A Freewheelin' Time (17 page)

Art
and
Influences

Bob and I were
right back together again, absorbing the changes that had happened to both of us during our separation. I was more confident and he was more open. Whatever it was that held us together hadn’t dissipated. He wanted to be part of my world as much as he wanted me in his.

He had traveling tales to tell me, opinions to express, more songs to sing, and I had found other artists, poets, and music to add to my roster of enthusiasms to share. I was reading poetry by Rimbaud and it piqued his interest. We went back and forth, feeding each other’s curiosity. When Bob searched for more, Allen Ginsberg took him further with his great spontaneous knowledge of all the poets.

After the events of the past October the fear of a political confrontation leading to the use of nuclear weapons hovered over every day more than anyone wanted to contemplate. There was no doubt how profoundly scary the threat of nuclear war had seemed. While in England Bob had written “Masters of War,” and shortly after his return he sang the new song in an interview with Alan Lomax. His conversation was upbeat in contrast to the emotion in his singing voice. He cited Soviet premier Khrushchev’s response to an English reporter who asked who had won the conflict over Cuba. Khrushchev had replied, as quoted by Bob, Kennedy didn’t win, I didn’t win. Humanity won. He’s a poet, Bob added, laughing.

Izzy Young decided to put together a songbook about the bomb and asked for contributions from Bob and other songwriters. The same sentiment that provoked “Masters of War” was behind the song Bob gave Izzy but the tone was entirely different. Despite our anxiety about the world around us we were in good spirits and happy to be together. The song displayed the black humor and the surrealist tone we communicated in:

I hate the letters in yer word—B that means bad yer so bad that even

A dead hog in the sun would get up an’ run O that stands for orrible

Yer so orrible that the word drops it’s first letter and runs M

That stands for morgue an’ all them folks in it ’re feelin’ lucky

The bomb songbook idea was one of many projects initiated by Izzy Young but it never went anywhere in the end. Izzy, who never threw anything away if it had writing on it, filed the song among his papers for 1963 and forgot about it. It was only recently he came across Bob’s “Go Away You Bomb,” given to him so long ago for a book that was never published.

G
rowing up, I loved Shakespeare, and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Lord Byron. When I found Bertolt Brecht and later the Beat poets, once I got over the jolt of the staccato rhythms—so different from Byron’s rhyming lyricism—I was all ears for the harsh sound and the straight talk. Visual art was another story. When I was still in high school, I saw an exhibit of new American artists at the Museum of Modern Art, with Coke bottles embedded in the paintings and large, sloppy-looking canvases slathered with swaths of what looked like house paint, not oil paint.

The 1950s were a formal time—no one sat on the floor of museums or any other institutions. But I was so struck by what I was seeing that I slid to the floor to stare at the paintings, especially the one with the Coke bottles in it. I thought it was absurd. What was all this?

I grew up looking at the great artists of the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch masters. I loved Picasso, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Derain. It was all about beauty. The art in this show was unexpected and unsettling. I didn’t know what to make of it.

The art off the walls was hard for me to comprehend also. The first time I encountered the combines of Robert Rauschenberg—specifically the goat with the tire around its middle—I thought it was ugly. I didn’t understand the lack of beauty. Where did “art” go?

On the other hand, the joy of youth is not to be bothered by where things might’ve gone but to find out where things are going.

I needed to take more time looking in order to develop my ability to see, but I got there. I think the transitional link for me was Wassily Kandinsky, whose work I was drawn to because of its vibrant colors and woozy shapes but didn’t like at first. His paintings appeared cartoonlike and flimsy to me. I made myself go and see everything he’d done, to find out why I didn’t like his work, and then of course I began to like it. I was learning the language of seeing.

I was lucky to live in New York, a city filled with galleries and bookstores, where I could take my time and look for free. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its accessible pay-what-you-wish policy, became my university.

