The Tubes offered more than just white punks on drugs.
Source: Loudersound.com
USA – In the 1970s, the provocative art rock band The Tubes, with their extravagant live performances and daring songs, were briefly among the most extravagant bands in America, until changing trends and poor record label decisions pushed them back. In 2016, they reflected on their unique career.
If you ever find yourself in a government building in the Greater Los Angeles area, you’ve probably run into John “Fee” Waybill, the frontman of The Tubes, going about his daily business. Ten years ago, his dream of rock stardom fading, Fee went to work for his ex-wife’s family business. The man who shocked audiences in the 1970s with his extravagant, drunken, cocaine-addicted glam-rock alter ego, Quay Lewd, now manages a nearly 100,000-square-foot commercial property. If you work for Los Angeles Social Services and your toilet flush is broken, he’s the man to call.
“It’s a really tough job,” says Waybill. “Every email is ‘urgent,’ every phone call is, ‘When is the plumber coming?’
But Waybill is a natural. His father was an engineer and helped build Arizona’s first resort hotel. He passed that knowledge on to his son. “I’ve got it in me,” says the man who made the first platform shoes for Quay Lewd out of giant cans of tomato juice.
But like a rock version of Clark Kent/Superman, John Waybill transforms into that other man after work. “During office hours, I fix leaky toilets. On weekends, I relax by singing with The Tubes.
In the 1970s, The Tubes were America’s most extravagant band. They combined sex, satire, and biting social criticism with virtuoso art rock. Their live performances were filled with naked bodies, dancing girls, roadies dressed as giant cigarettes, and a prosthetic penis. Even more bizarre, they then scored a string of pop hits in the 1980s. Then everything went south.
Waybill, Steen, bassist Rick Anderson, and drummer Prairie Prince grew up in Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona, in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1979, The Tubes released Remote Control , a concept album about a TV addict. It could have been autobiographical.
“In the summer, when schools were out, it was too hot to do anything but watch TV,” says Waybill. “All those sitcoms, game shows, and cowboy programs like Hopalong Cassidy .”
When the visual overload became too much, Waybill and his siblings would jump from the roof of their house into a shallow, three-foot-deep kiddie pool in the backyard: “Then we’d cool off and go back inside and watch more TV.”
“We were all stuck in the burning desert and going crazy with the television,” Prairie Prince confirms.
It was here, in the sweltering climate of Death Valley, that The Tubes were born. The Beatles’ television appearance inspired them all. In the mid-1960s, Prince and Steen played in a school band; Rick Anderson and future Tubes guitarist Bill Spooner and keyboardist Vince Welnick were in another.
“We were compared to Alice Cooper, but we were even more different than him.”
Bill of Lading with Costs
Meanwhile, Fee Waybill was the star of his local high school, a singer, actor, and dancer. “I was the Broadway musical guy. I did them all— Camelot , The Sound of Music , Oklahoma …”
In 1969, Prairie Prince received a scholarship to the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute. The rest of his band and their roadie, Waybill, a truck driver, went with him.
Spooner and Anderson’s band, now called The Beans, joined them on the West Coast shortly afterward, but finding gigs for two unknown groups proved impossible. In the early 1970s, the two bands merged, with Waybill moving up from roadie to backup singer (“I said, ‘I’m going to stand here and put on some silly costume'”) and eventually becoming the frontman and ringmaster of The Tubes.
The band, joined by synthesizer player Michael Cotton and second drummer Bob McIntosh, performed theatrical mock-rock shows that parodied the pulp science fiction and cowboy films of their youth. They played wherever they could find a spot: strip clubs, biker bars, the canteen at the art institute…
“[Promoter] Bill Graham had us open for the Fillmore West whenever some weird band was in town,” Waybill recalls. “We were compared to Alice Cooper, but we were more different and socially critical than they were.
The Tubes were more than just music. Cotton and Prince were their artistic directors and designed the sets and posters. The female dance group Leila and the Snakes and Prairie Prince’s girlfriend, singer Re Styles, appeared on stage with them. Kenny Ortega, who would later work with Michael Jackson, was the Tubes’ choreographer. “Kenny was and is a genius,” says Waybill. “He brought all those crazy ideas together.”
