Before his death in 1982, the producer and musician Patrick Cowley was best known for electronic disco productions that defined San Francisco’s gay hi-NRG scene. He was one of the first entertainers with national impact (if not the first) to die of AIDS (his “Menergy” and “Megatron Man” hit the top of Billboard’s club chart in 1981). The party line is that his “career began to rise as his health failed him” (words cribbed from his Bay Area Reporter obit), and the music he made in his final year had a starry slickness to it suggesting even better things to come. The last song he cut with Sylvester, “Do You Wanna Funk?,” would go on to become his most widely known, somewhat ironically, after its inclusion in 1983’s Trading Places. That movie was a vehicle for Eddie Murphy, who told virulently homophobic jokes in his standup at the time; his landmark special Delirious, from the same year, opens with an extended bit about “faggots.” In the ’80s, Murphy was a mainstream icon; Cowley was an all-but-forgotten cult figure. The disparity in the cultural volume of their voices is a small illustration of how gay history worked for decades.
Josh Cheon, former member of the queer DJ collective Honey Soundsystem and mastermind behind the reissue label Dark Entries, has worked to flesh out Cowley’s legacy with an archival series of posthumous releases. By now, he has shepherded more releases into the world than were available when Cowley was alive. Cheon’s excavation work has exposed less frenetic, ambient-leaning and weirder sides of Cowley’s music. The three previous solo Cowley releases on Dark Entries largely contained material he composed for gay porn flicks—sleazy synth work whose sheer oddness could easily have been lost on consumers who had, ahem, other things to focus on.
The latest compilation, Mechanical Fantasy Box, was released on what would have been Cowley’s 69th birthday. It spans the years 1973 to 1980 and has less of a conceptual framework than earlier collections, offering 12 previously unreleased odds and ends mostly sourced from 10-inch reels of Cowley’s synth work juvenilia. It’s unclear if Cowley ever intended this material for release, and as such, will likely appeal most to fans hungry for more excavation of Cowley’s legacy. While not without its charm, Mechanical Fantasy Box is the last place those unfamiliar with Cowley’s work should go exploring.
“His early process was often shooting in the dark and seeing what happened,” wrote early Cowley collaborator Maurice Tani, and there is a sense of playfulness to Mechanical Fantasy Box. An arpeggiated squiggle flirts with the right ear in opener “Out of Body (Intro)” before hard-panning to the left as other synths whistle and clunk like a swimmer hitting his head on a boat underwater. Many of the songs contain one, if not several, high-pitched and twitchy sounds that repeat anxiously, but there’s an overall sense of motion here—these aren’t looped compositions, they’re sound designs that mutate over time as parts fade in and out. The best example of this is “Moving Bodies 1,” which starts out dissonant to the point of seeming hostility before, out of nowhere, it all coheres into an unlikely groove.
“Right Here, Right Now” is the Mechanical Fantasy Box cut with the most bodily immediacy, pummeling through its arpeggiated bass line, drums that pop and sizzle, and synths that mimic cosmic phasers. It’s the closest thing to hi-NRG here, though a little too fast and woozy to be a proper dance track. The amusingly titled “Lumberjacks in Heat” has the insistence of a John Carpenter score with the terror-prog energy of Goblin’s Suspiria main theme. It doesn’t sound like sex music to me, but Cowley had a voracious appetite and a vivid imagination; if anyone could make this work in a sexual situation, it was probably him.
I get this sense, mind you, after reading the sex journal Cowley kept (at times sporadically) from 1975 to 1980, which Dark Entries is publishing and releasing in tandem with this new compilation. It’s also called Mechanical Fantasy Box, after Cowley’s somewhat oblique term for San Francisco’s public sex scene during the first wave of mass gay liberation in the United States. In brief, sometimes poetic snapshots of his encounters, Cowley evinces a poignant shamelessness about loving sex with men.
To hear him tell it, Cowley was enthralled by the sex he was having—so many great asses, so many great cocks, and such prowess. “I could never take the fuck I give,” he brags. In addition to the graphic sex, his writings contain sprinklings of romance and momentary ambivalence regarding his fast lifestyle (“The churning, crowded heat of men in a sexual banquet crowds in on me and the forced-by-circumstances emotion-lacking atmosphere drives me away”). There’s also a real sense of the brotherhood that the ritualistic scene could foster for a lapsed Catholic like Cowley: “I’m on my knees worshipping Phallus. All around me are the other similarly engaged. I feel the one-ness of our activity. Silent yet all things understood.”
Some passages are breathtakingly moving coming from someone who had no idea that his life would be taken from him in a few short years. “This is a sweet sex and the feeling flows with the juices. Let the feelings flow. The longer you love, the longer you live,” he wrote in 1976. In ’77, he recalled telling a partner, “I know I’m going to be 50 yrs old and be able to look back and say, ‘I spent what I had to spend and used what was mine to use as it was intended.’” Cowley, who didn’t live to see 33, then wrote, “I loved it up.”
The book is also the rare opportunity to hear directly from Cowley; because interviews with him are not easily accessible online, much of what there is to learn about his life comes only through secondhand accounts of the people who knew and loved him (and many of them, of course, have also since died). To his fans, he’s existed as a myth. The one-two punch of the Mechanical Fantasy Box release and the journals represents a balanced portrait of the way Cowley lived, to hear some tell it. “He really didn’t have much of a social life. It was just music and the baths, music and the baths,” said Cowley collaborator Frank Loverde, quoted in Joshua Gamson’s 2005 biography The Fabulous Sylvester. Though this sounds like quite a social life to me, this quote suggests that Cowley did not compartmentalize his sexuality. It was imbued in his essence.
There’s a legendary story, recounted both in Gamson’s book and a 2016 New York Times piece on the Cowley revival, in which an AIDS-ravaged, wheelchair-bound Cowley looks down from a balcony at the Galleria at a dancefloor filled with revelers at a tribute party thrown in his honor, and says, “Those stupid queens, don’t they know?” And indeed, even a few years ago, Cowley’s accounts of the storm might have read as prelapsarian, even tragic. But in an age when proper access to antiretroviral therapies can keep people from contracting HIV and keep people with HIV healthy, Patrick Cowley’s sex journal is a voraciously readable historical document, a seminal text in every possible manner of the phrase. Over 40 years ago, Cowley was a forbearer of the kind of unapologetic sexual liberation that’s currently throbbing through many queer urban centers. His transmissions have made it all the way to the future to culture that is defined in no small part by the potentially lessening grip of HIV, a culture whose history is now becoming a mandatory component of some states’ public-school curricula. “It seems that life is there for the taking and I took my share,” he wrote in his journal. Even today, Cowley is as insatiable as ever.
Buy: Rough Trade
