I spunked on a cat, set fire to it, then threw it in the pool. The cat was fine...she enjoyed it

"I once rode a hippopotamus with a crocodile saddle,” declares Kim Fowley, who resembles a steroid-pumped giraffe on rollerskates, a waif-like, real-life Irish-American Frankenstein’s monster. “The hippo got a hard-on, but it didn’t move too much as a girl started masturbating it – all to the sound of the band playing and people laughing.”

The underground record producer, publisher, songwriter, publicist, talent scout, occasional recording artist and legendary scenester is regaling us with his tales of heady nights at hedonistic Hollywood parties. Makes sense, as we are currently perched outside the Rage club on Santa Monica Boulevard for the birthday celebrations of another party monster, James St James. Now aged 67, and using a cane to walk (he suffers from positional vertigo, which affects his balance), Kim Fowley is still hip with the Los Angeles in-crowd.

The musical renaissance artist has failed, struggled and triumphed in the entertainment industry for nearly 50 years, an eccentric figure who has always had his finger on the pulse, mainstream or underground. From rock’n’roll to psychedelia to punk to metal, Kim Fowley’s been there, bringing his unique, intense and otherworldly personality to music.

Doubly stricken and doubly conquering both polio and cancer, he has a survivalist attitude where each day should be lived like his last. Often seen in garish fashions and make-up, he’s like the bastard alien father of David Bowie with the libido of Hugh Hefner on crack. He’s also sold over 100million records by working with the likes of The Byrds, Cat Stevens, Helen Reddy, The Plastic Ono Band, The Runaways, Alice Cooper, Kiss and Guns N’ Roses, to name but a few, and was the man that first spotted the talent of Jimi Hendrix.

Kim doesn’t take any drugs, smoke or drink (even caffeine). Yet at the rapidly descending anarchy of the party revellers around him, tales of intoxication flow unselfconsciously from the raconteur’s thin lips, one involving a death cocktail mix of Quaaludes and beer.

“I had to fuck four lesbians on my dining room table, each of us individually falling to the ground as we orgasmed. We took the drugs and alcohol until one of the girl’s heart stopped. Then two of the lesbians came in her mouth and we all masturbated. When the girl revived she said, ‘What have I missed?’

‘A heartbeat,’ I answered.”

After our own exhausting party, we make a coffee-and-pancakes trip to Canters, the famous Jewish deli. Since he doesn’t care to drive, Kim is riding shotgun with one of his many ‘Hollywood mommies’, attractive 20-somethings he hires to take care of business he would rather avoid.

The employment of women by Mr Fowley is somewhat ironic, given he has been accused of misogyny many a time. Some members of LA-based all-girl punk band The Runaways, whom he managed, accused him of more.

“The girls were young teenagers and I was 36. Younger people always view authority figures in a mixed way. If some of those people were drinking or drugging they may have a distorted view of what they saw or heard,” he earnestly explains. “I didn’t socialise with them because they were 20 years younger. I don’t know what they did or didn’t do, but it was labour versus management, authority versus adolescence. But I’m not a misogynist. I’m just a dirty bastard and I like dirty girls.

There’s a fondness between filth on a beauty-and-the-beast level. I’m not afraid of a strong or dangerous woman. When you have sex with me you get even with your parents. You have the chance to take a sexual shit. You do something forbidden. Then they can take that and fuck up their next partner.”

His penchant for perversion could perhaps all be blamed on Jayne Mansfield, whom he encountered age 11 in Tinseltown.

“I went up to her in her pink Jaguar and said, ‘I want to have sex with you,’” he recalls with a glint in his eye. “‘I know I’m too young but I’d enjoy it if I could get a hard-on.’ She replied, ‘If you’re going to hit on me and you can’t fuck me, you’re a man. When you are an older man, you’re gonna do fine. Adult men are watching you talk to me and they don’t have the balls.’ So it was Jayne Mansfield that encouraged me to be a ladies’ man.”

Everyone in our group has finished their food. Kim is getting impatient and literally screams as loud as he can, “Boy!” The entire busy late-night restaurant put down their cutlery and turn. The waiter scampers to the table looking rather flustered, then pauses.
“Aren’t you the guy in that movie?” the employee asks, writing out the bill.

Kim was a major interview subject in the documentary The Mayor Of The Sunset Strip, a film about KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, who was the first in the US to play the likes of David Bowie, Blondie, The Sex Pistols and recently Coldplay.

It seems the ‘John Peel of America’ is a regular at the deli and was actually eating there the previous day. Fowley was, in fact, the original self-proclaimed ‘Mayor’ of Sunset Strip, from 1965 to 1969 when, as a groovy music producer, he toured the scene with an entourage of hipsters, crashing all the A-list parties and grand openings.

“I did it to get into clubs for free,” he explains.

