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[man vocalizing]
♪ Ah ♪
♪ Ooh, ooh ♪
♪ Do, do ♪
[plucking strings]
♪ I'm watching out of my ear ♪
♪ When the fog goes out ♪
♪ I am like a river's ear ♪
♪ Hearing but not understanding ♪
♪ Seeing the clouds, but not the sky ♪
[funk music]
♪ I get excited ♪
♪ You get excited ♪
♪ I get excited ♪
[man] The things that I like seem to be so different.
I don't know. They don't-
They're not the things that everybody likes.
But, you know, the records you listen to when you're small,
I think they have a big effect on you.
If you listen to Arthur's music, and you're not familiar with it,
then you think, "Well, how could one person work in all these different ways?"
Not many people allow themselves the full extent of their complexity.
As a scientist, I find it very interesting.
I'm unplugging the hotline.
I'm set.
[vocalizing]
[man] He made some really remarkable, very individual music,
which was, I guess, too remarkable and too individual for its time.
[vocalizing]
♪ Look to the moon ♪
♪ And back to the tree ♪
♪ You can see us go merrily ♪
♪ And you can too ♪
♪ You can see us go merrily ♪
[country music]
[man singing] ? I close my eyes?
♪ And listen ♪
♪ To hear the corn come out ♪
♪ Don't ya hear the stars ♪
♪ They glisten ♪
♪ As we go in and out ♪
♪ Down where the trees grow together ♪
♪ And the western path comes to an end ♪
♪ See the sign, it says, "clear weather" ♪
♪ I'll meet you tonight, my friend ♪
♪ Will the corn be growing A little tonight? ♪
♪ As I wait in the fields for you ♪
♪ Who knows what grows In the morning light ♪
♪ When we can feel the watery doom? ♪
Charles Arthur, Junior. I'm the senior.
People used to say, "Oh, there's little Chucky."
And I think that bothered him.
And so he changed his name to Arthur.
[slide projector whirring]
[changing slides]
[chuckling]
Bet he was, what, five years old here?
That was a heavy dog too, and he was carrying that animal.
Now what's this bird doing in that cage?
That was Charlie. His face was changing and his nose was kind of big
for his face, going through that stage.
- That was in junior high here. - Uh-huh.
That was just before it hit the fan.
We tried to do whatever good parents are supposed to do.
[Russell] ? The air is sweet and?
We were a little more experimental
and interested in different things and new things.
Something that might strike our ear or our eye.
♪ I know the sky is ready ♪
[Emily] He went through a magic period, was always putting on magic shows.
[Chuck] And he didn't seem to have to have an audience.
- [chuckles] - ? Will the corn be growing?
To be in the band, you had to wait
until the middle of the semester, in 5th grade,
but you could be in the orchestra at the beginning of the school year.
And so he didn't want to wait.
So he decided he'd be in the orchestra.
I played the cello at the time, and so he-he chose the cello.
[birds twittering]
[Chuck] I think the kids made fun of him.
I know they did.
'Cause he was a different sort of a kid.
And, uh, he was quiet,
and he was thinking about different things.
You know, he didn't go out and play marbles
and, you know, he didn't do things like that.
He had- He was into different things than that.
- [Emily] He had a severe case of acne. - [Chuck] Yeah.
That's very tough on a teenager.
[Chuck] 'Cause even though he was the kind of a kid
that didn't act like he cared much about how he looked, he really did.
- Oh, he did. He-He really did. - Really did.
[Emily] He was a big reader.
He'd go to the library, and
he'd have all different kinds of things that he'd bring home
that, uh, we didn't have.
Say, some things of John Cage.
I think he was reading things
that he really wasn't emotionally old enough to handle,
like Timothy Leary.
The rascal.
[Emily] Drugs was, you know, it was-
[Chuck] Just coming in.
[Emily] No one knew what pot was, really, around here.
[Chuck] I went back to that bedroom, opened the third drawer down.
There was a pipe.
Paraphernalia kind of stuff for marijuana, I think.
I found that, and-
You know, if you were caught with that stuff,
they'd almost cuff you and take you in, you know?
It made Chuck mad, and, uh-
I picked him up and bounced him a couple times on the floor.
And, uh, he ran away.
[Russell] How are you?
I'm sitting goggle-faced
in front of a microphone of a cassette player
wondering under what conditions you're going to be
when you hear this, when I send it to you.
[Emily] So, it must have been around '67.
Some friend of his went to San Francisco.
They decided that they'd go to San Francisco.
- You know, that was the big deal. - [Chuck] Hanging out on the street corner.
[Emily] In the Haight Ashbury district. You know, all that business.
[Chuck] We really didn't know what kind of a place it was at the time.
I'd been there during World War II.
You read about it, though, Chuck.
I know. You read about it,
but that doesn't necessarily mean what it is.
It was a hippie drug scene.
We thought the worst, of course.
[man] I met Arthur in a park, 1970 or so, '71.
He was wearing a strange composite Buddhist uniform,
semi-military, semi-Mongolian,
under the auspices of a, uh, strange
Mongolian Buddhist teacher, Reverend Warwick.
