Bob Ostertag – Music politics people and machines

Marco Pandin from Stella Nera talks about Bob Ostertag and his book “Music politics people and machines”

“…Politics in the more conventional sense concerns struggles over balances of power involving large nodes in the web of human relationships with strands running out in all directions, nodes like states, transnational corporations, and so on… Of course, a lot of political activity involves people who occupy strong nodes in the web seeking to defend their position, or other people trying to push those occupants of the strong nodes out of place so that they themselves can enjoy the privileges of that real estate. But there is another kind of politics that seeks to restructure the web itself so that power is distributed more evenly. Let us call this insurgent politics. Insurgent politics is necessarily experimental, unruly, and disruptive. It examines, tests, expands, breaks, and restructures the strands between the nodes in the web. It always centers on struggle. This is so close to my artistic aesthetic that in this light it is hard for me to even discern the line demarcating art and politics at all. For all my work is in some sense about struggling with the limits of the social and physical world: testing, examining, expanding, breaking, and restructuring. Seeking possibility where before there was none, making new connections and rupturing old ones. It is fundamentally about struggle – struggle with and within the social and physical world. Others can make peaceful, sonorous music about beauty and symmetry and celebrate the world as it is. For me, struggle is the root, the source…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

Bob Ostertag, then. I know, you’re all wondering: who the hell is he? Quick answer: an American musician, a journalist/writer, and an activist. And who’s ever heard of him? The most knowledgeable and passionate among you will already be scrolling through different mental lists of members of minor and microscopic meteor bands, endless lists of impossible-to-find records and cassettes duplicated in just a few copies. Others will already have armed themselves with a PC and/or smartphone by relying on a search engine, and will soon have found a tall, bald Bob Ostertag with a moustache and goatee who is hyper-productive (music, films, books, computing, performance, activism, teaching, and so on) and who perhaps has little to do with punk as we know it here and now. 
But that’s not entirely true. In the liner notes to one of his albums, he writes: “…My friends and I didn’t wear safety pins or mohawks, but I’m not sure we weren’t punks. We were really loud, and our music was perfect for CBGB’s, where we often played…”. Let’s say that Bob was a rehearsal room roommate, stage companion, and a strong supporter of punk, especially the stars-and-stripes version of the mid/late 1970s. He knew, listened to, and frequented the scene, but he did something else entirely and was interested in something else entirely – for example, social conflicts, history, and radical journalism. 

I think Bob Ostertag is an interesting person, with a lot to say and just as many experiences to recount, and that he has composed some remarkable works – and if they can’t be crudely labeled as “punk,” so much the better. One of his books was recently translated and published in Italy: I read it years ago in English, and I think that whoever worked hard (literally for years) to bring Bob and his book, his insights, his reflections, and his lucid analysis here to Italy did me and you a big favor. 
I thought I’d talk about it here because I’m convinced that this is a place where attentive and curious people hang out. I’m certainly not going to invite you to buy anything, but I hope that reading this will spark something in your mind and make you want to investigate, delve deeper, and open your ears to Ostertag’s strange music, so full of meaning and constructed in such a mysteriously attractive way.
 

“…The thoughts that occupy the pages of this book begin in Manhattan, where I moved in 1978 at the age of twenty-one to play music. And here they end, in a coffee shop down the block from the downtown loft where I used to live. My old doorway is now as close as one can get to the site of the crumbled World Trade Center without special ID. Soldiers in camouflage fill the sidewalk out front… In the subway down below, as was often the case when I lived upstairs, an African American man is playing soprano sax… He has a sweet tone and a nice sense of melodic ornamentation. But instead of playing NYC subway standards like “Take the A Train” or a Coltrane-inspired “My Favorite Things,” he is playing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and hearing it is sending cold chills down my spine. Up above ground, American flags flutter everywhere…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

To tell you about “Music, politics, people and machines” (that was the subtitle of “Creative Life” in the original American edition of 2009), the first thing that came to my mind was to compare the environments in which Ostertag and I grew up and draw parallels between our childhood and adolescence. Of course, our homelands and families were both different and distant, just as the opportunities and chances that life offered us were different and distant, but deep down I had a strong suspicion (or perhaps a presumption) that we had gone through similar or at least comparable experiences and vicissitudes, and that we therefore had things in common. 

As I set about weaving some kind of presumable network of relationships, I realized the looming risk of turning it all into a self-referential and unrealistic endeavor. So, much more simply, I came back down to earth and collected my notes in the form that follows.

“…My music is often described as “political”, yet it is never about trying to convince anyone of anything, not about getting anyone to think like me, not about moving anyone to march on anything… But I do use “political” elements: a recording of a Salvadoran boy burying his father (“Sooner or Later”), images of war (“Special Forces” and “Yugoslavia Suite”), memoirs of friends who died of AIDS (“Spiral”), letters to heads of state (“Dear Prime Minister”), audio from a queer riot (“All the Rage”, “Burns Like Fire”), and others. I do not use these with the intention of achieving a political result, but simply because they are what move me. They are my life, which has been lived in Central America, New York City, San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic, and the United States during a particularly bellicose time in its superpower reign. I use them because it would be unimaginable for me not to. Everyone who spends a life making art has a particular affinity with certain particulars of their craft. Some painters are drawn to color, others to form. Some musicians have an instinctual affinity with harmony, others with melody. For me, the social relations within which I live and make music have always been the materials to which I am naturally drawn…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

On the other side of the world from Venice, Italy, in Colorado, a rectangular US state located roughly halfway between the east and west coasts and roughly halfway between the Canadian and Mexican borders, Bob Ostertag was born around the same time I was, he in April and I in October of the same year. It was 1957, and I had no idea he existed until 1980, when I bought one of his records because Fred Frith played on it – an English guitarist I really liked and whom I had met personally a few years earlier with his band at the time, Henry Cow. 

