The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Like Leslie and Rivers, Cage also appeared on a game show, and it made for magnificent Dada television. In January 1960 he went on I’ve Got a Secret and performed “Water Walk,” a short piece for grand piano, iron pipe, goose call, rubber duck, bathtub, five radios, ice cubes, steam cooker, and other objects. Today, you can watch the clip on YouTube. Everything about his appearance is a detour from the show’s routine. To begin with, the host Garry Moore jettisons the usual process of having the celebrity panelists try to guess the guest’s secret. He simply tells them what Cage is about to do, calling him “probably the most controversial figure in the musical world today,” and adding that he teaches a course at the New School “on experimental sound.” “Experimental music,” Cage politely corrects him. Moore also explains that there’s a hitch: two of the unions that work on the show, adding a perfectly Cageian element of chance, have gotten into a dispute about “who has jurisdiction over plugging in the five radios.” Cage says that to compensate he’ll hit the radios when he would have turned them on, and push them off the table when he would have switched them off. “I’m with you, boy,” Moore replies. Interestingly, the studio audience responds more warmly to Cage’s performance than some of his sophisticated downtown friends tended to do. They seem to get the Spike Milligan humor of it, laughing along with it, not at it, as Cage bangs pot lids, waters some flowers, squeezes the rubber duck, and shoves the useless radios to the floor. The audience heartily applauds when he’s done.

  In the mid-1960s Cage asked Duchamp to teach him chess; they played at Duchamp’s home on Fourteenth Street at least once a week for the rest of Marcel’s days. Meanwhile, in his studio next door, Duchamp was secretly working on one last piece of art, the mysterious assemblage Étant donnés, not shown in public until after his death. It was only at the end of the 1950s that Duchamp’s own art had been rediscovered and embraced by the new generation of Pop artists. Andy Warhol was among those who saw the first major retrospective of Duchamp’s work at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, where Duchamp played chess with a nude woman. Chess was Cage’s pretext for getting to know Duchamp but he was never any good at it. “Don’t you ever play to win?” the exasperated older man frequently chided him. In 1968 Cage staged a performance in Toronto where Duchamp and his second wife sat on stage playing a game. Cage had wired the board so that the moving pieces signaled a group of musicians to play or stop playing, making accidental music. It cleared the space of the audience but became a legendary event in performance art history. Duchamp died soon after.

  BORN IN COLORADO IN 1930 AND RAISED THERE AND IN LOS ANGELES, Robert Delford Brown studied art and devoured jazz as a teen. For a couple of his college years he lived above the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier in rooms filled until 2 a.m. with the relentless mechanical cheer of calliope music. He had his first solo show of abstract paintings in a small LA frame shop in 1952. When nothing sold, the shop owner took all his paintings out back and burned them.

  “I came to New York in the spring of 1959, because this is where everything was happening,” he recalled in a 1995 interview. “When I left LA, everybody said, ‘Go jump in a lake. Next year LA is gonna be the art center of the world, and we won’t invite you back.’ ” Brown arrived as the downtown art scene was going through a major shift. He’d come as a dedicated Abstract Expressionist but the work that had so bemused Truman’s America a decade earlier was now old and familiar. The new shockers were Fluxus, Happenings, and the still-unnamed Pop art, exemplified by Jasper Johns’s Flag and Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (both from 1955), with Andy Warhol soon to emerge as its Pollock. “Everything was up for grabs,” Brown said. “You’d take a handful of something and throw it on the floor, it was sculpture. You couldn’t run fast enough to keep up.” He bounced from one gallery to another, feeling that everything he had learned and practiced as art was being pitched out the window. “I was an impressionable hillbilly. I was really going nuts trying to keep up.”

  In 1963 he met Rhett Cone, who in 1957 had founded the Off-Broadway Cricket Theatre on Second Avenue. They married and became an inseparable art and life duo, known as “the Delford Browns,” until her death in 1988. On a trip to Paris in 1963 they caught an Allan Kaprow Happening at a Bon Marché department store. “It was just incredible. Those French hated it. Nobody had seen a Happening. It was just the most exciting goddamned thing you ever saw. I figured, Jesus, this is where it’s at.”