And Warwick ran a commune house in San Francisco.
And there were a group of people in a sense hypnotized by this guru,
whom I always suspected of being a charlatan.
Uh, but, on the other hand, he was very strict,
and there was a lot of meditation.
And apparently he would, uh, banish Arthur to the closet
to practice cello for hours and days on end.
So, apparently that's where Arthur sharpened his ax.
I had a sort of crush on Arthur.
There was something that he exuded
that was both- both delicate and exquisite-minded
and youthful, and, at the same time, oddly reticent.
It was 1971. We recorded a number of mantras.
And Arthur was so quick and sympathetic as a cellist
that he could play absolute unison
with anything that I was singing after he heard it once or twice.
[Emily] He was getting more and more and more
into music and that maybe didn't sit well with the commune group,
because he was not able to do all the chores he was supposed to do there.
The cello was supposed to be part of the commune,
and he had to give up his cello.
- [Chuck] No ownership. - [Emily] The ownership of it.
He was all music. He was just-
There's no question about it. He just was- That's all he wanted to do.
[Chuck] I called him one day and I said,
"Charlie, do you ever have the idea you'd like to come back to Oskaloosa
and go into the insurance business with me?"
[chuckles] It didn't take him long to say, "No."
He said, "I don't think I'll ever come back to the prairies." [chuckles]
[rock music]
[man] I know these very nice girls from where I come from.
But they get tough to talk to.
I can't understand the way they do.
I can't understand the way they act. I can't understand anything.
♪ They cracked Oh, I'm sad, but I won't ♪
[man] Spring of 1974, one of last concerts of the Modern Lovers.
Somehow it came to Arthur's attention.
And we were already in the process of almost breaking up.
He showed up after the concert
and introduced himself.
And said, you know, he liked the music.
Said he wanted to meet me,
or he said he wanted to get together with me and play songs for me.
So he came up to Cambridge, where I was still living, I think.
I don't know, a couple weeks after that, with his guitar
and started just playing these songs that he had.
You know, it was sort of folky songs,
but he already showed his kind of avant garde background
in the sense that the chords were often really complicated, really sophisticated.
He was funny because he was very
awkward in a certain way, and very shy,
but at the same time, he was very insistent.
And he thought that I had some rock secrets or something that he didn't have.
I mean, Arthur was like that.
He really would go find
what he thought he needed to complete his music.
[folk music]
♪ You did it yourself It keeps you down ♪
♪ You did it yourself Your move is their move ♪
♪ You did it yourself It keeps you down ♪
♪ Did it yourself Your move is their move ♪
The songs that he played when we first met
were- a lot of them were about his childhood.
He's got one called, "My Sister Knows the Saddest People."
And another one about,
"I felt so sad, I treated everybody bad."
It's about him and his-
probably his elementary or junior high school days.
There's a lot of scenes which are really clearly from Iowa.
♪ Last night, the movie, oh ♪
♪ Said a thing to me ♪
♪ I understood all of it very well ♪
♪ I didn't like the ending though ♪
♪ Maybe I'm crazy But it just seemed tacked on ♪
♪ I was afraid at the end ♪
♪ That I might be crazy ♪
♪ But I didn't know ♪
♪ What the whole story Was before it ended ♪
I don't know. There's some transcendent magic of a kind of beautiful pop sound,
and that's essentially what we both agreed on,
and one of the things behind deciding to form this group The Flying Hearts.
It was in the middle of sort of the beginning of the punk era,
and our sound was sort of totally the other end of the spectrum.
[pop music]
♪ Hey, there's a letter for you ♪
♪ Downstairs, can I read it too? ♪
♪ Hey, there's a letter for you ♪
♪ Downstairs on the table ♪
I remember him being amazed by how Johnny Ramone played guitar,
and he was certainly fascinated by the Rolling Stones.
He was fascinated by Abba.
And the Talking Heads, when he saw them,
he realized that they were on to something.
[country music]
♪ Pledging their love to the ground ♪
He had this vision of transforming them with his cello.
And he did play cello on a version of "Psycho Killer."
And it wasn't entirely successful.
I had a lot to do with getting him into that situation,
then wondering whether it wasn't a mistake.
♪ Nowhere to go, but I'll find ♪
One more time.
[man] The first time I saw Arthur,
Allen took me to see him do a one-man concert on the Bowery.
Allen said, "You've got to see this guy because he's, like, this poet who sings.
He's like William Carlos Williams, only he sings."
And so Allen was already, like, his biggest fan.
He looked like a farm boy.
He looked like he'd just stepped off a tractor.
And Arthur, at that point, was
in the process of turning from straight to queer,
which, of course, Allen found very exciting,
the idea of watching this process.
When he was living at 437 East 12th Street,
the same apartment that myself and many other artists, like Richard Hell,
and poets, John Godfrey, also live in that same building,
so it's like an artistic building.
So, a lot of the people in the building knew Arthur
as a part of a community within that apartment house.
He'd come downstairs to give me lyrics or samples of lyrics,
and ask my-as a poet, ask my opinion.
And we had a constant fight over whether he was being
too general, too abstract, too elusive.
