Sloppy
Larry "Wild Man" Fischer
Watching the documentary Derailroaded last night, I was pondering the relationship between space and creativity. Bill Mumy described following Fischer around on the city streets recording him with a stereo microphone as he composed his songs. He would take them back to the studio later to create backing tracks and clean them up. One of the things I always remembered about Slim was his resistance to “cleaning things up”— Slim always wanted to leave the dirt there. It wasn’t just a matter of sloppy craft (as some people took it). It was more a matter of maintaining the genuine article rather than simulated perfection—it was a punk attitude.
Looking at this picture today, I keep thinking about the tendency of photographs to provide an “excess of fact” (a phrase from Lee Friedlander I keep trying to track down). I got it wrong when I wrote about Helen Liggett’s presentation at C&W 2007, calling it a “surplus of fact.” I do think excess is better. Surfing around looking at discussions of Friedlander, I’m amazed by the large number of people who just don’t get him. I suppose it’s a search for a simple message (like the one displayed above) rather than a complex construction that people are often drawn to. But there’s another way these questions might be framed.
