Few rock bands possess the legacy and high level of mystique you find in The Tubes. Since their stunning 1975 self-titled debut, the legendary San Francisco-based collective — comprised of left-of-center musicians, artists and actors — has represented humor, catchy songs and good times, not to mention a live experience no other rock band has ever had the chutzpah to pull off. Described as anything from pornography to performance art, their carefully crafted concerts (ring-led by can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him lead singer Fee Waybill) balanced outrageous visuals and stunning musicianship – juggling costumes changes, stage characters, scantily clad dancers, theater pieces and chainsaws amid playing. This wasn’t a gang of talentless hacks with the sheer purpose of shocking an audience; these were skilled musicians who wanted to turn a conventional rock concert into full-fledged sensory overload.
After break-ups, hiatuses and various line-up changes, the cult-favorite band is back on the road again but now Fee & Co. have the luxury of touring and traveling on their own terms. As a recent lengthy and quite entertaining phone chat with Waybill revealed, the group (which had a massive hit single during MTV’s 1980s heyday in “She’s A Beauty”), continues to tour but without the aid of a booking agent or manager, whenever and wherever they want. And they like it that way…
The Tubes play with John Waite on Fri., June 3, 8 p.m., at Capitol Theater, 405 Cleveland St., Clearwater. Tickets are $35 to $65 in advance, and can be purchased here.
Gabe E.: The Tubes created a highly visual, provocative stage show from the very beginning. What was the inspiration?
FEE WAYBILL: That’s the way we were. I was a Drama major. A couple of the guys were Art majors, so it wasn’t just a bunch of musicians. We had a lot of other interests. We didn’t want to just stand there and play; we wanted to do more. We wanted to create a scene, we wanted to have stuff and props and sets. It was just in us. We just wanted to make it more visual entertainment along with being musical.
You had elements of comedy, social satire, jabs at the excesses of rock ‘n roll in your shows. How did you narrow down the topics you wanted to cover?
Just sitting around talking about it and trying it, trying different things to see what worked. We did a lot of experimentation. In the beginning, we pretty much did not censor ourselves at all. There was nothing sacred. When we started, we had topless girls in the show. We thought it was great. It was not a problem in San Francisco but then when we got to Kansas City, people weren’t going for it. We got into trouble a bunch in the very beginning. We got banned from cities. Our reputation wasn’t all that outrageous but you know how people like to exaggerate stuff. So we got the reputation of being a porno band, of being X-rated. It was ridiculous.
Did that reputation help you or hinder you?
I think it helped us. There’s only one Tubes. There’s no one else who could do what we did. There were plenty of bands who had visuals, like Alice Cooper. But that’s the way we were. We wouldn’t have changed it at all. We got away with murder. And we got bigger and bigger. And as we got to play for bigger performers and performing arts centers, they all put clauses in their contracts. ‘Well, if you do this, it’s going to cost you this…’
I remember once, in a city in the Midwest, I can’t remember where, but it was a very straight city and we were at the sound check and the city attorney showed up and said ‘We’ve heard about you. You’re going to have to post an obscenity bond of ten thousand dollars and if you violate the terms of our city, you’re going to lose that money’. And naturally, we’re all for art, but we said, ‘ok, fine!’ . The funny thing was that, although at that point we weren’t having topless dancers, our drummer was a very good airbrush artist, and we had him make up these nude colored body stockings and he painted female genitalia on this stocking. That was my prop and I would show these guys this stocking and say ‘Look, it’s all bullshit. We really don’t have naked girls’.
So it sounds like it all depended on what part of the country or what city you were in.
Exactly! Most of the cities we were banned from were in the South. Charleston, S.C. banned us. Our reputation was really exaggerated but we were like, fine, let them exaggerate. We’re selling tickets in the markets where we get to play. So it was kind of a gimmick that in some respects backfired. Everyone was so worried and I was like ‘What, are you worried that it’s going to be like a sex show?’.
What was imagined was probably far worse that what you actually did.
For the most part, the whole thing was based in humor. We used to do a Tom Jones bit where the girls in the show would all wear bras and panties like the Tom Jones girls. And I would pretend to throw their underwear out into the audience but then we’d have a smoke cloud and you’d never see the girls again. The whole [onstage character] Quay Lude, and the big dildo in his pants, it was all to be outrageous and to exaggerate all the bits we were doing. And we learned what we could get away with and what we couldn’t. As we got more famous and got bigger and got into bigger venues, we’d have promoters say, ‘Hey, you want to play our 20,000-seat arena, you can’t have nudity or you can’t throw drugs from the stage … even fake drugs.’
Fake drugs?
Yes. Early in the ‘70s, we got a gig in San Francisco opening for Led Zeppelin at a football stadium. It was a daytime gig and we went on early, like 10:30 a.m., and this was the first big gig we’d ever done. I came out in my Quay Lude outfit, my rock star outfit, and this big bag of white powder and a bag of white pills and I told the audience ‘This is cocaine and Quaaludes for everybody!’. It was flour and sugar pills and we starting throwing it out into the audience. They obviously weren’t buying it and then immediately started throwing the pills back at me so I was ducking missiles for the rest of the set. But the police believed it. There were a bunch of cops there and they were all going berserk. They were like ‘He’s throwing drugs into the audience! Arrest him immediately!’ The promoter, Bill Graham, knew it was fake. He went to the cops and told them it was complete bullshit.