In “Getting a Head,” Fred’s guitar, already played in a very unconventional way, is rendered practically unrecognizable by the treatment it receives. Bob had designed and built a system of three interconnected reel-to-reel tape recorders: the passage of the magnetic tape over the heads was made unstable and irregular in a random manner because it was run through rings connected to helium balloons left free in the air (you can get a rough idea from the photo on the back of the album cover, which I have included above), just as unstable and irregular was the operation of the recorders themselves—an aggregate of analog and mechanical devices, cheap and shaky. Quite a far cry from the mathematical precision and crystal-clear sound of the luxurious loops designed and created by Robert Fripp, known as “frippertronics.” 

I then bought his next album, “Voice of America,” which documents two very lively performances recorded in London and New York with Phil Minton and Fred Frith. Since then, I have bought many more of his records and some of his books: Ostertag has written several – “Creative life” is his first and, for now, only book translated into Italian, a co-production between Candilita in Naples (link: www.candilita.it) and Colibrì in Milan (link: www.colibriedizioni.it). 
 

“…”Voice of America” was created in 1980 at a turning point, after Vietnam and president Carter, after years of liberal America, Ronald Reagan arrived, whom no one expected, and that was the beginning of a right-wing policy that continues to this day. I was twenty-three years old, I had just returned from Nicaragua where there had been a revolution, and I found myself in a completely opposite situation. It was a special weekend, the American hostages in Teheran had been freed and there was a sense of nationalist revival, and at the same time there was the Super Bowl, which is another super-nationalist American event. I took my tape recorder and recorded Reagan and the Super Bowl from the television. That evening I was supposed to play with Fred Frith, and without telling him I played the tapes during the concert. I didn’t do it to make a political statement, I did it because I was pissed off. It was angry music, maybe unlistenable, I don’t know, but definitely angry…” (excerpts from an interview by Giuseppe Aiello, 2015)
 

In the early 1970s, when I started high school, I was an introverted kid who tended to get lost and confused. I was a loser, basically. The neighborhood where I lived was a tough place where the countryside was quickly succumbing to concrete and asphalt. At home, however, I felt comfortable, in the sense that my parents loved and supported each other and never let their problems, difficulties, and frustrations hail on me. 

Unlike many of my friends’ parents, mine were not a source of stress or overly controlling: my dad worked himself to death doing shifts at the chemical plant, my mom was in poor health and was often in the hospital or bedridden for long periods of time, so since I was in middle school I had my own house keys and fairly flexible curfews. My family’s difficult, if not critical, situation must have made me take on responsibility a little earlier than usual. My parents were affectionate and trusted me: they never blackmailed me by demanding great results at school, they never embarrassed me by investigating the company I kept, nor did they put me in a difficult position by asking me to justify the presence of certain books, records, magazines and newspapers in my room. 

Those had been tough years, all those months of strikes and demonstrations – Dad had been threatened several times with transfer to the company plants in Sicily and, like some of his colleagues, had even risked dismissal at times. It was the early 1970s, and the effects of the protests of 1968 were still strongly felt: only recently had Italy become aware of the presence, reasoning, needs, and more generally the culture of that social group born out of the protests – ‘young people’. 

Wearing colorful t-shirts and growing your hair long had become the most obvious and widespread symbols of protest: it was common for the police and carabinieri, suspicious of your appearance, to stop you on the street or in front of the school and take you to the police station or barracks for a check and to be put on file, and then perhaps summon your parents (at that time, you came of age at 21) to give them a hard time and cause them trouble. 

But us girls and boys knew it deep down in our hearts: we weren’t just puppets at the service of fathers, priests, husbands, and country, nor were we obedient housewives and mothers forced to keep quiet, bear children, and then raise them, nor were we expendable flesh in the fields, in the barracks, at the front, in workshops and factories, but we each had our own individuality and rights, we had a head and a heart filled with ideas, needs, aspirations, and expectations. We liked certain music, we read certain books and certain poems, we loved watching certain films. Among our desires, in addition to the innocent one of growing our hair and wearing multicolored clothing, many of us dreamed of having the opportunity to study and perhaps that of travelling  – a destiny generally reserved only for the wealthiest.

It’s not all that complicated for me to get an idea of what Bob Ostertag’s life as a kid might have been like. I can picture him isolated, bewindered, and buried up to his neck in the middle of the American countryside, surrounded by hundreds of miles of nothingness, a life as bleak and inexorably flat as the plains, punctuated by school and the liturgical calendar – but these are just assumptions borrowed from cinema and literature. His official website (accessible at bobostertag.com) features a biography less than forty lines long, which begins in 1978 when Bob was already 21 years old. But fragments and traces of his earlier personal history, even the most profound and intimate, can be found in his books, particularly in his recent “Encounters with men” (Black Lawrence Press, published in America last year). 

