Monkeys in the Foodchain

Monkeys in the Foodchain
Tonio K. Makes an Austin Connection

by Luke Torn

Tonio K. peers out over the bandstand and asks, "You want personal or political?" then realizes his gaffe and shrugs, laughing, "Oh yeah, what's the difference?" Naturally, he goes off into a new song that tangles both elements into an indivisible jumble. You could say Tonio K. has spent his entire career trying to sort out the implications of his question. Twelve years ago, on his Amerika album, Tonio K. wrote, "I just want someone who can laugh/At the fact that there ain't nothin' funny." The line deftly wraps severe cynicism and faint personal hope, politics, and relationships into a conundrum worthy of Shakespeare.

"Yeah, I've always been a real lyric fascist," Tonio jokes while dragging a chamois across his friend Charlie Sexton's 1950 Mercury at Sexton's West Austin home. "That's kinda what I do. I don't consider myself a musician. I consider myself a writer, and flail away at the guitar, enough to sketch the song out and then trash it up on stage."

Currently, the flailing and trashing is taking place with his Austin-based combo 16 Tons of Monkeys, a group put together in 1991 while he was spending time here writing with Charlie Sexton for the debut Arc Angels album. Formed out of the Austin Rehearsal Complex crowd, the band includes rhythm section deluxe Scott Garber (bass) and Don Harvey (drums), new guitarist Jerry Holmes, and a pair of keyboard hotshots in Reese Wynans and Bukka Allen.

Tonio K.'s Austin connection began in 1985 with an unlikely pairing with then-teen phenom Sexton, who happened to cover two Tonio K. songs on his first mega-hit LP Pictures for Pleasure. The two wrote together at the behest of Michael Goldstone and Keith Forsey—Sexton's A&R exec and producer, respectively—for the second Sexton album in 1987, and the collaboration has continued and friendship blossomed through the present Arc Angels project. Of Sexton, Tonio says, "He's incredibly talented and a really nice guy. He's turning into a really good writer at the ripe old age of 23. I think people in Austin were just real disappointed to see Little Charlie the blues kid go to L.A. and turn into an Englishman. I think even Charlie laughs about that now, but God, he was only 16 years old. Give him a break. Teenage boys make a lot of silly moves. That's a tough subspecies—the teenage male, it almost argues against any sort of orderly evolution. But I was one once, too, and evolved out of it."

As for the enigmatic Mr. K., however, his story begins some 14 years ago in L.A. when, following a stint in the Crickets, Buddy Holly's still-touring back-up band, he embarked on his strange odyssey of a solo career. In a lazy and oh-so-hip late Seventies southern California environment of peaceful easy feelings, rumours, taking it easy (aka Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Browne, etc.), Tonio K. shattered the ennui with Life in the Foodchain, an absurdist, apocalyptic, angst-ridden treatise on broken relationships and the end of the world. Oh, yeah, and it rocked like crazy. Critic Robert Christgau surmised, "Tonio shouts numerous humorous words—his evolution jokes are funnier than Devo's—over the noise made by crack El Lay session men as they revisit Highway 61 at 110 miles an hour."

Not surprisingly, this anarchic attitude scared off the laidback, solipsistic L.A. music crowd. In fact many of them, according to Tonio, were (and still are, in some cases) so uptight and/or threatened that they wouldn't talk to him. "Yeah," admits Tonio, "those people don't like me." If Warren Zevon was the enfant terrible of that clan, as was celebrated, then Tonio K. compounded the iconoclastic, literary-madman-with-guitar image immeasurably with characters run amok like Willie & the Pigman, Fast Rodney, and a spurned and very pissed-off ex-lover in "H-A-T-R-E-D." (This is the song with the infamous Jackson Browne referenced line: "I wish I could be [sic] as mellow/as for instance Jackson Browne/ but 'Fountain of Sorrow' my ass @#$%¢&-(*&)$# /I hope you wind up in the ground.") But there were always jokes—a peculiarly wicked brand of gallows humor—bringing a precarious balance to his writing. Even in "H-A-T-R-E-D," you can hear Tonio warbling over the fading waves of feedback at the end that "Then again, maybe with the proper counseling, we can work this out."