And his ambition seemed to be to write popular music,
or bubble gum music, but Buddhist bubble gum.
[Hall] Arthur was Allen's music teacher.
Most of the songs that Allen wrote
were based on forms that Arthur had taught to him.
[Ginsberg] A young man sits on the bridge...
after nightfall...
and looks across the Hudson River to New Jersey.
He wonders about life...
and he wonders if he'll ever get old.
He sees the lights.
He wonders if they are talking to each other...
and he wonders if they are talking to him.
And he asks if they are.
[Russell] ? My mind settles down?
♪ On those lights from New Jersey ♪
♪ Why I chose New Jersey ♪
♪ To look at, I don't know ♪
♪ Well, one thing is sure ♪
♪ I'm here to see those lights ♪
♪ It doesn't matter, don't matter, no ♪
♪ Where I come from or where I go ♪
[trombone plays]
[man] We must have met in some musical situation.
Probably a rehearsal of somebody's, but we were playing together.
There was an attempt to create a big band, which was sort of a collective,
and people would bring compositions.
Arthur had no trouble assuming the role of leader.
He had the materials. He had the brains.
One of the things I first discovered in his group
was the idea of bringing people together who had very different backgrounds.
What we're doing is engaging in a process, and you're engaging with the instrument,
but it also comes from a sense
of looking at the person more so than the instrument.
It's not like he was seeking a-
"I need someone to play this trombone part."
It was me.
So, I think that that's what a lot of us were after.
Was to create these groupings of people in which people can be themselves
and do what they do best
and create a, um-a whole that's... larger than the sum of its parts.
[man] Part of my generation
that we were a generation of people who were composers who performed.
So he played. He had an instrument. It was a cello.
And, uh, he was one of the more eccentric of our community.
The Kitchen at that time was on Broome Street.
It was a center for dance, video and music.
But in those days, in the '70s,
if you wanted to know what was going on in The Kitchen,
you had to walk past the place and look at the sign on the door.
It was like a restaurant that would just put up a notice.
There was a lot of spontaneous programming done that way.
Arthur was very much able to do- I mean, he attracted people.
He was very open to other people's work.
[audience clapping along]
[music ends]
[cheering]
[Zummo] When I first met Arthur,
he was the musical director of The Kitchen.
He seemed to have a comprehensive awareness
of, you know, where he was situating himself in terms of all kinds of music.
He must- He must have been a great listener.
[Glass] I remember being there
when John Cage was doing his Thoreau piece.
Where he took words and took them apart, and they became just sounds.
And listening to John read was like-
It sounded like he was growling and barking.
He had gone beyond human language into just sound.
[man] If you listen to sound in a certain way,
then there's actually no big jump
from listening to a certain kind of country music
and going from there to John Cage.
Sound itself is the common factor.
[vocalizing]
In a way, all these different types
of experimental music were very contradictory, but somehow
all these people made a scene together.
A lot of people in that scene had a very defined style.
They had worked out a signature as a composer.
You know, in a way, Arthur was much more free than any of these people.
[Glass] He often did concerts alone, just with a cello.
People who become an artist on an instrument,
the instrument becomes bent to their needs
and their expression, and that's what he did.
♪ Eli, Eli, Eli ♪
♪ A simple dog with ears and nose ♪
♪ Eli, Eli, Eli ♪
♪ I don't know why nobody likes him ♪
♪ There's some people Trying to put him away ♪
♪ When he comes up to them ♪
♪ They always say, "Go away, go away ♪
♪ Please take him home Make him stay" ♪
♪ Eli, Eli, Eli ♪
♪ But some people never are satisfied ♪
♪ Eli, Eli, Eli ♪
[gentle pop music]
[Brooks] A totally different process that he used
was in a piece called "Instrumentals."
It was sort of a self-consciously arbitrary conceptual process.
[Zummo] The fragments of songs that comprise "Instrumentals"
were intricately composed little items.
I think the title is telling.
He called it "Instrumentals."
Which is a play on pop music already
because an instrumental is- is a pop tune without vocals.
Well, he always had that kind of simple, playful style.
[Brooks] What maybe was the most unusual about what Arthur did
was that melodic gift that always came through.
One of the ways in which Arthur
was confronting the issue of popular and serious music
was to bring the Modern Lovers to perform at The Kitchen
in a so-called "art music" environment.
[Glass] Many of us were interested in the popularity of popular music.
We were a generation of people who were interested in playing
in a contemporary language and finding a real audience.
Arthur felt in his bones that he was destined
to have a larger audience than he had at that moment.
[man] I was walking along St. Mark's Place,
and I saw Arthur on the street, and he was on the telephone.
And something just drew me to who he was.
We hadn't made eye contact or anything,
but I was intrigued by some guy on the telephone.
[vocalizing]
[Lee] Just being in the neighborhood,
there was another time where I was walking
by the Tisch building, I think on Second A venue,
and I saw Arthur walk into the building.
And I remember walking into the building but not knowing what to do
after that, so I just walked out.
The time when I finally met him, I was coming home from Danceteria.
