Ian Penman · Nom de Boom: Arthur Russell's Benediction
Ian Penman
Arthur Russell makes a virtue of his home studio limitations, producing a feeling of sinuous, wraparound intimacy: a...
/assets/icons/apple-touch-icon.png
London Review of Books
Iwas​ still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.

Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya index? Breathless dance tracks like ‘Is It All over My Face’, ‘Go Bang!’ and ‘Kiss Me Again’ are definitely way too allegro. But his album World of Echo, from 1986, is so languid it could only dream of one day being called ‘too slow’. Somnolent, smeary, subatomic, the first couple of times you hear it you may wonder, as with my early morning news report, if it wasn’t just a dream. Russell was a one-man index of all the tempos modern music might use or try out. He played in rock bands. He wrote and played experimental modern classical music. He was an open-hearted singer-songwriter. He made music for every possible mood: something to play during the snoozy afternoon, a 12-inch to light up the dancefloor later on, and some sonic mist for your early morning chill-out. He even recorded two versions of some songs, one for the club and one for hi-fi or headphones: a vibrant oil painting followed by its preparatory sketch. Listening to the ethereal World of Echo in my office at home recently, I popped downstairs and was amazed to hear a big bass boom pulsing through the floor like a dub track. As if Russell’s music were itself a house where there are no dividing walls and everything can’t help but leak through.

Cruise all the different Arthur Russells on YouTube and the comments range from an approving SICK! and TUNE! for his dance classics to people confessing they cried uncontrollably over a song from his posthumously released ‘demos’ album Love Is Overtaking Me. It’s as if Neil Young had made not just the lilting Harvest Moon and the frazzled Tonight’s the Night, but also Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ and Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians into the bargain. What can they possibly have in common, these wildly different figures, the nature boy and the urban genie?

Charles Arthur Russell Jr was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in May 1951, and died in New York in April 1992 from complications related to Aids. His father, Chuck, a former naval officer, was the town mayor. It’s easy to picture something down-home and folksy, but the family lived in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Russell was named for his father, with whom he seems to have had a fractious but intensely close relationship; an ex-girlfriend remembers being surprised that even in his early twenties Russell still routinely referred to Charles Sr as ‘Daddy’. Something else that catches the eye, given where things were headed, is that his mother, Emily, played the cello. Russell was no Glenn Gould-style prodigy, but he does seem to have wilfully set his own course from very early on. ‘He was ahead of his age in the things he cared about,’ according to his sister Kate, ‘and that led to all kinds of trouble academically and emotionally.’ In a letter to a friend from 1966, reproduced in Richard King’s new oral biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.

It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over Feeling, to hang on to the timeline of Russell’s steep developmental itinerary. Some of this blurriness is characteristic of the man, but some is the result of a lack of editorial focus. (There’s an unfortunate typo on the very first page, which locates the recent revival of interest in Russell in ‘the early years of the 20th century, a decade or so after his death’.) Everything seems to be happening simultaneously, in different locales. We see Russell in a series of settings, like a montage from a PBS documentary without a voiceover. Standing in a cornfield. Sitting on the deck of a boat. Astride a hay bale in San Rafael. Playing guitar for an audience of bark and moss. Playing cello on the edge of a lake in Minnesota.

In 1968 Russell moved from Iowa to San Francisco, city of bays, bridges and hills. At this early stage he comes across as a somewhat sulky, ascetic figure. He bought his clothes from thrift stores and had zero interest in popular music. His letters were chatty, but in person he wasn’t one for small talk and could be hard work. He was laser-focused on his music (he had already heard Cage and Morton Feldman) and felt a deep spiritual yearning. By 1969 he had become one of the walking wounded of Haight-Ashbury: sleeping in crash pads, selling underground newspapers, arrested for marijuana possession. He appeared to be one step away from some grimy hippie abyss, but like the Fool in the Tarot pack reared away just in time. He entered a Buddhist commune, and seemingly a Sufi commune too. Both at the same time? One after the other? It’s unclear. He enrolled in the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music and studied the North Indian classical tradition: strange new tunings and mind-expanding microtones. The discipline of repetition, the rigour of improvisation. Quiet that intrusive ego! You don’t ‘make’ music, you prepare to let it arrive. The first public performance of two of his own modern classical pieces took place in March 1973, in Berkeley. Arriving in New York in June that same year, he enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, where he learned counterpoint and compositional theory. Everything was set to go bang.

There was​ a time when young people with a dream or an angle could still afford to live in big cities like London and New York. But the world that incubated Russell, and drew out all the snaking tendrils of his offbeat eclecticism, is long gone. Lofts once inhabited by breadline artists, musicians and filmmakers are now the sole preserve of billionaires. The cross-pollination that allowed Russell to switch between different musical idioms didn’t just appear one day out of nowhere, but emerged in very specific economic conditions. Russell’s friend and fellow musician Peter Gordon recalls the mutual support that sustained their circle of friends in late-1970s New York: ‘We used to joke that the same $50 got passed back and forth between us. There was no dividing line between money and the community.’ New York had a (pre-digital, pre-Aids) lineage that included La Monte Young, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith and a lot of loft-based jazz. A fertile and fluid exchange between discrete communities: high, low, queer, druggy, artsy, radical, hedonist. There’s a lovely moment, recorded in Travels over Feeling, where Gordon and Russell go to Union Square Park to buy ‘loose joints’ and hear one of Russell’s latest club bangers thundering out of the boomboxes of the skater kids and dealer-delinquents assembled there. Avant-garde composition and Indian raga practice, beat-making and urban cruising: wherever Russell went he seemed to be at the heart of this magical crossover of circles and scenes.

