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Cristina
Don Shewey. Rolling Stone Magazine
One of pop music's
best-kept secrets is the ongoing party being thrown by prolific
producer-composer August Darnell, a founding member of Dr. Buzzard's Original
Savannah Band. Over the last two years, the Darnell touch has gilded albums by
Gichy Dan's Beechwood #9, Machine ("There but for the Grace of God Go I"), James
White and the Blacks, Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band ("Deputy of
Love"), Cristina, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts, as well as Dr. Buzzard. Along
the way, Darnell has invented a new sound: a sophisticated, sidewalk
jungle-jangle of Latin rhythms, pop harmonies, disco energy, black street talk,
big-band swing, Caribbean lilt and Hollywood glamour. This dense, intelligent,
irresistibly ebullient sound has revolutionized contemporary dance music.
Playing one Darnell-directed record after another is like swirling from room to
room during a fabulous soiree at which the Original Savannah Band is the life of
the party. These folk are the hip, theatrical typethe kind who take over the
living room with their witty talk, complicated personalities, in-jokes and
lovers' quarrels. Dr. Buzzard which features Darnell (who writes all the lyrics)
on bass, guitarist-composer-coproducer Stony Browder Jr., drummer Mickey Sevilla,
vibraphonist "Sugar Coated" Andy Hernandez and vocalist extraordinaire Cory Daye
display their dazzling complexity consistently throughout their third LP, Dr.
Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Goes to Washington. The cartoonish, syncopated
swing that distinguished the group's splashy debut album has evolved into a
richer, more turbulent sound, on which several overlapping and sometimes
harmonically dissonant conversations converge. Darnell now fits Browder's breezy
tunes to startlingly ironic lyrics. The woman whom Cory Daye plays in "Call Me"
wants a man, but she's no pleading masochist: "If I choose/To sleep with you,"
she sings winsomely, "Don't mistake me for a whore." "Once There Was a Colored
Girl ..." is a Walt Disney-style waltz over which the singers croon a cryptic
protest lyric ("The Yankee! Humbug!/Neo-Nazi!"). |
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In contrast to Dr. Buzzard's parlor prominence, Cristina presents the
quintessential party girl: someone's ostentatious girlfriend or the gal in the
back room letting everybody have at her. A former model and ex-girl-friend of
Michael Zilkha (the Z of ZE Records), Cristina (Monet) is more a personality
than a singershe sing-speaks August Darnell's saucy, custom-written songs like a
disco Lydia Lunch but Darnell's exciting cinematic production redeems what might
have been an obnoxious novelty act.
Between Dr. Buzzard's smart set and Cristina's trash queen stand Kid Creole and
the Coconuts, the rec-room rompers. Their music is simpler and more
calypso-oriented, alternately danceable and dreamy, often comical. The all-girl
Coconuts taunt our hard-working hero for his limpidity in bed ("Mister Softee")
and demand to be taken to Studio 54 in "Darrio ..." ("They tell me the place is
just about through," Kid Creole argues haplessly. "The DJ he don't even play the
B-52's!"). But Off the Coast of Me's title track brings it all back home with a
wonderfully tropical, romantic image: "Off the coast of me/Lies you."
As at any good party, the various factions overlap a lot: Don Armando Bonilla,
formerly of Dr. Buzzard, heads the Second Avenue Rhumba Band, whose lead singer
is Fonda Rae of the Coconuts and whose producer is "Sugar Coated" Andy
Hernandez, and so forth. And the party's big enough so that you can either dance
or retreat to the balcony for some truly fresh air, since the diverse
personalities and multiethnic inflections of this crew distinguish August
Darnell from that other black party-master, George Clinton, whose funk disciples
sound tediously alike. Of course, such a wide-ranging cast makes Darnell and his
friends difficult to market: they sprawl across several record companies that
don't quite know what to do with them. But it's okaythis is one party you can
invite yourself to. Getting into it is easy.
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In an interview, black Bronxite August "Kid Creole"
Darnell - writer, singer, producer- once alluded to not being able to play reggae as well
as Bob Marley or salsa as well as Tito Puente, but possibly being able to combine the two
styles better than anyone else. Darnell's internationalist fusion was one of the freshest
new sounds of the '80s, drawing together strains of Latin, reggae, calypso, disco,
rap and rock into a unique sound. Add to his vision and smarts an amiable partner in
"Sugar Coated" Andy Hernandez (aka Coati Mundi), the singing/dancing Coconuts
and a medley of talented sidepeople, and you have one of the most formidable bands around.
Off the Coast of Me introduces Darnell and company's unusual sound
(more Latin-tinged here than on later records). Although the material isn't strong
enough to make this more than adequate, its uniqueness and danceability, along with the
Kid's occasionally risqué wordplay, are enough to suggest the band's potential.
Launching a conceptual album trilogy, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places
stands as Kid Creole's tour de force, a musical odyssey in which the Kid and the Coconuts
set off from New York in search of the elusive Mimi. The flavor of the music changes with
each stop on the journey, providing a perfect setting for the band to display its
mastery of intercontinental bop. Each cut is an adventure, and the album works as
well as any rock concept LP. A major achievement. (Read the Saga
of Mimi)
After the perfect realization of Fresh Fruit, nearly anything would
have been a letdown. Wise Guy (entitled Tropical Gangsters outside the US) follows
the concept, but much more loosely. The material is far less adventurous, with Fresh
Fruit's wonderful diversity toned down in favor of a straighter dance music
approach. As a commercial move it worked, at least in Europe, where two tracks
("Stool Pigeon" and "I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby") became hit singles
and elevated Darnell to stardom.
Doppelganger is posited as the continuation of "the saga."
In this installment, the Kid is cloned by King Nignat's evil scientist. The songs don't
all move the story along in narrative fashion-they sound more like the disjunct score of a
Broadway musical-but that's fine, since each stands as a marvelous example of Darnell's
multifarious brilliance. Mixing '40s be-bop with Carib-beat, reggae, country, funk, salsa
and something like highlife, the record sparkles with a cover of "If You Wanna Be
Happy" (a 1966 American hit for the Jimmy Castor bunch as "Hey Leroy") as
well as such original frolics as "The Lifeboat Party" and "Bongo Eddie's
Lament." Sung partially in Spanish, "Survivors" laments the death of
rockers from Frankie Lymon to Sid Vicious.
In Praise of Older Women, while less spectacular, is still another
(ca)rousing success, a collection of wittily written, sublimely arranged,
energetically performed songs. "Endicott" (cleverly verbose), "Caroline Was
a Drop-Out" (a nasty character study), "Particul'y Int'rested"
(exaggerated, showy torch song)--to name but three--all reflect the Kid's wonderful
attitude and outlook. With Coati Mundi and the Coconuts, plus a stageful of sidemen,
King ("self-appointed in Feb. this year") Creole demonstrates his stylistic
transcendence by making every track different but identifiable; no longer a mere genre
dabbler, he's developed the Kid Creole format.
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On I, Too, Have Seen the Woods, Darnell seems to be treading water a
bit within that format. Although he introduces female singer Haitia Fuller to share
lead vocals with him, her overall impact is fairly negligible. As always, there are
some very good tunes (especially "Dancin' at the Bains Douches" and
"Call It a Day"); Darnell's words are typically clever and insightful. On
the whole, though, the music seems less innovative, succumbing to repetition of previously
charted lands. (Hernandez's "El Hijo" is a near carbon-copy of his 1980 dance
hit "Me No Pop I.") Good, but hardly top-notch.
Showing tons more imagination and inspiration, Darnell bounced back
to full artistic strength with the marvelously entertaining Private Waters in the Great
Divide, a diverse party of singular wit and intelligence. While the lyrics of songs
like "(No More) Casual Sex" and "He's Takin' the Rap"
demonstrate an awareness of changing times, the music still comes in time-warped
from a tropical dance-happy era somewhere around 1940; the only track that even
acknowledges rap bends it all out of shape. (How many other hip dance records released in
1990 can claim such stylistic nonconformity?) There is a reggae-styled love song, however,
a surf-pop harmony exhibition and "Lambada," the intent and irony of which
is unclear. Mundi is only a minor player here (Darnell acknowledges his departure in the
self-referential "Funky Audrey and the Coconut Rag," which Hernandez co-wrote),
but the Coconuts are in full effect, providing a campy foil in such fizzy delights as
"Laughing with Our Backs Against the Wall" and "Funky Audrey."
Not a bad banana in this bunch.
The UK-only Cre-Ole compilation includes all the band's 1981-'83
British hits (and then some), with such classic Darnellisms as "Stool
Pigeon," "I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby" and "Annie, I'm Not Your
Daddy," as well as "Me No Pop I." The Coconuts' solo album, produced by
Darnell to resemble a stage revue (complete with crowd sounds and stage introductions), is
rife with innuendo and apparent internecine squabbling. Despite the billing, Darnell sings
the introductory title track without the three ladies; the inclusion of "If I Only
Had a Brain" (from The Wizard of Oz) might be someone's idea of an editorial comment.
Otherwise, it's a typically rich, clever dance-funk-Carib-salsa-tango stew, and the
Coconuts' smooth harmony vocals are as appealing as ever.