  In 1964 he participated in the New York premiere of the electronic music composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale, in effect a Happening, with a who’s who of the New York avant-garde in attendance including Kaprow, Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Dick Higgins, and Jackson Mac Low. According to a head-scratching article in Time, it “featured two white hens, a chimpanzee, six fish floating in two bowls suspended from the ceiling,” a guy covered in shaving cream, a pretty girl in her underwear, and Brown playing the Mad Painter. Wearing a hooded hazmat suit with an enormous phallus hanging from it, he dropped eggs from atop a ladder and punctuated the event with demonic howls and yolps.

  He staged his own event, The Meat Show, in 1964. He and Rhett rented a refrigerated meat locker in the Meatpacking District at West Thirteenth Street and Ninth Avenue for a three-day weekend and artfully hung it with 3,600 pounds of butchered beef carcasses, pigs’ heads, barrels of guts, and such. Chilled visitors pushed through yards of draped cloth painted with blood like giant intestines. A gallon of “Strange Moods” perfume added a weird olfactory signature. Because the environment was up for only three days, too quick for the art world to react, Brown figured that “if it was going to get any response at all it’d have to be through the media.” So he sent out a press release announcing that The Meat Show was the Grand Opening Service of a new religion. “I am attempting to bring religion, sex and art into the same vital relationship that existed prior to the degenerative plague that Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Gautama Buddha, and Lao-Tse visited upon humanity,” the press release declared. “The Meat Show will induce startling spiritual, sexual and aesthetic revelations in the viewer. It is my belief that even the most bereft wretch will be jolted into some kind of consciousness when confronted with the awesome sight of tons of meat, gallons of blood, hundreds of yards of lingerie fabric and other sights as yet undisclosed, which will be organized into a harmonious and inspirational work of art.”

  He called his new “Orthodox Pagan” religion the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. “It has but one commandment: Live,” he said. “It has but one prohibition: Do not eat cars.” And it had but one god, named Who? “For example: Why is it not raining? Who? knows.” The central concept was “the theory of Pharblongence. Pharblongence is a very ancient word of Yiddish origin, the most accurate translation of which is total confusion. We don’t know where we’re going, but Who? does. There are many religions which teach how to get to Nirvana. They all give very complicated directions. The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. tells you how to get to Nevada. It’s simple. You take a bus.”

  An international gaggle of newspaper stringers and television crews reported on The Meat Show in oh-those-artists tones. Brown had successfully established himself as the meat artist guy. People wondered what he’d do next. The chicken parts show? The raw fish show? “Back in the ’60s, everybody accepted that if you painted stripes, you painted stripes for the rest of your life,” he said. “If you painted squares, you painted squares for the rest of your life.” He couldn’t see himself hanging meat for the rest of his life. It would be the German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys who ran with the idea, incorporating dead rabbits, live coyotes, and great slabs of fat into his work from the mid-1960s on.

  Brown, like Alfred Leslie, pursued whatever kind of art struck his fancy and his dadaist sense of humor. In London he marched around the streets with his hair dyed a nuclear pink and his clothes festooned with buttons that declared, “I am a Young Jazz Immortal.” He called that piece Free Striptease wit
h Drum and Bugle Corps Accompaniment. In France he and Rhett staged Orgasm Event in a hotel bridal suite. Guests walked from room to room with cocktails in their hands, viewing a replica Statue of Liberty holding sparklers, a woman in the bathtub who appeared to be a murder victim and was lit by highway flares, and a couple simulating sex in the bedroom. “It was a four-minute event,” he later explained. “It lasted as long as the flares lasted.” He did a series of hand-tinted, blown-up fetish and bondage photos. His series of “plagiarisms” anticipated postmodern appropriation. He published a very nicely printed pamphlet called Ulysses, made up entirely of early critical responses to Joyce’s book but with Brown’s name inserted every time Joyce had been mentioned. “This is instant gratification and energy conservation,” he explained. “You don’t have to write a big book—just get the reviews and stick your name in them.” Hanging, another pamphlet, was a medical text describing the effects of hanging; Brown simply stuck his name on it as the author. When he gave away copies, he always signed them Here’s hoping the rope breaks. Then there was the book about Duchamp in which he forged Duchamp’s signature. Running into Duchamp at El Faro, he showed the book to him. Duchamp pulled out a pen and wrote under the forged signature Confirmed: Marcel Duchamp ’64. Who? knows how long they could have gone on out-Duchamping each other this way.