In this book, among other challenges he has faced throughout his life, he recounts his difficulties at school, including bullying and insidious, if not dangerous, teachers. He describes how his parents forced him to play sports so that he would stay away from what they considered to be bad company, and how it was precisely that bad company that often inspired and stimulated his learning. 

I can thus reconstruct a life in a rural nuclear family like those shown in American TV series, which we have also been watching regularly on television for decades. From the outside, it seemed like a simple happy life, consisting of school, gym, high-protein dinners, and punctuated by celebrations involving turkeys in the oven and trips to relatives’ homes in New Mexico, but just beneath the surface of normality, that life hid many questions and dark spots. 
His father, an Episcopal priest, systematically abused him, first with spankings and then with punches and kicks, until Bob grew old enough to fight back. Bob’s mother, an unemotional woman forced to be in tune with her husband, contracted kidney disease and decided to end her life by refusing dialysis. Only after his wife’s death, and in the grip of a severe nervous breakdown and depression, did Bob’s father confessed his bisexuality to his children and tried to rebuild a life that resembled him.

“…Looking back, what stands out is how carefully I kept my distance from my father. The less he knew about my life and what I was really up to, the better. The other side of that coin was him keeping his life separate from mine. I now know that the other Episcopal priests around him were also closet homosexuals, as were his closest friends… I tried hard to know nothing about these men. Not their desires. Not their shame. Not their cover stories. Didn’t want to confess my sins to them. Didn’t want to put on a dress and eat the body of Jesus, nor drink his blood. Most definitely did not want to be an adolescent acolyte alone with one of them in the sacristy, most of all with my own father. But for a brief time, that was unavoidable. I was the preacher’s kid. Kids in the church who were my age were supposed to be acolytes. Thus I was to be an acolyte… Acolytes are the boys who dress in robes and carry the cross and the candles and bring the priest the bread and wine. One of the jobs of an acolyte is to help the priest undress from all the frilly ritual clothing backstage after the show. One by one he peels off the layers and hands them to you, mumbling a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo. Magic incantations… I had to do this several times for my own father. We did it exactly the way the rituals of the Episcopal Church specified. There was no touching or nudity, but if I were to single out an experience from my youth that would qualify as “sexual abuse,” that would be it: a boy and a man absolutely alone, no one else can see or hear, the crossdressing, and that somehow we are supposed to be “united in the body of Christ”…” (excerpts from “Encounters with men”)

Compared to what my parents had to deal with when they were my age, such as surviving through World War II, my teenage problems were fortunately different and much less serious and complicated, and were mainly focused on school, where I was taught things that I understood very little or not at all. I did well in Italian and English, but during the other lessons I would sit at my desk in a vegetative state, accumulating perplexities and questions in my head until the bell rang at the end of class. For the rest of the day, I drifted happily, fantasizing about pop music. I fed on crumbs from a radio, a mono portable record player, and a very cheap cassette recorder. 

At that time, there were broad categories such as pop, jazz, rock, and classical music: punk, metal, and other labels dividing the music scene had not yet been invented. Or perhaps those labels already existed, but we didn’t know about them. By “we,” I mean myself and a handful of my friends and schoolmates and neighbors, weird kids for whom music occupied a strategic place inside the heads and who spent half their afternoons listening to it and practicing it more or less clandestinely instead of studying. There weren’t many of us – fewer than we would have liked, but still too many for the tastes of the people around. Some teachers at school shook their heads, thinking we were just born crooked and raised wrong, and since we didn’t go to church, some parents thought even worse and demanded that their sons and daughters stay away from people like me. 

The likes of me lived in the so-called “cardboard condos” (cheap houses with six or nine small apartments) and in the “big barracks” (very large buildings with 24+ small apartments) arranged along the crossings of the State road #245, on the outskirts of Mestre in what would become a high-risk neighborhood within a few years. We were all children of factory workers in Marghera, raised in poor families. In the middle of the month, on payday, my father and mother would sit at the kitchen table and, after deducting the rent and food expenses and the cost of a couple of bus or motorboat trips to hometown, they would resign themselves to the fact that there was not much left to celebrate. It was pretty much the same at my friends’ homes.

We were used to poverty, and anyway, we kids really didn’t need much: a pair of jeans handed down from an older cousin and a jacket picked up at American Strasse (note the double meaning, understandable only to those who speak Venetian: it was the nickname of a market stall that sold used goods salvaged from who knows where and often flea-ridden), an old military shoulder bag to stuff books, notebooks, cassettes, and records into, in winter some wore berets, others fisherman’s hats, all of us hungry for words, sounds, visions, suggestions – a hunger we satisfied by dreaming. Dreaming was wonderful and free, but to keep dreaming we had to keep sleeping. And so, one fine day, a couple of my friends and I woke up. 

In the whole neighborhood, there was only one other kid who loved music more than anything else, just like me: Mauro lived right behind my house in another “cardboard condo”. He was almost a year younger than me, he loved to play flute and had enrolled in the conservatory in Venice. Like me, he didn’t go to the parish youth club either. He had got hold of a worn-out Binson tape echo somewhere and, in my garage, which was transformed into a rehearsal room once a week to the delight of the neighborhood, he used it to modify, layer, and distort the sound of his flute. We had stolen a microphone from a concert. Together with Roberto, a schoolmate of mine a couple of years older, we had formed our own trio, which was soon joined by a drummer and a long list of guitarists who generally didn’t last very long in the band – an afternoon, a few weeks, a few months. 

