To use a term dear to rapper M ¥ SS KETA, Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons is “crazy”. I don’t know if there is a scale of insanity but Bozzio blew up any pop seismograph at the beginning of the eighties with his personality, his neon make-up, his transparent plastic bras and his crunchy synth wave songs. This column has always been on the side of the least, the forgotten and the unheard prophets. Dale Bozzio, now mostly removed from the collective pop unconscious, has been a meteor whose luminosity has taken advantage of entire generations of pop stars more ambitious and savvy than her: from Madonna to Cyndi Lauper, from Gwen Stefani to Lady Gaga.
The Missing Persons frontwoman was inspired by Blondie’s progenitor Debbie Harry; and that post-punk attitude, from a weird sexy girl leading a band of nerdy men, blew him up in a blaze of neon, rainbow rimmel, colored plastic and dry ice. They were the origins of MTV and Dale Bozzio rose from that primordial fluorescent soup like a new wave Venus, her nakedness covered only by a plastic raincoat.
In 1980, the Missing Persons weren’t the newest arrivals. Dale and Terry Bozzio had met, and soon married, working alongside Frank Zappa in the rock opera Joe’s garage. With them there was also the guitarist Warren Cuccurullo (future member of Duran Duran, future restaurateur and future sexy model). It was Zappa himself who encouraged the trio to form a band; he wanted them to be called The Cute Persons, “the cute people”, but in the end Dale and Terry Bozzio and Warren Cuccurullo became the Missing Persons, “the missing”, a name that will prove prophetic given the short duration of their fame.
After a first ep funded by Cuccurullo’s father, the Missing Persons get a contract with the multinational Capitol records and in 1982 they come out with their debut album Spring session M. A good commercial success launched by music videos for the phantasmagoric and ultramodern era. Those were the years of second british invasion and in the United States, import bands like Culture Club, Eurythmics and Tears for Fears, very different bands that overseas were casually defined as “new wave”. As long as the Missing Persons functioned as a local response to the British invasion, the industry was with them.
But with their second album, Rhyme & reason, something changed and the band started playing another game. Rhyme & reason it was too messy, too crooked, too experimental, in a word too much pazzesko to please the Capitol, which is beginning to fall out of love. Missing Persons were far too bright musicians and pawed into the cramped pop dance category their record company wanted to confine them to. And Dale Bozzio had too much personality to just wag his tail in videos like a new wave version of Betty Boop.
Rhyme & reason it’s an album that manages to be pop and ambitious at the same time: it has great songs but buries them in a sea of virtuosity and gimmicks. The album seems to get out of hand at all times: it is so full of detail that it becomes dizzying. Just listen to the bass line of All fall down, any piece of the album; other artists would have come up with three different dance pieces: they cram everything into one hypertrophic song. It is as if the Missing Persons, having arrived at their second album, have remembered that they were students of Frank Zappa and had begun to work in his own schizoid and impromptu way.
A serious mistake especially in 1984, the year in which the US music industry changes gears and takes the road (which will later prove to be without return) of hunting for blockbuster. In 1984 there was no longer an average product, the mirage for everyone was to repeat the unprecedented success of Thriller by Michael Jackson. Music critic Michaelangelo Matos has dedicated his latest book to this theme, Can’t slow down: how 1984 became pop’s blockbuster year.
Analyzing the most successful albums of 1984 (Born in the Usa di Bruce Springsteen, Like a virgin by Madonna e Purple rain of Prince among all) Matos portrays a record industry devoted to acceleration, to maximizing profits. All economic and marketing resources are focused on a few leading products from which singles on singles, videos on videos and gigantic tours loaded with advertising opportunities are extracted. From 1984 onwards the US music industry became dependent on the blockbuster, a doping from which he will never detoxify.
In the year of Like a virgin of Madonna and of She’s so unusual by Cyndi Lauper there is no more space for the bulimic and experimental pop of the Missing Persons. In different ways Madonna and Cyndi Lauper focus on details and make them explode in MTV’s imagination. Missing Persons are too artistic and rambling for that kind of attention to detail: they make too much happen on their records. The threshold of public attention has been considerably reduced and the stars of the last generation (Madonna in the lead) have understood this very well. Yet Dale Bozzio had already anticipated everything: in Rhyme & reason you feel the future of so much pop to come: there is the most idiosyncratic and elusive Lady Gaga, there is the Gwen Stefani of the first two albums of No Doubt and there is a shocking affinity with the angular, biting vocality of Karen O by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
After the failure of Rhyme & reason the Missing Persons are commissioned by the Capitol which puts them in the hands of Bernard Edwards of the Chic, who produces for them the conventional Color in your life (1986), the third and last album before the breakup. Dale Bozzio in 1988 is rescued by Prince who publishes, with his label Paisley Park, Riot in english his first solo album. Bozzio thus becomes the only artist in the world to have worked with two different but equally influential geniuses, such as Frank Zappa and Prince. The hard lesson of 1984 taught the Missing Persons that, in the era of blockbuster pop, being too experimental doesn’t pay.
Missing Persons
Rhyme & reason
Capitol, 1984
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