You could call Kid Congo Powers a Zelig of the music underground—that ubiquitous character who keeps popping up at pivotal moments—if he hadn’t already traveled the world in some of the most lauded rock ’n’ roll bands of the era before 1983, when Woody Allen’s film “Zelig” was released. You could even call Powers the original Zelig, except that film takes place in the 1920s, and more to the point, why reference anything from the canon of a known creep? So with that, I discourage further use of the term henceforth.

Alternately, Forrest Gump kind of works, except Powers is too cool. While Gump spent the late ’70s run-ning around the country in circles, Powers was cutting his teeth on the first wave of punk rock in Los Angeles and beyond. Before long, he was further pioneering that siren-song sound himself, in seminal groups like the Gun Club, the Cramps and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. More fitting then, in a celluloid alternate-reality, is that Gump and Powers would scan the same headlines at the same newsstand on the morning after John Lennon’s assassination, coincidentally the same night as Powers’ first concert with the Cramps at the Ritz in Greenwich Village. Maybe Lieutenant Dan was there, too?

Of course, Powers’ real life story (which he wrote in “Some New Kind of Kick“ and we covered here) is more randomly exalted, unexpected and complicated than fiction; it’s more tragicomic and magical than your average music memoir, too. Earlier this year, Powers released a new album, “That Glorious Vice,” with his longest-running going concern, the Pink Monkey Birds. It’s their best album to date. Taut and fraught, it’s cinematic and sparse in construction, sprawling at times in revelatory dirges and celebratory at others, with forays into cumbia. The album reconnects him with old friends (Alice Bag makes several guest appearances) and acts as a conduit for his tributes to the spirits of others since lost. We called Powers at his home in Tucson before his rapidly approaching Richmond show at Fuzzy Cactus, rescheduled from last spring.

Style: Next week marks Pink Monkey Birds’ triumphant return to Richmond. The show was rescheduled from the end of 2022. I’m interested in hearing about your injury and recovery in light of everything you’ve accomplished since then.

Kid Congo Powers: I had a bicycle accident and broke my tibial plateau, which is right where the knee meets the bottom bone of the shin bone. So, that was very exciting. I’ve had surgery and I have metal plates and screws in my leg now. The recovery was much longer because that bone is the one that bears all your weight. If you want to stand up, you need that bone to be completely healed. After much physical therapy, I got up and got to work. But I actually played a show in a wheelchair.

Wow- 

It was about a five-month recovery before I could really walk unassisted, without a cane or a walker or something. But I had these things booked and I was like, I’m going to do them. I had clothes made to wear. I had my friend Mike Mitchell make some culottes for me. I had to look good. You’re going to be in a wheelchair, you’ve got to look good. Within a year I was going on the road again, and I’d made an album. You don’t need to be on two feet to make an album. We made that record in Tucson, so I didn’t have to travel for that, the band came here.

Did you start writing the album while you were laid up?

Some of it, yeah. Some of it was lyrically written while I was recovering. The song “Silver for my Sister,” the first line is “a wish to crawl’ and I had scrawled that on a Post-it note. I was just laying there, and I couldn’t get up. And I was like, All I have is a wish to crawl. Also, on “Murder of Sunrise,” I had to go live on my couch ’cause my bedroom had steps to get to it, so my couch was the hospital bed and the sun would come in in the morning and I was like, ugh, the murder of the sun.

A rude awakening-

Yeah, exactly. So some songs were written like that. But Pink Monkey Birds, we’ve always worked on an intensive kind of level and system, because we have always been a band that lived far away from each other. We’ve always had to convene in quick circumstances with little budget. We enjoy working that way, and everyone comes to the table with something ready. The thing is the alchemy of the people is quite perfect and makes everything work. We just kind of do it and make it happen, and luckily we’ve gotten good at it.

Is there a benefit from those limitations? 