Roberto was already in his fourth year and was studying electronics: he had designed and built a complicated sound generator complete with cables, inputs and outputs, knobs and various buttons – more than a few flashing colored LEDs were just for show. It was a real noise machine: we were the only band in town with equipment like that – apart from Toni Pagliuca of Le Orme and Claudio Ambrosini of Arid Land, both very famous local bands, who owned a real synthesizer, or perhaps more than one. 

Dario had seen and heard us play at a collective concert in his school’s main hall. He lived in the countryside just a couple of kilometers down the State road #245, studied electrical engineering, and was in his fifth year. We used to meet on the bus, and one day he came to my house with his tool bag: he fixed the volume potentiometer on my beat-up electric bass and gave my amplifier an overall tune-up. Once, when I went to visit him at his house, probably to swap records, he gave me a couple of crazy distortion pedals that I don’t know how he got his hands on and which he had then modified. Every time I pressed the button with my foot and ran my bass through those fuzz pedals, the hairs on my back stood on end and something bizarre happened to my privates. 

To our mess we added the noise produced by a couple of old cassette players, also modified by Dario with additional buttons that speeded up or slowed down the tape playback. With old cassettes, adhesive tape, and razor blades, Roberto and I had created short loops with random recordings such as radio frequencies, excerpts from what sounded to me to be news programs in foreign languages, dogs barking, traffic noises recorded on the highway, and trains passing on the railroad tracks behind my house. 

Our rare live concerts were the subject of much discussion. I don’t know if ours was courage, stupidity, boldness, or sheer nerve: perhaps it was a mixture of all these things. Needless to say, we were terrible, but that didn’t matter: playing kept us busy and away from danger. Imagining and making music kept us alive. 
Back then, in the first half of the 1970s, things like “circuit bending” and “tape manipulation” were unknown, or to be more precise, my friends and I were completely unaware of them, lost as we were in the middle of nowhere in the northeastern province. We just did it. Now we do know that all around the world young people like us were tinkering with soldering irons in who knows how many small clandestine and illegal electrical workshops, just like the ones Dario and Roberto had set up in their basement at home. 

Ostertag had also struggled to make friends in the village, but one day he finally managed to find a couple of strange guys he could bond with: Jerry and George, who attended the same high school as him. They soon started playing music together – Jerry on drums, George on bass, and Bob on guitar – spending half their days squeezing out long improvisations and offbeat songs. 
Jerry was the son of farmers and lived outside the city with two problematic parents, one brother who was mentally challenged and another who was hyperactive and abusive. George had been taken into foster care by a devout and practicing Christian couple. He practically owed them his life, but he didn’t feel like a believer at all, so he tried to drown out his remorse and sadness by listening to Frank Zappa and growing his hair long enough to reach his butt. All three of them were heavy users of LSD. 

The trio, albeit intermittent, lasted until the end of high school: George was increasingly depressed and couldn’t even apply himself to the electric bass, he did poorly in school and couldn’t afford to go to college, so he decided to hang himself. Jerry simply disappeared one day. Bob met him by chance many years later on a bus in San Francisco – he would die of AIDS shortly thereafter. 

In “Encounters with men,” Bob reflects in hindsight on the fact that all three were young homosexuals, but without realizing it. A few years earlier, the Stonewall riots had taken place in New York, and several organizations and associations connected to the LGBT community had already been established in San Francisco, but the three young friends knew nothing about it. They were just confused kids, completely unaware of themselves, who had grown up in the middle of nowhere, isolated from the rest of the world. In that place far from everything, certain information took a long time to arrive – if it arrived at all. 

My friends and I played pop music. Pop was just a name like any other, in the sense that it wasn’t something worth wasting energy and time arguing about: there was no need to label our favorite sound in a specialized way. We were just kids, we were so marginal that the market hadn’t noticed us yet to turn us into consumers, nor had we losers and penniless kids noticed the market yet. Slowly, however, I realize that things around me are changing. Whereas before I struggled to find any reliable information (never trust magazines like “Giovani” and “Ciao2001”, which pushed you to buy new records to take to a desert island), now magazines like “Muzak” and “Gong” are coming out, which are very well done, critical and thoughtful, and therefore useful. 

On the shelves of the big bookshop in the city main square, from one day forward are shown simple, accessible pop booklets and bigger, cooler pop books, even pop encyclopedias. I’d love to get my hands on some books with lyrics by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez: they don’t cost much, but it’s still too much and I can’t afford them. That’s when the market notices me, and that’s when I notice the market: from now on, music has to be paid for. You can’t find records for rent anymore, so I fall back on recycled cassettes and used or borrowed records, because new ones are too expensive. 

There were reduced rates for students at La Fenice theater, and you could often get in for free, but at pop and jazz concerts in other theaters and at the sports arena, they ask for tickets that I can’t afford: if you don’t have money, you’re left out. I don’t have any, so I’m left out. I don’t have the courage to steal the records and books I want to listen to and read, so I’m left out. I soon learn to have fewer scruples, and even to stop having them altogether: I never thought it would be so easy to take a couple of records or books from the shelves in stores, hide them under my parka, and simply walk out without rushing or attracting attention. 

