Interview with Eric Bachmann of Crooked Fingers

Originally posted on MadeLoud,  November 3, 2008.

In the not-so-distant past, getting signed by a label was a primary goal for most up and coming bands. Like so many aspects of the music business, that ambition has changed in this internet age.

Not only are unsigned bands finding more and more non-label routes to distribution, now even some established artists are stepping away from the traditional label system.

Crooked Fingers front man Eric Bachmann is one of these artists. Bachmann has recorded with some of the most recognizable indie labels around. Earlier Crooked Fingers albums have been released by Merge and WARM, and Bachmann’s 2006 solo album To the Races was handled by Saddle Creek. His previous group, the seminal alt-rock band Archers of Loaf, once turned down a potentially lucrative contract with Warner Brothers-owned Maverick Records to remain one of the flagship artists on the much smaller Alias label.

Two decades on the indie rock circuit have earned Bachmann a devoted cult following and strong working relationships with some of the most respected small labels in the business. Still, he opted to self-releaseCrooked Fingers’ new album Forfeit/Fortune, distributing CDs online, at shows, and in a select few record stores around the country. What inspired Bachmann to take the road less traveled? “It certainly wasn’t the behavior of the labels I’ve been on,” he explains. “They’re great.” But when his manager suggested recording the album without a contract and then shopping it to labels, Bachmann had another thought. “I just hinted at him, ‘Well, I’ve never done this before. I would kind of like to do our own label.’”

After crunching some numbers, the self-release was deemed feasible, but with a few catches. “He says, ‘If we do that, print advertising, old formats, that’s out the window. We can’t afford to do that shit.” The band’s initial decision was to release Forfeit/Fortune as a download-only album, with a short run of vinyl pressings for hardcore fans. Bachmann soon decided he didn’t like the idea of not having a physical CD available, so the plan was modified to include limited distribution at select, independent record stores, with downloads available at iTunes and the Crooked Fingers website.

This unorthodox model has worked reasonably well for Crooked Fingers thus far, especially in the online department. “At this point we’ve sold way more downloads on our website than on iTunes,” Bachmann says. “The whole point is to get all of the 10,000 or so people who buy the record to our website, versus having to find it all over the place.” To that end, they also pressed a deluxe edition CD featuring a concert DVD and a bonus track guest-starring Neko Case to be sold only at shows and via the website.

The record store situation has been a bit more delicate, largely due to the laws of supply and demand. The group hired a marketing company to assist in getting Forfeit/Fortune onto shelves, But Bachmann says there have still been some bumps in the road. “What you inevitably, unintentionally do is, you give your record to this record store, but there’s another cool one in town that you don’t give it to and they get pissed off. We’ll sell it to them, but it’s more of an effort than receiving it from ADA or Red Eye or some distributor… but we’re doing it exclusively with independents. We don’t touch the big stores like Best Buy. Best Buy and those places don’t give a shit about selling our records.”

Bachmann does worry that this new approach and its attendant lack of publicity is making it tougher for fans to find the new release. “If you’re Radiohead and you say, ‘We’re gonna do it online,’ everybody knows about it. If you’re a small little pissant like me, nobody gives a shit. Even the 10,000 fans we have, a significant number of them don’t know it’s out yet… The toughest part is not having a label to help you promote it, especially something like Merge or Saddle Creek, where they sort of have a built-in audience. I’m sure everybody that likes Merge Records doesn’t like Crooked Fingers, but they at least know there’s a new Crooked Fingersrecord out… That’s why I tour and do press. I’m going out in January; I’m going out in April with Neko Case, just touring like crazy. Sort of doing it real old-fashioned.”

Crooked Fingers’ current tour schedule keeps the band on the road for nearly seven months straight, variously opening for Okkervil River and Neko Case and headlining sets with The Ugly Jacket and Black Joe Louis and the Honeybears. Bachmann says he would like to have booked even more live sets, but the realities of the road wouldn’t allow it. “We were gonna do a bunch of in-store [performances]. It’s designed well for this type of situation, where we’re dealing with specific independent retailers. They would love to have me come in and do in-stores, but we can’t do it when the drive is six hours or more. If we want to do an in-store at three or four in the afternoon, but we have to leave from a city that’s seven hours away after going to bed at five in the morning, we won’t sleep.” He’s currently thinking of setting up yet another small tour that will focus mainly on those in-store appearances.

Bachmann is the first to admit that this tenuous attempt at self-sufficiency might not be sustainable in the long run, but he’s taking a wait-and-see approach for the time being. “It’s an experiment. It may not work, and if it doesn’t work, we still have the label we just started. We can maybe get a distribution deal.” Nonetheless, it’s a fairly risky proposition for a well-established band. But in music as in life, Bachmann has never been keen on settling into a rut.

“People’s expectations are wrong,” he says. “They want you to be something consistently. They want to go cracker barrel. Not necessarily my fans, but people in general. So when you make an album that’s weird or unfamiliar, if it’s produced differently or you sing differently, you lose people. And maybe you should, I don’t know. I’m not saying that I know how to do it. But I do know that I don’t want to repeat myself.”

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by iobrooker on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Interviews, Music

Posted by iobrooker on January 2, 2012

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Little House in the Big Woods

Here’s a little slice of my childhood. It was originally published in the Winter 2008 edition of No Touching, the creative nonfiction journal (currently on an extended hiatus) that I co-founded with the splendid Molly Each.

To answer your first question, the smell really isn’t that bad. Or maybe you just get used to it. I guess I really couldn’t tell you, since I never knew anything different. To tell the truth, the spiders concerned me a hell of a lot more than the smell, but then I’ve never dealt well with arachnids. Otherwise, the only major obstacles were distance, temperature and poor upkeep. Except for those elements, growing up with an outhouse was no big deal.

A lot of people hear the word “outhouse” and immediately assume “hillbilly.” One childhood classmate even asked me in all seriousness if I was Amish. I pointed out my Hawaiian shirt and Velcro shoes – I was one of the cool kids, obviously – and asked if they looked Amish to him. The fact was, my parents were neither rednecks nor religious rebels; they were just a couple of hippies with a dream of solitude.

Actually, my mother would bristle to hear herself described as a hippie. In her book, hippies were pretentious and lazy. She and my dad were just a couple of counterculturalists who’d had enough of the hustle and bustle of Minneapolis and wanted to stake a claim of their own. Around the time they became aware of my impending arrival, they started hunting around the upper Midwestfor a plot of land that was large, cheap and rural. They found it in the two-hundred acres outside of Sparta, Wisconsinowned by Elwood and Evelyn Kast (Elwood and Evelyn, now they were hillbillies, as evidenced by Elwood’s cause of death, namely being crushed under a tree chopped down by his brother Barney). My folks bought the land in early 1978 and moved on down in the summer of ’79, seven month-old me in tow.

It was gorgeous property – acres of former cropland gone to pasture, low canopies of birch and oak, crystal clear springs and creeks bubbling out of the ground, a high ridge overlooking the cornfields of Lyons Valley – all the accoutrements your discriminating hippie could ask for. The only problem was housing. Evelyn and Elwood had been living in an uninhabitable frame house for God knows how many years, and that was torn down before we moved in. The only other structures on the property were a crumbling horse barn, a tiny, defunct pump house/tool shed and a two-story grain barn. The latter being in the best condition, my dad and a rotating cast of relatives set to fixing it up into a habitable domain. In the intervening months we slept in a big blue tent in the pasture, curious dairy cows tottering around outside our lodging.

By the time of the first frost work was more or less completed on the main house, and the workers had sunk a well about a hundred feet down the hill and constructed a “bath house” (so dubbed before the term became synonymous with sexually transmitted disease) where we could draw drinking water and, wonder of wonders, take hot showers, doubtless a huge step up from bathing in the creek as was our previous tradition. Unfortunately, funds were running low at that point, and my dad’s chimney sweep’s salary couldn’t fund a septic system just yet. And so it was that we rolled into the 1980s defecating out of doors.

The outhouse was a simple enough structure, but the design was rather ingenious. A permanent outbuilding intended for everyday use has to be a little sturdier than those plastic port-a-johns you see at outdoor festivals and construction sites. To start with, our building straddled a very deep hole, since it couldn’t be pumped out once weekly like those mass-produced models. The walls and roof were made from two-by-fours nailed together to create a cozy little shack about eight by four by four, painted the same odd peach-tan as the bath house (it must have been the cheapest option at the hardware store). There was a hinged door complete with a latch for privacy (no traditional crescent moon cut-out in the door, as my dad felt that to be tacky and, in winter months, impractical). The floor and the base of the seat – the “throne” portion – were concrete poured from the leftovers from the house renovation. The seat itself was made from more slotted two-by-fours, with a strategically shaped hole cut out in the middle. There was a closable lid that stayed open most of the time, and at the back of the seat, a makeshift wooden “ventilation shaft” leading to the outdoors. Throw in several small screen windows, a ten-gallon bucket of crushed limestone for deodorizing and a few Sunday comic strips taped to the walls and brother, you’ve got yourself an outhouse.

I don’t know when exactly I became conscious that not having an indoor toilet was a bit of an oddity, but I do recall a rush of embarrassment when a friend told me, “I can always tell when you peed in our bathroom, ‘cause you never flush.” It had never occurred to me before, but I really didn’t know how to use a regular bathroom. Sure, I’d been using them all my life, at school, at church, at other people’s houses, but bathroom time is solitary time, so no one ever taught me the intricacies of flushing and washing and all of those processes normal people took for granted. I was utterly mortified by my friend’s accusation and thereafter took to flushing every time I entered a bathroom, whether I’d used it or not. (I feel I must mention here that I am now fully versed in the proper usage of indoor plumbing and I would ask that any of you who might by chance encounter me in a restroom not feel compelled to edge away from me. Unless I give you other reason to do so. Which I very well might.)

