After appearing in a 2003 documentary called Mayor of the Sunset Strip about the disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer, Kim Fowley became an experimental filmmaker. He won the Special Jury Prize at the 2012 Melbourne Film Festival for two of his films, Golden Road to Nowhere and Black Room Doom.
Black Room Doom is also the name of the all-female band that is featured in the film of the same name – his answer to the 2010 film The Runaways.
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Kim Fowley closes his interview with Chris Estey by contrasting the Hollywood movie about the Runaways with his own film, Black Room Doom; and in his trademark wide-ranging manner, he provides a vision of rock and roll that is so different from the situation today, when many rock bands are lasting for decades and are releasing albums that are designed not to offend any of their fan base:
“And that’s why Black Room Doom is more important to me than The Runaways. It’s a movie, and the premise is that a bunch of girls get together at noon in a recording studio, who have never met each other. And I say, ‘By the end of the day you will have recorded, and you will have danced and sung, and have pizza together. You will finish songs that you have played together, and then at 6 PM you will go home. And that will be your band experience. What do you girls think?’ ‘Let’s try it.’ And it’s a bunch of happy women. And girls. For that afternoon. And when it’s over, the movie’s over. Maybe all bands should form in one day, and at the end of the experience just break up at the end of the day.
“You think I’m kidding, but you go back to the early days of rock and roll, and there used to be people who would show up and play under a phony name, and sing together from other bands, and they all need $25 or $50 so they show up and sing and play. The drummer from one band would be the guitarist from that band, etc. And they would never play again. And they were called ‘One Hit Wonders’. Remember them? What if bands could be one hit wonders? What if you could form a band just for tonight? It would be a great night.
“And I do other things like run a rock and roll workshop, and help a studio, and supply food to musicians and technicians and anybody’s who’s good to come in to make noise if they want to. I don’t care what kind of music it is as long as it’s interesting.”
(January 2015/1)
