by Dave Hickey
For four years in graduate school, I hardly watched Perry at all, or even watched television. I thought I was becoming refined, but I can see now that I didn’t need to go to church because I was living in one. I was swaddled in the Church of Higher Education, effortlessly borne along in the tempo of its calendar. Semesters began and ended, like weekly episodes, in an endless cycle of redemption and renewal; and, in the safety of this cloister, reassurance and closure were the last things on my mind. What I wanted, required, and dreamed of was contingency, a lot of it, so during those years, I worshipped at the Church of Difficult Art, Improvisational Politics, and Dangerous Drugs, with James Joyce and John Hawkes, Tom Hayden and Herbert Marcuse, LSD and methamphetamine.
The moment I quit graduate school and went into the business of difficult art, however, contingency became my livelihood and not my blessed refuge. So the TV sprang back to life. For a year or so, I was helplessly addicted to Mission Impossible, which I quickly recognized as the Church of the Small Business Guy, because for one hour, every week, there was a task to be performed, and by God it was! If you needed expertise, you sent out for the best people—and they all showed up! Right on time, and they didn’t hate one another, or call in sick, or show up stoned, or complain about the bucks, or loaf on the job. They were fucking professionals, who could operate the equipment, and the equipment, my friend, always worked!
So, once a week, on Mission Impossible, the job got done, slammed down and nailed tight. By the end of the hour the “Mission Impossible Team” was driving away into a freeze-frame, heading home from work. Then, the next morning, I would drag myself down to the gallery and sit around all day, waiting for some asshole to come fix the copy machine. Clearly, I needed a team, but the truth was, I liked the flakiness of my endeavor, the weird kids who worked for me, and the (un)stable of artists that I exhibited; so ultimately, Mission Impossible proved too corporate for me, too Episcopalian. It had no rhetoric, no sociability, and no moral passion. We never got to see Barney’s workshop or Cinnamon’s boudoir. It was all procedure, efficiency, deception, and bottom line. So, it was probably inevitable that, in the end, I would return to Perry Mason—and to rock-and-roll.
Thus it was, in the late nineteen seventies, that I found myself camped out with Miss Chapman and her band, Jaded Virgin in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in a stucco cottage on the beach, in the midst of a three-week gig at a blood-bucket farther down the beach where we were granted the privilege of playing very loud because the building was situated within five yards of a giant, wooden roller-coaster. Every night, all night long, every four-and-a-half minutes, the coaster cars came thundering by, shaking the walls and bouncing bottles on the tables. We just smiled and cranked it up. So it was a good gig. It would have been a great gig, if the jerks at the local television station hadn’t fucked with Perry Mason, but they did.
In order to insert more ads for The Carolina School of Miniature Golf Course Management into their programming, these freaking philistines simply cut their Perry Mason episodes immediately after the “confession scene”—the one in which the guilty party, having been shrewdly unmasked by Perry’s courtroom machinations, usually jumps to his or her feet and proclaims: “Stop this! I can’t go on. I did it! I killed him. But you have to understand. He laughed at me. He laughed at me!” (Breaks down in sobs.) The End. What! The End!? You got to be kidding! By Wednesday of our first week in Myrtle Beach, the entire band was up in arms at this bastardization of the liturgy. It became a source of general unhappiness and much discussion—and even taking into account the lack of sane proportion that is endemic to band behavior generally, the aesthetic point made in this discussion, I think, has some validity.
“I mean, Jesus, what about the best part!” (This was the consensus.) “What about the part where Perry and Della and Paul go out to dinner after the trial, and Perry tricks Paul into picking up the check. Or maybe Hamilton Burger comes over to say that they’re still pals? Or maybe the defendant is reunited with her boyfriend? What about that! Or when they just sit around the office while Perry explains the part that Della doesn’t understand, or Della explains it to Paul, and Paul makes some lame joke and then the music starts? What about that part? Without that, the whole thing is just nothing. I mean, it’s like you play a gig and everybody just packs up their gear and goes home to eat TV dinners—like you’re playing ‘Tumbling Dice’ and at the end you just quit, without repeating the hook, without cycling those chords for five minutes, screaming, ‘Yah got-ta roll me!’ into the sweat-speckled microphone. It’s just not rock-and-roll.”
And it’s not Perry Mason either, since guilt is not at issue here. We are all guilty. Innocence is the object of wonder, the grail of our endeavors. So the working family must be reunited and the validity of its endeavor confirmed. We must eat and drink together, then, and discuss the events of the day, however disastrous, in order to continue. And even though one loses touch with the purity of these sentiments and stops believing in the possibility of a happy workplace and a job worth doing, one continues to watch—just as one’s great aunt continues to go to Mass—communing with the form of reassurance, with the aesthetics of the ritual.