  In 1967 the Delford Browns bought the small, churchy-looking Victorian library building at 251 West Thirteenth Street just off Jackson Square, one of those confusing Village triangles where West Thirteenth, Greenwich Avenue, Horatio Street, and Eighth Avenue all manage to converge and go veering off in different directions. The library was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, who also did the Tenth Street Studio. The Delford Browns hired an architect to modernize the exterior and gut the interior, creating a high, open volume of light and air somewhere between an artist’s loft and a Mondrian church, a jazzy collage of intersections in an upthrust tumble of airy spaces, with minimalist wooden stair blocks scaling exposed brick to shiny pressed-tin ceilings. Brown christened the renovated building the Great Crack-Up. He named one room the Temple of Hilarity and another the Chapel of Pharblongence. He hung two EXQUISITE PANIC signs out front, a pair of goony cross-eyed faces with the motto Who? Knows! on them. In later years the lights of a disco ball would spill out at night through the big picture window next to the entrance. For the next three decades he would hold Exquisite Panic services there—always billed as grand openings—including “The Mr. Jesus Christ Contest” and a celebration for VD (Victory over Dumbness) Day. He would baptize people by silly string and get them to bake what he called Metaphysical Radio Cakes, “metaphysical radio” being his metaphor for prayer.

  “I’m a religious leader. Somebody’s gotta do it,” he shrugged in 1995. “The great thing about being a religious leader is, anything I say is true. I’m an expert on all metaphysical matters.”

  19

  Bebop

  BEBOP SUGGESTED ANOTHER MODE OF BEING. ANOTHER WAY OF LIVING. ANOTHER WAY OF PERCEIVING REALITY . . . STRANGENESS. WEIRDNESS. THE UNKNOWN!

  —LeRoi Jones

  SAY, YOU STILL SELLING GRASS IN THE VILLAGE? I BET THE SPADES THINK YOU’RE A REAL BAD MAN.

  —Panic in Needle Park

  BEBOP BEGAN DURING THE WAR YEARS IN HARLEM. IT TOOK A few years to make its way down to Greenwich Village, but when it did it found a natural home there. Bebop was as much an expression of the postwar avant-garde as Abstract Expressionism and Beat literature, and it inspired both painters and writers to be as freely, spontaneously creative on the canvas and the page as boppers were in the air. Its influences are as obvious in Pollock’s action paintings as in Jack Kerouac’s “bop prosody.” And as bebop begat the laidback cool jazz, the funkier hard bop, and the fiercely atonal free jazz—a boppier bebop, what Amiri Baraka calls “an atomic age bebop”—they all found attentive, even studious audiences in the clubs, bars, and lofts in and around the Village.

  Bebop started as a revolt inside the big bands of the so-called swing era, which didn’t have much swing left in it by then. Big band music “had passed completely into the mainstream and served now, in its performance, simply as a stylized reflection of a culturally feeble environment,” as LeRoi Jones put it in Blues People. “Spontaneous impulse had been replaced by the arranger, and the human element of the music was confined to whatever difficulties individual performers might have reading a score.” Younger musicians, bored to tears with tightly charted dance music, jammed this new, more freely improvisational and complex jazz. Jones and others saw this as not just a musical revolt but a political and social one as well. A new generation of black musicians was repudiating the way jazzmen had prostituted their creativity to entertain white audiences, he argued. They were taking back an authentically black cultural expression that had been commercialized and assimilated by a society that was thoroughly racist. In their way they formed a leading edge for the black nationalist and separatist movement of the 1960s that would turn LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka.

