Questions & Answers
1997 — Burn The Quilt
Artistic Influences
Who were your artistic influences leading up to Burn the Quilt?
For Burn The Quilt specifically:
Spalding Gray
Monologist, actor (Swimming to Cambodia), autobiographical performance artist (from Rhode Island. Pared-down aesthetic, urban, no-frills, direct address to audience. Spare, stark, simple set. Carries the show; he is the show
Michael Petrelis
Pioneer AIDS activist, a founder of ACT/UP and Queer Nation, landmark achievements and not without controversy; now active in LGBTQ+ landmark preservation (the toothless lion in winter); he’s a daddy now.
Rinde Eckert is always foundational and I had him in mind from his solo work.
That’s where I got the tone and style for writing and presentation – direct, spare, edgy, provocative.
Musically, it’s not my best work, and I’ll detail why later in the analysis. Still, I was able to get my pet licks and Phrygian modal modulations in there, and there was enough lushness in the arrangements to carry the anthemic elements in the composition and lyrics.
My primary template for the music composition, and sonic palette was Peter Gabriel's “San Jacinto” (you can hear snippet of the orchestral version as the music bed for my Finding Animal Instagram post). 1992, one in a list of songs I first heard at John and Brittany Neff’s house that were instant epiphanies to my mind’s ear (along with Black Sun by Dead Can Dance). Tone paintings of stunning breadth and scope, male singers howling, xylophones and tympani and pulsating strings … primal, feral, in extremis, desperate to stave off the end of the world.
Who else was making art and performance around you in San Francisco at that time?
Tony Vaguely, The Sick and Twisted Players, homed at 21 Bernice. Check him out in the FB group, he was the major underground queer theatre producer/director of that time – we never connected during those years because we were both so busy all the time writing our fool asses off.
Omewenne Grimstone – Nico: My Empty Pages at 21 Bernice, directed I think by Tom Marzella (a joint project with Vaguely’s group) was one of the finest, most fully-realized, raw, affecting, stunning and unforgettable theatre pieces I have ever seen in my entire life; she is still recording, based in England.
Michael Kerkes (Michael Blue) and Lewis Walden IV – DJ’s and creative talents behind Club Uranus, the spiritual and artistic home of the Gay 90s in SF.
Lewis is the co-founder of the Gay 90s FB group. Michael has been a close friend for 30 years who inspired several Animal lyrics and contributed art to my Christmas shows; he’s a horticulturist now who owns Crazy Hill Botanicals in Washington state with his husband Elton Busby.
I’d like you to talk to Michael and I’ll ask him for clearance for contact. He knows me well, more intimately than most, and was part of my extreme core group in those days with the late Wolf Harvath and Noni Heath. Wolf was my entry to this crowd in 1991, a brother and soulmate who we lost to AIDS in 1994.
Leigh Crow – “Elvis Herselvis”
Justin Vivian Bond – “Kiki and Herb” (Justin [they/them] is a legit Broadway star and an Animal fan at a distance – they’re the one who ‘made it big’.)
Jerome Caja – Scenester, performer, artist whose work almost made Whitney Biennial, beloved legend.
Ggreg Taylor – club promoter, activist, arts professional, very much the face of the community, now living the low key life in Washington state.
Waiyde Palmer – scenester and historian, very active today, FB group stalwart.
Jack Curtis Dubowsky – composer, conductor, brilliant in a million ways: met him through Tom Marzella at 21 Bernice when he did his musical adaptation of The Silver Whistle, also played for his Duran Duran orchestra gig at The Stud/Trannyshack in 1997; composed music for the Tom Marzella-directed production of a play based on Milos Forman’s autobiography (1997); now has an ensemble in LA I think, also worked for Pixar (engineer?)
In the interests of time, I won’t put hyperlinks here, but all these folks (except Wolf and Noni) are present or referenced in the FB group.