And it was 2:00 in the morning, and there he was
in the Gem Spa buying an ice cream.
And I just thought, "Now it's- I just have to talk to this guy.
I don't know if he's going to beat me up or what's gonna happen."
This idea that I was gay and he was gay, never-at that time, didn't cross my mind.
So he called me, and then we
got together and, you know, that was how we met.
♪ At the same time ♪
♪ That they were letting go ♪
♪ They weren't the same ♪
I really liked the way he looked.
It was funny, because he was always self-conscious about his acne scars,
which were-really just covered his whole face really badly.
But yet, it didn't stop me from being attracted to him.
So many people say, "Oh, Arthur was strange"
or "Arthur was hard to get to know",
or he was so into his work that, you know, people didn't know what to make of him.
But yet, for me, it felt very intimate to be with him.
You know, he's the guy I wanted to be sitting on the couch with,
you know, just end of the day.
The person you wanted to be next to, you know,
and that's how it felt for me with him.
I just remember that, from the beginning, they were so naturally a couple
that you couldn't imagine them being apart.
Arthur couldn't believe he was so lucky to have Tom.
Tom made the whole thing possible in terms of his support.
[disco music]
[Zummo] Disco happened.
As soon as it was starting in obscure studios, he was there.
Arthur said he wanted to make mass-market music.
He wanted to experiment with that.
[Lee] Kids were dancing
and his quest was "Well, what makes them get out on the dance floor?"
[Toop] Arthur was beginning to release strange dance records that seemed...
almost kind of African,
and there were definitely Indian influences in there.
But at the same time, he clearly also loved disco.
[man] I met Arthur at The Loft.
The Loft was this place where David Mancuso had this concept of having
a non-profit party
where he would bring people in, you would pay a donation.
There was a giant room, which had a giant mirrored ball.
There'd be free water, bowls of fruit, a lot of drugs,
where there was a sense of feeling safe-
white gay, black gay, Spanish gay, and some hippies.
It was a party. It was like a birthday party for kids.
He had a mural of Spanky and Our Gang,
'cause that had to do with childhood, being at a party and being friends.
Arthur and I became friendly,
and we would just talk music and talk stuff at The Loft,
while the party was going on.
Arthur just said to me, "What are you doing now?"
I said, "You know, I'm working.
I got another job and I'm living, you know, around the-"
He goes, "You wanna put a record out?" And that was it. I just said, "Yup."
I was in my apartment. I lived in a sleeping bag.
I didn't make a bed. It was a lot easier.
James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" came on.
So, Arthur starts saying, you know, we can call it
Brown Bag Records and this and that.
And when he said "Brown Bag Records," I said, "Well, that's interest-" I said-
I said, "'Cause I'm into a sleeping bag."
And Arthur went ballistic.
He goes, "That's it. Sleeping Bag Records."
Arthur's thing was, "Yeah. I got a new bag, man.
My bag is sleeping. I'm into a sleeping bag."
[man] In the early '80s, I had just come off
a couple of number-one records with Chic and with Instant Funk.
"I Got My Mind Made Up" was number one.
I remember when Arthur found out that Lola and I were getting together.
He was freaked out because he did love James Brown.
He really wanted to meet her, and they hit it off in a very strange way.
[Lola] I was back and forth on the road with James Brown.
And, um, Bob was playing this music, and all of a sudden,
I'm hearing this funky organ playing.
It was, like, funky music.
And I'm, like, "This stuff is hot. Who is this?"
And he said, "Oh, this is Arthur."
I said, "Not that little white boy? That strange little white boy?"
He said, "Yeah."
He had to be the funkiest white boy that I had ever met.
So, he came in, and he told me the line.
And he cranked the music up.
And he said, "Okay. Let's try it."
And I would go, ? Bang, a-bang, bang?
He said, "I want it crazier."
And I'd go, ? Bang, a-bang, bang?
And he'd go, "Crazier."
♪ Bang, a-bang, bang, go bang-o ♪
? Go bang, a-bang, bang, go bangin'? [shriek]
♪ Bang, a-bang, bang, go bang-o ♪
? Go bang, bang, bang, go bangin'? [shriek]
♪ Bang, a-bang, bang, go bang-o ♪
? Go bang, bang, bang, go bangin'? [shriek]
♪ Bang, a-bang, bang, go bang-o ♪
? Go bang, bang, bang, go bangin'? [shriek]
♪ Bang, a-bang, bang, go bang-o ♪
[man] ? I wanna see all my friends at once?
? Go bang, bang, bang, go bangin'? [shriek]
♪ Bang, a-bang, bang Go bang-o ♪
[Socolov] It was probably 2:00 in the morning.
Francois had just finished a ref on the mix of "Go Bang."
I came with that ref to the club.
So I get brought in,
like, uh, some dignitary bringing special news, and David just
took the record, the ref, from me.
He took off what he was about to play.
I just leaned against the wall.
I could see that people were first, like, listening to it
and it was weird, 'cause they were trying to get into it,
and then, all of a sudden, they were going crazy for this record.
And a guy walked up to me and he said, "It's a great record."
Of course Arthur walked up to me and said, "I'm ruined. I'm ruined."
