What More Could a Country Boy Want: A Portrait in Echoes
Lucy Schiller
As they are everywhere, the customs in Oskaloosa were strange. Men had, for some reason and for years, sprayed bullets into the side of the Spencer building, which held five hundred kegs of explosive powder. It was a miracle, they said later, that nothing worse had yet happened.
Three boys, one the mayor’s son, just like Arthur would be, sent bullets across the building with a gun the mayor had won in a raffle. There was a suspension of time, then. The boom was so loud it registered at first as nothing. And then the townspeople realized that all of the glass in the town had shattered and flown: across the street, into flesh, into wood, into brick. A boulder in the foundation of the powder building had rocketed through a living room. Doors were forced open. All of the light woodwork of the town was destroyed: those little curlicued flowers, embellishments made by fanciful hands interested in beauty. The buildings danced for a few minutes as if dangled in the lap of an earthquake. Cattle fell down bleeding and stunned in their fields. The boys lay dead—violently, obviously, gratuitously dead—down the hill and in the creek, beyond a wire fence through which they had been blown. Tenderly, they were gathered up like drooping bluebells.
What queer things people will do, the town’s longtime columnist would write. For years, Oskaloosans wore small glittering jewels in necklaces and bracelets and watch chains: bits of the calamity’s blown-out glass. You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa, wrote Gertrude Stein, even though she’d never been.
I sleep over in the house in Oskaloosa where Arthur Russell grew up and where his mother Emily still lives, alone. Her remaining daughter Kate is here visiting, staying just down the hall. Two of Emily’s three children are gone now—arthur died in 1992 of HIV/AIDS, and Julie last year of a long illness. What I learn this night are little things. The pond outside has been mysteriously cleared of duckweed, for the first time in living memory, and the man said he didn’t use anything toxic. A feral cat is wandering the neighborhood. There are letters and emails, covers of Arthur’s songs, new articles, new fans.
Arthur Russell is famous now, outside of Oskaloosa. The son who spent his life tinkering with music his family couldn’t quite comprehend (his father: just give me something to tap my foot to, Charley) has been caught up to, as they like to say. He worked ahead of his time, they say, writing strange songs that waved between folk and disco, electronic and raga. Allen Ginsberg, his friend, and one of the last people to visit him in the hospital in New York where he died, called it “Buddhist bubblegum pop.” He’s sampled by Kanye West now. People come out of the woodwork, now. Fans send Arthur’s family letters saying variations on the same thing: I can feel him in his music, and he is speaking to me. Now.
What Arthur was doing was evoking the feeling of what it is like to come from a place composed half of pain and half of love. The feeling of aching while dancing. Of standing in a thick field of corn and looking north and west and east and south and seeing only corn, and feeling, oddly, like you’re on some sort of precipice, like you have to jump and like you also want to sink back into the stalks, be swallowed up. The house is mostly quiet at night. Fall is close in, everything a silken surface over something darker and deeper. All night, down the hall, Emily keeps the television on. I can hear the voices, the bombast, infiltrating, occasionally, my dreams. Outside the living room window is Russell’s Pond, rid of duckweed, about to become a lick of ice. Decades ago, Arthur’s dad erected a pole from which the family flew a red or green square. Green and the Russell family blasted “The Skater’s Waltz” out from their kitchen and waited for the town to come, thirty people at a time, all gliding along. One girl was a stick-straight skater, a pro, hands behind her back, cheeks blooming. Legs moving as if on their own accord.
And where was Arthur, I ask, staring out of the window at the glimmers in the dusk. A long pause, then his sister says, In his own world.
Arthur, who his family calls Charley, wrote as an eleven-year-old, on a small scrap of paper:
I am going to have scientific apparatus. I am going to have a secret stairway. In the binding of “A Dog named Chips” I inclose my foremost intentions. Charley Russell, 1962
He would stand on the edge of the dance floor in New York and wait, watching for the moment in the music when the bodies began to transcend their place, their time.
He would sit on the edge of the Hudson River at strange hours of night and stare out at glinting, winking New Jersey, listening to the shapes of the wind, in the way that John Mcphee, in reverse and a few years earlier, stood in the middle of the Pine Barrens and stared back at the Empire State Building. Mcphee recorded the “silence of a bewildering green country.” Arthur, staring back, recorded the sound of the water and the barges.
He walked, it is remembered, with his headphones on—the way we all do, now—but out of a need for study, not distraction. Out of a need to deepen ordinary life, not take himself, as we do with our little screens, exhausted and overcome, out of it.
On World of Echo, the only album he released by himself, solo, during his forty-year lifetime, he enters the noises of the world. He retracts; he bounces and echoes. He sounds infinite.
His sister Kate: He absorbed the space around him. They’re love songs. Could it be that when we hear his music, what we really hear is deeper, and what is deeper is Iowa?
“What more could a country boy want,” sings Arthur, about a letter from out of town.
“In Iowa, in the tall grass, there’s a couple,” and then he barks his sister’s name: “KATE. I’ve been touched by the Lord. I don’t need you anymore.”
“I close my eyes and listen to hear the corn come out.”
He is coming back to Oskaloosa. It is his drone, the note like a spine around which the muscle of music curls. Arthur was, as a young man, enamored of the idea of creating an endless song, one you could drop the needle on at any moment, and it wouldn’t sound the same, exactly, but it would make sense.
