Drawing Fire
Artist Derek Hess is leaping into the national spotlight with visions of apocalyptic music
by Anastasia Pansios (January 4, 1995, Cleveland FREE Times)
Joe McTighe of Craw leans on his microphone stand tipped at a dangerous angle over the rim of the low Euclid tavern stage. His voice dips from a wild cackle into a low howl as his slippery eyes roll up towards the brim of his battered hat. Firm, precise, rhythms and yammering guitars swell up and then drop away, leaving the listener with no ground to stand on, no musical compass. Welcome to the underground, the real alternative music. Bands like Craw, and Jesus Lizard, and tar, and season to risk, have gone beyond whining about alienation from a world that doesn't understand them. They've created a world so harsh and sinister, it might scare you out of the room.
For those who like to explore dangerous musical terrain, Monday night, Euclid Tavern is the place to be. The small, pleasantly scruffy club with its tin tiled roof and Mardi Gras posters boasts of being the setting of a Michael J. Fox movie nearly a decade ago. But its real impact on the area music scene comes from those Mondays, which creates a musical cauldron simmering diverse, even incompatible musical ingredients. From the burly roar of touring bands like season to risk, helmet, or the cows, the low tech roots rock a flat duo jets, the sketchbook pop of Zuzu's petals, or hazel, to the engaging clamor of Japan's boredoms, or the reckless punkability of southern culture on the skids. The concert series has also encompassed free wheeling, noisy, or experimental local bands like craw, screw tractor, prison shake, sissy, psychobilly Cadillac, and Hucklebuck. It's not what you'll hear on the commercial radio being touted as alternative. It really is alternative.
Imagine translating the sonic world into visual terms so that it can be seen and felt and maybe even understood by those outside that world. It requires a special person, someone who not only has talent, but someone who has lived with the music until it is in his bones, someone who sees this music as an extension of his own thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and nightmares.
That person was sitting at the front door of the Euclid Tavern most Monday nights from March 1990 until early this past year. Collecting the cover charge. A soft-spoken man with close cropped blonde hair, Derek Hess is known nationally among managers and agents who work with the noisy offbeat bands as a man of open-minded tastes and fair business practices. Even though he's easing out of the booking business, some of those agents still call him and ask him to book their bands in Cleveland, but right now, he's got another priority. his art.
Until recently, telephone polls and record store windows have been Hess's main outlet for his talents, where the white 8.5 by 14 flyers he created to promote his shows were displayed. For a young artist whose work springs from an underground culture, it's a direct pipeline to the audience, the art speaks to, and about. Certainly rock concert posters are about as populist as art can be. The only question in some cases is whether some of them are really art at all. But these days, not too many people are questioning whether the work of Cleveland poster artist Derek Hess is “really” art, nor do they doubt that he has captured the spirit of a certain segment of the community that is setting the tone for much of today's popular culture. With his 1st solo show opening this Friday at the William Buster Gallery in Little Italy, Hess is ready to announce his arrival to the world outside the underground music community.
The secret of Hess' growing success is that he has been able to harness a pair of tornadoes: his own prodigious talent and the national resurgence of rock concert poster art, which began a couple years ago, roughly paralleling the emergence and subsequent mainstreaming of alternative music. The new generation of poster artists – the cream of the crop anyway – who toiled in obscurity and poverty in the late 80s, are now starting to get media recognition. While their work is commanding prices more appropriate to work in art galleries than a grateful dead poster in your local record store. Hess has already joined the ranks of poster artists like San Francisco's Frank Kozic (the trailblazer blazer for this new wave) and Detroit's Mark Arminsky, whose work is the most in demand across the country, as his inclusion in a June 18 piece in Newsweek on concert poster art attests.
Hess' first collectors were kids who picked up his work in area record stores and tacked it to their wall, recognizing early on a special element in his work, the ability to visually interpret the musical genre. and its practitioners. To them, it was immediately clear that these carefully hand drawn flyers, with their dark, elaborate visual puns, spoke a special language.
The story of Derek Hess, the artist, actually began a long time ago. It's not like he noticed a bunch of concert posters on a phone pole one day and said, “That's neat. I think I’ll try that,” as he reached for scissors and a stack of magazines. Hess was reaching for the crayons as a toddler, when his arts minded parents (his father who died last summer, taught industrial design at the Cleveland Institute of Art) encouraged him to draw whenever he complained of boredom. By the sixth grade, he was taking Saturday art classes. By high school, he was starting to get derailed. “I developed other interests,” he says ruefully, “like drinking and drugs. It got to be a real problem for me.”
Graduating from Vermilion High School, he enrolled at the institute. Ironically, his father's position there allowed him to alternate between being a budding artist and a blossoming fuck up. “It became easy for me to use [drugs] because dad was there. I knew I could always take time off and come back next semester. I was taking a lot of things for granted. My transcripts tell a real good story of that time – 1983 - 1987.”
Among the things that Hess was doing in the mid 80s was hanging out at the Euclid Tavern. “Jerry Suhar did his one man band every Monday, and all the art students used to go there and get stupid,” recalls Hess. “Many nights I came home as the birds were singing, and I didn't make it to my Tuesday classes.”
In 1987, Hess decided his partying was out of control and blamed it on his surroundings, as well as the fact that at CIA, he would be required to get a grounding in fundamentals before going into his chosen nature graphics. So he transferred to the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Once there, he realized that the problem was in him and not his environment. He also luckily discovered that the school had an AA program specifically for artists. Though he says no one incident propelled him to clean up his act, more of a constant scraping bottom, quote, he joined up and went on the wagon. He'll be sober 6 years come January 16th.
After that, “I poured all my energy into my work. I realized graphics wasn't what I wanted to do. I had said I wanted to do it, so it sounded like I had a goal, but my real goal had been my next drink.” He found that his interest ran more towards fine arts than graphics and returned to CIA to take advantage of its outstanding fine arts program and print making department. He no longer felt compelled to get a degree. Instead, he audited classes in order to have access to the studios where he began creating lithographs.
Cleveland's underground music scene wasn't exactly flourishing when Hess returned to Cleveland in the spring of 1989. Local bands, who weren't doing mainstream, crowd pleasing music were pretty much out of luck when it came to bookings. Touring bands whose styles were non-mainstream, sometimes played Babylon A Go Go up the street from the West Side Market. But its booking policies were erratic, and it often passed on some of the harsher underground bands on labels like Amphetamine Reptile – music almost entirely unknown to the average music fan in the pre-Nirvana late 80s.
Hess took an apartment above the tavern when he moved back to Cleveland and was doing odd jobs at the club to earn money. Early in 1990, he proposed to the tavern owners to take over their Monday nights. Jerry Suhar's loyal following had graduated, and those nights were no longer doing well. Hess proposed to book some of the bands that, unbeknownst to the world at large, were laying the foundation for the alternative music of the ‘90s.
Meanwhile, down in Texas and out on the west coast, a whole new concert poster art scene was just starting to happen. Austin, Texas, with its concentration of clubs and musical acts, was its hub. It was from there that the towering presence of the new movement emerged. Frank Kazak noted for his brazen day glow colors and sharp, punchy cartoon like figures, created a style aped by countless young poster artists, Derek Hess emphatically not among them. Kozik's work 1st began to appear on handbills in Austin in the mid 80s. By the early ‘90s, his silk screen posters were starting to attract attention and imitators. Not since the explosion of hippie psychedelic art in the mid to late 60s, has there been so much art revolving around rock music and its culture? Eventually, the posters became collectible with some Koziks fetching up to $600.
Of course, when Hess started his shows at the Euc, he didn't know he was joining an about-to-explode art movement. He just knew that he needed to promote his shows. He had no money, and he had his art training, so, he began to turn out the fliers that became so familiar in record stores and on bulletin boards and poles around Cleveland's East Side.
His fliers were clearly in a different league. From most ripe from the start, because they were based on his own draftsmanship rather than executed via cut and paste methods. His long years of training, he says, allowed him to concentrate on developing the concepts that have made his work so striking. “Knowing that drawing comes easily means I can focus on content. I don't have to struggle with the figures, so my creative energy is freed up to focus on content.”
Although he was doing lithographs at CIA when he began doing work on his own, he had neither the means nor the space to install the equipment needed to do litho work. So, he evolved a drafting style full of small strokes that simulates the appearance of lithography, first drawing his image in pen and ink, then photo stating his original work and scratching on the photostat paper with a razor blade. (He has recently been using sandpaper as well at the suggestion of another artist.)
