Cult-fave '80s band Was (Not Was) regroups for another go

Rock and roll is a young man's game, which is why I should have my head examined for giving it another go at the fork-tender age of 52. My band, Was (Not Was), hasn't been seen nor heard from since 1992, when we opened six weeks of dates for Dire Straits in Europe.

Since that time, my partner, Don Was (also known as Don Fagenson), and I have been on extended hiatus, a euphemism for that period of inevitable breakdown that seems to shadow success. We had the good fortune of posting four Top 10 singles across Europe and Asia between 1988 and 1992, and then went into a tailspin, not making music, not even speaking, for the next five years.

Why our creative and emotional cylinders stopped firing is a long story, especially as my relationship with Don began some four decades ago, in the eighth grade. He was already a working musician, playing the bar-mitzvah circuit with a band called the Royal Jammers, and I was a neurasthenic teen with a big vocabulary and plenty of excess angst to express. Put the two together and you have a suburban Detroit version of Lennon and McCartney, or so we wanted to think!

The Beatles had inculcated the delusions of power and grandeur that infected our entire generation. We had similar visions of being screamed for, chased and adored beyond all measure. But reality interceded, and I went off to university like a dutiful young lad, while Don remained in the musical trenches, playing bass in a cocktail lounge and learning to use bigger and better tape machines.

In due course, I moved to Los Angeles in search of bluer skies and greener paydays, and wound up finding a gig as the jazz critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

Meanwhile, my old buddy Don had fallen on hard times. He was still accompanying a lady jazz pianist at a depressing bar in the shadow of the GM tank factory in Detroit, but had also taken another job as Toner Dude for a copying-machine company to make ends meet for his wife and son. The bosses thought they'd found a promising young charge and sent him off to the Dale Carnegie Institute to learn how to call people by their first names every five seconds.

The net result was that Don called me on the phone in 1979 and begged me to return home to Detroit long enough to cut a couple of records. If I didn't, he said, he was going to have to rob a dry cleaner's and had picked one out with a particularly helpless teenage girl working the register.

I was more amused than shocked, but got on a plane and headed back to Motown. The recipe Don had concocted was to make R&B dance music, but without the florid instrumental excesses of disco, nor the boogie-til-you-drop sensibility of its lyrics. He was well-suited to the task of what I like to call "genre-splicing." Don was a musical polymath, with equal fondness for Middle Eastern oud players and avant-garde jazzers like John Coltrane.

We hired weird musical bedfellows to accompany us, like acid-rock guitar strangler Wayne Kramer of the MC5 and Marcus Belgrave, a local jazz trumpeter who'd played with Charles Mingus and Ray Charles. And then Don discovered our lead singer, Sweetpea Atkinson, a Chrysler assembly-line veteran who was wearing all orange when he first showed up at the studio — silk suit to Stetson hat.

I played out-of-tune saxophone, and Don played bass. My mother, a voice-over actress, did the lead vocal on one of the songs, called "Wheel Me Out," an absurdist tale about a former scientist in a wheelchair. I returned to Los Angeles and, in what would prove to be a valuable breach in journalistic ethics, I used the stationery of my employers to pen a letter of recommendation to any prospective record executives on behalf of "this brilliant young band."

One such mogul read said missive and claimed it was the only thing that prevented him from throwing the unsolicited demo tape in the trash. Instead, he listened to it and flew to Detroit the following day to sign us to a recording contract.

Turns out the music business would play an extended game of hot potato with us in the next five years. While critics seemed to enjoy our work, the public was having a hard time figuring out who we were and what we were trying to pull off. We had a shifting cast of guest lead singers, including names never before uttered in the same breath, like Mel Tormé and Ozzy Osbourne. We were admittedly a bit too eclectic for our own good.

Pop stars? Absurd!

