Eccentric, Prolific Music Producer Kim Fowley Dies at 75

Resident Los Angeles weirdo and musical luminary Kim Fowley, who in the 1970s famously assembled and produced the teenage punk band the Runaways, has died at the age of 75. Fowley had been suffering from bladder cancer and was undergoing treatment in Los Angeles, according to Billboard, but no official cause of death has been announced.

The news was confirmed on Thursday night by author Harvey Kubernik and the CEO of Peer Music, Ralph Peer, who said on Twitter that Fowley “and his energy will be missed.”

Waif-like, gangly and “with a face like Frankenstein that never seems to age,” according to Runaways songwriter Kari Krome, Fowley had a talent for spinning yarns and mythologizing himself. To some, he claimed he had been born in the Philippines, and had known Nancy Sinatra in high school.

The real story was that Fowley was born in 1939 and grew up in southern California. His parents were actors—his father, Douglas Fowley, appeared in Singin’ in the Rain—and Fowley became entrenched in the gritty, dark side of Hollywood. At one point he was a male prostitute, he claimed in his 2012 autobiography, Lord of Garbage.

Fowley worked in the music industry for the better part of six decades, getting his start by taking whatever odd jobs he could with the hope of breaking into the business. He was Thelonius Monk’s food runner, a studio janitor, and was taken under the wing of notorious DJ Alan Freed; he was also an associate of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. He kick-started his career in the early 1960s by co-producing successful records by the Hollywood Argyles (“Alley Oop”) and Paul Revere & the Raiders.

Then, he went on to work with the likes of Warren Zevon, Alice Cooper, Blue Cheer and Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers, and assisted in co-writing tunes on Kiss’s smash record Destroyer. Most recently, he worked—from his hospital bed—on hirsute Los Angeles songwriter Ariel Pink’s 2014 album Pom Pom.

Krome, in the 2001 Los Angeles punk oral history book We Got the Neutron Bomb, remembered Fowley as “one of those odd birds, brilliant at the art of hustle.”

Fowley became a fixture in the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene in the 1970s, and is perhaps best remembered for discovering Joan Jett and putting together the all-girl punk rock group the Runaways. In 1975, he introduced a then-15-year-old Jett, a “perfect rhythm guitarist,” and drummer Sandy West. The pair went on to form the Runaways with guitarist Lita Ford, bassist Jackie Fox and lead vocalist Cherie Currie, for whom Fowley and Jett co-wrote “Cherry Bomb,” perhaps the Runaways’ most memorable tune, as her official audition for the band. Michael Shannon, of Boardwalk Empire acclaim fame, portrayed Fowley on-screen in the 2010 film about the band, entitled The Runaways.

Fowley and the Runaways parted ways in 1977, following disagreements about money. But Currie, who had been outspoken about Fowley’s verbal abuse of the band members, helped care for him this past year as he was battling cancer, and even moved him into her home, reports The Guardian. “After everything I went through as a kid with him,” she said, “I ended up becoming a mom and realized it was difficult for a man in his 30s to deal with five teenage girls. He’s a friend I admire who needed help, and I could be there for him.”

Fowley released a string of solo records in the 1980s, but slipped into the shadows soon afterward. He resurfaced in the 2000s, when he went on to make several films, including Golden Road to Nowhere/Black Room Doom, which received a special jury prize for innovation and audaciousness at the 2012 Melbourne Underground Film Festival. He also hosted a radio program on Sirius XM’s Underground Garage channel, the Kim Fowley Program, which plumbed the depths of rock and roll’s greatest, and sprinkled some weirdness in between.

“The loneliness of a visionary is that you might be the only one in the universe at that time who recognizes magic. I’m a magical person, and so I recognize other magical people. It takes one to know one,” Fowley told We Got the Neutron Bomb co-authors Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen.