Collages, Winston Smith, and How Punk Rock Found/Saved Me
A book that actually changed my life...
I’m pressing a record of songs I wrote and recorded over the period of the year right before the pandemic lockdown began. This will be the first time—and I’ve been playing music since high school—that I’ve ever properly released anything. I’ve burned CDs at home and done digital releases, but this feels different, real. I’m excited to do this, and I’m at a point in my life, where I can afford to do it. I would, however, like to break even on the release. Anybody can press a record and end up with hundreds of copies in a closet. I’m trying to see if I can actually sell most of them and make my money back. We’ll see.
The world is flooded with practically free music, so I’m doing a few things to make it worth the $25 to buy this record. More details to come on the music itself and other bonuses that will come to album-purchasers, but for today I wanted to feature the collages. Every copy of the record will come with an original collage that I’ve assembled—unless, and I reserve the right to fall back to this option—it turns out that churning out 200ish original collages is more than I can do by the time the record comes out (which is looking like May). In that case, I’ll do prints of collages and insert one print per record.
I started making collages more-or-less in the style of the ones that will come with the album in high school, around the time I started playing guitar. I’m not sure why I started. It might have been an art-class assignment, but that seems unlikely. In any case, I pulled an image of a pile of skulls out of an old Nat Geo—still one of my favorite sources for collage images—and put it in a collage. Some time later that school year, my art teacher checked out a bunch of art books from the local college library for us to use in putting together reports on artists—or something.
I immediately gravitated to this book by Winston Smith.
In addition to the critique of Christianity and capitalism (a pairing I was already finding incompatible) embedded in the cover image, there was even a collage that included that same image of a pile of skulls I had used in my collage!
This book proved to be a very important gateway for me.1 See, Winston Smith (who takes his nom du plume from the main character of George Orwell’s 1984) was the visual artist for a whole bunch of punk bands, including the Dead Kennedys—whose iconic logo he designed.
I was immediately transfixed by the radical subversion of the messages conveyed in American magazines that encouraged jingoism, consumerism, conservatism, and lots of other -isms, I was ready, at that age, to lash out against. The fact that this visual art was allied with a whole host of music with the same artistic and political perspective was even better. It’s because of Winston Smith and this book that I got into the first wave of punk, even though I was about twenty years too late. I’m grateful for that. I got really deeply into the Ramones and DK in particular just a couple years after The Year Punk Broke, and a couple years before pop-punk would start topping the charts.
I’m saying all this because the collages I make, examples below, are informed by my own sensibility, but are largely just pale imitations of the bolt of lighting I got from Winston Smith. It’s a magic I am deeply grateful for that from his studio in San Francisco his work reached me in the horrible one-stop-light rural Georgia town where I was living (Bowdon). Shout out to Bowdon! You suck!
People say books changed their lives all the time, and it’s usually ridiculous hyperbole. This one actually did.
Some of the collages I’m putting together for the record are below, and I’ll put a few more, including some NSFW ones on the paid feed:
Fun fact: I actually own the very copy of the book from the local collage library. After my art teacher returned it, my miscreant friend, who knew how much the book meant to me, stole it from the library by throwing it out the window. I wasn’t there, but he brought the book to me at school, complete with damage from the multi-story fall. I drifted apart from that friend by the end of high school, and a couple years later he died from a drug overdose.