They talked through the night, imagining Boston and the clubs and music and friends Kjiirt would find there. His plan was to follow no plan, travel with no map, experience to the fullest whatever the city might hold. He’d worry about a job when he got there. After all, he and Maynard agreed, the key to success was to first prepare the scene, like a stagehand dressing the set, and then to step confidently into it.
Maynard settled into the apartment he’d share with fellow student and White Room guitarist Chris Ewald. The house stood at the edge of Heritage Hill, the neighborhood of stately Greek Revival and Queen Anne homes built for the city’s lumber barons a century before. Only a few blocks from campus and downtown Grand Rapids, Cherry Street seemed the ideal location for a student eager to explore the city.
Grand Rapids offered the diversity and cultural attractions of a major metropolis—fine restaurants, museums, and resident symphony, opera, and ballet companies. Even so, the city retained the closed-minded aura of an isolated small town, numbingly conservative and proud to be home to the central offices of the Christian Reformed Church.
By the fall of 1985, gentrification was already in full swing, forcing black families far from the neighborhoods they’d called home. Angry minorities and a religious Right nonetheless joined against a common enemy: art students in chains and spiked hair. Warnings to stay on one’s side of the tracks were meaningless in a town like Grand Rapids, where invisible boundaries separated the districts. Downtown was uptown was crosstown was collegetown, and Maynard soon learned that his best defense was a thick skin and a lead pipe tucked in one sleeve of his leather jacket.
Whatever that particular religion was, they’d apparently found a clause in their good book that justified oppression. People in the black neighborhoods were being treated horribly, so the pushback was that any time they had a chance to beat the shit out of a student with a baseball bat, they would. That put me at risk whenever I wanted to go to Subway for a sandwich.
Most of the time, the attacks were only derogatory shouts from the safety of the opposite side of the street. Indifferent to the taunts, Maynard focused on his part-time job assisting with demolition and painting and hanging drywall at another of his landlord Bill’s properties—and felt the safest when he lost himself in a frenzy of crayon and paper and pen and clay.
He discovered the fine arts program to be Kendall’s redheaded stepchild, second fiddle to the school’s more conventional design department. Not surprising in a town nicknamed “Furniture City,” Kendall focused on preparing students for careers at nearby American Seating and Steelcase, lifelong careers designing desks and file cabinets and laying out four-color magazine ads. The curriculum provided a solid foundation, but left little room for exploration and innovation.
Maynard sought out the department’s renegade subculture, the small cadre of nonconformists keen to invent their own personae and their own art, the fringe group that embraced their individuality and outsider status. He found in them comrades in music, prepared to discuss with him Nick Cave’s chord progressions and the poetry of Joni Mitchell’s lyrics.
Yet even among the avant-garde punks and armchair anarchists, Maynard—in his tight leather pants and jacket trimmed with bleached chicken bones and a coiled bass string—stood out and to everyone’s surprise, was named student council president in the fall.
The art students used spray fixatives to preserve our charcoal drawings, but there was no ventilation system in the studios. I went to the foundation to get them interested in our health, but they didn’t do anything.
So I tried to get the students to come to a meeting and demand action. I posted notices in the break room and circulated a petition, but they didn’t pay any attention.
Finally, I drew a really aggressive Sid Vicious on bright red paper and made a poster saying that we’d talk about it at the next student council meeting. A lot of people said the flyer was offensive and too punk, but people showed up who never came to a student council meeting before.
They came because they were pissed off about what I’d drawn. That’s the difference between illustration and design. You put something controversial out there, and people notice and actually do something.
My marketing prowess ended up with my getting elected student council president.
“Maynard was an advocate for justice at all levels,” Kendall drawing instructor Deb Rockman would later recall. “He was all about creating the best possible experience for students.”
