04 Feb The Goof
Time passes. We get older. Every second, every heartbeat, we’re all getting there, one way or the other. Love, possessions, status, health, wealth—all of it comes and goes in a constant state of flux. The most precious thing that we possess—if we can be said to truly possess it—is time, a commodity of which there is a finite supply. None of us can know how much of it we have and there is no way to obtain any more of it.
I once had a dream. This was many years ago, but it is one of a very small number of dreams that I’ve ever had which I both recalled when I woke and which has remained with me ever since. In my dream I was attending a lecture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The lecture was by the late Australian writer and critic Robert Hughes. After the lecture I waited for Hughes to emerge from the hall. He had been in a near fatal automobile wreck and was walking with a severe limp, aided by a cane. Hughes and I walked over to a food vendor’s cart outside of the lecture hall and Hughes purchased some crackers spread with cat food (this was a dream, remember). I had some questions that I wanted to ask regarding the lecture.
My questions concerned art and time. Once the painting is painted, the symphony is written, the book is published, its author has, in a sense, transcended time. As long as the painting is not destroyed, the symphony lost, the book forgotten or banned, the art lives on—perhaps for a relatively brief number of years or decades, but perhaps for centuries. Possibly forever.
My question for Hughes was this: ‘If time is beauty, what is death?’ The meaning of the question was that if transcendence is the essence of great art—specifically, transcendence of time—how does the individual transcend time? The answer that I eventually came up with is that death is the transcendence of time—the surrender to the final beauty of the eternal.
Regardless of the answer to my dream question, death is still loss and that loss can hurt. Terribly. This week I lost one of my oldest and closest friends. Steve LaRue was an artist and throughout his life he strove to create. Words, images, sounds—he worked in a wide range of media and despite the impediments that life put in his path his output was prodigious.
I first saw Steve perform with his group the Philisteens in Albuquerque in early 1980. Steve left the group shortly thereafter and came to work at the Budget Tapes & Records store on Central Avenue where I was employed, across the street from the UNM campus. I remember watching him as he came striding up the sidewalk one chilly fall day, dressed in what he called his ‘Pat Nixon coat’—a 1950’s vintage full length woman’s cloth coat in bright red, accessorized with a period appropriate brooch. He knew how to make an entrance.
From the beginning it was obvious that Steve was high-strung. The reason he had left the band was that he found out that one of his bandmates had been conducting an affair with his wife. The Philisteens were considered to be the best of the local musical talent (admittedly, fairly slim pickings) and it was thought that they were destined for the big time. Quite understandably, the loss of both marriage and band had Steve on edge and the possibility of harm, to himself and/or others, seemed distinctly plausible. We started spending time together away from the record store and there were some dark nights of the soul that we found our way through at Steve’s small house on a commercial strip southeast of the university neighborhood. We ended up on the roof late one long, crazed night with a couple of girls, striking heroic poses and loudly proclaiming ‘I AM SPARTACUS!!!’ to the passing traffic until a cop pulled over to investigate. He thought it was amusing and left us to carry on.
Eventually, music pulled Steve through the darkness. Jungle Red—Steve’s ongoing collaboration with the late, great Craig Ellis—drew myself and others of our friends in as guest musicians. Steve offered homemade Jungle Red cassettes for sale at the Budget store on Central, swearing to impressionable young acolytes that they were a secretive ensemble who, following the example of the Residents, kept their identities concealed but to a select few. In the studio and in the clubs there was John Q. Public, Lash LaRue, Buck Preston & the Doorknobs, G.I.D. (Gastro-Intestinal Disorder) and other assorted, unnamed recording projects. Steve was an exceptionally gifted guitarist, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. He had real talent: Everyone knew this. I felt privileged to have been accepted into his musical world and that feeling never left me. Steve’s work was idiosyncratic but he had high standards and a compliment from him genuinely meant something.
After his romantic rival left the Philisteens, Steve rejoined the group and then began our time on the road, criss-crossing the heartland in a Partridge Family-esque retired school bus. We played arenas, big clubs, small juke joints, college gigs on quadrangles and student union halls—sometimes to enthusiastic crowds, other times to tiny gatherings of incredulous hicks, baffled by the band’s aggressive yet accomplished music and their ‘80s androgynous look. We lived on next to nothing, slept on the bus in KOA campgrounds, rejoiced when we had a hot meal, drove each other nuts, and lived the life of young men touring in a rock and roll band.
