Despite issuing a
string of artistically inventive albums – The Tubes, Young and Rich,
Now and Remote Control and a celebrated live stage spectacle
showcasing the wild theatrics of lead singer Fee Waybill – by the turn
of the ‘80s The Tubes were quickly going down the proverbial tubes. That
is, until the entry of producer David Foster. With Foster at the helm
overseeing the band’s The Completion Backward Principle and
Outside Inside albums and also forging a songwriting partnership
with Waybill, the band scored major commercial success bolstered by the
hit singles “Talk to Ya Later”, “Don’t’ Want To Wait Anymore” and “She’s
a Beauty.” Now more 40 years since their formation, The Tubes are still
going strong, touring and intermittently releasing new music. In advance
of their upcoming February 8th show at The Canyon Club in
Agoura Hills, CA, we spoke to Tubes founding members Fee Waybill, Roger
Steen and Prairie Prince.
What
can fans expect from your current show?
Fee
Waybill:
We’ll be playing songs that cover our entire career. We try to do the
iconic songs and songs from all the records. We never do Love Bomb
songs ever. We used to do “Piece by Piece”, that’s the only song
we’ve ever done from that record.
Two
musical mavericks, The Tubes and the Alice Cooper Band, sprung from the
same music scene in Phoenix. Both bands were iconoclasts.
Prairie Prince:
We were all associates in the music scene in Phoenix. I think that our
unique identify and slant on our art comes from the brain damage from
growing up in that heat in Phoenix, Arizona. (laughs) Alice even
wrote about it in his song “Refrigerator Heaven.”
Fee
Waybill:
Everybody just stayed in the house all day long watching TV because it
was brutally hot. It was one hundred and twenty degrees for six or seven
months of the year and imagination sprung from being cooped up. What’s
funny is years later there was this undercurrent happening of “there’s
an Alice Cooper spy at our show” or that we were spying at one of his
shows. That we were going to steal ideas from each other. I don’t know
that he ever stole any ideas from us and vice versa. Alice surrounds
himself with the theater and with other people dressed in outfits with
big props and big sets. I become the theater itself and become the
characters. I immerse myself in the action and whatever vignette we’re
trying to portray.
Remarkably, it was almost 40 years ago that the band's debut album was
released, which was produced by Al Kooper.
Prairie Price:
We’d been working in the studio locally in San Francisco before we got
signed to a label recording all of that music. We were open to having a
producer come in and have his way with our music. Al was a big fan of
our music. He was really open to our ideas. Together we molded that
first record from songs we’d been performing and recording for the last
five years.
Like
much of The Tubes catalog, the band is all over the map stylistically,
did that hurt you?
Prairie Prince:
We just couldn’t be satisfied with a specific genre or style of music.
We loved so many so many other kinds of music. Like “Haloes,” which
Roger Steen wrote. It was his vision and he didn’t change it too much.
“White Punks on Dope” was really more Bill Spooner’s style of music. We
had three of four different writers in the band and we tried to meld
them into a style but it was almost impossible. The Tubes didn’t have a
recognizable style from album to album and that didn’t work to our
advantage. We were artists and trying to stick to our ideals and it left
us in the dark.
What
made the Tubes so distinctive is the band's unique musical and lyrical
approach.
Fee
Waybill:
First and foremost we were all huge Beatles fans. The Beatles changed my
life. When the Beatles came out I was in high school and I lost it. I’d
sing Beatles songs all day long. Then when Jimi Hendrix came out I
became a huge fan. In our current show we cover a Hendrix song (“Third
Stone From the Sun”). We all loved Captain Beefheart. On our third
album, Now, we covered a Beefheart song (“My Head is My Only
House When It Rains”). We had him come and do a guest appearance on the
record. He played alto sax on “Cathy’s Clone” and another song. We were
huge Beefheart fans, huge Zappa fans and loved the intricacy of their
music. It was just so different. It was not your typical bubblegum,
poppy shit. Before we got our record deal we used to do really weird
songs that had really weird time signatures. When we met our first
producer, Al Kooper, he said, “This is just too fuckin’ weird.”
The
Tubes are renowned for your outrageous performances with Fee Waybill
leading the charge as front man. What does he bring to the equation?
Roger Steen:
Fee is the relentless ham. In the most positive way, he just has to be
the center of attention. It’s something I don’t have. I’m not a self
promoting salesman. That’s not me but he’s that guy. His greatest
character is obviously “Quay Lewd” which has stood the test of time. Now
when Fee comes out as “Quay Lewd” in our shows it’s like a sea of cell
phones. (laughs) Fee is all about the costumes. If he has a
costume problem the song’s probably not going to be in the set.
Real
Gone Music (www.realgonemusic.com)
has recently released the band's second and third albums as a two-fer, Young
and Rich and Now,
with great songs like "Tubes World Tour", "Don't Touch Me There" and
"Smoke." Two underrated albums, how do you look back on those releases?