However, our third label in three albums decided that we actually had commercial potential and hired an outside producer to rework two of our songs. While the resultant style was a bit too slick and processed for our taste, the two singles from our 1988 collection, "What Up, Dog," became No. 1 dance records and also made their way into the Top 10 worldwide.

If all else failed, we would be remembered for the slightly embarrassing "Walk the Dinosaur," replete with bikini-babes in the video and a how-to dance step dreamed up by some Paula Abdul-era choreographer. Success was a mixed blessing. We were able to buy houses and send our kids to private school, but we also had to make more records like the ones our corporate mentors had bought and paid for. What had been a mom-and-pop surrealism shop had turned into something — heaven forbid! — profitable.

Not only that, but my old friend and partner met and recorded an album (the justly celebrated "Nick of Time") with an unappreciated blues singer by the name of Bonnie Raitt. That humble disc would sweep the Grammys in 1989 and put Don in the front rank of producers for the next decade. He would add names like Elton John, Iggy Pop, Brian Wilson and Willie Nelson to the list of those wanting their careers revived in like fashion. And Was (Not Was) became just another project in a fast-whirling revolving door.

Eventually, even Keith and Mick would come calling for Don's services, and the death knell of Was (Not Was) began to sound darkly and lugubriously. I was out of the glamour industry and back into the trenches of music-for-hire. I scored television commercials for Microsoft and Toyota, for Coca-Cola and Canon Cameras. I executive-produced two albums for "The X-Files" and did the music for two network dramas. The pay was good, but the soul suffered.

Shaking off the cobwebs

I had put aside any fantasies about getting back into the fray of recording and touring when Don had a near-epiphany while cleaning out his garage early last year. Coming across boxes of posters and gold records and the like, he called me in a fury and proposed we have another go at it.

In truth, I felt like he had sacrificed our salad years at the altar of his producing career and was reluctant to mount the predictable comeback tour that so many bands have fallen prey to. One thing you don't want to be is the cover-band version of yourself.

But a tiny bit of arm-twisting and an assurance by a booking agent that we could do decent business carried the day. All of a sudden, we had a 12-city tour mapped out (there may be a Seattle show later this year) and several record companies vying to put out a "best-of" collection and a brand-new album as well. We were always accused of being ahead of our time, so maybe a dozen years of Rip Van Winklehood may have served us well.

We have played a handful of dates of our tour so far, and the last week of December faced what would be our toughest audience, at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. In a crowd full of jaded industry insiders — all of whom had called to get on the comp guest list, by the way — we rocked the house silly, made grown people boogie like hopped-up teens on a Benzedrine bender. Gina Gershon was there, as was George Wendt of "Cheers" fame, so we even provided a little celeb-fodder for "ET" and "Extra." Are we hot, or what?

[Richard Cromelin of the Los Angeles Times raved about the show in a review on Dec. 30, saying the band "shook off the cobwebs in a set packed with big, bold hooks and irresistible beats. There's enough irony and literary overlay in there to fuel a graduate seminar, but the primary image the six musicians projected was a down-to-earth combo playing with fire and finesse."]

With apologies to Andy Warhol, it seems like we used up our precious 15 minutes but are being granted a five-minute overtime to try and beat the mortality buzzer with a 50-foot hook shot off the glass. Whether it goes in cleanly or caroms off the scoreboard is of little importance. The nice thing is to be doing what matters to you, what brings you and a few friends together to produce a roomful of smiles and some innocent booty-shaking.

If all goes well, Don is claiming that we will continue to do this 'til we die. Pop music is a Peter Pan industry, stocked by a bunch of slightly delusional adults refusing to acknowledge that their teenage years took place in another millennium. Only the drugs have changed — instead of illicit herbs and powders, we are armed with cholesterol and blood-pressure medications. One thing we aren't doing is going gently — they're gonna have to drag us away kicking and screaming.

David Was (also known as David Weiss) is a writer, composer and founding member of Was (Not Was). He is also a correspondent on NPR's "Day to Day" show. He lives in Los Angeles.