Tonio K. Unchained

One of Rock’s Angriest Young Men Finds Love and Grace in an Imperfect World

By Chris Willman

Contemporary Christian Magazine / October 1986

 

Tonio K. is in the process of clearing out the house in the hills of the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles where he’s resided for about seven years, most of the length of his recording career. The rustic house is, as a friend of his has noted, “a museum of his mind”—and what a mind it documents.

            Artifacts from various phases of his curious recording career are being boxed up while other memorabilia will simply have to go. It’s a safe bet that the new renters will not care to have their driveway strewn with the battered remains of records and books that failed the Tonio K. listening or reading test and were trampled under-tire. (Sample titles among the wreckage: Vanity 6 and the Book of Mormon.) Nor is it likely that they will want to keep around his collection of broken acoustic guitar necks, all tagged and dated from the days when he used to climax every performance by impaling the body of a guitar on a mike stand. Various coffee-table reading items (Kafka, T.S. Eliot, the New American Standard Bible, International Defense Review magazine) wait to be collected.

            Truly, the dismantling of this museum is the end of an era.

            There is one thing you don’t find being taken down that a longtime fan of Tonio K.’s might expect to be removed: a sign hanging over the front door that announces, like a clubhouse insignia from a Dennis the Menace strip, “No Gurls Aloud.”

            No such sign exists literally, but it must’ve figuratively because Tonio K. (whose real name is Steve Krikorian) used to be known in popular and critical legend as someone who—hard as it is to believe now—had a thing against women.

            The first three Tonio K. records (on Epic, Arista, and Capitol and dating between 1978 and 1982) were widely applauded by male critics everywhere, delighted to have found a musical champion who secretly seemed to fear and despise the other gender as much as they did. It was all ostensibly tongue-in-cheek, of course, and there were women who saw through the joke and loved it, too. But there was little doubt that the fellow who wrote such charming romantic anthems as “Go Away,” “Mars Needs Women,” and, of course, the immortal “H-A-T-R-E-D” had really had a bad relationship or five at some point. He would loudly regret “the years that I wasted on you” and sweetly conclude “I wouldn’t touch you with a stick.” The lyrics were riotous but not so far from real life that they weren’t also a little scary—the anger may have been exaggerated, but the bitterness behind it all was genuine.

            Now, in 1986, it’s a completely different—well, substantially different, anyway—Tonio K. that we meet. His new album, Romeo Unchained, is not only not hostile, but it’s an amazingly compassionate, soft-hearted piece of work that has produced tears of recognition in more than one listener. It exudes an honest-to-gosh sensitivity and empathy for the plight of the female of the species, so much so that he might be taken for a feminist instead of a misogynist, so much so that the fans still pogoing to his old songs might even charge that he’s sold out and joined up with the other side.

            And then there’s the reason he’s moving out of his house. It’s because he’s moving into the Los Angeles apartment of his new bride, Linda Myers, the album’s cover photographer. That’s right, kids. In June, Tonio K. actually up and got married.

            What happened? 

Faith Into Action

“What literally happened between then and now is that I finally drew my conclusions about what was going on on the planet earth and points north and elsewhere. And I fell in love,” explains K., lounging against the wall of his new newlyweds’ nest above the dangerous streets near L.A.’s MacArthur Park. “Those two things happened, and that changes everything. I haven’t quite come to know the peace that surpasses understanding, but I’ve come to know some sort of contentment that goes beyond the circumstances a lot of the time these days. When you sort of see how big this thing really is that you were created to be a part of, it can definitely make a difference. And it has.”

            In other words, Tonio K. found a wife and found God. Which, of course, makes it sounds much simpler and easier than it ever really is.

            “I spent four-and-a-half years in a relationship that eventually ended, but that woman did a lot,” he says. “She explained to me what aspects of the faith had eluded me and how simple it really was—because I’d believed it all along. I mean, I, along with Einstein, knew that this was a creation, and though I couldn’t prove it conclusively and exhaustively, I could prove circumstantially and to my own satisfaction that Jesus was who He said He was—no matter whether I could prove it or not—and told me to pretty much mind my own business and process the information as best I could and not look for a computer readout, which is to say, show a little faith.

            “I’ve always known that was true, and I’ve been thinking about it as one old enough to vote since the early ‘70s. I had just missed a couple of things which this girlfriend explained to me—like grace,” he says with a laugh. “I had just assumed that I, along with everyone I was yelling at, was going to hell in the same handcart! And then I realized that maybe that didn’t have to be.”

            Tonio K. had finally discovered grace, but he still hadn’t discovered the kind of love that was to result in a marriage. He and that girlfriend continued in a rather tortuous relationship for several more years—a learning experience reflected in some of the less upbeat songs on Romeo Unchained like “Emotional War Games” and “Perfect World.”