I remember once, a long time ago, we had a song called “The Terrorists of Rock” and we’d kidnap people from the audience and we had this wooden cage that was like a jail cell and we’d set it up onstage and we’d put them inside of it and they’d get really pissed off because we’d make them stay in there for the rest of the show as prisoners. We’d have these fake guns onstage but then we got in trouble for that, too. We used to travel with a chainsaw and I had a punk character and use the chainsaw, but then I couldn’t use that either.
How were you able to ensure the visual aspect didn’t overtake the music?
I think in the early days the visuals were so overwhelming that people didn’t buy the records, they brought their Kodak Instamatics and took pictures all night and then went home and developed the pictures instead. So it was tough. Our first national tour, we went out in ’75, and we had such a bad reputation, that we couldn’t latch onto any big rock tour as an opening act because no one wanted us to open for them. So, for our first tour, we went out to small theaters as headliners. For that tour, we had five dancing girls, three dancing guys, eight people in the band. The crew all wore costumes so we’d have 25 people in whacked-out costumes. But knowing we had such a visually overpowering show, we worked hard to make the music great.
You have to have the music to accompany the great visuals.
Absolutely. That’s why someone like Alice Cooper, from the very beginning and through Billion Dollar Babies, pulled it off. Those guys were great players. Before Alice ever got into doing all the costuming, they were a band. They were a great band called The Spiders from Phoenix. We knew those guys. And the same thing today. He uses only the best people and that’s how he’s been able to survive.
How do you describe what you do? Is it a rock show? Is it theater? Is it performance art?
Well…(ponders) I don’t know. It’s somewhere between theater and performance art. It’s definitely not just a rock show. This show we’re getting ready to do in Florida, I’ll probably have eight costume changes – eight or 10. I still wear the big shoes and do the Quay Lude thing. So it’s performance art. You’re going to see a rock show, you’re just getting a lot of extra stuff.
The term “cult band” gets used a lot when describing the Tubes. What does that mean to you?
The whole idea of being in a band is not to be small and weird. A “cult” intimates that it’s a small group, that it’s a secret group or a limited group. We never wanted to be a cult band or be thought of as a cult band. That’s the way it came out because we were weird and we were unlike anybody else. To have a cult following, that isn’t very big. But that’s what happened to us. That’s why we ended up, mid-steam, kind of changing our approach.
After five albums released at A&M Records, we were still a cult band. And A&M said ‘Well, it was really cool for the first couple of records to have a cult band on the lot but, ya know, you’re not making any money. You guys keep asking for more money, and tour support and album budgets and we’re not recouping because people aren’t buying the records. You’re not getting radio airplay, you’re not reaching the masses and a cult is not really all that great. We’re not down with it.’ And so they released us and we went to other labels and they said ‘NO, no… you’re too weird … you got nothing happening … you got no radio airplay, you got no sales.’
That’s when we went to Capitol Records and we sat down with the A&R guy and this potential producer they wanted us to meet, David Foster, and we all had a big meeting. They were like “Look, it’s simple. Cult bands are great if you’re selling a million records. But, you’re not.” So they gave us a three album deal, but each album was contingent upon them taking the option for the next record. And they said the option is going to depend on sales. ‘You gotta come up with something to get on the radio and you’ve gotta sell records. Otherwise, you’re just gonna get one record and that’s it.’ That’s why they brought in David Foster and they thought he wouldn’t be into doing it. At that point, he had never produced a rock ‘n roll band in his life. He was more of an R&B guy. The record he’d done just before us was Boogie Wonderland for Earth, Wind and Fire, which was a huge hit and “After the Love Is Gone,” which was a huge single, and it was kind of that era where they wanted singles. They wanted big power ballad rock singles. Like Journey and REO Speedwagon. Everybody wanted ballads.
So we got Foster and he was actually really excited about it. So it worked out well. He heard our songs, which were weird, like “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman.” But “Talk to Ya Later,” we came up with at the very end of the session. And I thought ‘Well, this is the greatest rock song we ever did.’ It was the single! But no, the record company wanted to release “Don’t Want to Wait Anymore” because it was a ballad. It was a great ballad – it’s still one of the best songs that we perform. We always play it and people love it, but I thought they should have released “Talk to Ya Later.” The ballad went Top 20 in the States but it wasn’t huge. Whereas “Talk to Ya Later” went to No. 1 in, I think, eighteen countries and it was No. 1 on the Billboard Rock chart.
It was a radio staple for a long time down here in Florida
Yeah, big radio hit. And at that turning point of our career, a lot of people criticized us. It was like, ‘The Tubes sold out! Now they’re popular and they’re on the radio. They have this big radio song and now they’re not a weird cult band anymore!’
