexican-American man operating in spheres that could be as racist and heteronormative as the overculture of pricks they were kicking against, Powers hacked out a space for those on the periphery of the periphery. Not bad for the first decade of one’s career.

What came next was the loss of Powers’ father, the death of numerous friends to AIDS, the 1996 death of his spiritual brother, Gun Club’s Jeffery Lee Pierce, and a steady intake of heroin that wouldn’t end till Oct. 22, 1997. The man—who, just a few years prior, had been the baddest seed on the scene—found himself working retail. Outside the Knoxville Girls and some very fine albums with Sally Norvell, Powers was treading water. Of course, larger context matters. It was a time between garage and post-punk revivals, after the Lyres and before Liars, when performative depression outsold winking at death 100 to 1. The only thing more fashionable than rockers singing about being dead inside was rockers dying. Grading on a curve, Powers making it through is no small thing.

In retrospect, that stasis makes his 21st-century renaissance slightly miraculous. What saves the miracle from being a Lifetime movie about merely existing is the fact that Powers’ work of the past 20 years, independent of legacy, succeeds to a blistering degree. The Pink Monkey Birds, who began in the mid-aughts but came into their own with the tittytassel-twirling go-go garage rock of 2009’s Dracula Boots, have managed the rarity of getting better with every album. When “Sex Beat” and “New Kind of Kick” are performed live, they’re played less as “the hits” than as celebrations of a lost world; essential, but no more worthy of love than crowd favorites written this century. Powers’ voice has grown from something likably sardonic (akin to John Waters describing a country that has a thousand dances) into something fluidly natural.

The 2021 EP Swing From the Sean Delear—with its tribute to the dead friend of the record’s title and its closing 14-minute Latin-funk dreamscape memorial to Powers’ Gun Club brethren—was a leap forward in the Pink Monkey Birds’ evolution. That Delicious Vice—with its 17-minute closer, twice the cumbia, three times the evocations of dead loved ones, and a badlands banger featuring Alice Bag chanting, “4, 5, 6, 7, you’re going to hell and I’m going to heaven!” over a six-string bass line that sounds like Suicide on cruisin’ control—is an even greater jump ahead. The Pink Monkey Birds have evolved into Rainbow Man Birds-with-Thumbs (I’m not a scientist).

“There was a lot of stuff that went into writing this, lyrically and musically. I went through an intense period where I had fallen off my bike and broke my leg, right below the knee. I had to have surgery, and it put me down. So, you know, crutches, walkers, wheelchairs...there was a lot of time for reflection,” Powers says. “And, you know, we have been working on longer pieces, soundscapes, pictures of music that intrigues us. We want to spread our wings. We don’t want to be just garage rock.” Powers laughs before adding, “Which we are.”

“Silver for My Sister,” a lovely haze of shimmying cowpunk, is the second (after “The Boy Had It All”) of two tributes making up That Delicious Vice’s center. The song is about a friend, dead of cancer, who was an activist in defense of wolves. It’s not about Powers’ sister. Though, he says, it could be. He lost her a couple years ago as well. The song’s mantra, “a will to crawl,” is a phrase Powers scrawled in a notebook while he was on the mend. So the song is partly about that. And it’s also for Jesse Malin, the singer for D Generation who has been paralyzed from the waist down since suffering a spinal stroke in 2023.

“The song is about many, many things,” Powers explains. “As songs are. But it’s for anyone who’s down and wants to crawl.”

In “Silver for My Sister,” Powers—a sideways polemicist if there ever was one—delivers that key line as a mix of empathy and threat; real ones know that howling on all fours is where it’s at. Lest anyone confuse grief for sentimentality, Powers conveys loss by asking a wolfman to take him and his dead friend back to the wolfman’s lair so they can let the fur fly. Without explicitly saying that some metaphors have been ruined by cornball mystics, self-serious goths, and/or Danzig, Powers says that he couldn’t say “wolves” in the song. In Kid Congo’s pop-trash cosmology, rock songs should have werewolves. Grief is a lot of things, and ridiculous is one of them. And damned if the guitars on the song don’t sound exactly like silver.

People do die. Some people make it to a hundred and just when they’ve established how good they are at living, they die from doing it for too long. When it comes to mortality, you can’t win for winning. Being able to evoke those you’ve lost is not a skill set anyone would choose to put in the hours required to perfect. I’ve gotten some worthwhile writing from my parents’ deaths, but I’d have loved the chance to haggle over the price.

Alas, that ain’t happening. Not for me. Not for you. Not even for the guy who played guitar on the Cramps’ Smell of Female. The only thing that could make all this loss any worse would be forgetting. Luckily, Kid Congo Powers is on the job, digging that grave scene like an undertaker in reverse (complete with sequined suit); bearing witness to all the fading neon, resurrecting what he can. Preserving every element and every “oh wow.”