There’s a certain magic that has to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, then you just have to try again. It’s immediate, and it has an immediate feeling. I think that people react to that. Often these songs haven’t been performed live, so it’s a very in-studio process. But we record live, so the magic happens. It has to happen. That’s the thing, the alchemy of people’s talents and their psychic abilities to read each other properly.

Is that magic you’re describing in the studio similar to the experience of performing and touring?

Very much so. Well, there’s a difference ’cause you’re recording, and you can do stuff over, but the performance is what’s important. It’s the immediate contact. I always think of live performance as just communication with people. The way I look at it, I’m hosting a party and people are invited to this party and hopefully, we’re saying something in a way that’s different from mainstream lyric or mainstream music, and it isn’t bogged down in this perfection, even though it is perfect as it happens. It’s more to get the visceral communication between artist and audience. And I know that people who like us respond in that way to the music, they’re not nitpicking. Wrong note!

You must have really missed that when you were stuck on your couch. I imagine that was hard to replicate or impossible maybe? 

I kept doing it despite my injuries. I was doing lots of interviews and podcasts. I was talking to people and interacting with people and things. But also I had to take a break, which was good because I’m someone who’s working all the time. I never take a break. So that enforced a bit of a break from running around, but the work continued. It gave me time to be a little bit reflective.

Where does scratching that creative itch bring you? 

Anywhere it brings me. It brings me to many places. I as much like writing as I do making music or performing music. It’s kind of all the same to me. Different disciplines, but very much the same. I like keeping busy. I’m pretty restless. I have done enforced time off. Don’t make music, don’t play gigs, take a month off, a sabbatical. I just end up depressed. So, I guess making music is what’s fulfilling me. And, you know, I love my cats, I love my husband. I have a life, a home life away from the arts, but it’s definitely my life’s work.

I think it’s a valuable distinction that you choose this work, that it’s a labor of love and not just survival.

It’s a creative survival. Also financial, because you have to work or you don’t get paid when you’re a musician. But the ultimate goal is not financial, although it’s nice when it happens.

It seems like touring has gotten more and more expensive and prohibitive for bands to do comfortably. How do you make it work?

Right now, we’re a three-piece band. Luckily, we have our foot in the door and we get paid. It’s easy for us to travel economically. Luckily, gas prices are down right now, and it’s always good to get a hybrid or electric car. We are very DIY and have the kind of audience that likes to buy records from the artist. The book definitely has helped things. I got a whole different kind of publicity from that. It opened up a different world. That was one thing I was afraid of, that only music fans were gonna read the book. But there’s a lot of people who are just interested in the story of a queer person or a Chicano person or a self-starter or the times, really.

I believe it. I feel like all the time you spent on it, and living it, comes across and that it’s beautiful. 

Thank you.

One of the things that I gravitated to was how it captures and celebrates the power of fandom.

Oh yea, a hundred percent.

I feel like, whether readers are musically inclined or not, if they’re passionate about anything they could relate to that. 

Yeah.

From your experience, do you feel like being a fan has changed in the modern age? Your book captures the culture of early fan clubs and underground zines so lovingly, but it seems like that landscape of fandom doesn’t exist anymore, or not as widely.

I have to disagree with you — the zine culture is very big right now. As a matter of fact, there are some queer kids in L.A. who do a zine, a queer-centric zine. They pick an artist for every issue. Kristian Hoffman, Joe Dallesandro, Cookie Mueller. And they were doing one on me. They contacted me and said we’re doing this and we’re fans, so I said, “Well, I don’t have a lyric sheet in the new record, what do you think about printing the lyrics?” So they agreed and their fanzine is my lyric sheet. So it’s an informative, fun old-school fanzine. It was nice to collaborate with them, and do zine-ing again. But they did all the work. I just …

You inspired it.

