FBOUND ELEGANCE
BOOKER
I was driving myself back Uptown still a bit woozy after a night of surprise debauchery at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak St. A place once referred to as "that laundromat up the street with the old piano in the front window." That's why I was driving back at noon because at 3am, I inadvertently left my freshly laundered clothes in the backroom dryer. That's the kind of town New Orleans was in those days. Laid back, way back.
I never dreamed I would hit the Maple Leaf for Happy Hour drinks and do a load of laundry, then not make it back home until well after 3am. But once I started having a good time, well let's just say time passes quickly when you're having fun, and I surely was. At one point during the evening I stepped out with some folks who lived nearby and as we returned about 30mins later I started to hear these incredible piano riffs emanating from the piano in the window. Turns out the Piano Prince Of New Orleans, the one and only, the incomparable James Carroll Booker.......was lighting up those old ivories!
I saw him perform about a month earlier, sort of, if you can call it that randomly at the Maple Leaf where he just sat in front of the piano rambling on about his personal dramas, which were largely unintelligible. Obviously distraught about something/everything, he appeared self medicated to the gills. And he would tease with a few magnificent chords, just enough to redirect the bar's drifting attention back on him, then, would unceremoniously resume his dissertation. And as they say, it got late early, as the bar patrons lost their patience with him, many left, as did I.
But this night, this night was completely opposite, it seemed he was going to make up for everything all at once he was coherent, up beat, funny, loose and he pulled out all the stops. He pulled out stops from places that I didn't know even had stops. And this is where he goes off the chart, where he departs from everything else you've ever encountered, to arrive at something unlike anything else you've ever experienced. At times, if you closed your eyes, you'd swear Frederic Chopin, Scott Joplin and Allen Tousaint were all playing together at once smooth as interwoven silk. I've never heard anyone play anything close to that, before or since. It was my awakening to the remarkable and unfathomable creative talent this man possessed. I instantly became a fan for life, his life and mine.
Mesmerized, I went on to catch his performances wherever and whenever I could. He played around town for a while, then he'd disappear for a while, eventually he got a semi-regular gig at the Maple Leaf on Tuesday nights (I think it was Tues or Weds), providing he showed up.And it was on one of those nights at the Maple Leaf that will live in my memory forever, exactly as if it happened yesterday. Booker didn't show until almost midnight, nothing new but he had a couple of backup musicians in tow. Once he sat down and with nary a word spoken, he began playing and didn't stop until around 3am when he announced that if anyone was going to stick around, he'd be right back and would continue on. (Now, when I say he didn't stop I truly mean it, not even between songs, because they all flowed into one song that was three hours long.)
About 30 mins later he rolled back in the door, by himself, high as a kite, sporting what is some circles is called his shit-eating "Papa was a Rascal" grin. He never said a word but stood in front of the piano, took a little bow to everyone, sat down and started playing. He was simply mind blowing! Never ever, in my whole life had I heard anything close to what he was playing. Layer upon evolving layer of riffs, speeds, styles up and down, back and forth, in and out, all over the place, tightly focused, explosive, mellow, tight, loose...it was a complete menagerie that somehow blended seamlessly into one long uninterrupted piece of glorious art.And even though he had sampled about every style of piano playing ever realized, when I walked out of the Maple Leaf at 6:00 am, I was left with two deep impressions. The first was I had just experienced a once in a lifetime event that was so creatively expressive it felt almost super-natural. The second was the realization that despite the piano riff at any given moment, his music, his genius, was steeped somewhere out of a deep despair. It was clear that 'melancholy' was where he lived, it was his soul where his rhythm boiled and his comfort was easy. A heartbreaking realization really, but also one that surprisingly felt a little familiar and maybe a little too comfortable. It was a connection that hit me as personal yet it came from an oblique angle, an unexpected direction, something I never saw coming.
Booker got hit by a car when he was a kid, like 8 or 9 years old. It was his introduction to morphine, which he often referred to as 'his sweet Russian (rushin') mama', and which haunted him his entire life. A truly sad and tragic love affair.
People of different stripes, including those with great creative minds and wild imaginations tend to live on the edge of society. There are countless reasons for this on many different levels, but basically it's where the creative among us tend to function best. Less rules and more risk, freedom to fly and freedom to fall, flying without a net. I always say there are no fences there none to keep you in and none to keep everything else out. The thing about the edge is this: when you dance close to it it's very easy to slip over the side either on purpose, by accident, or by fate. The conclusion can be either disastrous or enlightening... depending on whether you fly or you fall.
