Whilst coming up with a list of people who would be interesting to interview for issue 1 of Roman Candle, Bill Daniel was one of the first names that came to mind.
For starters, he’s the man behind the highly enjoyable documentary, Who is Bozo Texino? Pieced together over 16 years of serious trans-Am rail-riding, this loose masterpiece is a 16mm window into the relatively undocumented world of railroad monikers—proto-graffiti tags drawn on the side of freight-trains across America by bored rail-workers and the occasional hobo.
There’s no stiff intellectual talking heads sat in front of a book-shelf here… and instead you’re treated to a fast-moving view from the box-car door, as Bill traces the origins of one of the most frequent tags—a cig’ smokin’ chap with a figure-eight cowboy hat by the name of Bozo Texino.
And that’s just the tip of the high-contrast black-and-white iceberg. From his photos of the early 80s Texas punk scene to his images of San Francisco bike messengers, Bill had the foresight to point his Nikon at countless subterranean subjects, when they were still very much fringe subcultures. For some reason, he agreed to this fairly long-winded interrogation…
PART ONE: JUNE 2020
Where are you at now Bill?
I’m in the middle of a big life change. I’m moving out of my studio of seven years down here on the Gulf Coast of Texas. I tend to bounce back and forth between Texas, San Francisco and Portland, and I was recently thinking I was going to move to Upstate New York. I’ve got some rad friends up there doing all kind of cool projects and was planning on moving up there. But then Corona virus hit, and I was like, “I’m not going to be moving up there for a bunch of reasons.”
But I still had this plan to move out of my studio, so now it looks like I’m moving to this small town in rural Texas and getting involved in some projects there.
Has this big move put a point on your work as well to an extent? From what I’ve seen on the internet it looks like you’ve been whittling off a lot of darkroom prints lately.
Yeah definitely. The clock has been ticking for at least the last year or two so I’ve been sprinting to use the studio before it shuts down. It’s 1,500 square feet, and the whole place can be made light-tight so I print murals in this space… and it’s cheap, because I’m very far from Brooklyn and Los Angeles. It’s been great—being here has been like a production retreat—a sabbatical to just work.
But it’s also geographically a cool place because I’m close to the Gulf of Mexico—I’m 50 minutes from Galveston, and then 20 minutes from some beaches right on the bay, so everyday I sneak out after my post office run, and if it’s windy I’ll do a windsurfing session, and if not, I’ll go out on the paddle-board.
That sounds alright.
It’s cool. It’s near the ship channel, where ocean-going ships come across the bay, and then there’s fifteen miles of oil refineries in a row, and that’s basically my neighbourhood, so when I head out in the water, there’s also these ocean-going tankers, container ships and fuel barges chugging along, and one of the funnest things to do is go out in the channel, find a gap between ships you think you can make, and dart across to the other side of the channel—make some ship pilots nervous.
It’s cool just being out in the middle of the day. I’ll get a couple of miles off-shore and it’s this incredible sensation of almost being at sea, just standing on a board.
I suppose there’s not many opportunities for raw experiences like that.
Part of the attraction of moving down here was to be near here all this oil refining infrastructure—it’s a negative fascination. I guess a lot of people have a weird attraction to industrial infrastructure—it’s kind of an end-of-the-world backdrop. There are fires burning and they literally blow up all the time. It’s a weird, stimulating environment to look at, both as a playground and as a subject for my photography, so I moved down here to shoot this landscape close-up.
That’s a fairly strong theme with your photographs isn’t it? I read somewhere you’d been shooting industrial stuff since the 80s.
Yeah, in the early 80s I got totally into industrial music. Things like Hunting Lodge, SPK and Zoviet France. I’d put Zoviet France on the Walkman and then walk around with my Super 8 camera, and allow the song to compose the camera—physically react to the music with the camera on. We’d then gather up in this artist’s warehouse called 500X in downtown Dallas where there was a little core of us shooting Super 8 films and showing them together.
