A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture
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A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture |
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THE DARK BOB SINGS LOVE SONGS FOR ARTISTS Interview: His New Double Album "Ekphrasis Synesthesia - Songs for Artists" |
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by Gordy Grundy
Art Report Today: What does 'Ekphrasis Synesthesia' mean to you? Google had no idea. The Dark Bob: It means using one art form to extoll the virtues of another. Art critics Peter Frank and Michael Kurcfeld came up with that title! ART: How did the concept of 'Songs For Artists' unveil itself?
He was looking for a copy of my first solo Dark Bob record "One Bob Job," which, oddly enough, happens to be in the collection of MoMA in New York. He saw it on their website. I became curious and kind of excited about his archive. I had no idea that so many artists had dabbled in song and audio works, other than the few that I knew about. I mean, who knew that Yves Klein or Joseph Beuys made records and cassettes? Somehow that got scrambled up in my head, and I was suddenly inspired to write a sort of 'tribute' song to one of my dearly departed friends, Mike Kelley. I knew Mike way back when he first got to LA, and he was very much into doing music in those early years. So I went into the studio and recorded "Long, Long Way (for Mike Kelley)." It’s a sad song. Kind of a punk thing. I played all the instruments. The lyric was just ONE line. "I got the feeling that I’m goin’ down and it’s a long, long way" repeated over and over. ART: That's very sweet, Mike Kelley as inspiration. And your love list just kept growing? TDB: Suddenly the songs just started coming to me one after another. First as "love songs" to a few of my dead friends like Chris Burden, Billy Al Bengston and Carole Caroompas. Eventually, I began writing songs for other artists. Some that I knew personally, and others that I’d never met, but I loved their work. So throughout this process I was also writing songs for Goya, Picasso, Monet, Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, Agnes Pelton and others whose work touched and influenced me. It felt like these songs were an opportunity to thank them. In the end, I literally had to force myself to stop writing after I amassed 26 songs! I could have gone on and on, because there are so many artists that inspire me and give meaning to my life. That’s a corny thing to say, so I won’t say it, but wait! I just said it, didn’t I? Oh well. I mean, I love other stuff too, like Batman, thermal socks and French fries, but art has always been my anchor. So essentially these songs are 'love songs.' ART: Right! And you have an eclectic selection of artists. TDB: A few of them like Barbara Smith, John Fleck and Llyn Foulkes are really close friends that I totally love. "Feed Me," the piece for Barbara Smith, is a sort of techno track that digs into one of her more famous performances of the same name. It’s a duet with Kate Crash. "Johnny’s Got A Hit Show" is a full on punk song that celebrates John Fleck’s rise to fame and his popularity in LA that reaches way beyond the art world. And “One Man Band" for Llyn Foulkes is a full on hillbilly style song that focuses on, what Llyn calls, his "machine" and the music he makes on that "machine." But it also gets very personal and pretty mushy about how much his friendship means to me. ART: I love the notion of 'Songs for Artists.' What a great way to honor those that you admire. Unlike a basketball or Hollywood star, the appreciation of a creative is a beautiful, objective bond. It's a wonderful feeling to admire someone and their outstanding work. You chose to honor Ed Ruscha. Why do you like Ruscha's work? What is significant about the artist? TDB: Well, as an LA artist, tipping one’s proverbial hat to Ed Ruscha is pretty much unavoidable. When I first began making art thousands of years ago, Ed was still very active on the scene and I got to know him and his wife Danna and his brother Paul pretty well. Ed was very open and supportive of the performance work that I was doing in the Bob & Bob team and I remember that he and Danna attended some of our early performances. I particularly remember that they showed up to our first exhibition of drawings at the Ruth S. Schaffner Gallery, and even back then it was a positive affirmation to feel his support. And let’s not forget that Ed was pretty out-there! He had done plenty of conceptual art pieces with the books and films that he made and his collaborations with Billy Al Bengston, Mason Williams and Joe Goode. It was crazy stuff. The piece I did for Ed on this album is quite funny and clearly fashioned after 'Alvin and the Chipmonks.' ART: On this new album, you have quite the merry band of accomplished musicians and talent. From Dave Alvin, Peter Case, Nels Cline, Syd Straw and more. Tell us who they are, their notable accomplishments and how they became a part of your creation?
TDB: When I look at the list of contributing musicians and singers on the album I’m blown away. I mean, I love these musicians and I’m a huge fan of their work. So I’m very grateful that they shared my enthusiasm for the project and came in, and gave so much of themselves. The folks you mentioned have had a lot of success with their music. Almost all are Grammy winners and Grammy nominees and they’ve all made great records. They know I’m an "outsider" and I think that’s exactly why they enjoy working on my stuff. I’ve always been on the peripheral of LA’s music scene and felt more comfortable doing my work mostly in the underground art world. My co-producer on almost all of the songs is Glenn Nishida at Pacifica Studios. I have worked with Glenn for over 30 years. I don’t even know how to explain the way he has shaped my songs, my monologues and all the other audio works I’ve done over the years. There’s really no way I can even begin to thank Glenn for decades of collaboration and friendship. My other co-producer on this project has been Ryan Zin at Sunset Park Music. He’s in his mid-20’s and was able to interpret the songs with the techno-sonics of today’s music. He also played bass and guitar on nearly all of the songs, as well as the melodica, harmonica, synthesizers and doing vocal harmony arrangements. And best of all, Ryan is my son! So how great is that? Without the support and collaboration of all these folks, this album simply would not exist.
TDB: Everybody loves the cover of 'Ekphrasis Synesthesia - Songs For Artists!' I get as many compliments on the cover art as I do the songs! It’s a Lou Beach original called 'Universa.' Lou has a long history as a very successful and influential illustrator and he also has a fine art practice exhibiting his works in galleries and museums. Aside from my record, he’s done many great record covers for albums by The Police, Stevie Wonder, Weather Report, and I can’t even think of who else. And his involvement with my record is the direct result of him being one of my best pals! ART: You play many of the different instruments. How crazy does that get? TDB: I end up playing instruments only when no one is around, and I need to get the job done. ART: Exactly! TDB: Sometimes I’ll play a drum part or bass line as a guide for the intended musician, and then I end up saying, "to heck with it, I’ll just keep what I did." Since I don’t have any formal training in music, I often do things that an academically trained musician finds weird or unorthodox and that usually works to my advantage and keeps my stuff from being predictable or "formula." I think my musical naivety can sometimes defy expectations, and that’s a good thing. I might change keys in the middle of a phrase and not even know it, or do an odd number of bars in a verse. ART: "I need to get the job done" demanded that you learn a wide variety of instruments. Please detail some of the more difficult work, like learning the oboe. TDB: Learning anything is always about putting in the time. It’s about making every mistake possible and then figuring out how to avoid making those mistakes again! But like I was saying, making mistakes can sometimes be a good thing. So you don’t want to overlook a mistake that might eventually be heard or seen as your unique or new way of doing it. ART: The artist Llyn Foulkes has been very influential in your work. TDB: At the time I met Llyn in 1974, he was not only a well-known painter, but he also had a musical, comedy group called 'The Rubber Band,' which performed around town and even appeared on Johnny Carson’s 'Tonight Show.' So Llyn was a huge influence, as well as a mentor and he became, and still is, one of my best friends. ART: Your song for Llyn Foulkes highlights his musicianship. I forget about that aspect, because his painting is so distinctive, so forceful. Thoughts? TDB: Learning to appreciate Llyn’s music took time for me mostly because I’m so moved by his visual art. To me, he’s one of the best modern or contemporary artists that I know of! It’s not often that an artist can make such intimate personal statements or have such strong social or political opinions and express it so artfully and powerfully. His paintings just floor me! Of course Llyn’s performance works were a huge influence on Bob & Bob’s early work and also my own solo work, because at times he was unapologetically humorous. And let’s face it, humor, or being funny, is almost a taboo in the fine arts. ART: That's why I've always been your fan. The humor. TDB: Llyn pretty much gave me the courage and permission to do work that was flat out funny. And that has become a huge part of who I am as an artist. Sometimes I would stop in the middle of a performance to tell the audience that no matter how serious I got, they were always welcome to laugh. A critic up in Oregon kind of summed it up in a review saying, "The Dark Bob is never serious, but always sincere." I