A Short History of the Cosmopolitans

CD Liner Notes by Parke Puterbaugh

The Cosmopolitans were a nifty little dance troupe-turned-rock combo that caught the fancy of swinging New Yorkers at the height of the punk/New Wave era. As the Seventies bled into the Eighties, the Cosmopolitans' delightfully absurd and danceable party-rock creations inspired normally sedentary, shoe-gazing clubgoers to move their two left feet to the beat. Old Sixties dance steps like the Frug, the Jerk and the Swim were reborn, and hot new Eighties inventions like the “dB Drop” and the “Fleshtone Flank Step” – consult “Dancin' Lesson” for further elaboration – were brought to the floors of the hippest downtown rock clubs, including CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, Irving Plaza, Club 57, the Ritz, the Peppermint Lounge and Tier Three. The group also ventured uptown (Hurrah) and over the river (Maxwell's, in Hoboken). In the anything-goes Eighties, these high-stepping terpsichoreans helped many a young man and woman make a splash at their next New Wave cotillion.

The Cosmopolitans are best-remembered for cutting one of the most infectious singles of the era: “(How to Keep Your) Husband Happy” b/w “Wild Moose Party” and the aforementioned “Dancin' Lesson.” The first two songs got heavy airplay on New York's most popular rock (WNEW) and disco (WBLS) stations, as well as college radio. You might flip on WNEW and hear one of George Thorogood's rocking boogies segueing into “Wild Moose Party” segueing into some classic-rock perennial or New Wave nugget. It was a good time for music in New York: a lot of disparate scenes were happening at once, the listening audience – along with radio programmers and club bookers – was generally open-minded, and the various camps hadn't yet hardened into mutual intolerance. Fun was not a dirty word, and club rats would dance to “Wild Moose Party” without hesitation or inhibition. In fact, the Cosmopolitans would hold dance competitions to “Moose,” decided by audience applause, with the winner getting a six-pack of Moosehead beer. As Lou Reed sang, “Those were different times.”

If the Kingsmen had been Queens, if the Swingin' Medallions had been sorority sisters instead of frat boys, and if all of them had a schooled background in modern dance, then you might have some idea of the devilishly unique space the Cosmopolitans occupied. Think Shangri-La's meet Fleshtones, if you can wrap your mind around such a concept. The Cosmopolitans simultaneously referenced Sixties girl-group pop and party music; the DIY spirit of late-Seventies punk and power pop; the angular, driving minimalism of early-Eighties New Wave; and a timeless, well-cultivated sense of the absurd. And during their brief lifespan as a band, people got it.

Stripped to its essences, the Cosmopolitans were Jamie K. Sims and Nel Moore. Both sang, Jamie played keyboards (most often an Acetone organ), and Nel blew a wicked harmonica. There was a third Cosmo girl in the early days (Leslie Levinson) and a replacement for Nel at the tail end (Judy Monteleone, wife of the Fleshtones' Keith Streng). Various musicians passed through the Cosmopolitans, but the most stable lineup found Jamie and Nel augmented by drummer Evan “Funk” Davies, guitarist David Itch and keyboardist Jeff Dedrick. The Cosmopolitans had no bass player, but numerous drummers can claim to have kept the beat. They include Mitch Easter (of Let's Active), dB's Will Rigby and Peter Holsapple, Robert Crenshaw, Ted Lyons, Neil Winograd, the Individuals' Doug Wygal, and the guy who played George Harrison in Beatlemania. “It was like Spinal Tap: you'd turn around and there was another drummer,” laughs Jamie. “Evan just refused to explode.”

It all started at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Jamie majored in music and founded a small, offbeat dance/theater company, the North Carolina Progressive Dance Troop [sic]. Nel also attended UNC, studying dance while majoring in business. Oddly, the two didn't meet until both had moved to New York, where Nel joined Jamie's renamed Cosmopolitan Dance Troop. The “troop” would rehearse at the dB's' practice space, often bumping into a pre-fame Madonna en route to rehearsals in the same building with her own band, the Breakfast Club. The seeds for the Cosmopolitans' kooky songs and stage demeanor were sewn during the dance troupe days. “We did some serious things,” Jamie recalls, “but I always thought of us as more of a Saturday Night Live version of a dance company.”

Jamie knew she'd found the ideal collaborator in Nel during rehearsals for White Souled Loafers, one of her dance pieces. Set to songs by the Supremes and other songs of that era, White Souled Loafers told the story of a high-school girl whose crush on a guy went unnoticed. “During the slow dance, I had Nel and another guy (who wore two different plaids) rolling around on the floor together in their teenage attire,” Jamie recalls. “And I figured if she would do that, she would do anything.”

For one project, the dancers entertained municipal workers outside New York City Hall during lunch hour with Rockin' Doctors, a piece for which they donned health-care worker's uniforms and spacemen's helmets. Afterward, still in costume, they handed out fliers on the New York subway for upcoming performances. Given such scenarios, playing and singing wacky songs at downtown rock clubs was no problem whatsoever.

“The reason we could be so wild is that we didn't come from a musical perspective,” Nel explains. “We did modern dance, and there were all kinds of crazy things you'd do onstage. So we didn't look at it like, Oh, I'm a guitar player and I've gotta stand here and look cool.' There was nothing holding us back. We didn't think twice about throwing around a baton or doing these wild cheerleader jumps.”

