Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  Even the lesser arts like printmaking, pottery, ceramics, metalwork, weaving, woodturning, textiles, glassblowing, knitting, felting, macramé, landscape gardening, architecture, shoe repair, even these had nothing left to give. Some artists decided to eschew them altogether, and made attempts pickling aquatic creatures, or cross-breeding species to generate glow-in-the-dark rabbits, but was there anything more in this than Duchamp’s appropriation of the urinal, ready-mades and assisted ready-mades, just another example of an instance where the specific physical subject was of no importance in comparison to the concept itself? Within a year of the first one in North London, there was an exhibit by some Stuckists in San Diego that featured an identical shark in formaldehyde, only with a caption that said: “Ceci n’est pas un requin.” Simultaneously in Minneapolis, there appeared another, by one of the last remaining living Dadaists, Marinou-Blanco, nearly one hundred years old, with the words: “Ceci n’est pas un Magritte.” And a third, perhaps the closest copy of all, was exhibited at the Georges Pompidou, by another member of the slavish mob, an Irishman with a perforated ulcer, who had only drawn a tiny moustache on the snout and called it E.S.N.S.O.L.

  Strangely, it was the same photographer who had “made” the medium, the Austrian-born Janos Rohr-Steichen – or “Pato” as he was more commonly called towards the end of his life – who was the influence for Chris Eaton’s last conventional project. Rohr-Steichen had moved to America in the 1860s as part of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian’s entourage as the new Emperor of Mexico. The official court photographer responsible for most of the existing images of His Imperial Majesty (although commonly uncredited), Rohr-Steichen became more widely known back in Europe when some of the photos he took for his own personal use were intercepted by an aide to Louis Napoleon himself (a gift from Maximilian) and put on display at the 1865 Salon des Refusés. Even among works of art that were considered at best risqué and at worst blasphemous, the inclusion of Pato’s foreign savages was considered so scandalous that the reaction it created was parodied in a famous sketch by Daumier, with a group of bourgeoisies fanning themselves to keep from fainting. Over the next two years, Rohr-Steichen’s popularity back home grew even faster than Manet and the Impressionists, fed by this new opportunity to view nude women and call it art, stigma-free, and he was included in both Paris Salons and sold hundreds and perhaps thousands of prints to the French and Austrian elite, at a price per image nearly double the average weekly wage, making him fabulously wealthy and providing him with the extra capital he needed to convince even more poor, young Mexican girls to disrobe for his lens. That’s when he became known as Pato, the duck, not because of his curious walk but because any charges that arose from the questionable ages of his models seemed to slide right off his back, at least until both he and Maximilian were captured and executed by Liberal forces in 1867. He was a disgusting individual, who is still used by Mexican mothers to frighten their daughters. But aside from a fame that arose more from his subject matter than any real artistic skill, he did contribute one technique to the art world that led to an international movement. For his last Paris exhibition, he exposed one sheet of paper to all of the images he had captured, laying each on top of another until he had created what he called the typical Mexican girl. Few pieces of art – not even Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, anything from Gauguin’s Tahitian phase, Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Asheville Citizen) or any work of opera – can really compare to Rohr-Steichen’s Ils sont tous la même for pure unadulterated racism and chauvinism. And it’s curious that he didn’t recognize the experimental originality of it himself, as his journals clearly treat the piece as a joke on his friend the Emperor, even calling the new technique Maximilism. While most of his oeuvre has long been forgotten, it is this piece that occasionally rears its head in fringe discussions of contemporary art, the idea that one work of art could, through the inclusion of as many seemingly unrelated elements as possible, contain an entirety, that through many specific details one could achieve universal truth.

  After learning about him in a slightly anachronistic art history class called Kodachrome and Colonialism: Oppression Behind the Lens (a course likewise heavy in Gauguin and Brunias), Chris Eaton spent a year painting his own portrait, daily, always using the same canvas, just painting directly over the one from the day before. At any given moment, all you saw was one Chris Eaton. But all the rest of them were always there. As one.

