The vanished
Joe Cripps may be presumed dead but his spirit lives on
By custom, you are presumed dead if you are not heard from for seven years.
In Arkansas, the statute says: “Any person absenting himself beyond the limits of this state for five (5) years successively shall be presumed to be dead in any case in which his death may come into question, unless proof is made that he was alive within that time.”
Joe Cripps has been missing since Oct. 19, 2016. We can hold out hope.
That evening he was drinking in the White Water Tavern, less than a mile from the halfway house he’d been living in since he’d moved back to Little Rock. Cripps was an alcoholic, he’d been to rehab at least once. He had relapsed. He drank enough the night he disappeared the bartender cut him off.
There was some discussion about how he was going to get home — a taxi or an Uber. Or just hoof it.
That might have been a mistake. Cripps might have had a wad of cash on him that night. He’d cashed a final check from a job he’d recently quit.
Two days before he disappeared he shared on his Facebook page a story about how suicide affects those left behind. You could take this as evidence he was not intending to do harm to himself, but then people post all kinds of things on social media for all kinds of reasons.
But then we hear he left his drumsticks and his mallets behind. He left his blood pressure medication behind.
Oh.
★★★
Cripps was a drummer. A percussionist. A musician. A creative engine.
He was a timekeeper. “Sworn to the drum.”
My feeling is this is both blessing and curse. More than other kinds of artists, drummers are born rather than made. Everything comes down to rhythm, the beat of blood in your temple. A clockwork turbulence you can’t escape, not even in the quietest room. The beat is literally in your blood, literally whispering in your ears.
Some people feel this more than others; they attend to the rhythm and its complications. It permanently bends them toward their nature. They can’t help it, the thrumming. They try to hedge their bets with grad school, and get pulled back in. It’s that deep.
And with deep feeling comes deep pain. Maybe a genuine artist has no choice but to follow the pulse. Drummers maybe feel compelled to pick out and sort the vibrations and patterns of the universe, even when to do so is not conducive to their obtaining the
accoutrements of adulthood like health insurance, 401(k)s and late-model SUVs. Being a drummer is simply not a viable business plan.
But Cripps was successful at it, by the lights of his industry. He had shares in Grammys and the universal respect of his peers. He played on at least four continents, he backed up Tiny Tim. He supplied the throb, the swing, for bands like Ten Hands and Brave Combo and nailed the gut-bucket of otherworldliness of CeDell Davis to the Earth.
Before that he played with fundamental Little Rock bands such as the Patios, Jubilee Dive and the Magic Cropdusters. He explored Afro-Cuban jazzfunk in Norte de Havana. He started a Herb Alpert tribute band called A Taste of Herb. For a while he tightened the groove for the worship service at the New Grace Baptist Church, where he said they were teaching him new ways to play slowly.
He was part of the University of North Texas storied Green Brigade Drumline. He performed with more than 100 bands, including Dallas-based Ten Hands and, for seven years, with Brave Combo, the polka/world music/rock band with which he toured the world and won a Grammy (in the polka category, for their 1999 album “Polkasonic”).
He worked with the marching band at his old high school, McClellan. He co-founded a record label. He was reportedly working on starting a non-profit organization to bring music education to poor children. Joe had lots of ideas. Some of them were inspired.
Palms slapping on congas. A stick ticking up and down the side of a guiro. A sly smile lurking somewhere beneath a perpetual Movember mustache. This is how we remember Joe Cripps. If you got out at all to the places that feature live music over the past 40 years, you likely encountered him.
He’d have turned 59 years old Jan. 5. 59, if.
Maybe he did.
★★★
Chris Maxwell met Cripps when they were 11 or 12 years old. They were in band together in the wayback, playing in the Blunads with Bruce Hulsey and David Jukes. Hulsey and Cripps left and were replaced by Brent Smith Lebeau and Jud Martindale and the Gunbunnies were born.
They signed to Virgin Records, released the Jim Dickinson-produced “Paw Paw Patch,” a lost college rock classic that managed to evoke Big Star, Guadalcanal Diary and the Scott Miller-led Game Theory. They had a couple of videos on MTV and, in the way of pop rock bands that stall out from lack of promotion, kicked it in the head circa 1990.
Maxwell moved to New York — the city, first, then, in 2000 to Woodstock — and went on to play in Skeleton Key and form, with Phil Hernandez, the production team Elegant Too which is best known for composing songs for the Fox series “Bob’s Burgers.” (They’ve also worked on the Disney’s series “Walk The Prank,” Showtime’s “Dice,” Netflix “Who Was,” and with Amy Schumer, Yoko Ono, They Might Be Giants, John Oliver, Iggy Pop, Demetri Martin and Trevor Moore. They contributed music to the soundtracks of “Silver Linings Playbook,” as well “Hot Fuzz” and Michel Gondry’s “The We and the I.”)
Maxwell has also released two extraordinary solo albums, 2016’s “Arkansas Summer” and 2020’s “New Store No.,” both of which I gushed about in these pages upon their release. (Full disclosure, if I ever make another record with an outside producer, Maxwell would be high on my dream list.)
Saturday Maxwell is returning to Little Rock to play a benefit for the Joe Cripps Foundation at the White Water Tavern. He’s bringing with him his frequent collaborator, Ambrosia Parsley, the former lead singer of Shivaree. Maxwell and Parsley will open the show, probably playing acoustic guitars, at 7:30 p.m.. They’ll be followed by Kevin Kirby and Mulehead will blow the roof off the building. Tickets, available at whitewatertavern.com, are $20, with all proceeds going to the nonprofit foundation.
“It’s always great to have Chris take time to come home and play just like we were back in Ms. Cripps’ front room on Drexel Avenue,” John Bowen, co-founder, with James Cripps, Joe’s brother, of the Cripps Foundation says. “We are also thrilled beyond measure that Kevin Kerby and Mulehead enthusiastically agreed to support the effort and they’re guaranteed to own the room.”
During the covid-19 pandemic the Cripps foundation, which was founded in 2019, partnered with the Clinton Foundation and World Chef Kitchen to support the Pulaski County Meals Program. But their stated mission is to “spread the love of drumming throughout the world … to provide material and personnel support to young percussionists by sponsoring instructional scholarships via private lessons, endowments and masterclasses and to facilitate equipment acquisition in communities of need and to also acknowledge and uplift programs of note and distinction which deserve recognition.”
They aspire to launch direct programs of instruction in the coming months. They mean to make the calling a little less difficult to navigate.
“This is the fifth annual ‘Happy Birthday Joe!’ show but the first in Little Rock,” Bowen says. The others were held in Denton, Texas, where Brave Combo is based, where Cripps went to school and is still beloved.
But it is possible to be beloved, yet feel despondent. It is possible to feel lost steps away from home. It is possible to meet with misadventure, with callous criminality. Joe Cripps might be presumed dead. That is the probability.
We don’t know what happened, so we can imagine what we like. We can imagine he blew town, changed his name, found a kind of peace.
And we can summon, with drum and voice, his spirit.