An icy December squall rattled the windows of Kendall’s break room, where students sat with books and Walkmans, their late dinners a hodgepodge of the few selections still available in the cafeteria. One glanced nervously outside, where snow fell faster. He must brave the 45-minute trip to his parents’ house, he told his friends, the drive he made to and from school each day. Maynard recognized him as Ramiro Rodriguez, the diligent student whose sure lines and warm palette he’d admired all semester, whose intriguing images skillfully combined the mythological and the familiar.
Ramiro had noticed Maynard, too, his combat boots and white anarchy symbol painted across the back of his jacket. He looked up from his plate, unsure for a moment just how to respond to Maynard’s announcement of a vacant room at Cherry Street. “Coming from a small town, I was amazed that there was anybody like that around,” Ramiro would recall. “Maynard was one of a kind, even in art school. But I was desperate to move closer to campus, and my car was dying.”
The next day, Ramiro arrived to find the apartment strewn with canvases and brushes, a four-track recorder, two guitars propped against chairs as if they’d been set there mid-song, and a crowbar against the wall near the front door.
“I’m not sure what convinced me that living there was going to be all right,” Ramiro would confess. “I was totally out of my element, but I thought, ‘Well, he seems like a decent enough guy. He dresses weird and all, but living here might be kind of exciting.’”
Friends gathered at the Cherry Street apartment at all hours to exchange cassettes and their latest drawings and poems. When Maynard’s part-time job didn’t require him to head across town to paint or hang drywall at another of his landlord’s properties, he and Ramiro prepared quiches and casseroles for their guests with fresh vegetables and lentils from the nearby food co-op.
“Planting acorns. I’m planting acorns,” he’d answer when asked about his activities, as if he realized that given enough time, the most esoteric of skills, the most dubious of investments might one day provide a return.
At the end of the school year, Maynard was one of only ten students—and the sole freshman—whose work was selected to travel the Midwest as part of Kendall’s recruitment effort. His charcoal life drawing would be displayed at college fairs and career days representing the exceptional quality of Kendall students’ work.
He proudly told Kjiirt of the honor when Kjiirt visited Grand Rapids that spring. On high alert, the pair walked about the Cherry Street neighborhood beneath greening ash and Norway maples, Maynard’s lead pipe hidden inside one sleeve. Kjiirt described the wonders of New England: the endless selection of beer at the Wursthaus in Harvard Square, the ornate Symphony Hall, and the gritty Rathskeller, the center of Boston’s rock scene. He told him of his job as wine buyer for Martignetti Liquors and his study of aldehydes and maceration and vins both ordinaire and premium in order to master his craft.
Back at the apartment, Maynard cleared cassettes, crimped tubes of oils, and hog hair brushes from his kitchen chairs. He brought from the dish drainer two tumblers while Kjiirt lined across the table the half-dozen bottles he’d brought from Martignetti’s high-end lockup.
Maynard sipped the 1961 Krug rosé, mystified by his friend’s talk of tannins and complexity and balance and varietals. He marveled at Kjiirt’s ability to detect base notes of oak or citrus or vanilla in what he called the wines’ finish.
Baffled, Maynard set his glass o
n the Formica tabletop and turned to the subject of his drawings, his excitement over his growing understanding of line, shading, and perspective, of his sometimes girlfriend Laurie Rousseau, and of the plan for the next evening. They’d visit the Ice Pick, he told Kjiirt, the punk music venue in the Muskegon countryside, the raucous club where not long ago he’d performed with the area’s newest group, Children of the Anachronistic Dynasty.
For all its straitlaced conservatism, Grand Rapids was the vortex of a lively music scene, one of the many such areas that had emerged in the mid-’80s to cater to unconventional young people living far from the cities. Their guide was Steve Aldrich, host of WLAV radio’s weekly Clambake, the alternative music program featuring punk and New Wave and local indie bands. With a keen ear for quality and an unerring sense for the next big thing, Aldrich gave Western Michigan youth their first taste of the latest sound.
Primed for the real thing, they bought fresh packs of clove cigarettes and attached a few more safety pins to their shirtfronts. They made their way to shows at the Ice Pick and in function halls and condemned storefronts on Division Street where the only stage lighting might be fixtures fashioned from bulbs and coffee cans.