  ***

  For a time, he considered covering his body with the tattoos of every country in the world. But then he heard of a man from India who had begun a similar process in the late eighties, who had eventually had to have the flag of The Soviet Union removed and replaced with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the Ukraine; East and West Germany rejoined; the Czech Republic and Slovakia emerged out of Czechoslovakia; Yugoslavia split into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Slovenia; and years later even Serbia and Montenegro split into two separate countries, followed by a unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia by Kosovo; and he left that idea on the curb with the rest of the trash.

  ***

  He returned to Athens, working as a largely useless and mostly enfeebled construction worker for a friend of his father, and spent most of his time after the accident haunting several of the city’s patios, stirring ground chicory into his black coffee to remind him of Paris (“Only American expats over there drink that fancy Italian tourist bullshit”), or at night, sliding over to Odair Ach’s Tavern, where he knew a bartender – a lovely girl – who would give him free pitchers of run-off. Occasionally he would go to Toni’s Reach, because the girls were prettier, but only during happy hour, or when he was meeting a friend who might pay. One day he overheard a new crop of recent graduates from Ohio U (mostly bullshit, post-outsider artists, but also a handful of kitsch and performance artists) talking about a parody television show on Public Access 27, based loosely around the most popular show of the day but setting their version in their own zip code of 45701. Before he knew it, he was at their table, pretending to be nice, and interested, and no more than a beer later, he had talked them into an infrequent role as the older brother of one of the main teens.

  The initial scripts were predictable and safe. Periodically, Chris Eaton would appear as Ensel, who was supposed to be cooler than the rest of the characters and involved with a lot of underground music and possibly even illegal activity. It should never have lasted more than a handful of episodes. But because the production values were so low – and because it was on Public Access television – many people thought it was a documentary, and Chris Eaton started getting recognized on the streets, not as himself but as his character. Without discussing it as a group, Chris Eaton wrote several letters in character to the editor of the local paper: in support of gay rights, in opposition to the Gulf War, in support of re-opening the flood gates on the river, and eventually Ensel was offered a regular column, the editorial staff completely unaware that he was not, in fact, a real person.

  People began to take notice. Because of the popularity of his column, Ensel began to take on a starring role in the show, and Chris Eaton had the leverage to take the story in more exciting, unexpected directions. And if no one else agreed, he just had to do it for real, making sure it was caught on the News so that it became inseparable from his character. Ensel had affairs with rock stars. He took trips to tropical countries. He contracted tropical diseases. He began appearing in public in drag, so they worked that in, too. There was even a brief storyline involving time travel. People stopped referring to him by his real name – even the other cast and crew members. And he marveled at how easy it was to just shut himself off and become another person. He slept in different positions, brushed his teeth longer, took showers instead of baths and peed sitting down. He stopped calling his parents on the weekend. He bought a new car.

  It
was in his column near the end of 1992 that he joked about running for mayor, and suddenly the city was overrun with homemade t-shirts for his campaign. Several of the other actors convinced him to register for real. Everyone in the group was excited about it. And as interest continued to grow, they began filming the show live, running twenty-four hours a day, following Ensel around on his campaign trail so that you could be watching the show on Channel 27 and flip to Channel 4 to catch the exact same thing from another angle on the news. He was an instant hit. For at least a week and a half, he was leading in the polls. Then, after he lost, the group’s interest in producing the show waned. The storylines, now that they actually had to write them again instead of just filming the action as it happened, naturally felt less real, less creative. Then it was done, and they were all back to being themselves again.