"Ain't it funny how falling feels like flying for a little while."... I don't know who wrote it but I suspect it's from both the Country and the Western disciplines of life. But how true it rings in the ears of those crazy artists who've launched themselves over the edge of certainty and into "X, the great artistic unknown".
This is often where things like drugs or alcohol or other self destructive activities tend to surface. I believe it's largely fueled by the great insecurities involved in committing everything you are and have to support your art.
I've had mixed results launching myself over the edge, sometimes by my own hand and sometimes not. I've mostly had positive experiences but I do sport a few abstract belly tattoos courtesy of unexpected and extremely abrupt encounters with the cold hard ground. Luckily, it didn't kill me and I eventually climbed back to the relative safety of the edge.
But Booker never made it back to the edge and that's largely because of who Booker was he lived his entire life over the edge... not on it. I believe it's because he could not function anywhere else.
Dr John once said of Booker, " he's the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced." To me, he was all that and a thousand times more and he did have his crowning moments, however, because he was Booker they were few, far apart, and fleeting at best.
Booker's story is of pure genius and tragic creativity and maybe that's why I'm so touched by him. The world was not made big enough to contain a soul like Booker. The layers of his music are deep pure art, a runaway train of self expression, that nothing could stop or even slow down. His, a raucous ecstasy of melancholy.
He paid for his talent dearly with drug addiction stints in Angola State prison and various mental health and rehab facilities. He often didn't have an agent or manager because he was mostly unmanageable. Booker could not corral himself long enough to fit into the mainstream world, even for a little while, it just wasn't an option for him. Sadly, he died young and alone sitting in the emergency room waiting area of Charity Hospital of cardiac arrest due to heroin overdose. What follows are the ongoing thoughts, feelings and perceptions that rose within me during the course of creating his likeness in scrap steel. Put into words the best I can.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was commissioned to do a portrait piece of the New Orleans Piano Prince, James Carroll Booker by dear friends of mine who also lived in New Orleans in the era of Booker. I have yearned to do his likeness for many years but the opportunity never presented itself, up until now. I am very familiar with Booker the musical genius as well as Booker the madman. I saw him perform live many times in New Orleans, most often at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak St. in the late 70's. And I absolutely love James Booker...You Heard Me? ....I LOVE JAMES BOOKER!
I started with a few simple quick pencil doodles just to begin to get a feel for how to visually approach him. In the scope of my overall process, this would be the equivalent of warm up exercises before running a marathon. It gets the blood flowing to my brain and gets my eyes searching out shapes.After rolling around the mental notes I took from that exercise, I was able to eliminate some ideas and direct my focus towards others. I started by creating a clay sketch of his facial landscape emphasizing his unique physical characteristics to bring out his complex personality. Let me state here that having had the good fortune to experience his live performances left an indelible mark somewhere deep inside my inner goo.
So I worked on him, adding and subtracting, trying on different expressions and playing with textures until I completed a version of the man that I liked. I was trying to get there adjusting subtle elements and (this happens all the time) then all of the sudden, poof, he evolved into a presence. I thought I was satisfied and was ready to move his clay likeness to the studio and start him in steel. So I placed him on a table in my living room temporarily.
Autumn arrived and I decided I wanted to get my seasonal chores done with the fair weather, so Booker sat in my living room where most days at somewhere around 5pm I would have a drink or two, listen to music, and visa vi we started to have conversations...long, involved conversations.Where he sat formed a triangular sight line between his clay figure, where I typicially sit, and a large movie poster on my wall of Bayou Maharahja (a movie about Booker's Life.) Typically I would play various blues piano artists, sip Powers Irish Whiskey and engage my friend in whatever topic would arise. You'd be surprised at the often lively discourse.One evening we started off listening to Pine Top Perkins and his Delta Boogie Woogie then drifted down river to New Orleans and got in this awesome back and forth about Tuts Washington and ended up playing a ton of Champion Jack Dupree. This made Booker happy, which I think emboldened him to expand our discussion to focus on him. Specifically about how I was going to portray him.
