Arthur Russell
Charles Arthur Russell Jr. was an American cellist, composer, producer, singer, and musician from Iowa, whose work spanned a disparate range of styles. After studying contemporary composition and Indian classical music in California, Russell relocated to New York City in the mid-1970s, where he became involved in Lower Manhattan's avant-garde community and later the city's burgeoning disco scene. His eclectic music was often marked by adventurous production choices and his soft tenor vocals.
Russell worked as musical director of the New York avant-garde venue The Kitchen in 1974 and 1975, but later embraced dance music, producing or co-producing several underground club hits under names such as Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, and Indian Ocean between 1978 and 1988. He co-founded the independent label Sleeping Bag Records with Will Socolov in 1981, and collaborated with a wide variety of artists, including musicians Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, and Talking Heads, DJs such as Walter Gibbons, Nicky Siano, and Steve D'Acquisto; and poet Allen Ginsberg.
The only full-length studio albums Russell issued under his name were the orchestral recording Tower of Meaning and vocal LP World of Echo ; he also released the disco LP 24→24 Music under his Dinosaur L alias. Over the last two decades of his life, he amassed a large collection of unreleased and unfinished recordings, in part due to his perfectionist working tendencies. He died from AIDS-related illnesses in 1992, still in relative obscurity and poverty.
Russell's profile rose in the 21st century owing to a series of musical releases and biographical works. Several posthumous compilations of his music were released, including The World of Arthur Russell and Calling Out of Context. The documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell was released in 2008.
Early life
Russell was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa; his father was a former naval officer who eventually served as mayor of the small city. As a child and adolescent, he studied the cello and piano and began to compose his own music. When he was 18 he moved to San Francisco, where he lived in a Buddhist commune led by Neville G. Pemchekov Warwick. After earning his high school equivalency, he studied North Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar College of Music and Western composition part-time at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He met Allen Ginsberg, with whom he began to work, accompanying him on the cello as a soloist or in groups while Ginsberg sang or read his poetry.Career
1973–1975: Early years in New York and The Kitchen
In 1973, Russell moved to New York and enrolled in a formal degree program at the Manhattan School of Music, cross-registering in electronic music and linguistics classes at Columbia University. While studying at the conservatory, Russell repeatedly clashed with Pulitzer Prize-winning serialist composer and instructor Charles Wuorinen, who disparaged the composition "City Park" as "the most unattractive thing I've ever heard".Embittered by his experience, Russell briefly considered transferring to Dartmouth College at the behest of experimental composer Christian Wolff, whom he had sought out and befriended upon arriving in the Northeast. But after a chance meeting at a Wolff concert in Manhattan, he became close with Rhys Chatham, who arranged for Russell to succeed him as music director of The Kitchen, a downtown avant-garde performance space. As a result, he abandoned his studies and remained in New York. Russell and Chatham later briefly roomed together in a sixth-story walkup apartment at 437 East 12th Street in the East Village; Ginsberg supplied electricity to the impoverished composers through an extension cord. Russell resided in the apartment for the rest of his life. During his tenure at The Kitchen, he greatly expanded the breadth and purview of the venue's offerings, crafting a program that "support other local and relatively low profile composers rather than... accentuat the work of composers who were beginning to acquire an international reputation." This approach elicited controversy when Russell booked Boston-based proto-punk band The Modern Lovers for an engagement at the venue, widely regarded as a leading bastion of minimalism. Russell's booking of Fluxus stalwart Henry Flynt's "punkabilly" ensemble Nova'billy, concluding his season as director, was likewise unsettling to the avant-garde establishment. According to biographer Tim Lawrence, "the decision to program the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads was Russell's way of demonstrating that minimalism could be found outside of compositional music, as well as his belief that pop music could be arty, energetic and fun at the same time."
From 1975 to 1979, Russell was a member of The Flying Hearts, recorded by John Hammond, which consisted of Russell, ex-Modern Lovers member Ernie Brooks, Larry Saltzman, and David Van Tieghem ; a later incarnation in the 1980s included Joyce Bowden and Jesse Chamberlain. This ensemble was frequently augmented in live and studio performances by the likes of Chatham, David Byrne, Jon Gibson, Peter Gordon, Jerry Harrison, Garrett List, Andy Paley, Lenny Pickett and Peter Zummo. During the same period, various permutations of this ensemble, together with Glenn Iamaro, Bill Ruyle and Jon Sholle, performed & recorded excerpts from Instrumentals, a 48-hour-long orchestral work that constituted Russell's first major work in the idiom. Selections from the Instrumentals sessions were eventually collected on an eponymously titled album, released by Belgian label Disques du Crepuscule in 1984. The collaboration among Russell, Brooks, and Chamberlain extended into The Necessaries, a power pop quartet fronted by guitarist Ed Tomney. Their lone 1981 album on Sire Records featured few songwriting contributions from Russell, who abruptly left the band at the approach to the Holland Tunnel before an important concert in Washington, D.C.
