The Bird on the Rhinoceras: On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief (Musical) Moment in Time
Sunspots
August, 1988: The intersection of Wooster and Prospect Streets, Crystal City, Ohio. Hot and humid. A lanky white boy in a black leather jacket and Beatle boots is feeling the heat as he walks downtown. He's taking in the sights and the whole crazy adventure of America, a place imagined through the fictions of Jack Kerouac, Jim Rockford, Theo Kojak, wide eyed with possibilities only imagined back there in the narrow grey valleys of Yorkshire. Now here he is in Crystal City, USA, and the sky is wide and bright--there are stop signs!--and despite his studied nonchalance he feels a lot conspicuous, a lot out of place.
He sweats his way across the incandescent intersection in his heavy black jacket and pointy boots. Suddenly there's a forest green 1968 Ford Fairlane, heading South on Prospect, and a ruddy face, topped by a disheveled mop of blond hair, framed in the glassless square of the open car window.
"Are you a drummer?" the face asks.
"No, I'm not."
That face in the Fairlane's dark window belongs to Jeff (that's Jeff on the left in the picture above), who is from Springfield Ohio, is managing a Red Roof Inn, and fronting a band called Psychobilly Cadillac. The lanky boy meet Jeff's friends, most of whom--the ones the boy likes best, anyway--are either musicians or barflies or both, and from then on Jeff is the boy's portal to a vibrant but largely hidden landscape of local musics that's soon his home away from home. . . .
1998: The exhibit No Cover: Ten Years of Bowling Green Flyer Art opens at the now-defunct Renaissance Art Gallery in downtown BG. A few friends and I plaster the walls of the gallery floor-to-ceiling in flyers. My bands, Kmind, and The Plastic Factory, open the proceedings. About 100 people show up, and just like real art, we have a book for guests to leave comments. "A true grassroots art form consistently undervalued and overlooked" someone writes.
2001: In a column on local music I write for the local newspaper, I pay tribute to the anonymously public quality of the flyer art and see in it the same roots as the DIY ethos of punk and the gorgeous presence created in the Bay Area at the height of the psychedelic era by poster artists such as Wes Wilson.
2007: In a tiny upstairs space in a warehouse downtown, a friend and I reprise the flyer show for the Artomatic 419! public art event in Toledo. The room has port holes and is wall-papered in flyers. It looks pretty cool.
2010: I start a blog, The Art of BG Noise, in which I plan to tell the story of the flyers, this folk art of the local scene. A few other people share stories and a few send in their relics retrieved from drawers and closets. Sadly I set the blog adrift after about a dozen posts.
March, 2020: Culture archivist John King and I launch the Northwest Ohio Independent Culture Archive, NOICA at the Jerome Library, BGSU, right before the world shuts down. Later, John creates a digital public exhibit through BGSU Libraries featuring a hundred flyers, telling the story of the scene.
But our momentum is swallowed up by the pandemic.
Secret Histories
Greil Marcus, rock critic and author of Lipstick Traces maps the secret history of the 20th-century, an underground current that runs through a long line of artists, writers, and musicians, roots snaking up into European dada and 1970s British punk and binding them with a medieval "realm of heretics, alchemists, esoterics, . . . naysayers." This is an underground countertradition, an "imaginary terrain of a parallel history." Marginal, lurking, breaking through the soil every now and then to confound and, sometimes, alarm. This current is "powered by the plain wish to break out of the story most often told and most often condemned to travel with it like the bird on the rhinoceros" (189-190).
So this is a story about stories, about birds riding on the backs of rhinos. About how solidity and bulk can eclipse other visions of a place that are easy to overlook. It's a story about about secret histories that swirl invisibly around the stone buildings that line downtown streets, or gather in corners under cover of night.
The scene, the underground. Evanescent moments, entire worlds emerge on an evening out, where nothings turn, always it seems, into somethings, always in orbit around the latest sounds, the latest rock-n-roll sun. Impromptu, improvised, jamborees of just because, midweek afternoons in bars, weekend night smoky fires, dogs and drunks, cosmic plans on the backs of envelopes and in kitchen corners while some band rehearses, new worlds at five in the morning after the old one died at six minutes past two the night before, blue dawn breaks and shakes its head and heads off to work. Hiss of cassette tape, crackle of vinyl, whir of blue-tinted CD-R. Laughter caught in a flashbulb grimace, frozen on all those screens of memory, Friday's lightning fading already in Sunday's wind, electric remembrance crackling across the horizons of the skull.
Those proud buildings in those downtown streets. County Courthouse, jail, shop and storefront, Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, School board, boards of health, of trustees, of commissioners, Normal College and State University, merchants, school principals, councillors, managers, mayors, deans, presidents, cops. Familiar anchors frame a familiar world.
Geographer Jay Appleton uses a landscape metaphor to talk about historical perspectives, with their "size, closeness and distance," and what they say about the past. 'Prospect' history is an accounting for the past that, like those big buildings downtown, or a curve in a mountain road or overlook, with their sweeping panoramas and imposing vistas, offers us an encompassing view that is confident in its assumptions about 'how things should be.' It has an all-explanatory breadth that can be seductive.
'Refuge' history, by contrast, is partial and unfinished, messy by definition, tangled in the valleys, snagged by the streets, with eyes only for the particularity of a passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time.
The Crystal City comes alive in these stories that lurk in unfinished moments, in the always becoming.
Look, here is a young man, heading downtown. His head is full of stars. Soon he will join a band.
In Punk Productions: Unfinished Business, musicologist Stacy Thompson defines what he calls the “punk project” which clusters around different forms--the music of course, but also the way that music registers as style, in a T-shirt or a way of wearing the hair, or in the words used to talk about it, in the rhythms of its hearing. "The term music culture is crucial here" writes the late Mark Fisher, music critic and cultural theorist, "because it is the culture constellated around music (fashion, discourse, cover art) that has been as important as the music itself in conjuring seductively unfamiliar worlds." (Fisher 27).
This local scene, while it existed, a few dozen people making music and art in a town surrounded by cornfields just off the highway, coalesced and glittered like a soap bubble. Then it was gone. These unfamiliar worlds seduced me, opened me up to something that felt--still feels--essential and important, even in its brevity.
That that something could exist here, in this place, far too flat for secrets, seems a marvel now. I read the signs of its passing, like visions pieced together from a dream, and wonder how to make it say its name.
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