  After hours at clubs like Minton’s and Monroe’s in Harlem, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and others pioneered the new form. After the war it spread to West Fifty-second Street (aka Swing Street), Lincoln Square, and eventually to the Village and what became the East Village. Like any newly emerging art form it struck some early listeners as weird, ugly, and threatening. “The willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound of bebop fell on deaf or horrified ears,” Jones recalled. Older jazzmen scoffed at it. “They flat their fifths,” Eddie Condon once said, referring to the boppers’ use of the somewhat menacing and discordant flatted-fifth scale later beloved of heavy metal guitarists. “We drink ours.” It was no coincidence that a revival of interest in old-school Dixieland jazz occurred around the same time, creating much heated debate between the bop fans and the old-timers, nicknamed “moldy figs.” Dixieland was big in Village clubs through the 1950s. When Jones started hanging around the neighborhood toward the end of the decade, he got a part-time job at the Record Changer magazine, whose office on Sullivan Street was to moldy figs what Izzy Young’s Folklore Center was to the folk music revival.

  That bebop in its developmental years was considered a cult, a fad, the music of crazy outsiders only enhanced its esteem among hip young fans, black and white. “BeBop. A new language a new tongue and vision for a generally more advanced group in our generation,” Jones wrote. Jazz had become dance music and entertainment; bebop musicians made the unequivocal statement that it was art. Like the Ab Exers they deconstructed the too-familiar forms to invent new ones. When Baraka writes about John Coltrane’s solos “taking the music apart before our ears, splintering the chords and sounding each note, resounding it, playing it backwards and upside down trying to get to something else,” he sounds much like Clement Greenberg describing the methods of Pollock or de Kooning. Among Village intellectuals, probably more than anywhere else at the time, the boppers’ attitude that jazz deserved to be considered a serious art form was taken as a given. It was in the Washington Place apartment of the Hunter College English professor and huge jazz fan Marshall Stearns that the Institute of Jazz Studies started in 1952, with a board that included John Hammond and the avant-garde composer Henry Cowell, who taught at the New School. Robert Reisner, a curator of the institute’s large archives, which started as Stearns’s private collection, was an impresario who booked jazz acts in Village clubs. His ads included the only-in-the-Village tagline “Bob Reisner says: the three great life experiences are sex, psychoanalysis and cool jazz.” It was in the Village that Charlie Parker knocked on Edgard Varèse’s door and asked him to teach him composition. “I only write in one voice,” Varèse later recalled Bird saying. “I want to have structure. I want to write orchestral scores. I’ll give you any amount you wish. I make a lot of money. I’ll be your servant. I’m a good cook; I’ll cook for you.” Varèse was leaving for Europe. When he got back Parker had died.

  Unlike Dizzy Gillespie, who was bebop’s ambassador-at-l
arge to mainstream America, Parker was bop’s leading emissary downtown. Gillespie was flamboyant, affable, and easygoing, happy to promote the new music to broad audiences, even willing to play a bit of the (dizzy) clown in his campy look—a combination of clichéd arty-intellectual symbols including a beret, horn-rimmed glasses, a goatee, and ostrich-leather shoes. Life did a spread on him in 1948, with photos of hip Hollywood celebs Mel Tormé and Ava Gardner living it up in his audience.

  Charlie “Bird” Parker, on the other hand, was the bop god to hipsters and fans, a jazzman for the cognoscenti. He was not even mentioned in that Life article, or in much other mainstream press during his lifetime. Growing up in Kansas City in the 1920s and ’30s, he’d dropped out of high school, gotten married, developed a heroin addiction, and played his first professional gig all by the age of sixteen. As befits a bohemians’ hero, he lived the rest of his short but action-packed life at full tilt. He matched his Promethean talent with prodigious appetites for everything—food, drink, drugs, sex, knowledge. He was as complex and mercurial as his solos, a tormented perfectionist whose moods veered from madcap antics to titanic rages to suicidal depression. After following other jazzmen to New York in 1939 he made it his home base. By 1949 he was so revered that he had a club named after him, Birdland, on Broadway near Fifty-second Street. It was a mecca for boppers, where of course he headlined. But he gravitated to the scene downtown and attracted other jazzmen there. In 1950 he moved his family to a brownstone on Avenue B near East Tenth Street, designated a historic landmark in the 1990s. When Reisner asked why he chose the neighborhood, he replied, “I like the people around here. They don’t give you no hype.” It also put him a short hop from Greenwich Village, where he did a lot of hanging out, partying, and playing. “He loved the Village more than any other part of town,” the black Village poet Ted Joans said. Arthur’s Tavern, which opened in 1937 next door to Marie’s Crisis, still prides itself on having been one of Bird’s haunts.