“All the top hardcore bands were coming through Grand Rapids,” Aldrich would recall. “People could see the very best, and I think that influenced a lot of them to put together their own bands.”
The shredding guitar riffs and anti-establishment lyrics were a call to break free of the disco years and the narcissism of the Me generation, just as the music ignored conventional structures and traditional rhyme schemes. Musicians took up their drums and guitars whether they understood chord changes and rhythmic patterns or not, these hipsters intent upon bringing music to the masses in new, non-elitist forms. “The early punks didn’t want to turn into Michael Jackson or be on the cover of Tiger Beat,” Maynard would explain. “They felt privileged to be hearing stuff no one else had discovered.”
Maynard and Laurie drove along Alpine Avenue to Top of the Rock, an isolated warehouse of a building deep in the woods. Punks and goths and sensitive art school students paid the $3 cover to experience live bands and Thursday’s Alterative Night, a celebration of anarchy in the middle of farm country. “Maynard showed me there was another way of looking at the world,” Laurie would recall. “There were people making music and art who saw things differently than the mainstream and acted on those views. I’d been on the outside for so long growing up that it was a relief to find them.”
The DJ spun Fear and the Cure, Erasure and New Order, and in Doc Martens and dog collars and multicolored mullets, the crowd came forward to dance. Partway through the evening, the more timid among them retreated to the shadows as the dance floor became a slam pit where skinheads and the most radical of the punks hurled themselves against one another in a frenzy of head-banging and unchoreographed flailing, until inevitably, one fell—and in the spirit of solidarity, the others scrambled to help him to his feet.
Maynard had the inkling that visual art wasn’t after all the medium for him. He preferred the collaborative atmosphere of the punk clubs, the almost palpable sensation of energy that flowed between musician and spectator. Band members turned to one another and their audience, attuned to their every nuance, drawing from the energy in order to cocreate an experience that excluded no one.
Art exhibitions seemed self-indulgent, and all these sycophants showed up claiming to understand the paintings. It had been so long since I stood in front of something original and said, “Wow! That changed my life!”
It felt like advertising and design had no soul, no pulse. Then I’d look at what they were doing in the visual arts and think, “Just go get therapy.”
When I saw a roomful of people literally and figuratively tuning into each other to create rhythms and images, it just made sense.
In the fall, Maynard and Chris took an apartment in another of Bill’s buildings, a semi-refurbished house at 649 Evans Street. Ramiro, concerned that the hammering and drilling and drywall dust would disrupt his studies, opted for a less chaotic space a few blocks away. But for Maynard, whose only requirement was room for music gear, the apartment was ideal.
The canvases in his living room and his half-empty tubes of oils would last until another odd job turned up, he calculated, and he withdrew what he dared from his college fund. With it, he purchased a Peavey Black Widow amp, a Korg drum machine, and a Tascam four-track recorder and turned to his writing with a new seriousness.
He took as his influences the bands whose styles most intrigued him: Depeche Mode, Ministry, Black Flag, Kiss, of course, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and local punk-meets-metal fusion group Born Without a Face. He created linear soundscapes embellished with mantra-like drones and crafted minimalist lyrics that left room for listeners to inhabit the songs and fill the silence with stories of their own. Yet the complex constructions were all his.
“I was trying to abandon the easy intro-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus format,” he would explain. “You can take almost any popular song, whether it’s rock or pop or R&B or country, and lay them right over the top of each other and they all match up. There’s nothing different about them.”
And with a little help from his rhythm guitarist friend Kevin Horning, C.A.D. became a reality, if not a live band. Recorded in his living room and duplicated at a recording studio north of campus, its two cassettes, the 1986 Fingernails and Dog.House in 1987, sold for $5 each and realized enough sales to cover Maynard’s modest rent.
