LONNIE HOLLEY
Alabama’s 21st century sage survived kidnapping, modern slavery and more to make art out of trash and poetic space gospel with his friend Matthew E White.
LONNIE HOLLEY IS LAUGHING AT my phone. We’ve been talking about his new album, a five-track collaboration with Matthew E White (below) titled Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, a mix of jittering On The Corner electric jazz and the 70-year-old Alabama-born artist’s improvisatory Afro-futurist lamentations and mournful space gospel, centred on the loss of the real in the digital age.
“Now we don’t have that many mirrors in our homes,” Holley says, through the Zoom screen from his Pulp Arts studio space in Gainesville, Florida. “[Instead] we depend on Computer Technology Management which I call ‘Cold Titty Mama’, to give us that reflection of ourselves.”
MOJO holds up our own cracked iPhone to the Zoom screen.
“The Broken Mirror!” replies Holley, with a chuckle, before explaining where he and White are headed on this new album. “Way out into the future,” he says, “but I’m also returning to let everybody know we’re not caring enough for the planet, which I call the Mothership. We’ve got to treat her like paradise, even though we may be living in the ghetto.” This is how Holley does an interview, taking MOJO’s simple enquiries and stretching them into extended riffs of high, tangled lyricism – like John Coltrane’s deep explorations of light Broadway standards. It’s not dissimilar to how he conjures up his own songs, these exquisite tapestries of improvised ideas drawn from his dark past, our collective deranged present and a thousand possible futures. We’re talking at the end of 2020, what Holley rightly describes as “a rough time on Earth for a lot of humans”. And while the apocalyptic percolating funk of Broken Mirror… perfectly encapsulates a year of Covid and Trump insanity the album was finished before the pandemic even began. Holley was doing what he always does: tracking what he calls “our future footsteps” in the detritus we create.
“I was in New York at 9/11 for a book launch and I went to Ground Zero as close as I could, inspecting the r un-off of soot, dust, and ash that had fell,” he recalls. “If we take that as a picture, we’re in one of the meanest
atmospheres that has ever been on the planet. And that run-off, I have been there from the start, down in the creeks and ditches, touching what others would refuse to touch. I was doing that at five years old. I was crawling around in that as a baby.”
UNDERSTANDABLY, HOLLEY’S CHILDHOOD HAS tended to dominate writings on the artist. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, the seventh of 27 children, when Holley was one and a half he was snatched from his mother by a burlesque dancer who took him on the road, a life of sideshows and fairgrounds. Then, when he was four, he was brought back to Alabama and handed to the keepers of a whiskey house – traded, Holley has said, for a pint of liquor. The establishment stood next to a drive-in theatre that young Lonnie accessed through a sewer pipe.
“That’s part of my childhood,” says Holley, in his distinctive plaintive rasp. “I snuck into the sewer pipe. I’d crawl through the muck and dirt. I’d picked up other people’s trash at the drive-in but I also picked up concepts. I didn’t pay my way like everybody else. I read books found in alleys or ditches, I learnt songs on the whiskey house jukebox. I built myself a little bitty place up on top of the house to watch the movies, hooked up the speakers from the drivein with a telephone line through the sewer pipe. It was an intense education I think we all have to go through. Look at the Bible. Being a carpenter, down by the sea, Jesus probably walked along the seashore, picking up materials for study. John the Baptist, in the wilderness, studied healing herbs and plants. Again, that’s hardship. But it’s an offering.”
If Holley makes his life sound instructional, it’s an education few would wish for. After running away from the whiskey house, he was hit by a car, and dragged for two and a half blocks. “That put me in a coma for three months,” he says. “My brain stopped functioning.”
At nine, Holley hopped a train to New Orleans but was soon back in Alabama where he was incarcerated in infamous child labour camp the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, where he was physically and mentally abused, forced to pick cotton and clear trash from the hard shoulders of Alabama highways. As a way of dealing with the trauma, Holley now refers to his past as “Lonnie’s Encyclopaedia… a group of information gathered at a young age.”