Coati Mundi has done some odd musical projects in his time
(including a production job for Germany's Palais Schaumburg!), and the singing
vibraphone/keyboard player's solo album is no less idiosyncratic in lyrical outlook. In
addition to the clever title reference to Stevie Wonder, the irrepressibly funny Hernandez
also parodies "Grand Master Flush and the Fluffy Five" and "Kurtis
Bluff" on the rap jape "Everybody's on an Ego Trip." While the album
cleverly--and occasionally buoyantly--mixes soul, salsa and disco, it also suffers from
Hernandez's simply trying too hard.
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"It's very competitive times we live in now", August
"Kid Creole" Darnell remarks, "with M.C. Hammer and the rappers doing there
thing, you really must present something exciting, valid, artistic, aesthetically
pleasing, all of that now. and of course, there are more bands than there ever were out
there these days. So, you have to fight for your space".
YOU SHOULD TOLD ME YOU WERE..., the second Columbia album from Kid Creole and the Coconuts
(and the group's ninth career album), may be their most exciting, artistic and cohesive
release ever. Many of the previous collections of Darnell's tropical dance delicacies were
held together by the freshness of the material and the group's unique style. The new album
has those elements, but sports new musical directions and a feeling of unity, as well.
"There is good a reason for that", Darnell intimates. "This was approached
as an album. It was done more or less over a given period of time, whereas the previous
one took a track from here two years ago, and a track from there. So, this was more of an
album project."
The new album also has some of the toughest, wryest lyrics that Darnell has recorded to
date. "Oh Marie," for example, comments on the phenomenon of ' Mushroom',
innocent bystanders mowed down in the urban drug wars: "the only thing she was guilty
of /Was living on a street where they sell drugs... Happens all the time/ Marie didn't
even make the headlines "
On the other hand, "Soul Intention" and the first single, "Party
Girl", deal with more interpersonal matters in a typically Kid Creole manner. Infused
with playful energy, these two tunes may be among Darnell's most twisted songs. anyone
familiar with Kid Creole knows that is saying a lot.
"Funnily enough about 'Soul Intention', "Darnell muses, "there has been a
resurgence of the late'60s sound these days. I didn't write the song with that in mind,
but that genre has always been fun for me. 'Party Girl' also has that late- 60's, early-
70s feel".
Then there's "Consequently", a musical antidote to all the hoopla over the
impending Columbus Quincentennial, "but I'm sure nobody is going to hear the lyrics
anyway," Darnell winks.
"The lyrics on this album are deliberately not printed inside," he notes.
"So much of the music that I do, people get surface idea of what it's about, but they
don't really know. I think people will love Cory Daye's vocal on that song and never know
what it says. It took four years before I got a fan letter from someone asking me to
explain 'Cherchez Le Femme' Back in 1976, people thought it was just a dance record."
That was the year August Darnell first rose to notoriety as bass player, vocalist and
lyricist for Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, one of disco's most unusual ensembles.
The brainchild of August's brother Stony Browder Jr., and featuring the vocals of Cory
Daye, the vibes work of Sugar Coated Andy Hernandez and the jungle of Mickey Seville, Dr.
Buzzard's Original Savannah Band was one of the most singular groups ever to cross-over
pop. Sounding like a '40s big band with a more modern beat, the OSB struck RIAA gold with
their first album, including the mighty hit, "Cherchez Le Femme"
In the dozen years since the OSB went on hiatus, August Darnell has fronted one of the
hardest working bands in showbiz, Kid Creole and the Coconuts. They have played thousands
of shows, recorded eight albums and a greatest hits collection, been featured on several
film soundtracks, performed the music for "Life Without Zoe" (Francis Ford
Coppola's segment of the film New York Stories), and played in Taylor Hackford's film
Against old Odds. You have also seen them on television, everywhere form "The Tonight
Show" and a Barry Manilow Special, to the Miss Teen USA Pageant and their own special
for Granada TV in England, Something Wrong in Paradise.
Ironically, Kid Creole and the Coconuts were initially conceived as a holding action until
the Savannah Band could record again, and a means for August to tour (something the OSB's
elaborate strings and orchestral arrangements made very difficult). From the start, Kid
Creole and the Coconuts have been playing human music you can dance to, with various
Caribbean influences and one of the most interesting pop sensibilities around. (Witness
the rare soca version of Darnell's hit for Machine, "There But For The Grace Of God
Go I.")
This approach carried over the Off The Coast of Me, the first Kid Creole and the Coconuts
album, which was rife with sardonic touches, like a dance version of the 1940s German hit,
"Lilli Marlene", or the silly but sensual title track, or the song that still
best sums up the band, "Calypso Pan American."
Darnell expanded on the idea with Kid Creole and the Coconuts' next album, Fresh Fruit In
Foreign Places. Loosely conceptual, that album found Kid Creole searching for Mimi, with
"15 cronies, seven mariners and (his) skipper, coatimundi." The album was
performed more or less as an opera, with former Savannah associate Gichy Dan rapping the
narration in concert in New York and for Joseph Papp's Public Theater.
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Their next album, entitled Wise Guy here and Tropical Gangsters nearly everywhere else,
became the great European hit of 1982, and spawned three top ten U.K. hits, "I'm A
Wonderful Thing Baby," "Stool Pigeon" and "Annie, I'm Not Your
Daddy." A continuation of the Mimi cycle, it brought the band a level of wealth and
adulation they had not previously even imagined.
The cycle was completed with the next album. Doppelganger. The story then became the basis
for There's Something Wrong in Paradise, a Granada TV special broadcast in England on
Boxing Day, December 24, 1984.
The next two albums, In Praise Of Older Women and Other Crimes and I, Too Have Seen The
Woods, were supported by extensive touring through Europe, with notable engagements such
as the Montreux Jazz Festival, a performance before the Princess of Wales, and a gig for
the United Nations in Geneva. Darnell also wrote the music for an Off-Broadway performed
wall-to-wall Kid Creole music throughout the 1989 "Miss Teen USA Pageant."
After a two and a half year break between albums, Kid Creole and the Coconuts recorded
Private Water In the Great Divide, the group's Columbia debut. The album featured the
single "The Sex Of It," written and produces by Prince, and offered a dozen
prime slices of Kid Creole, like "No More Casual Sex," "Dr. Paradise",
"He's Takin' The Rap" and a tribute to Darnell's self-described extravagance,
"Laughing With Our Backs Against The Wall." That tune and "Cory's
Song" reintroduced Cory Daye into the full time world of popular music, as the former
Savannah Band lead singer became a full time Coconut.
One constant theme in Kid Creole and the Coconuts has been personnel. Nearly every person
who has been a member of the band, every person Darnell has ever worked with, either is
still with the group or makes guest appearances. On YOU SHOULDA TOLD ME YOU WERE... such
stalwarts in the Darnell talent directory as Gichy Dan and former Coconut Lourdes Cotto
sing. Stoney Browder Jr. also lends a hand.
"Same old family," Darnell adds. "It's like the old days in Hollywood, when
the studios, 20th Century Fox, MGM, they used to have an extended family, like a repertory
company. That's been my philosophy from 1976 on. You find cats that you know can cut the
music, and you stick by them. You work with them time and time again, because you know
they can give you what you need. Consequently, it makes life easier for you. I'd hate to
have to go through that whole process of finding the guys again. It took such a long time
to find the right band that I'm for holding onto them, against all odds. David Span, the
drummer, goes back to 1975. Long time.
"On this album," Darnell continues, "Bongo Eddie raps and plays percussion.
Who else are the special guest stars on the album? Peter (Schott) played the tracks on the
album; he also co-wrote 'Oh Marie' and 'Something Incomplete' with me, but he recently
became a father, which cut into his time factor. So, he's not with us on the live show
anymore. He's been replaced by Kevin Nance, who used to play with Machine. He co-wrote
'There But For The Grace Of God' with me.
"Carol Colman had a hiatus for six months," August goes on, "but she's
back. Father Grey from Jamaica is still on guitar; Danny Blume is still on lead guitar.
The horns are still the same; Ken Fradley, Lee Robinson and Charlie Lagond. The Coconuts
are still Adriana (Kaegi), Janique (Svedberg) our Swedish entity; and Taryn (Hagey), who
was on hiatus for about three years, is back with us."
Not that he's conten to rely strictly on the old gang. True, Kid Creole and Coconuts has
been the launching pad for singers like Fonda Rae, Lori Eastside and a host of early '80's
dance artists. But new talent works its way into the fold, too.
"There is a new singer that we used on the album," says August. "New for
us, not new for the world. Her name is Dian Sorel. She's the soulful voice that you hear
on 'Oh, Marie at the end and on 'Baby Doc.' She's all through the album, and I thought
that was a nice added twist. She's an opposite entity to Cory Daye's mellow
approach."
Always the road animals, even as YOU SHOULDA TOLD ME YOU WERE... hits the racks, Kid
Creole are touring. As wonderful as the albums are, Kid Creole and Coconuts live is
something else again.
"Of course, my something else is more theatrical," August laughs. "If you
remember, choreography was a word that no one could even pronounce twelve years ago. No
one even knew what it meant. Couldn't even spell it. But now, it's become part and parcel
to almost everything with the video world out there. Everyone needs a choreographer these
days.
"Needless to say," but he does, "choreography has been a large part of our
thing since the very beginning, and is still a very large part of our thing. You have to
et the audience's attention. I've known this lesson for a long time. The Coconuts used to
come onstage in bathing suits, scantily clad, strategically ripped, leopard skin, to get
your attention.
