Runaway Love: Remembering the Real Kim Fowley

Fowley and friends at L.A. club the Dragonfly (all photos courtesy of Lina Lecaro)

Veteran Los Angeles nightlife journalist Lina Lecaro recalls her friendship with one of rock ‘n’ roll’s late, great eccentrics.

The first time I interviewed Kim Fowley was an exhausting and exhilarating experience — a draining, three-hour phone conversation, during which I had to ask some very tough questions regarding claims against him and his handling of seminal ’70s girl band the Runaways, made in two documentaries (Vicky Tischler-Blue’s Edgeplay, and the Rodney Bingenheimer film Mayor of the Sunset Strip).Fowley talked nonstop — quick-witted, wickedly funny, and armed with an arsenal of audacious comebacks. He could have gone on forever, but I had to respectfully end the call.

When it was all over, my ear was numb, but I was anything but. I felt like I’d been sized up, seduced, and schooled, all at once. Despite the many negative things I had heard about the notorious rock ‘n’ roll impresario over the years, he won me over, big-time. And more than that, I had actually made a friend who would go on to entertain, flabbergast, and inspire me for the next decade. I was not alone.

When news of Fowley’s death at age 75 from cancer came out and quickly flooded social media Thursday afternoon, it wasn’t unexpected; he had been ill for some time. But his passing still came as a shock to those who knew him. Everyone thought he’d be around forever, even post-apocalypse, hanging out with the cockroaches and Keith Richards. The duration and intensity of any given conversation with Fowley made him seem unstoppable, so even when his health started failing in recent years, he continued to appear as vibrant and vicious as ever.

Fowley called in to my radio show last year (then broadcast on iHeartRadio via TheIndependent.FM) while laid up in his bed. He did a lot from that bed, in fact: He broadcast his own Sirius Radio show for Little Steven’s Underground Garage, wrote music and prose, did promo for his autobiography Lord of Garbage, and even fell in love and got married (in September 2014, to Kara Wright). Although my radio show is no more, Fowley will forever be remembered as my most frequent guest, because he always had something to promote and he always, always gave the most fascinating interview imaginable.

Fowley on my radio show at Wavaflow Studios with Brianna Garcia, Noizee Noize, Al Ridenour, and Crime-bo the Clown

On my favorite Fowley broadcast, he joined Cacophony Society/Art of Bleeding’s Reverend Al Ridenour to promote an event they were involved in. Wearing warpaint makeup and a woman’s negligee, he freestyled his special brand of perverted poetry while a violinist spontaneously accompanied him. He even performed a fully fleshed-out theme song, just for me, while a great new musical protégé (he always had one hanging around) sang backup. Despite the wackiness of it all, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t kind of amazing to have the guy who co-wrote the Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” with Joan Jett sing about me and call me the “Queen of the L.A. Scene.”

Fowley on my radio show again, with girl rockers and some members of Black Room Doom at Werewolf Heart Studios

Everybody who’s “somebody” in L.A. has a colorful Fowley story, and many of those stories have been shared on social media and blogs in the hours since his death. One thing that’s stood out in all these posts is the way Fowley unapologetically articulated his thoughts. His unfiltered, often foul-mouthed words could be hard to take, especially if you were in a band and hoped to “make it,” but he was always brutally honest, and he always made you think.

For instance, this week one of my entertainment-industry Facebook friends shared that he called her “a supermodel with a fat girl’s personality,” while another revealed that he told her to “stop wasting Daddy and Mommy’s money” on her fledgling singing career — the latter comment uttered during one of his infamous $1-a-minute advice sessions. He ended up being right.

It’s difficult to remember the best Fowley-isms I personally heard over the years, because he said so much, so often. But scrolling through my emails, I found an old message that was revealing.

He sent me a note saying he would not be coming to my birthday party because of a new “Kim Fowley Neon Nightmare Psycho-Drama.” He sadly felt that the “empty & hollow Hollywood” of the modern age was not the “Technicolor Tinseltown” he knew when he first reigned over the Sunset Strip. This email was from 2009, but tellingly, Fowley did eventually move back to Los Angeles, and he once again became a fixture on the club scene in his later years, hitting up rock shows, arty parties, and fetish events. (He was a self-proclaimed “freak,” after all.)

Poring over more archived conversations, I was touched by his outrage when my longtime column in the L.A. Weekly was cut from the newspaper’s print edition. He promised to spread the word and cause an uproar. That never really happened, of course; the transition from print to Web was full-speed ahead, and there was nothing anyone, not even someone as iron-willed as Kim Fowley, could do to stop it. We both adapted. But it was nice to know that he cared.

There are countless Fowley tales to be told. But for better or worse, his link to the Runaways, the band that launched the careers of rock goddesses Joan Jett and Lita Ford, will always be what everyone remembers first. As depicted in the Floria Sigismondi-directed film The Runaways (which Fowley liked, for the most part) or ex-frontwoman Cherie Currie’s memoir Neon Angel, Fowley didn’t always have the best relationship with the band. But fortunately, he did resolve his issues with the surviving members before his death. He even recently worked on new material with Currie, who actually cared for him and moved him into her home during the final stages of his cancer battle.

Of all Fowley’s talents, I think it was his understanding of promotion and hype, and pumping up/pimping out superstars (or potential superstars), that set him apart from other music-business types. The Runaways may not have been the greatest musicians when they started out, but he saw something special in them, and despite his alleged harsh treatment (or maybe even because of it), they eventually rose to a higher level. They became the Queens of Noise in part just because he said they were. Whether or not he was really the Runaways’ Svengali in the true sense has been hotly debated, but clearly, many admirers wanted him to be theirs.