I said, "What do you mean?" He goes "I'm ruined."
He goes, "Did you listen to the drums?"
I looked at him. He goes, "Francois did this on purpose."
I said, "Arthur what the fuck are you talking about?"
He said, "The drums aren't strong enough.
They're-They're a little muddy. There should be more."
I said, "Arthur, you're out of your fucking mind.
People are going crazy here."
But he would say that,
and then he would sort of smile a minute later,
and he goes, "Well, that's great."
[Hall] Arthur lived in hippie communes,
so that's like being in a commune with everyone happy together.
[dance music]
[vocalizing]
♪ That country I am swimming to ♪
♪ 'Cause where you've been, I go ♪
♪ That's where I always go ♪
♪ I'm banging on your door Up in the big, blue sky ♪
♪ Up in the big, blue sky ♪
[Hall] Well, he had these personae.
So, he had the name Killer Whale.
So, some people only knew him as that,
and they didn't even know who Killer Whale was.
But some of the dance hits were done under the name Dinosaur. Dinosaur I.
For the public, Loose Joints is one person and Indian Ocean is another person,
and those two people could make totally different kinds of music.
Arthur was a person who had all these different pseudonyms.
In one sense, it's a kind of withdrawal from that celebrity process.
But I think also it can be a way of saying,
well, every project expresses something
slightly different about me as a character.
It accepts the kind of fragmentation of the person.
Arthur, in a way, was not tied to any of these styles.
Arthur was tied to Arthur.
[Russell] I stopped dancing in a social setting.
Actually, I never started. I mean, I-
It was kind of hard to go to a disco
and kind of go out there and start dancing.
It engenders a certain perception of social interaction...
that's pretty-pretty interesting to me.
And I don't know how interesting it is to other people.
Judging from the failure of certain records,
it's not that interesting.
But I-I think that some of those will be, you know,
the most interesting in years to come.
[Socolov] When you have a commercial hit, a lot of money starts to come in,
you want to start making money.
And you want to start putting out records that are similar successes.
Arthur was making a lot of esoteric records
that still weren't even coming out,
and Arthur was driving me crazy.
[Toop] He had to keep on making music,
but maybe finishing anything was difficult for him.
There was something slightly missing.
Maybe Arthur was often more interested in the process of making work.
It seemed to be, you know, just his life.
♪ Calling all kids, calling all kids ♪
♪ Grown-ups are crazy ♪
[vocalizing]
♪ I, I, I will wait ♪
♪ Wait for the sun to kiss Sun to kiss me ♪
♪ I, I, I will wait Wait for the sun to kiss ♪
♪ Sun to kiss me ♪
[Hall] So, there wasn't really a question of
that Arthur should or shouldn't be forced
to be like a regular person, because he just wasn't.
He was going to write songs all day no matter what.
[Brooks] He was always working on music. He was always thinking about music.
He was always writing music.
That song "Wild Combination"-
He probably worked on that for five years, you know,
changing the beat, changing his parts,
doing different edits, and he was never satisfied.
Ultimately, you could say it was because
he was after something that was so difficult,
but at the same time, it was frustrating to work with him.
There was the opportunity through his relationship
with, uh, the avant garde community and the compositional community
to work with Robert Wilson.
[dissonant acoustic music]
Robert Wilson had worked with Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach,
and that was Philip's introduction into the consciousness of American music.
When Arthur hooked up with Robert Wilson,
it looked like that might be his opportunity
to follow in those same footsteps with the musical theater piece Medea.
You know, it was a big theatrical production.
It was also an incredible chance for Arthur.
Arthur- First of all, he couldn't finish it,
and then when he was finished with it, he was forbidden to go to rehearsals.
And he somehow went and was in the building,
and was, like, crawling around in the rafters of the theater,
watching the rehearsal and getting crazy about it.
Part of the problem was not finishing it,
and part of the problem was that he wanted to be there,
making sure it was done the way he wanted it to be done,
and that didn't happen.
It wasn't a fruitful working relationship.
Arthur couldn't keep to schedules. Arthur, um, couldn't take direction.
Um- And Robert got very frustrated with that.
And they ended up doing one performance with Arthur's music...
and then Robert fired him.
[Brooks] Later, he joined this band that I had called The Necessaries.
He just constantly was bugging me about-
He wanted to be part of the band,
and then as soon as he was in the band, he wanted to change the band.
He wanted to take it apart.
'Cause I believed so much, I guess, in his musical ability
that I'd always have the impulse to try
to get him into any situation that I knew about.
And sometimes it was, you know, total disaster.
We were on the way to play this show-
a pretty important show in Washington, D.C.
And right before the Holland Tunnel, he just said,
"I'm not coming to the show."
And he took his cello and got out of the van.
I was trying to say, "Arthur, what are you doing?"
He said, "No, no, it's better I don't come.
I don't like the way the music's going."
I remember I picked him up and, like, threw him on the floor.
I didn't hit him. I just went, "What the-"
And I think a lot of people got really angry at him.
So, he would be paranoid in general about the business,
that people were ripping off his ideas in the dance music world.