One place where this crossover logic was always embraced was the Loft, run by David Mancuso. On any given night, the playlist might include club hits like Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’, the Peech Boys’ ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ or Fingers Inc’s ‘Mystery of Love’; but you’d also likely hear Marianne Faithfull and Yoko Ono, the Steve Miller Band and cuts from Joe Gibbs’s African Dub All-Mighty: Chapter 3. The Loft was conceived as a private party rather than an all-comers’ nightclub; it was ‘invitation only’, not through any high-life snobbery but from a need to protect itself against the drunkenness and prejudice of potential interlopers. The first ever Loft party, called ‘Love Saves the Day’, was held in February 1970 at 645-647 Broadway, Mancuso’s own home. He had a wide circle of friends and was, like Russell, a product of the hippie era. He had seen Nina Simone and Timothy Leary at the Fillmore East, and had run or attended rent parties all over New York, from Harlem to Staten Island. Mancuso’s sound designer Alex Rosner remembers an inspirational ‘mix of sexual orientation … a mix of races, mix of economic groups. A real mix.’

The Loft had all the necessary accoutrements: a big bright mirror ball, lots of drugs, and one of the best sound systems in the city. It also laid on free water, fresh organic food and bowls of fruit. ‘It was like a birthday party for kids,’ remembers one regular attendee in the 2008 documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell. In an era when gay men routinely faced night-time harassment, this was a genuine ‘safe space’. The Loft cultivated an egalitarian atmosphere where nobody was seen as hipper or more valuable than anyone else. The entrance fee was low, and donations were made to charities like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. It put the community above personal profit. (This would not be the direction DJ culture would subsequently take.) All of which helps explain why Russell’s track ‘Go Bang!’ (recorded under the nom de boom Dinosaur L) wasn’t just another hot pick at the Loft, but the very encapsulation of its communal ethos: ‘I want to see/all of my friends at once.’ It hymns Dionysian ignition, but the tone is piercingly wistful. Who knows what trials tomorrow may bring, let’s all love one another now.

Russell’s own Buddhist ethos pokes through in a line from ‘Go Bang!’: ‘Thank you for asking the question/To uproot the cause of confusion.’ This is surely the sort of benediction you might address to your Zen roshi. Russell was someone who rarely danced, but worked the recording studio like it was a place of worship – what David Toop, in his remarkable new book, Two-Headed Doctor, calls the ‘creation of provisional sacred spaces’. Music that induces both communal warmth and wild abandon. You could drop in a whole thesis here on the crucial role of the 12-inch single in the late 1970s. It was an expansive idiom in itself, allowing DJs to stretch time into a never-ending night: a circular trance where the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ undertake a sweat-soaked merger, unloosening the guy ropes of ego. What do disco music, Sufic improvisation and avant-garde composition have in common? All reach, through repetition, for the same state of No Mind. Boundaries dissolving inside the bright flame of a dervish music. Spokes around a spinning wheel.

On the ear-opening compilation David Mancuso Presents the Loft Vol. 2, ‘Go Bang!’ is programmed between the Salsoul Orchestra and – one of my own personal Desert Island Discs – ‘Set Fire to Me (Latin Jazzbo Version)’ by Willie Colon; as well as propulsive beats and a wild trombone solo, they share a mood of near-transcendent moment and release. Disco as a form of secular gospel: singer dizzy and pleading, chorus providing a soft cloak of redemption. Saturday night/Sunday morning dance tracks like this had a pervasive sense of loss built in. They honoured recent victories, and anticipated all the mourning to come.

Russell recorded World of Echo alone over a long period leading up to its release in September 1986, shortly after which he tested positive for HIV. It’s a song suite of winded chamber music: stoned-sounding but sober, domestic but otherworldly, something between a séance and a diary. World of Echo is sitting-room dub music, folk song with tape delay. Russell plays his cello like a percussion instrument or bass guitar, generating a series of booms and squeaks and whistles. He makes a virtue of his home studio limitations, producing a feeling of sinuous, wraparound intimacy: a musical Impressionism where background and foreground merge in a dappled, smeary haze. These songs don’t feel ‘written’ in any conventional way; they are like pollen on the breeze. Words as vibrations, passing places, silvered keys to unlock the heart.