This one guy Roger Justice who had just moved back from New York. He’d lived the total life on the Lower East Side, and he turned us onto a bunch of crazy music and shooting film. He was kind of the Pied Piper of our experimental film club.
And that work led over and inspired my still photography. I started making these film strips—I’d expose the entire roll of film with these overlapping multiple exposures to create patterns, and then print the whole strip—representing a section of a film or a passage of time. Lots of time I thought of them as a score of music. The print would be almost like the aspect ratio of a composition—like experimental music notation.
It’d be sequential, rather than just a still.
Yeah, it had a sense of time to it. But I haven’t done specifically that since then. In a lot of my landscape photography, I’m thinking about using super-imposition and multiple images, maybe breaking the horizon or using multiple horizons to create abstraction. You know when you look at a piece of art, and you make a noise when you look at it? Or maybe bounce or tap your foot? I’m trying to get an image that imparts a physical feel.
Something more than just a straight-up documentary image?
Yeah, I feel that my work is halfway between documentary and experimentation. It’s a weird thing to aim for. The hybridity of experimental work and documentary work was really going on strong in San Francisco. San Francisco always had an experimental film background, coming from the Beats, and Bruce Bailey and Canyon Cinema, and then there was a tradition of great, socially-active documentary work there.
And when I got there in the late 80s and through the 90s, the film scene was just rich with this connectivity and hybridity, an ‘experimental documentary’ basically described what everybody was doing, in one way or another.
I watched that film, Sonic Outlaws, that you made with Craig Baldwin, and I suppose that’s a perfect example of the kind of thing you’re talking about. It’s a document of something, in that case those artists like Negativland, but then it’s got all this found footage in there.
Exactly. Craig Baldwin looms large in my story. He was the first person I met in San Francisco.
Was that ‘cos you were hunting down, or was it just by chance?
No, I didn’t know of him. I knew that Valencia Street was the cool street because I’d toured with The Big Boys in ’82 and we played a show there at Tool & Die between 20th and 21st Street, so the first day I was in San Francisco I borrowed a bike and rode down into the Mission, locked the bike up at Valencia and 16th and started walking up the street, looking at telephone poles.
This was the era of posters on every pole for every imaginable kind of event or cause or thing, and I saw a poster for Eyes of Hell Cinema. It had a schedule for the next couple of weeks, and it was the most incredible line-up of films that I’d seen—such an unlikely mix of experimental and exploitation films and art films. So I pulled the poster off, and marched up to the door, and it opens, and there’s Craig Baldwin with a Jolt Cola in each hand. A week later I was helping him make films.
I was Craig’s cinematographer, his editor, his co-producer. I got involved with his weekly cinema, Other Cinema, which was a Saturday night cinema which has been going for 37 years.
What was San Francisco like back then?
Those were the days of living in a city with cheap rent. So the neighbourhood was lousy with artists, of all kinds. There was so much different work being done… murals, graffiti, performance art, every kind of music, every kind of film—and it still had a bit of a small town feel to it, it wasn’t like New York, it was just this little neighbourhood. The level of stuff that was going on was just incredible.
And all the while you were working there with Craig, were you doing your own stuff too? Was that when you started making Who is Bozo Texino?
Bozo Texino really came out of learning film-making in that environment. I didn’t go to film school, I just learned by hanging out and being in the middle of all that, and I learned a lot about film-making, making art and how to approach making new forms of art, from Craig.
I worked on it for 16 years, and it started out as a little Super 8 film. I was making these little Super 8 documentaries—there was one on bike messengering, or maybe a three-minute portrait of a spare change guy doing a performance on the corner, and Bozo Texino was originally going to be one of these little Super 8 mini documentaries. But then it just grew and grew.
Its gestation was in this ecology of experimental film-making and documentaries—we lived in both worlds at the same time. So the film really was always this thing that didn’t have a specific form in mind.
At one point I was aspiring to be a documentary film-maker—like a real one who had stuff on PBS, so I was applying for humanities grants with visions of having the film going on a more mainstream channel, but the film really follows a path that’s closer to that core that I lived in at Artist’s Television Access. That was the name of the store-front and gallery at 992 Valencia Street.
