Kid Creole and the Coconuts

MUTANT DISCO INFERNO
Mutant Disco was the term coined by ZE Records to describe the multi-hued musical pollinations which they plucked from New York’s club underground, representing the dancefloor-driven side of the city’s post-punk movement. While still a Savannah band member, August Darnell became the label’s in-house producer until his Kid Creole alter-ego was ready to step out in 1980.
Michael Zilkha started ZE in 1978 as an outlet for his girlfriend Cristina Monet’s first single Disco Clone, an acidic comment on New York night-life. The label swiftly gained a name for diverse and bold statements ranging from manic sax-warrior James Chance to Suicide’s second album while providing an outlet for Darnell’s audacious genre-blending experiments.
“We have to sing the praises of Michael Zilkha,” says Darnell. “A lot of stuff like Dr Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band only became doable when he came aboard. You’d go in the studio and spend a lot of money being ridiculous.” Many of the tracks were engineered by Bob Blank at his Blank Tapes studio, according to Darnell, “a haven for creative artists because they knew that Bob Blank was a creative son of a bitch who would try things that other engineers wouldn’t dare because it was unorthodox.”
Darnell’s late 70s projects, usually road-tested by big fan Larry Levan at the fabled Paradise Garage, featured a stellar gaggle of freaks and funkateers led by his bass disciple Carol Colman, usually locking with drummer Yogi Horton who provided a human counterpart to drum machines on the productions emerging from their friend Sylvia Robinson’s Sugarhill operation which was spearheading New York’s third late 70s musical upheaval, hiphop.
Just as Eno’s No Wave album introduced the world to the blanker generation which had risen out of the CBGBs scene [Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Mars, DNA], ZE set out its stall with 1981’s Mutant Disco: A Subtle Dislocation Of The Norm, featuring Darnell spinoffs Coati Mundi, Gichy Dan, Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band and Kid Creole, along with Bill Laswell’s Material and new Detroit outfit Was [Not Was]. Like many creative supernovas, ZE didn’t last long after its US distribution deal with Ariola ceased but the gems it left behind are a fascinating array of experiments and statements from this period. The Mutant Disco guest list included…
Coati Mundi
‘Sugar-Coated’ Andy Hernandez, aka Coati Mundi, was Kid Creole ‘s comic foil but in the studio he was Darnell’s right hand man handling arranging, orchestrating, producing and playing vibes. In 1981 he became first of the crew to score a UK hit with Me No Pop I, which became massively influential as Latin music and fashions infiltrated London’s hipper clubs.
Dr Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band
[Don] Armando Bonilla’s streetwise personality inspired August Darnell’s nascent Kid Creole persona, his studio-assembled Second Avenue Rhumba Band releasing one self-titled, Darnell-produced album on ZE. There was a distinct cowboys and Indians mood, notably their zesty romp through Irving Berlin’s 1946 I’m An Indian Too from Annie, Get Your Gun which placed future-diva Fonda Rae’s supremely camp vocals over tribal percussion before predating house music with its frantic piano riff. Zilkha thought this novelty item would be the hit but the flip’s Deputy Of Love exploded in New York’s clubs instead. Rae, later to enjoy club smashes like Over Like A Fat Rat, also dueted on Going to A Showdown with Taana Gardner, who went on to major disco fame produced by Levan. Both were part of the floating coterie of female singers, also including Lori Eastside and Sue Who, who sang with the Coconuts and Aural Exciters in the early days.
The Aural Exciters
The Aural Exciters were Bob Blank’s after hours party band, named after a tone-boosting studio gadget, a way of accomodating the groundswell of ideas running riot when the freaks came out at night. Again, they made just one album in 1979, lost classic Spooks In Space. Under Darnell’s direction, jams turned into songs, Emile [Night Shift] a supremely unsettling back alley crawl featuring Taana Gardner’s sensual vocals, James Chance on horns and Andy Warhol assistant and Walter Stedding [later of Chris Stein’s Animal Records] on violin. Darnell’s first date with future wife and Mama Coconut Adriana was an Aural Exciters session at Blank Tape where she ended up blowing bubbles in the sound booth.



Gichy Dan’s Beachwood Number 9
August Darnell described silken-voiced Staten Island crooner Frank Passalaqua, aka Gichy Dan, as, “the precursor to Kid Creole & The Coconuts” giving the singer music which considered too esoteric for the Savannah Band in 1979. He also made just one album, Beachwood Number Nine, arranged by Andy Hernandez and produced by Darnell. Beginning with a 40s tropical boat scenario, it was another mixture of urban realism and affectionate nostalgia relocated to the Caribean with soca, calypso and doo-wop strains sneaking in the disco, a sublimely exotic taste of Creolism to come.
Cristina
Darnell produced the princess of ZE’s self-titled debut album in 1980, a beguiling mix of jungle grooves, detached disco and damaged world-view. The pair also created an audacious rewrite of Lieber and Stoller’s Is that All There Is? which incensed one of the composers so much that the record was pulled before it got past promo stage under threat of lawsuit. Maybe it was the line ‘let’s break out the ‘ludes and have a ball’.



The LA Daily News preview for Kid Creole & The Coconuts’ Key Club show:



Have zoot suit, will travel
On October 03, 2007
It's jazz, salsa, funk and funny
Kid Creole is one of pop music's wittiest comic figures
BY FRED SHUSTER >MUSIC WRITER
The alter ego of New York musician-lyricist August Darnell, Creole is a Latinized Cab Calloway in a zoot suit and broad-brimmed hat who sings songs like "Mister Softee," "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy" and "Stool Pigeon" in a flashy musical revue that sees him frequently berated by a glamorous chorus of female backup singers called the Coconuts.
Incorporating big-band jazz, disco and Caribbean/Latin American salsa, Kid Creole & the Coconuts had their biggest success in the '80s, when they fit neatly into the colorful new-wave scene at home and in the U.K.
In the decade before devising Kid Creole, Darnell helped create the "Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band" album, one of disco's most listenable and elegant concoctions.
We reached Darnell in London to talk about tonight's Key Club date.
What's the live show like these days?



We've brought back the way it used to be. New York was a very exciting place to be in the early '80s. It still had this sordid underbelly where anything could happen on the streets - and that made for a dangerous, edgy, druggy energy. At the same time, the clubs were jumping with this incredible musical scene that accepted salsa, funk, big band, free jazz, fake jazz, punk - as long as it was exciting and had style and looked good. That's Kid Creole's natural habitat.
How did you form the group?



After the Savannah Band fell apart, we started looking for cats who could play jazz, r&b, funk, rock, reggae and salsa. The audition was the testing ground to see who could play all those types of music. We always wanted to be a band that looked and sounded like the streets of New York.
Those streets sure have changed.



They've cleaned it up, whitewashed it and taken away all the flavor of neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. It had to happen because of all the money that could be made out of the real estate down there. But it's just a shame that parts of the city now look like anywhere else in the U.S. That crackling energy where anything can happen - where you can go out to a club one night and end up coming home at 4 the next afternoon - is just gone. The people and the music are different today. Even though the crime is gone, it's a much harder, colder place.



The Savannah band thing was so sophisticated at a time when disco was about to become a joke.



We wanted to put a '30s and '40s sheen on dance music. We were trained in harmony and theory and loved the big-band era. We were listening to the Gershwins and Burt Bacharach. James Brown and Count Basie were idols. Somehow it all came together and it worked. But did we think it would be intellectualized three decades later? No.



Fred Shuster, (818) 713-3676 fred.shuster@dailynews.com



KID CREOLE & THE COCONUTS
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