Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds with Lupo Cittá

In 1976, Brian Tristan was the 17-year-old president of The Ramones Fan Club. Today, he’s the man we know as Kid Congo Powers, legendary guitarist for The Gun Club, The Cramps, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

With his two decade-old outfit, The Pink Monkey Birds, Kid Congo digs deep into his roots as a crackerjack guitarist playing the primitive music that inspired him: the raw sounds of early garage and Chicano rock. The songs are loud and fuzzed-out, dark and greasy, brash and boisterous, and psychedelic beyond belief. This is primal rock n’ roll at its finest, and there’s just nothing more punk.

Following the recent release of That Delicious Vice, and just back from a wildly successful tour of Australia, Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds announce live shows for this summer and fall. Kid was also part of the “Old Punks” Focus Group with Fred Armisen and a wealth of other punk legends on a recently-aired episode of John Mulaney’s Everybody’s In LA.

“It’s a new lineup,” landlord of the avant-garage Kid Congo Powers exclaims of the Pink Monkey Birds edition responsible for the fifth studio full-length of their 19-year recording career, That Delicious Vice, released April 19 on In The Red Records, the band’s home since 2009. “We’ve gone from a four piece to a three piece,” continues Kid, whose unique guitar style has been at the center of some of the most forward-thinking bands in punk and garage: The Gun Club, The Cramps, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Knoxville Girls, to name a handful. “Because Mark Cisneros (Des Demonas, Hammered Hulls) is playing guitar, sometimes we have songs with two guitars. And then sometimes, he plays bass on a bass six (i.e. — the electric bass version of the mariachi instrument, the bajo sexto). So, that is a new development. We lost a member and decided to try to do it as a three piece — more space, you know?” Ron Miller remains on drums, percussion and vocals.

“I’m not sure if living in the desert is making me want more space in music or not,” laughs Kid, a Tucson resident for a few years now. “Maybe I’m turning into a desert stoner rocker. But I’m not a stoner, so that’s not happening.” No, the former Brian Tristan is most decidedly not unleashing a Kyuss tribute album. But you hear the desert all over That Delicious Vice, beginning with opening instrumental “East Of East,” its Duane Eddy/Rowland S. Howard guitar twanging through some malicious reverb. You feel it in the slide guitar-drenched theme from an imaginary western, “Silver For My Sister,” which echoes the pioneering Los Angeles blues punk band Kid formed with Jeffrey Lee Pierce, The Gun Club. There’s also such unique pieces as the acid/garage cumbia title track, translated into Spanish at least for its name, “Ese Vicio Delicioso.” As he tells the tale of his musical journey over the Pink Monkey Birds’ cowbell-thumping Latinate rhythms, Kid’s thickly distorted guitar groans and screams with feedback, likely a conscious sonic homage to Jimi Hendrix, namechecked in the lyrics.

“Mark came up with some great Spanish guitar things,” Kid enthuses. “We were working with cinematic sound a lot — creating a mood, creating a picture and creating a feeling. We actually like to expand, spread our wings each time a little more and not do the same old thing, and not just be the thinking man’s garage rock band. But the album’s major hallmark has to be its extended collaboration with Alice Bag, the face of and voice of early LA punk titans The Bags. How and why these two took this long to unite creatively is a dense mystery, considering both graduated with honors from early Hollywood punk palace The Masque, and their photos had to have stared at one another from opposite pages of a few issues of Slash or fLiPSiDe. “Yeah, we were around that ground zero, that tight circle of friends,” chuckles Kid, “But there was a lot of cliquiness going on, even though the scene was so small. Everyone knew each other, but I was more with The Screamers and she was more with The Bags and the punk thing. You know, I was more arty farty!” “We go back a long time,” enthuses Alice. “When I was doing my book tour, Kid called me and I hadn’t heard from him in ages! And he’s like, ‘You’re coming to DC! If you need me for anything, I’m gonna make some noise with you — I’m in!’ It always amazes me how deep those early friendships go. You can not speak to somebody for years and years, but if you have punk rock in common, you’re my sister or brother forever. So he came out and he played with me at one of my early readings in DC. And then, every now and then I’d see Pink Monkey Birds, but just randomly. Because he was living on the East Coast and I was living on the West Coast, we didn’t see each other very often and fell out of touch again.”