Non-gay/general club – I ran an open mic night at the Albion Club in the Mission District called “Circle Arts” – “anything on stage for 5 minutes or less” – that started with 11 people and grew to over 80 every Tuesday night, and that’s where I became ‘Animal’ one Tuesday night in February 1988 while I was living on the Zen writer/philosopher and radio host Alan Watts’ converted ferryboat Vallejo in Sausalito, just over the Golden Gate Bridge (wild Beat energy there, oh the stories!) I’d been “Joe Kelly Smith” (my legit stage/radio name) but I went on stage that night freshly shaven and said, “Hi folks, from now on my name is Animal, because that’s just the kind of guy I am!” and they said Hey Animal and that was that.
The Albion is where I had the chance and worked up the courage to perform my first writing since I’d dropped out of Trinity Rep Conservatory in 1986 where the curriculum was interdisciplinary acting, directing, and “playwrighting” (the spelling is affectatious but I stick with it). My writing caught the attention of the conservatory director and several of my works were produced at school, so when I decided to ditch the legit stage and go performance art, that was part of what gave me the idea that I might be good at it.
My wild and hypermasculine, graphic, drug-reference-filled iconoclastic rude nasty shit seemed to catch on well, and the radio stuff I was writing about the rhythms of Morse code and 50,000 watt-clear-channel signals caught the industrial science-y vibe of the late 80s, “Channel Z”-style angular imagery, ‘nature and art united with science’ inchoate thing I was beginning to discern from the fog of indeterminate vision and the primordial ooze of just what the fuck it was that I was supposed to be talking and playing and singing about.
The Animal Ensemble was formed in large part from the Albion people and the work I did there, along with folks from the Gay 90s crowd and people I knew from some film work I’d done and musicians involved with the Lutheran church where I was a member. Notable names:
Jessie Turner (original ensemble member, muse, classical soprano, guitar/singer/songwriter, another one to talk to about Animal who knew me deeply, I wrote beautiful songs for her.)
Ira Marlowe – singer/songwriter, playwright, compatriot in activism, still has a gig today in Berkeley.
Mario DeSio – singer/songwriter, met on the steps of Sproul Hall at University of California in Berkeley in 1986, he and a friend were playing guitar, I held up my flute, they said yes, I jumped in, and we played together for a decade at clubs and gigs, I think he’s still out there too.
OK, Chris, that’s all the folks I can think of for the moment – I’m sure as you talk with people and as I finish up 1997 more names will manifest.
Was there a sort of scene, and did you feel part of it in some way, or out of it?
Yes, there was a scene, and I felt … attached to it, and parallel to it, but I never, ever, ever felt part of it.
I was older than almost everyone around, and my gig was different – very activist, “out there”, controversial, designed to agitate as well as entertain, and of course the Christian-content thing put off a lot of the crowd.
The age difference especially was isolating. I didn’t drink a lot, certainly not a dancer or club kid, and my intensity wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. “You like it fast and hard,” a rave keyboard studio kid told me once about my creative process, and he was right. I’d been pro since 1981 and worked at a very high level of musicianship while asking the same of my collaborators (all of whom were at least as good or better than I).
My leather mentor, Joseph W. Bean, the first director of the Leather Archives & Museum, was a huge supporter of my work. In 1995, after my workshop “Beowulf Nixon”, he had me to his home, poured himself a Scotch as I sat on the floor at his feet, and he said to me, “You are a creative genius. No one else does what you do; no one else can even attempt to do what you do.”
But I never got noticed or accepted by this crowd really… to some extent yeah, but a lot of that appreciation came later and is coming today in retrospect. I was sui generis to them, a guy who’d been in the Army, worked all over America, traveled the world, done so much, seen so much, had such big ideas, who and what the fuck is he doing here, ok he’s fun to party with and fuck sometimes but jesus christ!
So there you have it. I did my stuff, wondered why I didn’t get to hang out more, loved my core crowd, turned out a show every six months for six and a half years, and did my work relentlessly, because you know, I was on fire.