don’t know if that’s 100% accurate, but I liked that she said that. And Bob & Bob certainly had moments of pure comedy as well. ART: I love these inclusions. Carole Caroompas, Duchamp, Mike Kelley, Chris Burden to Goya. Wild! TDB: Yeah, the record kind of ping pongs through art history. Carole Caroompas and I worked on some songs together which sadly never saw the light of day. Burden and Bengston I knew pretty well, and man, those two were like night and day. The first time I met Mike Kelley, we bonded immediately. ART: Tell us more about Kelley. TDB: Mike told me Bob & Bob were one of his main inspirations to start doing performance, which woos me to this day. I wish he would have said that in print somewhere because now you just have to take my word for it. [TDB laughs.] He’s a guy that I spent many hours with, talking about art, and how it was changing and what it meant to be an artist. I mean, this was a time when people were saying that "painting was dead," and that gave a lot of artists the freedom to explore new forms like performance, video, site specific installations and other works outside of the gallery world. Art was no longer confined to something that hung on a wall. So Mike had this encyclopedic knowledge of art history and he was very passionate about his work and the work of others. ART: And you knew Chris Burden. TDB: I knew Chris about as well as anybody could know him. He did have a couple of close friends, Barbara Smith and the sculptor James Croak and others, but he mostly kept to himself and was a very serious guy. I could occasionally get Chris to laugh, but it wasn’t easy. I mean this was a guy who had a permanent scowl on his face and carried a gun everywhere he went! But I liked him. His intensity was palpable and I love pretty much all of his work, from the performances he did to the sculptures and installations. His presence was powerful. You also mentioned Goya. So to be clear, Goya and I never met, mostly because he was busy hanging out in another century. He was like that, y’know... a real joker. ART: Did you ever meet Duchamp in the flesh? He had a history in LA. TDB: I was just a kid when Duchamp came to town, so I never met or knew him. I think everyone in the art world would agree that Duchamp was a consciousness bomb. He blew up every notion and rule about what it meant to be an artist. In my song for Marcel, a line in the lyric points out that "art is breathing, art is being” which is a reference to his idea that “art is life.” He really wanted to blur the line between art and life. And that notion that 'art is life' is so heavy, I can’t even begin to interpret or explain the impact that has had on so many artists, especially performance and conceptual artists. ART: How did Agnes Pelton make your list? By the way, I would have made the same choice. TDB: Pelton made my list for a couple of reasons. First, because her work is so beautiful and I love it. Secondly, because it was an opportunity to reflect on the particular time in which she was making art. It was a "man’s world" back then, and pretty much still is. Things are a bit better now, but back when Pelton was working, so many talented women were simply overlooked. So the song for Pelton gave me an opportunity to trash the men of her era and to rally for the support of women artists.
ART: Right on. Pelton is fascinating... This is your 9th album. Your discography features an assortment of albums, each with a distinctive, autobiographical subject. There is one with the work of poet Lewis MacAdams and a focus on the LA River. Another goes back to your youth in Venice Beach, California. How did your life build upon itself to create "Songs for Artists"? TDB: Well, making art and being an artist is pretty much my entire experience in life. It always defined who I was. As soon as I could hold a pencil I was drawing all the time. I would copy cartoons from the funny section of the newspaper and it didn’t take long before I was making up my own characters and creating a universe for them to exist in. In school, there’s always the kid who was good at sports, and the kid who was smarter than everyone, and the kid who was better looking than everyone and I was always the kid who could draw. So I was the one doing comic strips in the school papers, doing the Christmas program covers and the yearbook covers. Being the artist kid gave me permission to be different than the other kids and I liked that. I didn’t have to conform to the norm. For better or worse, people sort of expect artists to be weird. So, after getting out of art school [the Art Center College of Design] the struggle of holding down odd jobs and being broke most of the time while still pursuing that need to do art deepened my commitment to making a life in art. But honestly, I never questioned that that was my path. It all comes back to that urge, that compulsion, that ghost inside that has to paint or has to sing to survive.
