Having grown up close friends in the suburbs of Detroit, after their 1977 track Wheel Me Out hit big in clubs across the world, Don Fagenson (aka Don Was) and David Weiss (aka David Was) fell headlong and haphazard into a career as dance-pop hitster Was (Not Was). Although the duo—often joined by an army of backing musicians and vocalists—became a household name with novelty track Walk the Dinosaur, their catalogue reveals a treasure trove of esoteric booty, with tracks such as The Sky's Ablaze, Man vs the Empire Brain Building, Out Come the Freaks and Needletooth standing as a testament to David’s lyrical acumen.

By Ananda Pellerin and Victoria Ford

LA, mid-70s.

I was a jazz writer. At my tender age I probably didn’t have what I’d consider the full-on chops, instead of calling yourself a critic you might properly call yourself a reviewer. The beautiful thing about it was the opportunities it presented. The other thing was it demonstrated that something subtle and random can influence bigger movements out there in the world of fate.

When I got to Hollywood after college I had two contacts from my dad, who had spent a life served in showbiz. He and my mother were both stage actors who became radio and TV voiceover pitch people. They were the king and queen of pitch, even though my mother was a truly histrionic actress who didn’t take guff from ad guys, and my dad was very political, he ended up being the President of the Astra TV and Radio union. I grew up using voice, body and mind instead of hard labour and it’s served me well to this day.

I failed at my two meetings with my dad’s old showbiz pals however and there I was in LA, stuck with an uncle's recommendation that if ever I fell on hard times, I should look for a job proofreading.

So here’s how the butterfly wings work. I opened the LA Yellow Pages and found under Typesetting a particularly big font with bold letters and I picked that typesetter, Photographics Inc., to call and solicit for proofreading work. It turned out they occupied a tiny part of the building which housed the Hollywood showbiz Bible, Daily Variety, which has been around since the 1930s. They were the in-house print shop that generated the hard copy of the paper five days a week.

The guy who owned Photographics Inc. says “funny you should call, the old Irishman Tom Prior, the Editor of Daily Variety, hates his proof reader. You should ring him up.” So I wind up with the job of proof reader for Daily Variety. When I told the rock‘n’ roll critic I was a jazz fan, she said I could do jazz reviews for them.

I generated a bunch of bylines and then I heard the Herald Examiner was staffing-up for a music insert called The Sound. I sent my clips over, they sent me out to do a trial review and then hired me to be their jazz critic.

Then Don calls me six months later and says he’s planning to rob a dry cleaners in Detroit if I don’t come home from LA and cut a couple records with him. It was his only career solution, having become, I like to say to him disparagingly, a ‘toner boy’ for a copying machine facility. So to save him from a life of copy machine sales and servicing, I go home and cut Wheel Me Out and the B-side Hello Operator. I then return to LA and in my new found chair at the Herald Examiner, write a letter in my Clark Kent, mild-mannered journalist guise to perspective labels saying “you must hear this dynamic band, Was (Not Was).”

Ze Records.

Don’s son was discovering what Piaget calls reversibility thinking. It’s when a child says, for example, “hot, not hot.” Don heard his child saying this kind of stuff and thought “hmm, was, not was. You'll be David and I'll be Don.” And I thought, “whatever, we'll never get a deal anyway what's the difference?”

Then Michael Zilkha who ran Ze Records in England takes a look at this phony letter and says “I would definitely have thrown out this unsolicited demo but for this crazy letter. A critic endorsing an unsigned band? ” So he puts it on, loves it, and his assistant at the time—some kid David Sigerson who went on to produce The Bangles, then became chairman of EMI Records in America—well Zilkha says to him breathlessly “I love this music, what should I do?” And Sigerson says “fly to Detroit and sign these guys. ”

I believe Wheel Me Out and the B-side came out in ’79. They were big in dance clubs, especially gay dance clubs: New York, San Francisco, London. Originally I’d cut the vocal in a mock German scientist voice, “I'm rrrooolling on dees veels,” and Zilkha said something like “let's get rid of the ethnic guy.” So my mother came in and cut it. At this point we stood as this weird, avant-garde, dance, funk, whatever the hell it was…

I would say we owe everything we ever became—a dubious reputation we might want to escape from—to the UK and a couple of dance clubs. Before Rolling Stone ever uttered a word about us, NME sent Vivien Goldman and a photographer from London to Detroit to write a cover story. Don and I, later, in our art-directed wisdom wondered, where was our stylist that day? We looked like a couple of real bumpkins, but it actually fit the story that here we were, these two white, Jewish kids from Michigan doing avant-garde funk music for the world.

I think at the beginning we actually blazed a trail. Part of it was we were guilty, in a good way, of showing our hand. We liked jazz so we hired this real jazz musician Marcus Belgrave to play trumpet. He played with Mingus and Ray Charles but was still in Detroit. We had George Clinton's musicians because they were all around Detroit and George never paid them, they were happy to show up for a paid session.

All along the water tower.

When Don and I were naïve teenagers we used to fancy a go at beat poetry. In fact we were photographed by the NME at the site of this big, white, bulbous water tower in a field near our hometown where we would go and, I don’t remember if we were pharmaceutically-aided at that point or smoking weed or whatever, but at the foot of this local stone hedge at night with the red lights blinking on top, we’d write our automatic poetry.

We were just stylising and didn’t have a thought in our heads, but at the same time I remember memorising small Byron poems and sitting out at four in the morning under a streetlight by my home, intoning these poems. One in particular was Byron’s Stanzas For Music, which starts:

There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away

When the glow of early thought declines in feeling’s dull decay

We were these nascent Ginsburgs and Burroughses and that’s all we were reading. Then it came time to do a song, at which point you realise that, as the cynical wisdom of the music business puts it: everything is repetition in pop music. There’s an old watchword, "don’t bore-us, get to the cho-rus."

If you take a real long view of song writing versus poetry, even though there are repeated stanzas, phrases and rhythms in poetry, song writing is a matter of saying everything you want in one pithy phrase, whether it means anything or not. “Wheel me out”… “out come the freaks… ” this, that or the other, it's that one arrow aimed well and true that you hope is going fit in the interstices of someone’s mind.

I realised song writing was a content-optional trade, whatever else you say in the verses, as long as you come up with something memorable, verbally, to ride the back of the rhythm, the harmony and the melody, you were home free.

DAVID WAS continues... >>