So pay attention, because live and on record there is a lot going on. Beyond everything
else, Kid Creole and the Coconuts are quintessential entertainers. The live show has
always proved this. Appearances in the forthcoming film Love Stinks will no doubt add to
this. YOU SHOULDA TOLD ME YOU WERE... takes it even further.
"You can be as creative and esoteric as you want to be," August Darnell states,
"but you damn sure better make somebody happy at some point. I'm a hard working
individual, and I'll always be that. I make a lot of money and I spend a lot of money. And
that's my life-style. And that's why I'll always have to do what I love to do, which is to
entertain.
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He had a lovely bunch of coconuts ... but now he's playing the
summer season in Blackpool. Emily Barr falls for the cool charms of Kid Creole, the
best-dressed man in Lancashire.
Kid Creole leans back in his dressing room and smiles. `It's going
to be great,' he tells me in his New York drawl. `We're nervous, yes, but excited.' He is
already in costume, a bright orange zoot suit and trilby, and is picking sporadically at a
mushroom salad and sipping orange juice. We are not, however, backstage at a major gig, or
one of Europe's leading concert venues. We are at the Blackpool Opera House, where Kid
Creole, formerly of Coconuts fame, is starring in the summer show, a seventies musical
written specially for the occasion, called Oh! What A Night. More unlikely still, he is
pleased to be here, because it allows him spend the summer near his family: he lives in
the countryside outside Sheffield with his wife, Karen, and their young daughter.
In the eighties, Kid Creole was, in his own words, a
`mega-mega-mega-superstar' (he has many strengths, but modesty is not among them).
Everyone wants to know what happened after the cool, Calypso-style hits Stool Pigeon and
Annie I'm NotYour Daddy, from the album Tropical Gangsters. He was the epitome of cool.
How has he ended up in Blackpool?
August Darnell (his real name) has, in fact,experienced success
twice. In his early twenties, he threw in a career as a Long Island schoolteacher to
become a musician (he became a teacher accidentally, after hastily swapping from a drama
major at university to English: `They were drafting the frivolous majors. Not that I was a
coward, but I couldn't see in my destiny going to Vietnam'). His brother offered him a
position as bass player, backing singer and lyricist in Dr Buzzard's Original Savannah
Band, and he accepted. `I look back,' he says, `and I say to myself, how did I have the
courage to do something so ridiculous?' Straight away, though, the incredible happened.
`The gods must have been smiling down, because our first record was a hit,' says Darnell.
Caught up with the unexpected success of the single Cherchez La Femme, the Savannah Band,
millionaires in their mid-twenties, moved to Hollywood. The brothers fell out, the second
album didn't sell, and by 1979, he was back in New York, broke.
So he started again, writing the songs, leading the band, doing it
all himself. The result was Kid Creole And The Coconuts. Kid Creole's first two albums
were acclaimed in Britain and more or less ignored in America. `The first sold five
copies, and they were to relatives.' Island Records suggested that lyrics such as `Gina,
Gina, he's just a ski instructor' were too obscure, and sent him away to write something
`accessible'. `So I goofed it up,' he says. `You want something commercial, I thought, I'm
gonna give you schlock. Bottom line nonsense. A mockery of the present dance scene.'
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The result was Tropical Gangsters, and worldwide stardom. The silly
music fitted the times perfectly, and the band spent 360 days of the year on the road,
where Darnell's marriage crumbled. `I was in doing my womanising stage,' he says coyly,
and the fact that his then-wife, Adriana, was on the road with him led to a swift
separation. `I couldn't control myself,' he says, and, seeing him gyrating on the
Blackpool stage with 20-year-old Spice Girls-alikes, you can well believe it. Karen, to
whom he refers as `my current wife', has insisted that his contract for Oh! What A Night
has a clause specifying no love interest. `These Hollywood stories,' he laughs, `they
scare her, about leading ladies and all that. Even though I assured her that would never
happen ' Better safe than sorry? `That is correct.'
It began to go wrong when Sony offered Kid Creole And The Coconuts a
$2m deal, which they accepted (`Island were pissed,' he recalls). Sony wanted the music to
be yet more commercial, and Darnell does not like to be dictated to. Prince saw them in
concert and wrote some songs, but the next two albums didn't sell in any significant way
`because the promotion wasn't correct'. When the contract expired, Darnell began producing
and distributing his albums independently. This was when we lost him. `It was what I call
my Far Eastern Period,' he explains, meaning that the band suddenly became big in Japan
(and Scandinavia), while he could find no distributors in Britain. The band put out four
albums, which never made it to our music stores. However, when Oh! What A Night opens on
Monday, they will be for sale in the foyer.
There followed an inspired deal with the French company Canal Plus,
who put out a Kid Creole record tied in with a documentary. `They took me around the
world, living with indigenous tribes,' he says, laughing at my surprise. He and Karen
lived with tribes in Ecuador, Africa, Indonesia and Australia for four months. `There was
no running water, and we were bathing in streams, living in tents. 'He describes it as
`humbling'. While the tribes people were wearing loincloths, Darnell made no concessions.
`I was dressed the same way I am now,' he says, smiling down at his orangeness. He is
hoping Oh! What A Night will be a success, and that this will ease the distribution of his
next album, due out `maybe in December'.
In the meantime, he is happy to be near his children, three of whom
live in this country (the other two in Manchester). The only time he becomes slightly
flustered during the interview is when I ask how many children he has. `A few,' he says.
`People get carried away with that question, and they put the wrong angle on it.' Then he
cracks: `I have seven children.' (So if he's not Annie's daddy, he's just about eveyone
else's.) They were dancing in the aisles at the end of the first preview, and the elderly
audience even joined in the movements to YMCA. Whenever Darnell is not on stage, I find
myself hoping he'll be back soon. He is the reason to see the show. As he finishes his
salad, he admits that `they didn't say Blackpool' when they offered him the role. `I'll
survive,' he shrugs, looking at the hazy sunshine through the window. `You follow your
heart in life, and you can end up in the strangest places.'
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Kid Creole and The Coconuts was conceived on my 20th birthday when
August, Sugar Coated Andy and I had drinks to celebrate. Soon after we went into the
studio and had lots of fun creating a sound. Our first live show was at the Scuat theater
1979. It was packed and a great success. August was wearing his robe and a shower cap on
his head and slippers on his feet. The Coconuts then were Anna Ratafia and myself. We were
wearing leopard loincloths ala Jane in the jungle. More will Follow. Love, Adriana.
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It's not easy being a disco purist in the late '90s. Ninety-nine
percent of the time, daring to admit this passion yields responses like "Oh yeah . .
. Gloria Gaynor was awesome!" That might not sound so bad to some folks. But imagine
being a jazz collector, only to meet a chorus of "Kenny G is so cool" every time
you mentioned your hobby, and maybe you'll begin to appreciate the level of discomfort
'70s dance music fanatics must contend with, even today.
Admittedly, the state of affairs has improved vastly since 1979's
infamous anti-disco record burning held in Comiskey Park. Thanks to countless compilation
CDs packed with the biggest hits (not to mention the golden touch of Puff Daddy),
the sound that signified the second half of the '70s has moved beyond being needlessly
reviled. Now disco shakes its bountiful groove thing under the glowing auspices of
nostalgia. That's progress. Yet along the way, five years of great music has been pared
down to an entrenched canon of 20 or so hits - "Ring My Bell," "More, More,
More," "Y.M.C.A." - that are starting to wear as thin as the bareback
Bianca Jagger's birthday suit.
It was a movie-Saturday Night Fever-that took disco out of the
underground and made it a phenomenon. The accompanying double-LP won an Album of the Year
Grammy Award, elevated squeaky Australian geeks the Bee Gees to sex symbol status, and
became the best-selling soundtrack of all time. Two years later, even Kiss had a disco
hit, and the mood turned ugly almost overnight. Now, like a stilled mirror ball set in
motion once more, several new soundtracks - two for Hollywood movies, and one for a
book-aim to more accurately reflect the diverse sounds of the era, shedding new light on
facets of disco that have faded from mainstream memory.
"I spent a lot of time at [Studio] 54
during its heyday, just partying as a musician," chuckles Andy "Coati
Mundi" Hernandez (of Kid Creole & The Coconuts fame), who - along with Susan
Jacobs - assembled the soundtrack to 54. The balance struck between the familiar
(Sylvester, Thelma Houston) and the forgotten (The Gibson Brothers' "Que Sera Mi
Vida") on the 32 cuts of 54: Music from the Miramax Motion Picture, Volumes 1 & 2
(Tommy Boy) was their goal throughout the 18 months spent on the project.
"We were trying to include stuff off the beaten path, to
show people that, despite what overtook disco towards the end, with the 'Disco Sucks'
movement, there were a lot of great melodies and rhythms, and even lyrics, on some of
these tracks," insists Hernandez. "That was the whole purpose of including songs
that are not stereotypical signature songs, the ones young kids have heard on every
compilation record."
Likewise, while The Last Days of Disco (Work/Sony Music
Soundtracks) weighs in more heavily with recognizable numbers, it compensates by
concentrating on the likes of "I'm Coming Out" and "He's the Greatest
Dancer," well-crafted songs that have shown greater durability than most rock
compositions of the same era. Which #1 hit from 1979 would you rather hear: Chic's
"Good Times" (featured here) or "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" by
Rupert Holmes?
