When I first met the pioneering avant-garde musician Tony Conrad, who passed this weekend, he was dressed entirely in marine green. This was almost 20 years ago now, when I was a new graduate student at the University of Buffalo. I’d been accepted into the English program, but was teaching undergrads in the media studies department because I’d made films while I was living in Canada. I had a meeting with Tony, I think because of my interest and background in noise and experimental music, and because he was the head of the department for people like me, even if that wasn’t his official title.
I was familiar with Tony’s work with La Monte Young and John Cale in the Theatre of Eternal Music, his associations with the Velvet Underground, and his collaborations with Jack Smith. I knew about his 1966 film,The Flicker, though at that time I hadn’t seen it. (Later, I took my English 101 students to see Tony speak about and screen it; most of them said it made them want to die.) I knew enough about him to be nervous about the meeting. It turns out I didn’t know enough about him because I expected him to be serious, pretentious, dressed in black. Instead, this man with a welcoming face and huge smile, his head slightly too big for his body, came in wheeling his bike, dressed from head to ankle in pale bright green, welcoming me with a pat on the shoulder and a hearty handshake.
Tony and I hit it off. I took a few classes with him and he was ultimately my thesis advisor, but we also collaborated on projects and I worked for him a few days a week out of his Livingston Street house. He was writing a book about “the history of music.” I’m not sure what happened to it, but as he wrote it and bounced ideas off me, I ended up learning about martial music, French minuets, Pythagoras, Angus MacLise, and traditional Hawaiian dance. We’d take breaks and drink coffee. He hated that I used sugar in mine, and so he loaned me a book from the 1970s called Sugar Blues, about the evils of sugar. After that, he’d only let me use honey or syrup if I wanted sweetener in my coffee. Nowadays, I drink it unsweetened and black. And there are still foods that remind me of Tony on a daily basis. He’s the only person I know who, instead of butter, would freeze olive oil, and scrape it off onto bread.
During those days of work, Tony would play old tapes from music he’d made with La Monte Young in the '60s. This was in the late '90s, around the time that his feud about authorship and collaboration with Young had become something people were talking about again, and the label Table of the Elements was releasing associated music with Tony’s help. Young didn’t want the music they’d made in the '60s to be released. Tony disagreed with the Western notion of “the composer” or authorship and was pro collaboration, so he started recreating the old music himself and letting people hear it that way. (At one point, later, he picketed a Young performance.) The feud culminated in 2000 with the release of Inside the Dream Syndicate, Vol. 1: Day of Niagara, which featured a bootleg of music Conrad made with Young, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Marian Zazeela in 1965. Incensed, Young wrote a 27-page essay about it.
While this was happening, Tony was playing me the actual tapes, including audio of him, Young, Marian Zazeela, and others, singing an old folk song during Thanksgiving— I remember it being “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” but it was a long time ago, and I’m not completely sure. He also played me practice tapes from the Velvet Underground. Part of my job was to archive the things he owned, so I listened to and watched it all.
I was in my early twenties, basically a kid, and I was spending hours a day with a genius—someone who’d done so many things in so many different areas. I’m not sure I completely grasped how lucky I was to be in that position. I had a band at the time, Tree Lined Highway, and we’d play shows with Tony in Brooklyn. He loaned me an amp. After our first show, he said he had thought we would suck, but that we were actually pretty good. He suggested we go on tour.
He was just always present. There was a video event in Buffalo where Tony vamped inside a porno image he’d green-screened himself into. He and I would put on LPs in his living room and make our own noise over it with instruments he’d built himself. I was his camera person for a public access show he was shooting which involved me putting on this kind of homemade steadycam he’d made, and we’d wander around Buffalo as he asked random people questions. It never aired. As my friend Tom put it earlier today, Tony had “genius to burn,” and it could be hard to keep up.
We worked together, but we were also friends. We had Thanksgiving together. He’d come over to bring me books, and vice versa. We screened videos. When my partner and I at the time moved, he helped. He insisted on carrying a chair up the back stairs by himself and smashed it. I think he may have broken a dresser drawer, too. We tried to record a version of Dylan Thomas’ radio play Under Milk Wood—we’d meet with a bunch of friends on the weekends and do our parts. Nothing ever came of it, but those recording sessions (in a room, onto a DAT), were a blast. He led me and a bunch of friends on a protest across the Peace Bridge. I think we were against the Free Trade Agreement. He suggested we all wear all red so people thought we were communist.
A key thing Tony taught me was to not overthink things. It’s more important to keep busy creating, because once you finished making something, you had plenty of time to think about it, and learn from it. That’s part of the reason I decided not to pursue a PhD—I wanted to get out of school and make things in the world. Tony also kept things light and funny. My friend David and I often talk about the time Tony projected an image of himself onto one of his collaborator Tony Oursler’s cut-outs, and pretended to be a baby. As a small class of grad students laughed uncontrollably, he whined, “I’ve soiled myself— someone change my diaper.” He taught me to be serious, but not to take myself too seriously.
After I left Buffalo, Tony and I still collaborated on a few things. The highlight was in 2009. My friend Brody Condon and I organized an art piece, a six-hour reading of William Gibson’s Neuromancer at the New Museum, complete with a gamelan band to signify virtual reality and some cubist set design that we moved around between scenes. The readers were supposed to be uninflected; no acting or enunciating. They didn’t have to sound bored, necessarily, but they should just be even and almost not there. Everyone followed this direction except for Tony. Each time he read, he’d overact, chew the scenery, make everyone in the crowd (and crew) laugh. It honestly ended up being the best part of the piece, and I don’t think he did it to be a dick—he realized we needed him to be Tony, and he was right.
When I was first dating Jane, the woman I eventually married, she met Tony at No Fun Fest during a Wolf Eyes set. He’d snuck in a bottle of rum in his suit jacket. I was writing about the show so I wasn’t drinking, but Tony kept offering Jane sips instead. She assumed he was drinking from the bottle as well, but he wasn’t, so she ended up half asleep on a bench for the last part of the night.
Years later, my old band was asked to play a reunion show in Buffalo, so I traveled up there with Jane and pretended to be a rock star for a night. Tony came to the show. He’d just had his first surgery for prostate cancer and was wearing pajamas. He spent the night sitting in a booth, making jokes, and being the same Tony I’d known before he’d gotten sick. It meant a lot to me that he ventured out that night, when he clearly wasn’t feeling his best. And he taught me a lot by facing sickness with such grace.
I didn’t see Tony much over the past couple of years. As I said, one thing I learned from him was to make things, to never be complacent or stagnant, and so as he juggled his dozens of projects, I juggled mine. I also went from a freewheeling kid in his twenties to a grown-up with a wife and two kids. The last time I saw him, I was coming out of the pet food store on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he flew past on his bike. I was going to yell out his name, but figured I’d see him again soon, and he looked like he had somewhere to be. When my old bandmate Mike Bouquard, who teaches now at UB, reached out and told me Tony was dying, I was shocked, because it felt like I’d only just seen him that day on his bike. I quickly wrote Tony an email, telling him I loved him, and that I’d learned so much from him, and that I hoped he’d be OK. I guess I didn’t realize how serious it was. A couple of days later, Mike wrote and told me Tony was dead.
Hearing that, I of course wished I’d called out his name one last time, and that we’d been able to catch up again. He would have laughed that funny laugh and given me one of his strong hugs, and we’d have gone our separate ways. But, all said, the more I think about it, that's a good way to remember him: In motion, standing up on the pedals, weaving through traffic, and then disappearing from my sight onto something else.