You said the film took 16 years. Was there any point you thought it wasn’t going to happen?
Yeah, there were definitely periods where I thought it was never going to get finished. My friends were making fun of me, and certain ambitions I had started to fall away. At one point I really thought I’d use a lot of historical footage—working for Craig, he used a lot of found footage, so that was a natural impulse. I was going to have a chapter on the Wobblies, and a chapter on the expansion of the railroad in the West, but at some point all those ideas fell off. I thought, “The film has to be made out of what I gather on my trips.” And that was liberating.
You’d given yourself a limitation.
Just go with the core, drop all of the accessories and trust there’ll be a material integrity. I was in total abject fear for a lot of that time, just thinking there wasn’t enough material to make a film. I’d been shooting for so long, and the case that had all the film in it was huge, but by the time I’d transferred all the footage to digital to edit it, there wasn’t that much material. It was like a jigsaw puzzle where you only have a third of the pieces. And then you find out that you can compose with whatever parts you have.
I suppose it wasn’t like it had to be a certain length to fill a TV slot… or it had to be in colour for a specific channel to use.
Yeah. As I was editing it felt like I was making a found-footage film out of footage that I had shot. There was no shooting script. All the years working from Craig taught me to look at it and think, “Alright, what can you make out of this? What does this pile of stuff want to become?” I was working from the material up. One of Craig’s tenets is ‘available-ism’—here’s what’s available, we can’t go out and buy anything, we’re just going to use what we’ve got here.
Like making a meal out of what’s in your cupboards.
Fully. Completely. We can’t make a proper curry if we don’t have spice! But we’re not making a proper curry.
16 years is a fairly long time. How was it going through that footage to edit? There must have been stuff you’d forgotten you’d filmed.
The fact that it was a life project made it feel a little bit of a scrapbook of my life. With certain shots that were ruined for one way or another it was like, “I know why that shot is sideways, it’s because I dropped the camera and the viewfinder was bent. It’s full of this personal, interior history—all the things that happened in order for it to get made.
And then there was footage that I shot and audio that I recorded that, by the time I sat down to edit, I couldn’t find. I might still have them in the piles of stuff I’m standing around in now, and I sometimes think I might find them sometime and remaster the film.
I have this absurd idea that I want to make a 35mm negative and print of the film, because a core part of my obsession, and my project of being on earth for this period, is to make work in a long timescale. I’m interested in the ability for material to speak across generations. We can time travel—we can communicate with the past, and if we’re lucky, we can communicate with the future. If we make something that’s physically robust and retrievable, and interesting and resonant to the future, we can talk to people in the future, and tell them the stories that we’re telling each other now, because it’s on a DVD, or they can come to a show… but what about 150 years from now?
The way you get to 150 years from now is film… silver emulsion embedded on a base. Besides sculptures and stone tablets, that’s how you get media into the future. So a dream project is at some point to remaster all the material for Bozo Texino, recut it and make a 35mm negative to then make prints.
That sounds like quite a slog.
But here’s the question for you Sam—in doing that, should I reconstruct the film exactly how it is now, with the faults and the missing parts, or should I take the opportunity to put the lost shots in, and maybe fix a couple of things?
I don’t know. I sort of think that the finished article at the time it was released is the ‘finished thing’. It’s tough though—because you’ll always watch it thinking it’s missing things.
There’s a huge danger in killing the magic in something. The things that make something good are often beyond your intent or control. It’s like those early ZZ Top records they remastered—they completely cleaned them up too much. It was tragic.
Like ET?
Oh, I don’t know.
They remastered ET in the early 2000s and they gave him some bizarre CGI face.
Oh, awful.
It looked rubbish.
I’d definitely have to make sure I went in there in the right headspace, and not make the mistake of fixing it too much. The film never got mixed—it never went in for an audio mix as I had to finish at the studio I was working at. And I like it. It’s totally wrong. So I’d have to make sure I wouldn’t polish that insanely rough mix.