Hernandez insists that before the crass commercialization of
disco set in, post-Saturday Night Fever, quality songwriting was very much the rule, not
the exception. "You can take a lot of songs from that era, break them down, and play
them on a piano ballad-style. You had serious writers. They accepted disco and dance
rhythms, but a lot of thought and structure went into their music."
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One of the best examples is August Darnell
a.k.a. Kid Creole, with whom Hernandez began his career in Dr. Buzzard's
"Original" Savannah Band (who scored a Top 40 hit in 1976 with "Cherchez La
Femme"). Darnell and Hernandez later were integral members of the Ze Records family.
Perhaps more so than any other label of the era, Ze - which featured artists including Kid
Creole & the Coconuts, Was (Not Was) and Material - recognized how to mate dance
rhythms with a diverse mix of musical elements. "I cared a lot about the
lyrics," reiterates former Ze founder Michael Zilkha today. "Bob Dylan is my
hero."
When Zilkha was approached to compile The Last Party (Island), a
collection inspired by Anthony Haden Guest's 1997 nightlife memoir of the same name, he
retained that sensibility. If the key to a brilliant club is just the right mix of
patrons, ideally the music reflects that diversity. The programming of The Last Party
zigzags from Lipps, Inc. ("Funkytown") and the Village People to Grace Jones and
Third World with all the grace of a drag queen on roller skates soliciting a light from a
cocaine-addled Wall Street suit.
And even so, Zilkha encountered obstacles creating a collection
he felt nailed the spirit of the day. "One of the songs I most wanted to get was 'Is
It All Over My Face?' by Loose Ends. That's one of the best dance records ever, and you
never see it on compilations," he laments. Ditto for Machine's "There But For
the Grace of God Go I," another August Darnell creation. "Those were the two
songs I really wanted to put on there that I didn't get to." (You can find both,
however, on the 1997 Harmless U.K. import Jumpin', alongside equally seminal cuts from
Dinosaur L, Musique and Two Tons of Fun.)
There are numerous explanations as to why the history books fail
to take disco seriously as a genre. "It was meant for clubs, and since it was meant
for clubs, people didn't listen to it at home," opines Zilkha. "But it was made
with incredible integrity. Patrick Adams, when he was making [Musique's] 'In the Bush,'
thought he was making an epic. Even with the trite lyric, it's an amazing record. I really
think it's a question of attitude. There's a certain snobbery that Patrick Adams isn't a
singer/songwriter."
Hernandez points out that the ease with which disco records could
be made, regardless of quality, didn't improve matters. "It got to a point where
everything had a dance beat, and what was on top didn't matter. You had Ethel Merman and
people who knew nothing about disco getting into it. Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger and Kiss
doing disco songs? When that started happening, these people's real fans resented it. That
helped the backlash."
And what of the tunes that did survive? Were they indisputably
the finest, or merely the selections simplistic enough to have endured America's short
attention span for 20 years? "The Village People had a package, a sound, a
style," says Hernandez. "Kids would be dressed up [like them] at their concerts.
Donna Summer is a great singer. Her treatment of things was bound to last. Those records
are nothing to be ashamed about. The only problem is they totally dominated the field. A
lot of other great music got pushed aside."
"The disco canon is pretty meat and potatoes. But there were
a lot of other things going on," concludes Zilkha. Regardless of quality, certain
songs will always survive. "Maybe it's because now you go to a bar mitzvah and you
hear 'Good Times,' 'Le Freak' and 'Last Dance' played by the orchestra. They're just so
familiar. They're like 'My Way.'"
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Biography
William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
1999
Thomas August Darnell Browder (a/k/a August Darnell) was born in
Montreal on August 12, 1950, the son of a French Canadian mother and a Dominican father,
but was raised in the New York City borough of the Bronx. In 1965, he formed the In-Laws
with his half-brother, Stony Browder, Jr. He earned a master's degree in English and
became an English teacher, but in 1974 again joined his half-brother as bass guitarist,
singer, and lyricist in Dr. Buzzard's Original "Savannah" Band, a group that
mixed disco with big band and Latin styles. In 1976, Dr. Buzzard achieved a gold-selling
album with its self-titled debut release, which featured the Top 40 hit
"Whispering/Cherchez La Femme/Se Si Bon," but its subsequent recordings were
less successful. Darnell began to write and produce for other acts, co-composing Machine's
1979 chart entry "There But for the Grace of God Go I" and working with James
Chance among others.
In 1980, he became a staff producer at Ze Records and created the
persona of Kid Creole (the name adapted from the Elvis Presley film King Creole) with a
backup group, the Coconuts, consisting of three female singers led by his wife Adriana
("Addy") Kaegi, and a band containing vibraphone player "Sugar-Coated"
Andy Hernandez (a/k/a Coati Mundi), also from Dr. Buzzard. Kid Creole was a deliberately
comic figure, a Latinized Cab Calloway type in a zoot suit and broad-brimmed hat who sang
songs like "Mister Softee" that found him decrying his impotence while being
berated by the Coconuts. Off the Coast of Me, the first Kid Creole and the Coconuts album,
was released in August 1980 by Island Records subsidiary Antilles through a distribution
deal with Ze. It earned good reviews for its clever lyrics and mixture of musical styles,
but did not sell.
Ze made a deal with Sire Records (in turn part of Warner Bros.
Records), and Sire released the second Kid Creole and the Coconuts album, Fresh Fruit in
Foreign Places, in June 1981. It reached the charts briefly, and Coati Mundi's dance
single, "Me No Pop I," was a Top 40 hit in the U.K. Fresh Fruit was a concept
album that found the Kid Creole character embarking on an Odyssey-like search for a
character named Mimi, and it was given a stage production at the New York Public Theater.
Darnell continued the story with his third album, which was released in the U.K. under the
title Tropical Gangsters in May 1982. The band toured Britain for the first time to
promote the album, and they broke big: The LP hit #3 and three singles, "I'm a
Wonderful Thing, Baby," "Stool Pigeon," and "Annie, I'm Not Your
Daddy," made the Top Ten, with "Dear Addy" reaching the Top 40. In the
U.S., where the album was retitled Wise Guy, the band remained cult favorites, though the
album charted and "I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby" made the R&B singles charts.
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In 1983, Darnell produced side projects for the Coconuts (Don't
Steal My Coconuts) and Coati Mundi (The Former Twelve Year Old Genius) before releasing
the fourth Kid Creole album Doppelganger, which completed the Mimi cycle. The album got
into the charts in the U.K., where the single "There's Something Wrong in
Paradise" made the Top 40, but it did not chart at home and was a commercial
disappointment after the breakthrough represented by Tropical Gangsters/Wise Guy.
Nevertheless, Kid Creole and the Coconuts remained a compelling live act with an
imaginative visual style, which led to film and television opportunities. They appeared in
the film Against All Odds in 1984 and continued to be tapped for movie projects in
subsequent years, either for appearances or music: New York Stories (1989), The Forbidden
Dance (1990), Identity Crisis (1990), Only You (1992), Car 54, Where Are You? (1994). They
also made a TV film, Something Wrong in Paradise, based on the Mimi cycle and broadcast on
Granada TV in the U.K. in December 1984.
Darnell broke up with his wife in 1985, and the original band split,
with the Coconuts forming a group called Boomerang, while Andy Hernandez appeared in the
Madonna film Who's That Girl? (1987). Darnell pressed on, appearing at the Montreux Jazz
Festival and releasing the fifth Kid Creole and the Coconuts album, In Praise of Older
Women and Other Crimes, which did not chart. Neither did the sixth album, I, Too, Have
Seen the Woods (1987). The group joined Barry Manilow on "Hey Mambo," a song on
his Swing Street album that made the singles charts. Darnell then took time off to write
In a Pig's Valise, an Off-Broadway show that ran for 12 weeks.
Kid Creole and the Coconuts, now featuring former Dr. Buzzard singer
Cory Daye, resurfaced in 1990 on Columbia Records, issuing a seventh album, Private Waters
in the Great Divide, which featured "The Sex of It," a song written by Prince
that made the British Top 40 and the American R&B charts. It was followed a year later
by You Shoulda Told Me You Were .... Kid Creole and the Coconuts spent the 1990s touring
internationally and releasing albums primarily outside the U.S. To Travel Sideways and
Kiss Me Before the Light Changes both appeared initially in Japan, though they found
stateside release on a small label in 1995. The Conquest of You was released in Germany in
1997. (An American release on Fuel 2000 was scheduled for 1999, but did not occur.) In the
U.S., the group appeared in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Kid Creole starred in the British
musical Oh! What a Night, which ran in the West End from August to October 1999.
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A band formed during a "hiatus" occasioned by the meteoric
rise and fall of Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band -- Stony Browder and Cory
Daye took the blueprint in one direction, straight R&B, featuring nouveau diva
Daye. Not a success. Thomas August Darnell Browder and "Sugar Coated" Andy
Hernandez formed Kid Creole and the Coconuts, a downtown NYC rock band with the
OSB's multi-media ambitions, an encyclopedic grasp of
urban(e)mudpeoplepartymusik, past and present, and a backlog of songs. "Kid
Creole" was Darnell's onstage alter-ego, a skinny wiseass Cab Callowayish rake
with a name swiped from one of those cheesy Elvis flicks (King Creole; The Kid
would, years later, crown himself King as well, but it was too late to change
the band's name). The Coconuts were, originally, two chick singers dressed in
fake-leopardskin loincloths; when the budget permitted, there were three
Coconuts. Hernandez became "Coati Mundi", The Kid's wacky sidekick.