Unable to nail down that one big break, the Philisteens imploded in California a couple of years later. Steve returned to New Mexico and we picked up where we left off. We put together another performing band that never made it out of the garage followed by more fruitful recording ensembles—Gyzym, Sally Forth, Los Hermanos de Gein, and TWGWRHPNK (Two White Guys With Really Huge Penises, No Kidding). We would record on my TASCAM Portastudio and, later, on more advanced and flexible digital units. We would mix down the songs onto cassette and play them ad nauseum in our homes and cars. A few favored friends would receive copies. This was all pre-internet, so that was it. And it was enough.
Two of our favorite anecdotes regarding our music projects: Once, at Steve’s apartment near Old Town, we were playing some of our recent work on the stereo with the front door open. Steve’s neighbor from across the small passageway between the apartments leaned her head in the door and requested that we please turn down the ‘so-called music.’ We loved that. On another occasion we had popped one of our cassettes into the boombox at a backyard party near the university and were standing there admiring our efforts. A friend of mine walked up and stood chatting with us for a moment before remarking, unwittingly, ‘This is a pretty good party, but that music has GOT to go!’ Score another one for the team.
We put a lot of effort into what we did and if other people hated it we wore it as a badge of honor. It was our art and as long as we satisfied ourselves it made not one bit of difference what anybody else thought. We never made a dime off of any of it and never tried to.
When Steve was on an even keel and we were feeling our muse the recording sessions were amazingly fun and productive. When we were in the zone hours would go by and they would seem like minutes. Steve would play and I’d be the engineer, then I would play and Steve would be the engineer. We’d stop for Steve to smoke or to take a leak. We’d look up and it would be getting dark outside—we would have recorded 90 seconds of music. Often we butted heads on final mixes and would do our own separate versions, both convinced that they were the best. One of our most successful collaborations was the ‘Silence, Cunning, Exile’ series based on photographs by Diane Arbus. Those seven pieces appear on the Music page of this site. We intended to do more but never got around to it.
As time went by, Steve’s increasingly fragile psychological state began to interfere with his ability to deal with day to day life. It eventually became impossible for him to hold down a regular job and he applied for and received a disability from the state. The intake of drink and drugs was alarming at times and Steve’s weight went through wild fluctuations. His family life began to suffer and by the time that Steve retreated to his own apartment his connection with the outside world had begun to diminish down to a stalwart group of patient and thick-skinned friends and whatever came through the intrawebs to his computer. Steve didn’t make it easy and at times it seemed that he was purposely attempting to jettison everybody from his life, to complete his isolation from a society that he felt himself increasingly at odds with. Paranoia and self-loathing competed with his estimation of his worth as an artist and the impulse to connect with people through his work. 40-plus years of chain smoking and almost complete physical inactivity began to take their toll on Steve’s health. He was hospitalized multiple times as he began to develop pulmonary embolisms.
Despite it all, Steve kept working. In his last years he rarely—and I mean that very literally—rarely moved from the chair in front of his array of computers and terabyte drives. He began to produce short video projects culled from old public domain movies that he found online and collaged with abstract computer-generated textures. His music, some of which was produced to accompany the videos, was created from unorthodox and obscure sources: Samples of the squeaking of a chair or tequila bottles clanked together, layered dozens of times and run through digital effects—cavernous reverbs and echoes that produced disconcerting expanses of hollow ambient sound. Listening to them over and over and over again in his headphones, Steve began to hear voices in the caverns—voices discernible to no one but himself.
Steve’s loss of his apartment and his car last fall proved to be catastrophic. Brutally, and most likely illegally, ejected from the very small world he had created for himself, Steve was ill-equipped to deal with the cruel hand he had been dealt. The 2016 election and the ascendancy of the Orange Goblin and his cabal weighed heavily upon him as well. To her eternal credit, Steve’s cousin Anita rescued him from incipient homelessness and took him to Tucson.
I cannot say that I was surprised when I heard of Steve’s passing. Between one thing and another, it’s remarkable that he lasted as long as he did. Steve LaRue was my brother, my collaborator, my touring mate, for a period my roommate, and one of the most significant people in my life from the moment he came marching defiantly into it in all his Pat Nixon glory back in 1980. I never met anyone quite like him and I know that I never will again. Even though our face-to-face contact had been limited in recent years, the world feels distinctly depopulated now that he’s not in it. Even a shut-in can leave a very large empty space, if he’s Steve LaRue.
In my heart I truly do believe that Steve has finally attained the beauty he strove ceaselessly for in life. I truly do believe that he has transcended time and that eternity is now his. His immortal soul will live on in his work and I am left to continue my consideration of the question: If time is beauty, what is death?