Going back a bit, where did you first notice those railroad monikers in the first place?
It was in ’83. It was at that same warehouse studio space me and my Super 8 friends were living at in Dallas. It was right next to a Santa Fe freight yard, and that’s where I saw the drawings. This is before aerosol moved onto the freight, or certainly down here at least. The only aerosol would be a band-tag—Led Zeppelin was popular. If you stood close, you’d see the monikers. They’re small and they’re not very flashy.
I wasn’t a graffiti artist, and there wasn’t any in Dallas, but I was reading about it in the magazines because it was really blowing up then with Keith Haring and all that stuff in New York. I ended up working in New York for a month, and I saw all the stuff in the streets, so I was turned onto graffiti. So when I saw the stuff on the trains, I was like, “What’s is this? This is graffiti, but what the fuck is it?”
Even at that point was it something you thought about documenting?
I started taking stills of it, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. I looked at it as something that was so sacred that I didn’t tell anybody about it. And that impulse went through the whole project. With the idea of making a film about it, I was like, “Am I going to snitch this out?” Am I going to really show the identity of buZ blurr?” What a terrible thing to do: kill this mystery. The film grappled with that—it was well aware of that and it realised that it needed to still hold the mystery.
It certainly doesn’t answer all the questions.
Yeah, hopefully it poses as many questions. But of course I want you to see who buZ blurr is, he’s brilliant. And Grandpa—I want you to meet him when he’s still alive.
I suppose you sat on it all long enough and made a finished film. It’s not like you just blew it up with some cheap, quick thing.
For sure. I think what the film was able to do, and I attribute this to being schooled as an artist by living in the Mission District in those years, was be a piece of folklore, about folklore. And it functions as folklore—most people have encountered it through an actual proximity… a friend gave them a copy, or they saw a poster in a record store and they went to a show that night.
Was that something you intended? You were driving around in a van, touring it like a band.
Because I was originally turned on by punk rock and touring bands, that was the light bulb idea. It was like, “Aha! This is how culture works.” Somebody gets in a van and brings it to you because you live in a place where there is none. They perform it, and you learn all the things they’re imparting. So I always knew that as soon as the film was done, I was getting in the van and touring it.
When did that punk rock thing hit for you then?
Around 1980 in Austin, which had a really fantastic scene. I grew up in the late rock ’n’ roll era, with Aerosmith and all that shit, and it was awful. I was into a lot of blues, and ‘hippy country’, like Jerry Jeff Walker, and so the first time punk bands started playing in Austin, it was a revelation.
The first show that I photographed was this all-girl band called The Foams. They weren’t musicians at all, they were pure performance—they’d read the ingredients of a bag of potato chips for a song. And then the second band was The Big Boys, and that was it. They were the beacon. I was like, “This speaks to me, these are my people.”
I can’t imagine many people were taking pictures in clubs back then. Was it a conscious thing to document these bands?
At first, I was just taking some photography classes. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was a business student. But quickly, within a couple of a months, I could see this punk thing was amazing, and my pictures were good.
Within that first year I was definitely operating with the idea that the future was going to want to know what this looked like. Like with Black Flag, I just thought, “I have to document this, because the people in the future would never believe what this is.” I had no idea that punk rock was going to become huge and Black Flag would become giant and enter the lexicon of everyone, but I felt like I was charged with the responsibility of capturing them for the purpose of the future.
So even in the very beginning of my photography work I was obsessed with the idea of archival value and historical utility.
Whether it was hardcore or skating or bike messengers… you documented those things quite early on when they were still very fringe scenes. What’s it like looking back at it all now?
As a photographer I’m not someone who shoots a lot. I’ve been shooting a long time, but I quit shooting bands in ’84, so it just stops there. There’s only 327 rolls of film of the punk stuff… so there’s not much. But yeah, in that batch I’m always finding things I’ve never noticed before – those hidden gems I missed.
