Sun PK Interview with Robert Pally

Robert Pally: February, 2001
As released from: http://www.fufkin.com/pally_02_01.htm

Sun Pk "Inquire Within" CD Cover Sun Inquire Within

The Sun Rises Here

The New Yorker Sun PK has many talents. Besides being an artist, painting, doing drag shows and writing poetry, he just released a wonderful piece of sixties sunshine pop à la Archies, Sagittarius and others. On Fufkin.com, he tells everything about his world.

You do Music, Art, Philosophy and Drag. What do you enjoy most and why?

Music. With music I feel I create something from my heart that I can share and also enjoy without having to give away or sell a piece of my soul. With my paintings I feel like even though I still retain the image by way of a photograph when one is sold, I may never see the original piece again. A piece of my soul is gone. With recorded music I've always got the original and anyone who wants an original can have one too. Does that make sense? A lot of the songs are filled with philosophy too.

Tell me a bit how you connect some of them with each other.

I hate to sound too 'high concept' but they connect out of my commitment to creative self-expression.

Your first full-length album "Inquire Within" is a very beautiful piece of sixties sunshine pop. What are your influences and how have they actually had an impact on the album?

I chose to do the album to evoke 60's pop because though I have eclectic tastes the kind of music that makes my mouth water and heart melt most is the music of that era. The bulk of my extensive 45 collection is from that era. But I knew we (my Producer Daniel Wise & I) couldn't make it sound really like the 60's simply because to attempt the constraints of 60's technology would be more costly than using current methods. I provided Dan with almost 5 hours of tapes of songs and groups I wanted to emulate or evoke. The first song on those tapes was Harper's Bizarre's version of "Pocketful Of Miracles" and the last song was "And Then He Kissed Me" by The Crystals. We did manage to get a laud to Phil Spector in there in the oddest place! (Aside to Keith Cook, Yellow Balloon, New Colony Six and Sagittarius songs were on those tapes - thank you for noticing their inspirational presence!) Each song on "Inquire Within" had it's own group of songs that we used for inspiration and motivation. Some of the songs had lots of source material and they seem to sound the most retro. Some songs we really zeroed in on one or two inspiration songs. When we were doing "It's a Smiley Face World" Dan just kept going back, much to my chagrin, to The Innocence version of "Mairzy Doats"! Certain songs had little or no reference and we let them sort of create themselves within the confines of the instruments we used as our palette. They wound up sounding more contemporary. I had no source material for "Feel" (I was clueless) and only 2 songs each for "On & On Forever" & "If Love Has Ever Passed Me By" which we pretty much discarded. When we were working on it we were really taken with the latter's evocativeness of Julee Cruise! There were a few songs from the 80's, 90's and earlier 60's but most of it was from like 1964-1970. I was coming from the point of view that I might only have the opportunity to make one album ever so though we used alot of the same instruments on many of the songs the styles vary. I told Dan about The Turtles' album "The Battle Of The Bands" on which they played each song as though they were a different band and that was roughly the approach I wanted to take. Musically I wanted the album to make left turn after left turn to keep the listener's interest. I start with an intriguing little lullaby that hops into the ultra goofy, uplifting and fun (and, philosophical) "It's a Smiley Face World". Then left turn into two very pop-rock songs dripping with layers of acoustic and electric guitars then left turn again into "The Puppet Master" which has no guitars at all but features it's own many intriguing left turns within the song. Bill Dobrow, the drummer called the song 'ear candy' the first time he heard it after we finished it. And on it went and still goes. With the exception of a few synth pads almost all of the other instruments we used were vintage. Among the seven different guitars Mark Bosch played were a Melody Maker and a '57 Gretsh. Dan played real Wurlitzer and Hammond Organs and so on. Lyrically, too the album tells a story that takes left turn after left turn. That story is there for anyone who cares to hear it. I'm actually surprised that so many people get it. Kind of proves that bubblegum can have a soul. But if the story eludes you, you still get what David Bash calls "A pleasurable listen…a lovely album". I'm not being brief enough.