“…In 1976 I left my hometown in Colorado to study at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio. I spent the first year in ecstasy over escaping from smalltown Colorado and finding a community of others my age with similar interests. I spent the second year banging my head against the wall. Everything I learned there I learned from other students or just one teacher…, a wonderful composer who was denied tenure my second year…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

By the mid-19th century, Oberlin was already an important center of abolitionism: fugitive slaves were relatively safe when they reached the vicinity of the city by taking advantage of the railroad line, from where they could then travel by water to Lake Erie and reach western Canada and freedom. The city’s university was one of the first in the United States to accept African American students, and the first to accept female students – but you can find and learn more about all this online. 

At the age of twenty, Bob Ostertag managed to leave town: he enrolled at the conservatory in quite a big city in another state, and soon formed a trio with two of his classmates: Jim Katzin on violin and Ned Rothenberg on wind instruments, while he tinkered with a used synthesizer he had bought after getting rid of his old electric guitar. The band was Fall Mountain and, just a couple of years later, the three recorded their first and only album “Early fall” in New York City for Eugene Chadbourne’s Parachute label.

Despite being a white, conservative institution, Oberlin College was exceptionally open to cultural exchange: in 1977, it invited none other than Anthony Braxton, a radical black saxophonist and composer and jazz superstar, to lead a workshop on improvised music. Bob immediately signed up and participated, bringing with him his Serge synthesizer, which he had bought by mail order and assembled himself – a box with knobs, buttons, and tangled cables, and no keyboard. In Italy at the time, Paolo Tofani of Area had one: he had bought it on the advice of John Cage, and then used it when recording the “Maledetti” album.

“…Anthony [Braxton]’s workshop was a revelation. While most professors at the conservatory were highly adept at conveying their sense of boredom with their own classes, from the minute Anthony walked into his workshop there was an electricity to it wholly alien to everything else I had experienced at school. I learned more in the first hour with him than I had in two years of classes. The most startling thing was how seriously he took his encounter with students. It was immediately clear that he expected great music to be made, right there and then. His demeanor would have been no different if he was in a room of world-class virtuosos instead of struggling students… I learned essentially (…) what it means to be a committed musician. How to center your life on it. How music must absorb you. How you must enter each musical situation with the expectation that it will be transcendent. And how to share a sense of this kind of engagement with those around you… The rest you have to work out for yourself…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)
 

My survival kit consisted of a very few new records bought / more records found in second-hand shops / many stolen, homemade cassettes, but above all: music from the radio. Fortunately, the era of free radio stations had begun in my country, and fortunately I found myself in the middle of it: I was one of the youngest contributors to Radio Mestre 103, one of the very first independent FM stations in Italy. 
 

There were many anarchists running and hanging around the radio station: they were like older brothers and sisters to me, teachers, guides, shelter, fog lights, inspiration, and role models. I was curious and tried to take part in as many opportunities as I could: with the excuse of doing reports and interviews for the radio, I sometimes managed to sneak into concerts in the early afternoon to ask the musicians questions during the soundcheck breaks. And if I couldn’t, I would join groups of older kids who were protesting the excessive price of admission tickets and break through. 
I didn’t care if they played jazz or rock or rubbish inside the theater or sports arena: I wanted to take back something that I felt had been taken away from me, and taking back the music – whatever it was – was just another attempt to try to take back my life, piece by piece. How I loved to find myself in the middle of the mess. 

Among the various characters who frequented the radio station, there was a couple of hippies who were at least fifteen or twenty years older than me. I don’t know exactly what they did for a living, and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that they were drug dealers. They were smiling and peaceful, always dressed fashionably and smelling of patchouli, and perpetually traveling, preferably in Northern Europe. From there, they would occasionally return to their home in Venice with boxes full of records we had never seen before, made by musicians we had never heard of, which they then sold at low prices to the radio station’s editorial staff and to us collaborators. 

It was from them that I got the System Tandem album on Japo, which would heavily influence our band’s style, as well as “Afric pepperbird” and “Sart” by the then unknown Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek. The two offered me some vinyl records by John Fahey, an American guitarist who blew my mind. Once I was given two records for free: a Brainticket LP (it had a silly warning sticker on it: “After listening to this record, your friends may not know you anymore!”) and “Children at play” by Tom Van der Geld – the two hippies felt they couldn’t sell them as the cover sleeves were a bit damaged.

There was a skinny guy with long hair who came from out of town in a van that smelled terribly of gasoline and burnt gaskets and always seemed on the verge of taking its last breath there on the side of the road. He had set up a homemade stall for selling books and t-shirts outside concert venues. They had nicknamed him Agony, I guess because he looked really unhealthy – just like his van. When you asked him something, it took him a while to think and reply between coughs. 
Every now and then, Agony would give me a book that was too dirty and damaged to sell: he had piles of cheap, semi-clandestine publications stacked on the counter, mimeographs with hippy poems and comics or with translated lyrics by singer-songwriters like Neil Young and bands like Jefferson Airplane, reports of protests at concerts, flyers, texts criticizing major record labels and certain bourgeois publishers – all very cheap, self-produced, published or distributed by Stampa Alternativa. I didn’t even know such things existed. That’s where I learned that there are the masters of music and that people like me are enlisted in the guerrilla war to fight them. 