            “First I went astray on a theological and psychological point, being that she pretty much intimated that God had sent her and that we were supposed to be married and live happily ever after,” he relates. “And I figured that she knew him better than I did, so I went for it since I found her physically attractive!” He laughs, though neither in or out of retrospect was it amusing. “Psychologically, I knew a month or two into the relationship that we didn’t have the stuff that two people needed to be together.

            “What I’m getting at is, in the course of that, I learned a whole lot about what it is from men and women to love one another. I learned through trial and error and through seeing what was right and what was wrong about that relationship. And then once I got away from it, seeing how it’s really supposed to work.

            “This record, I think, sounds like it was made by somebody who has finally become able to love and be loved and has found a person who is compatible to do that with, but who knows nevertheless that it’s not quite that simple,” he comments. “I don’t want to be offensive, but a lot of Christendom seems to want to compartmentalize and simplify things into unrealistic black-and-white terms. Then when their lives fall apart around them, they can’t believe that God would abandon them like this. I think there’s a lot more causality built into the creation than a lot of people would like to admit. Love is real simple at its bottom line—‘Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ That’s pretty simple—but the working out of that causality is pretty involved.

            “All of which is to say, that’s what songs like ‘You Will Go Free’ and ‘Perfect World’ and the rest of those are about: Yes, there is love: yes, you can do this; but no, you can’t do it stupidly or blindly or particularly simplistically, I don’t think. At least I haven't known anybody who could." 

Bad News for Modern Man?

As Tonio K. sings in the opening bars of Romeo Unchained, “It’s a jungle out there / It used to be a garden…” The words, obviously, of a man who knows that these are times in which lovers have to watch their step, or which vine they’re swinging from, or which balcony they’re stepping onto to let loose their wherefore-art-thous. It’s a world in which Romeo is really Lothario, and the tunnel of love is really a missile silo, and the primrose path to love and success is littered with snakes. It’s a world in which, as the Firesign Theater might say, everything you know—at least everything you learned about love from TV and Playboy and rock ‘n’ roll and your last five dates—is wrong.

            Indeed, much of Romeo Unchained seems like bad news for modern man. It’s the news that true love and modern romance don’t have much in common. It’s the news that the world, “has built a machine designed to crush you, and they’re been tinkering away at that machine for thousands of years, and it will crush you” if you’re not careful, says K. It’s the news that they’ve got an enormous set of expectations for you to live up to that could crush you with its weight.

            The good news—heavy sigh of relief—is that you don’t have to live up to any list of expectations designed by mortal man. It’s the news that, like Tonio K. in the album’s centerpiece song, you can listen to what they have to offer as examples of truth and love and then respond, “I am not impressed.” It’s the news that, with a little help from above and with good old-fashioned hard work and commitment, the emotional war games he sings about are survivable ones.

            “What’s really wild is that finally, in that this is all about the truth, this is gospel music,” he affirms with a smile. “It’s the good news. The good news is that the 6 o’clock news doesn’t have to be the only news.”

            The folks at What? Records thought that Romeo Unchained was good news enough to be the flagship release for their new label, distributed through Word and A&M and reaching old fans on the mainstream side and new ones on the Christian side. “Tonio K.’s style is so revolutionary,” says Roland Lundy, executive vice-president of Word Records. “His music brings out truth in a way that has never been done on the Christian market.”

            Of course, not everyone is so progressively minded as to find Tonio K.’s sometimes caustic and tongue-in-cheek songs to be “gospel” the way K. does, and there has been a bit of controversy among some bookstores and radio stations who have a hard time sandwiching a guy who would write a song like “I Handle Snakes” in between Sandi Patti and Dan Peek. Typical of the dissenters was a DJ who found the ballad “Perfect World,” the first radio single, “too negative” for airplay. For the most part, though, reaction on both sides has been remarkably strong. This is a “crossover” record that never had to cross over from one side to the other. In Los Angeles, for example, album tracks are in rotation on both top “new music” station KROQ and new Christian station KYMS which, ironically, are right next to each other on the dial.

            K. theorizes why the album has struck emotional nerves among both believers and nonbelievers: “In or out of the church, everyone apparently suffers from the same contemporary disease. In or out of Christendom, all of us are trying to live up to images, ideas and ideals that are completely false—which doesn’t mean that there aren’t critical differences of world view and perspective and faith. But we all have to live life out on the street every day, and I don’t propose abandoning that life for a monastic life, even if the monastery is as big as Orange County.

            “I think Madison Avenue—using that as a symbol rather than as a geographical point in time and space—has found it convenient to present all of us kids in the closing quarter of the 20th century with a particular image of what men and women should be, an image that’s convenient for the moving of product on and off the shelves. Meanwhile, down on the street, we’re trying to live up to things that are completely unrealistic, and most relationships are failing because of it.

            “It’s a crime to be over 21 these days. It’s that Playboy philosophy that tells all of us guys as we grow up that what we need and deserve is a teenage concubine at all times—and as many as possible. I’m surprised that the women of the West haven’t dragged Hugh Hefner out of that big house and into the streets for public scrutiny, if you catch my meaning. It’s jive. How can anything withstand that kind of jive?”

