Some New Kind of Kick by Kid Congo Powers

Author:Kid Congo Powers [Congo, Kid Powers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

“You have to have a Cramps name,” Lux and Ivy told me. This was one of the first orders of business. “Make a list of names,” they said. I asked all my friends to make suggestions. “Thing” was an early one, after the hand in The Addams Family. Then Pleasant said, “Oh, your name should be Brian Gris-Gris.” That was a good one. I liked that it incorporated my own name and made it voodoo-sounding. Lux and Ivy rejected that outright. They didn’t want another Brian in the band, or anything that would remind them of Bryan Gregory.

Bryan had announced his resignation from the Cramps a few months earlier by disappearing mid-tour, after a show in Berkeley, taking off with not only the band’s van but also all their equipment in the dead of night. There were rumors he had joined a satanic cult. Bryan was a sweet man with a caustic wit but also very strange. Anything was possible. Bradley Field once told me Bryan used to favor older women as lovers because their skin felt soft like crepe paper.

The Cramps finished the tour with a fill-in guitarist: a woman named Julien. She played with the Mad, a New York horror-punk band fronted by Screaming Mad George, who later became a huge horror movie special-effects artist. The Mad were extremely theatrical and I’m sure that’s what probably drew Lux and Ivy to Julien. They gave her a more fitting, Cramps-sounding name: Julien Griensnatch. I saw her onstage with them during the Urgh! A Music War concert at the Santa Monica Civic and thought she was great. But Lux and Ivy wanted someone who was going to be a more permanent addition. That was me.

They came up with their own suggestion for a name. “You should be like Kid Thomas,” they said. Kid Thomas was a crazy, screaming rhythm-and-blues piano stomper from New Orleans, who had this giant jelly-roll hairdo and a pencil mustache. He looked great and I was a fan. Being the youngest in my family, I was often called “Kid” by different family members, especially my auntie, so the name already felt familiar.

Then, one day, we were sitting around their apartment. Lux was looking at this Santeria votive candle, which had writing all over it. “When you light this candle,” it read, “congo powers will be revealed to you.”

“There’s your name,” Lux announced. “Congo Powers.” It had a great ring to it, for sure. Magical, and sprinkled with old Hollywood glamour. As if Tyrone Power had been reincarnated as an orisha. We married that with Kid Thomas and I had my Cramps name: Kid Congo Powers.

This was a great talent of Lux’s, coming up with characters and assigning roles to everyone. He even came up with a name and backstory for my mother. There was an old ’50s pulp magazine in their apartment lying open at an ad for Elura wigs, these fake-fiber hairpieces made by Monsanto. “Your mother was a Mexican vampire actress,” Lux said, “named Allura Monsanto.

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