[Reprinted from BAM, March 11, 1988]

By Dave Zimmer

Welcome to the heart of the Lost Civilization. From the rooftop of his house in downtown Los Angeles, Tonio K. looked around one day last year and jotted down some notes. "It's a little like living in a civil war zone...the streets are alive...unlimited action...it looks like the future has finally arrived...there's high-maintenance women and idiot songs...and gentleman losers and runaway children with no place to run...the girl with the needle and the child, the guy with the gun...the fallen believers gone wild...the leftover hippies...the 50-foot woman...I love this city...you feel so alive...there's so much excitement...I hope I survive." Those words make up the heart of "City Life," one of the most striking songs on Notes from the Lost Civilization, the latest LP from Tonio K. (known to his parents, wife and a few friends as Steve Krikorian).

Inside a small office at A&M Records, TK removes his dark glasses to reveal dark, Humphrey Bogart eyes. After a swallow of Avian water, he comments, "Post World War II, life's just gotten really cheap. There's been a real shift to the brutal. It's pretty scary. But I'm no historian. I'm more of an armchair historian, a political observer, whatever."

Despite this openly gloomy take on the world, when he examines his own personal life, TK admits, "I'm not unhappy. You could say I'm content and have moments of real satisfaction. The fact that I'm now happily married [to photographer Linda Myers, who's responsible for the cover shot on his new album] says something about my current personal psychology, I guess."

At the tail end of "Where Is That Place?," a questioning song about the disappearance of old America, Tonio finds a beacon of light and sings, "You could buy anything but love." That's his touchstone. And such a viewpoint makes his openly feminist attitudes throughout "What Women Want" seem more like cynical cracks. He sings: "They want a lover, they don't want some little boy/Don't want to wind up being someone's broken toy/They want love/They want somebody they can trust/They've got a feeling/They're not asking all that much." "A friend of mine heard 'What Women Want,' says Tonio, "and couldn't believe the same guy who wrote 'H-A-T-R-E-D' had become a foremost feminist. Of course, about 50 percent of the people who heard 'I'm Supposed to Have Sex With You' proclaimed me the foremost advocate of random sex in the '80s."

Originally written for a male strip club scene in Martha (Valley Girl) Coolidge's The City Girl, "Sex With You" sat around for a year or so as that movie got hung up in litigation and was never released. The song was still looking for a home last spring when Tonio was called on to contribute some music to Carl Reiner's Summer School. Bingo! It made it onto the soundtrack and quickly became one of the summer of '87's most requested songs. Unfortunately for Tonio, this enthusiasm didn't translate into record sales. Why? "You could not get the song on a 12-inch [single]," he says, still a bit miffed. "I couldn't believe it when the song went number one in LA and New York and still there was not a 12-inch. A lot of people didn't know it was on the [Summer School] soundtrack and those that did weren't interested in buying the whole soundtrack. I know Chrysalis was in the process of shifting regimes, but they've never been interested in soundtracks and 12-inch singles. So that song didn't do much business."

His favorite memory about "Sex With You": "A friend of mine was down at Zuma Beach and heard about 10,000 radios all tuned into the same station when 'Sex With You' was being played." His second favorite memory: "This may sound pretentious, but I was signing some autographs at a KROQ deal. But before I'd sign, I'd ask each person what they thought about the song. About 70 percent could see the humor. The other 30 percent thought I was serious, about 10 percent of whom were drunk. So I think most people knew my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek."

Regarding his career-long penchant for satire, he says, "I think I'm tending to do less of that these days. On [Notes from the Lost Civilization] there's the odd wisecrack, but not as much obvious parody as on some of my other records.

"This psychologist I talk to once in a while," Tonio continues, "told me that people who experience racial prejudice—if they are creative people—tend to be satirists. Woody Allen, I'm sure he took some heat. I took a little heat as a kid and it's affected me to this day. If someone tells you that what you are is unacceptable and there's nothing you can do to change that, you can't lash out at an individual. The culture at large has assaulted you. So one way to deal with it is to satirize, mock it and make fun of it."

Growing up first in the Valley, then the desert, Tonio remembers, "Me and some friends put together our own version of MAD magazine—weird articles, silly things. The governing principle was: 'What would they think if...' Then we'd think of some weird thing and go out and do it. ...We were sort of into creative vandalism. We'd steal books from the library and very aesthetically deface them. We'd turn pictures into obscene acts. Things like that. Then one day I stole a book on the Dada movement and said to myself, 'Wow! I don't need to do anything with this. This is great.' And I've been sort of a neo-Dadaist ever since.

"I started taking the pop song form seriously as a teenager after paying attention to what Bob Dylan was doing. Then after high school, a couple of us guys just started playing and by the end of an afternoon proclaimed ourselves a band. I'd never played an instrument in my life. Then in the finest proto-punk tradition, we booked a gig two weeks later. It was some back-to-school party by someone's pool. I think we made 30 bucks. My first professional gig."

When he made the move to go to LA in the early '70s, Tonio had the good fortune to do some recording next door to Buddy Holly's old band, the Crickets. "I started hanging out with them," he remembers, "and wound up as the hot young singer-songwriter in the band from 1973 to '76, something like that. It was amazing, like being in this four-dimensional rock history class. Rick Grech from Traffic was on bass. Albert Lee was playing guitar. There was Jerry Allison, the original drummer; and Sonny Curtis, the guy who wrote 'I Fought The Law,' was singing. It just blew my mind."

Tonio K.'s career as a solo artist began in 1979 with the release of Life in the Foodchain. Highly original songs such as "Mars Needs Women," "I Handle Snakes" and "Funky Western Civilization" followed. He likes being in control of what goes on his records. "I wouldn't want to have to decide with five other guys," Tonio says. But he admits, "I don't consider myself a musician, really. The writing is what I still feel I do best. So when it comes time to record, I surround myself with real musicians."

On Notes from the Lost Civilization, Tonio got healthy assists from executive producer/guitarist T-Bone Burnett, producer/bassist David Miner, drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Jack Sherman, bassist James Jamerson and keyboardist Booker T. Jones. Peter Case, Billy Vera and Charlie Sexton contributed some harmony vocals.

"We started in June [of '87] and finished in July," says Tonio. "The sessions were very to the point, musically. After recording 'The Executioner's Song,' Booker T. said, 'That felt just like a bunch of people playing together, live, in the '60s.' I thought, 'Wow! Mission accomplished.'"