Gary James' Interview With Fee Waybill Of
The Tubes
He's the lead singer of a band that opened for Led Zeppelin at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, headlined the Knebworth Festival in 1978 with Frank Zappa and Peter Gabriel, and enjoyed a Top 10 hit in the U.S. with a song called "She's A Beauty". The gentleman we are talking about is Mr. Fee Waybill, and his group is The Tubes.
The Tubes will be hitting the road on October 1st, 2021 at Agoura Hills California, October 2nd, in Montclair, California, October 14th, in Chicago, Illinois, October 15th, in Hamel, Minnesota, October 16th, in Omaha, Nebraska, October 21st in North Tonawanda, New York, October 22nd in New York City, October 23rd in Bedford, Massachusetts, October 24th in Cincinnati, Ohio, October 29th in Leesburg, Virginia and finishing up in Akron, Ohio on October 30th.
Q - Fee, I guess the first order of business is to say congratulations! Today is your birthday (September 17th). Happy birthday!
A - Oh, thank you. (laughs) Thank you very much. We set this up a long time ago and I just went, "My birthday? You have to do it on my birthday?" And he (Fee's publicist) went, "Yeah." I said, "Okay, okay I don't really have a lot going on on my birthday. My wife is going to take me out for lunch and we're going to do a tennis clinic later in the day. So, I'm good." I'm grateful for still being here. I'm healthy and I've got hair. God, it's great! (laughs)
Q - Did you know that you also share a birthday with Hiram Williams?
A - Hiram Williams. I didn't know that. I'm not sure I know who Hiram Williams is.
Q - He was born Hiram Williams, but the world knows him as Hank Williams Sr.
A - Oh, really? Hank Williams was born on this day?
Q - He was born on this day in 1923 and died on January 1st, 1953. Just a little trivia for you Fee on your birthday.
A - Hank Williams huh? Okay. That's pretty cool. He was pretty cool. The next gig we have is outside Memphis, Tennessee, home of Elvis Presley. That's pretty cool.
Q - How does it feel to be getting back on the road? Are you excited about it? Are you a little apprehensive?
A - I'm really grateful to be back on the road. We did some gigs, not last week, but the weekend before. We did Orange County, Scotsdale and Sacramento. One was a club show. One was a casino show and one was an outdoor amphitheater show with 3,500 people in it. Nobody was wearing masks. Everybody was pretty groovy. We didn't have a mass outbreak after we left. (laughs) So, that was good. But, I'm really grateful that things are happening again. We've got a lot of shows coming up. We're playing all over. We're playing California. We're playing Chicago and Minneapolis and Omaha and back East in New Bedford, and Boston and New York and North Tonawanda. It's a long time coming I'll tell you. Our first gig was August 20th, 2021 and the gig before that was September 20th of 2020. It was really hard. I'm so thrilled to be back on the road.
Q - Are these venues you're performing in 3,000 to 3,500 seaters?
A - Some of them are not even that big. Salisbury I think is about a thousand. The Riviera Theatre in North Tonawanda i think is about 1,200 to 1,500. That's kind of the best of the best for The Tubes. It's visual. I'm still doing costume stuff. So, if you get to the 20,000 seater, the subtlety or the nuance gets lost. And it was always that way back in the old days when we had a big production. We had dancers and we had sets and we had costumes. It was all kind of the ideal venue was 5,000 or less, which is good and bad. It's great for the fans because they get to see the show up close and personal. But we kind of set out limiting ourselves. It's not going to work in a stadium. Sorry.
Q - And your money went out for production.
A - Yeah, but that's what we wanted to do. We were artists. It was art for art's sake and we were happy with that. Maybe the manager wasn't happy, be we were happy.
Q - When you're not performing with The Tubes, you're producing records by people like Richard Marx and Bryan Adams. Everything I've been hearing is there are no record companies. So, where are these people getting their material recorded?
A - I haven't been producing anybody lately, not in the last nineteen months. I did a solo album with Richard. He was pretty much the producer. The guy's a genius. A brilliant producer. My third solo album came out about a year ago (2020), "Fee Waybill Rides Again". It was really fun and I didn't have a record company. I made CDs and I'm selling 'em at gigs and online. Everything is different. Everything's changed. I'm planning to do some solo shows in January (2020), which I have never done before, but you have to be able to go play live. That's the only way you're making money in the music business these days. Now streaming, I keep getting these statements. It lists the song and then it says what you're making on the streaming for each play and it's a joke. It's like .000003 cents. (laughs) If you do like a billion streams you make about twenty bucks. It's crazy.
Q - When I interviewed Stephen Wrench a few years back, he said the industry shift is back to radio. People in England for example take the music very seriously.
