SHARKEY’S WHILE YOU W ERE OUT: A /luge and awesome pin/ slip from an office message pad is illuminated ooer f/ie stage. A successive scramble of strange and silly notes appears, file a journal of missed communications, miscommunications, and slipped dial tones. “Time.- noon; Caller: no one; Message: none. ” "Was t/iat extra c/ieese you wanted on your pizza?” "Or was it anc/louies?” "Tried to deliver pizza. W il fry again tomorrow. ” The inclusion of this familiar stationery in Laurie Anderson's Sunday, June 3, concert at the Hult Center in Eugene strikes me with some private irony, since less than a week before I got a message from one “Lori Anderson” (sic). “Ok. Who is this really?” I wondered. My introduction to Laurie Anderson had been in 1981, when a friend in New York sent me a tape of what was his favorite music at the time, and it included her hit single, “0 Superman," and the flip side, “Walk the Dog.” Weird music, I thought, but I liked it. That single sold more than 300,000 copies and was on pop charts around the world. By the time the Big Science album came out on Warner Bros., I was listening to the lyrics. I was already tired of discussions about whether she was a musician or a performance artist, a wizard, an actress, a comedian, a poet, a feminist or a filmmaker, because I didn't really care; she had so much to say and she spoke in the voice of a close friend — she was funny, but her words made a lot of sense. What's amazing is that I felt this connection with her music without ever having seen her in performance, and now I was going to talk to her. After four or five more interchanges of message chatter, electronic reproductions of our voices met up for a telephone interview. CSQ: In the Musician interview you said, “When I’m onstage I'm definitely looking at the audience. I like to see who comes to those things.” Well, who does? How would you characterize your audience? Laurie Anderson: I'm never able to predict. It’s always a little different. It depends on the city and who was promoting the concert. Sometimes it’s people who've just heard this record. If an art organization has supported the concert, it's more of an art crowd. The Hult Center is slick, and still brand- new. If it were a car, it “would still smell new. It s hard to imagine a better facility for the kind of show Anderson does. Ironically, it wasn't the art crowd that put her there. Although Portland Center for the Visual Arts, her sponsor on two previous occasions, also supported this year’s production, it was presented by Bill Graham and Double Tee Promotions. The backing was commercial and music oriented, but the audience still represented a somewhat artistic milieu. Hundreds of Portlanders were sent on a cultural pilgrimage to Eugene. Her performances have special requirements, since they often include props, film, light projections, and complicated sound systems. She uses a Vocoder and a Synclavier, and plays a special tape-bow violin. Her own invention, it’s a violin tha* has been refitted with an audio head mounted on the body of the violin, which plays a tape on the bow — backwards and forwards — as the bow is rubbed back and forth across it. Anderson has an “electronics designer” to create gadgets like this from her specifications. She played a real violin quite seriously at one time but gave up practicing it when she was in high school. She still plays it occasionally.during concerts, alternating it with the tape-bow model. And at one point during the Eugene concert three ghostly violins, painted white, were lowered down to the performers. The instrument has gone through so many metamorphoses for her that it’s turned into an independent visual icon. In her hands, the telephone has undergone a similar transformation, and I find it's hard not to be self-conscious talking to somebody whose whole schtick is language. Somebody who's been relentlessly satirizing collisions between humans and machines since her hit, “O Superman”: “Hi. I’m not home right now. But if you want to leave a message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.” Who repeats the theme of missing persons on her latest album, Mister Head- break, with the song “Sharkey's Day”: “Mr. Sharkey? He’s not at his desk right now. Could I take a message?” Whose Eugene concert includes a skit where she’s talking on the phone and the talk gets to be a kind of expectant patter: “Lunch? Next week? OK. Bye bye. Un- huh. Take it easy. Take care. All right. . . Bye bye.” CSQ: I like the way you used repetition and ambiguity on the Big Science album [1982], in lines such as, ‘Isn’t it. Isn't it just. Isn’t it just like a woman?' The lyrics for Mister Headbreak are a lot more narrative, and yet it’s harder for me to tell what they’re about? L.A.: Well, I suppose you could call that narrative. Pause. Cinematic, actually, was my goal. Big Science was closely related to the performance. On this album, I tried to respect the form of the record. I was shooting for what you might call a depth of field in sound. CSQ: I have a hard time visualizing Sharkey, for example. Or rather, I have a number of possible ways of imagining him. What’s he supposed to look like? L.A.: This was the first time I tried to write fiction in the third person. Id always been suspicious when writers said, “This character just writes itself." After all, they're not real people; they don't live anywhere. But once you give the character a name, it is a lot easier ... I don’t padicularly have a visual image for.that song; I guess I connect it with the video that goes with it. In the conced, it's related to the masks that everybody wears. ’ These masks turn out to be rather inscrutable/ The expressionless features are primitive, reduced to minimal, geometric shapes. The look could be horror, ignorance, or just the common denominator of human emotion. Sharkey remains a blank, a missing person. I think of predatory salesmen, politicians, pool sharks looking for a sucker, greedy businessmen calculating profits, and the genuine shark’s tooth I kept in a box as a kid. A gray fin circling in the water — he sounds like a bad guy. The Hult Center is impressive and, coincidentally, the galleries outside the Clinton St. Quarterly 45
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