When the shoe was on the other foot, my playmates made no secret of their fascination with my unique bathroom lifestyle. Kids visiting the Brooker estate for the first time would usually ask excitedly to go see the outhouse within a few minutes of their arrival. I would dutifully lead them across the lawn and down the hill, about a hundred yards from the house, and invite them to try it out. Few were brave enough to actually take me up on the offer but they all peered inside, in awe of the primitive savagery I called home. And those were the farm kids, kids who were used to seeing nature in all its ugly glory. The rare visitor who lived in town, or worse yet, the big city, was generally rendered near catatonic.

There were always questions, of course, and I had my answers down pat. No, we didn’t have to go running down the hill every time we needed to pee. We usually just stepped outside for that, or, in the dead of winter, kept an empty ice cream bucket in the house for late night emergencies.

Yes, we still used the outhouse in the winter (did they think we just ceased bowel movements for four months?) and yes, it was very cold. Sometimes there’d be frost on the seat and you’d sort of have to lower yourself down slowly, letting the heat from your buttocks melt it away before you settled in. In the winter it was often advisable to hold it in until you went to school, church, Wal-Mart or some other heated environment.

Yes, the hole would eventually fill up, at which point my dad would dig another hole next to the outhouse and set to the unpleasant task of transferring the contents of the original hole into the new hole. I never actually witnessed this process – Dad did it while my brother and I were at school, as I can imagine it’s the type of thing you’d prefer to do alone – but I can testify from my days of lawn mowing that the grass forever after grew much faster over the site of the second hole than in the rest of the yard.

It’s tough to explain to someone who grew up toileted, but the outhouse was more than just a pit stop for a quick excretion. Its easily climbable walls doubled as a jungle gym for my little brother and me. Perched atop the tarpaper roof, we turned our humble biffy into the flight deck of the Millennium Falcon, or Lex Luthor’s secret lair. It was also a sort of fortress of solitude for a bookish kid like me. Oftentimes I’d hang around well after my business was done, finishing up a chapter in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader or polishing off the latest Jughead Jones Double Digest. That kind of seclusion became all the more precious when I hit my adolescent years. My dad had designed the renovated house as kind of an open living space, with no interior doors to denote individual rooms. This left very few options for a hormonally charged youth to “discover himself” in private. The outhouse, on the other hand, was physically removed from the house and even had a lockable door. The presence of an aging People magazine featuring a pictorial profile of Madonna was just an added bonus.

But time marches on, all things must pass and all that jazz. When I was a junior in high school, my parents finally decided to take the plunge and take out a home repair loan to thoroughly overhaul the house. For six months we moved into a crummy rental place in town while my dad and various work crews more or less started rebuilding the place from scratch. When we returned to the countryside, the grain shed had been replaced by a lovely, totally modern dwelling with all the comforts of the twenty-first century, including running water and a septic system. As of that day, the outhouse was obsolete.

It was probably just as well, as the old facilities had taken quite a beating over the years. It had been toppled in several windstorms, so the walls were far from plumb. The door had fallen off at some point and never replaced. Using it in the rain had become an exceedingly soggy process, and for the last few winters snow drifts had been finding their way through the door. It was a change, we all had to admit that, but there were few tears shed for the passing of the outhouse.

We never did tear it down, my folks preferring to keep it as a sort of reminder of their first sixteen hardscrabble years on the land. Occasionally on my visits home, I like to wander down the path and reflect awhile on a childhood that necessitated my leaving the house at least once every day. Moving on is for the best, I understand that, but it’s still a rather melancholy feeling to see that little piece of who I am fading into memory. I linger awhile before deciding to resist the urge to duck in and give it one last spin. The power of nostalgia only goes so far.

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by iobrooker on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Creative Nonfiction

Posted by iobrooker on January 2, 2012

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Interview with Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead

Bill Griffith has been one of my artistic heroes since I was a teenager. I’ve been fortunate enough to interact with him several times. I’ve contributed photos for use in his daily Zippy the Pinhead comic strip, which earned me several of his coveted “Tips o’ th’ pin.” I’ve also interviewing him a couple of times, the most substantial being this lengthy conversation that was originally published in the wonderful but now-defunct arts journal The Drama.

Bill Grffith is the best kind of rebel, the kind who aggravates the system from within. The Levittown, New York-born cartoonist somehow managed to shift his surreal, socially aware comic strip Zippy the Pinhead from the underground comix scene to America’s funny pages in the mid-1980s, much to the chagrin of Marmaduke fans nationwide. Griffith’s nonsense-spouting, muu-muu-sporting, taco sauce-slurping lead character quickly gained enough cult icon status to ensure himself a place in shady corners of our national consciousness for the next two decades. Ira Brooker spoke with Griffith recently about Zippy’s twentieth year of syndication, the difficulties of being the smartest strip in the room, and the importance of getting collateral before lending anything to the Ramones.

 How do you explain the longevity of such an unorthodox strip?
Totally my own perseverance, encouraged by my tiny but elite cult following. A lot of people are encouraged by money or success. I’m just encouraged by the occasional fan letter or e-mail, so I know somebody’s still reading it, and King Features is still paying me, so I keep doing it. I’m just grateful for the whole thing because it’s really what I feel most comfortable doing.

So you still hear from fans regularly?
Oh yeah. I have plenty of interaction with fans. Enough to make me feel I’m connecting with enough people. It’s actually much more than it used to be because of e-mail and the Zippy website. I remember when I first started the website a friend of mine asked, “How many fan letters do you get a week?” and I said about five or ten. He said, “You’ll get that per day if you go online,” and he was right.

Do you also get a good volume of detractors?
Surprisingly few, although they do happen. At this point I think it depends whether Zippy has been suddenly introduced to somebody’s newspaper. They might have a violent spasm of hatred, but that doesn’t happen too often. I think the people who were initially angered by it or didn’t get it wrote to me a while ago and then kind of faded away. Although I do get the occasional hate mail. Sometimes it’s specifically directed at… if I’ve offended somebody’s political viewpoint.

Like the trip to Cuba?
Yeah, that and whenever I do something anti-Bush or Cheney, making fun of them, I usually get somebody writing something outraged about how politics doesn’t belong on the comics page. “Get over it, you dumb liberal. Get over the fact that you lost,” things like that. But my strip is not usually political in the obvious way, so that doesn’t happen a whole lot. The guy that does “This Modern World,” Dan Perkins, he gets big doses of that every day. My more common hate mail is something along the lines of… I’m accused of doing a dumb strip. Stupid and dumb and unfunny. I once asked Garry Trudeau, when he gets hate mail what’s the typical complaint. He said, “Dumb, stupid and unfunny.” Those are things that it makes the people feel who don’t get it: dumb and stupid. They know there’s humor but they can’t find it. And I have to kind of agree. You can accuse me of not being funny, but to accuse Zippy of being stupid I think has to reflect more of a frustration with the strip than anything justifiable. What I should be getting is hate mail saying, “It’s an elitist strip aimed at very few people. What nerve do you have doing this and ignoring millions of readers who appreciate humor on a more Garfieldian level?” But I never get those. After a while you realize those people are satisfied with what they have and the other ones who don’t like it are reading it almost by accident. They shouldn’t be reading it, in other words. Their eyes should be passing over the Zippy part of their comics page. But they have to read every strip on the page and then they get annoyed because the punch line didn’t happen.

Well, there is a tendency to read it just because it’s there. I’ve never stopped reading “Rose Is Rose,” even though it drives me crazy every time. How would you say public reaction has changed since 1986, when Zippy was first hitting people’s breakfast tables?
Well, I had a lot of reaction from people who had read Zippy in his underground comix incarnations and were sort of blown away by the fact that it was in a daily newspaper. They were happy, but they didn’t get it. How did this happen? How did Zippy go from an obscure underground publication to the Washington Post? It’s a question I’ve asked myself a few times and I can’t really explain it either.

Were you accused of selling out?
I’ve had a sprinkling over the years. People who say Zippy has changed in a way they weren’t thrilled with. They liked him more insane and chaotic. Very early Zippy was a loose cannon. Today Zippy’s character has kind of adjusted to the amount of satire I want to inject into the strip. He has conversations. Even though they’re circuitous and not point A to point B, his attention span has lengthened over the years so that he can actually carry on a conversation. In 1972 there was no hope of a conversation. If he encountered a person or an object, there would be a series of non-sequitors that he would shout and then run away or have a reaction that was seemingly inappropriate to the stimulus. Now he doesn’t have a normal reaction, but he bounces off what other people are saying, whether it’s the roadside attractions that he’s prone to talking to or the cast of characters of the strip. I don’t think any strip doesn’t change if you do it for as long as I have. It evolves. I suppose in some cases it freezes or stultifies, but I’ve tried to make it something that works for me. What I wanted to do in the beginning of Zippy is not what I want to do now.

It seems pretty natural that the strip should mature, especially since you’ve had a surrogate of yourself as one of the characters for so long. Has the Griffy character reflected your own artistic maturation?
Yeah, having Griffy as the foil, sort of the straight man, for Zippy, made a huge difference. I think that started around 1980 or so. It’s a way of putting myself into the strip more or less unfiltered. Every cartoonist’s cast of characters represents facets of themselves, that’s kind of a given. But when you actually put yourself as a character into the strip, you’re allowing yourself to be more direct about it. It kind of allows me the freedom of letting the other characters go their own ways too. If your characters are all based on aspects of you in a steady, consistent way, that could be a little boring. Making one character be me lets the other characters be… I mean, they’re me in the sense that I’m putting words into their mouths, but I’m trying more to channel them than use them as a sounding board for my own thoughts. When I do Claude Funston, I kind of find that part of me that feels a connection to the redneck male from Oklahoma City. And I think that’s an essential part of satire, to feel some sort of affection for your target. Otherwise it just comes across as mean-spirited.