  The group still hung around each other for a short time. But eventually the only artistic pursuits they shared was a sense of common vitriol, constantly trying to one-up each other to feed their own self-worth. Once, during a particularly combative conversation, his mind drifted into a calm, therapeutic stasis. There he imagined meeting one of them in the future, outside an office building, or a shopping mall, arranging something else for a later date, actually carrying through with it, at a restaurant where they served mostly meat, with only the most boring vegetables as decoration, as two people would, who had not seen each other for some time. They would speak of all the things you might expect, as well as a few you might not, and later they would drink until they could stand one another, then have one more. At the end of the night, they would both wonder if they should hug, if it were the proper etiquette for such a thing, which it might have been, but in all that split-second thinking they would miss the proper window of opportunity, and go home with their arms feeling empty.

  The next day, he opened up the portrait studio.

  It was also in Ohio that she became a folk hero, most notably for an album called She Was a Big Freak, which was reissued in 2010 with the following liner notes:

  In the first third of these liner notes, available in the Otolith Records reissue of Chris Eaton’s Greatest Hits, we discussed Chris’s humble beginnings: her birth in Cleveland to a young piano teacher and her surgeon husband who left them to go to war; how her remarkable mother managed to raise two kids on her own as a nanny for big band leader Sammy Watkins (responsible for discovering Dean Martin); and how because of this, Chris Eaton spent her early formative years drawn to Watkins’ extensive collection of singles. Chris apparently listened to most of these ‘45s on her own, and was never properly instructed on the speed differences between 45RPM singles and the jazz LPs the band leader most often played for his own enjoyment, and this is how she developed her own signature, bass vocal stylings. On moving back to Cleveland in the early sixties to attend The R. B. Turnbull Jr. School of Enterostomal Therapy, she bought her first Gibson guitar for $50 and hit the growing coffeeshop circuit. The war was on in Vietnam, and perhaps because of that, folk music was the going concern across America. Many of her songs even used war imagery to great effect. But most of the Cleveland scene were not ready for Chris Eaton’s slowly lurching style, especially the way it made her body move like poured syrup. She also wrote very few songs with choruses, and sing-alongs were very popular. So few club owners would give her the opportunity to really spotlight her talent, and the only time she was able to perform in front of actual audiences was at open mic nights.

  Then there was the strangely coincidental run-in with her future manager and husband, Larry Harmon, an experimental jazz trumpet player who, when his shining star was eclipsed by the planetary draw of Miles Davis, went even further into dissonance as a modus operandi. Their love affair was hot and brief, with the making of her cheekily eponymous debut album likely a significant contributor to their subsequent divorce. In this second part, we’ll discuss the making of She Was a Big Freak, but also Chris Eaton’s search for a new voice, and the new explosive live show that came out of that.

  ***

  If you were ever lucky enough to own Chris Eaton’s first two albums on Harmony Records (the label started by Larry Harmon in order to promote and exploit Chris’s intriguing talents), you’ll notice that they were released only a year apart. But if you quickly scan the personnel, you’ll note that the only two names that remain from Greatest Hits are Eaton and – curiously – Harmon. After splitting with her husband/manager, it was clear that Chris was looking to take another direction with her music. Phil Giallombardo, who was an original member of the James Gang before joining the Chris Eaton juggernaut (other members went on to join The Eagles and The Guess Who), described Harmon’s influence this way:

  “Larry was a real clown. He saw what Chris was doing as a real freak show, you know? She was a new sound he could use to explore his own noise experiments. He was the real reason why that first record never caught on with the people. Chris recognized this. She asked me if I would produce the next record. But I told her she had such a clear idea of herself that she should be the producer. I would just add keys however she wanted.”

