Iwonder if I’m the world’s only music fan to have a Tubes concert among his top 10 favourites? The band, from Phoenix by way of Frisco, were horrifically denigrated as soon as their massive, initial media buzz wore off, but in my eyes they remain the closest thing to the marriage of theatre and rock that Bowie ultimately didn’t have the heart for and that Alice Cooper gave up trying for once everyone started laughing too hard. Not even “Rocky Horror Picture Show” came close.

Anticipating MTV by a decade yet limited to their own bank of television sets onstage, the Tubes put on wonderful circuses, packed with wit and satire, and both their songs and their musicianship were often brilliant. I saw them live three times and loved every show, though nothing came close to the first time.

“A Tubes set,” Paul Nelson wrote in Rolling Stone as late as 1978, “is like a runaway express train through the dark heart of pop America, mixing comedy with tragedy, bullshit with ballet, and throwing off enough sparks to burn a hole in all but the most stagnant of imaginations.”

Reviewers were invariably dumbfounded, but often not happy with the camp carnival and the blasting parody. Even Wilder Penfield of the Toronto Sun, one of the few half-decent music critics the city has ever produced, fretted in an otherwise jubilant review that the Tubes were presuming too much cynicism in their audience. Their lampooning of the mass media cut too deep for him.

Nevertheless Penfield gleefully reported from ringside the “90-minute high-powered assault on the senses”, in particular the frenzied finale in which lead singer Fee Waybill emerged from the quartet of TV monitors alongside Jagger, Alice and Rick Wakeman as Quay Lewd, and then appeared in the flesh, seven feet tall on 18-inch platform shoes, wearing a silver-lame pantsuit, massive Eltonesque shades that spelled out “Quay” on rims of flashing lights, and a guitar in the shape of a toilet seat.

As the monster rock star sang “Boy Crazy”, “Stand Up and Shout” and “White Punks on Dope”, roadies frantically stacked up more and more speakers to feed his lust for loudness, only to have the whole structure collapse on him. The TVs beamed breaking-news bulletins and firefighters rushed about spraying dry ice, and then, wrote Wilder:

“Moments later he was back on crutches, bloodied and bandaged and led by angels with candles and an overly endowed nurse who attached a plastic waist-high child to his front while various science-fiction acrobats (including a rollerball champion) began to do gymnastics and frenzied dancing and a crowd of costume ballers came in at choir level for the reprise of ‘White Punks on Dope’ …”

How can anyone not have a show like this among their all-time top 10 favourites?

The Tubes in those days numbered 24, including seven mostly female and usually near-naked dancers. Fee Waybill went through eight costume changes as the performance raced from madly choreographed off-off-Broadway to surreally schizoid skit. Except for the lack of animals, it was Barnum & Bailey on acid. Except for the gratuitous sexuality, including bondage hijinks, it was Busby Berkeley doing a high-speed, reefer madness Charleston.

As best as I recall, the concert opened with “What Do You Want from Life?”, a send-up of “Let’s Make a Deal” in which Waybill played a flash emcee dangling fabulous prizes in front of goggle-eyed contestants. “What do you want from life?” he sang. “To kidnap an heiress, or threaten her with a knife? To get cable TV and watch it every night? There you sit, a lump in your chair — where do you sleep and what do you wear when you’re sleeping?”

He suggests spiritual happiness through a guru, or a bank account that swells while you’re snoozing, but perhaps it must be: “Someone to love and somebody that you can trust … To try and be happy while you do the nasty things you must!

“Well, you can’t have that,” Fee said, abruptly jerking into a machine-gun salesman’s patter:

“But if you’re an American citizen you are entitled to: a heated kidney-shaped pool, a microwave oven — don’t watch the food cook, a Dyna-Gym — I’ll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home, a king-size Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum, a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi, real simulated Indian jewellery, a Gucci shoetree, a year’s supply of antibiotics, a personally autographed picture of Randy Mantooth and Bob Dylan’s new unlisted phone number, a beautifully restored Third Reich swizzle stick, Rosemary’s baby, a dream date in kneepads with Paul Williams, a new Matador, a new mastodon, a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego, a Merc Montclair, a Mark IV, a meteor, a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu, a Mort Moriarty, a Maserati, a Mac truck, a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped, a Winnebago — Hell, a herd of Winnebagos — we’re giving ‘em away, or how about a McCulloch chainsaw, a Las Vegas wedding, a Mexican divorce, a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot, or a baby’s arm holding an apple?”

