Baldridge—Performing:
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Performance: My Oldest Practice, where writing and making meet
Raised among shape note singers, in a fundamentalist, very-much fellow-ship, I, from an early age, performed live, on stage —whether reading the scripture for the Sunday Sermon or leading the a cappella singing (in four part harmony) for which that sect is justly famous…
Or, a favorite, as part of the puppet ministry of Vacation Bible School, I have been, all unseen, before audiences since I was in short pants.
As a puppeteer (naming my alter ego Melvin J. Pickles) I learned to improvise. It was in this persona that I devised, on the spot, my first joke…
While torturing the live MC with my outrageous bants, the kid —just a couple years older than me— complained comically:
Mr. Pickles, you’re gonna give me a complex!
In the moment, I replied:
Aw, you’re too simple to have a complex!
And, ok, now that I write it out, I feel like I maybe copped it from an episode of The Jeffersons… But what a moment! It sold me. I’d paralyzed the guy!
Singing and Storytelling: the US and Abroad
In the approach to my highschool graduation, I qualified to join the Texas All State Choir at about the same time I’d planned a trip to India. The choice wasn’t difficult.
A couple years earlier, an exchange student from Andhra Pradesh had spent a year in our weird little Christian School —while remaining steadfastly Hindu.
I and my friends were keenly interested in our visitor, had him for sleepovers, to vegetarian dinners in our homes. We became friends and, on his departure, he invited us to return the visit.
This, I was eager to do.
I’d felt, from my earliest days, that the world was mine, belonged, personally, to me —that I should explore it. See something of it. No pioneer, me; this was sheer privilege.
But I doubt our friend expected two of us to take him up on the offer, and so soon…
It was the very next year when, as highschool seniors, my good friend Scott Simpson and I spent a couple of winter months —taking advantage of the Christmas break and the blessing of our teachers— in that summer-like land.
Traveling, singing and storytelling our way around the subcontinent gave me perhaps my first sense that these practices, honed in our homey church life, could take me to that larger world I had so coveted.
Scott and I remain lifelong friends and —our paths having taken very different trajectories— we've discovered in recent years how much we still share much in common.
In that open spirit, we co-create a biweekly podcast, FaithFulcrum, covering topics in creativity, spirituality and technology, in more or less that order.
The Boy in the Bands— an incomplete list
Before I get to the Great Band of my Life, I should mention a handful of others, from a dozen examples.
NOTE: Sound Cloud appears to expect files compressed within an inch of their lives and normalized right up to the red. As I prefer what I like to call Dymanic Range, I urge the listener to raise the vol on the following embeds!
Mister Tickle
In South Korea I fronted and wrote for Mister Tickle, a jazzpunk trio of professors from England, Ireland and the US.
We produced songs and performances appealing to the international avant-garde set, in and around Seoul, notably congregating in a performance venue where I’d also perform solo —place known as Bulgasari— which, in Korean folklore, appears to be a kind of iron-eating, entirely unkillable, monster.
We were a rough, hard drinking bunch. It took me a full year to recover!
Alice in Oz
In 2015, through Australian arts organization In Lak’esh, I was awarded an Artist’s Residency Uniting Church, Katoomba, NSW, Australia. There, on the newly restored, century old pipe organ, I composed music for Alice in Wonderland.
Joined by long-time collaborator Skye Evans, on double bass and backup vocals, I visited Alice upon Oz in a thunderous manner! The audience was filled with children, some of whom you can hear clapping along…
I should note that the story Skye tells to introduce the encore, No Such Place as America, is entirely true in all its particulars.
Rope Smokin’ Roy the Hair Farmer & his Orphans of the Storm Band
I met Rope Smokin Roy —as a matter of course— in a little bar in Little Falls, NY. We hit it off over a shared love of Bluegrass and mountain music.
When he learned I’d been teaching myself to play the banjo, he recruited me, note unheard, to play in his band (that’s me, on the trunk) in his upcoming, inaugural, Bluegrass, Bikes and BBQ festival.
Which I did.
I also took up all marketing design for the group and the BB&B festival: T-Shirts, mugs —I created one with the XXX of moonshine which read:
My Other Mug is a Jug!
And, of course, there were all the posters.
Me and the Orphans toured biker events, county fairs, backyard parties and bars in the region right up until the world closed down in 2020.
What you’ll hear at the link is my attempt to spin off a studio version of the same sort, during lockdown. I called myself Col. Roadhard and the Putaway Wet and took advantage of tuba chops earned when I helped Lubbock Christian Highschool win State Champion in Marching Band, Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (TAPPS), 1983.
Somehow recording at home, alone, eventually pushed me into less public and more private places as a performer. Today I consider the songs I produce as collections of soiled rags, hastily wadded and waved about like crummy puppets.
I had learned to stitch so loosely during my time as creative director for:
HOWLOOSEANATION, the band that made me what I am
I spent 15 years as Artistic Director with this ever-changing performance heptet —the only constant’s being myself and co-founder Dr. Fred Mausolf of Lincoln, Nebraska (pictured).
Prominent eye surgeon, painter performer and lifelong patron of the arts. Personal mentor to me.
Over the years we welcomed more than 20 performers into our ranks, all made lifetime members.
When we wanted a laser show, I bought 100 keychain laser pointers and released them to the audience. We used black light effects, puppets, costumes, video projection mapping.
Employed dancers, collaborated with visual artists, comedians, cantors.
I used to say if I went in to our weekly rehearsal with the notion that I’d never play another note, but just wrap myself in plastic sheeting and writhe around onstage, every member of the group would have thought for a moment and responded: Sounds cool.
We composed and performed for television (NETV’s documentary Torn Notebook, on the life and work of Claes Oldenburg), devised theatrical events with participation by The Flaming Cupcakes (Lincoln, Nebraska’s notorious drag ensemble), Presented, live, a new score for the classic of silent cinema Der Golem (1920) and wrote and performed an Ecumenical Requiem.
Our final show, The Long Count premiered at the Montreal Fringe in 2007, after I’d graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (with Leadership Award) and I’ve no doubt that my work with this fertile and liberating ensemble was an important part of my accepted in the program in the first place —entering in Performance Art before switching to Art and Tech, working in VR.
Well, it must have been partly HOWLOOSEANATION and partly the theatrical work that began to spin out from that.
From The Stage, music for live theatre
I and Skye (Susanne, in those days) Evans, opened the first theatre in Wyuka Cemetery and I performed in what would evolve into Flatwater Shakespeare Company.
Under the direction of Bob Hall I produced all the music for Twelfth Night and delivered it from stage and even rooftop, in character as Feste the Fool, at the venue now known as Wyuka Stables.
I played Amiens (and Hymen) in As You Like It, as a kind of “green man” of the forrest. I wrote all the songs for a cappella voices, employing the harmonies I’d learned as a youth.
Thus began a dense, four year period of composing and performing music for theatre, and almost always from the stage.
I did Hamlet, Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Under the direction of the late-great Paul Pearson, I sat out there night after night at the grand piano watching The Little Prince unfold once more. That show won a state competition and launched the international circus career of Colin “Donkeyboy” Creveling. It was also for Paul that I first scored Alice in Wonderland, a show in which I spent the entire run perched atop a gazebo.
This is the video, produced on analog tape-to-tape, with which I applied to SAIC.
It features HOLOOSEANATION and my theatrical work pretty heavily…