What was the concept behind the CD cover? What did you want to express with it?

I wanted to be brief and then you ask questions like this! There may be many ways to hear "Inquire Within". Everyone hears differently. And many ways to see the cover. There's a sign in the window that says 'Positions Available, Inquire Within, No Experience Necessary'. Does that need an explanation? There are three images of me. How do they look? Where are they looking? Are they turning out or in? Which is smiling? Where is it drab? Where are the colors? Heh, heh, heh. The back cover is a black & white drawing I did with a lot of falderal written by a faux publicist and a faux review by a faux critic for a faux magazine (a lot of faux blaux as I call it) to emulate the back of a 60's album cover when they did only the front in color to curb expenses and usually had a cheesy black & white graphic with some ridiculous promo written by an 'industry insider' or like Dick Clark or Jonathan King or somebody or other on the back. I know it's a stretch. The title of the album is a lyric from the song "I Wonder How I Know". A lot of the songs on the album are engaged in (among other things) inquiry and wonder. Even the love songs…even the sad songs. One friend said the inside of the j-card was a much more compelling visual and would make a more eye-catching front cover but one must inquire within to get to "Lavender Lane". There's more but I dare not go on!!!

In the lyrics you sing a lot about love. What is love for you?

Okay, now you're hitting below the belt. No, I'll answer briefly, if possible. Self love, intimate love, brotherly love, universal love. Really what love is for me is answered quite thoroughly on the album and in the end for all it's trials and tribulations "love will take you higher than you've ever been before....

You used to work as a Drag Queen. When and why did you pursue that career?

I needed a job! No, really! I'd been away for a while and when I came back that was the first job I got. If you want more details I'll give them to you but I'm trying to be brief. I haven't had a drag job in over a year. I haven't had a regular drag job since like 1996.

Tell me more.

When I was a kid my mom would really get into dressing me up for Halloween. I was either a clown or a woman...usually some 'grand dame' character. It explains a lot. I talk about it in my memoirs. I hope to have some excerpts from that on my site soon. As a young adult I was still into Halloween and I would do drag or glam or androgynous stuff. Then every so often somebody would need somebody in drag for some event or something. I remember when I used to hang out at Club 57 it was a very 'performance art-y' kind of club with a really mixed crowd and like one night we did "Beauty Shop Night". We had wigs on wig forms on the bar with brushes and hair spray for people to make hair-do's. There was a live demonstration of dog grooming and I was asked to do the door that night so I did it in this sort of maniacal manicurist drag. When they groomed the dog I was asked to come up and do his nails. So I painted the dog's claws red! One night we did a fake PTA (Parent Teacher Association) meeting. The audience was the parents and the regular crew played like the Vice Principal who showed educational films and the Librarian, a bull-dyke who was all for burning the smutty books in the school library and a school nurse who was a junkie. I played the special guest speaker, Dr Ruth Worsthomo (A spoof of Dr. Ruth) who gave a frank lecture about sexuality in youngsters and hormones and masturbation ...not to mention the importance of prophylactics ...imagine all that with as good a German accent as I could muster up. Stuff like that. Then right before I went away one year it was Halloween and I did black girl drag for the first time, LaToilette Jackson...there's a thumbnail of her on my site in the drag section in The Pyramid Years with a whole gallery coming up. Well after that it was like a dam broke. I came back from being away and needed a job and that was the first one I got. A friend who'd done the door at a club I'd tended bar at was managing the Pyramid and he gave me a job....go-go dancing on the bar in over the top and conceptual drag and I got to participate in some group shows and do my own shows. That's really what made me begin to look at songwriting seriously. I'd written and performed a couple of country songs in male cowboy drag for a Grand Old Opry spoof at Club 57 a few years earlier and then at the Pyramid I started writing my own songs for my own drag shows. It was fun and creative and I was the only one who was doing that. That's when I began to take songwriting workshops. My day job was selling fabric and at the time I lived over a closeout fabric store. So you see it all really ties together. I'm just a walking multi-media show! With a philosophical streak! Is that enough detail for you? By the time we finish with this interview it will be my entire memoir!

