Even in his 60s, Kid Congo Powers is still searching for Some New Kind of Kick

Kid Congo Powers. // Photo courtesy the artist

Musician Kid Congo Powers is a rock ‘n’ roll legend. With tenures in the Gun Club, the Cramps, and the Bad Seeds, as well as his own prolific output via Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Money Birds, Powers has left indelible traces across punk history.

While music fans are likely familiar with his distinctive guitar work, they’re less likely to be familiar with the man himself, born Brian Tristan in La Puente, California.

That should all change with this week’s release of his autobiographical work, Some New Kind of Kick: A Memoir, via Hachette Books. Written with the aid of Chris Campion, Powers’ book explores his time growing up in the Los Angeles punk scene, trips to New York, his longtime friendship and musical partnership with the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and so much more. It’s an intimate look into what Powers learned about himself growing up, as well as the musical environs in which it took place.

We hopped on Zoom to speak with Powers about creating Some New Kind of Kick.

The Pitch: There’s a lot in this book. How long did it take you to assemble all of these stories?

Kid Congo Powers: 2006 ’til now. I started with no real idea. I had an outline. A friend of mine, Jonathan Tobin, had done a profile on myself and done kind of a podcast quite early on in the internet world. It was exhaustive. He was releasing a compilation of stuff I have called Solo Cholo, and it was a lot of my solo works. And he’s like, “Well, people know you’ve been in the Cramps. People know you’ve been in the Bad Seeds. People know you were in the Gun Club, but people don’t know you.”

He was trying to put it together in some form, and he made a discography and everything. I thought, “Okay, here’s a timeline for a book and it’ll be easy–I’ll just fill in the blanks and then we’ll be done. I’ll have a book in six months from now,” and then, 12 years later, we’re still editing.

What happened is that it turned into a bunch of disparate stories. My original idea was to have a photo book with some funny stories, and that was gonna be it, but then it became apparent that it should probably be a real book. Then it was a timeline: was this coming of age, maybe stop[ing when I become a musician? Kind of a Just Kids sort of timeline? The metamorphosis went on and on.

I asked Chris Campion to edit and help me write it and put it together, and he’s like, “Okay, there’s a lot of stories here, and you’re not telling everything, so we’re gonna get to the bottom of all of this,” and that took time and I have a music career. I’m a big road dog. I’m on tour a lot where I do a lot of live shows and it was kind of good, ’cause every time I would get writer’s block or stuck or writing about something very uncomfortable, it was like I’d jump up, say “It’s time to go on tour! It’s time to make the record and go on tour for a year!” and then come back to write a little bit more.

I’m very happy it took time because I like music, which I can create quite quickly. I come to some quick decisions and then, playing live with music, the songs change and become something else. That’s how it worked with the book, as well, just giving it time to live and grow up.

This book is so many things: it is a coming-of-age tale. It’s a musical history. It is, at times, a cautionary tale. Given that you were on a lot of drugs throughout this book, was part of the process trying to remember these things that had happened 40-plus years ago through the haze?

Why is my brain not destroyed? I dunno if it isn’t, but it was actually–these were all stories that stuck with me. All of these antics were very vivid in my mind. And, obviously when writing a memoir, you have to make choices of what is gonna be the important stories. There was a lot of stuff thrown by the wayside that didn’t make sense once we started putting it together and editing. It’s how I remember it, but I talked to many people.

I called up people and they told me, “Oh, well I have a completely different version of this story,” and then I would say, “But maybe you are right,” so no one could really remember exactly. There was a lot of fact-checking going on. This took a long time too, and this was something I stopped after a while–immediately trying to fact-check, like, “Did I remember that right? Is that real?”

Luckily, also online there are what they call the nerds, that catalog everything. There’s a great Jeffrey Lee Pierce archivist person Gene Temesy, who was actually written a kind of oral history book about Jeffrey that was never published. He had a lot of information that, and there’s a site called From the Archives and it deals with all the Nick Cave offshoot. They catalog everything so there was timeline references and then sometimes, that would spur on a memory of exactly what was happening when, but these were the vivid stories that stayed with me, that I write about, and that were important.

