Join
Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member?
Sign in.
Editorial Reviews
About the Artist
Automatic Pilot, San Francisco's satiric / erotic jazz wave ensemble, was the bleeding edge of the gay musical movement from 1980 to 1985. Born as the first unofficial subgroup of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, they soon came into their own as an independent force. Using an acoustic punk rock parody with choralistic settings of nasty gay lyrics as a starting point, the songwriting team of lead singer Matthew McQueen and pianist Karl Brown forged a new musical form incorporating elements of jazz, classical, theater and the avant-garde. Automatic Pilot played their hits Killer Purses and Sit on My Face at the Kabuki, Fabulous Follies, Palms, I-Beam, Valencia Rose and the Castro Street Fair, venturing as far as the Chute II Bar in Reno. They shared bills with SFGMC, Silvertone with Chris Isaak, Jane Dornacker, Margo Crossman and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and made a number of studio recordings. In 1983, vocalist Tony Kramedas set out to produce an album for major release, with new songs and arrangements featuring some of the Bay Area's best studio musicians. These tracks have a decidedly more 80's, electric sound. Derelict in My Doorway, was played on the nationally syndicated Dr. Demento radio show. Six songs were completed as Tony's health began to fail. The album was unfinished when Tony died in 1985. Five other Automatic Pilot members have died since. The master tapes sat on the shelf until they were digitized in 2002, and published on the official Automatic Pilot website (www.automaticpilot.org) along with photos, posters, complete lyrics and detailed historical documentation. Two compact discs were produced in 2005: Back from the Dead - the very best of Automatic Pilot's studio works, and Live On Broadway - the historic 1982 concert at San Francisco's On Broadway Theater.
Product Description
Of their 1980 debut at a fundraiser for the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus National Tour, a critic wrote: It's a punk type rock group called Automatic Pilot. They were talented for that genre, but one of their numbers was extremely tasteless, and belonged on Broadway (San Francisco's Broadway) and not at the elegant Japan Center Theater. On September 1, 1982 the On Broadway Theater presented Automatic Pilot in Doughnut Shop Dream: An Evening of Panthers. That historic week, San Francisco was also host to Gay Games I (prohibited at the last moment from using the name Olympics) and the West Coast Choral Festival, the first such gathering of what would soon grow into the international GALA Choruses. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence opened with an act that literally went down in notoriety. Next was Margo Crossman, Automatic Pilot's costumer and choreographer, who regularly worked on Broadway as a dancer, performance artists and stripper. Here she did all three. Finally, Automatic Pilot took the stage and gave their definitive performance, summing up two years at the bleeding edge of the nascent gay musical movement. They would soon venture in new directions, as heard on the bonus songs recorded in rehearsal shortly after, and a series of studio recordings now available on the compact disc Back from the Dead. This is a live recording. There are no edits (except between songs) and no overdubs.
%method>