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“I was a big fan of Rod Stewart and Robert Plant, and Quay Lude’s original name was Rod Planet,” Waybill divulges. Quay Lude, with his blond fright-wig and platform boots, was a parody of the archetypal glam-rock star. “No big deal now, but at the time, it was: ‘His butt is hanging out!’”īut it was White Punks that would inspire Waybill’s most popular onstage character. “That was about us boneheads from Arizona seeing gay people on Pope Street wearing assless leather chaps,” Waybill says. In between, The Tubes made fun of greedy consumers ( What Do You Want From Life) and fetish-wear on Mondo Bondage. Up From The Deep was an orchestral jazz-rock overture, White Punks On Dope a gonzo pop song lampooning spoiled teenage rock fans (‘ I go crazy ’cos my folks are so fucking rich/Have to score when I get that rich white punk itch…’). The LP was bookended by two tracks that illustrate the breadth of their sound. “We’d had some of those songs for years – ‘Fuck, let’s get rid of these’ – but it still works.” They dedicated it to Bob McIntosh, who had just died of cancer, and the band still have a lot of love for that first record. The Tubes signed to A&M Records and recorded their debut with producer Al Kooper in spring 1975. “I love rock’n’roll groups, but there were so many rock’n’roll groups, but only one of us.” “We needed to do stuff that made us stand out,” former guitarist Bill Spooner says now. The Tubes were a multimedia experience before the term existed.
#THE TUBE YOUTUBE TV#
On the night an A&R rep from A&M Records came to see them, Waybill was on stage conversing with himself on TV via a pre-recorded video. The Tubes made a visual statement before they’d played a note. “He made all these crazy ideas coalesce.” “Kenny was and is a genius,” says Waybill. Kenny Ortega, who would later work with Michael Jackson, was The Tubes’ choreographer. Female dance troupe Leila And The Snakes and Prairie Prince’s girlfriend, vocalist Re Styles, joined them on stage. Cotton and Prince were their artistic directors and created backdrops and posters. “We got compared to Alice Cooper, but we were more deviant and had more social commentary than them.” “ Bill Graham put us on as support at the Fillmore West when anyone weird came to town,” Waybill recalls. They played anywhere that would have them: strip bars, biker bars, the art institute canteen… The band, completed by synth player Michael Cotton and second drummer Bob McIntosh, staged theatrical ‘mock-rock’ shows that parodied the pulp sci-fi and cowboy shows of their youth. The Tubes in the mid-70s (Image credit: Getty) By the early 70s the two bands had merged, with Waybill graduating from roadie to backing singer (“I said: ‘I’ll stand here and wear some dopey outfit’”) to eventually becoming The Tubes’ frontman-meets-circus barker. Spooner and Anderson’s band, now called The Beans, joined them soon after on the West Coast, but it was impossible finding gigs for two unknown groups. The rest of his band and their truck-driving roadie, Waybill, went with him. In 1969, Prairie Prince took up a scholarship at the esteemed San Francisco Art Institute. I did them all – Camelot, The Sound Of Music, Oklahoma…” Meanwhile, Fee Waybill was the all-singing/acting/dancing star of his local high school. By the mid-60s, Prince and Steen were playing in one high school group Rick Anderson and future Tubes guitarist Bill Spooner and keyboard player Vince Welnick were in another. The Beatles’ appearance on TV inspired them all. It was here, in this sizzling Death Valley climate, that The Tubes gestated. “We were all stuck in the burning desert, frying our brains with television,” confirms Prairie Prince. When the visual overload became too much, Waybill and his siblings jumped off the roof of their house into a four-foot-deep paddling pool in the back yard: “Then we’d cool off and go back inside and watch more TV.” “All these sitcoms, game shows and cowboy shows like Hopalong Cassidy.” “In the summer when school was out, it was too hot to do anything except watch TV,” says Waybill. In 1979 The Tubes released Remote Control, a concept album about a TV addict. Those four – Waybill, Steen, bass guitarist Rick Anderson and drummer Prairie Prince – grew up in Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona in the 1950s and 60s. Then it all went wrong.Īnd yet here they are in 2016, still touring with four original members. Stranger still, they then had a run of pop hits in the 80s. Their live shows featured bare flesh, dancing girls, roadies dressed as giant cigarettes and a prosthetic penis.
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They merged sex, satire and biting social commentary with virtuoso art rock. In the 1970s, The Tubes were America’s most outrageous band.