So, one revels in the gorgeous black and white, and in fugitive glimpses of lost, populuxe Los Angeles. One appreciates the alacrity with which the story wings its way through miles of complex exposition to arrive in the courtroom just at the half-hour mark. One smiles at the complex locutions required to do so—at how everyone says everyone’s full name in order to keep the characters straight. (“Yes, I was at dinner on Thursday night with my wife, Marge Winterwater, and her cousin from Bolivia, Astrid Montalbo, but we did not see my comptroller, George Trim, until the next morning.”) One embraces the absence of screaming, explosions, and automatic gunfire (the better to snooze through), and grudgingly acknowledges the verisimilar portrayal of genuinely heartless American assholes, which privileges our joy in their demise; and, finally, one comes to appreciate what a wonderful actor Raymond Burr was—to seduce us so effortlessly and for so long into the idea of genuine trust, and the possibility of innocence, and the dream of a job worth doing.
ROMANCING THE LOOKY-LOOS
It is a cloudy spring night in the mid nineteen seventies. Waylon Jennings and I are sitting in the shotgun seats at the front of his bus, slouched down with our heels up on the chrome rail, watching the oncoming highway between the toes of our boots. We are leaving Atlanta after a tumultuous concert, about two weeks into Waylon’s triumphal breakout concert tour. I am along to write a piece for a magazine about Waylon’s ongoing transformation into a pop star, although, at this point in the tour, Waylon himself is somewhat less than sanguine about his rising status. Not that he’s doing anything to deter it. He’s just not particularly enjoying it.
“They think you just get up there and sing your songs,” he is saying, addressing the highway. “They think it’s just a one-way deal, but it’s not like that at all. Because you start out playing for people who are just like you. That’s the only place you can start. You play for people who come from where you come from. They seek you out in little clubs because they understand what you’re doing, so you feel like you’re doing it for them. And if you go wrong in these clubs, you know it immediately. And maybe you want to go wrong. That’s your option, but you know it when you do it. Then one day, you’re not playing for people like you anymore. You look out there, like I did tonight, and you realize that you’re playing for people who want to be like you, and you can’t trust these people. Because to them, whatever you do, that’s you, and that’s cool. Which would be okay except!—even though all these people want to be like you, you don’t know who you are anymore, because it was the people in those little clubs that gave you that understanding in the first place. God knows where they are tonight. Sitting at home, probably. Pissed off at me. Listening to Willie Nelson records.”
“So what do you do?” I ask.
Waylon shrugs and grins. “Right now, hoss,” he says,
“it’s completely out of my hands. I’m looking at those people out there, but I don’t know what I’m seeing. And they’re watching me, too. But they don’t know what they’re looking at. My best guess is that they’ll keep on loving me till they start hating me, or their Waylon duds wear out. Because they already hate me a little, you know, just because I’m me and they’re them. That’s why they always go on about how talented you are. Because they hate you. Because if they had this talent, they would be you. The fact that you’ve worked like a dog, lived like a horse thief, and broke your mama’s heart to do whatever you do, that don’t mean diddly-squat. To them, it’s talent. Supposedly, you got it, and, supposedly, they don’t. So eventually you’re bound to disappoint them.
“My real people, they get jealous because their girlfriend thinks I’m cute and try to kick my butt. They get envious because singing pays better than roofing and try to kick my butt. But, basically, they understand that I do this job for them—that I’m up on stage with my Telecaster, sweatin’ in the lights, coughing in the smoke, and trying to hear the monitor—that they’re sitting out there all cool and comfortable with a bottle of beer and a bowl of peanuts. So when this all blows up, I’ll just go back and do that, find out if I’m still me.”
A month or so later, I find myself standing at the bar in CBGB’s on the Bowery with Lester Bangs and David Johansen. We’re listening to Tuff Darts, who are playing their official “teen anthem”:
What this world needs is a lot more girls!
What this world needs is a lot less boys!
What this world needs is a lot more NOISE!
(Noise ensues.)
When the noise subsides, Johansen tilts his head and nods theatrically toward the door. Lester and I turn to watch as a limousine load of uptown trendies file slowly into the back of the club, settling their coats on their shoulders and waving smoke away from their nostrils with frantic little gestures.
“Who dat?” Lester says.
“The beginning of the end,” says David Jo, “Spectators.”
My dad called them “looky-loos.” He would come home from playing in some bar or listening to someone else play, and Mom would ask, “How was the crowd?” If those in attendance were not up to his standards, he would say “looky-loos.” Or sometimes he would just mutter “civilians,” which meant the same thing. We all knew what he meant: Civilians were nonparticipants, people who did not live the life—people with no real passion for what was going on. They were just looking. They paid their dollar at the door, but they contributed nothing to the occasion—afforded no confirmation or denial that you could work with or around or against.
With spectators, as Waylon put it, it was a one-way deal, and in the world I grew up in, the whole idea was not to be one of them, and to avoid, insofar as possible, being spectated by any of them, because it was demeaning. So, you just didn’t do it, and you used the word “spectator” as a term of derision—not as bad as “folksinger,” of course, but still a serious insult. Even so, it wasn’t something we discussed or even thought about, since the possibility of any of us spectating or being spectated was fairly remote. It is, however, something worth thinking about now, since, with the professionalization of the art world, and the dissolution of the underground cultures that once fed into it, the distinction between spectators and participants is dissolving as well.