They signed with Ze Records (where Darnell was then working, and which would
have been the grimy, genre-smashing, multiculti NYC equivalent of 4AD, had they
lived long enough to prosper) and debuted with Off the Coast of Me (1980),
followed the next year by Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, the first installment
of a Caribbean rock opera, of sorts, "The Saga of Mimi"; just as in Savannah
Band days, the lyrical content steered clear of R&B generica, in favor of an
imaginary B-movie musical (Darrio / can you get me into Studio / 54? -- a bridge
and tunnel Judy Holliday singing and chewing gum at the same time). They peaked,
perhaps, with Tropical Gangsters (1982), gaining enough UK success to put the
band on the biz map even to this day, but were, as much as with the previous
LPs, pretty much ignored in the US -- I can recall seeing them on SNL back
around 1980 (doing "Mister Softee" or "Darrio" and maybe a soca cover of a
Darnell hit from his days as a disco producer, "There But for the Grace of God
Go I"; my memory's fuzzy), but you have to remember that those were the days
that Mr. Michaels would have bands on that the NBC suits (and their damn kids,
for that matter) had never heard of (Ahhh.. those were the days...)
The deals with Island Records, and later Sony, took the edge off the concept and
music, but the craftmanship is, still, always there (Darnell has always been too
proud a man to take the money and run). It's a little odd, seeing them in recent
years, on The Tonight Show, mainstream enough now to be invited onto the famed
stage of dull old Mr. Leno to run through their paces, but it's always nice to
see Darnell et cie doin' their thang. But I'm nagged (OK, only a little) that
Darnell could have been the Duke Ellington of his era but will now probably end
up a huffing-and-puffing case of Fat Elvis Syndrome, like septugenarian James
Brown, though a less cringe-inducing one, since a cult figure like Darnell has
less need of maintaining the illusion of legendhood.
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The original band lasted until around 1985, returning full-time in 1990; they've
always been Darnell's little repertory company, with Daye and Browder joining
the group on occasion over the years; the late reggae master-drummer Winston
Grennan was a member, as was singer Fonda Rae, probably better known for "Over
Like a Fat Rat" and Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band's "Deputy of Love"
(a Darnell project as he was transitioning from flaky disco producer into The
Kid), and Adriana Kaegi (the former Mrs. Creole) as one of the Coconuts, who
spun off their own solo LPs (and had appeared on U2's War), as did Coati Mundi
(The Former Twelve-Year-Old Genius, with the (uhhh...) hit "Me No Pop I") before
splitting semi-permanently from the group. One of his more recent projects was
helping compile the period soundtrack for 54, the Studio 54 film. (Gee, I wonder
how the OSB's "Cherchez La Femme" got included?)
Last year saw the release of Too Cool to Conga! (approximately the 20th Kid
Creole disque) which was my first occasion to really cringe, as I collapsed into
visions of Mr. Sony, chomping a cigar, ordering The Kid to come up with "one of
those swing rekkids that the kids like to dance to these days" -- you, dear
listener, are better off with the fonky original version of "Endicott" (from In
Praise of Older Women / Other Crimes) than the I-missed-the-damn-party rendition
on the new CD. Swing? That's sooooo 1990-something, isn't it?
Mine own subjective fave moments: I think even before Tropical Gangsters was
released in the States (as Wise Guy), I was sitting, stoned, in my sister's
house in Dutchess County, New York, and WBLS plays this new song with a gently
loping dance beat. (It turned out to be "I'm a Wonderful Thing"). I
spontaneously begin to get up off the couch and unselfconsciously waggle my
little tush to the music (I had the house to myself). Then I recognize Darnell's
voice, and my buzz is heightened, because -- if only for this one time -- he and
the band are getting airplay on a mainstream US radio station, and the biggest
R&B station in the country, to boot. I lift an imaginary champagne glass to
salute him as the song starts to fade, and there's this passage in the horn
section with (IIRC) a piccolo and baritone saxophone crisply playing the same
line, in their respective ranges, grabbing my attention, and I marvel and think,
"where else are you going to hear something like that on the radio?"
A couple of years ago, I was listening to a Leicester City football match on the
RealPlayer, and the BBC station, having no commercials to fill up the halftime,
plays, out of nowhere, an extended mix of "Stool Pigeon" (from the
aforementioned Tropical Gangsters); my till-then lethargic mood (for only the
truly hardcore can get worked up over a radio broadcast of Leicester City
playing an equally-dull opponent) switched immediately to jubilation as I
Callowayed around my cramped quarters, hot-cha-cha-cha.
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The name is August Darnell
but a lot of people don't know that. "People in the street and in shopping malls
tend to know me as Kid Creole," says Mr Darnell. "A lot of people call me Mr
Creole." Mr Darnell (alias Kid Creole aka Mr Creole) roars with laughter.
Mention the name Kid Creole to anyone with a passing knowledge of the late 1970s
and early 1980s music scene and they are likely to raise an eyebrow and say:
"... and the Coconuts?" That's him. Kid Creole and the Coconuts were one of the
hardest working, outrageously flamboyant bands of a pretty flamboyant era.
When Kid strutted his
stuff in his baggy, 1940s-inspired suits, the kids in the audience bopped and
boogied till their feet hurt. Kid and his glamorous Coconuts performed thousands
of shows, recorded 12 albums, spawned four greatest hits collections, featured
on six film soundtracks and appeared on so many TV shows that they have lost
count.
And now Kid, minus his
Coconuts, is touring the country with a stage show called Oh! What A Night,
recreating the heady, disco world of the 1970s. Thirty actors, dancers and
musicians plus a clutch of Seventies classic songs - and Kid Creole at the top
of the bill. The whole caboodle rolls into Sunderland today (Monday November
12) for a week-long run at the Empire Theatre.
But at one point recently
it looked as though the thing might not happen. August Darnell, a proud New
Yorker, has not only had the horrors of the World Trade Centre attack to contend
with, but also a tragedy closer to home. August's older brother, Stony, died two
months ago of alcoholism. It was Stony we can thank for the very existence of
the character Kid Creole and all the fun he has given us.
Without the older
brother's youthful ambition, his younger sibling would never have figured on the
showbusiness Richter scale. "It was quite difficult because he was the big
influence on my life," says August, remembering his big brother. "It happened
just as the tour was kicking off. We were in Scotland and there was a point
where I thought: this is the worst thing that could possibly have happened. I
didn't know if I could continue. "But after a while I realised it was my destiny
to continue and that it could be a tribute to him if I did so."
Without the intense
rivalry between the two brothers, there would never have been a Kid Creole, says
the man behind the alias. "My brother was always the musician in the family. He
was the first to follow his Bohemian dream and did music while I was still a
conventional school teacher." In the end August joined the band, writing the
lyrics for the songs. "But in my silly, youthful head, I thought it was the guy
who wrote the music who would get the accolades. He thought you couldn't do the
music and the lyrics and so he wanted things to continue as they were. The more
he restricted me, the more I rebelled. "When things really started falling
apart, I suggested I could do it all on my own. They all laughed and I left."
The result was Kid Creole
and the Coconuts and a swift rise to fame. The name didn't take too much
agonising over. "I had the nickname Creole Kid from high school. In America,
Creole is a general term for a person of mixed race, and particularly for people
who have a bit of a French heritage mixed in. "It also applies to a language,
the language of the Caribbean. The name does have quite a high standing in
America."
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The brothers parted and
followed different courses. "His lifestyle was quite the opposite to mine," says
August. "He liked the Bohemian lifestyle and he always liked to drink. I have
never wanted to. "We tried to steer him away from alcohol but we never managed
to do it. We could see the way he was going but couldn't do anything about it.
It's strange because Mum and Dad brought us up the same way. "It's just amazing
how two people can be brought up the same and go such different ways. It has
taught me an extremely important lesson.
"I have children of my own
now and it has taught me to monitor them in everything they do. If something is
going wrong I want to spot the signs, and it isn't always easy." I suggest that
in August Darnell's case, the monitoring process must be particularly difficult.
We have already established that he has seven children, ranging in age from six
months to 25, although he does not yet qualify for the name Grandad Creole.
"That will come," he chortles.
Talking of his children,
he says: "They came to see the show in Blackpool, the two boys from Manchester
and the little daughter from Sheffield." The wife mentioned in the Kid Creole
and the Coconuts biography, Adriana Kaegi, one of the original Coconuts and the
choreographer and stylist responsible for their look, is no longer Mrs August
Darnell. "She was Swiss," says August. "She is no longer my wife and we had no
children together. All she gave me were the Coconuts. "And that," he says with a
gleeful burst of laughter, "is all you are going to get on that subject."
Suffice to say that August Darnell - or Kid Creole - has been popular in
different spheres, public and personal.