One of my favorite things you’ve done is your “Cast of Characters” story. In that one you directly addressed all the psychological aspects of your characters as they related to you. That story always struck me as one of the more honest things I’ve seen in a comic book. You really seemed to pull no punches against your own psyche.
Right, and they started talking back to me. I still occasionally do a strip where Mr. Toad gets out of control and comes at me in some way I can’t quite handle.

You mentioned the early craziness of Zippy, when he was more grounded in actual microcephalic style behavior…
Yeah, Zippy was inspired first and primarily by the Schlitzie character in the movie Freaks. I found out about five years ago that Schlitzie went on to live into his late seventies and last was performing in a sideshow in Hawaii. He was alive when I was doing Zippy. He died in about 1978. The original Zippy, the way he looked and to some degree the way he spoke, was based on what little I could understand of Schlitzie’s dialogue in the movie, which was not scripted, of course. Years and years ago a friend of mine had a 16-millimeter print of the film. We slowed down the film including the soundtrack and I could actually understand some of the dialogue. It was surrealistic and random, as you would expect. But it was very emotional, as if you were verbalizing your emotions without content. Just words as emotion. It’s hard to explain… But I was fascinated with that whole way of life. I met a microcephalic right around the same time, in a situation where I was able to talk to him for about fifteen minutes. He was very verbal. He processed the input that was thrown at him very quickly. When I met him he had just seen the TV news, so he was talking about the news as if it was real and it was happening to him.

So there is a level of comprehension?
Well, there are all different degrees. I was in a situation where I was surrounded by seven or eight microcephalic patients in a mental institution in Oakland, California. They were impossible to understand. They had that Schlitzie quality of just sort of yelling and giggling, a lot of them just grabbing whenever I tried to tape record them and take pictures. They took my tape recorder and ran away with it. I had to basically escape. I had a friend who was a nurse there and she’d said they’d be happy to talk to me, but it was a disaster. Anyway, the original Zippy was based on how I interpreted the way a microcephalic thinks, as far as I can figure out. I was interested in the poetry of the way they spoke, the emotional directness that they exhibited. But you know, someone once reviewed Zippy, in an early review I read – it wasn’t really a negative review, but it said Zippy was best in small doses because it was like being stuck in an elevator with a crazy person who wouldn’t stop talking. It was about that time that I started bringing Griffy into the strip.

So you think that big cast of characters is part of what’s made the strip so long-lived, that people would get tired of a daily dose of Zippy alone?
Right. My abortive attempts at making a movie and a TV series over the years, that was always a big thing we tried to do, to keep Zippy as the main character but not always the main focus. In live action it was even more important that Zippy’s peculiar way of seeing the world be doled out in not just small doses, but doses that made the story move along, that made him seem like the unwitting protagonist, because he couldn’t really be a traditional protagonist.

At some point in the ‘80s there really was major studio interest in a Zippy movie.
Starting about ’84 and going through the early ‘90s, Zippy was optioned by several places at different times. Brandon Tartikoff, the NBC programming genius, was doing his dance to try to make a movie through NBC Productions, their film division. That went on for a number of years. He himself talked to Michael Richards and got him interested in playing Zippy. Then he left NBC and went to Paramount. After he was at Paramount he gave a press conference where he was asked what to expect, and he mentioned Zippy. It got a lot of play in the press, but more or less as an indication that Brandon Tartikoff must be crazy. He was made fun of for mentioning Zippy, even though he was trying to do it in a humorous way, couching it in a certain context. But the fact that he said the words “Zippy the Pinhead” – probably just the word pinhead itself – made it this weird buzz that was not appreciated by the rest of the studio execs. I remember him telling me shortly after that that he had to make one blockbuster James Bond movie before he could do Zippy. And then shortly after that he had a recurrence of a fatal illness and he died. He was our biggest ally, but we had others. Like Steve Martin’s manager, Bill McKuen. He produced The Jerk, also produced the first Pee Wee Herman movie…

Seems like a good fit.
He was a big player in Hollywood. But we also got him at a point in his career where he would get very inappropriately angry at meetings. He actually lunged across the table during a meeting at Warner Brothers to choke the person we were meeting with. He’d decided the guy we were meeting with was so low on the totem pole that it was an insult. The guy made some comment that you could interpret as insulting but wasn’t necessarily, and he leaped across the table and grabbed the guy. That was not a good meeting. But [McKuen] took out a full two-page ad in Variety to try to encourage interest, he was really into it for a few years.

That’s kind of amazing to me. I don’t know if the Hollywood structure has just changed so much so recently, but a Zippy project seems like such a risky endeavor that I couldn’t picture big studios being interested in it now.
No, although if I had played the cards the way they wanted me to… One of our early meetings was with Mike Medavoy at Orion, and he said he needed a Christmas comedy and he saw Robin Williams as Zippy. At that point, I had Randy Quaid as my choice. He said Robin Williams and something like – and this was in the ‘80s – a ten, twelve million-dollar budget. I said, “I know Robin Williams, and he’s a fan, but he specifically told me once he wasn’t interested in being Zippy.” And Medavoy said, “That’s my job, to get him interested.” I told him I’d really prefer Randy Quaid and a much lower budget. We were out in the parking lot pretty quickly after that. But if I’d said yes to all those things, who knows? Dennis O’Brien of Handmade Films, which was George Harrison’s production company, flew from London to speak to me, and once again had I played the cards he wanted me to play, it probably would have happened. He actually wanted Zippy’s muumuu to be replaced by normal clothing. He said, “We really love Zippy, George loves Zippy, but we see the muumuu as a problem. Is he a cross-dresser? What’s going on with the muumuu? How do you feel about Zippy in a tank top and jeans?” And of course I just went home and did a strip about Zippy in a tank top and jeans. Had I said yes to that, I don’t know. And then the TV show got really close to being made. We had three scripts ready and Showtime was signed on. Then we had the dreaded change of executive. Our champion at Showtime left and we got a phone call saying it had taken too long to get into production. I’m better off, I think, not having done it. I got loads of material out of the whole thing, lots of strips, lots of stories for parties and interviews. That was probably the real value. The world is better off, as well as me.

It could have been interesting, though. Michael Richards as Zippy sounds like a pretty perfect choice.
He was really into it. Although I’ve heard a lot about how difficult he is to work with.

I can imagine. Right now, with the resurgent interest in all the ‘70s underground work – “American Splendor,” the R. Crumb movie – are you finding that people are rediscovering your early work, or have people come to regard you more as a newspaper cartoonist?
I have noticed the rediscovery phenomenon happening, although I think there’s a real separation in my audience between people who are aware that I’ve done years of work pre-newspaper strips and people who have no awareness of that. My website has actually shown that people who are going there to peruse the archives, if they look through the website they’ll quickly see that, oh, there’s a lot of other stuff besides the daily strip. I’ll get letters from someone who says, “I want to check out Arcade, I never knew about Arcade.”

There’s a lot of your older stuff that isn’t readily available, right?
Well, some is and some isn’t. Most of it isn’t. But I was one of those people who’d save large amounts. I’d keep a whole box of my early comics. Not just three issues in a plastic bag, but a hundred. So I’m actually selling a certain amount of those on my website, just because I saved huge amounts of it.

I’d wondered where those stores of t-shirts were coming from…
Yeah, most of those are from stashes I’ve kept. I have the right to keep those in print on my own. When I went to King Features I made a deal that said whatever previous merchandising deals I had would be allowed. Any old merchandising I’d done I could keep doing on my own.

Even back in the ‘70s when it was more anarchic and free form, a lot of your work was more esoteric than most of what people were seeing in the underground field, like, say, “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,” or even the “Zap Comics” stuff.
I wasn’t one of the underground cartoonists who reinforced the counterculture stereotypes of drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll. I was off in my own sphere, as I am today. If certain people want to come along and see what I’m doing, great. If not, I’ll keep doing it anyway.

So would you say that put you in sort of a niche group at the time?
Well, yeah, I think. [Art] Spiegelman and I first started doing “Short Order Comics” together, which morphed later in “Arcade” and various other things we did together as editors. We and Justin Green, Kim Deitch, a few other people, we kind of thought of ourselves as having an affinity that didn’t quite fit the mold that people expected from underground comix. Robert Crumb also in many ways wasn’t giving the fans what they wanted, but he was giving them such a large dose of raw talent and facts that they got enough. They got what they wanted out of him, but he was always giving it to them begrudgingly. I remember when Robert first met me he was afraid I’d give him a hippie handshake. I went to shake his hand and he said, “It’s not gonna be a hippie handshake, is it?” I said, “No, don’t worry, I don’t do that handshake.” [laughing] I have a picture of all the cartoonists in Arcade in front of the Print Mint [in San Francisco] in 1975, and Robert has a tie on. Cliques had already begun to form in the San Francisco scene in the early and mid-‘70s. Rip-Off Press had the more drug-oriented comics, the trippy stuff. Last Gasp was trying to be more political. Then there were the more E.C. science fiction derived cartoonists.

It seems like your little group had more staying power than a lot of the more visible stuff of the time.
I guess the price that you pay for being in touch with the zeitgeist is that your bubble bursts quicker. Some people go on to do other things, some people that was it, they peaked at that point.

A lot of it seems so specifically tied to the times.
Yeah, reading a lot the stereotypical, Classic Underground Comix of the 1970s, you can’t not feel like you’re in a time machine. But that’s not really true when you read some of it. Like Justin Green. Justin Green is timeless, always has been.

