Kool Keith Over the years

Kool Keith – April 1st 2016 – The Rail Club – Fort Worth, TX

Ok, you know who Kool Keith is, you know his reputation (if you do not, Google it because I’m not pausing this time to tell ya :).
You know already that he’s unfathomably bizarre, porn-obsessed & defines the word unpredictable.
In spite of the fact that he’s one of the most brilliant MCs to ever to hold a microphone and easily the most prolific artist of any genre that’s ever existed.
He has so many Lps and releases music so often that you have to wonder if he even remembers most of it.
Given his alien like disposition your waiting the whole time for the entire thing to go off the rails which is usually does.
This time he never even made it onto the tracks.

Let me unpack a few things for you first:
The current Kool Keith live experience (& has been for a few years now) is this: Due to his restlessness & just over-all eccentricies, it appears that he has no booking agent, manager or publicist. He’s just booking the shows himself, living on the road, bringing along whatever DJ that will tag along (in tonight’s case his nephew).
He shows up at like 1am, comes out solo and just does 20-30 minutes of whatever bits of songs he can remember in one long calamity of a medley and bails, all to the tune of a ticket price of around $30.
I’ve missed the last couple of shows due to this underwelming live show, but MY nephew was in town, an accomplished MC himself whom I’ve been telling about Kool Keith for years & he was playing just a few miles from the house so not going wasn’t an option.
The location was just as much of a mismatch in terms – A Metal bar.
When we pulled in we wondered if the show had been cancelled as their was literally no one there. It was April Fool’s Day, he is one weird motherfucker, so was the joke on us? Not yet (but soon enough).
Once inside (& thankfully we were on the guest list) we see that including the bartender & us their are exactly NINE people here.

Adding to the surreal nature the opening act was the burlesque troupe Devil Dolls who’s membership seemed to demand morbid obesity exclusively.
That’s by no means an attempt at body-shaming anyone, just necessary to illustrate how surreal the event was and the time period it would require to acclimate.

They originally came out with Keith (which I thought was awesome & perfect) but they didn’t stay long.
After Keith did his “medley by numbers” act once (as described above) we were taken “backstage” along with all of the “promoter”s friends.
Which amounted to about a dozen people crammed into this makeshift hallway most of them appearing to be emulators of Sasha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character without being in on the joke.
I couldn’t help but suggest that we just move this out into the actual bar area as their was literally no on there, exclusivity be damned.
Why was everyone trying to go “backstage”? Just come out to the bar, who are you excluding yourself from? The bartender?
Even in these lean times, his rider still insisted on lots of condoms & buckets of chicken. Good times.

Kool Keith – Aug 29th 2013 – Club Dada – Dallas, TX

I had just left  a prior event and though anticpating weirdness as always with Kool Keith, the bizarreness started before I even arrived – As I was making my way over to Deep Ellum from Downtown, a major transformer exploded and it was pitch darkness in every direction. The sounds of amublances, fire trucks & police cars mixed with relying on others to do the right thing when it came to the outtage of stop lights, created a stew of dysfuntion beyond words.
I finally got over there & though I hurried just to be sure, I had a strong feeling that Kool Keith wasn’t gonna start at the advertised 11pm, transformer or no transformer.
My buddy Tony was already there and had generously grabbed a couple of tickets for us – We had feared it would sell out as the last time he played here, it was a much larger venue and it indeed did sell out.
I was actually happy for the delay, I was starving and a bit rattled by the cacophony of sirens so this gave me a chance to eat next door and get it together and ready to have a good time.
When I walked over to Club Dada for the show it was just now 11pm and the place was so empty I actually thought I might be at the wrong spot.
The super-hot door-girl assured me that this was the place.  Though Tony lingered close to the door to effectively spot me, that point was mute as we were two of maybe 15 people there.
I know Keith has made himself an unmanagable charachter, booking his own shows through a gmail account, back to selling t-shirts out of the trunk of his car etc. but I was still really surprised by the lack of turnout. You could also blame it being a week-night and any fan of his knows that he probably ain’t going on till after 1am no matter what is advertised, but the advertisment effort itself could be to blame as I (whom is obsessive of such things) didn’t even know about this show until Tony told me just yesterday.
I greet Tony and immediately run into an old friend Diana, who I don’t think I’ve seen since the last time I saw Kool Keith in Dallas and maybe only a few times in the last 15 years. I catch up with her for a bit and well as Tony while checking out local openers Topix, finishing up there set.
I see Chris, the promotor fidgeting in front of us and lean over to tell Tony what I’m sure he already knew was that Keith wasn’t going on anytime soon.
He informs the openers of this almost immediately after they were doing their “This is our last song, etc” thing for which delighted they responded with “Well, THIS changes things” – Ok, so they were good, but this was going to be a long night.

So getting our fill Tony and I went outside to the patio out back to catch up – I had just seen amazingly a Fugazi tribute band, just an hour prior that he was originally going to join me for and I was excited to tell him how it went as he was to hear it.
Right as I was about to launch into my monologue when suddenly, we are approached by our mutual friend Lisa who we didn’t even see was sitting behind us.
We both have known Lisa for over 15 years – Her and I used to basically run an independent record store together and were close at one time but haven’t seen much of each other in awhile. I saw her at Deedle’s film premeir for his documentary on the Descendants a few weeks back but that was the first time in years.

I realized that as we were catching up how much we didn’t know about each other’s lives in the past 7-10 years. Though we are all friends, a night of just Tony, Lisa and myself is something that has never happened and probably would only happen circumstantially – given that and the emptiness of the place, he gave the evening a special vibe and I really enjoyed bonding with those two again.
..and man Keith def gave us time to do it – I arrived at 11pm and at 1230am their was still no sign of him. We started to worry/figure he walked by the club thinking it was the wrong one too like I almost did – saw how empty it was and split. But if I know Chris the promoter is smart, he def didn’t pay him until he showed.
And he finally did about 15 mins till 1am –

Though he was playing to only now about a dozen people (and with the lights on) giving it a “soundcheck” feel (a joke he also made himself) and any feelings of legitmacy were long out the window, but that’s what you come to expect from Keith, not nessecarily settle for – he shows up, usually without a DJ and only a hype man or one or the other – tosses a DAT tape to a locally hired DJ and does an hour-long medley of whatever songs he can remember for his staggeringly prolific output, that feels like one long glorious trainwreck that yields certain degrees of success.
In this case, the vibe was so pure that the first 15 mins of this show was better than like the last 4 “complete” shows I’ve seen him perform combined.

Setlist:

The “setlist” if you can call it that, at these recent shows go something like this:
He’ll do as little as a half verse or as much as whole song or just as little as he remembers in a medley style that usually only cover 3-4 of his best known LPs.
For example, he’ll start with a freestyle to warmup and then maybe one or two new tracks and then its medley city, ususally starting with hes best known alter-ego Dr. Octagon and he’ll do a medley of –

Blue Flowers/Halfsharkalligatorhalfman/Earth People/Girl Let Me Touch You

– then the guy who kills Dr. Octagon in the story Dr. Doom and do a medley of –