Russell said that he enjoyed the ‘musical effect of words as sounds, but where the meaning is not totally withdrawn’. There are scattered references in Travels over Feeling to the influence exerted on the apprentice songwriter Russell by poets such as Ginsberg, Robert Bly and Ezra Pound; William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley in particular inspired the ‘idea of using simple language to convey something very beautiful’. Russell also spoke about how he wanted his home-studio ‘echo system’ to kindle song ‘from the point of view of instrumental music, in the hope of liquefying a raw material where concert music and popular song can criss-cross’. Echoes recognise no boundary, cannot be made to fall in line. ‘As I considered echo,’ Russell said, ‘it seemed that in it, concepts of time and space were expressed sonically.’ You are here now in this moment in this room, but your song hovers over a childhood tree house, a tractor in a field, a swimming hole, a world. Your own private Iowa.

Russell’s work evokes a genuine love in people, more than mere fanboy genuflection. Richard King’s devotion is obvious. He was granted access to the collection of Russell’s papers held at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The custodian of the archive is Steve Knutson, who also set up his own label, Audika Records, to release all things Russell. Travels over Feeling is big, chunky, colourful – like a deluxe CD box set, or what we used to call a coffee-table book. As well as new interviews King conducted with people who knew Russell in the various stages of his too-short life, it features reproductions of correspondence, flyers, photos, scores, album sleeves, studio logs. Halfway between a definitive resource and a lucky dip. If all the voices that sing inside Travels over Feeling don’t finally gel, perhaps that’s only fitting: not a precisely etched Arthur Russell, but a scattered chorus of echoes. King’s scene-setting can be a bit bloodless: ‘In the late 1970s two clubs had opened in Manhattan that reflected the interdisciplinary and interpersonal social energy of the city.’ This is accurate, but lacks heat. The title also seems a bit vague to me. Given the nature of the project – all these fond yammerings of co-workers, lovers, mates and mentors – I would have thought the perfect title was hiding in plain sight in those lyrics to ‘Go Bang!’: ‘I Want to See All of My Friends at Once.’

There’s a risk of fetishism in such acts of curation – the spilled confetti of life tidied up and displayed in a spotless vitrine. Unbiddable lives made over into secular shrines. One of the nice things about Travels over Feeling is that its artefacts all belong to a recent but now distant world of tactile communication: pens, paper, postcards, foxed music scores, hastily scribbled notes pinned to the doors of flats. Life before the mobile phone and its treacherous wand power. A lot of letters from Russell are reproduced in Travels over Feeling, but deciphering many of them is more or less impossible; you do wonder what purpose they serve, or if one telling leaf mightn’t have worked just as well as several pages in a row. I’m not sure what the tiny corner of an envelope Russell once addressed to his parents is meant to signify. Some of the items on display are identified, some aren’t, and there’s no helpful index. Some biographical details clash or smudge. The text says he moved to New York in ‘late 1972 or early 1973’ when a few pages before he is in Berkeley in March 1973 for his first ever public performance. One moment he has zero interest in rock music, the next he’s starting a group with someone he has just met at a Modern Lovers concert. Friends say he was immature, yet in 1974, just arrived in New York aged 23, he became musical director of the Kitchen, a ‘video, arts and music space synonymous with the New Music movement’. While you could argue that with Arthur Russell things don’t always cohere, if you’re going to stake so much on the curatorial approach, it should be watertight.

But there is a logic to King’s collagist approach, if only because Russell had so many sides and facets. He blurred his own identity in a series of wry pseudonyms and impish signatures: Loose Joints, Dinosaur L, Gulf Stream, Indian Ocean, In the Corn Belt, Killer Whale. Some of the most alluring items reproduced here are flyers, concert bills, and most of all the sleeves of Russell’s records from the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a time when vinyl wasn’t an overpriced luxury, but a mainstay of daily life – you caressed these objects with your eyes before you played them. There are some lovely DIY designs here, replete with Russell’s tiny personal watermarks, but my own favourite is probably the sleeve for Dinosaur L’s ‘Go Bang #5/Clean on Your Bean #1’ 12-inch on Sleeping Bag Records from 1982: a friendly UFO hovers over a pastoral hillside and a vacated sleeping bag. The spirit animal hiding behind the DINOSAUR L legend on the label is, naturally, a koala bear.

There are a handful of songs on Love Is Overtaking Me which seem to hold a special place in a lot of people’s hearts. Here is an underground seam of gold – rough, lilting songs which cry out to be covered. You only need to hear them once or twice and the hooks stay in: ‘Close My Eyes’, ‘I Couldn’t Say It to Your Face’ (with its poignant parting wave: ‘But I won’t be around any more …’), ‘Nobody Wants a Lonely Heart’. And ‘This Time Dad You’re Wrong’, which is surely the song Brian Wilson never quite got round to writing. Listening once again to ‘Close My Eyes’ (‘Who knows what grows in the morning light’) I thought back to the utopian tradition of Cage, Ginsberg and Whitman that Russell loved and honoured. Wide open spaces and a cupboard-sized studio. A non-dancer who made some of the best dance tracks ever. A cello player in a cornfield. The cello is there in the portrait on the cover of Travels over Feeling. It’s pretty much the one constant in his life, from beginning to end: foundation, alter ego, companion.