That was the thing: what was important to my makeup? What step went to the next step that went to the next step? That was kind of an ongoing, “follow your nose” kind of process.

Some New Kind of Kick is both about your love of music and your love for the people who make it. You got into making music through friendships, not through the usual route. You’re hanging out and Lydia Lunch is like, “Here’s a guitar. Play it.”

Exactly. I am first and foremost a music fan, and until a guitar came in my hand, that’s what I was. That was my whole life and that was my whole education. I learned everything from rock and roll and from pop music, reading magazines and interviews with pop stars. Every bit of literature, every movie, every everything.

But as the opportunities came up—meeting Jeffrey or just playing around with Lydia Lunch—I was right about people just saying do this. Just make up whatever. Just do it. You have a good mind to do this. I realized, “Oh, that’s how people make music.” I didn’t realize you had to have lots of lessons and have started when you were five years old. That didn’t come into my idea of what it was.

I just wanted to be near music at all times and I knew I wanted to be involved in music and that’s why I was doing journalism and I did earlier fan clubs, fanzines, and all of that was a way in, and when you do that, then you meet musicians, and that was what I wanted. I was an ineffectual groupie but when Jeffrey Lee Pierce said, “Oh, you should be in a band,” I thought, like, “Why not?” and it was frightening.

It was more his encouragement—“Of course you can do this”—and it was like, “Well if he says so, I’m gonna do it.” That kind of spurred me on. A big part of the book was to be about my relationship with Jeffrey and his influence and how we were both just fans, really–music fans and fan of all kinds of different things and how we both traveled to get near it.

We didn’t just localize it. We were into going into the world and finding out about it. We needed proof. We needed proof it existed. We needed firsthand experience–a bit like method acting–and as it turned out, we learned how to do it by doing that. That was our education.

I went to community college for half a year before I joined The Cramps. I didn’t have much beyond high school education, but all of my education came through being a fan of music and finding out about literature from music people or magazine articles or writers, and just being a culture vulture.

It’s like that line from Willie Nelson’s “Me and Paul”: “We received our education/ In the cities of the nation.” In the book, it’s rather amazing that you’re just like, “Yeah, we’re gonna go to New York and see about this CBGBs place that we keep hearing about.” Your dedication–it’s not fandom, it’s true love of a sort. You wanted to not only listen to these records, you wanted to see these people play in the place where they were from.

It was a religion. It was a following and you have to make your pilgrimages, you know? I was just a tenacious young thing so I never gave it any thought other than, “Of course we’re gonna do this,” and I always found people to do it with me, so I wasn’t the only one, but it was a matter of being quite tenacious, quite ballsy, and quite quite single-minded.

This is one thing writing the book let me know: that I was very single minded about music and fandom and that from an early age, it was a religious thing and a kind of holy grail of excitement. I knew that was what turned me on. I talk about being a kid and my older sisters going to shows and how exciting it just seemed to them. And I’m like, “I don’t know what they’re doing, but I want that,” and that’s still today. My thing is, “Is it gonna be exciting?” I don’t wanna miss it ’cause it could be exciting, and when I make music, I want it to be that as well.

I take that into account a lot: Is this going to excite me first, but also, will this language become something that other people understand and get excited about? There was no questions about what are we gonna do? We were not gonna be left out of this whatever it was, you know? It’s kind of like a religious pilgrimage, you know? If you wanna get spiritual, you go to India, meditate; if you wanna go to hear punk rock and roll, you go to CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City from LA at any cost, on a dime.

That’s how I met so many friends who are friends today. We were all on the same quest and all had a singular vision about fandom and music and a lot of these people became musicians, obviously, or somehow worked in music, if not just lifelong fans of music who still go out and see everything well into our 60s.

Some New Kind of Kick is out now from Hachette Books. Powers also currently has two digital albums via In The Red Records; Wolfmanhattan Project Summer Forever And Ever and Kid Congo Powers and The Near Death Experience Live In St. Kilda, both out now.