I could tell he was less than happy with his clay likeness. As we drank on, he kept looking at me, then looking up at his image on Bayou Maharaja poster, and then back again at me with his one good eye and that damn 'Papa was a rascal' grin of his.Initially I was intimidated, but after we both got pretty well lubricated, I was able find the courage to squeeze it out of him.Turns out, he was unhappy with some of my choices concerning his portrait. He put it this way: "I thought you were waiting to do me so that when you did, it would be a worthy representation of who I really am, baby."Naked to the world, I froze and after a long silent pause and another well poured Powers or two, I asked what about the piece specifically was bothering him?
"You, motherfucker!"
Then, "Look man, you got my hair looking just like the gotdamn poster, it ain't bad, see what I'm sayin, it just ain't fabulous like me baby... I need my big Fro, Bro,- Dig?"
"And what's going on with that mouth? Where's my "Papa Was A Rascal" shit eating grin, man?
He was right of course, I had thought of doing his Fro, but I allowed my concerns over fabrication difficulties to back me off of it. He did everything but call me out as a pussy, straight up. Well deserved. I had totally embarrassed myself in the face of the one I wanted to impress as much as or more than any other presence in the entire Universe. A soul I wanted to celebrate with the energy and purity of his art. I was humbled beyond my words, but also... awakened.
The next day I changed the clay piece by adding his giant Afro and by cheezing up his smile a notch or two and you know what, we were both happy and our lines of communication reopened, wide.
We spent the rest of our winter happy hours sitting in my living room, sipping Powers Irish whiskey, listening to endless piano bluesmen, sharing dirty jokes, and reminiscing about life in the late 70's Big Easy. We became close friends as it was the winter of Covid and frankly, there was no one else to talk to.Funny, but as bat-shit crazy as Booker was, I came to respect his depth as a deeply tortured soul and the layers of creative energy he found there. How he effortlessly could tap into it and be a sparkling musical genius, but if he wasn't 'there' or 'feeling it' he was just another lost soul.
But I was ready for him now and come Spring we would go into the studio to begin the process of bringing him back to life, or as close to it as we could get. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I had been putting off walking his clay study up to the studio because the armature holding the clay was weak due to the excessive weight of his clay Afro. The armature was old, it's better days past. As I just entered the studio the armature let go of the base and Booker's head rolled forward, as I tried to catch it, it's weight pulled us both to the floor, ass over teacups.
No one was hurt, but it was a sharp reminder that I was launching myself off the artistic cliff with the most creative and self destructive genius maybe in the whole universe, ever, and that I needed to be very careful dancing this dance with Booker. Humbled by the whole affair, I wondered to myself if I could do him the justice I felt he truly deserved.
There's an artistic understanding or maybe a creative confidence he's instilled in me though that is rock solid. It's the stuff backbones are made of where you feel empowered and confident enough to let completely go of the creative energy percolating inside of you. The trick is to bring it to the surface just as natural as taking a breath while navigating an emotional intensity similar to birth. Every single distraction of life outside of the studio is effortlessly repelled like water off a duck's back. Oh sweet life! For my nickel, if and when you can accomplish that well then, congratulations my friend, you've just become an artist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So I made my adjustments, internal and external then started to bend steel.
This part of the process went very smoothly as creating the clay study and then drinking with him all winter made the landscape of his features more than familiar. I tend to get close to someone when I am deep into making a likeness of them. It sounds funny but it's the small things that bring them to life. At least for me, and sometimes something like getting an eye just right makes me feel like I'm close to their energy. It's important for me reach those places with these portraits. It's personal.
Personal enough that I created Booker's bad eye even though his patch covers it. After his bad eye was complete, I could find the depth I needed for his good one. The rest of his face came together rather quickly out of my familiarity and soon I was figuring out how to attire him.He was a dude very much concerned with his appearance and I wanted some of that to bleed through without overdoing it. I wanted his wild side to shine but with some underlying measure of dignity attached and that brought me right to the summit of his mighty 'Fro'.
Talk about new sensations, I knew I was in for a challenge but I had given Booker my solemn promise so there was no looking back. When I bent the outline of his hair it felt foreign and out of natural scale to me (which was what I wanted, but visually caught me off guard).