None of the above
information has been shared with anything approaching despondency. August says
he has always had a sunny personality and finds that happiness is generally the
best approach to anything. He turned 50 recently. How does that feel? "It feels
magnificent," he enthuses, as if he's been waiting for it all his life. "I'm
still alive. When you think of all the traps that are out there, it's amazing
anyone can survive that long. It's down to luck as much as anything." He
attributes a pretty high energy level to his invigorating career. His approach
to showbusiness, avoiding the traps such as drink and drugs, has kept him in
shape. His approach to romance, you suspect, has also contributed something.
The stage show, which
opened with a try-out run in Blackpool in 1997, has done very well. It is set in
a New York nightclub called The Inferno in 1976. August Darnell as Kid Creole
plays DJ Brutus T. Firefly. Ironically, part of his job is to keep the club
owner, Paul Burns, an alcoholic, back on the straight and narrow. This aspect of
the role, at least, August should be able to play with high credibility. Then
there's a young wannabe from England who comes to New York looking for fun and
falls in love with the nightclub boss's daughter.
August didn't create the
piece but he has almost become synonymous with it and he revels in its success.
It is on tour until December 15 and then goes to Hamburg for four months, taking
over from a production of Cats. After Europe it heads for Las Vegas, one step
nearer August's dream of having it open on Broadway. You may spot August Darnell
on Wearside this week. He'll be hard to miss. "My stage persona has never been
that different from my real-life persona," he confides cheerfully. The
1940s-style gear is what he wears on and off stage. He started with the real
McCoy and gradually replaced the authentic garments with new ones cut in a
baggy, 1940s style.
August Darnell is his own
man and happy with it, despite recent blows. He would love to share his memories
of performing in the North-East but confesses with a fruity chuckle: "When
you've been performing in as many places as I have, and for as long as I have,
it all becomes a bit of a blur."
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August Darnell And The Creole Perplex
Carol Cooper
Village Voice, July 27, 1982
"The dominant feeling of the black poet is one of malaise, better still of intolerance. Intolerance of reality because it is sordid, of the world because it is a cage, of life because it has been stolen on the high road of the sun." Aime Cesare(Tropics # 2, 1941).
The Kid Creole world is one in which a society babe can be a bottom bitch. Downward mobility? Not at all, this is present day, real world egalitarianism where an Inaugural ball may have as many call girls as debutantes in attendance and never know the difference. Illusory class divisions as fragile as Japanese wall panels provoke semantic transparencies: the chippie becomes a courtesan; the pimp becomes an entrepreneur. Migrating to cities in order to attain new rights and powers, bucolic personalities dissolve into the sophistic fluidity of form and identity epitomized by Kid Creole and the Coconuts. The songs they perform embody a crash course in human nature that accepts "evil" as a relative virtue . . . call it the omnipotent perspective. In the City (which Kid Creole has conceived as a handcrafted jungle habitat), a Japanese wall panel will not be perceived as anything but perforable paper, nor a bottom bitch as anything but a loyal wife.
The tintinnabulation of hell's bells opens side one of Kid Creole and the Coconuts' Wise Guy. Bandleader August Darnell created this socafied aria "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy" as simultaneous homage to Edgar Allan Poe, illegitimate joy babies, the upscale and downscale "leisure" classes, and every ringing telephone that ever pierced the sleep of the weary. Although casual listeners won't get past the characteristically acerbic subject matter, "Annie" represents a sort of culmination for the ex-copilot of Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band. Darnell's musical and literary in-jokes used to be too obscure to translate effectively on vinyl (Frank Zappa said facetiousness never translates in print, either), but the songs collected on Wise Guy, the third Kid Creole opus, are among the most accessible of any number of Darnell-produced projects.
Wise Guy may not be as populist as the first Machine LP, or as exuberant as '79's Gichy Dan's Beechwood #9, or as arch as 1980's Cristina. But all have been hot, manic, pop illusions, alternately flecked with lurid cynicism and cloying euphoria. Pathology, not politics, inspires Darnell and his fascination with the universal kinks in the human psyche makes him a most accurate chronicler of the passing scene. Darnell achieves universality where other pop musicians have failed because he frames each musical question in genuine paradox rather than mere controversy. He wants to force an inner assessment and hence a destruction of the gap between what we think we are and what we are culminating in a violent revolution of the will. By sheer dint of will Stony Browder Jr.'s erstwhile lyricist and protege has become a formidably astute composer. When the head of Savannah Band was asked to describe how brother August's work differed from his own he could say: "It's the same thing -- dream music."
Or nightmare music. What always separated Browder and Darnell from the pop mainstream was their insistence on dreams as "the shadow of something real," a way to thoroughly confront a sordid reality. Neither the lulling escapist fervor of disco, nor the formulaic self-righteousness of rock could comfortably compare with songs from the second and third Savannah albums whose music and lyrics made the concept of contradiction an art form in itself.
There is a most fundamental contradiction in the work and persona of August Darnell alone. Ever since Island Records signed the Kid Creole act outside the U.S., Darnell has become a favorite interview for the European press. Great Britain has been particularly solicitous, zeroing in on his elegance, glib erudition and gigolo mien to iconize their first black American pin-up boy. Paul Robeson, Darnell is not, but he is, consciously, closer to Robeson than Teddy Pendergrass and accepts the foreign adulation with an ironically arched brow. Moving with equal ease among rich-raff and riff-raff he incorporates scenes from their respective salon-to-boudoir lives in songs that see such social designations as interchangeable. He has taken words like wit, charm, and style away from the entertainment and society columnists to invest them with equally true antithetical meanings. No modern songwriter is quicker to recognize wit as sarcasm, charm as hypocrisy, or style as superficiality than Darnell. But such are the games that famous people play, and Darnell will act the fool if that will get him over.
On the basis of his extremely flippant and equivocal public image it would be easy to play a rabid Daffy Duck to Darnell's urbane bugs Bunny, damning his ways and means as sexist, racist, classist, et al. But I have no intention of stammering "You're deth'picable" at New York's own Francois Villon. Too many interviewers have been thrown by Darnell's effortless self-hype, and confused the quality of the music with the quality of the put-on. Darnell's lyrics are better guides to his creative intent than his quoted explanations. His poetry (at its metaphysical best on the Savannah Band LPs), reveals it all, from ballots and bullets to sluts and saints. Aware of how media legends are implanted, Darnell views the interview process with fascination and contempt; qualities that provoke magnificent encounters but little in the way of insight. Darnell purposely withholds the key to his parables because he pursues larger media in which to unfold the complete idea. The trick is to sustain our curiosity until he lands that movie deal.
I remember being witness to the first performance of last year's Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places at the Ritz, wedged amid a throng of nonplussed trendies and press in the balcony, a capacity crowd of groundlings below. Gone was 1980's REM pastiche of abstracted urban stereotypes. Fresh Fruit was a polyglot playlet that transformed the giddy fantasies collected on the previous Off The Coast Of Me into nightmare. Claiming to be a "rap musical" concerning the Kid Creole character's frantic search for his one true love, Fresh Fruit offered song after song indicating the degenerated American Dream for crimes against the state of man. Aghast that control of the social hierarchy is shunted between predator and parasite -- perpetuating the most primitive form of determinism -- Darnell fills his stage with living mirrors of every false dichotomy, an array of juxtaposed obsessions. Three Fay Wrays and a phalanx of banana-boat refugees, screeching middle-class shrews and Vegas girls, Dorsey and Ellington, Rosie the Dyke and Carmen Miranda deliver Darnell's lyrics with yelping scorn -- rending love, sex, race, power and politics to bloody shreds. "Going Places," one of several songs that holds out the possibility of escape, ultimately denies surcease with the punchline: "When you leave New York you go -- nowhere!", a mordant declamation which is just an upscale version of the Player's Creed: You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.
Wise Guy extends this idea with the addenda that hell's denizens learn to enjoy corruption and relish internecine cruelty. Thus you have songs like "Annie" and the insidious "No Fish Today" that expose the roots of mental and physical aggression. The child abuse implicit in "Annie" and the petulant sarcasm in "No Fish Today"'s dialogue between Almost Have and Have Not frame the moral limitations of Darnell's international cast of characters. It is here that all the mulatto/mongrel posturing first initiated by Savannah's Mulatto Madness breaks down to reveal itself as metaphor. Darnell is no half-caste, nor does he believe that black versus white is the central contemporary dilemma. He is simply aware that the general public has been socialized to think so, and this misapprehension is manipulated to draw the kind of media attention that no other black or mixed band would attract. Nevertheless the Creole conceit, which like Mulatto Madness is a pop mythologizing of the "tragic mulatto" (as delineated by Langston Hughes) into a symbol of rebellion, is becoming unwieldy. Darnell is careful, perhaps too careful, to make sure that his allusions work on several levels: from the most literal to the most abstract. The pronounced decadence of Wise Guy, in particular its provocative staging, strained Darnell's half-breed gigolo persona to the limit of many a critic's indulgence. Former fans like the London Sunday Times' Simon Frith were mildly appalled during Wise Guy's recent European debut, by Darnell's literal rendition of "I'm A Wonderful Thing" which sent the single zipping up the British charts. Seriously offended, Frith went on to bemoan Darnell's self-characterization as a "small time pimp," oblivious to the likelihood that he had fallen prey to a highly calculated means of discovering prejudice.