Sometimes he could call me up at 2:00 in the morning
and say, "You stole that line from me.
The line of the song that you sang to me today that you're working on,
I thought of that line first. That's mine."
In music, borrowing goes on all the time, but Arthur would get obsessive about it.
I remember one time he was convinced
that the Rolling Stones had been listening to his tapes
and were using his ideas on their album.
To see him go in and make some great music,
and then it's sort of, like, floating away,
you know, would- would get us into conflict.
I think Arthur deliberately veered from commercial success.
Although he was very charismatic as a person,
in his own way, he was also very much...
not comfortable with the limelight.
[Hall] Tom recognized that Arthur was a genius from the beginning,
and was totally, 100% supportive of him.
Every day, like, Arthur was also thinking of ways
to write songs that would say, "Thank you. I can't believe you like me."
We both lived on 12th Street.
His boyfriend would go to work at a regular job, like a regular guy,
and then, we were, like, the wives.
I would go over to his place in the morning,
and we would go out and buy some grass from the candy store.
And we would walk around a lot and check out guys together.
He might be listening to a new mix he had done.
[Lee] I was working every day at the silk-screen printing company.
He wasn't working, but he was working on his music all the time,
a lot of which he was doing at the apartment.
What I saw in Arthur was the kind of person who's an artist
who really pursues it at all costs
and doesn't worry about the 9:00 to 5:00 job.
I was totally enthralled by that.
Here's somebody that's just doing what they-what they're driven to do.
[vocalizing]
♪ What you use to tell me ♪
♪ What the answer is ♪
♪ And the song In the end die out naturally ♪
[Lee] He had tons of equipment here
with, you know, the early DAT machines, but even before that,
he always had a reel-to-reel machine working.
Effect boxes and the cello, and experimenting
with the sounds of his voice and the echo on his voice.
♪ What he says answers me ♪
♪ Answers me, answers me ♪
♪ What he does answers me ♪
[Lee] I think some people would see he's a workaholic
in that he was the one who pulled it together enough
to get everybody to the recording studio.
And then, when those friends moved away or were involved in other projects,
I think that's what drove Arthur to work more and more by himself.
And that's where the music that became the World of Echo music got developed.
♪ Answers me, answers me ♪
[vocalizing]
♪ Words you used to tell me ♪
♪ What the answer is ♪
♪ And the song In the end die out naturally ♪
[Brooks] I remember when I was- first took tapes of his
to people to play, they didn't really get his voice.
"It's too folky. It's not assertive enough. It's too quiet."
But to me, it was kind of the gentleness and grace of his voice
which is what makes it so powerful and so beautiful.
♪ Answers me, answers me ♪
He was, like, writing a diary, basically, for his boyfriend.
He would often write a couple of songs during the day
that he would play for his boyfriend
when his boyfriend came back home from work.
♪ Answers me, answers me ♪
[whirring]
[Lee] I can clearly remember the day
that I came in the apartment and the blender was on.
And I don't know how long the blender had been on for.
But Arthur was just very peacefully sitting right here at his keyboard
just playing music and recording music
with this drone of the blender on.
[vocalizing]
He always liked that ambient noise or background noise to his own music.
Very early on, he had decided to get this huge fish tank.
So, he would have his keyboard set up sometimes right in front of the fish tank.
I remember he really liked the sound of the water.
Sometimes he would let the water down really low
so that the filter-as it filtered in,
would have that gurgling sound like a water fountain.
[gurgling]
Around that time- That was, like, the mid '80s, say-
He was also jogging.
Once Walkmans came out, he would always have one.
Jogging with his Walkman across to the West Side.
It was just something that he did all the time.
He would walk down along the Hudson River and go to the Staten Island Ferry
just to be out on the water more- even more than just watching the water.
And I think it gave him that drone background.
[vocalizing]
[vocalizing continues]
[Toop] Arthur's music often had a very oceanic feel.
That sense of boundlessness.
Arthur loved echo,
which gives you the feeling of cavernous spaces and wide-open plains.
One of the interesting things about Arthur
was that he was able to use this sense of oceanic formlessness,
but make his own shapes with it.
[Lee] It's funny. I still have the paper that says that he was HIV positive.
It didn't seem so bad. It seemed like that was happening to other people.
I mean, certainly at that time when people were positive,
they were getting sick, and they were dying.
And yet, he seemed so real to me
that it just seemed like that's not going to happen.
We weren't immediately thinking, "Oh, you're going to die."
We just were shocked, I guess.
And I was tested, and I was not positive.
And it was very upsetting because we were-
what I thought we were monogamous.
And I thought that, you know, when did this happen? How did this happen?
And, you know, it happened, you know, at some indiscretion.
It just takes one time, and it-
You know, he was fooling around with somebody sometime,
and-and it happened.
I was driving home from Gull Lake with my son-in-law.
He was driving the car, and I was sitting there,
and he said, "You know, I've always thought it was really good
the way you and Chuck were with Charlie being gay,
and how tolerant you were."
- "What?" - "What?"
And that was my first recognition of it.