Were you a bit torn between being a man and dressing as a woman?

Gender, gender, gender...people make such a fuss! And as you can tell by looking at my drag it's more about creative self-expression than sex. Not only that, and here's where philosophy enters the picture. I hope you're prepared. For me, physical gender exists as a mere convenience for God. Just think, if God had not created gender, he or she...you see how backward our planet is? The only way in which you can ascribe a what is it 'pronoun' to God is to say him or her...or it and it seems so disrespectful. Anyway, if God hadn't made this gender thing, he/she/it/God/The Great Cosmic Schmutz/Our Lady Of The Immaculate Smiley Face (© 2000) would have to keep creating us over and over again! Do our souls have physical gender? How is gender defined in the spiritual domain? On the outside in this physical domain we are male and female. Inside we are a spectrum of archetypes, male, female, androgen and everything in between. Some are more masculine, some are more feminine. Some may be completely masculine and some completely feminine…who knows? And these ideas of masculinity and feminity …how are they determined? Who created these ideas? Even on the Tarot, some of the Deities are androgynous or hermaphrodite. That is a term that comes by way of the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. The child was born with both physical genders. This phenomenon still occurs - albeit rarely - but it happens. Is this human manifestation of both genders accorded the glorification one would expect when one is born with both sides of God's coin? No, it is a freak. Perhaps somewhat like the gay population, which though not born with both physical genders is born with archetypal genders generally associated with the opposite sex. Needless to say, not all cross dressers are gay! Of course it's okay for women to dress like men and not be considered freaks. Indeed, particularly in the business world, when women masculinize themselves and wear suits they are more likely to get ahead than the girls who wear mini-skirts, spaghetti strap tops, sexy shoes and too much make-up. That's because our planet has been dominated by men for myriad centuries. It still is. So when men feminize themselves...or are simply feminine just by the nature of who they are on the inside...being true to those archetypes that exist in them and not being pressured into oppressing them by the ethics of the world at large what is thought of them? A woman may wear a business suit to the office with nary an eyebrow raised but what if a man wore even what would be considered suitable women's attire to the office. The eyebrows would be in the ozone. Derision and dismissal would follow. This is a glimpse into the misogyny on the planet...the devaluation of the feminine. People think we're out of the Dark Ages. Not until the last hand is raised in violence against a fellow human (let alone gun), not until all children are fed, nurtured, loved, treasured, not until the people on this planet as one race become responsible for this, the Garden of Eden - our home, not until "the axis of greed, that makes the world spin" is done away with will we be out of the Dark Ages. The biggest Dark Age atrocities in history occurred in the century we've just left...and not just 6 million Jews were murdered in that war. 55 million human beings were killed in World War 2, let alone the 10 million Stalin exterminated in his power struggle. 50 to 60 years is just a drop in the bucket when you look at the universal picture. One lifetime but a mere blink of an eye. Genocide is still being committed around the world. And people are so uptight about sexual identity. I feel like I'm standing on some sort of gay soapbox and really being gay isn't that important to me. My music and art…they are important to me. I just happen to be queer. Aren't there more important things than gender specificity and sexual identity? Well, you asked for it! I could go on but that's another discussion! When I catch somebody's ear, I always feel like I overstay my welcome.

A lot of people think that Drag Queens are only good for a laugh. I tend more to think that they represent something sad and tragic. What is your opinion about it?