Zippy was kind of an icon during the rise of the Southern California punk scene, right?
Yeah, I would get a lot of attention from people in that field. Also from the Ramones. I remember one time in the early years of the Ramones, they were playing in San Francisco, and they had an over-the-head Zippy the Pinhead mask, it might have been made out of latex or something, and they had lost it. They called me in the hopes – not in the hopes, actually, on the assumption – that I would just have one. And I didn’t, I just had a regular mask that I had made myself, a Halloween mask. They said, “That’s good enough, we can use it for tonight.” And some roadie came over to my house and took it and I never saw it again. [laughing] I actually did a strip for Rhino Records when they were doing Weird Tales of the Ramones. The liner notes for that boxed set are in comic book form. Everybody was asked to do comics about the Ramones, so I have Zippy directly interacting with the Ramones.

That seems fairly natural. Aren’t you also friendly with Fred Schneider of the B-52s?
Yes, that connection came through The Manhattan Transfer, the singing group, actually. In the early ‘80s I got a letter or a phone call from Janice Siegel of The Manhattan Transfer saying they were big Zippy fans and they had a lot of free time on their hands because their European tour was cancelled. I think it was the year Reagan invaded Libya, and Khadaffi was attacked, and suddenly there was the fear of hijacking and reprisal. So apparently a lot of tours were cancelled that summer. Janice told me that she and a bunch of other people – Phoebe Snow and John Hendrix and Fred Schneider of the B-52s – were just hanging around for a month or so with nothing to do and they wanted to do a Zippy theme song, and what did I think and did I have any ideas? I thought about doing the lyrics, but then I thought no, let’s just see what happens. Because my lyrics would be totally uncommercial. I thought, I dunno, maybe this could be my chance for airplay. [laughter] So Fred Schneider did the lyrics and Janice was the lead singer, Phoebe was backup, John  Hendrix did scat, various other musicians came. They did a totally professional theme song. I have it as a souvenir. That’s where Fred and I connected. We communicated and whenever he’d come to San Francisco I’d have a few free tickets waiting for me. So I saw all the B-52s performances in San Francisco for many years. Madonna also did that for a while. Madonna was a Zippy fan.

Really?
Through her publicist, she would send me free tickets whenever she came to the city. It impressed my thirteen-year-old niece to no end.

I never would have anticipated that.
In her tour book of one of her concerts, she said, you know, favorite color and all, and favorite comic strip: “Zippy the Pinhead.” I never had any personal contact with her, though.

You’ve said you structure a lot of the strips around jazz riffs, at least in your recent work. Has that always been the case?
I think that’s always been the case. It’s not a conscious thing, it’s something that… I kind of noticed it and I thought it was an analogy that might help some people understand what I’m doing. That when Zippy speaks, to some degree, he’s playing his instrument. He’s riffing. He’s improvising. In the middle of a jazz conversation, each instrument will have its solo to play with the melody or deconstruct it or whatever they want to do with it. I think that analogy helps me, and maybe it helps some other people get what I’m doing.

Who are you into, jazz-wise?
Well, the old jazz, the stuff that Crumb introduced me to. When I first met him, I was kind of aware of it, but I didn’t have a huge taste for it. Early pre-swing jazz is the big seat of pleasure for me to listen to. In terms of Zippy, the correlations are more Charlie Parker-ish, Miles Davis-ish. I remember trying to talk to Crumb once about Charlie Parker and the conversation just died in a second. But it’s early be-bop especially. Not Sun-Ra, not crazy experimental atonal jazz, but just that kind of free-form be-bop jazz.

People regularly make the accusation that Zippy is obscure for obscurity’s sake, but I don’t think there’s any other strip that makes as regular reference to mass entertainment and pop culture either.
Some newspapers actually put Zippy on the TV and entertainment page. I thought that was appropriate. Zippy is my coping mechanism for the bombardment of pop culture that I seem to be unable to fend off. Not only unable to fend off, but have a need to pay attention to and monitor and absorb, and either be amused by or outraged by or whatever. Zippy’s reaction is always like a sponge. He just soaks it up. And then, of course, Griffy comes in with an analytical approach. That’s my way of saying, you know, pop culture is both something to be enjoyed and also something to be looked at as a mirror of society. A way to understand culture. I feel both. I feel something inside me – I think this is probably true of everybody, to a degree – likes and hates something at the same time, or appreciates and is repulsed by something at the same time. And I don’t think that’s usually recognized. I think one of the things that makes my strip hard to get for some people is that I deal in ambiguity. I like ambiguity. I don’t take a hard position on things. And Zippy is kind of a vehicle for not taking a hard position. Zippy listens to hip-hop and it’s just more stuff to listen to and react to and ultimately enjoy. And me, it puts me off. That’s just me. But when I’m doing my strip, I can allow that part of me that won’t admit I kind of enjoy it too to do that. So Zippy is my vehicle. If that works for me, maybe it works for the reader too.

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by iobrooker on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by iobrooker on January 2, 2012

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What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Newsprint?

Originally published on MadeLoud, June 17, 2010

Even on Hollywood’s parched and barren post-Garfield landscape, the recent adaptation of Brad Anderson’s space-filling comic strip Marmaduke seems like a movie made on a dare. Nevertheless, it appears possible that we’re on the cusp of a new era of ripped-from-the-funny-pages filmmaking not seen since Blondie and Dick Tracy packed matinee screenings in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Whether this trend will carry over to the music industry remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be the first time. We’ve pulled together a sampling from pop music’s long, if not especially rich, history of paying tribute to stars of the daily and Sunday papers. (Note: We’re excluding comic books and animated cartoons, or this would be a far longer list.)

Billy Rose – “Barney Google (With the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)”

Considering the scrubbed-and-sanitized nature of modern funny pages, it seems almost unthinkable that America’s favorite comics star of the 1920s was a diminutive, slang-spouting gambling addict with anger management issues. Nevertheless, Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google was regarded as something of a national treasure when songwriter Billy Rose penned this buoyant 1923 ode to an inveterate loser “with a wife three times his size.” It was recorded by dozens of artists in many different styles over the years, including a typically anarchic treatment by Spike Jones in 1963. Barney himself was eventually muscled out of his own strip by his hillbilly cousin Snuffy Smith, but the song lives on as a reminder of a time when the word “Google” conjured up decidedly lower-tech images than it does today.

The Hollywood Argyles – “Alley Oop”

V.T. Hamlin’s tough-talking, time-traveling caveman made for a peculiar protagonist even by comics page standards. Still, stellar artwork, a colorful cast of characters and surprisingly intricate plotting made Alley a big enough star to merit a 1960 tribute tune. The Hollywood Argyles were less a band than an assemblage of studio musicians (including legendary surf drummer Sandy Nelson) slapped together by L.A. songwriters Kim Fowley and Gary Paxton, but that didn’t stop the song from topping the charts.

Their ode to the prehistoric “toughest man there is alive” features an appropriately loose, lurching production, possibly attributable to the mass quantities of hard cider allegedly consumed at the session. Although various incarnations of Hollywood Argyles continued to record sporadically for several years thereafter (even releasing a less successful sequel called “Alley Oop ’66”), their most lasting legacy came as a David Bowie allusion. When Bowie paraphrased the song’s “Look at that caveman go” chorus on 1971’s “Life on Mars?”, he transformed “Alley Oop” from a trash-rock novelty into a pop culture archetype.

The Royal Guardsmen – “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”

It’s weird enough that Americans embraced a comic strip narrative about a fictional dog waging an imaginary war against a real-life German military legend. It’s even weirder that they sent a pop song about said showdown to number two on the charts in 1966. The Royal Guardsmen’s energetic take on Charles M. Schultz’s overachieving beagle and his feud with WWI flying ace Manfred von Richthofen is as strange as its subject matter, intermingling goofy voices and shout-outs to The Great Pumpkin with a running count of the Red Baron’s actual kill tally. Odder still, the Florida-based band parlayed their big hit into a long string of Snoopy-themed sequels, including a Christmas version that finds the airborne rivals making peace and a 2006 update in which Snoopy hunts down Osama bin Laden. No, seriously. That exists.

Queen – “Flash”

Flash Gordon may have started life on the comics page as a poor man’s Buck Rogers, but Alex Raymond’s action-adventure strip set the template for dozens of sci-fi potboilers to come. The strip was adapted for radio, film and television many times through the decades, the most notorious version being Mike Hodges’ 1980 would-be blockbuster Flash Gordon. Hodges and crew opted to approach the material in the campiest vein available, and where there’s camp, there’s Queen.

The glam-rockers took to the material just as enthusiastically as you’d expect, drenching the score in enough synthesizers and falsettos to make Max Von Sydow’s Ming the Merciless look subtle by comparison. The soundtrack album even yielded the minor hit single “Flash,” a melodramatic rocker intermingling film dialogue (“Flash, I love you! But we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!”) with Freddie Mercury shrieking heady lines like “Flash! Savior of the universe! / Flash! You saved every one of us!”

Fred Schneider – “The Zippy Theme Song”

Is there a more perfect pairing of artist and subject matter than oddball B-52s front man Fred Schneider and Bill Griffith’s non-sequitur-spouting Zippy the Pinhead? Schneider called in a collection of musical pals like singer Phoebe Snow and half of The Manhattan Transfer to knock out this peculiar little vocal jazz ode to a guy who’s “a totally modular fellow / The maraschino in Jell-o” with “a heart as pure as Tastee Freeze.” Although Schneider himself doesn’t sing on the track, he reportedly intended to include it on a solo album. That plan never came to fruition, and the song now resides only on the Zippy the Pinhead website, alongside a pair of Griffith-penned Zippy tribute tunes performed by new wave band No Sisters.

Billy and the Boingers – “I’m a Boinger”

From the Rolling Stones playing a public school dance to Opus the Penguin trading places with Michael Jackson to the local denizens organizing a self-serving benefit concert called The Us Festival, popular music was a constant presence throughout the run of Berkely Breathed’s Bloom County.