I needed to take pause and digest, so I took a long walk, emptied my mind and just let him speak to me I returned to the shop and met him head on with fresh eyes and a freshly rekindled exuberance for his 'Fro'. And it was a challenge. I used a lighter gauge steel to support his welded 'hair' to keep the overall weight down. However, in the process the steel warped under the heat of applying the 'hair' which made everything somewhat uneven. To compensate, I had to fill the lower areas with more 'hair'.During the course of that I inadvertently gave my left eye "welder burn" or "flash burn". It happens occasionally if you subject an unprotected eye, to the welding arc. It's painful but mercifully only lasts for hours in lieu of days or years. I did it out of haste. What a dumbass.Funny thing was, it felt like maybe Booker was letting me know what it was like to be blind in my left eye, if not only for a few hours. A little reminder of what daily pain actually feels like. Again he made me pause, and then I understood very clearly.
Eventually I finished his Fro...and what a Fro it is! (I'm green with envy... if only...) When he told me he wanted folks to relive the "70's, baby" when they encountered his portrait, I assured him I would do my best. I only hope I did him justice.
As I prepared him for his final process the burnt oil finish, his baptism of fire, I tried to even up his Fro some and clean up some other areas with the mini-grinder and I started to feel kind of nostalgic, like we were approaching the bittersweet end of a long and enriching journey together.It felt like he picked me up hitch-hiking and we had taken a fantastic cosmic trip together and we were now approaching the time and place for me to exit his car.It's unusual for me to feel that way but through the course of it, Booker had engaged me way past where at the start, I felt I was capable of going. That depth just never occurred to me. Inevitably where he took me, was to a better place with myself.
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This project has been one of pure heart and soul for me. Booker made me relive my experiences of living in New Orleans in the late 70's. He made me re-engage many of the influences that have evolved in me to make up a huge part of who I am and what I've become over time.
Creating him has brought me right back to those formative days, sometimes I swear I can even smell New Orleans. You know how cities each have their own unique fragrance?... sweet, sour and everything in between all at once?New Orleans aroma is a gumbo of natural gas, rotting oyster shells and the river mixed delicately with sweet olive blossoms, fresh baked frenchbread, and the savory aromas of a thousand kitchens. Listening to Booker is all of that to me and more, and reminiscing brings me that far back, back to another place in time, back to a world of unlimited discovery and of easy openness a world dancing with life.Sweet, sad, savory, spicy, rich and sour.The tastes of life.Yum.Thanks Booker.
I was driving myself back Uptown still a bit woozy after a night of surprise debauchery at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak St. A place once referred to as "that laundromat up the street with the old piano in the front window." That's why I was driving back at noon because at 3am, I inadvertently left my freshly laundered clothes in the backroom dryer. That's the kind of town New Orleans was in those days. Laid back, way back.
I never dreamed I would hit the Maple Leaf for Happy Hour drinks and do a load of laundry, then not make it back home until well after 3am. But once I started having a good time, well let's just say time passes quickly when you're having fun, and I surely was. At one point during the evening I stepped out with some folks who lived nearby and as we returned about 30mins later I started to hear these incredible piano riffs emanating from the piano in the window. Turns out the Piano Prince Of New Orleans, the one and only, the incomparable James Carroll Booker.......was lighting up those old ivories!
I saw him perform about a month earlier, sort of, if you can call it that randomly at the Maple Leaf where he just sat in front of the piano rambling on about his personal dramas, which were largely unintelligible. Obviously distraught about something/everything, he appeared self medicated to the gills. And he would tease with a few magnificent chords, just enough to redirect the bar's drifting attention back on him, then, would unceremoniously resume his dissertation. And as they say, it got late early, as the bar patrons lost their patience with him, many left, as did I.
But this night, this night was completely opposite, it seemed he was going to make up for everything all at once he was coherent, up beat, funny, loose and he pulled out all the stops. He pulled out stops from places that I didn't know even had stops. And this is where he goes off the chart, where he departs from everything else you've ever encountered, to arrive at something unlike anything else you've ever experienced. At times, if you closed your eyes, you'd swear Frederic Chopin, Scott Joplin and Allen Tousaint were all playing together at once smooth as interwoven silk. I've never heard anyone play anything close to that, before or since. It was my awakening to the remarkable and unfathomable creative talent this man possessed. I instantly became a fan for life, his life and mine.