As he now notes, "The comic aspect, to take it all the way back to Mark Twain, is that if you don't laugh at this stuff, it'll drive you crazy. If you look at the world and find it that wanting, which is not hard to do and gets easier every day, you've got to be able to at least somehow laugh in the face of that, or be driven crazy by it. If you take a long hard look at the world we live in, it's pretty grim."

When pushed on the subject of how his songwriting might court the dark side a little too much, Tonio K. remarks that, "I don't know where this stuff comes from, where does any of it come from? I wasn't asking to be shown the worst of human nature. We could get deep down into the trench and talk about basically the whole drift of western civilization, which is away from anything of substance. What anybody does that has anything real to it is of very little value to the culture at large."

Tonio K. is the blackest of American black-comedy songwriters to appear in the post-Dylan era. You may say Randy Newman has penned some tragic-comic classics, and that Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns & Money" said all that needed to be said about down-and-out characters trying to hold on in the face of hopeless situations. Yet Tonio K.'s take-no-prisoners reckless consistency cuts closer to the bone, blending a thick layer of cynicism, a wicked sarcastic streak, and a more pissed-off sense of outrage. His worldview is angry, funny, bleak, and absurd all at once. Tonio K.'s irony is sometimes so pronounced, in fact, that it has to hit you in the face a few times before you realize that he's kidding. The closest thing he's had to a hit was a soundtrack number to the 1988 Carl Reiner film Summer School called "I'm Supposed to Have Sex with You," a song that could have had Tipper Gore climbing the walls.

"Half or more of the people that heard that song took it dead serious at absolute surface level," he explains. "Never figured out the irony and the satire of it. I mean the chorus was 'I'm supposed to have sex with you/We'll have the sex now/I'm supposed to have sex with you/The sex is next.' It was a joke. It was just a riff on dance tunes, basically."

Unfortunately for him, Chrysalis barely knew they had a hit brewing under their noses and failed to promote this oddity for the novelty potential it had. "In L.A. and New York, I heard, it was the number one requested song in the month of August of that summer [1987]. It was as close as I've ver come to a hit, and naturally·" he trails off. "No one knew where to buy, how to get it, what it was, and when A&M [his record company at the time] finally realized what was happening and tried to get it away from Chrysalis, by the time the lawyers went back and forth, it was over."

Then, there's the Merzsuite, clearly the farthest thing Tonio K.'s ever had to a hit. "Merzsuite: Let Us Join Together in a Tune/Umore/Futt Futt Futt/Umore" would have to be the ultimate joke, one of the most absurd pieces of music to appear on a major label record. "My biggest influences in life, including music, would have to be the Dada art people," Tonio explains, and with that final track on Amerika, he demonstrated it. A 10-minute medley that in part paid tribute to the Dada movement, it included a long chorus of "I don't know, I don't know, I just don't know," and a crashing train wreck sound as a transition to "Futt Futt Futt," a German oompah section which contained a "Bah!/I am stupid" chorus. Obviously, this track broke sharply from the collection of bent pop songs that dotted the rest of the record.