By comparison the pace was downright relaxing next for a bit of performance art built around one of their best songs, “Space Baby”, Waybill tumbling onto the stage in an astronaut’s get-up to sing, quite plaintively, quite endearingly, despite the inherent silliness, about having no planet to call home, “no air to breathe, but just the same, I dig my atmosphere machine”.

Space baby, you been so far
Unknown face on an unknown star
The time is now, my life’s begun
I’m burnin’ green like a rhomboid sun
I’ve never seen a flower grow …

Maybe I’m not even human but I know
there’s lots of room in infinity
There’s got to be a time and place
for me to cease this endless search
and settle down with my own race
and never, ever, ever be a Space Baby.

It amazes me, looking back, that the Tubes actually managed to squeeze so much into an hour and a half. The different productions from the three shows I saw over four years may be melding into one long carnival sideshow of the memory, but I certainly recall seeing, at one point or another:

* The troupe dressed as urban guerrillas, Fee as Castro singing “Malaguena Salerosa”;
* Waybill playing punk rocker Johnny Bugger, flailing a chainsaw around and spitting into the audience;
* “Halos”, sung a capella by “Little Early and his Sweet Pearls” while the band took a break;
* “Mondo Bondage”, Fee cavorting with the Tubes’ designated dancer, Shirley Marie MacLeod, known to the stage as Re Styles, all leather thongs and whips — did that segue into “Don’t Touch Me There”?;
* Waybill as Tom Jones, singing “It’s Not Unusual” amid a bevy of leaping milkmaids but inevitably yielding to horniness and getting unusual;
* More shameful yet somehow hilarious goings-on to the tune of “Slipped My Disco”, “Proud to Be an American”, “Poland Whole” and “Madam I’m Adam”.

Then there was the strange case of Dr Strangekiss, a crippled Nazi experimental polymer melding Henry Kissinger into Dr Strangelove, which I’m sure should have had the former threatening lawsuit and the latter, in the form of Peter Sellers, rolling on the floor. The A-bomb scientist was confined to a wheelchair, at least until his yearnings overtook him and he tried to climb/mount his South Seas nuke-test atoll’s last remaining palm tree, which as Wilder Penfield saw it, was “played by a buxom woman with two magnificent coconuts, while the band screamed into a ghastly perversion of ‘Bali Hai’.”

These fantastical romps all came before the finale, remember — “White Punks on Dope”: “Other dudes are living in the ghetto, but being born in Pacific Heights don’t seem much betto!”

Somewhere in the midst of all this craziness there was a magnificent rock band playing almost non-stop. Guitarist Bill “Sputnik” Spooner, who I have to thank for writing most of the amazing songs, led an outfit that featured pianist Vince Welnick, bassist Rick Anderson, Roger Steen also on guitar, drummer Prairie Prince and Michael Cotten on synthesizer. Every one of them managed to snatch away our attention with terrific riffs, and together they stitched together the individual skits with such outstanding arrangements as a medley of TV crime-show themes — “Perry Mason”, “The Untouchables” and “Dragnet”.

Soon after the Tubes began infecting their fellow Californians with their delirium, they opened shows for Iggy Pop and Led Zeppelin in San Francisco. By the time they had their debut album out (produced by Al Kooper, no less) and the performance fully revved up, no other act was willing to take the stage either before or after them. Toronto’s Carole Pope had a go at the 1978 Gardens show, but who remembers anything about her set?

It’s also worth noting that in 1976, when the band held a “Talent Hunt” in Frisco (hosted by Martin Mull, another name from my concert listings), the certifiably schizoid Robin Williams tried out — and was rejected. I wouldn’t want to suggest that he stole his Mork shtick from the Tubes, but hey …

The Tubes ran into a wall of incensed media anti-hype in Britain in ‘77, despite a record-breaking run at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, and in the wake of it seemed fortunate to be picked to headline the Knebworth Festival the following year, which had Frank Zappa and Peter Gabriel on the bill. They managed a top 10 hit with “She’s a Beauty” in ‘83, but watched 1985’s “Love Bomb” album die disgracefully, and then they broke up.

Welnick joined the Grateful Dead soon after, then in 2006 succumbed to cancer. In 1993 the Tubes reunited — Waybill, Steen, Anderson and Prince with keyboardist Gary Cambra — and last time I checked, they were entertaining tourists on cruise ships. What do you want from life?

“Sputnik” Spooner is active in other realms as well. A couple of the photos on this page came from his lively website.

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The photo at the top of this post is the copyrighted work of Ross Taylor and cannot be duplicated. As to the review, just ask: Click “Get in touch” at the top of the menu.

* See #9: Pink Floyd
* See #10: Bob Marley
* See #11: Bob Dylan
* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory