Hidden History: The Return of the Disco Cellist

TNG is taking a much needed break from Dec 19-Jan 4. TNG will return with new content on Jan 5. Until then, please enjoy this post from the past year. Original publish date: 8/20/08

Hidden History is my Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in gay and lesbian history.

What can we learn from the life and work of disco producer and avant-garde cellist Arthur Russell?

How to navigate a life in two geographies: the corn fields of an Iowa boyhood and the dirty streets and echoing practice halls of a musical life in New York City. How to wring every possible sound from an instrument. How to exist in such a way that life and art are integrated entirely. How to strive for the ultimate achievement, perhaps: to craft the image, to write the words, to create the melody so perfect it seems that it can only exist in our minds, our dreams.

What can we learn from Arthur Russell’s death from AIDS in 1992, well before he realized the full promise of those recordings left behind? What can we learn from the long years that have followed?

Nothing less than the rules about how not to be lost to history.

Oskaloosa, Iowa may not be the likeliest town of origin for a gay musical prodigy, but that’s where Russell was born in 1952 and where he would continue to return throughout his life. By the mid-1970s, though, Russell was in New York City. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music, but his most famous association was with The Kitchen, the famed music, art, and performance space founded in Greenwich Village. There, he worked with experimental musicians, such as Philip Glass, and as an organizer, bringing other musicians into the fold. Russell’s key instrument was the cello, in which he had been classically trained, and his scope was broad; he also worked with David Byrne and played on the first Talking Heads single. Rumor has it that Russell was at one point considered for membership in the band.

By the late 1970s, Russell had become immersed in the downtown Manhattan dance music scene. His early disco recordings were performed or produced under a variety of guises, including the names Loose Joints and Killer Whale. These disco records ("Is It All Over My Face," "In the Corn Belt," "Go Bang!" and others) were full of radical improvisations and attracted the attention of both club-goers and such DJs as Frances Kevorkian and the Paradise Garage’s legendary Larry Levan. Co-founding his own label, Sleeping Bag Records, Russell released the album 24-24 Music under the band name Dinosaur L in 1982, along with a string of dance singles on a variety of labels.

Simultaneous to his disco work, Russell was creating avant-garde instrumental music, sometimes for large groups of musicians to perform. The albums Tower of Meaning (1983) and Instrumentals (1984) were the result of these experiments. On an individual level, Russell also turned in a virtuoso performance on the 1986 record World of Echo. Named one of the top thirty releases of 1986 by Melody Maker magazine, World of Echo was a one-man show, featuring Russell on “Vocals, Hand Percussion, Cello, and Echoes.” A radical and difficult attempt to fuse pop, dance, and classical textures, many consider this Arthur Russell’s masterwork. It would be the final album to see the light during his lifetime.

Known as an extreme perfectionist, Russell would frequently not finalize his songs. The 1985 album Corn went unreleased, although three different versions were completed. Another, untitled album was abandoned after five years of work between 1986 and 1990. He would walk the streets of the Lower East Side, down along the Hudson River, listening to his own music on a Walkman. This personal stash of several hundred working cassettes contained dozens of arrangements and ensembles for in-process songs as Russell ground away at his search for the perfect variant of the sounds he was aiming for.

Although he continued to record and perform until near the end of his life, Russell was increasingly ill from AIDS. In 1992, at the age of 40, he lost his battle. The tremendous output of music and ideas stopped.

For all intents and purposes, that should have been it. Artists who die of AIDS, especially those who have not been commercially viable during their lives, do not experience after-death career resurgences. Russell may have retained his tiny cult following, but there’s really no way the audience should have expanded after his untimely death. Disco mavens may have continued to hear a few of the more widely-known singles. The avant-garde instrumental work and Russell’s strange, soft, strained vocals may have retained an underground audience. But to see more albums released after his death than during his lifetime? To be on the verge of breaking into mainstream attention? No, there’s no way that should have happened.

Still, that’s precisely what has happened. As you read this column, four posthumous albums and an EP have been released, with another on the way next week. A brilliant documentary film, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, played the film festival circuit (including in Washington D.C. at Silverdocs) and has now achieved a major-cities release in the United States and Europe. A biography of Russell, Hold Onto Your Dreams, is slated for release in Autumn 2009. And yes, it is true that, in our age, even the underground—especially the underground!—gets co-opted for commercials; Russell’s brilliant pop single “This is How We Walk on the Moon” appeared in a British TV advertisement for T-Mobile.

The circumstances that caused this rush of attention are a primer in the wild combination of good friends and good fortune necessary to avoid being lost in history’s shuffle. How does one achieve this feat?

1) It helps to have friends, both famous and loyal. Russell’s association with The Kitchen was key. His first posthumous album, Another Thought (1994), was co-executive produced by Philip Glass, another musician rising to fame from The Kitchen’s 1970s stable. How much harder might it have been, without Glass’s participation, to get this album produced? Difficult to guess, but let’s just say it couldn’t have hurt. Few would finance the effort involved in Another Thought—sorting through 800 reels of tape with songs in varying degrees of completion in order to produce a 15-song album by a deceased underground musician—without the backing of influential voices. Other musicians Russell worked with and befriended were also key in sorting through the mountains of music he left behind.

2) Leave behind lots of easily accessible material. Undoubtedly, those who worked on culling the best and most representative work from over 1,000 tapes and 1,000 additional pages of lyrics, including dozens of alternate version of single songs, would not say that Russell’s work was easily accessible. But albums like Another Thought and Calling Out of Context (2004; assembled from the hundreds of Russell’s working cassettes) were only possible to construct at all because Russell meticulously recorded and preserved his various efforts. Even this, though, would have been in vain, if not for:

3) Putting work in the hands of a loving executor. All too often, the work of gay artists and of artists with AIDS has been lost because families, ashamed of their son’s sexuality or ashamed of his disease, have destroyed materials or refused permission to re-release work. The Wild Combination documentary, though, shows that Russell’s parents, Chuck and Emily, are tremendously proud of their son’s life and his talent. Their love extends to Russell’s life partner, Tom Lee, who has been the executor of Arthur Russell’s work and has been intimately involved in the creation of the posthumous albums. Russell absolutely could not have found a better person to execute his estate than Lee, and this is the number one reason that his work has continued to be accessible to future listeners.

Note that I haven’t even mentioned Russell’s talent. Without his talent, of course, the music could not have been created or have survived. There’s little doubt that the musical experimentation Russell engaged in shows the mark of artistic genius. But genius is not enough. Without forethought, without luck, and without love, Arthur Russell would be forgotten. It is the great fortune of all those who have listened to and loved his music that this did not come to pass.

Author’s Note: Russell’s biography, Hold onto Your Dreams, is set for publication by Duke University Press, but not until late in 2009. Several of Russell’s albums are in print and available, particularly through Audika Records. Another album, Love is Overtaking Me, is scheduled for release October 28th. The documentary Wild Combination is not scheduled to be shown in theaters in Washington D.C., but it is going to be available on DVD in November; I highly recommend this film, as it is one of the most poignant and beautiful movies I have ever seen.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.

Next week: Lynne Cheney is my sister!