ART: A lyricist was born! That's a great story. The beats demanded words. TDB: I guess I was about 10 when my mom brought home a Bob Dylan album. I think that’s exactly the reason I wanted to write all those lyrics. Before I heard Dylan, at that tender age, I had a Davy Crockett album where "Davy" sang about his Indian friends and shooting bears and camping in the woods. To me, the Bob Dylan record wasn’t much different than the Davy Crockett record, except Dylan’s words were about the world and about relationships and he totally blew my head off and I’ve never been the same since! ART: How much time do you take to conceive of and manufacture an album? TDB: Usually I put out an album about every five years. And after the album comes out, I’m compelled to make visual works. It’s like a pendulum that goes back and forth from the visual art to the music. It’s hard to do both at the same time. I’m a visual artist at my core, but expressing myself in other ways and in other mediums also comes naturally and easily. But painting and drawing is at the root of it all. The same standards I have for painting also applies to writing songs or making little films or writing. For me, making art is all about creating puzzles, or mysteries, or problems for myself, and then figuring out how to solve them. That’s where all the fun starts. Of course, the process is often riddled with frustration and angst. ART: Your work is biographical. What is your history? Where did you grow up? In your youth, what did you question and what did you learn? TDB: I’m tempted to say that most art for the last 150 years or so has been “biographical” in the sense that it’s generated so personally from the unique neurosis of each artist. Our brains are sort of like a fingerprint because of the environment we grow up in, the kind of parents we have, our teachers, our geography, our race, gender and everything else that defines us. So even when my art is observational or political, it’s still being processed through my personal way of seeing things. I came of age during a powerful upheaval in our society. In 1968, I was 15 years old. So everything from Watergate to Vietnam to the Beatles, Jane Fonda, Timothy Leary, Spiderman, Betty Friedan, Paramahansa Yogananda, The Twilight Zone and Ralph Nadar had me questioning everything. But there was nothing extraordinary about my childhood other than the era I grew up in. I was born in Santa Monica back when it was a sleepy little town for retirees who needed the fresh ocean air. My dad’s family had been in the area for generations. He fought in Europe during WWll and was a private eye in the 50’s and 60’s. He was a great cartoonist, but too practical to pursue it as a profession. My mom was a Christian refugee from Palestine whose family was expelled from their home in 1948. She was a Shakespeare scholar and a world class chef. Both of them had flaws of course, but did their best to provide me and my sister with a modest middle class upbringing, and that’s about as deep as I need to get about it. My dad was funny and my mom was smart. ART: What drove you to become 'a performance artist’? TDB: That’s a tough one. Sometimes I look back at that early work and think "what the hell was I doing?" Performance art was such a new thing when I started that there was really no history behind it. There were no rules or expectations either. I knew some guy had himself shot [Chris Burden] and I heard about a woman in New York who played violin with an audio tape of her voice [Laurie Anderson]. I also remember getting my hands on a brochure from LACMA that had a bunch of still images from the funny videos that William Wegman was making. I liked that Wegman was young and looked like a rock star, but didn’t do rock and roll. He did art instead. Those things definitely pushed me in the direction of doing live art pieces and also gave me permission to do whatever I wanted. I figured that as long as I said it was "art," then it was! Which, of course, is very Duchamp-ish. ART: What is the history of The Dark Bob after Bob & Bob? TDB: During the Bob & Bob years I, along with The Light Bob, was exclusively half of that team. We were a perfect 50/50 blend. A two-headed beast. It was hard to tell where one Bob began and the other Bob stopped. We fully embraced and accepted one another’s ideas, contributions and concepts. If there was ever a disagreement or conflict, we’d toss a coin and that was that. Bob & Bob was bigger than either of us. But when The Light Bob decided to stay in New York after we did that album with PolyGram, I decided to come back to LA. He wanted me to stay in New York and continue our work there, but New York wasn’t my natural habitat. I loved being there, but didn’t want to live there. So when I got back to LA, I felt lost as an artist. I missed The Light Bob. We’d spent a solid decade making art side by side and had done very little solo work that entire time. So to fully embrace being The Dark Bob, I knew I had to do work again, even if it meant doing it alone. I mean, that need to make art is a real thing. It’s a compulsion I was born with! So thanks to Bob & Bob, I had become quite adept and comfortable being a multimedia or "interdisciplinary" artist even if it meant doing it on my own. So I essentially just continued doing what Bob & Bob had done. In the mid 80’s, I started painting, drawing, making little films and videos and doing music and audio pieces and, of course, doing performances. In the beginning, it was rough being on my own and kind of scary, because no one had ever heard of "The Dark Bob," but a lot of people knew about "Bob & Bob." So I leaned on Bob & Bob’s reputation to advance my solo work. And it worked! I was touring my performances, all over the country being touted as a "performance art pioneer" thanks to Bob & Bob’s legacy. And, like I said, there was never really an end to Bob & Bob. We still did stuff as Bob & Bob on occasion. We had a retrospective show at Otis/Parson in 1985 and collaborated on exhibitions and performance works with MOCA, the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, the Kitchen in NYC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the WPA in D.C. and I can’t remember what else. We would do drawings and even write songs together by mailing stuff back and forth. But these collaborations were getting less and less and we weren’t getting the same back and forth dynamic that propelled most of our best work. And the fact is, we were both getting more and more involved with our solo work.
