One
of Rock’s Angriest Young Men Finds Love and Grace in an Imperfect World
Contemporary Christian Magazine / October 1986
Tonio K. is in the
process of clearing out the house in the hills of the
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
What
happened?
“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
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."
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
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
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.”
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.”