One of the strip’s most celebrated storylines followed the meteoric rise of Billy and the Boingers (name changed from Deathtöngue under pressure from the PMRC), a hair metal band fronted by hairball-hacking, Friskies-freebasing vocalist Bill the Cat. Fans who purchased the paperback reprint collection Billy and the Boingers Bootleg were treated to an ingenious tie-in: a flexi-disc single containing two elsewhere unavailable Boingers tracks. On their valedictory statement “I’m a Boinger,” Billy and crew (as portrayed by The Harry Pitts Band) threw potshots at everyone from Boy George to David Bowie to Debbie Harry while laughing off the transitive nature of rock stardom (“Sure we look disgusting / But whose chops are we busting / In a year, maybe two, we’ll seem tame / And three years down the track / We’ll be a Las Vegas lounge act”). There are plenty of non-fictional bands that could benefit from that level of self-awareness.

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by iobrooker on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
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Album review: The Crayon Fields – ‘All the Pleasures of the World’

Originally published on MadeLoud,  Dec 1, 2009

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that sometimes a whisper can speak louder than a shout, but there are plenty of musical precedents to support that notion. All the Pleasures of the World is a prime example of what John Cale termed “seducing down the door.” Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, The Crayon Fields infuse their second full-length with the soft-spoken tradition of bygone acts like The Zombies and The Turtles, with good doses of newer groups like Belle and Sebastian and Iron and Wine stirred in.

That isn’t to say that The Crayon Fields are all about the quietude – this isn’t a Low album by any means. To the contrary, the quartet shows a remarkable aptitude for upbeat, smokily seductive retro arrangements. The darkness and quirkiness that American audiences have come to expect from Australian imports is replaced by a straightforward approach that brings to mind several eras of Brit-pop production. Geoff O’Connor’s songwriting also follows in that tradition, flavoring his universal themes of life and love with a smooth, sardonic wit. (“Disappear,” for instance, opens with the striking couplet of “I hear drowning is pleasant once you’ve swallowed enough / and a tiny orgasm can be felt in a cough.”)

The album kicks off with an oddly harmonic combination of tinkling chimes and surf-style guitar on “Mirror Ball,” a slyly worded riff on romantic uncertainty (“You are still my high mirror ball / I look at you and suddenly I’m a virgin in a dancehall”). The infectious title track provides an excellent showcase for the subtle virtuosity of O’Connor’s twelve-string guitar, which manages to evoke artists as disparate as Dick Dale, Johnny Marr and Tom Verlaine in the space of three mellow minutes. Low-key tracks like “Timeless” (“When I wake up next to you / I forget I have a day to be dressed for”) and “Lucky Again” sound like they could have been unearthed from Peter and Gordon’s back catalog, a legitimate compliment in this instance.

If All the Pleasures of the World doesn’t exactly blaze any new trails, it does dig into a corner of ‘60s pop that’s been largely ignored by the current revivalist bonanza. The past decade has seen a resurgence of old-school soul, psychedelia and garage rock, but precious few artists have paid much mind to the more accessible sounds of former chartbusters like The Buckinghams and The Association. The Crayon Fields know there’s no shame in taking a walk on the softer side, so long as the path never gets too mushy.

Recommended Tracks: “All the Pleasures of the World,” “Mirror Ball,” “Disappear”

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by iobrooker on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
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Fan Depreciation: Five sure-fire tips for the concert-going dick

Originally published on MadeLoud, July 21, 2008.

For most music fans, a concert ticket represents an evening of entertainment and engagement with artists they admire. But you’re different. When you punch in your credit card number and agree to pay every ludicrous handling fee Ticketmaster can dream up, you understand that this transaction entitles, if not obligates, you to behave in ways that would make Miss Manners curse like a roadie. In short, you’re a concert-going dick, and proud of it. To that end, we’d like to offer this handy guide for achieving maximum dickishness at any music venue. Why else go out to see live music?

Tip 1: Sharing is Caring
Sure, those folks up on the stage have all the mics and amps, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who deserve to be heard. You’re an intelligent, talented person, and any crowd could benefit from your input. When the band strikes up a familiar number, feel free to loudly discuss how much better they sounded with the original drummer, even if it takes the duration of several songs to make your point. Otherwise, someone in your vicinity may be foolish enough to enjoy the song just the way it is.

Your input needn’t be all negative. When you hear a tune you really love, you should sing along to your heart’s content, even if the band hasn’t asked for audience participation. And don’t just mumble to yourself – give it your full voice. The band will appreciate your obvious devotion, and your fellow fans will be impressed by your seamless harmonization.

Tip 2: Stake Your Claim
Some music fans cling stubbornly to outmoded traditions, like the antiquated rule of “first come, first serve.” But why should showing up early automatically entitle someone to a spot near the stage? The best vantage points should naturally go to the biggest fans, so don’t feel sheepish about muscling your way to the front just before the show begins.

Heck, even if you’re just a casual fan, you have a right to be up close for the songs you want to hear. Once you hear the opening licks of the band’s biggest hit, you have free license to rush the stage. Don’t let the groans of the trampled slow you down – to the victor go the spoils.

Tip 3: Preserve for Posterity
Memories are great, but they don’t always last. That’s why it’s of vital importance that you document as much as possible of every concert you attend. Today’s digital recording technology makes that task easier than ever – just click the record button on your camera or cell phone, hoist it over your head and let the magic happen. Don’t worry about blocking the view of people standing behind you – they can enjoy the show through your three-inch display screen. As for the band, they’ll appreciate the free publicity when you upload your grainy, barely audible footage to YouTube.

Tip 4: Party Like it’s 1999
Whoever said “everything in moderation” just didn’t know how to party. Folks like Keith Richards and Courtney Love didn’t get where they are by having a couple of Heinekens and calling it a night. When you’re out at a show, it’s your rock and roll responsibility to get royally ripped. Go ahead and smuggle in a fifth of Jim Beam, a couple of blunts and whatever else (brown acid, etc.) gets your groove rolling. Ladies, whip those tops off! Fellas, rock out with your cocks out! Stage dive! Body surf! Skank like a madman, even during the slow jams! There’s no shame in getting escorted out by security after projectile vomiting on the bass player’s Docs. At least you’ll have given all the squares something to talk about for the rest of the night.

Tip 5: Express Yourself
You may have heard talk of “set lists,” those needlessly restrictive guidelines bands impose upon themselves. It is your duty to free your heroes from these creative cul-de-sacs by incessantly hollering the names of songs that you and you alone wish to hear. There are two equally acceptable approaches. First, you can repeatedly demand the band’s most popular song. Chances are that they planned to include it anyway, but you simply can’t take the risk of them forgetting to play their biggest hit. Second, you can yell out various obscure tracks from their back catalog. Your request may not get played, but the rest of the crowd will surely be awed by your encyclopedic knowledge of the group’s b-sides and soundtrack contributions. And when all else fails, you can just yell “Freebird.” That joke never gets old!


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Lunch in August

Here’s another short story born out of a Fiction Writing class at Columbia College Chicago. Several people have told me it reminds them of a Larry David piece, which is about as grand as compliments get. It was originally published in the now semi-defunct Ghost Factory.

Behind the counter a small TV was blaring the opening theme of Jeopardy! The waitress’ wandering eyes were making it pretty clear that she was more interested in getting back to Alex Trebek than she was in taking Aaron’s order. “Good-morning-sir-what-can-we-get-for-you,” she monotoned in a bored Southern drawl. Aaron flashed her what he hoped was an ingratiating smile, but she wasn’t even looking in his direction.

Flustered by her indifference, Aaron stammered “Ah, the, um, rib eye steak, I think…” The tall woman snatched up the single-page menu and strolled back behind the counter, pausing to bark, “More coffee?” at three elderly black men silently nursing cigarettes at a table near the door.

The waitress was black too. So were the cook, the half-dozen other customers and, Aaron suspected, every person who had ever set foot in Silver’s Diner of Senatobia, Mississippi. Every person except him, that was.

It had caught him completely off guard. Up north, there were plenty of Afrocentric (that was the proper term, right?) businesses in big cities like Minneapolis and Milwaukee, but an all-black diner in a small town was unheard of. He wasn’t sure why it should make him so uncomfortable, but being in the minority had thrown him completely off track. The steak was a panic order. He was really craving fried chicken, but he just couldn’t bring himself to order that here.

Behind the counter the waitress and a jowly man in a red flannel shirt stared at the TV intently. The waitress was pretty good, Aaron noted as she rattled off a string of questions: “What is ricotta?” “Who is Grace Kelly?” “What is Copenhagen?” After each question the jowly man mumbled, “I knew that one” to her annoyed glance.

Aaron started to relax a bit. What possible threat did Silver’s Diner pose to him? It was a humble little joint, long Formica lunch counter fronting the kitchen and a dozen wobbly wooden tables scattered across a yellowing tile floor. The large picture window next to his table let in a lazy shaft of mid-August light, a reminder of how nice it was to be in an air-conditioned setting after four sweaty hours in his fossilized Volvo. At the moment the only customers were the jowly man, the three ancient smokers and a heavyset younger couple in the far corner talking quietly over their po’ boys. Aaron glanced at the Budweiser clock over the counter. Noon on the dot. If he got right on the road after lunch, he could just make Martin’s place in New Orleans before dark.

The old smokers had roused themselves from their stupor and now seemed to be telling jokes. Aaron caught the tail end of a rising voice just before the table erupted into laughter. The punchline seemed to have something to do with a donkey. Or was it… honky? He wasn’t sure what he’d heard. Did that guy just look at him? He ran a self-conscious hand through his shaggy blonde hair.

