The Tubes
The Tubes are a San Francisco-based rock band. Their self-titled 1975 debut album included the single "White Punks on Dope", while their 1983 single "She's a Beauty" was a top-10 U.S. hit and its music video was frequently played in the early days of MTV. The band also performed in the 1980 film Xanadu, singing the rock portion of the cross-genre song "Dancin'" opposite a big band.
History
The Tubes formed on March 22, 1972, in San Francisco featuring members from two Phoenix bands who had moved to San Francisco in 1969. One, The Beans, included Bill Spooner, Rick Anderson, Vince Welnick, and Bob McIntosh. The other, the Red White and Blues Band, featured Prairie Prince, Roger Steen, and David Killingsworth. After performing at Expo '70 in Japan, Killingsworth left the Red, White and Blues Band, leaving Steen and Prince to audition new bass players, albeit unsuccessfully. Before moving to San Francisco the Beans had been a local favorite in Phoenix, selling out shows with a tongue-in-cheek concept rock show called "The Mother of Ascension" featuring costumes and props. After moving, Bill Spooner worked at the Fillmore West concert hall sweeping floors in between Beans shows at the Longshoremen's Hall and other minor venues. The band's loud, heavy jamming style did not attract much attention, and the band needed to go back home to Phoenix. There they would sell out shows, which provided enough money to pay their rent. The Beans' manager and former Alice Cooper Group drummer, John Speer, suggested they add Prince and Steen along with their roadie John Waybill to one of these shows. Waybill's nickname among the band was "Fee," short for "Fiji," thanks to his copious head of hippie hair."The Radar Men from Uranus" played the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, as well as a show in Mexico where they were run out of town by the police. The group would stick together and play shows at biker bars such as The Inn of The Beginning in Cotati, California. The vocals at the time were shared by Spooner, Steen, and Waybill as different characters. Prairie Prince and Phoenix high school friend Michael Cotten were attending art school at the San Francisco Art Institute at this time; they attracted local press attention by painting a mural of crashing waves on the side of the Cliff House Restaurant. Cotten was asked by Spooner to buy an ARP synthesizer instead of a film camera and began to perform with the band as well as create props and costumes.
One of the first Tubes shows was at the Art Institute cafeteria as part of an art show for classmate and future Hollywood director Kathryn Bigelow. While experimenting with their stage show and art, Prince and Cotten met model Re Styles while painting the Cliff House mural. Styles was born Shirley Marie Macleod on March 30, 1950, in Middelburg, Netherlands. She had appeared in both Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain and Sun Ra's Space Is the Place, and posed for Playboy and Penthouse magazines. By 1975 she was credited with clothing design and dance co-ordination for the band. Onstage she played Patty Hearst and dress in wild leather outfits during the "Mondo Bondage" dance with Waybill. By 1979, she and Prince were married.
After several years of playing biker bars, the band needed help. They had a temporary agreement with producer David Rubinson and played on bills with The Pointer Sisters and Sylvester, but were still trying to find an audience. Prince had been hired by newly formed jazz-rock band Journey to record demos, and approached their manager Herbie Herbert, a former Santana roadie and Bill Graham employee. Herbert made a deal with Graham that if the Tubes could sell out three local shows, Graham would give him an opening slot on the show of his choice.
Herbert booked shows at a local club called the Village, which sold out thanks to themes inspired by the San Francisco post-hippie underground culture such as "The Streaker's Ball" and "Mondo Bondage." Much to Graham's dismay, Herbert chose an opening slot for the upcoming Led Zeppelin show at Kezar Stadium. The band pulled out the stops, including Waybill dressed as an early version of "Quay Lewd" throwing "Cocaine" and "Pills" at the crowd, who threw it back. Graham threatened Herbert saying that the band would never play in San Francisco again but calmed down and eventually fell in love with the band, booking them at Winterland and other California venues for New Year's shows and Halloween. After the 1973 Led Zeppelin show, Herbert wanted to manage the band, but Spooner and the group went with local management team Mort Moriarty and Gary Peterson, also known as "Bag O' Bucks." Moriarty was interested in the use of video in rock music and saw the Tubes' stage show as the future of music videos. Bob McIntosh died of cancer at this time, leaving Prince as the only drummer.
In 1974, Bag O' Bucks filmed a Tubes show at the California Hall and shopped the "video demo" around Los Angeles. George Daly, Columbia Records head of A&R in San Francisco, made some Tubes demos, but CBS' corporate headquarters in New York City would not agree to signing the Tubes to Columbia due to the radical nature of their art. After 18 months, with no success at his own label, Daly, at the suggestion of Rick Wakeman, finally pitched the group to competitor A&M Records, where his former Columbia East Coast A&R colleague and friend, Kip Cohen, had recently headed the A&R division. Daly personally flew managers Moriarity and Petersen to Los Angeles and Cohen signed the Tubes to A&M, a rare example of cross-company support by major label executives. Working with lawyer Greg Fischbach, the band signed with A&M Records.
