I originally knew Missing Persons from their hit Walking in LA. I already recognized it as a great new wave song with the right balance of quirk, hooks and lyrical finesse. But I had only scratched the surface: they were at the nexus of a lot of interesting movements. Despite not being chart darlings (did their precision and angular melodies trap them in the no-man’s land between punk and pop?), their prowess and presence give them well-deserved cult status. Missing Persons had the LA-style neon splash. But more importantly, they were what happened when Frank Zappa’s most disciplined musicians collided with the early-MTV art scene and ended up influencing Duran Duran from across the Atlantic.
What’s interesting about the Missing Persons is the pipeline they’re involved in. Lead Guitarist Warren Cucurrullo, bass guitarist Patrick O’Hearn and drummer Terry Bozzio were all part of Frank Zappa’s backing band. Now Zappa had a bizarre musical style on the surface. However, his craftsmanship and complexity of his songs meant he actually had high demands of his band. So when the three split off to form Missing Persons, their M-O was exceptionally tight musicianship, standing out even more when juxtaposed with new wave DIYers like the B-52s.
An example is Destination Unknown - sure it’s a pop song, but the delicate sheen of the chorus and especially the intro is technically difficult. Bozzio’s keeps up: her staccato vocals are in lock step with the melody, especially in the refrain. Words is another highlight: Terry Bozzio’s virtuoso drum timing (one-sixteenth hi-hats, anyone?) on that rivals that of a drum machine while preserving the natural sound. And you need Zappa-level precision to play Noticeable One live without it falling apart (watch out for that syncopated riff in the intro - it’s a doozy!).
Even their deep cuts reveal this training. US Drag staggers between time feels with a confidence no typical club band could pull off, and Bad Streets locks its rhythm section into a metallic pulse that feels more engineered than improvised. This was new wave played with a conservatory mindset: Zappa discipline hidden inside candy-colored circuitry
Singer Dale Bozzio is the frontwoman for the band - her quirky vocal style is a bit like Cyndi Lauper’s, but tighter to reflect the Missing Person’s music. As a female trailblazer she’s sometimes ignored for Debbie Harry or Annie Lennox, but she’s also important in the movement.
She’s a great example of LA Futurism: coming out of the late-’70s LA club and performance-art circuit, where hybrid fashion/music/body-movement pieces were en vogue. Her early work mixed mannequin-like poses, geometric makeup, and futurist costuming. She also absorbed Zappa’s absurdist skits, character voices, costume bits, and meta-commentary. But in a feminist twist - she transformed these from comedy bits to a persona in the vein of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust - in this case, half-robot, half-glam alien. What made Dale so magnetic is that she treated persona not as decoration but as an extension of the music itself. Her clipped phrases, sudden squeaks, and mannequin-still poses were all pieces of the same conceptual puzzle: a woman performing alienation in an era obsessed with surface-level glamour.
She then parlayed all of this into her charismatic Missing Persons stage persona as seen on tour and on MTV. Her neon-mannequin (thanks to plexi-glass bra, day-glo aesthetic and mannerisms) persona distinguishes herself from the other new wave feminists icons. The sci-fi pop look popularized with MTV? That’s Dale. And when you hear her breathy, mechanical delivery on songs like Destination Unknown, it deliberately brings you back to her persona. She delivers words like a teletype printer in, of all songs, Words. And if you like Gwen Stefani’s signature vocal quirks in songs like No Doubt’s Just a Girl, that’s just as much as nod to Bozzio as it is to Lauper.
The Missing Persons complemented the burgeoning Los Angeles new wave scene nicely, carving out their niche. Their anxious, futurist, perfectionist and angular stylings distinguished themselves. The Go-Gos had the LA punk-pop down pat - look at the mantra-like guitar and edgy enthusiasm of We Got the Beat compared to the Cucurullo’s guitar detours and the alienating vocals and lyrics of Walking in LA. Meanwhile the Motels had noir, melancholy and romantic stylings, as highlighted in Only the Lonely, where Missing Persons personified the opposite: take the anxious paranoia of Windows. Berlin had the German-style smooth and sleek synths and vocals (appropriately given their name) as highlighted in The Metro. Missing Persons, by contrast, occupied the jittery intersection between art-rock and urban anxiety. Another example is Missing Persons also had a back-and-forth sounding melody in Mental Hopscotch, but it’s guitar-and-drum forward and is chock full of Dale Bozzio vocal turns. Even a relatively straightforward track like Walking in LA comes wrapped in social satire and rhythmic unease, turning the city’s sprawl into a punchline and an existential crisis at once. Where others romanticized Los Angeles, Missing Persons dissected it. Finally, the rootsy power-pop leanings of Gary Myrick (as heard in She Talks in Stereo) takes you back, while Missing Persons propels you into the future with songs like their cover of the Doors’ Hello, I Love You (a much different sound while preserving Jim Morrison’s emotionless vocals, better than Adam Ant’s version).
And believe it or not (I didn’t at first), Duran Duran is influenced by proxy by Zappa! Actually, what led me to Missing Persons (beyond Walking in LA) was that, while feasting on Duran Duran (around 1997’s Medazzaland), I realized their guitarist Cuccurullo was in it previously.
While Warren lobbied hard to be Andy Taylor’s replacement in Duran Duran, they were also excited to have him: they had expressed admiration for highly competent American guitar work. Simon LeBon quickly praised his versatility and creativity, all honed under Missing Persons and Zappa.
So when you hear the lead guitar on the Notorious through Pop Trash albums, that’s the Missing Persons/Zappa pipeline in action. Indeed, the tight guitar solo on Ordinary World and his tour de force on the B-side of Big Thing (especially the instrumental Lake Shore Driving) were all things he was doing in Missing Persons. And remember Warren’s glisses (making his guitar sound like a whale call) in Duran Duran’s Palomino? And the rhythmic snap that characterizes Violence of Summer? Those tricks were old hat for Cuccurullo - having done them in Missing Persons’ Noticeable One and others.
His arrival also pushed Duran Duran toward a more textural, art-rock sensibility in the early ’90s: songs like Buried in the Sand and Michael You’ve Got a Lot to Answer For use atmospheric guitar sweeps that trace directly back to his earlier LA experiments. Warren didn’t just join the band - he subtly rerouted its sonic DNA.
Now Missing Persons may never have dominated the charts, but their impact echoes across new wave and beyond: Zappa’s rigor, Dale Bozzio’s neon futurism, and Warren Cuccurullo’s textural guitar work all collided to create something too strange - and too sophisticated - to fit tidy radio boxes. They stood apart from their LA peers while quietly shaping the sound of later MTV giants. Revisited today, these songs feel less like artifacts and more like dispatches from a future pop was still learning to imagine.