“…On the second day of the workshop Anthony asked if I would join his ensemble for a concert tour of Europe. I was stunned. Just a few weeks later, I found myself in New York City rehearsing with a fourteen-piece big band featuring virtuosos such as George Lewis, Kenny Wheeler, Marilyn Crispell, and many more. For a kid from a small town in Colorado, just being in New York was a full-on sensory assault… When I arrived on the first day of rehearsal, Anthony welcomed me in, handed me my parts, and then turned away to deal with the hubbub enveloping him… I stared at the charts Anthony had given me and my heart sank. Keyboard parts! I didn’t know how to play keyboard. My synthesizer didn’t even have a keyboard. In fact, it didn’t even have anything you could hit to bang out a particular rhythm or pitch. It was an automatic music box. You played it by using colored wires to connect inputs and outputs in different patterns, listening to the sounds that resulted, and then responding to the result by changing the automated parameters with knobs. What was I ever going to do? I was absolutely convinced that I should not be there. A country boy in the city. A kid among adults (I had turned twenty-one the week before). A white in a room full of blacks. A student among teachers. And most importantly: with the wrong instrument… What was a white kid with an automatic music box that made electronic bleeps and bloops in no particular rhythm or key going to do onstage with a collection of jazz greats getting down with some highly deconstructed yet totally foot-stomping big-band charts?…” (excerpts from “Creative life”)

A few days after the rehearsals in NYC, Ostertag and the other members of the Creative Orchestra are flying to Cologne, Germany. They all gather in the huge concert hall of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the national radio station that had commissioned major works from composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage – the spearhead of avant-garde music. What followed were two weeks that are difficult to describe, and which Bob sums up as follows: “…Anthony [Braxton] taught me how to internalize a sense of struggle in music… A famous quote by Frederick Douglass says: if there is no struggle, there can be no progress. For Anthony, if there is no struggle, there can be no music…”.

After that European tour, Bob decided not to go back to the conservatory. Most of the members of Braxton’s ensemble lived in New York, so he too found himself renting a tiny apartment in the East Village and soon befriended musicians such as Fred Frith, who had arrived in America from London shortly before, Tom Cora, Eugene Chadbourne, and John Zorn, who lived nearby. They had no money, no subsidies, no funding, and very little attention from critics. But they lived on nothing, played in nothing places, and didn’t have to answer to cultural commissions or wait in line at offices for arts funding. 
Since no venue wanted them, Zorn often organized house concerts that only five or six people could attend. Playing at CBGB’s was the best they could hope for. When the New Music New York Festival was organized in 1979, which in theory was supposed to broadly represent the city’s scene, including the alternative scene, no one invited them. So Zorn and Chadbourne quickly organized a three-day counter-festival with concerts by small groups and musicians snubbed by the official festival: just a few people came, and no one wrote about it. 

My childhood dream revolved around four thick strings. At the beginning of my freshman year at high school, I saved every penny I could, even skimping on food, and managed to buy my first electric bass – a well-used, unbranded piece of junk. The strings were a mess and needed to be replaced, but the smell of my poverty must have moved the widow of the music teacher, who was left alone to run the shop. Instead of turning her back on me and giving me the chance to steal, she gifted me with a complete set of replacements. She also gave me some picks for free, which I never used: I liked using my fingers.

At the time, I was influenced by Mauro Periotto’s playing style with OMCI: he was perhaps the first bassist whose style I wanted to emulate, but I never even came close. During my adolescence, I attended numerous Area concerts, becoming inexorably entangled in the vertigo woven by Ares Tavolazzi’s fingers. When, in October 1980, I had the good fortune to meet him at two consecutive concerts with Weather Report, I was amazed by Jaco Pastorius’s friendliness, wonderful cheerfulness, and smile, just as I was deeply saddened and hurt by his death. 

For years, I kept trying to make my old electric bass fly high, without ever really succeeding. 
A thousand times I found myself listening to a record where I would have loved to see my name printed on the cover. I imagined myself and my band playing while someone was recording in the next room, me watching the others in the group looking at me and laughing, and then I start laughing too, and we find ourselves throwing handfuls of notes at each other with the flute and the guitar and the drums as if they were snowballs, going crazy with happiness and flying, dissolving, disappearing, burning, becoming light. 

“…Our little Colorado town was as white as the Colorado snow until you crossed the railroad tracks to where the Latino farmworkers lived. But one day while I was in high school an apparition appeared seemingly out of nowhere. His skin was black like black coal. With this ear-to-ear smile of perfectly white teeth. He was tall, maybe six foot five or more. And skinny. That alone would have made him one-of-a-kind where I lived, but there was so much more. He played electric guitar with a wah-wah pedal like Jimi Hendrix. He wore crazy clothes. He walked around town in a silver cape and purple goggles. Oh, and he was beautiful. I had never met a man who was beautiful like that. And he had a girlfriend, who was a black as he was, and as beautiful, and as tall, and spoke English with a French accent. Dazzling… I never knew how they arrived in such an unlikely place, had no idea what they had done or who they had been before they showed up in my life. And they never offered any details. They were just suddenly here… And here is the best part: they both really liked me. They liked having me around. And they had their own place. A parent-free zone! With them in it! And I was welcome there! I was a devoted electric guitar player back then. He and I were at about the same skill level. And we were both Jimi Hendrix devotees. So we worked on guitar licks together, and talked about this and that… Then one night the two of them had a party at their place for all the young friends they had been making. For some reason I cannot 

remember, I couldn’t go. And the police burst in with guns drawn… We were in the Rocky Mountains, not in the south (…) [and] police in our town did not take out their guns much. I ran with kids who bought and sold drugs, and took more than our fair share, and we were always dodging the cops, and coming within an inch of getting busted, but there were never guns involved. Never. These two beautiful people had done nothing, and the police busted into their party with guns drawn. The next day they were gone for parts unknown. And that was that…” (excerpts from “Encounters with men”)