The first thing I said when I talked to Charlie after I found out he was gay,
I said, "Have you had a test for AIDS?"
And he said, "No, and I don't want to know."
I think that with the way medicine was going at the time,
people were constantly living in- always living in hope.
I mean, it was a pretty creative time, even post, um, his diagnosis.
Even in the last year before he got really sick,
he would leave here at midnight to go to clubs just to hear music.
[Brooks] He was writing his best work when he was battling AIDS.
And you know- I mean, that to me, when you hear that,
in his weak-you know, his faltering voice, it's incredible.
[cello plays]
♪ I take this time, baby, within ♪
♪ I can take this time ♪
♪ I take this time, baby, within ♪
♪ I take this time ♪
♪ I love, love you within ♪
♪ Oh-oh, long time ♪
♪ I love you within ♪
[Hall] And one of the things that happened to him
was he got, um, cancer in his throat,
so he couldn't barely sing.
But he kept on singing to his boyfriend every day,
um, this great song "Love Comes Back,"
where he's saying to his boyfriend, "Being sad-
Being sad-Yes, I'm sick."
And in the song he's saying, "Being sad is not a crime."
So, he's, like, telling his boyfriend, "It's okay, you know?
I am dying, but it's okay."
You know, his gifts were increasing as his, you know...
as his strength was leaving him.
♪ There was a certain ♪
♪ Memory of our home ♪
[vocalizing]
[continues]
[Hall] Arthur became literally spaced out. So, he got dementia.
So, he went from being a guy who was, like,
spaced out naturally, and then spaced out all the time
because he was stoned all the time,
and then spaced out because he was a genius.
And then he became demented spaced out,
but still with a feeling of grace.
[Lee] You know, Arthur would be very sick
and just barely be spending his days on the couch
and just having some soup,
and kind of being pretty out of it towards the end
before he went in the hospital.
And I just remember so nicely that Allen would just-
All of a sudden, I'd hear a knock on the door.
Allen would just say, you know, "Can I sit with Arthur for a few minutes?"
And then when he went to the hospital for the last time,
we had a meeting with the doctors.
And, um, she sort of laid out what was going to happen,
and, um, what treatments could happen.
It was his parents and myself and the doctor, maybe another doctor.
And, um- you know, I didn't know them very well.
And, um, the end result was that Arthur's father said,
"Well, we defer to however Tom wants to proceed."
And I was just really blown away by that.
I kind of teased Charlie once in a while when he was little.
Charlie would do something,
and then he'd frown up, or something... at the table.
And I said, "Charlie, you're a poor sport."
Oh, it would just make him so mad.
I would call him a poor sport once in a while
when he'd do things like that.
Then in New York, he was in his bed,
and I had noticed his hair was kind of mussed up
and I said, "Charlie, I'm going to comb your hair here."
He had a comb there, and I was combing his hair,
and his hair was coming out because of the chemotherapy.
And I said, "Charlie," I said, "You're a good sport."
And he was out of it.
And he opened his eyes and looked at me, and he says, "Are you sure?"
I said, "Yup. I'm sure."
The last words I heard him say.
[cello plays]
[vocalizing]
[music ends]
- Thank you. - [applause]
[ballad plays]
[woman] ? It's time to go home now?
♪ It's time to go home now ♪
[Emily] You know, I suppose where we really got to know Tom
was when Charlie was so sick.
[Chuck] Then later, when we knew Tom better,
- Hi. - we just loved him
like a brother, almost, you know?
He's just a great guy.
So what if he is... Charlie's gay... partner?
[Emily] So, we always saw him here, at least every summer.
- And he'd stay with us, at our house. - At our house, yeah.
And he was sort of a caretaker when we weren't around.
[Lee] If the chance were that we had come out here,
we would be in our 30s,
would I see it from this perspective of,
"now I see it as an older person who really appreciates all of this
and really pines for it myself."
I wonder- You know, when I first met Arthur,
we were busy being a young couple,
going to see music and being in New York and loving New York.
But now I love this more.
He embraced the sense of Iowa.
You know, I think he appreciated where he was from
and how different it was from both coasts.
There was a time he came back from Iowa with all these T-shirts about Oskaloosa.
And then the trucker hats.
What they were were seed companies,
like the hybrid seed companies, and feed companies.
And that's where the hat for the "master mix" comes from
on the Calling Out of Context record.
So, it says "master mix," which is just great for, like, a music context,
but it's- the mix is the feed mix for the animals.
He would come to Iowa with his keyboard, his cello.
He'd come equipped to keep working.
I think he was conflicted about how to spend time with his family.
[Emily] We never did understand his music too well.
- No, we really didn't. - So, it was-
I call it music you can't really tap your foot to.
[Emily] We-We like it better now.
[Russell sings, indistinct]
[Tom] This is actually off a test pressing.
You can hear the record crackling a little bit.
After he died, I revisited a lot of the pop folk songs
that I hadn't been listening to in a long time.
Kind of celebrating him, in a way, by listening to his music.
I would load myself up with cassettes
based on how much time I was going to be out of the house.
[chuckles]
So, it could be four or five cassettes.
And I would just listen to them nonstop.