Because I’ve been printing and looking at these photos for such a long time, in a sense, all the people in my photos… they’re still 21 years old.
So when Facebook first started happening, and I’d see pictures of these people, it was like, “Wow! You’ve aged 30 years!” In my mind they were still wearing that same funny eye make-up or that same ripped shirt. So there’s a weird fissure in reality. In my mind everyone is still there, sweaty, at a show with no air conditioning.
It’s strange how much these eras are talked about and dissected when in reality they were over so quickly. The early hardcore scene was only really for a few years, but so much came out of it.
Yeah, it was a blip. Small scale. Basically, it was just a bunch of friends. If you’re looking for a message, I think it should be to do shit with your friends. Make something happen, do what feels fun, and amplify it—leave the house! That’s what I always say, which is weird now we’re in this lockdown era. There’s all this talk now about how gathering will never be the same—but I don’t know. Once this thing blows over, I just hope people leave the house again.
One idea is that the virus will kill all these retail places, so we’re going to have entire malls and shopping centres that are closed, and every one of them will be a punk club. And when I say punk club I’m not really meaning ‘punk club’, I mean some form of community culture.
All of the things you’ve documented still go on now, but they maybe don’t have that early spark they did when you were first taking pictures or filming them. What has that spark now? What is the modern equivalent of punk?
I’ve known what it is for a while, and now it’s even more obvious… farming. Farming is the new punk rock, there’s no doubt about it.
Are you documenting that?
Photographically, it doesn’t yell at me, but I’ve been thinking about how I could make photography about farming which encapsulates it, or adds to it. Or maybe that’s the point? The new punk rock isn’t about image—it’s about making something that you eat.
One thing I’ve noticed about your photos is that they all fit together well. Was that an intentional thing?
Yep. About 15 years ago I started gravitating back to stills. I’d really went into video and filmmaking, but I missed the Nikon, so I purposely started shooting with the same camera, lens, flash, and film-stock as before—picking it up right where it was. By keeping all that consistent, you can see what changes or doesn’t change within the frame.
I was working in black and white exclusively for a bunch of reasons, and one is so that it all becomes one body of work. Some of it might be literal, and some of it might be way more abstract, but it’s all still nothing but the white of the paper, the black of the silver and whatever tones are in-between… and that’s it, that’s all we’ve got to work with.
It drums it down.
Yeah, and that has to do with that archive function. It’s information-based. They’re not necessarily pretty pictures, and if your house was full of black-and-white pictures, it might be pretty oppressive, but it’s about the index of the thing seen. It’s data. It’s simply what was gathered by a lens and resolved on a piece of film, and that’s it.
Digital technology is amazing, but all that extra apparatus doesn’t really add much more to the basic phenomenon of photography. And it becomes something which is very fragile and unstable—these digital files are bits of charged electrons which can be erased in a sun-spot, or become lost the next time you upgrade your operating system. Or you’ve got your photos on the cloud, your credit card gets stolen, you miss an payment on the cloud and all your photographs disappear…
It’s stressful to think about.
I am anti-cloud.
I don’t think people even own their photos anymore. It’s the same with music or films. No one has the hard copy anymore.
That’s how the enslavement is going to happen. I’m going to sound like a paranoid freak, but it is actually true that anything that you have access to that comes from an internet provider is provisional.
I read something about how one of the people involved with Spotify—some record company man maybe—had said that he wanted people to pay every-time they listened to a song, as opposed to pay for it once at first. I suppose me still listening to CDs that I paid five pounds for fifteen years ago doesn’t make them any money.
Hahaha—I think I remember a quote like that—about how they want us to keep buying it. And that’s how we go from being free men in the Jeffersonian sense to just serfs… renters and not owners.
I suppose you making your 35mm print of Bozo Texino is a fight against that.
For sure. The way into the future is with stable materials, and I want to communicate with the future.
And if you’ve distributed the DVD, people out there have it too.
Yeah, there are different ways into the future. One is the scattershot method—throw DNA as far as you can, and the other is to build a pyramid that’s too troublesome to take down.