Time passes, it’s 1977. I’ve grown up. I’m no longer the kid struggling at technical high school, but I’ve graduated and enrolled at university. For a couple of years now, I’ve been scraping by with precarious and underpaid jobs as a shop boy, delivery boy, warehouse worker, waiter, assistant, laborer, sales clerk, exploited seasonal worker, part-time handyman. I’ve also had my first head-on collisions with the system: fired on the spot for being a conscientious objector to military service when by law it was still impossible to say no. Months and months of trouble at the police station, at the harbor master’s office, at the municipal military office and at the job service agency. 

These are dangerous times. If you raise your voice to protest or even just to make yourself heard, you risk your life: the police, the carabinieri, and the fascists kill girls and boys like me every day on the streets. In the space of a few years, they killed Franco Serantini, Claudio Varalli, Giannino Zibecchi, Alceste Campanile, Francesco Lorusso, Roberto Franceschi, Giorgiana Masi, Walter Rossi, Fausto Tinelli, Lorenzo Iannucci, and many, many others. A list of deaths as long as Italy itself. They were all guilty of being young and not resigned. Perhaps for you these are just distant words, people you don’t know, faceless names that mean little or nothing, but for me each one is a cut across my heart that has not healed in fifty years. 

Autumn and winter of 1977 at university were peaceful, mainly because many of our teachers were more left-wing than us: behind the lecterns were partisan couriers and people who had lived through and built the Resistance, experimenters, writers and translators of poets, artists and frequenters of artists. Venice is not like Rome, Milan, or Bologna: there were a few assemblies, but no Molotov cocktails or balaclavas, no trade unionists to scold us from a stage, and no tanks hunting for subversives among the gondolas and tourists. In Venice there is just fog, and the city is being dismantled in silence, brick by brick. 

I decide to drop out of university at the beginning of my second year – because of my declaration of conscientious objection, I had been kindly warned at the police station that I would never be allowed to teach at school. Before returning home, I stop at the employment office and accept a job as a laborer at the same factory where my father worked, a job offered by a subcontracted maintenance company. My father gets really angry. He almost puts his hands on me: he doesn’t want me working in the factory at all. He yells at me that he wants a different future for me than his own, and he hugs me desperately, bathing me in his tears.

My twenties are dark gray and dirty, with a suffocating chemical stench and a soundtrack of unbearably loud noise. Every day I find myself forced to choose between unemployment and illegal work, between red flags and dropouts, between the first joints made with weed grown secretly behind the house and the dealers who give you the first dose for free (but only the first) and ride around on souped-up mopeds with pockets bulging with money, between a rally in the square and roadblocks on the highway, between pacifism and violent far left formations, between ecological recycling and polluted air, between running away or staying at home. 

Our band falls apart when Roberto is handed his draft card, of which he tells us about on the day before leaving. After a long silence, we learn that he has been admitted to the military hospital in Padua. Then they send him home, but he no longer seems like himself: you talk to him and he stays silent and stares into the distance through the walls. He has dismantled his noise machine. 
Mauro and I try to keep the band together for a while, but one day he decides to focus on his studies. With the help of a friend of mine who rather clumsily tries his hand at building guitars, I assemble (body, neck, mechanics, and pickups from four different sources) a fretless electric bass and soon find a place in another band. They are nice and very good. Our songs are complicated and bizarre, but the overall sound is a little too soft and prog-rock oriented for my taste. But who cares, Marco, who cares: rock on with those four strings.

According to the TV news, there was a new world war underway: punk. And judging by the presenter’s scandalized expression, “who cares” should have been punk’s keyword. 
The truth is that the young people in town know nothing about it: punk doesn’t make it into the left wing press and doesn’t get played on free radio stations. Johnny Rotten and those other idiots mocking us from the pages of newspapers were just ridiculous: we all had plenty of firsthand experience of delinquency, hooliganism, misfortune, malaise, rebellion, discomfort, and profanity. We didn’t need those stupid English punks to know how bad things were.

I had bought Patti Smith’s early albums because it felt like my sister was singing on them. I stole a seven-inch single by Television and then bought “Marquee moon” because Tom Verlaine sounded like a brother I had been separated from at birth. The Clash’s debut album arrived like a comet star high in the sky when I, and all of us youngsters in town, were up to our necks in shit. I’m no longer used to looking up, so I don’t know anything about it until a kid who hangs out at the radio station dares to play “God Save the Queen” and “White Riot,” two fucking songs from two fucking records that an aunt had given him after a short trip to London. The members of the radio station editorial office give him hell: punk is nothing but fascist music that must stay off our airwaves, they declare. I did not agree. I thought that fascists and anarchists were two very different shades of black. 

