THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

A guest posting by Leon MacDuff

Thomas August Darnell Browder – generally known by his two middle names – was born in The Bronx, New York, in 1950 and is best known as as the lead singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and general kingpin of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. But for this Imaginary Compilation Album I’m delving back into his pre-Coconuts work during the second half of the 1970s, as writer and bassist for jazz-disco (but NOT “jazz fusion”) combo Doctor Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and as in-house writer-producer for the New York “mutant disco” label ZE Records.

As it happens, there is an official download anthology “Kid Creole: ZE August Darnell Sessions” covering the same period, although – and I didn’t plan this because I didn’t know about it until after I’d assembled the ICA – their selection and mine have only two songs in common (and in different edits). If you do happen to be familiar with that collection (or its physical media predecessor Going Places) you may wonder why I haven’t included anything from Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band… well, that’s because I’ve stuck to songs where Darnell wrote the words (and usually the music too), and while the Don Armando album did have songwriting contributions from future Coconuts regulars Adriana Kaegi and Andy Hernandez, there were none from Darnell himself.

In keeping with the conceit of these ICAs being vinyl albums, and not wishing to try my listeners’ patience more than strictly necessary, I’ve kept the running time down to a shade under 25 minutes a side – still relatively long I suppose but not beyond the capabilities of a decent cutting engineer. Much of this material has never been officially reissued, and even the tracks which have appeared on CD are mostly mastered from very obvious needledrops – so apologies for the surface noise but until somebody tracks down the mastertapes (or gets Peter Jackson‘s AI on the case) this is likely as good as it’s going to get.

Side One

Cristina: Don’t Be Greedy

Cristina was the wife of ZE Records co-founder Michael Zilkha, and indeed the label pretty much came into being for the express purpose of issuing her debut “Disco Clone” – though it quickly diversified to become one of the coolest record labels on the planet, thanks in large part to its incredibly creative stable of in-house writer-producers: Darnell himself, Ron Rogers, Bob Blank and later Don Was. Darnell wrote and produced Cristina’s debut album (originally self-titled, reissued as Doll In the Box) and it’s a stormer.

Doctor Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band: Cherchez La Femme

The single that first made his name – lyrics by Darnell, music by his half-brother Stony Browder (though heavily based on the 1920s jazz standard “Whispering”). And a good representation of what Doctor Buzzard was all about. Off the back of this, they were Grammy-nominated for Outstanding New Artist, but they lost out to Starland Vocal Band. I think I’m on fairly safe ground by saying, wrong choice.
And the reference to Tommy Mottola? Before he became one of the world’s most powerful record executives, he was a manager for bands including… Doctor Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. The story in the song wasn’t true, they just used his name because it sounded good.

Gichy Dan’s Beachwood #9: Laissez Faire

It’s a shame that the Beachwood #9 album has never been properly reissued, not least because its latin stylings are an obvious prototype for what Darnell would do with Kid Creole & The Coconuts – in fact, according to Darnell himself, Frank “Gichy Dan” Passalacqua was the one other person who could have inhabited the Kid Creole character, if only he’d thought of it at the time. Indeed, this particular song, a duet with Lourdes Cotto, could easily have been a Kid Creole and The Coconuts number – it would have been a great spotlight number for Andy “Coati Mundi” Hernandez.

Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band: The Seven Year Itch

More swingin’ fun from the Buzzy ones, not actually based on a jazz standard this time but cramming in a reference to the much-covered “St James Infirmary” anyway.

Dana and Gene: Dario, Can You Get Me Into Studio 54?

Neither Dana nor Gene seem to have done anything else of note, but their Darnell-penned one-off is a daft gem. The song was subsequently remade for the first Kid Creole album, Off The Coast Of Me.

Side Two

Machine: There But For The Grace Of God Go I

Disco didn’t often get angry, but this is one angry record. Growing up in the Bronx, Darnell witnessed first-hand the phenomenon of young parents taking fright at the prospect of bringing up their children in the city and moving out – the phenomenon typically known as “white flight” though Darnell also saw it happening to Latino and mixed-race families like his own, hence the title of this one. The song has been covered many times, though usually with a key line in the first verse bowdlerised to “Somewhere far away, where only upper class people stay” – which works alright, I suppose, but is nowhere near as powerful as the original, which absolutely sticks the knife in regarding the parents’ real motivations. I also keep reading that the second verse originally had a reference to “popping pills and smoking weed” which is perhaps a better line than the “gaining weight and losing sleep” you’ll hear in this version – but I’ve been looking for that “original” version for years without success, so at this point I rather suspect it may be a myth.

As for Machine, they are often characterised as a Darnell creation but although he produced their first album and contributed three songs, it was really guitarist/singer Jay Stovall and keyboard player Kevin Nance’s band. They did make a second album without Darnell but to drastically diminishing returns; subsequently Stovall would put in the odd appearance with Kid Creole & The Coconuts, while Nance went on to be a mainstay of funky 80s club faves The B, B & Q [Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens] Band.

Aural Exciters: Maladie D’Amour

Aural Exciters was essentially a bit of a playground for ZE’s in-house team, with Darnell, Rogers and Blank (who was the nominal producer for the project) throwing ideas around and seeing what stuck. The Darnell-penned “Marathon Runner” and puntastic ode to poppers “Emile (Night Rate)” both turn up on compilations a fair bit – this one less so, though with a latin makeover it did become one of Kid Creole’s early signatures.

Cristina: Temporarily Yours

More Cristina! You can never have too much Cristina. And frankly we never got enough Cristina because with the demise of ZE in the mid 80s she basically quit music altogether. As Zola Jesus put it following Cristina’s death from COVID-19, she was “too weird for the pop world, too pop for the weird world”. She may not have been a technically gifted singer – but what a performer!

Doctor Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band: Once There Was A Colored Girl…

Some of the language may have fallen from favour in the years since, but there’s no mistaking the intent here as the Buzzards gleefully mock racists and bigots, to the accompaniment of a giddy alpine waltz. Finest use of the word “stumblebum” in any context ever. That’s fallen from favour too, hasn’t it? We need to get that back.

Gichy Dan’s Beachwood #9: You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down

And back to Frank for our feelgood closer. While he may have been deprived of the lead role, Passalacqua was nevertheless very much part of the Kid Creole family, popping up as a backing vocalist and taking a more prominent role in the short-lived Elbow Bones And The Racketeers, a sort of Coconuts reserves team which performed in the Doctor Buzzard “disco jazz age” style (Their minor hit “A Night In New York” will likely ring a bell with some readers, though Frank was just a backing singer on that one). I’m not entirely sure what became of him; I thought I’d read announcements of his death in the last five years, but I can’t find them now, while somebody online says he died of AIDS in the early 80s, though he was on a Kid Creole album as late as 1993, so that would seem to be the earliest possible date unless they were quietly dredging his parts up from the archives.

Leon