There are those stories where these obscure albums from the 70s that no one listened to are given a second lease of life after someone finds an old dusty copy and gets it re-pressed.
Yeah… imagine. You fertilised 300 eggs, and 299 of them died as the turtles were trying to get to the water… but one turtle made it to the ocean and lived a long time with a great garage rock band inside of it.
I know you’ve got to go back to doing some work now, but before we wrap this up, I wanted to ask you about bike riding in the 70s. You were into jumping pedal bikes before BMX weren’t you? How did you get into that?
Like a lot of kids my age, seeing the opening sequence of On Any Sunday with those kids on the Stingrays, that was like the first time the punk band came to town. We hadn’t heard of BMX—that word had maybe been coined by then, but we hadn’t heard of it yet—I called it Pedal Cross.
That’s a better name for it.
I mistakenly thought motocross was short for ‘motor cross’, but it’s from ‘moto’… like a heat. My zine was Pedal Cross Racing News. All we had was the kids in the neighbourhood—me, my brother and a couple of kids we dragged away from the TV. We set up some cones that we stole from the telephone company and built some wooden ramps, and we made a rubber band starting line by breaking open a golf ball and using the long rubber band that was inside.
Were you taking pictures of this?
We never shot the races because they were all hands on deck, but yeah, me and my brother took pictures of each other jumping, doing wheelies and crashing on purpose.
You’ve been early on quite a few things then. It seems like a common theme for you.
But how am I going to be early on something now? I wake up and think, “What the fuck am I missing? Something must be going on.”
PART 2 – NOVEMBER 2020
Months later, I receive an email from Bill. He feels estranged from the art world, he has no interest in printing photos and he wants to make picnic tables based around an old design he’s spotted in the woods. I ring him up once again.
Alright Bill—what’s been going on since we last talked then?
I moved onto this farm with some back-to-the-land art hippies, then I moved onto this other farm with my girlfriend—and then I found out about this abandoned fabric mill which was built in the 1920s. My buddy is the owner, and he said, “yeah, you could live down there.” So I’m trying to see whether it’s liveable or not. It’s 26 acres—it’s huge.
I found a little office that has air conditioning and a heater that works, and I may or may not be able to find water, but there’s a spring coming out the ground—so I can dig a well and pump water into the building.
So where are you now? Are you still in the middle-of-nowhere in Texas?
There are some places that are really in the middle of nowhere in Texas, but I’m 25 minutes outside of San Antonio—which is the seventh biggest city in the United States. And then the place where the mill is, is about 15 minutes from the farm I’ve been staying at with my girlfriend, and it’s suburban sprawl.
It’s not Texas Chainsaw then?
No, but if you look at this mill, it looks like a horror movie—in fact they shot a zombie movie there a couple of years ago. It’s been a graffiti destination, and a vandalism destination—people came in and broke all the windows. So ironically, part of my job will be to secure the place and keep people from breaking in—I’m going to be preventing graffiti.
And where do the picnic tables come in?
Yeah—I’ve got this ambition—I want to make picnic tables, sell them and make money for a change, instead of making art where you don’t make money. I want to start making them in this abandoned factory. And that’s a good narrative for this property—this place used to be a mill and there were tens of thousands of jobs, and then this guy broke in, and started manufacturing stuff illegally.
Why picnic tables?
It really has to do with this individual design which I saw sitting in the woods at my friend’s place, and I just fell in love with it. I saw the picnic table, and it chimed—there’s no better word than that.
From the pictures you sent me, it’s not an everyday picnic table.
Just the look of it blew my mind. It was a very irrational, emotional, aesthetic reaction I had to seeing it; “Oh my god, what is it? Who made it?” No company would ever make something like it, because it’s too silly. But it’s incredibly utilitarian—it’s two inch pipe, made from 1/8 inch thick steel—you could park a truck on it.
You know, I think it might be like the god-damn Bozo Texino thing—the moment I saw that oval head and that figure-eight crown of the cowboy hat, I was obsessed—and it’s the same with this picnic table. I looked at it and thought, “Who made it, and why?”