  In those days, she’d been hanging out a lot at La Cave, the club on Cleveland’s ghetto side that was featuring a lot of the newer sounds like Richie Furay’s Poco, and Mama’s Baugh (an early trio formed by the brothers who would later form DEVO at Kent State). La Cave was really the only venue you could play in Cleveland once you gained a certain amount of popularity. It would uncomfortably fit three hundred people, but the only other options were the Music Hall, which was a three-thousand-seat auditorium, or the Public Hall, which held more like ten. The smaller venues didn’t want her because she’d moved beyond folk into something unclassifiable. And after the Kent State shootings, when four student protesters were killed and nine others injured by the Ohio National Guard trying to break up a peaceful anti-war protest, protest folk was all anyone wanted to hear. All men wanted to be Bob Dylan and all women wanted to be Joan Baez. Meanwhile, Chris Eaton’s songs were more about working through a lot of hew own personal turmoil after her break with Harmon.

  Naturally, it was at La Cave that Chris Eaton opened for The Velvet Underground the first time, a relationship that would continue for several years because of the common ground they found in exploring one-chord song structures. Although they were actually from New York, The Velvets played La Cave so often that they might as well have been the house band. Because they had already set up their equipment on stage, Chris made a joke halfway through her solo set that anyone could join in if they felt the need, and in an interview with Creem magazine at the time, Chris recounted being halfway through a new song called “The Things That Bind You” when “the music I’d always heard in my head became suddenly louder. I always played with my eyes closed, and when I opened them, there was Phil, with his closed eyes staring right back at me.”

  Afterward, someone asked how long they had been playing together, and she replied “Honey, I don’t even know that man’s name!”

  In addition to Giallombardo on keys, Chris found more like-minded souls in Ramon Quinolt (rhythm guitar), Alan “The Robber” Grilt (lead), Nat Saurot and Ren O’Baldy on trumpet, Fred Arrabal on banjo and trombone, her second cousin Michael Turner on drums, who could never be trusted to do the same beat twice. But perhaps the biggest influence on Freak was the addition of a new young bass player by the name of Willie Collins. Collins was well known on the Cleveland scene because he stood out in any crowd, and not merely because he was only thirteen. Sometimes his mother would accompany him – occasionally his older brother, Phelps, would come as well – to shows, quietly smoking and reading romance novels in the back. Other times, local acts would claim responsibility over him as their own son, and keep him at the side of the stage, a lie in which everyone including the owners of La Cave were implicated because he was so remarkably good. To make up for the discomfort he felt at being both black and so small, he nearly always wore huge platform boots, let his afro grow as large as gravity would allow,
and somehow managed to accumulate the largest collection of novelty sunglasses one might reasonably expect to exist in the world. When he first joined Chris and the others on stage, there was certainly the notion that she was doing it for the gimmick of it all. She’d already hired a Serbian dwarf named Roussimoff to be nothing but a go-go dancer, complete with a Mexican luchador mask and a full-sized cape with ‘The Giant’ stitched in gold thread. There were way too many band members to fit on the tiny La Cave stage. Plus, her outfits were frequently scandalous and she refused to let the male members of her band wear shirts, personally oiling them up before shows. But all of these things were quickly forgotten when they started to play. This is the period where many of Chris’s crowd favorites were written, like “(Don’t You Believe) The Words of Handsome Men,” which supposedly featured a five-minute Roussimoff solo, whatever that might mean, and “Saviour’s Day,” which traditionally had the entire horn section leaving the stage to lead the audience in a conga line out the fire exit on to Euclid, tracing the entire circumference of Severance Hall a few blocks to the Masonic Auditorium, which was the home of the Cleveland Orchestra before they moved in 1931.

  Both Freak and Chris’s third album, A New Asshole, were recorded simultaneously, at the Killer B Studio, located in nearby Akron (where a young Chrissy Hynde was interning as a technician). Asshole also features contributions from Miles Davis on nearly half the songs, more than likely as a slight to her ex. According to Giallombardo, they represented Chris’s best work, successfully combining her lopsided melodies with Collins’s “danciest beasts” (sic): “It might have been too much for most people to understand fully, but even grasping a piece of it would have sent people into an awkward bliss … like you were dancing with a drunk aunt at a wedding but really enjoying it!” Collins agreed: “As soon as we heard it, we knew it was hit material.”