Sounds like you got some backlash from some longtime fans?
Yeah, we got backlash. But we had no choice. And once the people criticizing us saw the show, and realized it was just as weird as it ever was and that we still had scantily-clad women and that we were still running around trying to kill each other, that kind of ameliorated the criticism that we’d completely sold out because our show was still whacked.
And that’s sort of the flipside to the “cult band” theory because, I agree that no one wants to stay a cult band, but you always have a group of fans who want to keep the band as a pet project or their little secret. But that sort of defeats the purpose. If I love a band and not a lot of people know them, I want to spread the word – I want to turn people onto them because I think the band is great.
There was a lot of that ‘Oh, they were the band that only WE knew about…” But that doesn’t really work in the record business. A lot of the indie bands out there now, people have a lot of the same ideas about them. Look at Mumford & Sons. People thought they were so great and they were so weird and then they had a giant hit … although I don’t know if they’ve had any backlash.
As far as the onstage personas, do you feel like all that onstage role playing helped spur your acting career in both film and TV?
Absolutely I think it helped. That’s my reputation. I’m not someone who just stands there…or just sits there like Axl is doing, playing for $3 million dollars a show. I would like to do more but it’s such a hard thing to transition from musician to actor and very few people have pulled it off. Well, Bowie maybe, but he really didn’t get that big in the acting world. I’ve worked in theater in Michigan and every other summer I go back and work and do plays. I’ve done Rocky Horror Picture Show about, gosh, more than 100 times…
Which character do you play?
Frank-N-Furter, always. And then last time I was out there I did Spamalot, and I played King Arthur, which is just the greatest role I’ve ever done. Eric Idle is a genius, and I’ve always been a huge Monty Python fan and I actually got to meet him last summer. He lives here in L.A., next door to a friend who has big parties. Eric Idle dropped by and I’d just come back from doing Spamalot, and I just gushed. I went up to him and was like ‘Eric, you’re so great! I just did so great as King Arthur…blah blah blah…’ and he just kind of looked at me like ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ I’ve done bunch of hosting things. I did the Billboard Music Awards for years and years.
I loved you in [1982 punk rock drama] Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.
That was a lot of fun. I love acting. I don’t get to do it enough but I really enjoy it a lot.
What’s changed the most about this current incarnation of The Tubes? What about the touring process? Is it still fun?
It’s still fun, without a doubt. And it’s not nearly as rigorous as it was. It used to be that your life was in someone else’s hands. We had a manager, we had an agent, we had a record company and it was pretty much do what they tell you. Now, there’s no record company, I’m the manager, I do everything, I decide what gigs we’re gonna do and what gigs we’re not gonna do. I work with the booking agent and if somebody makes me a shitty offer, I just say no. I’m not gonna do it. I usually figure out how much it’s gonna cost, the logistics, how much I have to pay everybody, and what I’m netting. When someone says, “Well, you know, if you play out here, you can build a fanbase and next time you can make a little bit more…” And it’s like, NO. We’re not in the business of building up fans at this point. Either they’re coming, or they’re not. So now it’s actually a lot more fun because we control our own destiny. We control if we’re flying out the day before. I decide if we’re gonna stay in a shithole or if we’re gonna stay at a Holiday Inn.
Do you enjoy having a more active role in those types of decisions?
Yes. Now we are totally in control. We decide when we’re going, where we’re going, how much we’re gonna get paid and if they won’t pay us, we won’t go. It’s simple. I’ll stay home, I don’t care. I live in Venice Beach, I have a nice little house, it’s great here, I’m about eight blocks from the beach, I can cruise there and hang, I can ride my bike to the grocery store. I don’t need to kill myself.
And it’s funny, I was looking through boxes full of memorabilia … newspaper clippings that my mother had. She used to keep everything. When she died, I went back to Arizona and got these boxes full of shit and I was looking through this itinerary and I noticed that on some tour back in the early ‘80s, on a big tour, we would go out in like April and we’d stay on tour until November. Now, four shows in a row is my limit.
What can folks expect to see when The Tubes land in Clearwater? I can’t remember the last time you stopped in the area…
We played the Hard Rock in Orlando a while back when they’d have those shows in the lobby on Thursday nights. The “Velvet Sessions” shows. But we haven’t played Florida in a long time. But, again, if some club in Florida makes us a shitty offer, it might not even be enough to cover the airfare. But this is different…t
This is at a theater and it’s a package deal with John Waite – who is great by the way, John has opened for us a number of times over the years and he’s really a quality performer… We’re calling this the “Tour Noir” show, which is kind of our tribute to film noir. But we try to mix in the songs that everyone wants to hear, regardless of what the theme is. Actually, it will be the last show of this type. We’ve been doing it for about a year-and-a-half. It’s a Pulp Art kind of theme from that 1940s/1950s pulp art kind of era.
Before this, we did kind of a Fellini “Satyricon”-themed show where I did like a Marcello Mastroianni type of thing and I sang a song in Italian. So we just sort of go off on the deep end, find a theme and roll with it.
This article appears in May 26 – Jun 2, 2016.
