In March of 1991, I was in Austin, TX standing on the tradeshow floor of the South by Southwest Music Conference. I was next to the booth I was sponsoring for Big Shout Magazine when I suddenly noticed a stir several yards away. Even though the floor was full of activity and noise from all the other booths and people milling around, a definite swirl of excitement was forming around a very odd and tall-looking figure who was elbowing his way through the din. He would stop and say something out of earshot, but I could hear people squeal with laughter or astonishment.

“Who is that?” I asked a stranger perusing our booth. “That’s Kim Fowley,” the person said barely looking up. “He put together the Runaways and wrote songs for KISS and the Byrds.”

That combination of words didn’t make any sense to me at the time, but in just a few minutes the 6’5″ frame of Kim Fowley would be standing in front of me. “What’s good from your area?” he asked. I handed him a handful of tapes and he began listening to them on a Walkman he was carrying with him. He’d listen to 15 seconds of a song and then discard it and move onto the next.

“Which one is your band?” he asked, even though I hadn’t mentioned I was in a band. I handed him a tape of my band, and he put on his headphones to listen. Within five seconds he looked at me and said, “Your band is too polite.”

When I reflexively smiled and laughed politely at his unvarnished response, he said, “See?”

He wandered off with about a dozen hangers-on in tow, including an extremely attractive young “starlet” type who was way too young and too good for Fowley, but she was hanging on his every word, hoping he would help her get a record contract.

This interaction bothered me for the rest of the conference, and it continued to bother me all the way home. I ended up disbanding my “polite” band when I returned, and I formed a proto-grunge band with a few friends over the next few months.

I ran into Fowley at the SXSW Conference the next year, and I had a new tape of my new band that I presented to him. When he listened to the songs this time, his face lit up and he said, “Yes, this is more like it!”

This opened the door to us staying in touch for the next few years. I was wary of him asking for money to promote our band, and at this point I was all too schooled on what he was capable of. I had heard he had called dozens of band who had been at SXSW the prior year and offered to make them stars… for a price. He also seemed indiscriminate on what he was looking for. He could be just as interested in quality songwriting as he would an outrageous gimmick or stage presence… even at the expense of bad musicianship and hack songwriting. The only thing that was clear was while the rest of the A&R people at SXSW seemed to be interested in round pegs, Fowley was looking for the square ones, and he didn’t care how he came by them. He was the only producer type who was openly walking about the floor, circling like a shark amongst the minnows.

When I asked him what had happened to the young starlet singer who had been following him around the year before, he said nonchalantly, “Oh, she lived at my apartment in L.A. for a few months, but I had to get rid of her. She started to grow her winter fat and it all needed to end.”

When he saw my mouth flop open in amazement — that she had actually lived with him and that he had kicked her out — he said, “Let me give you some advice about women. You need to mistreat all of them so you always have the upper hand.”

The next day, he and I were talking in the main concourse of the conference and a group of young college radio journalists spotted Fowley and shoved two microphones in his face. “Can we get a quote, Mr. Fowley? What are your impressions on SXSW this year?”

Fowley instantly lit into a string of outrageous obscenities that involved the journalists’ relatives and body cavities that weren’t meant to contain certain objects and appendages he was describing so creatively. This made the two young girls squeal with laughter, and they ran away after they got what they apparently wanted.

“Put THAT on the air,” he growled as they departed.

An Open Letter Opens Trouble

Suddenly, Fowley turned to me calmly and said, “I’m going to write an article for your magazine… an open letter to the Maryland music scene. I used to run a recording studio in Baltimore and have fond memories of your area. I like your cold winters.”

I had to explain to Fowley that Baltimore was actually outside of our coverage area, which spanned from Philadelphia south to the Delaware beaches. Our coverage stopped at the Maryland border, but he wasn’t daunted.

“I’ll write it to the Mid-Atlantic music scene in general,” he said. “I’ll even include a rave mention of your band.”

I then explained to him that writing about my band was not a requirement of getting his article placed. “Please don’t mention my band unless you’re sincere about it,” I said to Fowley.

“I am,” he smiled, not so convincingly.

I returned home a few days later and in about two weeks, I received a hand-scrawled article from Fowley. In it he described his brief history with the region and dropped several names of co-producers, writers and bands he worked with while there. He also singled out my band and heralded them as one of the best things from our area. Here’s the article>>>

It ran in the May 1993 issue, and I was feeling pretty good about it until I opened my mail later that week. While attending conferences like SXSW, I routinely made friends with other entertainment publications around the country and got on their subscription lists. One of the publications from Minnesota had “An Open Letter to the Minnesota Music Scene” written by journeyman Kim Fowley. It was almost exactly the same article with some of the names swapped, and he gushed over a local Minnesota band in much the same way he had with my band. I was a little tweaked by this but I ended up laughing about it ultimately. When you deal with snakes you’re bound to get bitten every now and then. I couldn’t get mad at Fowley for always working some kind of angle if I realized that was his nature. It would be like getting upset with a lion for killing a gazelle.

He called me the next week to ask for a check for the article, and I said I’d send it in a few days. I then said wryly, “I liked your article in our magazine almost as much as I liked the same one you wrote for that paper in Minnesota.”

Fowley did not take to the joke. “Fuck you!” he growled. “I’ll kill you! They taught me how to kill a man with my bare hands when I was in the air force!”

I waited for him to calm down before I told him with a laugh in my voice that it really didn’t bother me that much. “I’m still sending you a check,” I said.

“Oh, good,” he purred. “Give me the subject for my next article and I’ll mention your band again like a good ni**er.”

I sent Fowley the check, but that’s the last interaction I ever had with him. Death threats are where I draw the line in a friendship or business relationship.

I didn’t hear anything from him or about him until the release of the movie The Runaways in 2010, and I was amazed at how much actor Michael Shannon resembled Fowley. I also wasn’t too surprised by the portrayal of his shenanigans in the film.

Five years later, Kim Fowley was undergoing cancer treatment and ultimately passed on January 15, 2015. It was at this time, during all of the retrospectives of his life that I got the full picture of who he really was. He always answered the phone, “Rock legend Kim Fowley,” and each time I would laugh because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. He really did co-write songs with Skip Battin of the Byrds, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Zevon, Paul Stanley of KISS, Alice Cooper, Helen Reddy, and Leon Russell. He hung around Frank Zappa and his wife Gail. He was credited for “hypophone” on the Mothers of Invention‘s first album Freak Out! When asked to explain about the credit, Frank Zappa later said “The hypophone is his mouth, ’cause all that ever comes out of it is hype.” Truer words were never spoken.

But of course, Fowley had his dark side that he didn’t try hiding. He is well known for putting together the most famous all-girl band of the early rock era, the Runaways with members Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford, and Jackie Fox in 1975. In two short years he got the band a record deal, a world tour and plenty of fame, but in 2015 bassist Jackie Fox (née Jackie Fuchs) leveled charges that Fowley had drugged and raped her in front of other band members one night while on tour. Other former band members and young girls involved with the band also complained of being sexually harassed, including teenage songwriter Kari Krome and bassist Micki Steele who would later join the Bangles.

One thing’s for sure, there wasn’t anybody like “rock legend” Kim Fowley, and that’s definitely a good thing.