There was a jukebox against the wall to his right. Aaron wouldn’t have thought of playing a song for fear of interrupting the obviously sacrosanct Jeopardy! session, but he needed to put his eyes some place. He could just make out the CD covers from where he sat: Otis Redding, Teddy Pendergrass, Etta James, The Commodores, Patti LaBelle. If he’d found a lineup that soulful in a bar back in Minnesota, the place would have become his regular Saturday night thing. Here it just made him feel all the more conspicuous. He shifted in his seat to let the air conditioning dry out his sweat-drenched butt cheeks.

The TV switched to a Mylanta commercial. Right on cue the waitress came loping out from behind the counter with a steaming plate in her hand. At least the service was fast, Aaron had to give her that. She plunked the entrée down artlessly and mumbled, “Need anything else today?” He started to ask for maybe a bit of A-1, but her steely grey bouffant was already bobbing away toward the TV.

“Good lord, that’s what passes for steak down here?” Aaron thought, eyeing the frazzled grey lump of animal product facing up at him from a chipped green plate. This slab of beef looked particularly dead, thick ribbons of fat glistening sullenly amidst the grim flesh. The side salad wasn’t much more promising. It looked like something on a TV with bad color adjustment. The alleged greens salad was more of a sickly grey, the tomato wedge a translucent yellow and the creamy dressing a day-glo orange. He really hoped that meant he’d been given thousand island instead of the bleu cheese he’d asked for.

Aaron sighed and began unwrapping the bundled napkin full of silverware. The napkin unraveled and sent a single soupspoon clattering onto the tabletop. “The hell?” Aaron mumbled, picking up the spoon and slowly rotating it in front of his face. His eyes scanned the surrounding tables in search of a steak knife, a fork, even a butter knife, but there was no silverware to be seen. He pressed his thumb into his eye socket in frustration. He started to stand to ask for a full set of utensils, but the big guy in the corner shot him what he took to be a reproachful glare. Aaron slowly lowered himself back onto the slick vinyl chair. Up at the counter, the game had moved into the Double Jeopardy round.

“What is ‘Heartbreak Hotel’?”

“I knew that one.”

“You so smart, why you don’t answer one before they do some time?”

“I got nothin’ to prove.”

Aaron took an awkward spoonful of salad, most of which slopped onto his plate. The dressing was a too-tangy thousand island, thank God, but it couldn’t mask the intense bitterness of the greens. It reminded Aaron of the way his fingers tasted after picking dandelions as a kid. The old men busted out laughing again. Were they watching his plight? He was tempted to just slap ten bucks on the table and take off, but he really was hungry and he just couldn’t be that rude. Instead, he took up the soupspoon and began slowly grinding it against the rubbery steak, hoping to work a hunk off by erosion. The steak didn’t budge. He flipped the spoon over and tried to penetrate the meat with the handle, but the plate just slid noisily against the wood grain and he quickly gave up.

“What is ‘Don’t Be Cruel’?”

“Knew it.”

“You didn’t know a damn thing!”

He wished he’d asked for silverware in the first place, but now enough time had elapsed that he couldn’t do it without looking awkward. Maybe the best strategy was just to pick the steak up and eat it like a sandwich. But that would be rude too, unless he could do it without being spotted.

Sneaking a surreptitious peek around the café, Aaron pulled the paper napkin from his lap and in one quick darting motion snatched the meat from the plate. Under the table his hands haphazardly wrapped the napkin around the steak and jammed the greasy bundle into the left pocket of his jeans. He stood up slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible, and trudged toward the unisex restroom at the rear of the diner, eyes fixed on his own shoes. As the men’s room door swung open, he caught another gust of laughter from the smokers.

The restroom was not half as disgusting as the food and service had caused him to fear, but there was an acrid hint of urine in the air that made the notion of wolfing down the gristly steak even less appealing. He pulled the parcel from his pocket and unwrapped it disdainfully. Bits of white napkin clung to the meat, but Aaron decided the difference in taste would probably not be worth the effort of scraping them off. He leaned over the sink and tried to hold his breath as he took his first nibble. Other than being awfully tough, it wasn’t too bad. In fact, it was downright decent, sort of like a good bar burger. He bit off a larger chunk and caught his reflection in the mirror. He couldn’t help laughing at the realization that he was crouched over a bathroom sink in Senatobia, Mississippi devouring an ugly steak as he hid from a perfectly harmless bunch of black folks. The laughing quickly turned to coughing as he accidentally inhaled a fleck of half-chewed meat. The spasm shook the steak loose from his hand. Aaron lunged to catch his lunch as it bounced off the side of the sink basin. He managed to get a hand on it, then watched in horror as the altered trajectory sent the meat tumbling end over end into the toilet.

Aaron’s eyes burned with hot tears. He wanted desperately to be out of the bathroom, out of Silver’s Diner, out of Senatobia, out of Mississippi and back in his ancient Volvo sailing down the interstate toward New Orleans. There was no salvaging the meal. After a moment’s mourning, he flushed the toilet bitterly, silently cursing whatever ill-fated cow sacrificed its flank to produce that hateful steak. He squeezed a few pumps of garish pink hand soap into his palm and began rubbing away the grease and grime of a long morning on the road. He turned off the tap and was puzzled to still hear water running. He turned in exasperation to see a stream of water trickling down the porcelain sides of the overbrimming toilet bowl.

Aaron was already digging in his wallet as he hustled out of the restroom, past the still-squabbling game show buffs.

“What is ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’?”

“Naw, what is ‘Only the Lonely’?”

“That ain’t even an Elvis song. I knew you didn’t know nothin’!”

“Didn’t stop you from marryin’ me.”

“Yeah, and you hear me braggin’ that one up?”

As Aaron approached his table, he noticed the portly woman in the corner rising from her seat. He picked up his pace, anxious to get out before his toilet transgression was revealed. Just then a burly, bearded man in a grey seersucker suit came bursting through the door, a blast of stifling hot air following close behind. “Hey, Reverend!” the smoking table chorused.

The bearded man didn’t return the greeting, just beckoned them frantically toward the outside. “Hey, y’all come help! Some fool parked in Miss Annie’s space and she had to park back behind the dumpster! She got her walker all tangled in the bushes and she’s like to pitch a fit back there, somebody don’t get her out quick!”

Every eye in the place fixed first on Aaron, then on the pale blue Volvo parked directly in front of the entrance, then on the Minnesota license plate in the center of the grill. “It… it wasn’t marked handicapped…” Aaron murmured, but his words were drowned out by the clatter of chairs as the three old men hustled to Miss Annie’s aid, shooting him dirty looks the whole way out the door. The big guy from the corner table grumbled something Aaron couldn’t hear as he followed close behind.

Aaron opened his mouth to make some kind of explanation to the accusatory waitress and her jowly husband, but just then the large woman emerged from the bathroom saying, “Mona, you got one hot mess back there! Toilet runnin’ over, water everywhere!”

Aaron was out the door before Mona had a chance to respond, two five-dollar bills fluttering to the tile in his wake. The Volvo’s aging belts squealed in protest as he backed out of the space, revealing a few yellow paint chips that might conceivably have once resembled a figure in a wheelchair. He glanced in his rearview just in time to catch five bodies scrambling out of range of his rear bumper. He saw the elderly woman who had been their nucleus throw her mouth open wide under her lemon yellow Easter hat. The transmission clunked angrily as he shifted into drive just in time to avoid flattening the unfortunate Miss Annie. The Volvo lurched forward and Aaron careered out of the parking lot serenaded by a chorus of angry bass voices.

He was almost to the interstate before he realized it was well over a hundred degrees in the car. He hurriedly cranked down the driver’s side window and was immediately slapped in the face by the unmistakable, greasy aroma of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He almost stuck his head out the window and cursed Colonel Sanders’ smug goateed face beaming down from the marquee, but he just bit his lip and pulled onto I-55 already doing 80.

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by iobrooker on January 1, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Fiction

Posted by iobrooker on January 1, 2012

http://irabrooker.com/2012/01/01/lunch-in-august/

Bouncing Back in the Big Easy: New Orleans’ literary community rises from the ashes

In 2006, the great Sam Weller, one of my writing professors at Columbia College Chicago, asked me to write a story for Fictionary, an annual publication of the school’s Fiction Writing department. Sam was interested in the effects Hurricane Katrina had had on the ever-vibrant New Orleans literary community. Writing the article turned out to be one of the toughest, most rewarding tasks of my career, and it left me feeling like there might be some real hope for my adopted homeland’s recovery.

The section of Maple Street between Carrollton Avenue and Tulane University is one of New Orleans’ hidden gems, a slightly upscale strip of boutiques, restaurants and salons beloved by locals and largely undiscovered by tourists. Although floodwaters ravaged frat houses and campus buildings only a few blocks away, Maple Street remained relatively undamaged and was one of the first retail districts to rebound after Hurricane Katrina. Still, even five months after the storm, not everything is back to normal. The street’s two coffee shops remain shuttered, a major loss in a city that loves its java dark and bitter. Fortunately for area residents, Maple Street Book Shop is picking up the slack.

“We started brewing free coffee every morning on the porch,” says Rhoda Faust, Maple Street’s owner. “CDM coffee, the kind with chicory. We also had a bunch of books that we couldn’t return or that people had given us as donations, so we started a free book exchange on the front porch. And we got free wi-fi so people can go online and find out about their FEMA checks.”

The bookshop has long served as a sort of community center for locals, but with the city’s libraries still closed in the wake of post-Katrina layoffs, that function has become more essential than ever. Faust recalls the neighborhood’s response to Maple Street’s re-opening: “People were teary-eyed with joy. It was unbelievably moving. It made us feel like we were doing something important, for real. These people are in need… People come in and compare notes on how they couldn’t read after the hurricane. They say they just could not pick up a book for two weeks, or for some people even longer. It was part shell-shock, but also a sense of, ‘It’s hard enough being in this reality; I don’t want to escape into something pleasurable and then have to come back to my whole world being changed and here I am in this strange place.’”

