The Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s 81^st Academy Award ceremony were all strong and worthy contenders with Man on Wire, the riveting account of Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire act between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974, winning the statuette. But no less riveting was Matt Wolf’s WILD COMBINATION: A Portrait of Arthur Russell,  an intimate and moving look at an influential figure in New York City’s music scene in the ’70s and ’80s who is finally beginning to acquire the reputation of a musical visionary more than 17 years after his heyday. Wolf’s film wasn’t even nominated by the Academy and didn’t have a broad theatrical release either but it deserved a place alongside Trouble the Water, Encounters at the End of the World, and the other documentary nominees this year that are presented as the best of the breed.      

I had never heard of Arthur Russell until last year when I was sampling some music on the internet and downloaded two songs – “A Little Lost”  and “Treehouse”-  based on a critic’s choice column in the New York Times. I was immediately struck by the music – an electric cello and a solo singer but what a voice!…encased in an echo chamber and rendered with a crazy kind of urgency.  It was a plaintive yet light and almost ethereal voice that flowed like a direct communique from the singer’s soul coupled with a unique and unpredictable phrasing. Assuming Russell was some new discovery on the New York City music scene, I did a Google search and quickly discovered that Russell had died of AIDS in 1992 which floored me. “A Little Lost,” in fact, was released posthumously in 1993 on the album “Another Thought” which was issued on Philip Glass’s Point Blank label yet it sounded fresh and contemporary in the way any new, extraordinary sound does the first time you hear it. I found myself becoming addicted to his music and in the process of discovering it was introduced to a new take on various musical genres from avant-garde experimentation to country-folk to disco to electronica, all of which he touched on, creating something new, during his brief but amazingly versatile career. “Get Around to It,” “This is How We Walk on the Moon,” “You Can Make Me Feel Bad,” “Is It All Over My Face?,” “That’s Us/Wild Combination” – all of them and more are still in heavy rotation on the iPod.  

And what sort of person created this unusual, compelling music? Just your average gay farmboy from Oskaloosa, Iowa who ran away from home at age 18 and lived in a Buddist commune in San Francisco which is where he became an accomplished cello player after studying at both the Ali Akbar College of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.   

Actually there was nothing average about Russell and WILD COMBINATION is refreshing in that it doesn’t deify the man but presents him as he was – complex, talented, possibly brilliant , a workaholic, and sometimes frustrating and difficult to deal with on a professional level.  Of course, you’ll already be rooting for Russell as the underdog most likely to succeed after witnessing high school-era photographs of him with his face erupting in a worst-case acne scenario. High school was bad enough for most of us but going through the indignity of having your face and body horribly scarred by an adolescent skin condition would put a dent in anyone’s self esteem. It’s no wonder that Arthur retreated into himself, preferring to spend most of his time alone. It’s that inward reflection that would later be projected back through his music in an almost transcendent way.    

Through found footage, performance clips and interviews with his family and friends, Arthur’s story becomes increasingly fascinating after he arrives in San Francisco and ends up working with Allen Ginsberg, accompanying him on cello while Ginsberg read or sang his own poems. Matt Wolf’s documentary zips through the San Francisco years quickly and a sense of mystery clings to this period in Russell’s life due to a lack of details but there are hints here and there of his developing experimentation with music such as live performances with the Angels of Light, an off shoot of the Cockettes, at the Psychedelic Venus Church in Berkeley. You can barely see Arthur in the below photo but that’s him with his cello on the far left.     

WILD COMBINATION really begins to hum when Arthur arrives in New York City in 1973 and within a year has landed the position of director of The Kitchen, an arts collective founded in 1971 that was dedicated to presenting new video, music, dance, performance, film and literature. Over the next two decades, Arthur crosses paths and collaborates with almost every major figure in the NYC arts scene – David Byrne (they were in a band together called The Flying Hearts and made an album recorded by John Hammond), Ernie Brooks of The Modern Lovers,  John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Philip Grass, DJ Larry Levan of the legendary Paradise Garage, French DJ Francois Kevorkian (considered one of the forefathers of “house music”), avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson (their one-time collaboration on a version of “Medea” ended disastrously with Russell being barred from the theatre and sneaking in to try and view it from the stage rafters), Jah Wobble (bass player for Public Limited Ltd), Bootsy Collins and many others. It’s as if Arthur is the real role model for Woody Allen’s Zelig – always at the right place at the right time in New York’s underground culture.    