Mesmerized, I went on to catch his performances wherever and whenever I could. He played around town for a while, then he'd disappear for a while, eventually he got a semi-regular gig at the Maple Leaf on Tuesday nights (I think it was Tues or Weds), providing he showed up.And it was on one of those nights at the Maple Leaf that will live in my memory forever, exactly as if it happened yesterday. Booker didn't show until almost midnight, nothing new but he had a couple of backup musicians in tow. Once he sat down and with nary a word spoken, he began playing and didn't stop until around 3am when he announced that if anyone was going to stick around, he'd be right back and would continue on. (Now, when I say he didn't stop I truly mean it, not even between songs, because they all flowed into one song that was three hours long.)
About 30 mins later he rolled back in the door, by himself, high as a kite, sporting what is some circles is called his shit-eating "Papa was a Rascal" grin. He never said a word but stood in front of the piano, took a little bow to everyone, sat down and started playing. He was simply mind blowing! Never ever, in my whole life had I heard anything close to what he was playing. Layer upon evolving layer of riffs, speeds, styles up and down, back and forth, in and out, all over the place, tightly focused, explosive, mellow, tight, loose...it was a complete menagerie that somehow blended seamlessly into one long uninterrupted piece of glorious art.And even though he had sampled about every style of piano playing ever realized, when I walked out of the Maple Leaf at 6:00 am, I was left with two deep impressions. The first was I had just experienced a once in a lifetime event that was so creatively expressive it felt almost super-natural. The second was the realization that despite the piano riff at any given moment, his music, his genius, was steeped somewhere out of a deep despair. It was clear that 'melancholy' was where he lived, it was his soul where his rhythm boiled and his comfort was easy. A heartbreaking realization really, but also one that surprisingly felt a little familiar and maybe a little too comfortable. It was a connection that hit me as personal yet it came from an oblique angle, an unexpected direction, something I never saw coming.
Booker got hit by a car when he was a kid, like 8 or 9 years old. It was his introduction to morphine, which he often referred to as 'his sweet Russian (rushin') mama', and which haunted him his entire life. A truly sad and tragic love affair.
People of different stripes, including those with great creative minds and wild imaginations tend to live on the edge of society. There are countless reasons for this on many different levels, but basically it's where the creative among us tend to function best. Less rules and more risk, freedom to fly and freedom to fall, flying without a net. I always say there are no fences there none to keep you in and none to keep everything else out. The thing about the edge is this: when you dance close to it it's very easy to slip over the side either on purpose, by accident, or by fate. The conclusion can be either disastrous or enlightening... depending on whether you fly or you fall.
"Ain't it funny how falling feels like flying for a little while."... I don't know who wrote it but I suspect it's from both the Country and the Western disciplines of life. But how true it rings in the ears of those crazy artists who've launched themselves over the edge of certainty and into "X, the great artistic unknown".
This is often where things like drugs or alcohol or other self destructive activities tend to surface. I believe it's largely fueled by the great insecurities involved in committing everything you are and have to support your art.
I've had mixed results launching myself over the edge, sometimes by my own hand and sometimes not. I've mostly had positive experiences but I do sport a few abstract belly tattoos courtesy of unexpected and extremely abrupt encounters with the cold hard ground. Luckily, it didn't kill me and I eventually climbed back to the relative safety of the edge.
But Booker never made it back to the edge and that's largely because of who Booker was he lived his entire life over the edge... not on it. I believe it's because he could not function anywhere else.
Dr John once said of Booker, " he's the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced." To me, he was all that and a thousand times more and he did have his crowning moments, however, because he was Booker they were few, far apart, and fleeting at best.
Booker's story is of pure genius and tragic creativity and maybe that's why I'm so touched by him. The world was not made big enough to contain a soul like Booker. The layers of his music are deep pure art, a runaway train of self expression, that nothing could stop or even slow down. His, a raucous ecstasy of melancholy.
He paid for his talent dearly with drug addiction stints in Angola State prison and various mental health and rehab facilities. He often didn't have an agent or manager because he was mostly unmanageable. Booker could not corral himself long enough to fit into the mainstream world, even for a little while, it just wasn't an option for him. Sadly, he died young and alone sitting in the emergency room waiting area of Charity Hospital of cardiac arrest due to heroin overdose. What follows are the ongoing thoughts, feelings and perceptions that rose within me during the course of creating his likeness in scrap steel. Put into words the best I can.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was commissioned to do a portrait piece of the New Orleans Piano Prince, James Carroll Booker by dear friends of mine who also lived in New Orleans in the era of Booker. I have yearned to do his likeness for many years but the opportunity never presented itself, up until now. I am very familiar with Booker the musical genius as well as Booker the madman. I saw him perform live many times in New Orleans, most often at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak St. in the late 70's. And I absolutely love James Booker...You Heard Me? ....I LOVE JAMES BOOKER!
