-I've been on the road as a tour manager for 36 years
and I spend a lot of my time sitting at my desk
waiting for the phone to ring or for another
email to come in.
So I've always found some other little craft
or kept sketchbooks to keep my time.
This is a kind of a culmination of everything
that all of us have done on the road together as a
as a touring team as we were trapped at work.
♪♪
as we were trapped at work.
-I always called it our golden cage
because we would be stuck in a Ritz-Carlton
and we'd just hang out and listen to music and and
and draw and make art to pass the time.
-I knew these guys as friends and artists way
before we were tour managers together.
I love the fact that he did
the same thing I did, made something out of something.
No matter where you were,
you always found the boxes or the pieces and
cobbled them together.
And probably since I met him when I was 18,
his artistic sensibility and his style and everything
he did, I, I loved.
I thought it was great.
Graphically, you were cool and you did great stuff.
And then you were doing records.
-You added to records to you.
-Yeah! -You put the graphics-
-I did, he gave me my first professional job.
On his Brad records. -He did the disc design.
-Cary and I worked together on the road
with Neil Young for years and years together.
Regan and I did the same thing.
Literally, I was probably the
the torture master at most times
because as tour manager, I always said,
we got to hang in my room, we got to be here.
We always do.
There's probably times when people could have gone
an enjoy themselves or had meals,
but I made them draw pictures and hang out with me.
♪♪ -I started
filming a lot of stuff with my phone
and getting into motion
graphics, and I spent a lot of my time
doing that on the road. -Unplug
that.
-I ended up
getting this little corridor
in my area of the gallery here.
So the piece that will show
and it's something that both of the guys reacted to
and it was
a little ad advertisement
I made for the light rail here in Seattle.
-I love this.
-This was an un-commissioned piece.
Sound Transit didn’t call you? -That's right.
Yeah.
This was this is just a moment of inspiration for me.
I was picking up
my kid who had come from SeaTac,
and we wanted to see what it was like
to take the light rail from the airport.
And it was spooky.
It was I had a kind of a not scary experience, but
it was was kind of escape from New York vibe.
-Kevin Shuss is the
fourth member of this group that's not with us today.
He's on tour with Pearl Jam at the moment,
but Kevin does a lot of stencils
and he does the drum heads so you can see up on the wall
and whatnot. He was with Alice in Chains.
He's worked with Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog.
He's been with Pearl Jam for 30 years.
-We booked this exhibit over a year ago,
so it's a culmination of a year of focus and work
getting all this stuff together.
-It’s, a pretty phenomenal opportunity for us.
-It hasn’t,
you know,
I don't know if you guys think
the same thing, but it was a year ago
was like, we have a year.
Don't worry about it.
I don't know what's happened
now, but this last week has been kind of whirlwind.
And also I've been on the road in the band that I work
with, just played here in Seattle this week.
So we were fortunate enough to do a pre-show for the folks
in Metallica this weekend and it was the first time
we were going to let anybody see what this was,
and I think we were all pretty nervous about it.
And I think they got the vibe.
They understood what it was.
You know, my stuff,
as you might see, isn't technically amazing,
but it's the idea of
where I am when I do it and how I do it.
If you're wondering where anybody’s toilet paper
went during the pandemic, I took all the rolls
and hoarded them.
I’d disassemble, you know, coat hangers in my hotel rooms
and make make mobiles. And I love music.
I always I would
love to have been in a band or, you know, musician, but I,
I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket,
but I was good at, at organizing things
and getting people places that I'm also good at,
getting them there in a good mood
and not letting them see the sweat and the stress.
♪♪ -I was doing a lot of sketching
and drawing people
and photographs that I've seen
and just practicing in my sketchbook,
drawing faces and portraits mainly.
And I went and saw
the Basquiat show in L.A., kind of inspired by that.
You know, he used a lot of oil pens in his work.
And so I bought some oil pens
and started working with them.
And that just kind of fed into,
I think I'll do portraits of my friends for this show.
And it just brought so much joy
to the dark, dreary, rainy winter days here last winter.
And and that kind of creative inspiration just lasted
for like three months doing these these paintings.
So that's how they came about. ♪♪
-I don't have a choice.
I make these robots and these crazy things because
I start thinking about them.
Then I started dreaming about them
and then I have these
panic attacks that I'm going to try to make it.
And it's not going to be what I think it's going to be.
And then I just have to sit down and do it.
So I would drive myself nuts if I didn't just keep making
stuff.
-I would like to see it grow into something
where there's a bunch of roadies
and a bunch of roadie art and history.
And because attached with each roadie is all these stories
and objects
that go along with who they are
and the bands that they work with and their history,
which to me
as you get older
stories and the history is what really intrigued
me and stay with me the most.
-There's no stopping.
It's, it's my passion.
So yeah, I'm going to continue to do it.
And I can't imagine life without it.
♪♪ -”The Golden Cage:
Trapped at Work” runs now through October 13th.
Catch Art Zone, Friday nights at eight
and anytime online at seattlechannel.org/artzone.