Darnell is possessed of an extremely chthonic imagination and is wholly intent on snatching the mask off anything that passes for respectability. The only "themes" Darnell has ever worked with are paradox and bathos, to focus attention (not smirking condemnation like Zappa, Ferry, Jagger, and others) on mankind's original irreconcilables: spirit and flesh, emotion and intellect. These, like the best of Darnell's music, transcend sex, race, and class.
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DARNELL WILL ADMIT he is no singer, and his taking the lead vocals on
the bulk of Wise Guy and Fresh Fruit was more a matter of expediency
than his own better judgment. After years of producing and paying close
attention to the successful risks taken by non-singers in rock and new
wave, he became convinced that cleverness could compensate for vocal
limitations. But the perfectionist in him that worked with fine singers
in the past, resents having to pass off inadequacy as poignancy, no
matter how successful the transmutation. Onstage there is no question
that he continues to maximize his group's potential; innovative
staging, charisma, and clear enunciation sell Kid Creole to any live
audience. But selling records is primarily an aural crapshoot. The
difference between a Darnell designed recording and one in which he or
the Coconuts have taken a prominent singing role has too often been the
difference between a hit and a near miss.
Spooks In Space, a bizarre workshop compilation that drafted members of
Savannah, the Ze Records stable and Darnell as primary lyricist under
the aegis of producer Bob Blank offers a peep into the evolution of
Darnell as musical scriptwriter. "(He's a) Marathon Runner," set to
music by Carlos Franzetti and Andy Hernandez, catalogs Darnell's
personal phobias: aging, failure, competition. His protagonist is a
victim of ambition and the protestant work ethic. Pattering feet strive
against the envy of a jeering crowd as the record subsides into a
chilling death rattle. Although Wall Street brokers can empathize,
"Marathon Runner," like Edith Piaf's "Traque," is pure ghetto
desperation. On "Goin' To a Showdown," where Darnell contributed words
and music, the scenario shifts to a lopsided Hollywood western. Taana
Gardner chirps encouragement to her street corner cowboy: ". . . Put on
something nice/ just in case ya die/ You'll leave a pretty corpse
behind . . ." There is something about this mannered syntax that
whistles up Madison Avenue, yet "Goin' to a Showdown" is fin-de-disco
tin pan alley.
Gichy Dan's Beechwood #9 which Darnell co-produced with Ron (Spooks in
Space, "Deputy of Love," "Cowboys and Gangsters") Rogers, is the sunny
side of this street. Darnell was still committed to Savannah band, but
had written a batch of songs Savannah couldn't use. So Darnell and
Rogers took Juan Cotto, Frank "Gichy Dan" Passalaqua, and Lourdes Cotto
into Blank Tapes to manufacture the most intriguing pop album of 1979.
Frank Passalaqua and the Cottos were a cagey choice for the vocally
demanding collection of ballads and Caribbean-flavored show tunes, for
they represented just the right touch of racial and sexual ambiguity to
overcome all the usual obstacles to airplay and fame in America. If
Elvis was the bridge to white audiences for black music and performers,
Gichy Dan was to be the inoffensive way to crossover Darnell's
apocryphal troops of south-sea islanders, Caribbean natives, chino-clad
immigrants, and zoot-suited fancy men.
As usual, much of the material is veiled autobiography, but the quality
of the singers elevates each daring merger of doo-wop, soca and latin
from in-group novelty item to instant classic. A listen to Passalaqua's
solos on "Splendor in the Grass" and "Lady from the Caribbean" lets you
know where Fresh Fruit's "I Stand Accused" and the new single from Wise
Guy are lacking. "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down," which got limited
airplay after the warm reception of the single "Laissez Faire," might
have been clipped from Darnell's score for the musical Soraya which Joe
Papp had been offered long before he saw and preferred Fresh Fruit.
"Good Man" and the doo-wop bop of "Young Hearts" frame the overall
optimism of Gichy Dan's Beechwood #9 the same way "Annie" and "No Fish
Today" frame the overall pessimism of Wise Guy. It's been a long way
from 1979 to 1982.
If the dreams of Gichy Dan were all of Hollywood romance and a
sometimes overheated hearth, then Cristina offers the dark side of the
moon-June-spoon sort of reverie. Michael Zilkha of Ze Records was
looking for someone to produce a tolerable record for his girlfriend,
and Darnell jumped to the challenge. What, he wondered, would be the
dream-life of a wealthy, well-traveled Radcliffe wench with a rakish
wit, manque pretentions, and no voice to speak of? Darnell, again with
the assistance of Rogers and Blank knuckled down to his favorite type
of conjuring: silk purses from sows ears. Merging Cristina's
personality with his own, he concocted a series of theatrical shadow
boxes for her to inhabit, embellished with the combined psychological
detritus of Ayn Rand, Eldrige Cleaver and Salvador Dali. "Jungle Love"
is the vinyl genesis of Darnell's extended flirtation with the Fay
Wray/King Kong mythos: "They say that a blond-headed girl/ Is tied
between two giant stakes/ Tonight in this primitive world/ She's going
to marry an ape . . ." Cristina's shrieks and 24 tracks of jungle sound
effects made this a minor hit in California. "Don't be Greedy" and
"Mama Mia" are my personal favorites. The former features unique
instrumentation set around a terse ultimatum to a wandering mate
thereby cushioning the singer's dramatic excesses. The latter does all
that and more to evoke the emotional mise-en-scene of a wife and mother
who is prone to wander, leaving a little family ever uncertain and
longing for her return. Resentment? You betcha, Cristina is all about
the politics of desire and resentment -- why we hurt the ones we love.
FALLING BRIEFLY BACK into the Savannah band to fire off Dr. Buzzard's
Original Savannah Band Goes to Washington, Darnell contributed lyrics
that were nowhere near the multi-lingual incisiveness of "The Gigolo
and I" or "Auf Wiedersehen, Darrio" from Meets King Penett. "We used to
laugh at Sandy Linzer and those guys after the first album," Darnell
admitted, "because they would only write and sing in one language." But
the public didn't get the point behind the fluent, almost subliminal
transitions from English to Spanish, English to French, or English to
German. So Browder and Darnell attempted a different sort of
complexity. "Seven Year Itch" merges be-bop theories with rock 'n' roll
technique to provide Cory Daye with an orchestrally busy, dissonant
backdrop where only she and a bank of horns know where the melody goes.
The lullaby of Southern Boulevard? Perhaps. There is something
frightening about the fact that each note of this swelling cacophony is
written down -- arranged -- like the vivid minutiae of recurring
nightmares, so that upon analysis one is able to decipher a good deal
more of the subconscious text than might be comfortable to know.
Darnell no sooner finished his contribution to Savannah's cryptic
dreambook than he was back on the casting couch with his own. Kid
Creole & the Coconuts became a performing entity because it wasn't
enough for Darnell to let people hear his obsessions without the visual
counterpart. Off The Coast of Me was just a screen test, a grab-bag of
Darnell's most varied ideas to see what the public would bear. "Lili
Marlene," a German disco version, was a bit too camp. "Darrio (Can You
Get Me Into Studio 54?)" was a bit too cute. "Calypso Pan American"?
Too bizarre. So all the more moderate elements of these tunes were
shifted, refocused and rethought to produce the rock/reggae/cabaret
extravaganza Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places.
Joseph Papp had originally proposed to mount Fresh Fruit on Broadway in
'82. But Papp's reservations about the script and the feasibility of
some of the music has pushed that date back until such time as Darnell
and Papp are able to reach a middle ground to collaborate
(collaborate?) on the definitive book and score. Asked if he found
Darnell resistant to changes in his concept, Papp replied that the
opposite was true, that he had to stave off Darnell's urge to
compromise (in the interest of speed) to preserve "what I like best
about his work."
"Darnell understands the middle-class very well," Pepp continued, "and
he likes to taunt them. I think they enjoy it too, but some of the
harsher aspects of his music which perfectly complement the downtown
club scene will have to be adjusted for a Broadway audience." No doubt
Darnell appreciates Papp's respect for the satirical thrust of his
writing, but it must gig Darnell, the master of irony, to have to
relinquish the final shape of his immorality play to even such an
accomplished entrepreneur as Papp.
Meanwhile, we are left to peruse the interim release, Wise Guy.
Although reminiscent of Off The Coast of Me's frivolous boogie appeal,
Wise Guy purports to be a flashback on the Fresh Fruit story, a tale of
21 days spent in the Coconut equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta.
In reality, we have only returned to that somnambulant never-never land
where even Darnell is forced to tell the truth. "Stool Pigeon," a
brassy swing salute to Joe Valacchi, careens along replete with screams
and moans in the instrumental breaks -- the gleefully violent sound
track for a pistol whipping. "The Love We Have" is a conga-line detour
into yet another evanescent romance, pounding out the frustration of
inconstant affection. An instrumental chant "I'm Corrupt" ends the side
by going to the heart of the matter. Who is so righteous that he is
"worthy" of being loved? Who is so evil that he is "worthy" of being
hated? How can immortal spirit exist in flesh, or rational intellect
coexist with brute emotion?