1976–1980: Discovery of disco and early singles
In 1976, Russell was in talks to join Talking Heads, who were a trio at the time. He recorded an acoustic version of the song "Psycho Killer" with the band, playing cello. He would also collaborate on arrangements for early Talking Heads songs. He stated that they became friends but he "ended up not joining the band. They were all from art school and were into looking severe and cool. I was never into that. I was from music school and I had long hair at the time."Around 1976, Russell became a habitue of New York's nascent underground disco scene, namely Nicky Siano's Gallery on Houston Street in SoHo. In a 2007 interview with Wax Poetics magazine, Siano downplayed the popular myth that Russell's interest in the genre solidified over the course of a single night, noting that "Louis was at the Gallery every single Saturday night. After spending a few Saturday nights without Louis, Arthur decided to come. After the third or fourth time there, he started to come without Louis". Though an eager dancer, Siano has described Russell's style as "strange... outrageous, weird... he was definitely a 'white-boy' dancer." By the time Russell was involved with Tom Lee in the 1980s, his nightlife activities had subsided to a large extent. "It wasn't like Arthur and I were in some gay disco world, getting dressed to go out to the club and dancing the night away," Lee has said. "We'd go to CBGB, we'd go to Max's Kansas City, we'd go to Tier 3 but we'd listen to the group and then go home. For him it was about the daily grind of actually playing music."
In 1977, trenchantly attracted to the minimalist rhythms of disco and funded by Siano's "Gallery war chest", Russell wrote and co-produced "Kiss Me Again" in collaboration with a diverse array of musicians—Flynt, Zummo, Byrne and Gloria Gaynor veterans Wilbur Bascomb and Alan Schwartzberg —under the moniker of Dinosaur L. The first disco single to be released by Sire Records, it was a fairly large club hit, reportedly selling "some ungodly amount, like two hundred thousand copies". Despite the modicum of commercial success and "ecstatic reaction" elicited by the record in the New York underground, according to Siano, "Ray Caviano never really pushed it," and the record failed to cross over into the mainstream. The song's main hook was interpolated by Desmond Child on his minor 1979 hit "Our Love Is Insane," leading Russell to accuse the musician of infringement among his friends. Although the duo was signed to Sire to produce a follow-up single featuring Gerri Griffin of the Voices of East Harlem, the sessions stalled because of Siano's burgeoning drug habit and Russell's myopic approach to recording.
In 1980, Loose Joints was formed with Russell, onetime DJ Steve D'Acquisto, Columbia student and Russell confidante Steven Hall, three singers found on The Loft's dancefloor, miscellaneous other musicians, and the Ingram Brothers rhythm section. With a stated ambition to create "the disco white album", the group—under contract to leading underground disco label West End Records—recorded hours of music but only released three songs: "Is It All Over My Face", "Pop Your Funk", and "Tell You Today". D'Acquisto, a non-musician who favored such extemporaneous touches as off-key singing and the input of street buskers, repeatedly clashed with the perfectionist Russell throughout the sessions. Despite the acrimony, Hall felt that "D'Acquisto allowed shy Arthur to come out of his shell in the gayest sense. He also taught him how to let go in terms of slavishly and clairvoyantly searching for and then locking in the groove." The experimental recordings bemused many of downtown New York's disco cognoscenti, including West End head Mel Cheren and Loft proprietor David Mancuso, a predicament that led Larry Levan to remix "Is It All Over My Face" for club play; the ensuing track, based around a female vocal wiped from the original mix was an enduring staple of Levan's sets at the Paradise Garage and a formative influence on Chicago house, in addition to becoming a bona fide commercial hit in the New York area via airplay on WBLS.
In 1981, Russell and entrepreneur Will Socolov founded Sleeping Bag Records. Their first release was a recording of 24→24 Music, a controversial disco-influenced composition that had been commissioned by and first performed at The Kitchen in 1979. The first limited pressing of this record had a hand made silk-screened cover. Steven Hall later described its debut as "the best performance of Arthur's work that I ever attended... it was like really hot dance music and no one got it. The idea that Arthur would turn around and bring that music into their venue and present it as serious music was really very challenging to them, and very threatening to them." "Go Bang," originally released on this album but recorded three years earlier by an ensemble that included Zummo, Peter Gordon, academic/composer Julius Eastman, Bascomb, and John and Jimmy Ingram was remixed as a 12" single by Francois Kevorkian. Kevorkian's remix of "Go Bang" and Levan's remix of "In the Cornbelt" were frequently played at the Paradise Garage.