I started with a few simple quick pencil doodles just to begin to get a feel for how to visually approach him. In the scope of my overall process, this would be the equivalent of warm up exercises before running a marathon. It gets the blood flowing to my brain and gets my eyes searching out shapes.After rolling around the mental notes I took from that exercise, I was able to eliminate some ideas and direct my focus towards others. I started by creating a clay sketch of his facial landscape emphasizing his unique physical characteristics to bring out his complex personality. Let me state here that having had the good fortune to experience his live performances left an indelible mark somewhere deep inside my inner goo.
So I worked on him, adding and subtracting, trying on different expressions and playing with textures until I completed a version of the man that I liked. I was trying to get there adjusting subtle elements and (this happens all the time) then all of the sudden, poof, he evolved into a presence. I thought I was satisfied and was ready to move his clay likeness to the studio and start him in steel. So I placed him on a table in my living room temporarily.
Autumn arrived and I decided I wanted to get my seasonal chores done with the fair weather, so Booker sat in my living room where most days at somewhere around 5pm I would have a drink or two, listen to music, and visa vi we started to have conversations...long, involved conversations.Where he sat formed a triangular sight line between his clay figure, where I typicially sit, and a large movie poster on my wall of Bayou Maharahja (a movie about Booker's Life.) Typically I would play various blues piano artists, sip Powers Irish Whiskey and engage my friend in whatever topic would arise. You'd be surprised at the often lively discourse.One evening we started off listening to Pine Top Perkins and his Delta Boogie Woogie then drifted down river to New Orleans and got in this awesome back and forth about Tuts Washington and ended up playing a ton of Champion Jack Dupree. This made Booker happy, which I think emboldened him to expand our discussion to focus on him. Specifically about how I was going to portray him.
I could tell he was less than happy with his clay likeness. As we drank on, he kept looking at me, then looking up at his image on Bayou Maharaja poster, and then back again at me with his one good eye and that damn 'Papa was a rascal' grin of his.Initially I was intimidated, but after we both got pretty well lubricated, I was able find the courage to squeeze it out of him.Turns out, he was unhappy with some of my choices concerning his portrait. He put it this way: "I thought you were waiting to do me so that when you did, it would be a worthy representation of who I really am, baby."Naked to the world, I froze and after a long silent pause and another well poured Powers or two, I asked what about the piece specifically was bothering him?
"You, motherfucker!"
Then, "Look man, you got my hair looking just like the gotdamn poster, it ain't bad, see what I'm sayin, it just ain't fabulous like me baby... I need my big Fro, Bro,- Dig?"
"And what's going on with that mouth? Where's my "Papa Was A Rascal" shit eating grin, man?
He was right of course, I had thought of doing his Fro, but I allowed my concerns over fabrication difficulties to back me off of it. He did everything but call me out as a pussy, straight up. Well deserved. I had totally embarrassed myself in the face of the one I wanted to impress as much as or more than any other presence in the entire Universe. A soul I wanted to celebrate with the energy and purity of his art. I was humbled beyond my words, but also... awakened.
The next day I changed the clay piece by adding his giant Afro and by cheezing up his smile a notch or two and you know what, we were both happy and our lines of communication reopened, wide.
We spent the rest of our winter happy hours sitting in my living room, sipping Powers Irish whiskey, listening to endless piano bluesmen, sharing dirty jokes, and reminiscing about life in the late 70's Big Easy. We became close friends as it was the winter of Covid and frankly, there was no one else to talk to.Funny, but as bat-shit crazy as Booker was, I came to respect his depth as a deeply tortured soul and the layers of creative energy he found there. How he effortlessly could tap into it and be a sparkling musical genius, but if he wasn't 'there' or 'feeling it' he was just another lost soul.
But I was ready for him now and come Spring we would go into the studio to begin the process of bringing him back to life, or as close to it as we could get. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I had been putting off walking his clay study up to the studio because the armature holding the clay was weak due to the excessive weight of his clay Afro. The armature was old, it's better days past. As I just entered the studio the armature let go of the base and Booker's head rolled forward, as I tried to catch it, it's weight pulled us both to the floor, ass over teacups.