For Burn The Quilt specifically:
Spalding Gray
Monologist, actor (Swimming to Cambodia), autobiographical performance artist (from Rhode Island. Pared-down aesthetic, urban, no-frills, direct address to audience. Spare, stark, simple set. Carries the show; he is the show
Michael Petrelis
Pioneer AIDS activist, a founder of ACT/UP and Queer Nation, landmark achievements and not without controversy; now active in LGBTQ+ landmark preservation (the toothless lion in winter); he’s a daddy now.
Rinde Eckert is always foundational and I had him in mind from his solo work.
That’s where I got the tone and style for writing and presentation – direct, spare, edgy, provocative.
Musically, it’s not my best work, and I’ll detail why later in the analysis. Still, I was able to get my pet licks and Phrygian modal modulations in there, and there was enough lushness in the arrangements to carry the anthemic elements in the composition and lyrics.
My primary template for the music composition, and sonic palette was Peter Gabriel's “San Jacinto” (you can hear snippet of the orchestral version as the music bed for my Finding Animal Instagram post). 1992, one in a list of songs I first heard at John and Brittany Neff’s house that were instant epiphanies to my mind’s ear (along with Black Sun by Dead Can Dance). Tone paintings of stunning breadth and scope, male singers howling, xylophones and tympani and pulsating strings … primal, feral, in extremis, desperate to stave off the end of the world.
Who else was making art and performance around you in San Francisco at that time?
Tony Vaguely, The Sick and Twisted Players, homed at 21 Bernice. Check him out in the FB group, he was the major underground queer theatre producer/director of that time – we never connected during those years because we were both so busy all the time writing our fool asses off.
Omewenne Grimstone – Nico: My Empty Pages at 21 Bernice, directed I think by Tom Marzella (a joint project with Vaguely’s group) was one of the finest, most fully-realized, raw, affecting, stunning and unforgettable theatre pieces I have ever seen in my entire life; she is still recording, based in England.
Michael Kerkes (Michael Blue) and Lewis Walden IV – DJ’s and creative talents behind Club Uranus, the spiritual and artistic home of the Gay 90s in SF.
Lewis is the co-founder of the Gay 90s FB group. Michael has been a close friend for 30 years who inspired several Animal lyrics and contributed art to my Christmas shows; he’s a horticulturist now who owns Crazy Hill Botanicals in Washington state with his husband Elton Busby.
I’d like you to talk to Michael and I’ll ask him for clearance for contact. He knows me well, more intimately than most, and was part of my extreme core group in those days with the late Wolf Harvath and Noni Heath. Wolf was my entry to this crowd in 1991, a brother and soulmate who we lost to AIDS in 1994.
Leigh Crow – “Elvis Herselvis”
Justin Vivian Bond – “Kiki and Herb” (Justin [they/them] is a legit Broadway star and an Animal fan at a distance – they’re the one who ‘made it big’.)
Jerome Caja – Scenester, performer, artist whose work almost made Whitney Biennial, beloved legend.
Ggreg Taylor – club promoter, activist, arts professional, very much the face of the community, now living the low key life in Washington state.
Waiyde Palmer – scenester and historian, very active today, FB group stalwart.
Jack Curtis Dubowsky – composer, conductor, brilliant in a million ways: met him through Tom Marzella at 21 Bernice when he did his musical adaptation of The Silver Whistle, also played for his Duran Duran orchestra gig at The Stud/Trannyshack in 1997; composed music for the Tom Marzella-directed production of a play based on Milos Forman’s autobiography (1997); now has an ensemble in LA I think, also worked for Pixar (engineer?)
In the interests of time, I won’t put hyperlinks here, but all these folks (except Wolf and Noni) are present or referenced in the FB group.