All of this must have been more than baffling for his conservative Iowa parents who probably never understood their son but are obviously proud and protective of his legacy; their memories of Arthur offer some of the more poignant moments in the doc. The one person, though, who probably perceived Arthur’s unique gifts from the beginning was his longtime companion Tom Lee, who offers a candid, clear-eyed account of their life together – one in which Lee would go to a daily job to pay the bills while Arthur would work on his music all day. It’s like a gender switch on that legendary couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Lee has proven to be a much valued torchbearer of the Russell legend, saving and preserving all of Arthur’s recordings which includes hundred of hours of tape and cassettes, some of which have been recently released due to the growing Russell cult. In the liner notes to the recent compilation “Love is Overtaking Me,” Lee writes “The lyrics of Arthur’s songs often express his memories and observations combined with thoughts of love and hope. He accomplishes that with both tenderness and humor. His notebooks are filled with such phrases and ideas gleaned from his walks around NYC, bits of conversations overheard at a restaurant, kids playing on the street, catchphrases from advertisements, and dialogue from news and television programs. As they developed into songs I was always listening for those heartfelt thoughts of his. Ultimately he was trying to express just that in one of his last songs,”Love Comes Back.” He could sit for hours at the keyboard trying out different vocal combinations, gently singing…”    

 In David Toop’s landmark survey of ambient music, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sounds and Imaginary Worlds, the author (who appears in WILD COMBINATION) wrote that Arthur “used sound relationships rather than electronic effects to create wonderfully strange music” and his quote from the musician reveals why the disco music Russell created was so unlike anything else heard on club dance floors. “…if you try to do something different in dance music, you just get branded as an eccentric. Maybe I am an eccentric, I don’t know, but it’s basically a very simple idea. I like music with no drums, too. Partly, I guess, from listening to drums so much. When you hear something with no drums it seems very exciting. I always thought that music with no drums is successive to music with drums. New music with no drums is like this future where they don’t have drums any more. In outer space, you can’t take your drums – you take your mind.”   

Since Arthur Russell’s death in 1992, a passing that the media and music industry barely noticed at the time, his legend has grown in leaps and bounds due to the wealth of great writings about his work. In Sasha Frere-Jones’ memorable 2004 essay “Let’s Go Swimming” [the title of a Russell song] for The New Yorker, he wrote “Russell’s work is stranded between lands real and imagined: the street and the cornfield; the soft bohemian New York and the hard Studio 54 New York; the cheery bold strokes of pop and the liberating possibilities of abstract art. Arthur Russell didn’t dissolve these borders so much as wander past them, humming his own song.”

Andy Battaglia’s essay for Slate in March of 2004 was titled “Disco Fever: Arthur Russell was famous in his day; what happened?” One of the more telling paragraphs read, “Russell made disco strange but also profoundly moving. The different elements of his tracks always sound like they’re meeting for the first time, maybe without makeup and sometimes in a mood. They interact, circle around, size each other up. That habit is uncommon to the well-connected funk and soul components of aboveground disco, but it’s just as unusual in the gawky underground stuff. What makes it all go down swimmingly is the easy agitation of Russell’s musical mind. He was unusual for making dance music sound remarkably casual and organic, but he was more unusual for the way he made its working parts – bass lines and drum beats – sound so intensely personal.”

And although this PR-flavored plug from Rolling Stone might be somewhat misleading, it is a just analogy – “If Nick Drake had lived long enough to make records with New Order, they might have sounded something like this.”   

Go Bang! - Arthur Russell Dance Club Hit

According to a press release, Tim Lawrence, an author and professor at the University of East London, will be publishing a comprehensive biography of Russell entitled Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1972-92 for Duke University Press this year. And I suspect that a film biography is just around the corner as well as several more compilations of previously unreleased songs. But in the meantime, if any of this article has peaked your interest, then WILD COMBINATION is the best way to experience this soon-to-be-well-known composer from the 20^th century who is still with us in sound, if not body.   

http://www.arthurrussellmovie.com/ Official movie web site

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/08/040308crmu_music

http://www.jahsonic.com/ArthurRussell.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2096948/

http://www.myspace.com/anotherthought

http://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/6034-resonant-frequency-25/

http://www.audikarecords.com/russell_8.html