Before they became a band, the Cosmopolitan Dance Troop would often join the dB's and Fleshtones onstage, gyrating atop pianos and all over the stage like the go-go dancers on such rollicking Sixties rock shows as Shindig and Hullabaloo. They even gave Sixties-style dancing lessons at Club 57. A turning point came when a bunch of musical acts – including the dB's, Fleshtones and Bobby “Boris” Pickett (of “Monster Mash” fame) – held a benefit for the dance company at CBGB's. At the end of the night, they did one of their own dance-pop numbers, and the crowd loved them.

”I thought to myself, We've just been doing this in the wrong places,' because the dance world did not love us,” says Jamie. In short order, the Cosmopolitan Dance Troop morphed into the Cosmopolitans, a female-fronted retro-rock combo who sang and danced. If they were going to change venues from dance spaces to rock clubs, Jamie realized they'd need a demo tape to send prospective bookers, so in August 1980 she and Nel trekked down to Mitch Easter's Drive-In studio (in Winston-Salem, NC) to cut three of Jamie's newest songs. It was a bare-bones affair, with vocals and instruments by Jamie, Nel and Mitch.

At the time, there was no plan to release a record. The tape was just a calling card to land club bookings. But then Alan Betrock – a noted New York collector, journalist and producer – heard the tape and issued the songs as a single on Shake Records, a fledgling tastemaker label that also put out several early dB's sides. The Cosmopolitans' tunes were irresistible and the impact immediate. It made waves on the New York scene and also washed ashore in such places as Florida, London and South America. In hindsight, this little record with the big hole looks like one of the one more significant releases of the New Wave era.

It can be argued that “(How to Keep Your) Husband Happy” broke ground on a few fronts. Foreshadowing the Eighties aerobics craze, Jamie wrote the song after years of working out to her mother's late-Fifties exercise record: How to Keep Your Husband Happy, by Debbie Drake. “Look Slim! Keep Trim!” read the album cover, and Debbie further advised, “Fighting against weight is one of the surest ways of fighting for a husband's continued love and getting it!” It was also a proto-rap song – or at least a spoken-word number taken at a manic clip well before rap and hip-hop came along. “We were doing a rap,” Nel contends, “even though we were white girls with Southern accents.” On another level, “Husband Happy” implicitly mocked the fairer sex's traditional role in American society. On the single's picture sleeve, a miniskirted Jamie is shown filing her nails while Nel curls her hair.

Then there's “Wild Moose Party,” a dance-floor raveup inspired by Jamie's cat, who was born Fritz but renamed Moose when he kept growing. Moose was a big, black furball who looked like he was dancing when he stretched out on his back with his paws in the air. He was a formidable feline. “Moose weighed about 22 pounds, but he wasn't really fat,” says Jamie. “He was just real long. It was like holding a chimp. One day when this police action happened in my apartment building, a detective came to the door to question me. When he saw Moose, he jumped back, asked if Moose was really a cat, then decided to stay out in the hallway.”

“He was gentle,” Nel remembers, “but if he got scared, he was one of those big cats that could hurt you. I remember one time I was holding him and he just dug in and it was like, whoa.”

Moose's sister – born Papaya, later renamed Baby Wee – also makes an appearance in “Wild Moose Party.” Cats figure greatly in the Cosmopolitans' cosmology. Jamie's first band, dating back to the psychedelic era, was called Greymalkin, which was the name of a grey cat who acted as the familiar to the Three Witches in the first act of Shakespeare's Macbeth. “Wooly Bully,” a frat-rock classic and staple of the Cosmopolitans' live shows, was also about a cat. For “Wooly Bully,” Jamie and Nel would don their most unforgettable costumes: enormous green furs that made them look like Neanderthal party animals.

This compilation collects not only all three sides from the Cosmopolitans' classic out-of-print single from 1980 but also a B-side (”Chevy Baby”) that appeared in Britain and a raft of previously unreleased studio and live material. Back in the day, Jamie would incredulously comb the New York Post, and a few of the tabloid's hard-to-believe stories inspired songs. The theatrical “Chevy Baby” is a veritable radio play that comically spins the real-life story of a couple who traded their baby for a Corvette. Sung in a deadpan monotone like a Fifties-style torch song, “Doug” relates the true tale of a woman who kept her late husband's remains in their Upper East Side apartment. Her love remained constant even as his body decomposed.

Such serio-comic studies of what Frank Zappa called “specimen behavior” dot the Cosmopolitans' repertoire. Some listeners may correctly detect similarities between the Cosmopolitans and the B-52's, party bands cut from the same bizarro-world Southern mold. But the Cosmopolitans took it a step further. “We touched on some of the same stuff,” Jamie allows, “but I think we were more demented.” On the evidence of “Chevy Baby,” “Doug” and “Psychic Joan” – a deranged psych-pop number about “the most psychic person I've ever met,” according to Jamie it's hard to argue the point.

Had the Cosmopolitans stayed together and gotten a few breaks, they might have broken through to the same mass audience that embraced the B-52's, the Go-Go's and others on that playful New Wave tip. But instead of crying over spilt milk, all of you hepcats and kittens now have the chance to discover (or rediscover) a band that inspired beaucoups of jaded New Yorkers to get off their backsides and onto the dance floor during some memorably fun years.

“I look at this album as a kind of time capsule of the New York club scene in the early Eighties,” says Jamie.

“It was a happy time,” adds Nel. “The whole club scene was hedonistic in a good way. People were doing stuff with a lot of energy, wearing outrageous clothes and having a great time.”

Now it's your turn. Pull back the rug, turn up the stereo and have a Wild Moose Party.

— Parke Puterbaugh