A - It's really true. We always did well in the U.K. The Tubes were huge in the U.K. In fact, back in the old days when we first went there, we broke records. We played the Knebworth Festival. Sixty thousand people. We came back to the United States and they thought we were a British band. We had gotten so much press over there. We haven't been back in a while, obviously. Last time we were there was 2018 and we opened for Alice Cooper and we played like 20,000 seaters, and we played Wembley. We played Leeds and Manchester and Birmingham. We used to go over every other year and I'm sure we'll go again and do twelve or fifteen shows in the U.K. People are into the music. It's special. It's a special place. Germany is kind of the same way. For the most part they understand English and speak English. They like to do big festivals in the summer and we've done a lot of those. Holland, Scandinavia. Those countries that all learn English as children, we do really well in. France, not so well. French people don't really learn English in school and they don't get it. They don't understand us.
Q - What was Alice Cooper like?
A - We played with him for years and years. One of the only two theatrical bands pretty much, we're both from Phoenix, Arizona, which is even weirder, so we've been paired up with Alice for a long, long time. I know him pretty well. He and Sheryl (Alice's wife) are really involved in charities in Phoenix and every year he has a golf tournament for charity. He has a Christmas show, a Christmas Pudding Show, which we've done quite a few times. I played golf with him. He's a really good golfer. Amazing golfer. I've done his golf tournament quite a few times. He's still out there! I think he's gearing up to go out there again and we'll probably play some shows with him in the new year.
Q - Back in March of 1977 I was walking down Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles and as I was walking past the Whiskey A Go Go I saw The Tubes' name on the marquee. There were a couple of girls walking into The Whiskey with cymbals on their heads.
A - (laughs)
Q - Did The Tubes have female roadies?
A - Well, no. We never had female roadies. But we had dancing girls and everybody helped. I'm sure they were just helping. We didn't have girls that were strictly roadies. Back in those days, gosh, I think we had four dancers and a featured vocalist. So we had five girls touring with us back then. All of the crew were part of the show. All the crew had costumes. Everybody worked. Everybody performed. It was a big, big family and we all toured together, stayed together. It was crazy.
Q - The Tubes once opened for Led Zeppelin. The promoter was Bill Graham. Is it true that he didn't like The Tubes? What didn't he like about The Tubes?
A - No. That's not true. He loved us. We used to play softball with the Bill Graham crew every weekend. We were like his favorite band. We opened for John McLaughlin. We opened for The New York Dolls. Any kind of theatrical band or unusual band that would come to San Francisco, Bill would put us on the marquee and we would play with them. Actually, in the early days a couple of us worked at the Fillmore West and they used to have a Tuesday night audition night. You used to have to audition on a Tuesday night if you wanted Bill to hire you. We talked him into letting us audition on a Tuesday night and he loved us. We played for him over and over. The first time we ever played Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Civic Center was a Bill Graham production.
Q - Herbie Herbert had something to do with your success, didn't he?
A - Herbie Herbert was the guy who went on to manage Journey. Herbie got us $250 to open for Led Zeppelin at a football stadium. Lee Michaels was the second act, the middle act. The Tubes, Lee Michaels and Led Zeppelin. It was a daytime show. We went on at 10:30 in the morning. Kezar Stadium was no longer being used. It was where the 49ers used to play. They had just built Candlestick Park, so they weren't playing there anymore. The stadium was kind of overgrown. It was not used for anything, any kind of sporting event. And they let the people in the night before. So, people camped out in the infield. The stage was down at one end, in the end zone. So, we went on at 10:30 A.M. So Al was doing quaaludes and I told everybody I'm passing out quaaludes. I had a big bag of white, sugar pills. They weren't quaaludes. They were like white sugar candy. I was tossing them out to the audience. The police were there and the police thought I was serious and here he is tossing out quaaludes to the audience. They wanted to bust us for drugs, and Bill Graham saved us and said, "No. Stop. This is all fake. He's playing with them. Those aren't really quaaludes, they're candy. They're sugar candy." And so he saved us from getting busted. But we got along really well with Bill. A good friend of ours was actually the pilot that was flying the helicopter that crashed and killed him (Bill Graham). A guy that lived down the street from us in the Sunset district.
Q - Did The Tubes lose all their master tapes in this 2008 Universal Studio fire?
A - Yup, we sure did.
Q - That means what for the group? Everything is is just gone?
A - Yeah. You're right. Everything is gone. It's all gone. IF we wanted to release a "Best Of" album for example, we'd have to go in and record all those songs again. They're gone. They're all burned up. There's a huge class action suit with all these bands trying to sue Universal, but it's Universal. You're gonna sue Universal? I don't think so. But yeah, we lost all those tapes. They're gone. The list of bands that lost tapes, there must've been a hundred or more. We were originally on A&M Records and then we moved to Capitol Records. Well, both of those companies were bought by Universal. So, all of those tapes from A&M and from Capitol were in the Universal vault and they all got burned up. They're gone.
Q - Are you saying that Herb Alpert lost all his master tapes in that fire too?
A - Well, I can't say that because Herb might have just held on to his masters. He owns his own masters. We did not own the masters because we took advances from the record company to make those records and so they owned them. They own the copyright and they own the master. And so, I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know if Herb sold his masters to Universal along with the whole record company or he kept them. He owned them. He had a studio so he didn't have to pay to record those songs and so he probably owned those masters himself and he probably saved them. If I had to guess I would probably say he still has them.