“It was easy with a couple of girls half-naked and guys that looked like movie actors. I was in my 20s and looked like Boris Karloff. I would do weird dances and do dry fucking onstage with dirty bitches. My other friends would do Kung Fu poses, some chopped tables and even did acrobatics. People were jumping around screaming, and all before the first band played. All the tourists loved it and the word spread, so they let us in for free because we’d loosen up the crowd to drink more beer.”

With a pounding hangover the next day, I take a journey east to Redlands, a small town in the middle of the Californian desert to photograph Kim and discuss some of his latest projects. For an affluent man he lives modestly, in a small wooden house with a friendly ‘Keep Out’ sign and an American flag to greet visitors. Most rock legends have their awards plastered around the walls and mantelpiece; Kim Fowley has a huge dusty stack of gold and platinum records lying on the kitchen floor and threadbare carpet. After travelling from country to country for most of his life, his interest is not in material things, and Kim himself happily describes his home as squalor.

Taking the tour, he shows me his darkened bedroom and flicks on a pair of table lamps, with a blue and red bulb respectively.

“I’m in my 60s now and this is the best light for skin. It takes the wrinkles away when I’m entertaining in here,” laughs Kim, pulling monster faces.

“I can’t fuck in the dark either,” he notes. “I have to see the anguish on the lady’s face.”

This pillow talk leads to the detailing of another bizarre sexcapade of the Don Juan of underground music, a story that may upset animal-loving readers:

“There was a fluffy cat the size of a small dog that my girlfriend attached to my cock. She manipulated me so I exploded on the cat. Not in the cat, of course, as the cunt was too small. Then the cat began scratching an orgasm on my thin stomach. I then placed the cat in her nylon stocking and set it on fire. I threw the flaming stocking into the pool and moments later the cat emerged, curled up next to me, purred and fell asleep. The cat was fine and enjoyed the whole spectacle. Everyone was happy. No animals were hurt.”

Lizards and tumbleweed are more prevalent than cats, or indeed musicians, in this one-horse town, so Mr Fowley has now ventured into the world of film. Actually, it’s more of a return, for his parents were actually actors in Hollywood during the Golden Age, his father playing character roles in dozens of films including the classic musical Singing In The Rain.

The town of Redlands was the inspiration for his first feature, Jukebox California, (selected for the Barcelona Film Festival), a strange affair that spotlights the varying musical talents of the town’s inhabitants with Kim spouting his philosophies on life. Another notable title is Gangster Puppets.

“It’s what happens when gangsters and puppets from outer space fall in love, a kind of Punch & Judy meets The Godfather. My current feature I’m working on is called Pink Cement,” he explains, removing his teeth. “It’s about using a denture as a love tool, what women talk about when they’re drunk and Hollywood at a post-Bukowski level. What’ll happen to these movies is what happens to my music. People will sit there and go, ‘This isn’t Brad Pitt! This isn’t The Beatles. What is this?’ And then, three to five years from now, ‘My God! This is astounding!’ Twenty years from now, ‘This was the best thing that ever happened in the year 2007!’ I’m always early, and when you see the early embryonic elements of it, people are always, ‘Well, so what?’”

Kim is still actively involved in creating music. His latest audio project is an all-girl punk band called Rebels Of The Flesh. Fishnet stocking- and boot-clad, these raunchy teenagers perform simulated oral sex onstage and drag butch male audience members around on a leash. Who could ask for a more ideal bunch of musicians to work with the likes of Kim Fowley?

“Their stuff tells you how to live if you are a girl in the modern age. Rebels Of The Flesh are the female Sex Pistols, a 21st-century-girl version of Slade. The songs, such as ‘Lust Ambulance’, ‘Pain Gynecologist’ and ‘Underwater Sex Class’, are designed to articulate the inner darkness of all young girls who need to lash out in the male-dominated chauvinist world. They can be female warriors any time they choose to.”

What kind of attributes is Kim Fowley looking for in a performer?

“Their need to be winners. They need to make a difference,” he glares. “People who can entertain a crowd, make you wank, shoot up, drink, cut yourself, beat the shit out of people you don’t like and make you feel good about everything because of their music. Anyone who can produce those emotions is a platinum artist and that’s who I demand to work with. You don’t have to teach those people anything. You can refine and make suggestions, but they already have it within themselves to be outstanding.“

With Kim Fowley as their representative, the Rebels Of The Flesh certainly have a great chance of conquering all. The gangly giant is the supreme publicist, and indeed self-publicist, even to the extent of often referring to himself in the third person.

“Yeah, I’m product,” he declares, beyond pride. “Remember what Cyrano de Bergerac said to the Queen of France in Act One, Scene One? ‘Cyrano, you’re a wonderful man.’ ‘No, your majesty, I do wonderful things.’ Kim Fowley does great work. Millions enjoy it. Kim Fowley the human is sub-human, with super-human working results, but is one of the emptiest people in the world. By choice. By design. Take away my projects – I’m a boring guy. Women, if you saw me naked, you’d start a new religion. But that has nothing to do with persona, it has to do with animal magnetism… Yeah… Top that, dude!”