The Tubes

When The Tubes lead singer Fee Waybill sang ‘What Do You Want From Life?’ on the San Francisco based band’s self-titled debut album, The Tubes (1975) he was asking a rhetorical question laced with a great deal of sardonic intent. Acting as a kind of fulcrum between Steely Dan at their most venomous and New Radicals at their name calling peak, The Tubes offered a virtual rock cabaret with delicious asides, lashings of erotica, amazing musicianship and drop dead funny lyrics. Another of their best-known tracks (they should all be) is the anthem ‘White Punks On Dope’ which turned a mirror on the West Coast’s most pampered, in much the same way that the Dan had done on ‘Showbiz Kids’.

But it takes more than out and out humour to make a great band. The Tubes paid the genre the utmost respect. They were sticklers for fine detail and understood that, after all, they were part of the consumer culture they threatened to behead. They had to wait years to receive their just desserts, ‘She’s A Beauty’ became their first number one single and attendant album. Outside Inside awoke a whole raft of folks to their stylish sound. But they were great in 1975 and fantastic in 1983, when they opened for David Bowie on his Serious Moonlight tour. They played with Dolly Parton and Cher (on the latter’s TV Special) and got them to take part in an outrageously camp and dramatic episode called ‘The Musical Battle to Save Cher’s Soul Medley’; they headlined at Knebworth with Frank Zappa and Peter Gabriel, toured with Todd Rundgren (one of their many fine producers) and played various shows under such pseudonyms as Metal Corpses. If you’ve never made a visit to Tubes-land, we’d suggest that could be rectified.

The Tubes are:

Fee Waybill
Roger Steen
Prairie Prince 
Rick Anderson
David Medd