            So would it be fair to say that the sympathies of Romeo Unchained are skewed even more toward the female viewpoint than the male?

            “Well, the sympathies are more obviously with the girls, but it’s implicit that the boys are suffering, too, because, it’s all the same problem. Us guys, we run through one relationship after another and then wonder why we’re never satisfied. We wonder why we fear our own maturity and mortality the way we do. It’s probably because we know if we’re not rich, we better stay young. If we manage to make enough money, we know that we can continually buy young women until we’re just completely, physiologically falling apart, and then maybe not. But if you’re John D. Rockefeller, you can still pull it off.

            “So set it straight. Write it down: No, my sympathies are not with women against men. My sympathies are for all of us. I think we’ve all totally screwed up how it’s supposed to be.”

            This ain’t no perfect world, indeed.

            “I’ve seen how men have ruined these women, how we have just completely dumped on them over and over and over by being little boys, for starters. And we’ve been raised, maybe by our mothers and by the sins of our fathers, to be these little boys and be unable—only unable in that it never occurs to us—to love a woman the way a woman needs to be loved. That sounds ridiculous coming from me, but there’s a definite dynamic of trust and unconditional commitment and stuff like that. Both parties apparently need to let down their guard and trust and love one another.

            “Apparently most women are more sensitive to it than most men are, and they’re not getting it from us. Women in the Western world can’t trust the men in the Western world for anything other than to have the sex and the attendant companionship for as long as it interests them and then go on down the street. No wonder women are deciding to be men and make it on their own. What else are they gonna do? These guys are useless. And I know these men. I was one of them.” 

Beating the System

If Tonio K. were to do nothing but rag on the imperfection of this imperfect world, the resulting album might be nigh unlistenable, if still quite justifiable in aesthetic and theological terms. Thankfully, he tempers it all with a sense of humor that shows he has more than one irony in the fire and with a real-live optimism that modern lovers can beat the crushing machine.

            “You Belong with Me,” a traditional ballad with sweet backing vocals from an uncredited Maria McKee of Lone Justice, is “a milestone song, the first love song of that sort I’ve ever written,” he confesses. “Living Doll,” a rocker which features some blazing guitar work from teenage whiz-kid Charlie Sexton, is about what Tonio commonly refers to as a “debilitated” woman, but it has a surprise happy ending in which she meets the right guy—not Prince Charming, or even Mr. Right, but the right guy. And the closing “You Will Go Free,” with production values and background vocals courtesy of pal T-Bone Burnett, is a long vow based on the title promise, even though Tonio warns that “I don’t know how much it’s gonna cost you, probably everything…” That is, freedom doesn’t come for free.

            And then there’s the character who finds redemption in the anthemic “You Don’t Belong Here,” inspired by a weekend drive through Los Angeles’ Westwood district, headquarters for first-run films and high-priced luxury items. “I was looking at this scene,” recalls K., “and it occurred to me that this was a religious ceremony going on here in the streets—and wasn’t this some congregation? The people were definitely worshiping on the street that night and every night. Who or what their particular god was and how widely it varied from individual to individual, I don’t know, but it wasn’t the God I know. And it did strike me that these people—the best of the best, the smartest of the smart, the prettiest of the pretty —they all looked like zombies to me. It was definitely the night of the living dead.”

            Like “Impressed” (which was co-written by Bob Wilson of The Front and was actually intended for that band), “You Don’t Belong Here” was recorded by Charlie Sexton for his recent smash hit album debut. Whether young Sexton picked up on the spiritual implications implicit in the songs is questionable, but in any case, some lyrics almost straight out of I Corinthians managed to make their way onto a Top 20 LP.

            “I wish I had caught Charlie before he left for the road and told him that if he got in any interview situation where somebody asked him what ‘You Don’t Belong Here’ was about, to just say, ‘Salvation’ and tell them they’d have to ask me beyond that,” laughs K.

            Between finding the grace explored in “You Belong with Me” and “You Will Go Free” (the latter two inspired by his wife in the early stages of their relationship), Tonio K. seems to have settled down into a state of contentment, if not quite utter tranquility. But no one—not the old fans who liked the funny/angry stuff or the new ones who like his more outrightly sensitive persona—should assume that he’s completely mellowed.

            “I’m still extremely cynical about my heart and the hearts of everyone else around here,” he says emphatically. “But, yeah, I’m real hopeful because I know that to the extent that any of us can first recognize the program and then get with the program, you can actually experience peace and some sort of fulfillment now. Beyond this particular space/time continuum that we’re on… beyond that, I don’t know. It gets wild beyond that. As you approach the speed of light, things get different, according to Einstein,” he notes with a chuckle. “So I don’t know exactly how it’s gonna happen after we die, but I know it’s gonna be good.”