Somewhere in my gallery wanderings I came upon a box by Joseph Cornell, and the effect it had on me was so strong that I had to look away. I thought I might harm the piece if I looked at it too closely. I walked around the gallery, waiting until I settled down a bit before going back to look at it again. I don’t remember any other work of art ever capturing me in quite this way. I felt that his work was mine alone, and I could not speak to anyone about him for some time, it was such a private sensation.

The work of the brilliant and witty Red Grooms was an accessible link between old and new. I could see how he descended from the art I was accustomed to. The spirit of Picasso, Derain, and the Dada pranksters was apparent in his paintings and constructions.

Another seminal show that furthered my art education was
The Art of Assemblage
at the Museum of Modern Art. By then I was with Bob and we went to see it together. Bob was as critical and curious about visual art as he was about the written word. It pleased me that he was able to look at something for as long as I could.

The exhibit was rich with art on and off the walls that was horrible and exciting and ugly and beautiful all at once. I was still a sucker for beauty, but I was discovering what beauty could be made of. By the time I encountered Nam June Paik’s video screens and his weirdly wired TV sets, some years later, I was fine. These artists were to the art world what the Beats were to the written word. But for me, Joseph Cornell was a time-stopping poet in a place all his own.

T
heater and film were other grounds ready for new plantings. During the early sixties Off Broadway was thriving, and Off-Off Broadway was just starting up. Plays were put on in coffeehouses and in church basements. New plays were performed and old plays were given new interpretations. I worked with different crews of people making sets and props for many productions. Most of the people I worked with were artists, actors, and writers, happy to do this work rather than wait on tables or drive cabs. The best memories I have of that period are the countless hours spent with others making and painting lightweight replicas for the stage: a Russian coat of arms, antique furniture, brick walls, rock piles, forests, and a Noah’s ark for productions most of whose names I no longer recall. The last, however, was for a production of the opera
Noye’s Fludde
by Benjamin Britten, and the first was for a play based on
War and Peace.

We built these things out of chicken wire, canvas, and special molding products similar to papier-mâché and we painstakingly painted in all details by hand. To give walls and rocks texture, we used uncooked oatmeal and farina. Being artists, we invented and improvised ways to do things and then spent many hours making it all work. We pored over books that had photographs of the objects we were replicating. I learned many techniques that came in handy over the years for my own artwork.

Quinton Raines was the overseer, so to speak, in this freewheeling atmosphere. He was the man who found the jobs, hired the crew, and was part of it himself. We all worked closely with the set designer, if there was one. Sometimes Quinton rented a basement or a loft space for us to work in, but many times we built everything from scratch in the theater itself. I spent so much time at the Theatre de Lys (renamed the Lucille Lortel in 1981) on Christopher Street and the Cherry Lane on Commerce Street that they began to feel like second homes.

LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, was an up-and-coming playwright and poet in the mid-1960s, and Carla and I both worked with Quinton on the production of his play
Dutchman,
along with Edward Albee’s
American Dream,
both directed by Alan Schneider, at the Cherry Lane. I remember Jones sitting in the back of the theater during rehearsals or walking around the set, saying little. His demeanor was always very serious and focused.

I also worked at Zeller Studios, a bigger and more established set construction company located in a loft way over by the East River on Avenue D. In addition to building sets for theater productions, Gary, the owner, also made sets for industrial shows held at fancy hotels in the general metropolitan area. Our mad crew of artists and actors would drive to the hotel location in the studio’s van and wheel in the big canvas carriers covered with tarps and filled with props, as well as the set to be assembled and the tools and supplies with which to do it all.

Metal frames wrapped in heavy-duty canvas, the carriers were like cloth Dumpsters on wheels. When we left, we loaded them up, covering everything with the tarps and putting it all in the van. We no longer had the sets, just supplies and tools that we placed carefully on top of the assortment of hotel flatware, tableware, and tablecloths we’d take back to the studio on Avenue D. Nobody had much money, and the temptation to have a nice platter or silver-plated salad forks was overwhelming at times.

