By Steve Simels

[This article originally appeared in Stereo Review, October 1980.]

Tonio K.'s first album, Life in the Foodchain, appeared at the offices of Stereo Review without much fanfare. In fact, it arrived without even a cover, being what is referred to as a "test pressing." There was no biographical data supplied with it (who was this guy?), no lyric sheet÷nothing but a record and a song listing. Noting, however, that the concluding tune was entitled "H.A.T.R.E.D.," I decided to give the mysterious disc a spin, since I have been known to assert that life is short and you might as well hate as many people as humanly possible in the time allotted to you.

Soon, my headphones were filled with the delicate, plaintive sounds of a solo acoustic guitar in the great folkie tradition, sounds I had come to detest after hearing them on my college lawn for longer than I care to think about. And then I heard a voice: choked, mournful, and pretty undistinguished. It was singing these lyrics, in tones more conversational than musical:

Now I know it's not unusual;
It's nothing so unique,
There's probably hundreds of wonderful love affairs
That go bad in this town every week
(it's a big town)
But all of them others, those sad-hearted lovers,
Could cry in their beer, what the hey,
It didn't concern me, was none of my business,
I never had nothin' to say
But suddenly darlin', the table has turned,
You have left me for somebody new
And now it's hard to express the resentment I feel
For the years that I've wasted on you
© 1978 Worthless Music

Then a dead stop. Softly, seductively, the singer declared, "But let me kind of put this another way. OK?" At which point all hell broke loose. What sounded like the world's loudest, fastest punk band crashed in around my ears with a Ramones-ish redo of the preceding verse, followed by a five-minute rant that was considerably angrier and ended with the recording studio being blown up. Needless to say, by the time all this aural carnage was over, I was persuaded. Tonio K., whoever he was, was clearly my kind of guy.

Further exposure to the man's work altered my opinion not one whit. The rest of the album turned out to be a crazed, brilliant meditation on what he described in one tune as "the Funky Western Civilization"; it made me laugh and it made me think and sometimes it even made me want to dance, which is more than can be said of 99 percent of the albums currently before the public. (And when I finally got a "real" copy of Foodchain it turned out to have the cleverest packaging job of the year to boot.) A few weeks later, I caught one of K.'s rare live appearances and was clearly impressed. His on-stage character was a bomb-throwing anarchist out of an old Charlie Chaplin comedy, which struck me as one of the most appropriate rock-and-roll metaphors I'd ever seen. So, when I heard that the man was in town recently to promote his latest-and-greatest platter, Amerika (this time on Arista, which may never be the same), I decided I had to find out if there was in fact a real person perpetrating these outrages on an unsuspecting public.

I am relieved to say that there is. Tonio, clad in a rocker's leather jacket and shades, met me at the Arista offices in Manhattan, where we discussed a variety of subjects ranging from the infallibility of hamsters (more on that later) to the current global situation, and he turned out to be every bit the engaging wiseguy his songs had suggested. He walks it, as they used to say, like he talks it. For the record, he's around thirty ("I could be over or under"), a California kid (he grew up in the San Joaquin Valley area), and an ex-greaser, and he will not disclose his real name (I asked him). When asked to cite his influences, he reels off Dada-ists Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, James Brown and the Famous Flames, Dick Dale and the Deltones, the Crickets (with whom he played for a time in the early Seventies), the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Thomas Mann (whose short story "Tonio Kröger" seems relevant), Sam Peckinpah, and Jackson Browne, and he is not kidding about any of them. Clearly, Tonio K. is not your average Los Angeles singer/songwriter, and the improbability of his stumbling on this other direction is not lost on him.

"People constantly think I must be from New York," he told me. "They can't believe I grew up on a farm in a pastoral California setting. The only thing I can say about that that makes any sense to me is that, with my attitude, if I had grown up in New York I would have been dead ten years ago."

But how did that obsession with the Dada movement begin? "That," he said, grinning, "is a good story. That's such a good story you may think I made it up. It's from high school; my friends and I were into this creative-vandalism trip.

"See, I was doing airbrush art because I had cousins in central California who had hot rods on the cover of Hot Rod magazine; that was my first deviate focal point. And through them I met this guy Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, who was the most famous airbrush artist, did all the sweat shirts and stuff. And I was inspired by him to become an airbrush artist.

"So anyway, we got into a trip where we would steal books out of the library, bring them back to my place, and then I would alter the pictures. Airbrush them·add dicks and tits, the usual teenage humor. But it was always with this bizarre edge, because we wouldn't just ruin the books. We returned them in the overnight book return and nobody was any the wiser. And we would just do these little alterations so somebody could be reading along and they would look at the pictures twice, and it would be all wrong. Unfortunately, of course, we were never able to gauge their reactions. We had a pretty good idea, though.

"So one day we were walking through the Fresno County Public Library, just grabbing books, and I literally randomly grabbed a book off the stack and it was a Dada book. I don't remember which one. We opened it up to check it out and make sure it was worth defacing before we stole it, and we started going through it and suddenly we thought, 'Look at this stuff÷it's better than what we're doing.' I was a fan from that point on."

He paused for a second. "Those guys were just great. Like, for instance, this guy Marinetti, the Italian futurist writer and painter, was invited by the Nazi hierarchy in 1933 to some cultural dinner in Berlin where everybody short of Hitler was in attendance. So he and Schwitters were sitting at this horseshoe table, and at all the other tables were storm troopers and the ministers for this and that.

