They’re back!
THE COCKETTES are “cumming” back to NYC!

JOE’S PUB AT THE PUBLIC THEATER, Saturday, Sept 9 @ 9:30pm, 425 Lafayette St, New York

The Cockettes were an avant garde psychedelic hippie theater group founded by Hibiscus (George Edgerly Harris III) in 1969. Their brand of theater was influenced by The Living Theater, John Vaccaro’s Play House of the Ridiculous, the films of Jack Smith and the LSD ethos of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. The troupe performed all original material, staging musicals with original songs inspired by classic Hollywood movie musicals.  We had a wonderful chat with founding member and performer, Scrumbly.

Born in California, this unique artist kept reinventing himself.  He settled upon being a “shockingly” good performer.  “I emerged from my good So-Cal Mormon upbringing, newly awakened and searching various belief systems to find acceptance for being who I am, energized to call attention to the Big Lies, as a folk-singing beat poet, then hippie, then androgynous Cockette. Since then, I’ve remained a musician and performer, composer of songs that purposely sound like they were written in the past, still delighting in shocking those who would call me wild or weird.”

The Cockettes are a wildly ambitious act comprised of likeminded friends that have been around for over 50 years.  “Late in 1969, Hibiscus, a musical flowerchild from a New York theatrical family, rounded up some friends who had the ‘spirit’ as he saw it, and we did a raucous kick-line at the Midnight Movies at the Palace Theater in San Francisco’s North Beach district. The audience went ballistic and soon we were doing full-out shows with lavish cardboard sets and amazingly creative thrift-store-sourced costumes. We became the Beatles of the San Francisco queer and avant-garde tribes, drawing huge, overflowing houses every show where the audience was as much a part of the fun as the under-rehearsed shows. We were anti-traditional theater, kids who foreshadowed the punk surge. As a troupe, we were young men, mostly in drag, but not trying to ‘pass’ as women, and women who were really doing the same over-the-top drag as the men. The press often referred to what we did as ‘gender role confusion’. Fame brought us to New York where we were marketed to the old-school Broadway first-nighters, who were more than shocked and insulted at our lack of professionalism, leaving us to please the audiences that found us and ‘got’ us after opening night. Then back home to complete our 2 ½ year run about 8 months later. Repercussions of the Cockettes were felt in the art, fashion and music worlds for several decades, and interest was renewed by the award-winning 2002 doc, “The Cockettes”, by David Weismann and Bill Weber. A few years after, I started reviving our shows with Thrillpeddlers’ director Russell Blackwood for nearly a decade and continuing the genre with alumna from those shows and more like-minded performer friends.”

This unique performance troupe sought inspiration from multiple sources that included big doses of camp.  “Our inspirations are thirties movie musicals, camp elements of classics like “The Women” and forties, art deco, the Rolling Stones and Tina Turner, fifties camp, and finally, John Waters and Divine, who joined in with us toward the end.”

With the underground movement walking hand in hand with the off-off Broadway movement, it makes The Cockettes and Scrumbly a part of history!  Scrumbly weighs in on that notion.  “I never felt much about being a part of history other than ‘What else would I have done?’ I suppose there is a certain satisfaction in doing what you feel you were made to do and letting the audacity of that affect history somehow. The Butterfly Effect.”

Every performer faces obstacles.  Here are some of the obstacles faced by The Cockettes during their artistic journey.  “Some people just don’t appreciate the thread of punk attitude that pervades our shows. We will never be mainstream and those who are successful swimmers in that stream resent the attention we garner. I never mean to put down someone who works hard and dedicates themself to refining their art. What we do is refined in another way, in a way of bringing performing back as a tribal ritual where everyone in the room is involved.” 

Scrumbly learned some beautiful things about himself while being on the path of a performer.  His fellow artists are lucky to have him around.  “That all I can do is all I can do. That I love people and I love helping to bring out their talent and making it shine.”

Scrumbly will continue to fill this world with compelling art.  His brain is on overdrive crafting future shows and music.  A maniacal ventriloquist from Vaudeville?  “Count me in!  I’m interested in writing in my style (genre-infused pastiche) doing musicals that bend towards opera, moving the plot along with many non-repeating melodies, setting dialogue to music, adding rhymes here and there at the most. I have a great project on the cooker with Cab Covay about a Vaudeville ventriloquist who goes maniacal”. 

“And I hope to retire soon. Maybe by the time I’m 90. Who knows?”