No one was hurt, but it was a sharp reminder that I was launching myself off the artistic cliff with the most creative and self destructive genius maybe in the whole universe, ever, and that I needed to be very careful dancing this dance with Booker. Humbled by the whole affair, I wondered to myself if I could do him the justice I felt he truly deserved.
There's an artistic understanding or maybe a creative confidence he's instilled in me though that is rock solid. It's the stuff backbones are made of where you feel empowered and confident enough to let completely go of the creative energy percolating inside of you. The trick is to bring it to the surface just as natural as taking a breath while navigating an emotional intensity similar to birth. Every single distraction of life outside of the studio is effortlessly repelled like water off a duck's back. Oh sweet life! For my nickel, if and when you can accomplish that well then, congratulations my friend, you've just become an artist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So I made my adjustments, internal and external then started to bend steel.
This part of the process went very smoothly as creating the clay study and then drinking with him all winter made the landscape of his features more than familiar. I tend to get close to someone when I am deep into making a likeness of them. It sounds funny but it's the small things that bring them to life. At least for me, and sometimes something like getting an eye just right makes me feel like I'm close to their energy. It's important for me reach those places with these portraits. It's personal.
Personal enough that I created Booker's bad eye even though his patch covers it. After his bad eye was complete, I could find the depth I needed for his good one. The rest of his face came together rather quickly out of my familiarity and soon I was figuring out how to attire him.He was a dude very much concerned with his appearance and I wanted some of that to bleed through without overdoing it. I wanted his wild side to shine but with some underlying measure of dignity attached and that brought me right to the summit of his mighty 'Fro'.
Talk about new sensations, I knew I was in for a challenge but I had given Booker my solemn promise so there was no looking back. When I bent the outline of his hair it felt foreign and out of natural scale to me (which was what I wanted, but visually caught me off guard).
I needed to take pause and digest, so I took a long walk, emptied my mind and just let him speak to me I returned to the shop and met him head on with fresh eyes and a freshly rekindled exuberance for his 'Fro'. And it was a challenge. I used a lighter gauge steel to support his welded 'hair' to keep the overall weight down. However, in the process the steel warped under the heat of applying the 'hair' which made everything somewhat uneven. To compensate, I had to fill the lower areas with more 'hair'.During the course of that I inadvertently gave my left eye "welder burn" or "flash burn". It happens occasionally if you subject an unprotected eye, to the welding arc. It's painful but mercifully only lasts for hours in lieu of days or years. I did it out of haste. What a dumbass.Funny thing was, it felt like maybe Booker was letting me know what it was like to be blind in my left eye, if not only for a few hours. A little reminder of what daily pain actually feels like. Again he made me pause, and then I understood very clearly.
Eventually I finished his Fro...and what a Fro it is! (I'm green with envy... if only...) When he told me he wanted folks to relive the "70's, baby" when they encountered his portrait, I assured him I would do my best. I only hope I did him justice.
As I prepared him for his final process the burnt oil finish, his baptism of fire, I tried to even up his Fro some and clean up some other areas with the mini-grinder and I started to feel kind of nostalgic, like we were approaching the bittersweet end of a long and enriching journey together.It felt like he picked me up hitch-hiking and we had taken a fantastic cosmic trip together and we were now approaching the time and place for me to exit his car.It's unusual for me to feel that way but through the course of it, Booker had engaged me way past where at the start, I felt I was capable of going. That depth just never occurred to me. Inevitably where he took me, was to a better place with myself.
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This project has been one of pure heart and soul for me. Booker made me relive my experiences of living in New Orleans in the late 70's. He made me re-engage many of the influences that have evolved in me to make up a huge part of who I am and what I've become over time.
Creating him has brought me right back to those formative days, sometimes I swear I can even smell New Orleans. You know how cities each have their own unique fragrance?... sweet, sour and everything in between all at once?New Orleans aroma is a gumbo of natural gas, rotting oyster shells and the river mixed delicately with sweet olive blossoms, fresh baked frenchbread, and the savory aromas of a thousand kitchens. Listening to Booker is all of that to me and more, and reminiscing brings me that far back, back to another place in time, back to a world of unlimited discovery and of easy openness a world dancing with life.Sweet, sad, savory, spicy, rich and sour.The tastes of life.Yum.Thanks Booker.