Yeah. So zine culture still is happening, but I think they are using the template of an older style, and they love that form, and they see that it’s fun and inventive in an agile way. And they keep me updated: Oh, we’re going to the zine fest in Chicago. We’re going to the zine fest in Denver. So fandom is quite alive. And I think people are looking at the analog form again. And it’s beautiful.

Will you have that lyric zine with you on tour? 

Yes, there should be some in Richmond at the show.

In your book, you undergo a transformation from a fan—a diehard fan—to being a musician. How has celebrating art that you find important informed your creative process? Do you still identify as a fan? 

Oh, a hundred percent. My whole thing is based in fandom. Music I like. I’m a fan of Chicano ’60s garage rock. It’s all a springboard. It’s all just influences. Almost all musicians are super nerdy fans of music. It’s our research. My entire education comes from pop stars. David Bowie makes a list of films he’s watched or books he’s read—I’ve read all of those books, I’ve watched all of those films. Same with Patti Smith. Or you know, how exciting is it when the Ramones say they love the Shangri Las and Herman’s Hermits? Oh, I love that too. So all of that feeds into what I do.

Thematically, a lot of my stuff, my lyrics, is tributes, and as we age there’s more people who leave the earth. Also, my book is very much tributes to people—self starters, people who I think are magical people. I think for one, I can’t believe they’re not here, and I really want to capture some kind of essence before it all flies away, off into the ether. So it’s just like things I write down. And I guess it’s also part of my process of grieving, to make something beautiful and pay tribute. Because I think these people, whether known or not, they may need tribute in my life. I was a fan of theirs, of these people, and it could be for a famous person, or it could be for someone not famous, or someone I don’t even know. It’s a theme that somehow I find a bit of a calling to address.

It seems like it’s a form of communication, a different form.

Yeah, it is a communication. I heard you, I see you and here you are. And we’re going to keep talking about it. So, yeah, it’s magic. I love magic. I like the inexplicable.

Your new album “That Delicious Vice” seems like a counterpart or continuation of the title of the book, “Some New Kind of Kick.” The two seem related or to hint at answering each other. Like, is that delicious vice some new kind of kick?

Funny you should ask. Yes it is, directly. The song on the album, “Ese Vicio Delicioso,” is “that delicious vice” in English, and “Ese Vicio Delicioso” is actually the title of the Spanish translation of my book, because “some new kind of kick” didn’t really mean anything translated literally. It didn’t make sense in the Spanish language, so we had to come up with a different thing, you know, the vice was a thing.

Actually, Alice Bag who guested on “That Delicious Vice” on a couple of songs, suggested that vice was a good word instead of kick, or addiction or whatever. Like getting kicks, you know, and it made sense in Spanish. It means more like ‘kick’ in Spanish than it does in English. But it made sense, and we were saying, well, vice doesn’t have to be drugs, because that’s not really what the book is about, even though it’s a part of it. It is about the addiction to music where I am the vice, or music is the vice, because, well, all the things I did to seek out music and be a part of music, it was an unavoidable addiction of sorts. I just knew I’d be involved in music somehow. It starts with fandom and friendships and collaborations and all these things, creativity, and it all kind of spirals into one thing: a life of vice. The vice of music, and other vices along the way—more traditional vices along the way. So, “That Delicious Vice,” I enjoyed that that was the translation, and I use some of the subjects of the book in some of the songs.

What are you looking forward to this coming year?

Nothing, nothing. Nothing—no, I’m looking forward to playing. It’s the medium I enjoy most of all. I enjoy all of them, but I really enjoy performing because it’s the direct communication, so the reaction, good or bad, the reaction is right there. It’s immediately gratifying. For an ex-addict, that’s something you always want: immediate gratification. So in that way, it works very well for me. I enjoy it. And I enjoy it when people enjoy it.

Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds play Fuzzy Cactus with the Owners and Shawnis and the Shimmers on Friday, Aug. 9. Doors are at 9 p.m. and tickets cost $15 (plus service charges in advance) and $20 at the door.