Next thing either party knows, they’re both In The Red labelmates, with the release of Alice’s third solo LP, Sister Dynamite. Following that, the producers of the Peacock comedy television series The Resort reached out to label head Larry Hardy, to inquire if either Kid or Alice would be interested in composing a Spanish-language song for the show. “It was actually Alice who said, ‘Well, why don’t you just get us together and we’ll do it?’” says Kid. “And they went for it. So we wrote a cheesy lounge act song, which is of course much better than any cheesy lounge act.” “We recorded it,” adds Alice. “Then we did these cameos on this show, playing our song. They flew us out to Puerto Rico for a few days. It was just a really fun experience. It’s really fun getting to hang out with Kid, and the process of writing a song with him was very enjoyable, even though I was living in Mexico City and he was in Tucson by then — we were still working remotely. “But we just clicked. I’d send him a recording, and then he’d add to it. and send something back. We both were very open to each person’s own brand of quirkiness.” This led to “Wicked World,” a full-on Kid Congo/Alice Bag duet that’s That Delicious Vice’s second track and major fulcrum. Over rat-a-tat “Big Bad John” drums, a blast of fuzz bass, and Kid’s siren-like slide guitar, the co-composers recount in tandem the tale of a child “born into trouble from a devil seed/Every fork in the road led her here.” It’s a short drive from there through a poor childhood and bad decisions to turning tricks and seeking kicks, amid an atmosphere heady with the scent of sex. The action stops, and Alice chants, “One two three four five six seven — you’re going to Hell, and I’M GOING TO HEAVEN!!” It’s a pulp paperback reincarnated as primal rock ‘n’ roll.

“One of the songs, ‘The Boy Had It All,’ was actually inspired by Howie Pyro,” Kid explains. Pyro, who died May 4, 2022, was a NYC punk fixture who co-founded the D Generation and was a popular party DJ and music/movie archivist. “The Boy Had It All” is the latest in a series of “songs about people we know that are gone.” “It seems to be a recurring theme,” he elaborates, “because sometimes when people leave this Earth, it’s hard to believe that they’re not on Earth anymore. They were all — no, they are — special friends that I thought were magical people. I always want to try to capture something before that magic flies away. I mean, I can’t grasp it anymore. But when it’s fresh, it’s like, ‘Okay, we gotta write about this magical person. Yeah, it’s the same with Sean DeLear on the last record (2021’s Swing From The Sean DeLear).” “It’s really great to be playing with someone who I’ve known for over 40 years,” he says of the collaboration with Alice. “I respect her as an artist. I respect her stance as a feminist. I respect that she’s such a great role model for a lot of young Chicano kids. We have a lot of parallels that make it joyful.”

The album ends with an extended soundscape, “Murder Of Sunrise,” which Kid claims is meant to be his “Barry White song.” “That was my idea,” he says, proud yet almost sheepish. “I was like, ‘This is a Barry White song and here’s some chords that are kind of like Barry White, kind of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’’ And I’m talking about how I’m in ecstasy!” he laughs. “And I thought, ‘You know, Barry White has been an actual real influence, you know?’ I realized that because I got asked during the pandemic — again, a German TV show. Someone I knew was making a documentary about the influence of Barry White. And he had remembered many years ago at the beginning of The Pink Monkey Birds that I had said, when he asked, ‘What’s your new band gonna sound like?’ And I said, ‘It’s gonna sound like Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen meet at a Barry White concert.’ So he actually remembered that like 15 years ago or something. He said, ‘Will you be in this documentary and talk about Barry White?’ I was like, ‘Of course, Barry’s the king!’ “So there’s all kinds of ridiculous, but heartfelt influences on the album,” he concludes. “Well, I don’t think they’re ridiculous influences, but they are unexpected sometimes, even to me.”

That Delicious Vice is produced by Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, recorded and mixed by Jim Waters (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Sonic Youth) at his Waterworks Studios facility in Tucson. Artwork is by Ryan Hill, graphic artist for all Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds releases on In The Red to date.

Lupo Città is a new trio with Chris Brokaw on guitar and vocals (long-term Cambridge resident, solo musician and member of Come, Codeine, Martha’s Vineyard Ferries), and Boston residents Sarah Black on guitar and bass and Jenn Gori on vocals and drums (both former members Minneapolis garage rock bands). Lupo Città’s debut LP released in January 12, 2024 on 12XU Records of Austin, Texas.