As such, you could live in New York and still be living in Iowa. Or you could be living in Iowa while knowing you were also living elsewhere. This is why you can hear seemingly opposing things in Arthur’s work: seas of corn and seas of water, a disco beat and I ride an old paint, tenderness and the scraping lash of ELI, Arthur’s voice and something else entirely—the cello—which sounds just like him and then doesn’t any
more. He sang of stalks of corn on the dance floor, and he could hear water in the corn, and everything was in fact connected. What he was trying to do was make those connections closer, and bounce them off one another like a voice shuddering down a canyon.
Not everyone wants to listen to it. “We just didn’t understand him,” say his family members, though I think, in some very deep ways, they did understand him, they just didn’t know how to keep listening the way he required: out into eternity. “He has to stop playing me these things,” Kate’s son complained to her once, because Arthur was obsessed with how a child might hear his music and would dog him. Once, Arthur brought on a family road trip to Gull Lake, in Minnesota, a tape he had stacked with slight variations of the same song and played it, asking everyone to say which version was best, and why, and listen to this one.
Now, on her ipad, Emily queues up “That’s Us/wild Combination,” on which Arthur’s voice burbles to a watery, shaky disco beat about a family road trip to Gull Lake (“Leaving at four in the morning/better mileage”). She laughs, but with sadness. “As hard as I can be,” sings Arthur, with knowingness, and maybe even with joy, and certainly with his slanting Iowa accent, “it’s never too hard.” Increasingly, it’s not hard to see the music Arthur left behind as one long piece, one long echo of a boy who left a long time ago, on a secret stairway. Drop the needle down. Click the cursor. Feel him there in a way he never was.
Emily’s house is full. It’s full with evidence of her family, of which she and only one of her three children remain. Jellyfish woven by one daughter float in the air, and a few photographs of Arthur dot the living room. The daughters, too. Then there is the wood: of a middling color, and retrieved from across the world, from when she and Chuck used to sail. Maps and old liquor receipts from a sunny trip to Grenada wallpaper the hallway. This is not a house of Iowa, exactly. Iowans are worldly people, says an old guide to the state. In fact, this house is on the moneyed side of town, and a Frank Lloyd Wright sits around the corner, as well as the house Emily grew up in. The Russells’ status in Oskaloosa is something I return to repeatedly—chuck was mayor, Emily was on city council, they were both from wealthy families, they listened to jazz; they were, as Tom Petty’s drummer says, progressive for the time. It was in this home, at age thirty, that Emily began to practice cello. Badly, she says. Charley stood at the edge of the room, a child, wavering, listening.
He would use Emily’s cello for all of his life—oskaloosa, San Francisco, New York. The family had flown to Illinois to get it, in Chuck’s tiny plane that he called Old Jedidiah. Imagine that, a whole family suspended over patchworked farmland, clinging to their prize. It was a very nice instrument. After Arthur accidentally stepped on it while getting out of a taxi in New York, the repairman stole it. Arthur was already gone by the time the family realized the cello was missing. Somewhere, it probably still exists.
Once, before he left, Emily and Charley spent a few days firing bricks themselves with which to form the walkway up to the door. Emily had the idea to draw them up as fish. Charley was obsessed with fish at the time— he kept aquariums, a lifelong hobby. It was an endless process. Emily and her boy scratched in the mouths, the fins, the tails, one after the other. She slipped them in the oven, wiped the sweat. Mother and son laid the fishbricks. They built, in this way, an antidote to loneliness, a school of small swimmers slipping toward the door, showing outsiders the way in.
As a musician, and as a child, Arthur dove into self-isolation in favor of intensity. He slid new layers onto old songs, splicing tape, rerecording, never finishing, because finishing wasn’t something he found particularly interesting. When things ended, he returned to them. This was why the world was hard, because it asks for edges and products, final decisions and fully formed people. Small talk was impossible. At Veselka, he whispered to Tom over soft potato dumplings about the waitress who had tried to engage him in banter: She hates me. I open an old photo album of Arthur and realize that behind one shot of him I have seen a million times sit five other snapshots. In each he is wearing a different shirt, or none at all, and a different expression. On a visit to Oskaloosa, he asked his dad to take these photos, out in a cornfield lost to time, a shifting, thrumming expanse of multiplicities.
Tom Petty’s drummer coughs over the phone as he describes what it was like to grow up in Oskaloosa, what it was like to be Arthur’s friend. This was nearly sixty years ago—entire lifetimes have passed, including Arthur’s. They were the weirdos, he says, the ones who the other boys beat up and bruised around. They’d gather, these outcasts, in Oskaloosa’s basements. They looked around for dope and acid. Arthur’s family lived on the right side of the tracks, Phil’s lived on the wrong. He listened to jazz for the first time at Arthur’s house. Charley could piss you off, says Phil, and even though Charley was a few years younger, and really weird, they hung out a lot. They were trying, always, to get the fuck out.
On a winter night, Phil told his mom he was going to Charley’s, and Charley told Emily he was going to Phil’s, and then they were off to Chicago in someone’s car, slipping down the highway, taking huge excited gulps of the frigid Illinois air. On Wells Street, they found parking and walked into the payment shack, and there was Muddy Waters unfolding bills from his wallet. They followed him inside the tiny little club and Muddy got on stage with his band. Phil laughs. He’s been across the world. He knows what it’s like to play from fatigue but be reignited by the music. They were playing outta that joint four, five nights a week, says Phil; they were phoning it in, but no, it was great. It was great. Where was Arthur, I ask. No real answer. As always, people remember the experiences they had around him rather than Arthur himself. Because, more often than not, he was standing slightly off to the side, watching and listening.
Not long after this performance, Muddy Waters released a song called “Country Boy.” Trilling slide guitar, velvet harmonica, and an ending couplet delivered: “You know I’m a country boy / I just love to stay out every night.”