Guitarist Kid Congo Powers has a new album titled That Delicious Vice

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Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds

When: Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Rickshaw Theatre, 254 E. Hastings

Tickets/Info: rickshawtheatre.com

Kid Congo Powers has a resume that reads like a who’s who of indie rock royalty.

The guitarist born Brian Tristan in La Puente, Calif., has shredded for the Gun Club, the Cramps, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Angels of Light and his own project the Pink Monkey Birds. The band released its fifth album, titled That Delicious Vice, earlier this year on celebrated garage label In the Red Records.

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The new album is joined by Some New Kind of Kick: A Memoir. Penned by Powers with writer Chris Campion, the Hachette Books release is 272 pages of very inside experiences, from the musician tracing his earliest days as founder of the Ramones West Coast fan club to playing with some of the most intense and extreme punk and post-punk bands of the last four decades. The title comes from one of the Cramps greatest songs.

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It’s a take-no-prisoners/pull-no-punches look at what happens when art and an appetite for self-destruction combine to create enduring music as well as a lot of casualties. That Delicious Vice serves as a kind of musical accompaniment to the book with its gutsy garage bangers such as Wicked World, which includes U.S. punk icon Alice Bag.

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Like the music he makes with the Pink Monkey Birds, the book is raw and honest and often very funny. Here are five things Kid Congo had to say about making music and telling stories.

1 — Some New Kind of Kick: The idea started in 2016 when I did an exhaustive interview for an early podcast and the point was made that, while there were people who knew I’d been in the Gun Club, the Cramps and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a lot of folks only knew those as separate things and not as a career. There was a chronological outline for a book, but I wanted it to be more than another ‘teen becomes rock star, rock star becomes addict, recovers and gets clean’ tale. So I went to writer’s retreats and discovered ideas that took a lot longer to complete.

2 — The Pink Monkey Birds: By and far the longest-running project I’ve been involved in, as most typically didn’t last longer than two or three years. Ninety per cent of the time in those other groups, I was involved in presenting somebody else’s vision and this band is me making my own music.

3 — Leaving the past behind: When the Pink Monkey Birds began, I mostly wanted to avoid it being some kind of a pastiche of what came before; a little bit Cramps, touch of the Gun Club and some Bad Seeds on top. Initially, it was a case of learning to do it myself, but then it became clear that I had learned a lot over the years and now we’re really our own thing.

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4 — Live shows: I think concerts are communication with the crowd that should always be visceral and honest as it was with amazing live acts like the Cramps. That Delicious Vice is our the first Pink Monkey Birds record as a trio, but since the remaining lineup has been together for over a decade and we play live a lot, I’m really happy with where we are and the shows are going great.

5 — Scenes, subcultures and renewal: All of us in L.A. were initially influenced by British music like Bowie and Roxy Music, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, John Waters films and so forth. When glam kind of rolled into punk rock, we all followed into a scene with a whole new energy coming out of New York and the U.K. that was dissatisfied with pop music. It was a complete rewrite of what rock stardom was because we were touchable and very much interested in otherness. I stayed in that lane, always being more interested in what was on the fringes of the underground, what came before to get us here and so on.

sderdeyn@postmedia.com

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