Writing with a Red Crayola

From our vantage out on the edge, Zappa and the Velvet Underground, and other more conventionally strange bands, were Vichy-puppet right-wingers, ordinary musicians trying to do something different and still function within the rock & roll framework. We said fuck the framework, listen to this, motherfucker. And then busted your eardrum.

Oxford American’s music issue has plenty to offer besides the article I mentioned in last week’s marathon post. Another feature, tying in tangentially with my recent posts on music and books, is a series of reminiscences by writers who led past lives as rockers, to one degree of success or another. Sven Birkerts, Warren Zanes, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Mike Powell, and James Whorton Jr. all offer a peek into their musical pasts. (Zanes, late of the Del Fuegos, has a particularly entertaining piece, which among other things relates his realization while onstage that he was going bald: “Everyone in the audience was looking toward the stage. They knew…. I was torn between playing the guitar and feeling for damage.”)

The real highlight, though, is the piece by Frederick Barthelme (brother of Donald, who I’ve written about before). Barthelme was the original drummer for the Red Crayola, possibly the longest-running art rock band out there. Anyone at all interested in the band should enjoy the article; it gives a lot of insight into the band’s beginnings.

Because we couldn’t play all that well, we had to do something else, something more interesting, and since we were art-inclined, we went that route, leaning on every possible art idea at every turn. Soon we were making “free music,” playing long improvised pieces heavily invested in feedback, random acts of auditory aggression, utterances of all kinds. We began to have big ideas about ways to listen to music, and what “music” was.

As players, some of us were better than others. Mayo could play a little guitar and already had that odd touch on the instrument that he has today—his playing was wonderful and startling, very spare, full of asides and quotations, and always giving you the impression he was about to screw the pooch, musically speaking. Steve Cunningham could play a bit of bass, and did so, fearlessly. As a drummer, I was like the last guy selected for the dodge-ball team—no time, no coordination, no nothing. So I was spectacular on drums. And all this worked fine because in the larger scheme of things, we didn’t really want to play well. Playing well was what we were against.

Barthelme departed from the Red Crayola after their second or third album, finding his own success as a writer and teacher instead. Since his second novel, Second Marriage, published in 1984, Barthelme’s fiction has been of a more realist bent—everyday people, usually living in the south. But his first book, War and War, was published in 1971 and was written between 1966–69, when he was still a member of the Red Crayola. The book is experimental (and out of print), unlike his more well-known work. If it is spoken of at all, it is usually noted for being similar (and inferior) to brother Donald’s metatextual, language-obsessed style.

It’s one of my favorite books on my shelves—not for its content but for its dated yet wonderful cover. Don’t ask me to explain it; I just like it. The book itself is a stream-of-consciousness pastiche of fiction and (drug-addled? art-school pretentious? merely youthful?) fact. It’s less a novel than a description of the novel Barthelme is writing. It’s a combination of lists, diagrams, photographs, and a constant self-awareness of truth and lies and revision, both of truth and of lies.

It's not a particularly great book, but Crayola fans may want to search it out, both because it's a document from the band's earliest days and because Mayo Thompson appears throughout the novel. For instance (click on the image if you can't read the text):

Elsewhere on pgwp:

• Donald Barthelme is King
• Two posts on experimentalism vs. accessibility in music and writing: part I, part II
• About that other, "more conventional" art rock band, the Velvet Underground, and that other directionless jam band, the Grateful Dead
• "Listen to this, motherfucker. And then busted your eardrum." Oh yeah? Fred, let me tell you about Glenn Branca

Comments

[Lawrence Tate]

Frederick Barthelme's "War & War" was his second book. His first, "Rangoon," was published by the short-lived Winter House imprint in 1970. It consists of short pieces - hard to even call them fiction - not unlike "War & War" but maybe less random than that book. It also includes dozens of charming illustrations by Mayo Thompson, including a hole-by-hole depiction of a golf course. It appeared in both hardcover and trade paperback and probably can be found via abebooks.com

[scott pgwp]

Lawrence, thanks for the heads up! I've heard of the book but didn't realize it was from the same era.