My Kind of Musical Outsiders -- Garbo
I was excited to move from a factory town to a college town in 1976, one where the university was well-known for its music program. Culture!! From perhaps 1977 to 1981 or so, I went to any number or art openings, plays, readings, and concerts.
As soon as I got there, I went looking for outsider music, though I wouldn't have used that term. All my rocker friends from high school liked REO Speedwagon, and my middle-class friends liked The Mamas and the Papas. I wanted someone else playing something else. Maybe someone a bit edgy, like The Queen of Just Intonation, accordionist Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros recorded strange, beautiful, fascinating music and she spent much of her life sorting out what was simply hearing from what she called Deep Listening.
It was tough to find what I craved, even in a small place packed with talented people, but it was easy to find what I didn't want. And it took me a while to adjust to the fact that almost all of the art music and performance stuff was not only angry, but randomly angry.
I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to being furious, but I've always been angry at specific people or groups or governmental administration and I knew what exactly I was so very mad about.
But I encountered a lot of creative people who thought free-form expression of general disgust and outrage was the highest form of art, and I found myself very tired of it. Over-blowing a saxophone reed till many audience members lost the upper registers of their hearing was not actual music, just auditory abuse. The super-hyper raucus din was a poor excuse for actual free jazz. Free jazz could be startling at times, or discordant, or confusing, but wasn't meant to kill you dead as punishment for having paid the cover charge and sat down in a chair facing the stage.
Here are a couple of true talents: free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, with James "Blood" Ullmer (famous for his same-note guitar tuning).
To my relief, culture moved from violent (and often misogynistic) noise to focused violence and rage -- punk, which at least I could understand (no jobs, man). And then in short order we went on to New Wave, where I felt creative people were -- um, very direct -- in rejecting cultural norms but performers knew what they were angry, frightened, or worried about. In "O Superman," performance artist Laurie Anderson sang specifically about our country's unjust power built on petrochemicals (that is, fossil fuels) and sales of military arms overseas:
One of the best things about New Wave, to my mind, was the use of new tech. For example, synthesizers were no longer the huge circuit boxes used by composer / performer Wendy Carlos (an outsider herself) to create "Switched-On Bach." Keyboards could be programmed to loop bits of music or distort sounds. And some people were beginning to use non-musical items to create sounds for their mixes. Laurie Anderson did "O Superman" as though it was recorded on an answering machine, the kind with a tape in it which beeped when you pressed a button to hear who'd called you.
The late, great Paul Sturm, founder of Turnstyle Media, used a recording and a telephone for one of his most approachable pieces of performance art, the much-beloved "Times Are Bad," from the LP "Long Distance." He would talk to himself, via phone, filling in live dialogue and then waiting for the pre-recorded responses, till both Pauls are talking over each other.
"Times Are Bad" ends on a comically-angry note, with Paul slamming down the receiver after yelling "And they ain't getting any better!!" But he was wasn't yelling at us, he was yelling for us. You can hear the audience's delighted response.
When I saw Paul doing "Times Are Bad" at the Black Box Theatre, he looked a bit like, oh I don't know -- Tommy Chong, maybe. I don't know who did the caricature of him on the album insert for "Long Distance" -- maybe Paul himself?
As the years went by, Paul looked less like half of Cheech & Chong and (judging from this photo from the Indiana Daily Student) more like a good-guy character on "Law and Order." :)
During this part of his life, Paul had a long woodsy commute to work, and on the album "The Diplomat's Shadow," he composed and (with the help of "Paul Sturm's Army") perfomed a couple of tracks about the distress of looking out the windshield and seeing deer, hit while trying to cross the road, and now lying, unnoticed, along the gravel burm. The compositions express Paul's dismay and confusion. He doesn't know what to make of a "civilized" and "advanced" culture which has supplanted the Native Americans who tracked deer on foot. Almost ever day in the autumn, modern humans chose to destroy a valuable, sacred creature and then leave its meat and hide to decay.
"The Diplomat's Shadow," tracks 5 and 8:
In the last (and most creative) era of his life, Paul began to resemble actor Wilford Brimly at the time of "Cocoon" to my eye (it's the specs and the silver mustache, I suppose).
In these last precious years, I would occasionally receive bubble mailers which held CD-Rs of Paul's new work (mostly in collaboration with his musical partner Will). Paul knew I was an advocate of his work, and that now and then I would send off a few promo copiesto various community and public radio stations, in the hope that some program director would know magic when they heard it. Paul and Will's stuff wasn't drive-time pop, I know, but perhaps perfect music for a performance/arts slot on a Sunday evening?
As these audio collaborations became more complex and deep, I sometimes didn't understand them. Also, they could be very discordant and off-putting. I found at times that I simply couldn't listen to all of Track 5 if it consisted of eight minutes of Total Weirdness. But I would sample every track when I got a new CD, and I would then email or Facebook message Paul about tracks I liked or thought were cool or intriguing. And I'd put a link to the composition in a Facebook post for others to check out.
Donald Trump's Presidential campaign and (Electoral-College- enabled) win hit Paul hard. The CD "The Hard Work of Angels" contains audio from an anti-Trump protest. I knew this because the included liner notes EXPLAINED. Paul was never about baffling and annoying his listeners. Maybe you'd listen and you wouldn't fully understand, of course, but this wasn't the generic hostile art music I encountered in the late 70s. As a listener, I was given enough information to try and figure out what I was hearing.
"The Hard Work of Angels" CD also contains my favorite track: a distorted, overlapped set of spooky robo-calls about insurance and who knows what, with musical accompaniment. That composition, called Symphony No. 4, Part 3 appears on Paul's tribute website.
Yep, back to phones and phone messaging again! But this really is more than playing with tech sounds. The music behind the looped blips of pre-recorded demands expresses the authoritative-bordering-on-meancing tone of the anonymous voicemails. In the same way Paul expressed our shared anger for me at the end of "Times Are Bad," I think he helped me express my natural freak-out feelings that can follow something like the phone prompt "You have -- three -- new -- messages."
Ever-evolving cultural "advancements" leave me weirded out constantly. For example, our local supermarket's P.A. system plays a recording about the store's Covid protocols. This begins with a woman's voice saying softly but firmly "Hello, Shoppers. . ." I mean it when I say this scares the crap out of me every time. It's the same voice that, when friendly and happy, tells me that I can get a delicious roast chicken in the deli department, but in the pandemic protocol version the tone the female robot voice uses for "Hello, Shoppers" is somewhere between the "Halt, Citizen!" which emits from the faulty Robo-Cop after the robot has already shot someone (very Summer of 2020, wouldn't you say?) or the "Fifth Element" announcement that Korban better place his hands in the yellow circles.
Through his work, Paul has given me permission to notice just how VERY MUCH I don't like it when the robot lady at Shaw's says "Hello, Shoppers. . ." And he's also given me permission to work creatively even if other people don't understand or like what I create. Laurie Anderson was famous, Ornette Coleman was famous, but Paul was not famous. He had a whole network of friends, many of whom he made music with, but you have to be a geek to know who Paul was or the work he did. That was true his whole life, and yet he continued to compose, conduct, perform, and record. He's been my mentor in that regard. Bless his spirit.
NOTE 2: This week I discovered that there is a beat-box version of Paul's "Times Are Bad"! You can find it here.
Next week: Someone whose name you might not know
Garbo
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