Kim Fowley and the Lost Art of Staying Teenage

By Patrick Brayer

My last remembrance of an encounter with Kim Vincent Fowley on this beer-stained plane comes and goes as thus. It was at a sleigh-bell Christmas Eve party, no less, one staged by himself himself. It was well worth going, not just historically, but just for the simple fact that Kim never threw a party ever, at least in my education of him. Kim Fowley didn’t throw a party, he was too busy being one. I didn’t know what to wear to such an occasion, being fashion exonerated, so I opted to sport a cast-off mothball, pool table green sweater, the leavings of my late brother Michael, who beat Kim to the grave by a month chronologically, in a mad rush it seems now, give or take a eulogy. I followed that up, costume-wise, with a straw pork pie hat I procured in Destin Florida on the Redneck Riviera. I approached Kim Vincent slicing my way through a glockenspiel of guests, bedside and apologetic, “Hey lover boy, I thought the invitation said that everyone was supposed to dress like Rex Harrison, all except Rodney Bingenheimer of course, who could still, being the sanctioned movie mayor of the Sunset Strip, still likening himself as Little Lord Fauntleroy”. For this, I got a slapdash rye acceptance in the eyes of Mr. Alley Oop. I didn’t know he would go so soon after, as far as a nail-hard beeline to the hereafter.

Harvey Kubernick and Rodney Bingenheimer (photo: Patrick Brayer)

I was, as usual, party-wise, out of my given element socially, so then, aided by his wife Kara, I embraced a newfound bottle of Merlot, and a crock stash of regimental Fowley comfort food (mashed potatoes). On that buzz, I got to then tell music history scribe Harvey Kubernick that his most recent book, one concerning air wave radio in L.A., held most excellent and entwined company on our shabby sheik wood slat coffee table, arm in arm, almost incestually, alongside an early 1900’s book by Kandinsky about spiritualism, and the ragged art thereof. The party attendants on that last occasion numbered only about fifteen to twenty. I had brought along a song lyric to share, one that I wrote for Kim entitled, The King of the Dust and Oranges, but it turned out the buzzing Los Angeles chitter chatter never got to where I could out-win its sonic favor. So I remained silent, which is how I came, so I had consistency on my side. Which was, I’m finding out, a good way to sit with Rodney Bingenheimer, us there side by side in a couple of plastic bus depot chairs. Not aloof, he’s just that stonewall shy. I last remember him graveside, Bingenheimer, tear-stained, and not giving away an inch to a disco haircut, there at the service for his pal at the Forever Hollywood cemetery, in close proximity of a youthful dish, all this, as I helped my long time friend Annie Carlson (from Spin Magazine fame) in kimono satin, to find her missing pack of Marlboros beneath the bruise shadowed underbelly of a lacquered limousine.

Tracking back to the Christmas party, I remember hearing Chris Darrow, one whom Fowley and myself both mutually considered, to be the Buddy Holly of the Inland Empire, him now there doing a guttural jowl-slung version of his composition, Evangeline, to and into the cantankerously cocked ears of bed-sheet Fowley, who was an erection of energy and wanting to just break out of his smorgasbord of illness then and there and spawn lyrics, as always, on the spot and in a sort of lethal carney spirit that he owned alone and earned. Well, “earned”, that’s a whole other subject with its own sugar plum fairy set of entirety. Nonetheless, I plopped my cell phone video thing down before his noodle plate in the midst of the perfect confusion to catch a headshot of him holding wide-angle court in his classic yet comically staged rancor. I don’t know if anyone will ever see it but me, but it was grand in that I saw in it the sweetness of the father that he was never to be, and perhaps even the aspects of a fatherliness that I myself never had, or at least one I longed for, presently not unlike him. I brought him a photo-shopped portrait of himself that I took in our draught tolerantly infested backyard in Claremont California in 2004, this just before we moved back in magnetism to the ditch-weed San Bernardino county, where I belong, at least according to most of my songs. I always like to call the photographic shot in mention, The Bee Keeper, as he was there hiding behind a flowering plant with his green flaming ski hat, which etched to one a certain period in time for him. Maybe a skyscraper on a Blarney skateboard fantasy. Upon the image I superimposed a faint headshot of his dad, Douglas Fowley, one that I obtained on eBay, from a movie he once did with Myrna Loy. When I pointed it out to him he grimaced just like you knew he would, could, and did. To which I there added, “In your greatness, you have conquered your father Kim, and now you need to forgive him”. We only winked.

Fowley at the Brayers with Douglas Fowley superimposed (photo: Patrick Brayer)

At some point later in the evening they traipsed out this singer fellow named Arial Pink, who was sort of a big deal in that present tense, and one that Fowley was presently doing some songsmithing with, or for. After Fowley’s passing, I looked up the new recordings in revelatory curiosity and they were just dog shit awful of course. Fortunately, I am not the judge and the jury of anything, yet still, this made me sort of sad, but then I thought to myself, they were awful, agreed, but they were an awful that only Fowley could make art of, and was famous for. Alley Oop, Popsicles and Icicles come to mind, both of which sold millions. You definitely had to bend your mind to address their level, if you even had the energy, which was his energy. He definitely had another side of the coin that had a couple of extra dimensions tacked on.

This leads me finally to my last and parting words to my resting friend Kim Fowley, as he tired, and the conglomeration, as was ushering by his bedside, a line, in rosary fashion, like the broadcasted seeds of his life story, each bead a character, not unlike a papal visit to the Pope, not of a Sunset Strip, but one that rather stripped the very idea of sundoown. I had nothing rehearsed, so this was it, so it just sort of came blurting out, for I didn’t know in fact that it was to be the last, but it was. “See you later Kim, I’ll have to say in all honesty that I don’t actually know where you’re going, but I want you to know, wherever it is, that we’re right behind you”. “When we’re gone, people listening will be the only music we hear” He was considering all of that, his eyes a soup of ray ban glass, as I passed by, trying my best to hold back the hunched back of reality, before his last nod to me under the sci-fi guard of a big fake Christmas tree adorned with not so fake 45 RPM records, many as not, of this friend’s very most thought and production.

I still had my brother’s eulogy in my coat pocket at Kim’s funeral, Joan Jett doing the honors this time. Fowley’s grave is situated right in company with Cecil B. DeMille in the Hollywood Forever Cemetary. Among the necessary dates and name on the black marble marker leaves his advice in quotes, “Stay Teenage”.