Business has been good at Maple Street since New Orleanians started returning to their waterlogged homes, but Faust sees the sales figures as more than just a patriotic desire to bolster the local economy. “People have been buying books that are relevant and hopeful,” she says, noting the great demand for books by local authors, particularly titles dealing with Katrina and its aftermath. A recent in-store signing by Mike Dunne and Beverly Knapp, authors of America’s Wetland: Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast, drew the store’s biggest crowd ever. “Many autograph parties, we’re lucky if we get several bodies,” Faust says, “At this one, we ran out of books at the very end, so they said, ‘We’ll just come back next week.’ We’ve never had back-to-back autograph parties.”

Tom Piazza is another author whose work has been flying off Maple Street’s shelves. His most recent book, Why New Orleans Matters, is a heartfelt argument for preserving the city’s culture and history. “The impetus of the thing was that stupid remark by Dennis Hastert,” Piazza explains, “that maybe New Orleans wasn’t worth rebuilding. I thought, ‘If the Speaker of the House is saying something this stupid, there are going to be a whole lot of other people out there who don’t get why New Orleans has to live. Why it has to live.’”

Piazza wrote the book for Harper Collins in one month, working largely out of an abandoned cotton gin in his temporary home of Malden, Missouri, then hit the road for a national tour. “Most of the places where I read, there would be heavy concentrations of New Orleans people who had come. I don’t even take that as a testament to my book. It’s just that people really want to see New Orleans out there in the public consciousness. The New Orleans people you run into in other places are all just dying to get back. Worried, grateful to see the other New Orleanians in the audience. It became almost like a big reunion. Everywhere I went, people were passionately concerned about the fate of New Orleans.”

Back in the city, Piazza sees a familial atmosphere among returning writers, but he won’t necessarily say the bond is any tighter or looser than it was pre-Katrina. “It’s like red kryptonite in the old Superman comics,” he says, “You never knew what was going to happen to Superman when there was red kryptonite around. The storm was kind of like the universal red kryptonite. It affected everybody in different ways, but there are certain common things. Everybody’s forgetting stuff. Everybody’s borderline aphasic in one way or another.

“I say it better in my book, but I think at any given moment you’re a more exaggerated version of a part of yourself. You’re more observant, more oblivious, more sensitive, more energetic or completely exhausted. It’s like you’re put in a centrifuge and they separate out the strata. You’re usually more of an integrated personality, but I think everybody’s had their personalities disintegrated by this event.”

As an example of the city’s cooperative spirit, Piazza points to the thriving blogging community, where New Orleanians from anonymous high schoolers to best-selling horror writer Poppy Z. Brite keep each other and the rest of the nation abreast of the latest developments in the Crescent City. “There is a living literary community in New Orleans right now that’s sharing information, staying in touch,” he says. He also notes the many national media outlets that gave space to writers living and working in the Gulf Coast area in the storm’s aftermath.

Joshua Clark is one of those writers. Founder and editor of Light of New Orleans Press, a small publisher best known for producing the popular French Quarter Fiction anthology, Clark rode out both of the big storms in his apartment on Royal Street. Salon.com ran his daily accounts of life in the city immediately following Katrina, and Poets & Writers recently published his impassioned essay speculating on the sway New Orleans has long held over writerly types.

Clark has two words for displaced New Orleans writers now working elsewhere around the country: come back. Although he acknowledges that writers living in the city were initially hampered by a paralysis similar to that of the readers at Maple Street Book Shop, he feels locals owe it to themselves and to their hometown to get the word out.

“We need people to be back here, writing about what’s happening here at home,” Clark says. “There’s been plenty written about the situation, but so much of it has been written either by people who have never lived here or by people who have but are writing from elsewhere. You can’t really know what it’s like here unless you’re on the street every day, living it, breathing it, eating it.”

Clark is doing his part to help those writers who do make the trip back by donating a portion of the proceeds from sales of French Quarter Fiction to Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support (KARES), a charity developed to help artists who lost their homes or livelihoods rebuild. Their website hosts a message board where displaced artists can post their whereabouts, inquire after others and generally get back in touch with the creative community.

KARES is also a beneficiary of this year’s Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. According to executive director Paul Willis, the fest never entertained a thought of holding this year’s twentieth annual edition anywhere but the Big Easy. “There really never was a question whether to go forward. We made our decision as early as September, when we could see that the French Quarter was mostly okay. The festival is all about tradition and history, and the people that are here really want to have this kind of cultural event.”

Still, even a venerable festival like this one will be unavoidably impacted by the hurricanes. “We have three Katrina-related events scheduled right now,” Willis explains. “One is titled ‘In the Wake of Destruction,’ and it’s going to be featuring writers who have books about Katrina out already. We’re also having a panel on reporting Katrina, more of a journalistic view from people who were here during and right after the storm. And we have a panel on urban development and the future of what the city’s going to look like.”

Local writers have been understandably enthusiastic about the opportunity to commune and get their stories out, but Willis has also been impressed by the reaction from artists outside of Louisiana. “It has been nice to see how many non-local writers have said, ‘I’ll pay my own way to get there. I just want to be supportive of this year’s festival.’ It’s the best thing you can do, I think. You’re supporting the local economy, spending money in hotels and restaurants and taking in the cultural events. Beyond sending a big check to the Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity, I think a lot of people see this as a way to help.”

Even those who can’t attend have shown their solidarity. “A little theater group in Chicago donated their refreshment sales from a weekend run of Tennessee Williams plays. A group in Vermont donated their concession sales to us. We had a woman in Texas who organized a reading with some local authors and collected donations, more than $500. Things like that mean a lot,” Willis says.

John Biguenet would agree with that. The O. Henry Award-winning short story writer and novelist was one of the most visible faces of New Orleans in the hurricanes’ immediate aftermath. In October of 2005, the New York Times contracted Biguenet to write a wrenching series of first-person essays detailing his return to the city. “So many people have come up to me to tell me how much those columns meant to them,” Biguenet says. “Whether they were back in the city or wherever they were around the country, it seemed like it was important to people to hear these stories from someone who knows New Orleans.”

While the bulk of New Orleans’ writing community resides in hip, less flood-prone neighborhoods like Uptown and the French Quarter, Biguenet’s Lakeview community suffered considerable destruction. Of course, in the face of devastation this far-reaching, suffering is a relative concept. Biguenet lost his home, his personal library and, worst of all, extensive notes for three upcoming books. Yet when asked if he’s received any assistance, he sounds almost offended. “There are so many people so much worse off than me,” he says, “it never even occurred to me to ask for anything like that.”

Biguenet does have something that many New Orleans writers couldn’t claim even before the storms: a steady job. A professor of English at Loyola University, he was greatly encouraged by the campus scene when school resumed this January after a full semester without classes. “We have 91% of the student body returning. We’ve been running a series of panels on the culture and future of New Orleans. For the first event, so many people came, so many students, that we had to move it into the largest auditorium on campus. In the past, something like this might have been a sparsely attended event, but we had over 500 people show up.”

Loyola’s campus suffered very little damage, but neighboring Tulane and several other local universities required major renovations. Before the new semester began, the New Orleans collegiate community established a credit-sharing system in which students from Xavier and Delgado can take certain courses at Loyola and Tulane and vice versa, further fostering the city’s new, we’re-all-in-this-together outlook.

So where does New Orleans’ beleaguered literary community stand today, nearly half a year after the city was turned inside out? The outlook is not as brilliant as one might hope, but neither is it as bleak as one might fear. As with all aspects of life in the battered city, New Orleans writers face a long, uphill climb back to normalcy. One of Katrina’s silver linings is that their work is now more immediate and vital than ever, and writers like Biguenet, Clark and Piazza are making the most of their time on the national stage, casting light into corners that desperately need to be illuminated. And as the patrons of Maple Street Book Shop, the attendees of the Tennessee Williams Fest and the students at Loyola can attest, they’re feeding a hunger that will eventually drive this city back to its former greatness.

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by iobrooker on December 29, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Interviews, New Orleans, Nonfiction

Posted by iobrooker on December 29, 2011

http://irabrooker.com/2011/12/29/bouncing-back-in-the-big-easy-new-orleans-literary-community-rises-from-the-ashes/

Vegas is in your mind: A profile of Ronnie Vegas, Elvis Tribute Artist

Originally published in NewCity, July 2005. Incidentally, the story of how I got this story may be a better story than this story. Ask me about it some time.

In a postage stamp tavern along Western Avenue, a spear-bald, muscle-ripped guy leaps off his barstool and begins to gyrate as the man in the sparkling jumpsuit belts out the opening strains of “Walk A Mile In My Shoes.” The pretty blonde behind the bar hollers out drink orders in vain, her voice lost under the baritone growl on the PA. A sixtysomething woman by the far wall sips her G&T, eyes the singer’s billowing black hair and asks a friend for some spare underpants to throw. It’s Friday night, the joint is jumping and Ronnie Vegas is in the house.

Ronnie Vegas is the North Side’s resident Elvis Tribute Artist (the PC term for what used to be known as an Elvis impersonator), a sparkly, sweaty dynamo who laughingly says he’s been doing his act “long enough to know I should be doing something else.” His look is late-period Presley – sequined jumpsuit, towering pompadour, doughy midriff. He doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to the man himself, but The King’s constant physical flux made it possible for just about anybody to become Elvis with the right costume.