Q - I didn't realize Universal bought A&M Records.
A - Oh, yeah. They own everything. I think there's only three record companies left. Maybe Warner Bros. and Universal and I think they even own E.M.I. now. I don't know. I've given up on record companies. When I released my album there was no record company. There's a couple of foreign companies. There's a company in Italy called Frontier that will sometimes give an advance to make a record. I paid for my own record, so I own that record.
Q - Did you write "She's a Beauty"?
A - Yes. There's three writers on "She's A Beauty", David Foster,
Steve Lukather from Toto, and myself. The three of us were all writers on that song. And "Talk To You Later" was the same three people.
Q - I'm sure when you wrote that song you had no idea that it would be such a perfect fit for MTV, or did you?
A - We made our own videos. We didn't let someone else make the video. We made our own video for "Talk To You Later". Actually, what happened with "She's A Beauty", one of our favorite movies was Freaks. It had the Chicken Woman and the Sausage Man. It was a 1932 film by Todd Browning about the sideshow and these freaks. It was so great. We originally wanted "She's A Beauty" to kind of be in that genre. We wanted it to be kind of a weird, geeky sideshow. We had actually hired a local circus here in Southern California. We had it all set up. They were wintering in some little town here in Southern California. We were going to go to their place and set up a sideshow and so the video there was in this real kind of sideshow place, circus place. We did the whole storyboard with Mike Cotton and Prairie Prince (The Tubes' drummer) and Kenny Ortega. We had this whole psycho freak show kind of video all set and the record company said, "No. This is too weird. This in not MTV kind of material. This is too weird." And they wouldn't let us do it. They said, "We're not going to give you the budget to do this." And so we had to come up with Plan B at the last moment. That's where the video came from. We came up with this kid in a little cart and we kind of set up this thrill ride kind of video thing where the kid went through a little carnival ride with the mermaid and all the different little things and me as a sideshow barker. So, we had to come up with a whole different storyboard at the last minute. They censored us. They wanted it to be really clean and PG for MTV. We were not thrilled. That's happened to us again and again, getting censored. When we first went out, we hired this quartet of girls. They were called Leila And The Snakes. It was Jane Dornacker and these three girls who were strippers on Broadway in San Francisco. But they also did this kind of comedy show. She was very creative, Jane, and she would come up with these bits, these comic little vignettes. We saw them performing in a little club on Polk Street once. They were dancers and they were strippers. So, we put them in the show. In San Francisco we used to do shows where they were topless. We did like Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual" and Tom Jones had these four topless dancers that he would dance with. Our reputation kind of got circulated around and it got to the point where people... We'd come into a town and they'd say, "You can't have nudity." So, the girls would have to wear a bra. Or they started by wearing pasties and then it moved to where they had to have a bra. We were constantly censored. Constantly. Over and over again. The District Attorney from wherever, Kansas would come to the show and go, "If you have nudity, you're going to have to pay $10,000. You have to put up a bond. If you have nudity you don't get it back." They used to say The Tubes had live sex onstage. It was just ridiculous. It was tits and ass turned into live sex on a stage, and that never happened.
Q - Did the negative press translate into record sales?
A - Oh yeah, sure. We were banned from quite a few cities and we loved that. "Oh, we were banned? Wonderful!" An so the concert down the road would triple in size. It was all complete exaggeration. It was just crazy. We were banned in England. We never played the South. We're actually playing a show in Mississippi on the 25th of September (2021) and we've never played Mississippi, ever. I haven't even been to Mississippi. I'm thrilled that they're opening up to where they're actually going to let The Tubes play in Mississippi. It's gonna be great. But yeah, we were censored. We were banned. And all of that bad press just fueled the fire.
Q - Do you ever think how different your life would be had you become an oceanographer?
A - Oh, boy. I never did. (laughs)
Q - I look at it this way, you'd be swimming with sharks, but in a way you're doing it anyway in the music business.
A - Very good. (laughs) That's a good line. We're still swimming with sharks. You're right. I love the ocean. I love all that planet earth stuff, Richard Attenborough stuff. Whenever my wife and I go on vacation it's gotta be the beach. There's no touring the back roads or Croatia. That's not happening. It's gotta be the beach. We went to Hawaii once and swam with dolphins out in the ocean, not in some little pond where they were captured. It was amazing. I think about that kind of stuff. I'm definitely conscious of climate change and the ocean rising. So, I think I would've made a good oceanographer or even maybe a treasure hunter. I am a diver. I'm a scuba diver. I love nothing better than going someplace that has a wreck dive where you can dive down and explore some giant ship that's wrecked. I'm pretty grateful for my life. I'm pretty grateful that I'm still healthy and can sing and perform.
Q - You've got a lot of things going on !
A - I really do. And I'm really happy about it. These next couple of months are really going to be busy for us, which is what I love. It's the best. It's really the best.
Official Website: www.TheTubes.com
© Gary James. All rights reserved.
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