"Words" by MISSING PERSONS

Plexiglass bikinis, a drummer's band, and Frank Zappa. [Summer of '82 pt. 1]

Media overload bombarding you with action / It's getting near impossible to cause distraction

Dale Bozzio woke up in Frank Zappa’s living room. She was 21 and had been in Los Angeles for about six months, in which time she had sung backup on Zappa’s Joe’s Garage Acts I, II & II and songs like “I Don’t Wanna Get Drafted.” Zappa was touring Japan with Dale’s future husband, drummer Terry Bozzio, at the time; she came to, to the sound of Zappa’s daughter Moon playing the harp. The harp and the spaghetti on the stove were an attempt to revive her, Frank’s wife Gail explained, before asking why Dale had fallen out of a hotel window. At which point Dale Bozzio passed out and slipped into a coma. 

Dale fell out of a window at the Holiday Inn in downtown L.A. because she was being attacked in her room. She didn’t know the man who was threatening to rape and kill her, and she went to the window to scream for help. In the struggle to free herself from his stranglehold, she fell through the window, landing 40 feet below. She was put on life support and sent to Boston, near her hometown of Medford, MA, where she recovered, at least physically. Once she was back on her feet, Terry Bozzio and Zappa brought her along on their European tour, not as a singer, but just so they could be sure she was well cared for. After that tour, she says, “I went back to LA and put a band together with Terry and Warren Cuccurullo. And the rest is history.”¹

“Words” comes from that band’s debut, Spring Session M, an anagram for Missing Persons. Terry Bozzio and Cuccurullo² had both played with Zappa since the mid-70s. Terry recalls that after a rehearsal where they weren’t quite connecting musically, Zappa asked him to meet him “in his office,” a k a behind the stage, where he told him that it was time for the drummer to leave the nest and start his own thing. Drummers leading bands is of course a rarity in rock and pop. But this was the New Wave ‘80s, where being different was, however briefly, a selling point. This goes beyond the front-stage position for Terry Bozzio’s kit, parallel to Dale and Cuccurullo. Where Punk opened the doors to bands who only thought they could play, New Wave did the same for avant garde and expert musicians to slide the next-level music into a pop context — just ask any guitarist in an ‘80s campus cover band what it was like playing Andy Summers’ parts in The Police. 

Terry Bozzio gave Missing Persons intricate grooves that were as much a part of the musicality as the songs’ melodies. His was jazz fusion-level stuff in an era that tended toward the robotic rhythms of a futurist machine age. His drumming is in large part why “Words” is so damn catchy³. There are cool riffs from Cuccurullo and keyboardist Chuck Wild that jump up to grab the spotlight, but the hook of the chorus is not all that strong; it’s what’s going on underneath it that makes you bop along. That, and of course, Dale Bozzio.

Dale is one of early MTV’s iconic images: white spun-sugar hair colored with bursts of neon, wide swathes of bright makeup, and wrapped in a plexiglass bikini that was more hardware store than haute couture. The look is the result of Dale the visual artist. She made those first clear bikinis out of plastic balls sawed in half and tied together with fish tank filter tubes; the metallic or latex inserts were interchangeable to match the rest of the outfit. This look of stylish salvage was echoed by Cuccurullo’s guitar, which was fashioned from an old Vox wah-wah pedal — the band looked like they were from the post-apocalyptic future that the cold war foretold, which was itself also very ‘80s.

via The Golden Closet

If you’re looking to separate the look of a band from its music; good luck with that. Even if a band is wearing ratty old t-shirts or untucked button ups from some bygone Christmas haul, they have a look that communicates something to an audience. Dale’s look was alluring and sexy, but it was also absurdist. As someone who worked at the Boston Playboy Club in the ‘70s, she was acutely aware that people would focus on her beauty. Her self-made outfits from found materials were her way of controlling the narrative, making her looks hers.

My lips are moving and the sound's coming out

The words are audible but I have my doubts

That you realize what has been said

You look at me as if you're in a daze

It's like the feeling at the end of the page

When you realize you don't know what you just read

Dale Bozzio’s vocals on “Words” are unmistakably mannered, which too was a New Wave trope. What she does with that, however, is another way in which Missing Persons exploited the freedoms presented by a wide-open, loosely defined genre. Dale sings the verses as a loose assemblage of three different songs: She punctuates opening lines with a dog-toy squeak, rambles through others as if she’s talking to herself, and swings from petulant mockery to snarly vocal fry, all within the melody. It sounds like a movie’s worth of Margo Robbie’s Harley Quinn line readings compressed into one song (without the New Yorky accent). It’s four and a half minutes of Akira Kurasowa’s “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”

Using an impressive breath control to sound emotionally unstable gives you another idea of Dale Bozzio as an artist and why Terry Bozzio and Warren Cuccurullo built their sound around her. This performance, particularly in the way she dares you to take her seriously, adds so much more weight to lyrics about a culture of information overload culture than the flat affect of so many New Wave soul-dead android boys. It’s like their time with Frank Zappa, who mated serious musicianship with his preferred means of social commentary — the scatological and profane. Missing Persons caused a media distraction to cut through it: If you’re going to listen to us, you’re going to have to listen to us.

12 Song Playlist

Missing Persons, plus a song from Dale’s solo record on Prince’s Paisley Park label⁴, and a handful of the super-interesting tracks Terry has been making in the 2000s.

The Summer of ‘82

“Words” is the first in a string of five songs from 1982 that I’ll be covering here. I’ve always bounced between eras and genres, in part because that’s what’s interesting to me and what I tend to do in my own listening, and in part that I like the challenge of relating the experience of very different songs to an audience.

Writing about Kate Bush and watching Stranger Things, however, pulled me into what was a formative time. I am not nostalgic for the ‘80s, which is what makes this era of music interesting for me now. I’m a believer in doing the hard thing. Flitting from ‘70s country to ‘50s jazz had become comfortable for me; writing about one year in music is a new kind of challenge that I believe will make the writing better.

But The Best Song Ever (This Week) not just about me, of course. Some feedback I’ve gotten is that people might well enjoy a series of songs all experiencing their 40th anniversary. So here we go.

Look At What Terry Bozzio is Doing Now

Seriously, look.

And listen. This is as melodic as a drum solo gets.

Also, if you’re wondering how many drums are in this kit, here’s the stats:

26 toms
2 snares
8 bass drums
53 cymbals (incl. ride gong)
22 pedals (incl: 5 working hi-hats, wood djembe, foot cymbal, jingle stick, rik, wood tamb, foot tom, 2 metal things⁵, foot gong).
xylo, glock, chromatic gongs, big gong
2 electronic drums
misc. percussion

Thank You

Thanks to all of you who have subscribed since I last published. This two week break was unintentional. I was stuck. Not just with writing, but of course writers would create a term for their particular flavor of being stuck — Writer’s Block. So thanks to all of you for putting up with me trying to reset and change my mindset.

See you next week with more Summer of ‘82.

1. Quote from a Dale Bozzio interview here: https://parklifedc.com/2022/02/07/interview-dale-bozzio-of-missing-persons-on-her-autobiography-life-is-so-strange-missing-persons-frank-zappa-prince-and-beyond/

2. Cuccurullo went on to join Duran Duran and co-wrote “Ordinary World”

3. The ways the cymbals carry the bridge is so damn good.

4. In her autobiography Life Is So Strange, Dale kisses and tells, and yes, she had an affair with Prince.

5. 2 metal things!