The Tubes made a visual statement before they even played a note. The night an A&M Records A&R representative came to see them, Waybill was onstage, having a conversation with himself on TV via a pre-recorded video. The Tubes were a multimedia experience before that term even existed. “We had to do things that made us stand out,” says former guitarist Bill Spooner now. “I love rock ‘n’ roll bands, but there were so many , and only one like us.”
The Tubes signed with A&M Records and recorded their debut album with producer Al Kooper in the spring of 1975. They dedicated it to Bob McIntosh, who had recently died of cancer, and the band still cherishes that first album. “It’s really who we are,” says Prince. “We’d had some of those songs for years—’Damn it, let’s just throw that away’—but it still works.”
The LP was framed by two tracks that exemplified the diversity of their sound. ” Up From The Deep” was an orchestral jazz-rock overture, while “White Punks On Dope” was an exuberant pop number that poked fun at spoiled teenage rock fans ( “I’m going crazy because my parents are so damn rich/Gotta score when I get that rich white punk itch…” ).
In between, The Tubes joked about greedy consumers ( What Do You Want From Life ) and fetish wear on Mondo Bondage . “That was about us, these idiots from Arizona, seeing gay men walking down Pope Street in leather chaps with no backsides,” says Waybill. “It’s not a big deal now, but back then it was, ‘His ass is hanging out!'”
But it was the White Punks that inspired Waybill to create his most popular stage persona. Quay Lude, with his blond wig and platform shoes, was a parody of the archetypal glam rock star. “I was a big fan of Rod Stewart and Robert Plant, and Quay Lude’s original name was Rod Planet,” Waybill reveals.
“Mondo Bondage was all about us idiots seeing gay men wearing leather pants with no backsides.”
Bill of Lading with Costs
The character, however, was based on David Johansen, the frontman of the New York Dolls. The Tubes were the opening act for the Dolls and were amused when the main act arrived in full regalia in the middle of the afternoon. Waybill remembers thinking, “What a bunch of posers. I have to make fun of them.”
Quay Lude appeared when The Tubes opened for Led Zeppelin at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium in June 1973. That day, Waybill’s alter ego caused chaos by throwing flour into the 60,000-person crowd, claiming it was cocaine.
“I made Quay Lude’s first platform shoes out of five-gallon cans of tomato juice,” he recalls. “But I drained the juice first. Halfway through the song, they started to collapse, so instead of 12-inch heels, I was left with two inches.”
“We did everything ourselves,” says Prince. “We used vinyl instead of leather, and our bondage outfits were held together with Velcro and glue.”
But it worked. Everyone on the West Coast was soon talking about the band, which Circus magazine called “the rabid geese of the San Francisco scene.” A&M quickly realized, however, that while people liked The Tubes, they weren’t buying their records. Their debut LP only reached number 113 on the US charts.
A second album, 1976’s Young And Rich, fared somewhat better and was produced by Ken Scott, the Beatles’ and Bowie’s sound engineer, the first of several Britons involved in the band’s history. ” Don’t Touch Me There” parodied Phil Spector’s 1960s pop hits, with Waybill and Re Styles ramping up the sexual content, and ” Proud To Be An American” satirized mindless patriotism. “But the reviews weren’t good,” says Roger Steen. “And that was the end for us.”
A year later, The Tubes worked on their third album, Now, with another Brit, Queen producer John Anthony. But the collaboration proved difficult, and the band ultimately decided to finish the album themselves.
The release of ” Now” in the summer of 1977 coincided with The Tubes dumping their manager and signing with Rikki Farr, son of British heavyweight boxing champion Tommy Farr and the brains behind the Isle of Wight festivals. Farr saw The Tubes in LA and, according to Waybill, “he was absolutely ecstatic. ‘You guys have to go to England. They’ll love this!'”
Despite The Tubes barely selling a single record in Britain, Farr arranged a UK tour for November 1977. “Rikki was a master at whipping up the press,” says Spooner. “We were banned in some places because they thought we were mocking the royal family. Rikki told people the Queen would be on stage with us. He was a master at manipulation—and I mean that in a good way.”
“I made Quay Lewd’s first pair of platform shoes out of tomato juice cans. Bill of Lading with Costs”
The Tubes arrived in the UK at the height of punk, and The Stranglers took them under their wing. “I loved punk,” says Steen. “We weren’t a punk band, we were a cabaret band, but we embraced that whole vibe.”
The Tubes’ sold-out shows at London’s Hammersmith Odeon confirmed Rikki Farr’s prediction: England loved them. After over an hour of bombarding the audience’s senses, the set concluded with Quay Lude, with some kind of fake appendage protruding from his groin guard, inspiring a collective chant of “You fucking bastards!” from the crowd before being crushed by a collapsing speaker stack. “They came, they were furious, they conquered,” declared NME .
What Do You Want From Live , a live LP recorded in London, reached the UK Top 40 in February 1978. The Tubes’ subsequent tour, however, ended prematurely when Waybill misjudged the edge of the stage at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall. “I broke the fibula in my right leg,” he recalls. “I heard it pop in the air.”
At the time, Waybill was playing his punk alter ego, Johnny Bugger, and carrying a chainsaw. The audience assumed his “brilliant fall” was part of the show. Later that year, The Tubes drove onto the stage at Knebworth Festival in an open-top Ford Fairlane, only to have its front end crash through the floor. “Yeah, it was Spinal Tap ,” says Spooner.
Ask The Tubes if they ever felt the props overshadowed the music, and only one man agrees: Roger Steen. “I was the one who thought we should focus more on the music. We’d work on the songs and then start talking about what costumes we’d need for the show, instead of working out the parts. I love Quay Lude; he still makes me laugh, but…”
In 1979, however, The Tubes faced a much bigger problem. “In A&M’s eyes, we could do no wrong,” says Prince. “But we weren’t making them any money.”
By the time Todd Rundgren produced The Tubes’ “Remote Control,” he had already transformed a theatrical rock band into a chart-topper. Couldn’t Todd do for The Tubes what he’d done for Meat Loaf with “Bat Out Of Hell” ? But well…
“Todd kept us focused,” says Prairie Prince. “He was the one who said, ‘We need a concept.'”
Fee Waybill had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel “Being There ,” about a man whose life experiences are shaped by television. The book was currently being adapted into a film starring Peter Sellers.
Remote Control offered streamlined pop-rock and social criticism. The songs “TV Is King” and “Prime Time” were made for radio—but radio didn’t seem interested. Most band members consider Remote Control one of The Tubes’ best albums. “But it didn’t do very well,” admits Waybill.
A&M let them make one more record, but rejected the songs before they were even finished. “They loved us so much they had to let us go,” Prince says dryly.
Bobby Colomby, former drummer for Blood, Sweat and Tears and then Capitol’s A&R manager, offered The Tubes a lifeline. But the Capitol deal came with a catch. “It was a three-album contract,” Waybill explains, “but they had the option to drop us after the first album if it didn’t sell.”
We were banned from some places because they thought we were making fun of the royal family.Bill Spooner
Looking back on this period in The Tubes’ history, Roger Steen laughs. “We were all about making art,” he explains. “We weren’t about making hit singles… no matter how badly we needed them.”
For their first Capitol album, The Tubes considered several producers, including Bob Ezrin and Mike Rutherford of Genesis, a big fan of The Tubes. They ultimately chose David Foster, who had just scored a hit with Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “After the Love Has Gone.”
Fee Waybill considers Foster “one of the best producers ever” and believes he saved The Tubes’ career. Bill Spooner remembers giving him the nickname ‘Bambi,’ “because he was such a soft-rock guy.”
Roger Steen remembers hearing Foster talk with his manager: “He was having a tense conversation about how much money he had to make each month. He didn’t understand the soul of The Tubes. To him, it was just a business.”
But it was a business venture that gave The Tubes some much-needed hits. The album The Completion Backward Principle , released in 1981, featured the ballad “Don’t Want To Wait Anymore” and the fast-paced, power-pop-inflected ” Talk To Ya Later ,” co-written by Foster and Toto guitarist Steve Lukather. The album reached the top 30 in the US.
The Tubes were pioneers in the use of video in rock music, but MTV audiences discovered them through Bill Spooner singing “Don’t Want To Wait Anymore” in a shirt and tie. “Every song I sing is the best ever,” he jokes. “But yeah, that was that big ’80s ballad with lots of reverb on the snare drum.”
Spooner and Steen both seem uncomfortable discussing “the Foster years.” Was it all an artistic prank, or were they just doing what they had to do to sell records? “A lot of good things came out of it,” Steen emphasizes. “But what will stand the test of time?”
The Tubes’ next album, Outside Inside , reached the US Top 20 in 1983, thanks to another Foster-Lukather composition: “She’s a Beauty” was a textbook example of ’80s rock, with an equally textbook ’80s music video, choreographed by Kenny Ortega, an old friend of the band. But Lukather brought the song to the studio as a nearly complete piece. Spooner says, “I don’t think Roger or I played a single note on it. Roger was pissed. I didn’t care—it’s a great song.”
After their chart-topping hits, the group scaled back their live shows, cut back on dancers, and parted ways with second drummer Mingo Lewis. The Tubes had evolved into a somewhat eccentric pop-rock outfit, the kind of band whose songs were featured in direct-to-video films like the 1980s “sex comedy” Hardbodies .
We weren’t about making hit singles… no matter how much we needed them.Roger Steen
Fee Waybill apparently convinced his bandmates that a solo album produced by David Foster would boost The Tubes. That proved not to be the case. Waybill’s album, ” Read My Lips,” was released in 1984 and flopped.
” Read My Lips —or whatever it was called—was the deciding factor in the Capitol deal,” explains Bill Spooner. “They reasoned: if the big star isn’t selling records, why should we invest in the band? And we were an expensive band.”
The Tubes recorded Love Bomb , their final album for Capitol, with Todd Rundgren as producer. Waybill, who sang on only a few tracks, isn’t a fan. “Fee doesn’t like Love Bomb because he wasn’t involved,” says Roger Steen. “And anything Fee isn’t involved in, he thinks is rubbish.”
He laughs as he says this, but there’s a slightly fragile undertone to his voice. 1985’s Love Bomb was the last album by the classic lineup of The Tubes. Waybill left the band to pursue an acting career (he recently played King Arthur in an American stage production of Spamalot ) and to write songs with the then-up-and-coming Richard Marx.
The Tubes toured with a new singer, their old Phoenix friend David Killingsworth—watch an awkward performance on The Late Show With Joan Rivers on YouTube . “Terrible,” says Spooner bluntly, though Steen is a bit more lenient: “He was a nice guy, but our numbers were too high for him.”
Michael Cotton was the next to leave, followed by Vince Welnick and then Bill Spooner, who was struggling with drug addiction. “I had health problems,” he says, “most of them self-inflicted.”
Prairie Prince joined Todd Rundgren’s band and became a session musician. But old musical ties proved difficult to break: “I’d been playing with Roger and Rick since 1965.”
The Tubes reunited with Fee Waybill for a comeback tour in 1993. Initially, they didn’t wear costumes. “But people would look at us in our jeans like, ‘What the fuck…'” the singer admits. “We built our reputation, and we have to live with it.”
The Tubes’ 1996 comeback album, Genius Of America , came and went. David Medd has been The Tubes’ keyboardist ever since. Tragically, Vince Welnick committed suicide in 2006. These days, a fully functioning Bill Spooner is content with his existence as a former member of The Tubes. “I still hear from them occasionally,” he says. “But I’ve played with them five times in the last twenty years, and that’s enough.”
Asked about the possibility of new music from The Tubes, Fee Waybill says he’d love to make another album, but that “nobody buys records anymore.” It’s not that the band lacks inspiration: corporate greed, media overload, and sexual fetishes are just as relevant now as they ever were. In the meantime, however, the 65-year-old is happy to wear “the cheesy outfits” and sing the hits.
Since 9/11, it’s been impossible to get a gas can through customs or a chainsaw on a plane as carry-on luggage. “But we still tour with two giant suitcases full of props. And people love it,” says Waybill. “I’ve always wanted to be a rock star, and I said I’d do anything for it. This is the life I’ve always wanted.”
With this, Waybill returns to the world of faulty pipes and angry government employees: the man you call when something goes wrong.
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 228 (September 2016)