The quality of the cassettes was remarkable given the simple equipment Maynard worked with in his living room. He’d learned to program the Korg to create delays and overdubs of sound and echo, producing tracks like the haunting “25 Hours,” a strident sermon sampled beneath the repetitive melody and segueing into a chant evocative of the sound of an army marching in lockstep into battle.
He included with each cassette a copy of the C.A.D. manifesto, a rambling screed addressing materialism, AIDS, and global warming, issuing a call for the union of opposites in a polarized world, and ending in a message of hope.
CHILDREN OF THE ANACHRONISTIC DYNASTY 1987
Based on our being merely average in the field of “Corporate Middle-Class, T.V. watching, American-Consumerism” . . . We
. . . the CHILDREN, have reached the following conclusions/predictions…out of need. What need? Well, we needed to know why things don’t work . . . why we cure cancer with cancer and pursue peace by building bombs. We needed to know why we know the ozone is the problem by manufacturing and producing #28 X-tra strength sun screen by Tropical Blend. We needed to know why we, in our advanced state of space travel and genetic research, haven’t discovered a cure for AIDS as of yet . . . and why we attempt to end racial prejudices by acknowledging the separation. We needed to know why we think that he who dies with the most toys is the winner and why all that we consider success can be physically taken away from us.
Why? Because we are victims of a dualistic, cause-effect paradigm that merely lacks empathy. 1+1+1=1 unless you are a slave of this dualistic, western, Rambo-culture, and then 1+1=2. No longer do we experience the harmonious interaction between each other and our environment.
All that we see experienced here is in twos, like opposites
. . . black + white, good + bad, us + them . . .
Therefore, We, the CHILDREN, have reached the fear of the following.
In five years we will discover a cure for AIDS merely because it began to seriously effect heterosexuals one year previous.
In ten years there will be no more cold winters.
In ten years heat from unfiltered ultraviolet sun rays will result in drought and frenzy. Drought and frenzy will result in mass starvation and race riots.
In ten years those without toys will take from those with toys, and soon all those toys will break, become meaningless, and be forgotten.
In ten years the Me
rcedes, the job securities, the stocks, the bank accounts, and the masters degrees will no longer be considered elements of success.
In twelve years . . . safe shelter, food, extra ammo for the rifle, surviving a raid or making a profitable raid, and just plain surviving will be considered true success.
In 15 years fewer and fewer will be successful because of lesser and lesser food for which to be successful.
In 15 years those who established isolate strongholds because they felt they were a superior breed or race will find that the person in the bunk next to them is more of a derelict and an imbecile than the person or persons they burned or murdered 5 years earlier merely because of their color.
In 15 years this tape will not matter. The instruments used to play and produce it will not matter . . . and whether you have the few dollars it takes to purchase it will not matter.
But what is said on it is timeless. It cannot be erased or taken away from us. It is forever.
And in 20 years when the ice caps have melted, Mother Nature will have another go at it. . .and hopefully as time progresses in this new world there will be no need for another bloodline of misplaced youth. amen. thank you, we are C.A.D.
Maynard’s sense of humor intact, he became a devotee of another local group, the acerbically humorous TexA.N.S.
TexA.N.S. was Tex and the Anti Nazi Squad, their music a comedic offshoot of alt rock. Led by Grand Rapids punk rocker Clint “Tex” Porker, TexA.N.S. was a talented lineup including Horning and keyboardist Mike Meengs but, as Maynard learned after attending only a few of their performances, sorely lacked a bass player. With his dwindling funds, he brought home a Hohner knockoff Steinberger bass.
“I didn’t know how to play bass, but I knew I could figure it out,” he would recall. “I thought, ‘It can’t be that hard. It has only four strings, so I’ll even have an extra finger to use.’”
Maynard’s short time with the band was a period of concentrated creativity, a time to explore his potential as a musician and to hone his performance and recording skills. Soon he was appearing with TexA.N.S. at the local venues he’d visited only weeks before, this time center stage, bass in hand.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 9