"Oh, I could tell you a story about that," offers Tonio K., who seems to have, oh, about 16 tons of amusing anecdotes about his past. "So we're doing this record for Clive [Davis, head of Arista Records], and he's getting involved and he loved 'Cinderella's Baby'—that was his favorite song on the record—and there was some other song that he didn't like and he wanted me to write a couple more. One of the other ones I wrote was 'Say Goodbye,' so that was a good A&R move. And finally he was satisfied and we made the record and then we were sitting after quite a few months, and I co-produced it with my friend Nick [van Maarth], and we were sitting at Clive's bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And he's listening to his latest masterpiece for Arista Records, the new Tonio K. record, and he's listening all the way through and he might have even wept at 'Cinderella's Baby'—you know, he's a very emotional guy. And then it comes to the Merzsuite at the end, which I think we may have never even let him hear, and he's listening to this. And I'm watching him, at first his eyes were closed and I'm watching him, and a ways into it his eyes suddenly opened when he realizes what's happening here. Finally he couldn't bear anymore. He actually got up and stopped the thing. And he said, 'I just don't understand why?' And I said, 'Everything else you need is on this record. This is last, so if you're not sold by then, you're not sold. And if they don't like it, they can get up and turn it off like you did. But I need this. This is for me.' And he said, 'Alright, but I just don't understand people like you, and Lou Reed with that machine album of his, and Patti Smith. You people make brilliant works of art and then in the last moment you have to ruin them with stuff like this.'

"Austin has the greatest music scene in the country," Tonio K. glows, "and, by implication, the world. It's the last bastion of American music, really, That's why I formed this band here.

"When I was back and forth writing with Charlie, I'd be here anywhere from three weeks at a time to a month at a time, every other month or so. Finally Don [Harvey] and a few other people around town said, 'Gee, you're here so much, let's put a band together.' And it was kinda like, 'You mean, play just for the fun of it?'"

The result sounds like a gang of gauchos out for a little road spree on the desolate remnants of Dylan's Highway 61. Wynans' driving yet ghostly organ sound is out front Al Kooperöstyle. Allen's piano adds to the band's rhythmic punch and lends a roadhouse aspect to the proceedings. Guitarist Jerry Holmes, a member of Austin band Big Blue Men, is just now working his way into the line-up, but Tonio says, "I wanna encourage him to get even ruder and more reckless. My whole theory on guitars is whomp that sucker, never mind the tuning, just put your shoulder into it and fall down if you have to."

Holmes replaced local hero David Halley, who initially wanted to concentrate strictly on his lead guitar skills as a Monkey, but has since resumed his solo commitments. "When we started off, it was kind of a temporary thing with David," explains Tonio.

"These guys are virtuoso players in this band," he brags. "Reese is mind-boggling. He's one of the most incredible musicians I've ever seen. And Bukka is a Berklee School of Music cat himself. This is the first time I've ever had keyboards in a band, period. To start off your experience with keyboards with Reese Wynans and Bukka ain't bad."

True to form, the band's theme song is a one-chord dance song incorporating so many of Tonio K.'s favorite subjects—moral outrage, cultural indictment, personal pain and anger: "I got sixteen tons of questions for the teacher/I got sixteen tons of monkeys on my back/I got sixteen tons of doubt about the future/It's a wonder that I've managed to survive the silent wreckage of my past." Tonio's snarling, commanding vocals handle this and most every number with authoritative aplomb, while the band plays both sides of the fence—garage band ferocity and professionally derived precision (or virtuosity, if you will). Wynans, in particular—Austin luminary and former Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble member—zigzags across the songs with purposeful intent to take what is essentially a folk and blues based medium into another galaxy.

Mostly, the band concentrates on recent Tonio K. material, from 1986's Romeo Unchained, 1988's Notes from the Lost Civilization, and an unreleased 1990 LP that was to be called Olé.

"The next record I make I hope is going to be a 16 Tons of Monkeys record with this band, not a Tonio K. record," he says optimistically. As his deal with A&M Records is a thing of the past ("Totally f***ed is what I am," he observes), it leaves the band grappling with the new label blues. "I want to cut maybe 10 tracks here, and hopefully, get whoever the next label is to buy about four of those A&M tracks."

Like any number of Austin musicians, Tonio K. has had his troubles with record companies, and A&M is currently asking for a fair-sized fortune for the master tapes to Olé, a record that was recorded with an all-star band that included David Hidalgo, Paul Westerberg, T-Bone Burnett and others. "Basically, they said, sure you can have this stuff back, give us $230,000." It's a classic catch-22 situation that Tonio K.'s characters have been dealing with for years.