This distinction is critical to the practice of art in a democracy, however, because spectators invariably align themselves with authority. They have neither the time nor the inclination to make decisions. They just love the winning side—the side with the chic building, the gaudy doctorates, and the star-studded cast. They seek out spectacles whose value is confirmed by the normative blessing of institutions and corporations. In these venues, they derive sanctioned pleasure or virtue from an accredited source, and this makes them feel secure, more a part of things. Participants, on the other hand, do not like this feeling. They lose interest at the moment of accreditation, always assuming there is something better out there, something brighter and more desirable, something more in tune with their own agenda. And they may be wrong, of course. The truth may indeed reside in the vision of full professors and corporate moguls, but true participants persist in not believing this. They continue looking.
Thus, while spectators must be lured, participants just appear, looking for that new thing—the thing they always wanted to see—or the old thing that might be seen anew—and having seen it, they seek to invest that thing with new value. They do this simply by showing up; they do it with their body language and casual conversation, with their written commentary, if they are so inclined, and their disposable income, if it falls to hand. Because participants, unlike spectators, do not covertly hate the things they desire. Participants want their views to prevail, so they lobby for the embodiment of what they lack.
The impact of these participatory investments is tangible across the whole range of cultural production. It is more demonstrable, however, in “live arts” like music, theater, and art than in industrial arts like publishing, film, and recording. Because in the “live arts,” participatory investment, as it accumulates, increases the monetary value of the product. You increase the value of an artwork just by buying it, if you are a participant. Thus, you will probably pay more for the next work by that artist you buy. You do the same if you recruit all your friends to go listen to a band in a bar. If all your friends show up and have a good time, you will almost certainly pay more at the door the next time the band plays. But that’s the idea: to increase the social value of the things you love, and the extra bucks are a small price to pay. They are next to nothing, really, compared to the value of forming a new, eccentric community, or compared to the pleasure of having one’s views prevail.
One of the things I feel best about in my life is the tiny part I played in convincing the Artist & Repertoire people at Warner Brothers Records to sign George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic to their label. I mean, all that fun and funk, borne upon the Mothership, zooming out across the republic—and even though I only contributed to the talk around the office, it makes me happy just to know that I participated. This sort of pleasure, however, is totally alien to the mind-set of spectatorship. The butterfly effects of cultural eccentricity are of no interest to spectators; they either consume, or they critique. They are all right with the way things are, or they know exactly what’s wrong with it (incest wishes, capitalism, both, etcetera).
Beyond this hegemony of corporate and institutional consensus, however, beyond the purview of uncannily lifelike blockbusters like Jurassic Park and the Whitney Biennial, everything that grows in the domain of culture, that acquires constituencies and enters the realm of public esteem, does so through the accumulation of participatory investment by people who show up. No painting is ever sold nor essay written nor band booked nor exhibition scheduled that is not the consequence of previous social interaction, of gossip, body language, fashion dish, and telephone chatter—nothing transpires that does not float upon the ephemeral substrata of “word of mouth”—on the validation of schmooze. Everyone who participates knows this, and knows, as well, that it doesn’t cost a dime. You just show up, behave as you wish, say what you will, and live with the fleeting, often unexpected consequences of your behavior. At this bedrock level, the process through which works of art are socialized looks less like a conspiracy than a slumber party.
The whole process, however, presumes the existence of artists who are comfortable with this tiny, local, social process, who are at ease with the gradual, lateral acquisition of constituencies and understand that the process can take place anywhere and, if successful, command attention everywhere. The musical vogue of Prince and his entourage, of The Allman Brothers Band and their compatriots, and of Seattle grunge testify to the efficacy of this process. It only requires artists who would rather socialize their work among their peers, horizontally, at the risk of Daddy’s ire, than institutionalize it, vertically, in hopes of Daddy’s
largesse. These, I fear, are fewer and farther between.
To cite the case at hand: I was visiting a group of young artists in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. They were obviously bright, ambitious people who were doing interesting work. Unfortunately, they could hardly speak, could not even converse like human beings, for sputtering their anger and outrage at the “fucking Los Angeles Times,” which had refused to provide advance coverage for their forthcoming “totally bitching underground rave-performance event.” And, silly moi, my first thought was “Why would you want it in the Los Angles Times?” In my vernacular, “underground” meant just that, and “rave-performance event” meant dope, nudity, and loud noises. Demanding publicity from the Times for such an event seemed about one step up from asking your mom to bring her friends from the garden club.
But I didn’t say this. (Nor did I quote Waylon and suggest, "I don't think Hank done it this way.") I said, “Hey! It’s a rave. It’s supposed to be fun. Invite your friends and word will get around.” They just looked at me, kept on looking, in fact, until one of them said, “But all of our friends are artists. We want real people.” Thus I entered a brave new world, and all I could think was, “What have we done?!” Because there I was, face to face with a generation of well-educated and expensively trained young artists whose extended tenure in art schools appended to the art world had totally divorced them from any social reality beyond it. The friends they drank beer with after Sophomore Lit, the people they dated in high school, the guys they played soccer with, were but fading memories, lost to them now out in the hazy world of bourgeois America. Now, they were artists, in the art world, and their art-world job was to make art. And my art-world job, they implied, was romancing the looky-loos on their behalf, now that the Los Angeles Times had screwed them over.