Good for a laugh? Yes. Be funny …cover the pain. Most comedians have the same gene. Probably most people in entertainment have the affliction. There is a tragic side to drag...you are right. It's sad & tragic when people have to feel bad about who they are because the world doesn't understand. That doesn't just go for Drag Queens. It really goes for anyone who feels in some way that they can't be true to himself or herself because of what others think or some 'established accepted opinion' or idea about how people should behave. Somehow Queens have that part licked. They just go ahead and say, "Excuse me world, this is who I am and if you've got a problem with it well, guess who's problem it is?" That's how the gay movement began. With Queens saying that…and saying "I've got a right to be a girl who has a penis if I want to and who are you to say I can't…Witch-Hunters?…The Gender Police? Who put you in a position reserved for God alone?" But I think some of the sadness is because of as you say, the 'outsider-ness' of its nature. Also, there is a lot of pain and confusion ...most of which I think comes from a rather belligerent, ignorant and phobic mainstream world. That's why I try to make light of and shed light on the gender thing. When feminine boys and masculine girls are growing up there is little room for acceptance of this kind of behavior. When that child is heterosexual the behavior seems to be overlooked because the relationships they're engaging in are "normal". When those children are gay...well. Do I need to spell it out? Maybe the sad and tragic part of it is really the limitations people allow restrictive and unimaginative belief systems to have on them. Geez, for all the religion in the world you'd think people would be even the remotest bit spiritual…connected in some way with the forgiving, understanding and accepting Cosmic Schmutz. I could go into the aspects of drag that get interpreted through the "perversity filter" many people walk around with on auto-pilot… I'm not denying that all sorts of fetish ideas go with the turf…that happens the second you start fooling with gender because people instantly sexualize anything to do with it but hey, you don't have to be a Nellie Faggot Drag Queen to be a pervert. Just look at my site. Honey, I'm a 'G' rated fag. 99% of the world probably doesn't think such a thing could exist. That's perverse! I'm embarrassed that I used the 'f' word in "Bear Witness" but if one were ever to use that word in a song it ought to be in one called "Bear Witness"!

Tell me how you got the name Sun PK?

I really had 2 separate drag careers. The first one was all about creating characters. I could never come up with a single drag name. I just kept creating all these characters. There are thumbnails of the main ones on my site and soon I hope to have the whole cast of them in there. Then I went into a 2-year semi-retirement after my mom died. Then I was asked to be a Roxy Queen and the persona of Sun evolved. But not just as a drag persona. Sun became a sort of stand to take. I wrote a song about it ...hopefully I'll get to record it. It's called "Bright & Alive & Totally Uncool". It's a stand for that it's okay to be soft in a world that's obsessed with toughness...that it's okay to be happy and comfortable about being a dweeb in a world that's obsessed with coolness at any cost. (That's why Archie & Steve Urkel have been heroes of mine) It's okay to be bright & colorful in a world that exhalts the darkness. "That's why it's gotta be a smiley face world & on & on forever". But I digress...again & again… my music publishing company is called Son of Boris after my father. I had been asked to hostess a night at a club and I gave the promoter my card. He said he'd call to ask what name I wanted on the invitation and before I knew it there was my name 'Son of Boris' on the invite! A lot of us thought it was really cool then one day a friend who was like our Queen Mother was introducing me as Son of Boris and said, "Oh, I hate introducing you like that" so I said, "just call me Son, I've been thinking of shortening it to that anyway" and we all loved it. I changed it to Sun because I was really into lots of day-glo colors and black lights sort of like Psychedelic Power Barbie or Day-glo Minnie Mouse Barbie! LOL. My drag was rarely about sex, even if it was sometimes ...or often sexy, it was more just a great big outlet for creative self-expression. I got to be Super Colorful and design and wear Fantastic and Ridiculous clothes and jewelry...not to mention the shoes!...not even many real girls take advantage of that they're women to do that! It was also really good exercise! Then more people started calling me Sun in and out of drag so I changed it legally. PK is the initials of my old name who is the person Sun evolved from. Like "Move on, can't go back, and though you won't forget..."

Tell me about your musical background.