“I’M NO MORE THAN THE STUFF OTHER PEOPLE LEAVE BEHIND, STUFF THEY DIDN’T GET A CHANCE TO USE.” Lonnie Holley
Miraculously, he was rescued from there by his paternal grandmother, and reunited with his extended family in Birmingham, Alabama. His grandmother dug graves while the family scavenged items at the local dump to sell at flea markets. It was from these harsh worlds of mortality and poverty that Holley’s art was born.
In 1979, following the deaths of his niece and nephew in a house fire, Lonnie carved their gravestones out of discarded sandstone from the local steelworks. Gradually, he began to work on sculptures hewn from the garbage that had surrounded him all his life: junkyard sculptures built from wooden ladders, burnt tyres, rusted oil drums, broken computers, a half-melted television set from the fateful fire. These Anthropocene fairground skeletons for a postapocalyptic America soon caught the attention of William Arnett, the late Atlanta-based collector of vernacular African-American art. Arnett said of Holley, “If he’d been white, and living in the East Village 30 years ago, he’d be famous now.”
Holley always sang while he created his art, music remembered from his patchwork past: the Hollywood soundtracks of the drivein theatre; the Motown hits of the fairground; the gospel music and work songs beloved of his grandparents. However, it wasn’t until he found a beat-up Casio keyboard in a Goodwill store that he started recording the songs on tape.
“I cry about how long it took me to get into the music world,” says Holley. “My grandparents’ musical offerings to us were moaning, singing every day as they did their daily work, or singing in church. I’m no more than the stuff other people leave behind, stuff they didn’t get a chance to use. We’ll never all get an opportunity to be on Broadway, but we can be on way, each and every day.”
HOLLEY RELEASED HIS FIRST RECORD, THE haunting and graceful Just Before Music on the Dust-ToDigital label in 2012. Working with manager/collaborator Matt Arnett (son of William), Holley has also teamed up with such eager fans as Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox (on 2013’s Keeping A Record
Of It), the late Richard Swift (2020’s National Freedom) and, since 2019, Matthew E White. “We played this show together in Richmond, Virginia in April of that year,” explains White. “It was an exceptional show. I mean, he’ll write down a phrase he’s gonna riff on, and next to it, it says, ‘black’ or ‘white’, and that’s the key, and then sometimes an adjective, like, ‘fast’, ‘slow’ or ‘dark’. And that’s it.”
White already had a series of loose jams in an “Electric Miles kind of vibe” that he’d assembled while working on his forthcoming studio album. So when Holley invited White to join him for a concert in Durham, North Carolina a few months later, White brought some along for a try-out recording session.
“We got it all down in four hours,” says White. “It was incredible. You’d play him, like, 15 seconds of a track and he picks up on a vibe, and has a notebook containing hundreds of one-line phrases that he’s working into the music. He said, very early on, ‘This is space music.’ Then he walks into the vocal booth and does it all in one take.”
White admits that there was some cleaning and editing done afterwards but he focused on Holley’s repeated phrases – “I cry space dust”, “this here jungle of modernness” and “get up, come walk with me” – strange cosmic broadcasts about the breakdown of human thought in the age of technology.
“I wanted to make sure you heard his mantras,” says White. “Lonnie is drawing on deep, powerful, painful heavy experiences and I wanted this to come through. In 2020, as a white artist I felt like I didn’t want to write anything, didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to move out of the way and let another voice be heard.”
“I’m just telling the truth,” says Holley, when MOJO asks what, ultimately, his Broken Mirror reflects. “I don’t want nobody to get angry at me and say, ‘He talks sad about humanity.’ But we were put on Earth to grow and right now we’re like the flower that has been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, trampled in the mud, dried up, pounded in the clay. We are humans. We must allow ourselves to continue to grow stronger, and stronger and stronger. That’s what this album is about.” He pauses. “Can I ask you to do something for the future? Create a Door Number One, a Door Number Two and a Door Number Three in your home. Door Number One is whatever you want from today. Door Number Two is between Door Number One and Door Number Three but Door Number Three should be a primitive door. It should be a strong structure but it should have just candles or an oil lamp in the room there. There should be nothing of the future in it.”
MOJO asks if Lonnie Holley’s own house is laid out in this fashion. He laughs.
“The possibilities are there.”