Roger Steen:
I enjoyed Young and Rich more than any of the other records we
did. That was such a great time to be in LA, working at A&M Studios with
Ken Scott (Bowie/The Beatles) as a producer. There’s a lot of good songs
on that record. The album didn’t get great reviews but the sound quality
is top notch. It was a great time for The Tubes. Our first record was
really well accepted and we got good reviews. That’s when we were now
starting to be somebodies. We were like the cool guys in town. We were
on the rise and Young and Rich reflects that excitement. We still
had all the potential and hope and life was good at that point. With the
Now album, we kind of lost the thread with that record. A lot of
those songs are over-compressed and over-produced. I don’t think our
producer, John Anthony, had enough control over us. Everybody had their
finger on the board. (laughs)
For
me, the Todd Rundgren-produced 1979’s
Remote Control is the band’s best.
Prairie Prince:
Remote Control was our last record for A&M. We were all Todd
Rundgren fans. I’d done some artwork for him. I did the Healing
album cover. Todd came to our show at the Knebworth Festival and hung
out with us for a couple of weeks. He dug the band and we started
talking about him producing our next album. We had some music with
lyrics but Todd said, “Why don’t we do a concept record?”
Fee
Waybill:
I came up with the concept for Remote Control. It wasn’t an
original concept. I read the book Being There [by Jerzy Kosinski]
about a boy that grew up watching television and his whole life
experience, his idea of love, wealth, came through watching TV. I
thought it was the greatest thing I ever read. I wrote this 20 page
treatise about the boy who grew up watching TV and tried to make it more
contemporary. I gave it to Todd and told him this is what we wanted to
do. We didn’t have any songs that lyrically connected with the concept.
The great thing about that record is it was so spontaneous. We’d come in
the morning and we all sat around and talked about it, how does it
start. “Turn Me On” is the first song, turning on the TV. We’d write the
lyrics and music together and go all day long. Then we’d break for
dinner and come back that night and start recording it. It was the
greatest thing because one of the biggest pitfalls to songwriting is
second guessing yourself. Todd was willing to be spontaneous and he’s
willing to just go with your gut and your instinct. We didn’t have a lot
of time and didn’t have a lot of money so we didn’t have the luxury of
going back and changing it fifteen times and trying thirty different
guitar solos.
Roger Steen:
We shared the writing credits with Todd on that record because he was
like a guy in the band. The most impressive thing to me about Todd is he
was always one step ahead. He always knew what was needed next and he’d
have it. He was our captain. We all respected Todd and we all really
clicked, what we thought was funny or was interesting. On that album
Todd made us sing higher than we’d ever sung before. A lot of those
parts were three or four of us singing those parts together all standing
on our tip toes trying to get these notes (laughs). It gave it
that huge background sound.
Fill
me in about those unreleased songs.
Fee
Waybill:
They’re songs from a record that was supposed to be called Suffer for
Sound. After we did the last released record for A&M, Remote
Control, that was the end of our deal. Remote Control didn’t
do that well, “Prime Time” did okay. The label was pretty much ready to
release us and we got them to give us one more shot. They really didn’t
want to do it. We told them we wanted to produce it ourselves in San
Francisco. They said, “Okay, we’ll give you half the money. Do the basic
tracks and do rough vocals and then send it to us and if we like it
we’ll give you the other half.” And that pissed everybody off. So we
said okay, took the money and started recording it. We were all upset
because it looked like the label was going to dump us and we wrote all
these very negative songs. We did the basic tracks but I refused to sing
rough vocals on the record because I was so pissed. “This is bullshit,
either they let us make a record or they don’t. Fuck ‘em!” Then somehow
they gave us the rest of the money to finish the record. We turned it
into the label and they said, “This sucks, we hate it, we’re not
releasing it.” So they released us instead. We added four tracks from
that original recording and they’re pretty good. I tried to pick songs
that weren’t so negative. I put on the song “Holy Water,” a song Roger
wrote called “Dangerous.” One that I wrote called “Dreams Come True,”
which is really positive and one that Bill wrote called “Don’t Ask Me.”
In
concert, The Tubes were a multi-tiered experience, delivering great
music and theatrical spectacle. Explain where the band’s visuals ideas
gel from.
Prairie Prince:
My mother and Michael Cotten’s mother encouraged us to do our music but
also incorporate visuals into our show – into a theatrical sense. We’d
have these group sessions where we’d pound out different ideas and talk
about favorite movies and TV shows which influenced us in our lives.
Art. Other bands. We’d incorporate all of that in our shows and try to
come up with something unique – different from other bands. Everybody
was pretty wowed about our shows. To this day, people come up to me and
say “that was the greatest show I’ve ever seen!”
What
is the status on the long awaited Tubes documentary?
Prairie Prince:
Michael Cotten, our keyboard player, has been working on that for some
time. He has two or three hours of interviews with the band, the
dancers, roadies and all our producers. We got Al Kooper to go back in
the recording studio and put up “What Do You Want from Life?” from the
original master and he starts messing around with the mix. It has all
kinds of live performances as early as 1965. Me and Roger had been
playing together since ’65; we’d known Bill Spooner and Rick (Anderson)
for many years. So there’s great footage of that and early performances
of the band in San Francisco. Our friend, Kenny Ortega, who was
instrumental in a lot of The Tubes production stuff, has started his own
production company and might release it.
For more info on
The Tubes:
www.thetubes.com
Tubes tour dates:
2/7-Ramona
Mainstage,
Ramona, CA
2/8-Canyon
Club,
Agoura Hills, CA
2/9-The
Coach House,
San Juan
Capistrano, CA
10/25 & 26-Tangier
Restaurant & Cabaret,
Akron, OH
