The Tubes biography
The Tubes are a San Francisco-based rock band, whose 1975 debut album included the hit single, "White Punks on Dope". During its first fifteen years or so, the band's live performances combined quasi-pornography with wild satires of media, consumerism, and politics. They are perhaps best-remembered for their 1983 single "She's a Beauty," a top 10 U.S. hit with a frequently-played music video in the early days of MTV.
Career
The Tubes started as a group of high school friends from Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona. Two Phoenix bands, the Beans and The Red, White and Blues Band, both relocated to San Francisco in 1969 and eventually merged. The new band's core membership remained largely intact for more than a decade: Fee Waybill (real name John Waldo Waybill) (vocals), Bill "Sputnik" Spooner (guitar, vocals), Roger Steen (guitar), Prairie Prince (real name Charles L. Prince) (drums), Michael Cotten (synthesizer), Vince Welnick (piano), and Rick Anderson (bass). Singer Re Styles (born Shirley Marie MacLeod) (vocals) and ex-Santana percussionist Mingo Lewis were also fixtures for much of the band's early history.
Show business excess was a common theme of the band's early work, with Waybill sometimes assuming the onstage persona of "Quay Lewd" (a pun on Quaalude), a drunk, drugged out, barely coherent lead singer, wearing flashing glasses and stilt-like tall platform shoes.
The First Album
The Tubes' first self-titled album was produced by Al Kooper. The track "White Punks On Dope" was an "absurd anthem of wretched excess" and a tribute to their rich, white teenage fan base in San Francisco Since then the song has been covered by Mötley Crüe, and the German rock musician Nina Hagen took the tune and set new lyrics to it (not a translation of the original lyrics), titled her work
TV-Glotzer ("Couch Potato"), and used this song as the opening track of her own debut album Nina Hagen Band, released 1978 on CBS/Germany Records. The album track "What Do You Want From Life?", which became another of the Tubes' signature songs, satirizes consumerism and celebrity culture and climaxes in a "hard-sell" monologue by Waybill which name-checks celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Paul Williams and Randolph Mantooth and well-known products of the period including the Dynagym exercise machine and a host of American vehicles including the Winnebago and the Mercury Montclair.
The Second Album
The Tubes' second album,
Young and Rich on A&M Records, was produced by Ken Scott. It featured the hit "Don't Touch Me There", a suggestive duet between Waybill and Re Styles, which was arranged in classic "Wall of Sound" style by Jack Nitzsche. The song was co-written by Ron Nagle and Tubes dancer/vocalist Jane Dornacker, who died in a helicopter crash in 1986.
The Third Album, A Live Album and Then The Fourth Album
The Tubes' third album gave way to thematic experimentation with
Now and after their live record
What Do You Want From Live, recorded during their record breaking run at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, England, the fourth album for A&M,
Remote Control was a concept album produced by Todd Rundgren about a television-addicted idiot-savant. The cover of
Remote Control shows a baby watching
Hollywood Squares in a specially made "Vidi-Trainer."
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