During their correspondence in 1919, Sigmund Freud congratulated Carl
Jung on his discovery of the American "Negro complex," which ascribed
the psychological eccentricities of Americans to highly symptomatic
sexual repression. Dr. Otto Rank was later to paraphrase this theory as
being ". . . sought chiefly in the effects of living together with the
Negro, which has a suggestive effect upon the laboriously subjugated
instincts of the white races." Freud and Jung also debated the use of
animist religion and parapsychology in diagnosing mental disease -- and
mental health. Much to Jung's disillusion Freud preferred to set up the
sexual theory as an unassailable dogma against "the black tide of mud,
of occultism," and to defend biological determinism against the type of
faith healing dream therapy could become. Being the grinning golem of
the black tide, and an archetypal beneficiary of the Negro complex,
Darnell probably attended these discussions as a protoplasmic fly on
the wall. Now, by creating a self-referential legend that makes the
story of Bumpy Johnson and the Domino Sugar heiress seem like Ozzie and
Harriet, Darnell has woven these psychodynamics into songs that are
trenchant social allegories.
Word for word and note for note, August Darnell is an eloquent
apologist for urban living -- the definitive pan-American tunesmith who
has made his home in the heart of darkness.
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STAGE / RISERS:
Minimum stage size is 28ft. by 24 ft. The downstage 8 ft. should be
covered with black or gray Marley, Stagelawn, or Roscoe flooring. Kid needs this to dance
properly and safely.
A riser configuration is necessary for our stage set: 2, 8 ft. by 8 ft. platforms at a
height of 3 ft, 1,8 ft. by 8ft. platform for drums at 14 ft. and another 8 ft. by 8 ft.
for horns at low height. Stairs or step units should be provided for the tall risers. The
drum riser should be carpeted.
BANDGEAR / BACKLINE:
The Promoter shall provide at his own expense the necessary bandgear
-- see Appendix B. Within the New York city area, the official supplier is Studio
Instrument Rentals.
SOUND SYSTEM / MONITORS:
Kid Creole requires a world-class sound system with the following
minimum specs -- a 40-channel mixing console, speaker cabinets, and amps commensurate with
the room and the expected number of fans using a ratio of 5 watts per head, that is , 1000
people = 5000 watts. The front of house rack should contain a professional assortment of
compressors, gates, reverb, delay as well as a cassette deck. Talk back to the stage is
essential. The preferred console is the Yamaha PM3000.
Kid Creole requires an extensive monitor system. For fullsize stages, a 32 by 12 mix
system is called for. On smaller stages it may be possible to use a 32 by 10 mix system.
This must be discussed in the advance with our production manager. A list of the mixes can
be found in Appendix C2. The preferred console is the Ramsa S840.
LIGHTING:
The extent of the lighting system will vary somewhat depending upon
the type of venue, size of stage, power availability, etc. However, a basic minimum would
be a tow-truss system, each truss to contain 24 Pars as well as 6 specials (Leicos) in the
front an a bar of ACLS in the back. A smoke machine is necessary. Any Vary-Lights,
Telescans, Colour Mags, etc., that may be available would greatly enhance. the look of the
show. Depending on the size of the facility, the Purchaser agrees to provide at his sole
cost and expense 2 to 4 Super Trooper spotlights.
MEALS AND CATERING:
Crew Lunch: The promoter shall provide lunch for a crew of 4 to 6
people consisting of sandwiches, hamburgers, etc., soda and coffee.
Dinner: A nutritious hot meals shall be provided directly after sound check for the entire
touring party of 20 people. There are 4 vegetarians who eat seafood.
Dressing Rooms shall be stocked with snacks consisting of chips, nuts, cheese, fruit,
veggies, etc.
Beverages: The promoter shall provide an ample amount of the following: water, soda, and
fruit juice. This should be available from sound check on.
Alcohol: The band requires 2 cases of domestic beer, 2 bottles of wine, and one liter of
imported Vodka, that is, Absolut.
These should be made available after sound check.
DRESSING ROOMS:
The Kid Creole band contains a minimum of 12 people and sometimes
more; therefore, at least 3 dressing rooms will be required. The breakdown is as follows:
No. 1 for Kid, No. 2 for the Coconuts and Cory Daye, and No. 3 for the Band.
All rooms should be stocked with the following items: mirrors, towels, chairs, hanging
racks for costumes, as well as the aforementioned catering requirements. During the
winter, it is essential that Kid's room be warmed with a heater.
WARDROBE:
As costumes are an essential part of the show, the promoter shall
provide a "wardrobe mistress" equipped with an iron, ironing board, sewing kit,
etc. She/He should be on call from the end of sound check through the start of the show.
They will not work during the show and can view the performances if desired.
PARKING AND MISCELLANEOUS:
In the event that the band is arriving by bus, the promoter shall
take steps to ensure adequate, safe parking as near to the stage door as possible. The
same shall be provided for the crew car and Kid's car as that may apply.
MISCELLANEOUS:
Tent poles and obstructions -- occasionally Kid Creole has the
dubious experience of playing in a tent. In no case shall the band perform on a stage
obstructed by a tent pole or other vertical hazard. Also, in cases where the staying
company is erecting a stage behind a pole, steps must be taken so that the pole is not
directly in front of the stage; that is, the stage must be positioned in such a way so
that the sight line of the stage-left or stage-right musician is obstructed but not the
center, Kid's position.
SUMMARY:
All of the above points as well as such items as show time, load-in
time, support acts, hotel arrangements, stage hand requirements, curfews, etc., shall be
discussed in advance with the band's production manager, Ernesto Kulka. It is highly
advised that the promoter compile a "reserve rider" with address, phone numbers,
show times, technical specs, etc,. and fax same to Ernesto.
A full and complete discussion of these points as well as any other matters that relate to
individual venues, etc., is the best insurance toward a successful show.
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SOUND- MICROPHONE PATCH LIST:
Kick
Snare
Rack 1
Rack 2
Floor
O.H. (House Right)
O.H. (House Left)
Guitar Mark (House Left)
Bass D. I.
Guitar (on stage)
Keys Top D. I.
Keys Bottom D. I.
Trombone XLR
Trumpet XLR
Bongos
Conga High
Conga Low
Timbales
Drum Machine D.I.
Coco 1
Coco 2
Cory Daye
Mark Vox
Danny Vox
Horn Vox
Percussion Vox 1
Percussion Vox 2
Kid Vox
Spare Vox
BACKLINE:
Keyboards:
1 Roland D-50
1 Korg M-1
1 mixer
1 keyboard cabinet with power amp
1 Apex Stand
1 stereo volume pedal
Guitars:
2 Roland JC 120 + 1 Fender "The Twin"
1 SVT Bass Cabinet
2 SVT Bass Amplifier
3 guitar stands
Drums:
1 Yamaha drum kit (Pearl, TAMA)
1 ride cymbal, 2 crash cymbals
1 straight stand, 2 boom stands
extra snare and pedal
Percussion:
1 bongos w/stand
2 congas w/stand
1 timbales w/stand
1 16" crash cymbal with stand
1 Roland octapad w/stand
1 Roland R-8 Drum machine
Misc. 1 110/220 transformer (Europe only)
2 additional drum seats (thrones)
SOUND - MONITOR MIXES:
1. Percussion 1 wedge
2. Kid 2 wedges
3. Keys 1 wedge
4. Horns 2 wedges
5. Guitar Dan 1 wedge
6. Bass 1 wedge
7. Guitar Mark 1 wedge
8. Cory 1 wedge
9. Coconuts 2 wedges
Drums
Side Fill Left
Side Fill Right
CONTRACT APPENDIX RELATING TO OPEN AIR SHOWS
Where no adequate roofing protection is provided and the performance is subject to weather
conditions, please be aware of the following:
The Purchaser will provide a stage area with adequate covering
against inclement weather conditions. Any change or shortening of performance or
cancellation resulting from failure to comply with this clause will result in full payment
of the ARTIST'S fee.
The Purchaser is responsible to and accountable for the ARTIST'S
equipment at all times once it is within the grounds of the engagement. Should any damage
or loss occur, the PURCHASER shall be financially responsible for:
Repair or replacement of all missing or damaged items to the
ARTIST'S satisfaction;
The cost of hire of such items while repair/replacement is being undertaken; and
Freighting/forwarding costs of any equipment replaced or repaired.
The PURCHASER will provide both PA and lighting monitors and mixing
systems to the ARTIST'S specifications, as directed in the ARTIST'S rider or as previously
forwarded to the Purchaser by FA.
Compliance with the ARTIST'S specification is of paramount
importance, and major consideration must be given by PURCHASER in supplying specific
equipment required even if this equipment will be solely used by the ARTIST and no other
artist appearing at the engagement.
Should the ARTIST'S playing time be delayed for any reason outside
the direct control of the ARTIST, the ARTIST will not be required to shorten the length of
their set unless the ARTIST so desires. If the delay is more than 1 hour, the ARTIST
reserves the right to cancel without prejudice to the full ARTIST's fee.
Where safety permits, no tent pole(s) should be located in a
position facing the very center of the stage (up to 20ft. on either side of the center
line of the stage). For open-air concerts, the entire stage area must be covered over
(above the lighting system up to a height of 26ft.) and the same applying to the wins
where the sound equipment is located. Overhead guards should like wise be provided for the
lighting and sound consoles and spotlights.
Where tents/marquees are concerned, an overhead guard should be
provided for sound and lighting consoles, spotlights, and stage equipment to prevent
harmful effects caused by falling dust, condensation, or rain.
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All rights reserved. All layouts and original artwork Copyright ©1998 - 2011 - Tony Sables (The Chameleon).
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors.
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