Debut album
The Tubes' first album, The Tubes, was produced by Al Kooper. The track "White Punks on Dope" was an "absurd anthem of wretched excess" and ridiculed the Hollywood kids of the rich and famous. Since then the song has been covered by Mötley Crüe, P.O.L. and the German rock musician Nina Hagen took the tune and set new lyrics to it, titled her work "TV-Glotzer", using this song as the opening track of her own debut album Nina Hagen Band. The album track "What Do You Want from Life?," which became another of the Tubes' signature songs, satirizes consumerism and celebrity culture and climaxes in a monolog by Waybill who, in a rapid game show announcer's patter, name-checks celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Paul Williams and Randolph Mantooth, as well as well-known products of the period, including the Dynagym exercise machine and a host of American vehicles such as "a herd of Winnebagos" and a "Mercury Montclair..." as part of a list of things that, "if you're an American citizen, you are entitled to" culminating in "a baby's arm holding an apple."By late 1975, the band created a stage show unlike any other after hiring Kenny Ortega to direct and choreograph, comedian Jane Dornacker and her band "Leila and the Snakes," and event support/video pioneer T.J. McHose to run a live video feed with films for each song. The show was critically acclaimed and broke them into show business in Los Angeles during sold-out runs at the Roxy Theater, David Allen's Boarding House and Bimbo's in San Francisco, as well as The Bottom Line in New York City. Compared at the time to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Tubes' stage show was closer to Saturday Night Live with its mix of topical satire and subversive postmodern Andy Kaufman-like routines such as Waybill beating up a couple in the front row during the "Crime Medley," then taking off his disguise as the band launched into "Mondo Bondage" and a huge stack of "Kill Amplifiers" falling on Quay Lewd during the finale of "White Punks on Dope."
The band was part of the mid-'70s underground comedy scene which included The Credibility Gap, Firesign Theatre, Ace Trucking Company, Kentucky Fried Theater, Groundlings, Ken Shapiro's Channel One Video Theatre and National Lampoon. The L.A. Connection Comedy Theatre performed during the Tubes show intermission many times. In 1975, the Tubes were offered a spot on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell and NBC's Saturday Night, but manager Mort Moriarty wanted the band to be able to play several songs in a row to show off how tight their transitions were; both shows declined, and without major network TV appearances, the Tubes missed out on huge TV exposure, cementing their "cult" status until the early 1980s. The band's touring crew was up to 24 people at this point, making it hard to tour for the standard weeks on end most bands of the era were committing to build a fan base.
''Young and Rich''
The Tubes' second album, Young and Rich on A&M Records, was produced by Ken Scott. It featured "Don't Touch Me There," a suggestive duet between Waybill and Styles, which was arranged in classic "Wall of Sound" style by Jack Nitzsche. The song was co-written by Ron Nagle and Tubes dancer/vocalist Jane Dornacker.The band toured America with a new stage show including new numbers "Slipped My Disco," "Madam, I'm Adam" and "Pimp." They also played several sold out nights at The Shrine in Los Angeles and Bimbo's in San Francisco. Mingo Lewis joined the band after performing several shows with them at Bimbo's.
''Now'', ''What Do You Want From Live'', ''Remote Control''
The Tubes' third album Now was an attempt to write less satirical songs with the band sharing song writing duties with Bill Spooner. It was recorded while the band was playing a special engagement on weekends at The Whisky in Los Angeles. They played a small American tour of the west coast and a month-long run at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts featuring the band's most elaborate stage show to date. The band had met manager Rikki Farr at a show opening for Alice Cooper. Farr fell in love with the band's stage show and agreed to manage them after they sued Bag O' Bucks to get out of their contract. Farr used his fame in England to promote them as "America's Answer to Punk."The band created a new "best of" stage show and finally played a tour of Europe. They were banned in several towns and attracted front page press attention for their dark satirical stage show that spoofed America's consumer culture with dancers, video and sketches. They appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test and played "God-Bird-Change" and "White Punks on Dope."
After their live record What Do You Want from Live, recorded during their record-breaking run at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, England, the band toured America and played a sold-out run at The Pantages Theater in Hollywood, which attracted celebrities such as the cast of Laverne and Shirley, Cher, Kate Jackson, and Gene Simmons. The stage show had reached new levels of lewdness with Quay Lewd's large dildo hanging out of his costume and a fake bomb threat number called "The Terrorists of Rock," which caused Cher to flee the theater, believing the threat was real. She later asked the band to appear in her next TV special Cher...Special. The band went back to Europe to follow up their big splash but it was canceled after Waybill fell off stage and broke his leg at an Oxford, England show. The band returned and played the dates in the fall before headlining the Knebworth Rock Festival with Frank Zappa, Peter Gabriel and Boomtown Rats.
The fourth album for A&M, Remote Control was a concept album produced by Todd Rundgren, about a television-addicted idiot-savant, inspired by the Jerzy Kosinski novel Being There. The cover of Remote Control shows a baby in a specially made "Vidi-Trainer" created by Michael Cotten and Dave Mellot. Much of the new music was rewritten by Rundgren and the band in studio, including "Turn Me On" ; "The Terrorists of Rock" number was cannibalized to become "Telecide."
Waybill and Styles shared vocals on "Prime Time," although Rundgren had tried to record a version with just Styles. When Waybill found out, he demanded to sing as well. The band performed the song on Top of the Pops and on tour in Europe before cutting it from the set, due to tensions between Waybill and Styles.
Synth player and visual stylist Michael Cotten designed an innovative multimedia stage show for the "Remote Control" tour, which employed multiple TV monitors and a 35 mm film projector, which according to Cotten, cost US$12,000. They tested it at UCLA's Royce Hall, but there were multiple technical problems, including the poor visibility of the small TV screens, and synchronization problems with the film projections. The show was scrapped after Steen, Waybill and the group's management reportedly complained about the cost, and the show overtaking the music. This led to a stripped-down tour in the U.S., Japan, and Europe with Squeeze as the support act. The band also played two shows at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, with Yellow Magic Orchestra as support; that show was released on home video in 1982. The band held an auction of Tubes stage props and costumes in 1980 at the Boarding House before the band attempted to play as a straight rock act for several sold-out shows at The Roxy in Los Angeles.