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"I
have faith in them. I firmly believe that this is the band that's going
to do it." It was only last year when I was backstage at the Country Club as the band was being paid for opening for The Suburban Lawns show. $120 was their total take.
Terry, Dale and Warren are well-known for their cutting work with Frank Zappa, early audiences were made up mostly of Zappa-ites. Moon Zappa, a friend of producer Ken Scott's daughter, can sometimes be seen at their gigs.
Terry Bozzio took time from
his busy recording schedule to talk to me about how the band got to
where they are now. As we walked by the studio's pool on a sunny LA
spring afternoon, I told him what a pleasure it had been to see the
band in the small clubs, to see professionals of his caliber up close.
"I never considered us a local band" Terry answered, "It was very frightening at first to play the clubs because I was so unsure what the reaction would be. We realized how easy we had it being with established bands." The road wasn't easy for Missing Persons. At the end of last year the band still hadn't signed a record deal, two years after forming and a year after releasing the hot selling EP. Meanwhile, LA based bands like the Go-Gos soared up the charts.
"We want to be successful, but I stand behind every note we play. We are just as convicted as any 'Art-rock' band." Terry turned down jobs with The Becker Brothers and Jethro Tull to stick with the plan, guitar master Warren Cuccurullo almost left to go back to working with Frank Zappa. As the band became more and more popular, the audience changed. It
grew larger of course, but in the beginning the crowd was mostly made
up of fans of Terry and Warren. Now the audience is there to see Dale
and the entire band, thanks to extensive airplay on KROQ. I asked Terry
about the new audience he's found with Missing Persons.
Happily surprised, no doubt. The single 'Mental Hopscotch' was the
number one requested song on KROQ last year, which helped the band quickly
sell all 6,000 copies of their self-released EP. Capitol Records has
re-released the EP, adding the 'Words" track that is right now climbing
the charts.
Terry told me, "It's not that we are trying to be commercial, but
we do try to write songs that people can relate to. I don't care to
be downbeat, doom and destruction makes good copy but it's not the type
of music we do."
I asked Ken Scott, who was devouring an enormous slice of Pizza, if
he had anything to add. "Well, I should say it's time we got some positive
press."
BONUS:
LISTEN TO A TELEPHONE |
These original Data-Boy Music columns have been collected in a book with LOTS of new material and photos - it's the story of Data-Boy magazine and the LA Punk / Post-Punk scene. The story presented is a lot more complete!
Everything you're looking for is here:
|
Missing
Person 
Missing
Persons took the hard road up through the LA clubs, pressed their own
record (the best selling E.P. ever) and now the record and the band
are a hit. Drummer Terry Bozzio,
wife and lead singer Dale Bozzio, guitarist Warren Cuccurullo and synth-master
Chuck Wild, aka Missing Persons, have a fresh new deal with Capitol
Records and a single ("Words") moving rapidly up the national charts.
Missing
Persons and producer Ken Scott are right now ensconced in the Le Chateau
Studios in North Hollywood recording their first L.P. entitled 'Spring
Session M', (an anagram of the words 'Missing Persons').
Indeed,
it must have been hard to turn down some of the small-time record company
offers coming in while Missing Persons struggled in the local clubs.
It
was, in fact, Warren who coined the name Missing Persons - a reference
to the fact that they were all 'missing' from other bands. 
"We
wanted to do something modern, but we really didn't aim at the KROQ
audience. We were surprised by that."
From
the found archives of The Billy Eye and Judy Zee articles / 1980-85
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Get it here! SAVE MONEY |
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