[Russell sings, indistinct]
And you can hear his voice. It's what's so nice.
♪ I will find you anytime ♪
And this is sort of, like, a bridge between, sort of, the pop songs,
and even, like, taking away from the dance music,
but moving towards the World of Echo music.
Because he's still trying to do the drumbeat, the drum sound,
but, you know- but integrating more of the cello with it.
[music continues]
It wasn't really until Arthur died,
um, in the early '90s, that I learned anything about the guy,
and I learned about this great body of work.
I was just fed up, as a fan, that this music wasn't available.
And for purely selfish reasons, I thought,
"The only way I'll get to hear this music is if I do it myself and get involved."
And I just simply called Tom one day and introduced myself
and told him what I wanted to do.
And it was really exciting to meet him, and I-
I'll never forget the first day I went over there.
He was just buzzing around the apartment,
just, you know- just pulling out all these cassettes,
and playing 30 seconds of one tape and taking it out,
putting in another 30 seconds of all this wonderful music
that, you know, I'd never heard before that-
You know, Tom said, "These are songs
that Arthur wanted to release, but nobody would put 'em out."
And this is a really beautiful song. "Love is Overtaking Me."
This was a song that was a really rough, rocky tape I've heard.
Like from, I don't know. It sounds like it's from the early '70s,
and then he revamped this.
And it's so sweet. ? Love?
[chuckles]
[acoustic guitar]
♪ Is it so different now ♪
♪ Or it's just the way I feel ♪
♪ Just the way I feel ♪
But there's literally...
maybe 800 reels.
Two-inch reels and quarter-inch reels of tape.
Another few hundred cassettes, several dozen DAT tapes.
Hundred and hundreds of pages of song lyrics and poetry.
♪ In my heart ♪
The records that I've released have been-
You know, they've been very successful for what they are.
Arthur remains contemporary.
♪ It's the same ♪
[Chuck] I spend a lot of time on the computer,
and I plug in Arthur Russell,
and there's close to 800, 900 different blogs.
Whatever that is.
And I'm just delighted to hear somebody say something nice about him, you know?
It pleases us that it's youth...
that are interested in listening.
I guess when everyone started talking about him-
Was that, like, four years ago or something?
When all those compilations came out.
I just started, mostly on the Internet, just reading about it.
At first, I definitely thought it was something very new.
I thought it was something released during that week, or something.
It felt almost like something from the future.
So, it surprised me when I found out that it was so old.
Everyone I know seems to have just an infinite love for his music.
There's a lot of great art that never finds a huge audience
or that never finds a huge audience during the artist's lifetime.
I mean, I could say that some of his stuff was just-
It was out of its time. It was ahead of its time. It was behind its time.
It just existed as itself, and-
I mean, from my point of view, he's one of the best songwriters ever.
You know, he's as good as the Beatles. He's as good as anybody.
[Toop] One of the real paradoxical aspects of Arthur's life and work
is that he clearly wanted to be successful,
and he had very few of the attributes
which help you to make it in the entertainment industry.
Arthur was creating a kind of utopia.
So, there was a compulsion to keep remaking this world,
and this world was very, very complicated.
[Zummo] I don't know what a genius is,
but if it's got to do with energy and drive and mental capacity,
you know, he had all of that.
He was dead set to bridge the gap between popular and serious music.
He said to me, "Will, music can heal. It can heal you.
Music is not just something you go dancing to.
It can really heal."
♪ That's us ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ That's morning time ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ That's morning time ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ That's morning time ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
[disco music]
♪ I just wanna be ♪
♪ Wherever you are ♪
♪ Hard as that can be ♪
♪ It's never too hard ♪
♪ With this our love to see ♪
♪ By its own light ♪
♪ Love inside of me ♪
♪ It's working at night ♪
♪ Seconds before I see in the dark, yeah ♪
♪ Seconds turn, this time ♪
What would have happened if he'd lived?
What would have happened if he hadn't gotten AIDS? And-
And, you know, he's-What kind of music?
How far would he have gone?
I think he would have gone far. I think.
Either that, or he'd have had another 4,0 0 0 or 5,00 0 tapes.
Just that many more. [laughs]
♪ He's a wild combination ♪
♪ He's a wild ♪
♪ It's a loving you, baby ♪
♪ It's a talk in the dark ♪
♪ It's a walk in the morning ♪
♪ He's a wild combination ♪
♪ He's a wild ♪
♪ It's a loving you, baby ♪
♪ It's a talk in the dark ♪
♪ It's a walk in the morning ♪
♪ That's us ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ That's morning time ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ That's us ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ That's morning time ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ For a price Push up and be part of it all ♪
♪ Surfing ♪
♪ Swimming ♪
♪ It's a wild combination ♪
♪ Can you say it? ♪
♪ It's a wild combination ♪
♪ It's a wild ♪
♪ It's a loving thing to do ♪
♪ That's us ♪
♪ It's a love ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
♪ That's morning time ♪
♪ Before we got there ♪
- ? That's morning time? - ? It's a wild?
♪ Before we got there ♪
- ? That's morning time? - ? It's a wild?