Last fall, Hess reached a turning point. His flyers were starting to create a buzz around the country, disseminated by the touring bands (and their managers, agents, and record companies) who came through the club, and offers to do other projects were starting to come his way. Marty Geramita, a young Texan who was a concert poster collector/dealer with a business called Altered Images in Austin, moved up to Northeast Ohio in the fall of 1993, feeling that the Texas market was tapped out, and there was no room for his business to grow there. He'd heard of two Cleveland artists. Clay Parker and Hess – and he had only heard of Hess, never seen his work. “I figured when I got there, I'd look for him. I picked up some of his stuff in record stores and said, this is amazing. How could somebody not recognize this?” He contacted Hesk, asking him if he'd done any posters. Hess ruefully told him he couldn't afford to, and Marty offered to bankroll him.
It was like opening the floodgates, starting with a color silk screen poster for a Cows/Pop Defect/ dimbulb show at the Euclid Tavern in October of 1993, Hess began to turn out such posters at a prodigious rate. Offers started coming to him from concert promoters such as Belkin Productions in Cleveland and Texas’ Pace Productions, from magazines like Your Flesh and Planet, and from bands he'd become friends with over years who were doing CDs like Craw and Bluto's Revenge. It became clear to him that he needed to seize the day, and he arranged to pass the booking of the Euclid Tavern shows on to Chris Anderson, a local musician.
Geramita sort of laments that poster art has become big business in Austin. People aren't doing it for the love of it like they were in the late 80s when they didn't get paid. I'm sure the quality of the work is better, but the feeling isn't there. The combination of band and artwork. Derek combines the 2 better than anyone I've ever seen. He's not in it for the money. He's in it because he loves the music.”
The exhibition at the William Busta Gallery represents a culmination of a feverish year of work for Hess. Bill Buster says, It's not like a band where you come out and work your way up. For an artist, the 1st show attracts the most attention. With national poster aficionados already paying attention to Hess's masterful, detailed work, it seems likely that his, that this show will only enhance his reputation as it brings together Hess's various constituencies, art lovers, musicians, and music fans.
Busta says, “I would have been happy if a year ago, he had said to me, he could have 16 posters ready in a year for an exhibition. I never would have believed he'd have 32!” Hess's own explanation, “I’m very much trying to make up for lost time, to forgive myself for wasting time – to take responsibility for my talent.”
Bill Busta actually discovered Hess's work years ago, right about the time when Hess was starting to do his flyers. He spotted some of Hess's lithographs at Pentagon Gallery, a frame shop he uses. He put the word out that he'd like to get in touch with Hess and soon had the lithographs available in his gallery. A couple years ago, Busta pitched the idea to SPACES Gallery of doing a show called Cleveland X, of younger area artists. One of the artists he suggested for the show was Hess, who was accepted to the exhibition based only on his fliers; when the artists were selected for the show, which opened in December of 1993, Hess had yet to do a color silk screen poster.
By the time the show opened, he had four on display. He also did the show's flyer, of which a special edition poster was made. Printed by another artist in the show, Bryn Zellers, whose company, Blast Furnace Press, does most of Hess' silk screening. Says Busta, “I know people who would go into record stores to pick up his fliers, who would never listen to the music. The image and graphics were that striking. It's obvious to anyone who looks at it that Hess, excuse me, that Derek, has created a vocabulary that makes a culture and a feeling of youth concrete. He communicates in such a way that people far from the culture can understand it, and grasp it, and cheer it on. It's inclusive, not exclusive.”
A major factor in Hess's growing acclaim is the perfect mesh of his personal style and that of the underground music that emerged in the early 90s. Hess's strong but struggling, threatened and threatening figures in cryptic but clearly unfriendly environments and situations already appeared in his work before he began drawing concert fliers. Perhaps the inner conflicts that produced such work also attracted him to the music. Hes has evolved a world defined by his personal iconography. Excuse me, iconology. Sinuously musical figures. Excuse me, I gotta start this sentence over. Perhaps the inner conflicts that produce such work also attracted him to the music. Hess has evolved a world defined by his personal iconology, sinuously muscular figures, frequently shackled, menaced by anthropomorphic machinery, attackers whose identity is hidden under helmets, malevolent angels, or angry dogs.
