[This piece runs in the summer issue of Signal to Noise. Out today. Pick one up at a finer retailer.]
Arthur Russell needs none of the cliché or mythologizing that tends to attach itself to the figure of the “forgotten genius” or artists who die young. But there is much to compound these tendencies in his case. The avant-disco cellist gave few interviews before his AIDS related death in 1992 – none of them in circulation, was thought (until now) to have rarely been recoded on video, and the vast majority of his musical recordings – over 1000 cassette tapes – have never been released. Given this, experimental filmmaker Matt Wolf’s WILD COMBINATION: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, the first documentary attention given Russell (a print biography is expected out this year from Tim Lawrence), could have survived on the strength of its archival discoveries alone. The film aims higher and succeeds as an evocative and often visually beautiful look at a complex person.
Images of childhood and play ruminate in WILD COMBINATION, as they do in Russell’s music (consider song titles like “Treehouse”, “Let’s Go Swimming” and “Calling All Kids”). A childlike sense of wonder and fascination free of self-consciousness seem to animate Russell’s ovure. Given the sumptuous footage of late ‘70s parties at The Loft, it’s easy to view such spaces as Russell must have: as fantastic mirrorballed playgrounds. Wolf revisits Arthur’s Iowa farmland home where the musician’s parents speak fondly of an awkward and bookish boy who was boundlessly curious but shy and whose considerable acne hindered his social confidence.
After a fight with his father over some pot found in his dresser, Arthur ran away to San Francisco, then in the full throes of its Haight-Ashbury hippiedom. He entered a Buddhist a commune but his renunciation of the world was crippled by the one earthy endeavor he could not loose himself from: playing his cello. After a period in which he would sneak off to the commune’s closets to practice, it became clear that Arthur was more musician than monk (though he was always to retain a bit of the latter). California was a flowering for Russell, but his real creative boon was to occur elsewhere.
Friend and collaborator Steven Hall describes Arthur’s arrival in the Manhattan, stating “he looked like he just stepped off a tractor, but he was coming in to take over.” Indeed Arthur was to captivate almost everyone he met, as the films interviews with Hall, Philip Glass, Peter Zummo, Allen Ginsburg and David Toop testify. The film features some great found footage, including Arthur playing some folksy songs he had written on the acoustic guitar for Ernie Brooks (then in The Modern Lovers), seemingly trying to enlist him in his aspirations. Indeed Russell was adept at winning people over and before long was the musical director of The Kitchen, then the center of the vibrant downtown avant-garde scene. One of the films best moments features an episode of the New York City public access show TV Party that someone tipped Wolf off to, in which Russell plays guitar sheepishly behind David Byrne and Brooks, both of whom are dressed like kids playing Cowboys and Indians. It’s an awkward if comic illustration of the way Russell came to intersect with so many scenes and dominate none of them.
Surely the anecdote most emblematic of the gravity of his personality is boyfriend Tom Lee’s remembrance of meeting Russell. Lee recounts seeing Arthur on the street and, without thinking, following him. It was only after following him at a distance on a few separate occasions that Lee was to work up the courage to approach him. The film wisely foregrounds their love affair, a relationship that ultimately gives us the best glimpse into the musician as person – a man who was thrilled with the advent of the Walkman because it meant he could listen to mixes endlessly, which he often did while jogging or on the Staten Island ferry (he liked to hear the sound of the ocean behind his music). Here we have a portrait of the man who would leave the blender on all day to listen to the whirring drone, or let the water level in his fish tank drop so that the filter would make gargling sounds for him to play cello alongside of.
Then came disco, which might have seemed an unlikely genre of interest for someone from the avant garde. But Arthur was attracted to the instantaneous communities of discotheque euphoria. And while it proved a fruitful pursuit, there is a certain mist surrounding Russell’s engagement with popular disco, one that the film is wise to discard as it does, highlighting the work as a creative experiment rather than career summit – which it was not. Sure, “Kiss Me Again” was Sire’s first disco single, but few people outside of lower Manhattan ever heard it. This modest success was insufficient for Arthur, who, while personally gentle, possessed a musical drive that was as relentless as it was perhaps blinding.
He recorded incessantly during this time but released little, a trend that was to continue for the rest of his life. He made splashes with “Is it All Over My Face?” and “Go Bang” but felt the anguish of a plateau in popularity. His ambition drove his neurosis. His eccentricities — especially his rampant perfectionism — frustrated collaborators. He squandered a chance to score a major dance production by harassing the director and haunting the theater during rehearsals. As writer and musician David Toop comments in the film, “He truly wanted to make it, but had none of the characteristics you need to succeed in the entertainment industry.”
As collaborators moved away or moved on, Russell withdrew into his apartment, toying endlessly with a stack of electronic instruments, effects boxes, and, increasingly, the instrument he largely set aside during the height of his disco work: his cello. This working configuration eventually led to the creation of Russell’s 1986 masterpiece World of Echo, an album as unflinchingly spare and personal as it is sonically cavernous – an unlikely hybrid of fragility and an instrumental dexterity near total.
Perhaps the cumulative effect of WILD COMBINATION and the forthcoming print biography will be to cement the persona of Arthur Russell to his own history – a pairing made improbable by the combination of a recent surge in profile and a public conception of him that has been (at least until now) more an amalgamation of anecdote than coherent narrative. Of course, the soldering of the legend to his material reality will in no way demystify the music itself, which doesn’t need a back story to compliment its still unfathomable singularity and grace. But rarely has music so begged the questions of how and by whom it was created. Now we have somewhere to begin to look for answers.
2 Comments
June 18, 2008 at 12:34 am
Nice one. Just got my copy in the mail, but read this online.
June 18, 2008 at 1:24 am
Thanks Casey!