Plankism

Bum-pa-bum-pa-bum-pa. For me these are such welcoming sounds. Scot was so excited about this racket. This is once again “Plank Road,” one of Scot’s final musical collaborations—this one a rich one with our neighbor, singer-song-writer, John Williams. This is John’s song, “Crack in the Liberty Bell.”

Scot didn’t take the absolute usual musical track. As a teen he liked art jazz—didn’t care so much about the roots. He did circle around to it through the Rockabilly revival that formed in the wake of Brian Seltzer and the Stray Cats in the late 1980’s.

We got to see um—The Stray Cats, that is. They sure made made ya feel like going on a rockabilly prowl. After going on tour playing drums for a C & W band, and fronting bands—being a showman (Funhouse), being an acknowledged composer (Headlands), and jumping on the wave of the surrealistic power trio (Folklore), he finally came to the blues.

He got hooked up playing drums for a blues outfit working on Grant Avenue in North Beach in San Francisco called the El Dorados. (Somebody famous came out of this band by the name of Joe Lewis Walker.) When we moved to Bloomington Indiana in 1995, Scot began checking out blues and roots music from the library. He had a period of wood-shedding. Playing along to records and then is keyboard improvisations—no bands. We were very engaged with the art fair business at the time.

Today’s artwork is a piece I pulled out of a whole folder of artwork that Scot created as illustrations for magazines. I choose this one because I just realized that my whole entry from yesterday was gone. Poof! I believe I probably deleted it by accident. This picture perfectly illustrates how that makes me feel. It’s hard enough to do it once.

Back in the early 1990’s Scot began doing artwork for a San Francisco based magazine publishing company called Miller Freedman who put together: Guitar Player, Bass Player, Drums and Drumming, EQ (home recording). The illustration combines original graphics (the figure) and collage (the boxes), air brushing (the black spatters), permanent color maker and acrylic wash. The original piece of artwork would then be sent in, under tissue paper, to the art director.