"There was all this stifled conversation, and finally the Nazi host asked Marinetti to make a speech. He said he would be very happy to, that he was so carried away with the moment, in fact, that he was going to make this speech in French÷probably to twist it in their side a little÷and then he recited this completely outside poem called 'The Raid at Constantinople,' resplendent with shrieks and howls and siren noises. Everybody was totally shocked; they didn't know what to do. For his finale, he was standing up on the curved table in the middle of the rostrum, and he collapsed over the table after whatever howling he did, grabbed hold of the tablecloth with both hands, and slid to the floor pulling everything into the laps of Himmler, Hess, Goebbels, and all those people. Schwitters at that point jumped up and began reciting 'Anna Bloom,' a nonsense phonetic poem of his, from his table in the audience, and they all left Germany very shortly after that."

Aha·I see. Certainly this bears out K.'s 1979 assertion that "Dada was very rock-and-roll." And I can imagine an unsuspecting listener's reacting to Life in the Foodchain in much the same way as whoever found his handiwork in the Fresno Library. But let's talk about the new album, I suggested. While I love it dearly, it is somewhat more serious than its predecessor. It's almost doom-ridden, in fact.

Tonio seemed to agree. "I know, it is that," he said, "and sometimes I wonder if people want that in their daily entertainment quotient. But it could be time to get serious; there may be a few more people than those comedy lovers out there who need stuff like this.

"I just have this feeling that we're heading downhill. We clicked into and clocked into a whole new thing in the eighties. Suddenly there was the end of 1979, and then Iran, and then we clocked into Afghanistan practically on New Year's Day. We're into some stuff now we may not be able to back out of.

"I mean, the Texans, when they're out of gas, will start a war. Texas being a state of mind, as they say, they just won't stand for it. Look what's happening over there now [our discussion took place the morning after the aborted Iranian hostage rescue]. They hate us, not to mention they want Israel, which we won't give them. They'll cut off the oil, which they are doing progressively and will do finally one of these days or years. That's when the trouble will start. Pretty bleak."

Too depressing even to contemplate, I suggested, a grey cloud forming above my brow. "Of course," he said, "the optimistic side of that is I could be totally full of it, and I hope that I am. Somebody please prove me wrong."

It must be rough on somebody as, er, sensitive as Tonio to deal with the news media, at least given the current geo-political climate.

"I just don't do it," he said. "I don't have a TV, and I never read the papers. Can't stand 'em. I literally go into anxiety swoops and get faint when I hear that stuff."

Oh sure, I thought. And pigs have wings. But enough of these bald-faced lies. Let's talk about·hamsters. Any truth to the rumor that a hamster actually programmed Amerika?

Tonio nodded, as if to say "Of course."
"Yeah, I have this hamster, John Paul III, who lives in Vatican City, which is an elaborate Habitrail on my back porch (it goes over the ceiling and has a north vestibule and an east wing and on and on). And John Paul also has a mouse companion, the ever-faithful Father Mickey.

"Now we had three songs we'd done for the new album: 'The Night Fast Rodney Went Crazy,' 'Doggytown' (which is actually hilarious), and 'You Make It Way Too Hard.' Clive [Davis, Arista president] hated 'Doggytown,' John [Devirian, Tonio's manager] didn't think we had done 'Too Hard' as well as we could have, which I was sort of in agreement with, and Nick [van Maarth, his producer and guitarist] hated and continues to hate 'Fast Rodney.' I sort of like and dislike them all equally.

"So we were trying to decide which of the three to use, and I called everybody I knew and gave them the three names, and there was no majority opinion. So finally I decided the hell with this, because John Paul III had what I call the sphere of enlightenment, one of those little clear plastic balls that you insert the hamster in, and by walking in it he's able to move around the house.

"So I put John Paul in the sphere of enlightenment, put a piece of legal paper down with 'Rodney' written on it, 'Doggytown' written on it, and 'You Make It Way Too Hard,' the object being that whichever one he rolled over first in his obviously enlightened state of infallibility, would be it. And he rolled over 'Rodney,' which I was actually glad about. I mean, we paid Flo and Eddie a lot of money to sing on it."

That makes as much sense, I allowed, as, say, the American presidential-primary system.
"Oh yeah," Tonio said. "Inscribed on the inner groove of the album are the words 'hamster's choice.'"

At this point, the wisdom of Tonio's contention that there is really nothing left to say seemed inescapable. Still, I couldn't leave without finding the answer to one last nagging question: was Tonio secretly a Believer? Given papal rodents, references on his new album to the Book of Revelations [sic], and the recent example of Bob Dylan (a major formative influence on the young K.), it seemed at least plausible.

"I've had these thoughts since about '72," he said seriously. "There's a song that will be on the next record called 'Hey John' that I wrote back then and can be updated, which I'm gonna do, which is about how uncanny all the prophecy is, all that we're going through. Read the headlines and then cross-reference them with Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelations." [more sic]

I must have looked a trifle pained, because suddenly he leaned forward earnestly.
"Mind you," he said, grinning, "I'm much too cool to be a Christian."
As I mentioned earlier, this Tonio K. is my kind of guy. He'll probably hate me for saying this, but I think we should run him for President. Say about 1984.