Time passes quickly, always dark gray and dirty. It’s already 1979, and I really, really, really need to breathe and dream and let off steam and get some air and sky and music and get away. 
I’m among those who break into the city sports arena to see Fabrizio de André¹ with PFM, but I leave disappointed. I need to find my place in the world, whether it’s in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow, come on. Every night I dream of buying a black Fender Jazz Bass and then climbing over the fences of the ring road and hitchhiking to go and play who knows where. Instead, I decide to stay at home and look after my parents, whose health is getting worse and worse. 

That summer, a friend returning from a short trip to London gives me a Crass record and, holy shit, within half an hour all my beliefs about music, how to make it and why to make it, are shattered. I go to a Patti Smith concert in Bologna, slipping into the crowd without anyone at the entrance asking me for a ticket. I find a steady job, and not in a factory. I turn twenty-two. After less than six months, I decide to stop playing music. 

“…As my father grew old, I did become close to him in a way. Once he needed me and I no longer needed him, an easier familiarity became possible. He passed many years in assisted living, needing ever greater assistance, so the tables were turned, in the way that life’s
rhythm dictates for parents and their children. But in a fundamental way I kept my distance. For one thing, he had been in and out of mental hospitals with depression so bad he became dissociative. So you never knew if having a real conversation with him about difficult topics would set off another crisis.One day the phone rang and it was him, calling from a hospital
where he was recovering from surgery. 
“Bob, I have had a lot of time to think and reflect on my life while lying in this bed, and I think I owe you an apology.”
“Really? For what?”
“There was a time I spanked you too hard. It has been weighing on my mind. It was too hard.”
“Oh, come on Dad, don’t worry about it.”
That’s not your problem anymore, I thought. It’s mine…” (excerpts from “Encounters with men”)

I would say let’s stop here. I think you have now built up a sufficient overview to tackle the reading of “Creative life”. Thinking it would be useful, I also translated other excerpts from recent interviews, but I am convinced that they do not add much to these notes. The book is a collection of writings by Bob Ostertag, most of which have already been published in American magazines but are completely unpublished in Italy. 

The book exudes human warmth and appeal: there is an interesting piece on “Art and Politics after September 11” that is perfectly clear and understandable even to us Europeans, an account of Ostertag’s journalistic activities in Central America at the time of the Sandinista revolution (when the only commentary that reached our part of the world at the time was those two or three lines on “Washington Bullets” by The Clash – a fact I have reflected on at length), and an excerpt from the diary of his trip to Eastern Europe at the time of the war in the Balkans. The fourth and final chapter of the book is full of considerations and points for discussion on the relationship between music and machines. 

Very often, if not always, Bob writes with his heart in his hands. His reflections are enlightening and relatable: it is easy to see that they are not boring and distant theoretical writings, but rather suggestions to open our eyes and finally start thinking, to notice the hidden connections, if not the explicit and subtle strategies that power uses to stay alive and crush us. I would say that this is a very useful manual for venturing to see the world in depth without being content to float on the surface. 

“…I’m not an artist that’s excited about technology. There’s many artists who look at computer technology and think, “Yeah, computers will set us free.” And this is not me at all in any way… I use it. I’m attracted to it. But I don’t worship it… I think technology is very ambiguous. Many negative things and many positive things. But more than anything, technology is everywhere. It’s everywhere… It’s just something that’s become like the air we breathe. It’s everywhere… And so to be an artist in 1999, at least in the United States, I feel somehow we have to address technology. New technologies are now part of everybody’s everyday life in the United States, but I think new technologies have become part of life in Yugoslavia in a very different way. Yeah, definitely. New technology is also part of the way they are leading wars… But I really did not want to come to the Balkans as an arrogant American who thought he understood everything and just was coming to show everybody the wonderful thing he made in the United States. I really don’t want to do this… A thing that really motivated me to make the piece was watching the war and realizing that because the war has become so technological, there’s no contact, no communication between the soldiers on one side and the soldiers on the other side. They’re 30,000 ft in the air or they’re all the way on some ship in the ocean pressing buttons, they don’t even see… Um, it’s not a piece that places blame on one person or another person. It’s not a piece that attempts to convince you that somebody is right and somebody is wrong, but it’s a piece about the shocking fact that American technology has reached the point that for Americans waging war is like playing a game. So there is a distinctive social message in it… And I use images from the war in Yugoslavia, I use computer game images and I use the images that are on the screens of American airplanes and tanks and they all look the same… But I think if I’m going to make a piece about this and I’m not going to try to do it here, then what am I doing? So, you have to take a risk. And sometimes if you’re going to be honest with art, then you have to take a risk…” (excerpts from a Radio FreeB92 interview, Belgrade 1999)

Marco Pandin
stella_nera@tin.it 

¹ Fabrizio De André (1940-1999), a widely popular Italian singer-songwriter. An openly anarchist and a peace activist, he was watched and filed by the police since the beginning of his music career in the early Sixties. Some of his songs were censored and were refused airplay at the national radio and television, but were regularily airplayed at the Vatican Radio. After his death, by popular demand, many streets, squares, theaters, libraries and schools were named after him.