missing persons

from http://regenerationtour.com:

Missing Persons is a New Wave and electronic pop rock band founded in 1980 in Los Angeles by guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, vocalist Dale Bozzio, and drummer Terry Bozzio. They went on to add bassist Patrick O'Hearn and keyboardist Chuck Wild. Dale's quirky voice and heavy makeup made the band a favorite on MTV in the early 1980s.
Dale and Terry Bozzio met and married while working with Frank Zappa, and Cuccurullo encountered the pair while contributing to the Zappa album Joe's Garage. O'Hearn was also a former member of Zappa's touring band.

In 1980 the band made its first record, a 4-song EP entitled Missing Persons, in Zappa's brand-new Utility Muffin Research Kitchen studios; the recording was financed by Cuccurullo's father. The band toured, promoted the EP, appeared in the movie Lunch Wagon, and became a must-see band among the Los Angeles live music crowd. "Mental Hopscotch" was a #1 record on local radio station KROQ, and the self-promoted EP sold 7,000 copies.
Two years of hard work led up to a signing with Capitol Records in 1982. With label support, the re-released EP sold another 250,000 units, and the new album Spring Session M (an anagram of "Missing Persons") went gold.
The singles "Mental Hopscotch", "Destination Unknown," "Words," "Walking in L.A.," and "Windows" met with varying success, especially in the local markets of Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. The visual effects used in the music video for "Words" were unusual for the time, making it popular on the fledgling cable TV channel MTV.
In June 1986, during a promotional tour, increasing tensions between Terry and Dale Bozzio led to the end of the tour, the couple's marriage, and the band.
Dale's solo album Riot In English was released on January 1, 1988 on Prince's Paisley Park Records. The lead single "Simon Simon" was a Top 40 dance hit and was also a crossover hit in Europe.

Since the early 1990s, Dale Bozzio has toured with her own hired band (including keyboardist Ron Poster, jazz pianist and organist for the Boston Bruins home hockey arena), using the name "Missing Persons" and performing Missing Persons songs.
In June 2005, this version of Missing Persons appeared on week five of the NBC show Hit Me Baby One More Time. They performed "Words" and a cover of the Kylie Minogue dance track, "Can't Get You Out of My Head". The winner of the show (original airdate June 30, 2005) was PM Dawn.
Following controversy over Bozzio's use of the "Missing Persons" band name and her former managers' misleading use of photographs of original band members when advertising her shows, she now tours under the name "Missing Persons Featuring Dale Bozzio."
Dale's newest album "New Wave Sessions" was released on October 23, 2007 on compact disc by Cleopatra Records. New versions of '80s classics "Words", "Destination Unknown", "Funkytown", "Der Kommissar", "Turning Japanese", "I Know What Boys Like", and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" are included.

June 2011, Dale Bozzio and Warren Cuccurullo reformed Missing Persons and did a small tour.

discography

semi-official 'radio show' albums

 

missing persons: live in new york 1981     (2017, cd, ??, air cuts)

concerts

Dale Bozzio
Warren Cuccurullo

• 2011/06/04 concert 'Fremont Street Experience', Las Vegas
• 2011/06/10 concert 'Dillon's Roadhouse', Palm Springs
• 2011/06/11 concert 'The Can', Garden Grove
• 2011/06/17 concert 'Red Devil Lounge', San Francisco
• 2011/06/24 concert 'Boyles Tavern', Pasadena
• 2011/06/25 concert 'Viper Room', W. Hollywood
• 2011/07/15 concert 'The Canyon', Scottsdale
• 2011/07/16 concert 'The Canyon', Scottsdale
• 2011/08/20 concert 'Monte De Oro Winery', Temecula

from alt.fan.frank-zappa / Hoodini
2007 01 05

Missing Persons finds new life
By Christopher John Treacy
Friday, January 5, 2007
http://theedge.bostonherald.com/musicNews/view.bg?articleid=175363

It took a 52-foot fall from a window in Los Angeles to seal Dale Bozzio's fate as lead singer of the '80s new wave rock band Missing Persons.

That and a series of bizarre encounters with Hugh Hefner and Frank Zappa.

     "It's a miracle I lived through it. I landed on pavement," the Somerville native said of her accident, speaking from the New Hampshire farmhouse she inherited. Bozzio, now 51 and a mother of two, brings the current Missing Persons lineup to the Middle East in Cambridge tomorrow.

     "I was blind for an entire year afterwards," Bozzio said. "When my sight returned I had to relearn how to walk."

     Locked in the confines of her mind and heavily medicated, she toyed with poetry. Some of it would become lyrics for Missing Persons' Frank Zappa-funded 1982 debut, "Spring Session M."

     Bozzio's eye-popping outfits of transparent, multicolored plastic and her teased fluorescent hair put the videos for "Words," "Destination Unknown" and "Mental Hopscotch" in heavy rotation on MTV. But the story really began a decade earlier in 1971, when Bozzio had better luck crawling through a window at the old Boston Music Hall to get backstage during Zappa's sold-out "200 Motels" show.

     "I'd hoped a friend working at the Music Hall could get us in," she recalled, "but we arrived late and had to sneak up the fire escape and into a window to get backstage. I was only 16. It was quite a sight, me in glittered high heels climbing the wrought-iron stairs."

     Zappa appreciated the girls' determination. He asked them out to eat and later invited them to his hotel room. Bozzio passed on the hotel visit, but the impression she made on the Mothers of Invention mastermind would pay off down the road. Meanwhile, she pursued modeling.

     "I worked at Boston's Playboy Club and was named Bunny of the Year in 1975 under the name Toni Consalvi," Bozzio said. "I was invited out to the Hefner mansion. This was a tremendous opportunity. If Hugh liked me enough I might've gotten to live there, which is what I was banking on when I made the trip in '76."

     But she hadn't planned on an intimate audition.

     "Hefner stood at the top of the stairs in his bathrobe and asked me to come up, but I didn't think that was wise," Bozzio said. "So I asked him to please come down and talk to me. When he wouldn't budge, I turned and walked out the door."

     With no dough and no mansion address, Bozzio was up the creek sans paddle, but running into Zappa again proved serendipitous. A phone call to her only L.A. friend, a musician, landed her at a recording studio where Zappa happened to be working. Barging in on him a second time resulted in a mentoring relationship that lasted a decade. It's also how she met her future husband and Missing Persons band mate, Terry Bozzio, then drumming in Zappa's band. So began the romance that sparked Missing Persons' pop success in the early '80s - a success that came only after Bozzio's recovery from her 52-foot plunge. But the band's reign was woefully short-lived. When the Bozzios' marriage dissolved in 1986, so did Missing Persons. Now Terry tours with the Zappa on Zappa tribute show, while Dale periodically revamps Missing Persons with a shifting lineup of longtime friends.

     Does she miss the fleeting fame she enjoyed more than 20 years ago? Or hope to recapture it?

     "I firmly believe that if you dwell on yesterday and tomorrow, you can't live in today," Bozzio said. "You need to find strength to handle life as it happens. I've learned not to expect anything, and that way I'm never disappointed."

     Missing Persons, tomorrow night at the Middle East, Cambridge.