But when it comes to succeeding as an ETA, the look is secondary to the sound. Ronnie is pretty solid in that department, nailing the aching desperation of “Kentucky Rain,” the bouncy joy of “See See Rider,” and the near-religious schmaltz of “In the Ghetto” with equal aptitude. Maybe he can’t quite replicate the sexy quaver of Elvis’ earliest vocals – and really, can anybody? – but he’s got the Vegas era down pat, right down to the self-deprecating between-song banter. (When a slower number draws only a smattering of applause, he just chuckles and drawls, “Yeah, it just kinda tapers on down to nothin’, don’t it?”)

A few tables have been cleared out so Ronnie can set up at the back of the bar, right in front of the swinging doors leading to the kitchen. There’s barely enough space to squeeze in singer, speakers and DJ table while leaving a path for the waitstaff, but none of this deters Ronnie. He’s here to mingle, roaming the length of the bar as he croons, handing out handkerchiefs to the ladies, exchanging high fives with the guys. It’s a tight space, but he cruises it easily like the pro he is.

Obviously, live music isn’t an everyday thing in this bar, nor in most of the Chicagoland venues that keep Ronnie Vegas booked nearly every weekend. These places are by and large tucked away in the local equivalent of fly-over country – those working class North Chicago neighborhoods where retired cops and firemen settle into blissful inactivity. Where every bar stocks Zywiec and Okochim alongside Miller and Bud. Where nobody would choose to stand in line for a slim chance at a Coldplay ticket when there’s a perfectly good Elvis show down the street. They’re fantastic areas if you know where to look, but there’s a reason no one suggests livening up a dull Saturday by cruising over to Gladstone Park and digging the scene.

And that’s the way the people like it. According to Barbie (“Just Barbie, like Cher”), Ronnie’s manager/DJ/road crew, neither Ronnie nor the venues he plays have much interest in attracting the “cooler” turnout one might expect in Lakeview or Ukranian Village. “These people expect a show. But shows done in the more popular neighborhoods, they expect visual amusement. It’s not so much about quality.” In a little blue collar bar like this one, people feel free to open up, have a bit of fun, maybe even get up and dance a little. The general feeling is that having a bunch of smirking hipsters hanging around “appreciating the irony” would ruin the show for everyone involved. Patrons place such a high premium on remaining undiscovered, in fact, that management politely requested to have the name of the bar omitted from this article.

So who are these anonymous Elvis aficionados who pack the house for Ronnie Vegas every weekend? “Hell, from Homer Simpson to Rod Blagojevich,” says Ronnie. And he’s seen them all, playing big ticket gigs at venues from the Chicago Hilton to last year’s memorial to Elvis’ death anniversary at the Excalibur in Las Vegas. But when it comes right down to it, there’s really nothing like playing to a music-starved hometown crowd in the type of bar where the words “Blue Moon” bring to mind an early Elvis side rather than a high-toned Belgian-style brew.

“It doesn’t matter if there are ten faces or a thousand,” says Barbie, “but definitely the smaller groups seem to make a better show for Ronnie and the audience… Ronnie brings the crowd into it and shows them that he’s just a guy doing what he loves, and at the same time paying tribute to another guy whose music has made a huge impact on the world.”

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by iobrooker on December 29, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Music, Nonfiction

Posted by iobrooker on December 29, 2011

http://irabrooker.com/2011/12/29/vegas-is-in-your-mind-a-profile-of-ronnie-vegas-elvis-tribute-artist/

Life as a Shorty: Hip Hop’s History of Connecting with Kids

From the “vulgar” notes of Dixieland jazz to the salacious swivel of Elvis Presley’s hips to the unwholesome oddness of Marilyn Manson, nearly every new musical movement of the modern era has been plagued by the refrain of “Won’t somebody think of the children?” In recent years, moral crusaders have frequently focused their censor’s tape on hip-hop, due to the genre’s tendency toward adult topics like sex, drugs and violence. That’s a shame, as hip-hop has made regular, concerted efforts to make itself as child-friendly as possible. Take a look at some of rap’s greatest adolescent ambassadors and then see if you still believe the hype.

Sardonic Old-School Rappers

Long before YouTube mash-ups turned every cherished childhood icon into something ironically edgy, rappers were mining the memory banks for gritty material. This list pretty much has to start with Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” in which Rick the Ruler regales his nieces with a bedtime story about a youthful stick-up kid’s misadventures with guns, cops and colorful caricatures like Dave the Dope Fiend. Nothing like sending the kids off to sleep with visions of pregnant hostages dancing in their heads.

Ice Cube at least keeps his kids’ narrative grounded in childlike terrain on “Gangsta’s Fairytale,” even if the Brothers Grimm would likely find their characters unrecognizable. In Cube’s version, the Three Little Pigs are drive-by shooters, Cinderella turns tricks in the street and Little Red Riding Hood and Little Boy Blue are warring Bloods and Crips. Oddly enough, the song spawned a mini-subgenre of thugged-out kids’ stories. Coolio’s “Ghetto Cartoon” finds a slew of Saturday morning staples caught up in a drug feud (“Now the war is on and Mickey Mouse is dead / Quick Draw McGraw took two to the head”), while Funkdoobiest’s “Superhoes” pulls superheroes, “Charlie’s Angels” and The Wizard of Oz into the mix.

Sincere Old-School Rappers

Of course, certain MCs have always adhered to the old adage about great power and great responsibility. The hip-hop archives of the ‘80s and ‘90s are rife with cautionary tales warning kids about guns, drugs and gangs. While that’s all certainly admirable, it’s not quite as interesting as the rappers who championed some less obvious causes.

Digital Underground’s “No Nose Job” is sensible enough, as silver-nosed front man Humpty warns little girls against media-inspired cosmetic surgery (“She’s only six, says, ‘Mama, I don’t like my nose!’ / Why’d you have to go and mess up the child’s head / Just so you can get another gold waterbed?”). Arrested Development’s “Children Play with Earth,” on the other hand, demonstrates a questionable understanding of both youthful psyches and then-contemporary gaming technology, encouraging kids to trade in their “Nintendo joysticks” [sic] in favor of literally playing with dirt. The era’s most arcane elucidation comes from Intelligent Hoodlum, whose “Posse” addresses perhaps the direst social problem facing urban youth in the early ‘90s: the under-representation of black cowboys in Hollywood Western movies.

Educators and Advertisers

Sometime in the early ‘90s, the American mainstream abandoned its longstanding policy of hoping hip-hop would just go away and adopted a motto of “If you can’t ignore it, exploit it!” Suddenly everyone with a product or a message was busting flows, fueled by the wrong-headed assumption that rapping was little more than talking fast over a steady beat.

On the positive tip, scores of public service announcements followed the old “Schoolhouse Rock” model, employing shaky rhymes and suspect beatboxing to disseminate their messages. More ambitious producers went to the trouble of booking actual rappers like The Fat Boys, whose burger-based math rap on PBS’ edutainment program “Square One Television” is the stuff of legend. On the more cynical side, kiddie show advertisers also followed the zeitgeist, perhaps most famously in a series of Fruity Pebbles spots that cast Barney Rubble as a Stone Age MC.

By the mid-‘90s, hip-hop was so ingrained that lazy classroom teachers began using it as a cheap catchall shortcut to engage with the kids “in their own language.” (We’ve even heard of one freelance music writer whose eighth grade English teacher forced him to write and perform a rap about mandatory retirement guidelines for commercial airline pilots.) That strategy carries through to today – witness the strange but successful “Smart Shorties” series of math teaching videos.

Kids Themselves

Once hip-hop started gaining mainstream currency, it was only a matter of time before some impresario started looking for the next Jackson Five or Little Stevie Wonder. Old school child rappers tended to fall into the “Kids Say the Darnedest Things” trap; witness Chi-Ali’s booty-hunting, forty-chugging cameos on early De La Soul and Black Sheep tracks. It didn’t take long for R&B star Jermaine Dupri – himself only 17 – to figure out how to make money off kids in rap. He plucked a pair of pre-teens from an Atlanta mall and birthed the backwards-dressing early ‘90s rap sensation that was Kriss Kross, the act that finally pulled the Tiger Beat crowd into the hip-hop era.

That success led to a predictable backlash, with various kid rap acts positioning themselves as the anti-Kriss Kross. Philadelphia’s Da Youngstas touted their self-penned lyrics and occasional self-produced tracks as evidence of their legitimacy, while L.A.’s Illegal milked their Snoop Dogg affiliation to declare themselves the hardest kids on the block. By the time Wu-Tang subsidiary Shyhiem dropped his first album in 1994, underage rappers had more or less shed the novelty label. That trend continued into the 2000s with the massive mainstream success of Lil Bow Wow (and, to a lesser extent, Master P’s inevitable nepotistic knock-off Lil Romeo), though lately it appears to be coming full circle. Try a YouTube search for “kid rapper” and be astonished at the array of allegedly cute, pre-pubescent performers being paraded in front of their parents’ cameras.

Mr. Courageous, ODB

In perhaps the most transcendent chapter of his reliably bizarre, ultimately tragic existence, Ol’ Dirty Bastard confirmed his commitment to the youth of America in front of a millions-strong audience of Grammy Awards viewers. Snatching the stage from “Song of the Year” winner Shawn Colvin, the Wu-Tang Clan wild man aired some brief complaints about losing the award and stretching his wardrobe budget before reassuring the crowd that all was well because “Wu-Tang is for the children.”

ODB practiced what he preached when it came to kids, becoming an urban folk hero after he rescued a four-year-old girl from a burning car in 1998. As further evidence of his dedication, he also personally contributed at least thirteen children to the American landscape. We are no doubt richer for it.

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by iobrooker on December 29, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Music, Music Lists

Posted by iobrooker on December 29, 2011

http://irabrooker.com/2011/12/29/life-as-a-shorty-hip-hops-history-of-connecting-with-kids/

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