Non-gay/general club – I ran an open mic night at the Albion Club in the Mission District called “Circle Arts” – “anything on stage for 5 minutes or less” – that started with 11 people and grew to over 80 every Tuesday night, and that’s where I became ‘Animal’ one Tuesday night in February 1988 while I was living on the Zen writer/philosopher and radio host Alan Watts’ converted ferryboat Vallejo in Sausalito, just over the Golden Gate Bridge (wild Beat energy there, oh the stories!) I’d been “Joe Kelly Smith” (my legit stage/radio name) but I went on stage that night freshly shaven and said, “Hi folks, from now on my name is Animal, because that’s just the kind of guy I am!” and they said Hey Animal and that was that.
The Albion is where I had the chance and worked up the courage to perform my first writing since I’d dropped out of Trinity Rep Conservatory in 1986 where the curriculum was interdisciplinary acting, directing, and “playwrighting” (the spelling is affectatious but I stick with it). My writing caught the attention of the conservatory director and several of my works were produced at school, so when I decided to ditch the legit stage and go performance art, that was part of what gave me the idea that I might be good at it.
My wild and hypermasculine, graphic, drug-reference-filled iconoclastic rude nasty shit seemed to catch on well, and the radio stuff I was writing about the rhythms of Morse code and 50,000 watt-clear-channel signals caught the industrial science-y vibe of the late 80s, “Channel Z”-style angular imagery, ‘nature and art united with science’ inchoate thing I was beginning to discern from the fog of indeterminate vision and the primordial ooze of just what the fuck it was that I was supposed to be talking and playing and singing about.
The Animal Ensemble was formed in large part from the Albion people and the work I did there, along with folks from the Gay 90s crowd and people I knew from some film work I’d done and musicians involved with the Lutheran church where I was a member. Notable names:
Jessie Turner (original ensemble member, muse, classical soprano, guitar/singer/songwriter, another one to talk to about Animal who knew me deeply, I wrote beautiful songs for her.)
Ira Marlowe – singer/songwriter, playwright, compatriot in activism, still has a gig today in Berkeley.
Mario DeSio – singer/songwriter, met on the steps of Sproul Hall at University of California in Berkeley in 1986, he and a friend were playing guitar, I held up my flute, they said yes, I jumped in, and we played together for a decade at clubs and gigs, I think he’s still out there too.
OK, Chris, that’s all the folks I can think of for the moment – I’m sure as you talk with people and as I finish up 1997 more names will manifest.
Was there a sort of scene, and did you feel part of it in some way, or out of it?
Yes, there was a scene, and I felt … attached to it, and parallel to it, but I never, ever, ever felt part of it.
I was older than almost everyone around, and my gig was different – very activist, “out there”, controversial, designed to agitate as well as entertain, and of course the Christian-content thing put off a lot of the crowd.
The age difference especially was isolating. I didn’t drink a lot, certainly not a dancer or club kid, and my intensity wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. “You like it fast and hard,” a rave keyboard studio kid told me once about my creative process, and he was right. I’d been pro since 1981 and worked at a very high level of musicianship while asking the same of my collaborators (all of whom were at least as good or better than I).
My leather mentor, Joseph W. Bean, the first director of the Leather Archives & Museum, was a huge supporter of my work. In 1995, after my workshop “Beowulf Nixon”, he had me to his home, poured himself a Scotch as I sat on the floor at his feet, and he said to me, “You are a creative genius. No one else does what you do; no one else can even attempt to do what you do.”
But I never got noticed or accepted by this crowd really… to some extent yeah, but a lot of that appreciation came later and is coming today in retrospect. I was sui generis to them, a guy who’d been in the Army, worked all over America, traveled the world, done so much, seen so much, had such big ideas, who and what the fuck is he doing here, ok he’s fun to party with and fuck sometimes but jesus christ!
So there you have it. I did my stuff, wondered why I didn’t get to hang out more, loved my core crowd, turned out a show every six months for six and a half years, and did my work relentlessly, because you know, I was on fire.