I haven’t managed to find the person who made it yet, but I found out where they came from—they came from an old industrial laundry—and they were outside of the plant as the worker’s break table.
And it’s not a design that was churned out by some company?
That’s what I want to find out. Were they made by an outdoor furniture company? I don’t think so—they’re just too bonkers. There’s no reason they should be this big, and use material so much. I don’t think they were designed for profitability, I feel like they were designed with some sense of whimsy; “this will be easy and fun.” But I don’t know—why does somebody make something with unnecessary flair?
You see that with old houses sometimes—the builders had pride in their work and decided to add a bit of something extra beyond the job at hand.
I think there’s an element of pride, and authorship going on with this thing. It’s like a signature, or a moniker—it’s a graphic thing that’s completely unique.
But like graffiti or the rail monikers, do you have the right to copy it?
Legally, it’s up for grabs, but I do feel like I’m taking something that someone made, that really was a signature, but it’s an anonymous self-expression, a piece of metal vernacular. Maybe I’ll find the guy and he’ll go, “No, no, no—you can’t make those,” but I’m sure he’s long dead.
It’s like anonymous graffiti—it’s analogous to me to Bozo Texino—that basic design has been passed on for 100 years, nobody really owns it, people might do their own variation of it, but it’s not a trademark and nobody owns it. Even though it refers to authorship, it’s really not a piece of intellectual property, legally. It’s a complete continuation of Bozo Texino. It’s not art, but it’s totally inspired by an aesthetic impulse.
It’s functional—it’s useful.
Yeah, I could make a picture of Nick Cave, and some people might want it, but how useful is it? But a giant, sturdy table outside, where you can play cards, or have meals, or read—that’s useful. That’s making a contribution.
I suppose it’s like practical art—like the pottery makers in the 60s and 70s.
It is. I always thought I was too cool and sophisticated to make practical art… but here I am. I’ve always had the greatest admiration with craft and people who made things that were utilitarian, but none of my skills really lined up with that. My buddy in San Antonio is an amazing glass blower, and he does all kinds of glassware, and they’re really amazing, and he has a lot of fun making them—and he’s able to sell them at a good price, because they’re just so cool. And I’ve watched him and thought, “That looks like a great job.”
For me personally, I want to do something that has a greater degree of utility and service. Filmmaking now seems less interesting to me than bending and welding pipe.
It sounds like you’ve had a bit of an epiphany.
You come from punk, you make this film, you travel with the film as a touring artist—but then you’re at a dead end. What are you going to do with your life? Nothing means anything anymore. It’s a late mid-life crisis… a crisis of capitalism… a crisis of social purpose. What are you going to do with your life that means something? But then the story changes, with a chime—like that movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Do you remember?
Yeah—when he’s making the mountain in his living room?
That’s exactly it. Something in his mind made that line—he was obsessed with that line. And for me, that was Bozo Texino and also the line of the steel of these benches.
What do you think it is about these sweeping shapes then? Whether it’s the cowboy hat of a chalk character on the side of a freight train or the bend in a steel bench?
There’s just an energy to these circular shapes—they move your eye around. It’s like a skateboard ramp—anybody who’s a skater, their brains are printed with an obsessive compulsive disorder to scan the visual field to find a curved plain. These kind of curves, they have energy.
There’s something to ‘em. What next then Bill?
I’m still trying to figure out the mill. It’s like squatting, with permission. There’s no landlord who’ll fix the roof. I’ve got to patch all the holes that people are getting in through—because if I’m working in there, I can’t have people coming in and smashing my shit and stealing my tools. There are about 30 or 40 doors and windows that I’ve got to screw shut.
Sounds like a task.
It’s a crazy task, but the thing is—here’s a task that has a goal—to bend the pipes into those shapes, weld them together and screw some boards on top. It’s so pure.
Interview originally published in Roman Candle 1
Roman Candle Magazine 