ART: As this new medium of performance art began to grow and explode in new ways, did the work of The Dark Bob change and how? TDB: Oh yes, it almost completely changed my approach to doing performance works. By the early 80’s, performance art was suddenly a “thing” that was happening everywhere in clubs, galleries, small theaters and even museums. It was getting reviewed and talked about and beginning to get a substantial audience. A paying audience, no less! There were flyers, posters, admission tickets, folding chairs and refreshments! Very different from the first wave of performance in the Seventies. Back in the Seventies, with the exception of Bob & Bob’s large scale “Happenings”, our performances were completely unannounced and done on the streets. We literally had NO audience other than those who happened to witness the “action,” or maybe just a handful of other artists would be invited. But suddenly, by the mid 80’s, I found myself surrounded by actors, musicians, comedians, dancers and what not, and they were creating a new template for ‘performance art’ that was very different from my early work. And yes, it upped the ante for me. Since Bob & Bob were often a parody of entertainment tropes, I knew a bit about comedy and timing and lighting and sound systems and how to engage an audience. And because of that, I transitioned pretty easily and fit in pretty well with the new artists like Rachel Rosenthal and John Fleck. My press release at the time took a line out of a review that said, “not just a performance artist, but a weird entertainer,” because that’s what people were expecting and looking for. Entertainment with some gravity and courage. So yeah, back to your very first question, I think my performance work does have two lives. In the 70’s, it was all about rebellion, defiance and revolutionary ideas, but by the 80’s, there was a lot refinement going on with presentation, and performance art became more topical with a lot of socio-political messaging taking over. And eventually, in the 90’s, a lot of performance work evolved into a soapbox for gender and ethnic grievances and I guess that’s kind of where I fell off the radar. But that’s okay. By then I had done a lot of work and I enjoyed seeing these artist empowering themselves and bringing awareness to their audiences. I’ve pretty much stopped doing performance. I’ve done a few pieces here and there, but I prefer to put my energy into painting and music. ART: What is the topic or subject of your next album? Surely, new passions are popping at something? TDB: Well it’s kind of nuts, but I’ve already gone back in to the recording studio to work on a new project. It’s a set of songs and monologues about food and eating. Who can’t relate to that, right? If I wanted to make a dumb joke, I’d say that I’m always hungry for the next project, but I would never make a dumb crack like that, so I won’t. Wait, I just did, didn’t I? Damn it. No self control!
See more of the videos from 'Ekphrasis Synesthesia, Songs For Artists,' Click Here! Buy the double album on collectible vinyl! Or classic CD! Or all of his creations!
Gordy Grundy is the editor-in-Chief of Art Report Today.
All images courtesy of The Dark Bob
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~ Gordy Grundy 
TDB: I got the idea to write songs for, and about, artists, after I was contacted by a Dutch guy, who was archiving recordings made by visual and conceptual artists. 
As far as the songwriting goes, that too started in my childhood. From the time I was about 10, I would write long and complicated lyrics to all of my parents instrumental albums. They had some instrumental Bossa Nova and Gypsy records, and I tediously wrote words to each song. Then I’d sing them into a tape recorder while the record played in the background. Boom! Suddenly I was a singer and songwriter!