L
etter from Bob, October 1962:

I saw this play called A Man is A Man in which Steve Israel (you might know him) played the lead—the best thing in it tho was Judith Malina—Steve invited me to come cause he plays the lead just one nite a week, the slowest nite, the Sunday one—anyhow he’s beautiful but no Gary Cooper (or Cary Grant)—(just kidding). That Judith Malina was great tho—you’ve got to see her act sometime—

When I got back from Italy and Bob was back from England, and we were once again united and settled into a life together in the apartment on West Fourth Street, we went to see the Living Theater production of
The Brig
at its space on Fourteenth Street. Founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in the late 1940s, the Living Theater was revolutionary in its day. Beck and Malina’s approach to theater was based somewhat on Antonin Artaud and the Surrealists’ ideas for the Theater of Cruelty in France during the 1930s. The theatrical philosophy of the Living Theater was to break the fourth wall, to eliminate the separation between audience and actors. The company performed the works of American and European experimental writers like Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau, in addition to contemporary playwrights.

The Brig
was about ritual cruelty in Marine Corps prisons. It was a powerful production exposing to civilians (the audience) the culture of the military. As I remember it, the entire stage was a chain-link cage with barbed wire and loudspeakers on top of poles. The “play” consisted of barking commands from guards to the prisoners, who in turn shouted requests for permission to move forward, sit, or step across an arbitrary line. The dialogue was incomprehensible a lot of the time, but the degradation of the men was jarring and the dehumanization of the prison system overall was shocking. The unrelenting verbal assaults of the guards and the general din left audiences with a feeling of exhaustion and defeat equal to that of prisoners confined to the brig. We were both blown away by the force of the production.

As a result of the success of
The Brig
and the relative success of equally controversial and abrasive previous productions, the Living Theater was constantly harassed by its landlords or the city for some infraction or other. Inevitably, it would lose the lease on its performance space. It became a nomadic theater group. When the IRS came down on Beck and Malina during the production of
The Brig,
they fled to Europe.

As unlikely as it may sound, it was at the Living Theater space on Fourteenth Street that Bob and I first saw Tiny Tim perform. When he first showed up in the Village in search of gigs, Tiny Tim was an anomaly, singing songs from the late nineteenth century and playing a plastic ukulele. What was he doing tiptoeing around deliberate bohemians, hard drinkers, poets, wisecracking satirical standup comedians, and folk, blues, and bluegrass singers in coffeehouses and bars?

Contrary to Tiny Tim’s reputation for fastidiousness, he tended to look disheveled in his baggy black suit and white shirt. He wore a dusty-looking black hat over greasy ringlets of black hair. His skin was pasty; he didn’t look healthy. But then he would get up and sing those silly songs in his whiny, trembling falsetto and you had to love him, if just for his courage. He was really knowledgeable about the music he sang and was completely committed to the work he set out to do. It made no difference to him if he was being ridiculed or appreciated. He reveled in both—attention meant an audience, which meant everything to him. He never stepped out of character. He was always Tiny Tim, though he did look a little spiffier by the time he hit it big on national television in the late sixties.

P
opular music and Hollywood movies were bland in the same way during the fifties and early sixties. Most popular music was about as exciting as a Doris Day and Rock Hudson movie. Finally music was evolving into something else, and movies shortly followed.

The Village movie theaters showed “art movies,” code for foreign films. There was even a theater on Eighth Street called the Art Theater. Bob and I saw
Pull My Daisy
in one of those Village theaters. It was unlike any other movie we’d seen, an abstract black-and-white American film by and about the Beat Generation that had more in common with the French New Wave than anything out of Hollywood. The characters were a wild bunch of crazy poets, painters, and music makers. Jack Kerouac narrated the short film, whose cast included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, and David Amram. Alfred Leslie, a painter, and the great photographer Robert Frank directed and filmed it.
Pull My Daisy
had no story and no plot. There was something familiar about the way it was off-balance, unknown, and freewheeling. It was oddly discombobulating to see a movie that made you feel you were in the next room.