“I’ve developed my own language of images. I use cupids a lot. I like underwear showing, baggy jeans, football helmets,” says Hess.
The recurring images, sometimes inhabiting a barren landscape, reminiscent of the surrealists, especially, DeChirico, perfectly reflect the aggressive stance of such bands as Helmet, Season To Risk, and Tar, and the jagged soundscapes of Cop Shoot Cop, Pain Teens, Jesus Lizard, or Craw. He speaks of a modern world full of threats and dangers that aren't always the obvious ones, like the vague fear of crime in the abstract that keep people prisoners in their homes, separating them from each other.
Occasionally, as one might expect, Hess's irreverent underground attitude collides with mainstream sensibilities. One of his memorable Euclid Avern Euclid Tavern flyers was for show by Washington, D.C. band, Shudder to Think. Though the flyer wasn't widely seen because the tour was postponed and the date canceled. It featured a Barney like animal in a Nirvana T-shirt with a hole in its head and a shotgun propped beside it, and the slogan, “Eddie Is a Poser Until He Pulls the Trigger.” Pearl Jam's handlers were allegedly extremely upset and made inquiries about taking action against Hess. They just couldn't figure out what action they might take. Another Hess flyer for a cannibal corpse show in Morgantown, West Virginia, was spotted on a phone pole and sent to the mayor, who arranged to have the show canceled. Apparently, the band's name and its music, undiluted death metal of the most abrasive sort, weren't enough to trigger a response, but Hess's poster with an angel being pulled from the sky by devils who pull its wings apart was a flashpoint.
The explosive power in his figures derives twin childhood passions for figure drawing and superhero comic book art. Though in Hess's world, that power is often frustrated, bound up, held at bay. Something of an anti intellectual when it comes to taste in art, Hess acknowledges that when his art school classmates listed impressive rosters of artistic influences, he'd come up with comic book artists like Gil Kane (who drew Hulk, Atom, Flash, and Green Lantern in the early
‘70s). “His stuff really flows,” says Hess of Kane. “That's the way the body moves. Now, a lot of comic artists just draw steroid freaks. They're not looking underneath at how the muscle is attached to the skeleton, how a muscle pulling on one side of the body pulls a muscle on the other side of the body.” He's also attracted to fantastical artists like Bosch and Brugal and the neorealism of British 70s album art company Hipgnosis. A long-time heavy metal buff, he even picked up a few pointers from metal art, though often more in the not-to-do vein.
The dense, angry post-punk post-metal sound that Hess's posters most frequently illustrate can be mean, menacing, and turgid, but it sometimes evinces a twisted sense of humanity, which Hess expresses in sophisticated visual puns. His guided by voices poster, for instance, featured a blind figure with a cane, around whose head fluttered an angel, an angelic and demonic Cupid, whispering in his ears.
The color palette, his silk screens, display is also unique among concert poster artists, rather than the bam, pow, primaries, and eye grabbing neons favored by many poster artists, has favors browns, grays, golds, subtle blues, and murky pastels, moody colors. “The colors are from my own experience, more environment oriented. I think the image should carry the poster and the color should complement it. I use a lot of grays. I look out my window, and that's what I see. I'm from Cleveland. I lived in Detroit. People here struggle against the environment.”
Admirers of Hess' work always get back to one point. His mastery of the ability to tell a band's “story” in a single gripping image that draws the viewer in and translates the band's music into terms even non-fans will understand. “This is an exciting way to express the feel of the music and my view of the human condition,” says Hess.
Backer Geramita feels Hess is hitting the mark. “There’ll never be anyone who can capture the spirit of a band in a single image like Derek can.” Geramita also compares Hess to poster king Frank Kozik. “I look at Frank's stuff and it's good, but it's instantly gratifying. It's right in your face. Derek's stuff is also gratifying, but I think in the long haul, you appreciate his stuff more.”
As one of Hess's biggest boosters, Bill Busta analyzes his work through the eyes of the art world in Northeast Ohio. “There's nothing to compare Derek's work with in the 30 years I've been observing the scene, says Busta. Nothing that approaches this strength. I'm not interested in rock posters. I'm interested in Derek's work because it stands out from everything of its type that's ever been done here.”