I studied lots of instruments when I was a kid (piano, trumpet, clarinet, violin & flute) but excelled at none. I started writing lyrics in earnest as a teenager. I took a lot of songwriting workshops for like 7 years in the 80's & early 90's. I'm going to give myself an honorary degree. LSNOL. I talk about some of that on the trivia pages in the "Inquire Within" section of my website. I had four great teachers but one, Henry Gaffney made a huge impact on me with regard to melody. I'd always been melodic but never understood that I could write melodically. That's actually what I was doing but when Henry talked about actually crafting melodies sometimes note by note it was like I could do it consciously and bring something more to the process and without needing to play an instrument proficiently. There's not a lot of agreement for that but I persisted and you are familiar with the results. A friend of mine, John Link has a degree in music and played "Inquire Within" for a friend of his who is a professor at Julliard who declared me a genius! So much for music education!

You also write Jingles. Can you tell me more about that? For whom have you done Jingles so far?

All the jingles I've done are on my site. (Nick at Nite, TV Land, Rug Rats and Disney.) Except for a couple of TV Land jingles that were never used and I turned into songs for my next album...if I get to record it!!! I love writing jingles, it's usually a lot of fun and I enjoy the challenge but it's as big a hustle to get the work as it is to network my beautiful "Inquire Within" to finding its audience. The rewards of finding an audience who will appreciate "Inquire Within" I'm sure will prove to be far more rewarding than doing another exemplary job for television people with a lot of tele and no vision!

You also paint. What inspires you your painting, for example, "Rainbow Furl" or "The Living Hand"?

My imagination.

Tell me more.

I don't know if there are more details. I just do sketches...from awful to good...and I begin a new painting by going through those sketches and picking one that I like. Sometimes, but rarely, I come up with a color scheme before I start painting. I did that with 'Rainbow Furl'. But usually I just sit down...and I always start with the background...and say something like, "Okay, hmm let's see, okay, BLUE!" It's really fun to watch them evolve. My last roommate before I had to move watched 'Rainbow Furl' come into being and he marveled at the process. He said something like "I never would have known that it would turn out like this when it started." I gave my producer, the genius Dan Wise a painting when "Inquire Within" was complete and he marveled over my ability to create visually. He almost seemed to feel kind of what?...incomplete? because he couldn't create that way and I said to him, "I wouldn't worry about it honey, you paint with sound!" Everybody has their God given gifts...like obviously, one of your gifts is your ability to have people feel comfortable and open up! You ask really good questions.

Sun Inquire Within

Internet: www.SunPK.com

Robert Pally: The Splitsville Interview

Robert Pally: The Margo Guryan Interview

E-mail Robert

Return to Sun's wing Entrance

Return to GLBT Artists

 
The  only GLBT Music ranking Chart Online Since 1996! Support GLBT Music vote for your favorite GLBT Artists.
StoneWall Society Network Member!

Receive our FREE monthly newsletter

Equal Pride

Subscribe Here

StoneWall Society free web-based email, 6megs of space.

Email login:

Password:

Login, or get your account today!

Site Map

StoneWall Society

Services

Resource Area

Home StoneWall Productions Resource  
Pledge Job Fair GLBT Web Reviewers 
Detailed Site Guide SWS Community Awards Program Web/Internet Tools
Business Members MountAroma  
Friends of StoneWall Society GLBT Petitions
Why Research and Student Assistance Program  
Favorite Sites  GLBT Web Site Reviews

History and Reference

Reading Room

SWS GLBTI Artists Promotion

History
StoneWall Webring GLBT Artists Free Promo Service GLBT Symbols
Member Webrings GLBT Artists   *** GLBT Famous Persons 
Link to Us   SWS Art World  Archives  *** and NEW
Contact Us Pride In The Arts Awards

Awards

Press Releases Our Awards

Features

  Award Recipients  
Equality Alert  

Member Related

Awards Received
NewsRoom Member Site of the Month Older site program

Media & Entertainment

Travel   Previous Member Sites of the month. Older site program SWS Internet Radio
Jacy's Page Members' This & That Older site program GLBT Radio   ***
StoneWall Society Zine About the founder, Len Rogers Activities
Privacy Policy   Chat
 

*** = Updated      N = NEW

Gardening  

Site opened 10/31/99

StoneWall Society 10/99 - 2012