Wayne County & The Back Street Boys – Max’s Kansas City 1976

11th May 2022 · 1970s, 1976, Music, Punk

Punk’s only trans performer, Wayne County – later Jayne County – made his/her first appearance with Max’s Kansas City.

Like most of my teenage contemporaries in 1976, my first taste of the underground music scene gestating in downtown New York was the Max’s Kansas City compilation album recorded the previous year.

This song made the perfect introduction, introducing us to the scene with a who’s who of the principal players (Patti Smith, Dee Dee Ramone et al).

Wayne County was a foul-mouthed drag queen who was the house DJ at Max’s and performed there with a ramshackle band of rockers called The Back Street Boys.

This, the album’s titular song was released in 1975 on an EP called New York New Wave – arguably the first recorded example of what would become punk.

One of the movement’s more outrageous characters, and its only trans performer, Wayne adopted an X-rated persona modelled on the Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis, whom he met when Curtis invited him to act in Warhol’s production of his play Femme Fatale, starring Patti Smith.

Wayne went on to appear in another Warhol production, Pork, and wrote and starred in a stage show called World – Birth Of A Nation (The Castration Of Man).

Signed bo Bowie’s management, MainMan, he created a musical stage production called Wayne At The Trucks which supposedly inspired Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour and included a song, Queenage Baby, that is allegedly the prototype for Rebel Rebel.

This 1975 recording was with The Back Street Boys but by 1976 Wayne had moved to London and soon became a fixture on the emerging punk circuit with a new group, The Electric Chairs, though he sometimes performed with Sting and Andy Summers as his backing musicians, allowing them to support him with their own band, The Police.

One of Wayne’s first recordings after moving to London, the live favourite Fuck Off (sample lyric: “If you don’t want to fuck me baby, baby fuck off”), is driven by a bluesy boogie-woogie piano played by a teenage Jools Holland – his first studio work.

The Electric Chairs played a revved-up rock’n’roll – part glam rock, part metal, and a little bit punk – inspired equally by The New York Dolls, Alice Cooper and The Stooges, but the main attraction was Wayne.

Soon to re-emerge in 1980 as Jayne, her repertoire was filled with filthy titles like Toilet Love, Cream In My Jeans, Fucked By The Devil and Man Enough To Be A Woman – also the title of her autobiography.