Interviewer: Laura Atkinson

Interviewee: Mark Reusch

Category: Arts

Genre: Poster

Keywords:

Haverhill, MA: a city in northeastern Massachusetts, on the Merrimack river. Currently, the population is about 56,500.

Massachusetts College of Art ("MassArt"): A public, free-standing college of art and design in Boston, MA.

Zombie, Rob: Born Robert Cummings in Haverhill, MA, in 1966. Frontman for band White Zombie from c. 1985 to 1999. Well-known in metal circles for his interest in horror and Halloween-related themes.

Go-go: A family of teen "craze" dances from the 1960's, including the twist and the shimmy, performed in discotheques and clubs. Go-go box: an elevated platform, usually found in clubs, upon which an individual dancer performs to elevate him- or her-self from the crowd.

The Boston Phoenix: An alternative newspaper for the New England area, started in 1966 as Boston After Dark. Expanded in 1988 and 1999 to Providence, RI and Portland, ME, respectively. Acclaimed for its reporting and arts and entertainment coverage.

--

LA: So. Um, you want to just start from the beginning? Of your life, or even your parents' general story?

MR: OK. My name is Mark Reusch. I was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1973, my dad did a million different jobs. He was in the army, in the seminary twice, thinking he wanted to be a priest, and then he changed his mind at the last minute, he worked in belt factories, he was a reporter for the Lowell Sun and got to travel around with like baseball teams. He ended up being a teacher, and he met my mom when they were at Lowell State Teacher's College which is now Lowell State University. Um… I hate saying "um." Like, I always notice that, when people are on NPR or something, they're always saying, "Um, um." I'll try not to do that.

00:02:20

LA: It's OK, don't worry about it. It's supposed to be like a conversation. I think they wanted us to make too big of a deal of this [the microphone], which is why I'm sorry it's not working.

00:02:30

MR: Right, right. It's just funny. So I was born in Haverhill, and it's the same town Rob Zombie's from. My dad was Rob Zombie's 6^th grade teacher.

00:02:42

LA: Wow.

00:02:43

MR: This famous author for kids' - mostly juvenile - horror writer, John Bellairs, is from Haverhill. He wrote all these really cool books called "The House with the Clock in its Walls," and "The Figure in the Shadows"… I have them all right up there. He used to come and talk at my Dad's school. And all his books are illustrated by Edward Gorey, so right off the bat, when I was a little kid, my Dad was always bringing these books home. Because both my parents were teachers, I learned how to read and write and do all that stuff way before I even got to school. I didn't go to kindergarten, which was weird. It seems like everybody went to kindergarten, but I didn't. I felt like the loser when I got to first grade because everybody knew each other already, and I was like the weird kid who never went to kindergarten.

00:03:33

So I have an older sister named Mary, and she is two years older than me, and we went to the same school, the same art school. I'm trying to think of really exciting things that happened. Ever since I was little, I was crazy about Halloween. Totally crazy about Halloween. I don't know what it was, but there was a show on ever Saturday called "Creature Double Feature," and it was two horror movies back-to-back. And even if the movies were bad, I would run downstairs just to see the beginning. The intro had all this black-and-white, back and forth from positive to negative, images from all the horror movies, and monsters just kicking the crap out of these cities. And they would go into strobe light stuff, there was crazy music going, so I definitely believe in the whole, little kids getting affected by strobe lights, and then just, you know… It sucked me in. You know… I had to se the beginning every week. And that's something I've noticed now … especially on E-Bay, you can find all this stuff that you were crazy about as a little kid. And the thing I can't find is "Creature Double Feature" on video tape or anything, because I just want to see the beginning, and they had such a huge impact on me.

00:04:50

Because I knew you were coming, I dug out all these pictures I did when I was little. The monsters, and that stuff. My dad would bring home these boxes of mimeographed tests that were blank on one side, and we would just go through them. My sister and I painted, you know, all the stuff that we liked, all the cartoon characters from TV shows. It was a blast. My parents would do, like, little art shows where we'd take the best pictures that we had done that week, and we'd stick them all over the house, and on all the cabinet doors and stuff, and then my parents would pretend that they were the judges and they'd walk around, look at everything, and they had these fake little ribbons to stick on their favorite ones to put on for some days afterwards. It was really cool. They've always been really, really supportive and encouraging. So I'm very grateful about that.

00:05:40

So never actually said that I'm a professional illustrator. That's what I do, my whole job. And it seems like lots of … like all little kids, they love to draw, and paint, and make stuff, but then they get older and get into more … you know, other things, sports - and I totally did too, but I never stopped loving pictures, and painting, and making stuff. It got to the point where I actually quit little league, because I was like, "I'd rather be drawing." When we were little, we were in the minors, and we sucked. It was fun, we had uniforms, and we would just go out and play. And as you get older and older, then you start having, like, these "real coaches," who scream at you all day, and you have to do, like, ten laps around the field before you even start throwing the ball, and you have to raise money for the uniforms. And I used to be a catcher, and a shortstop - loved it. It was always fun. I was always in the middle of things. And then I got sent off to left field. I was just standing there all day. And I'd be thinking of drawings, and stuff that I wanted to be doing, or just thinking of … "It'd be really cool if a giant monster came over the stadium, and stuff would happen," and then after a while, that just sucked so I totally quit… just decided to draw instead. And from then on, in high school, if my friends and I wanted to go play baseball, we'd go play baseball. There were no, like, soccer moms or baseball moms, or people screaming, it was just baseball. And it was cool. So…

00:07:13

Do you have any other questions? Or else I'm just going to ramble.

00:07:19

LA: OK, well, I was wondering if you -- I guess you sort of already talked about your formative experiences with art, but I was wondering if you had any formative moments of really formal realization that you wanted to "be an artist" for a career.

00:07:46

There were some times when I was playing as a kid, where I realized, "This is what I want to do." And I feel really fortunate in that way. A lot of people go through life, and they kind of don't know what they want to do, time goes on, and they start to feel really bad that they don't know what they want to do yet. I know people like that, and even my Dad was like that. And he did a lot of things without … like, he joined the army when he was eighteen - didn't tell his Mom, or anything like that. He felt - from what he says now - kind of like a failure, because everyone said, "What are you doing to do with your life?" And it's not like that. But ever since I was little, all I wanted to do is draw and paint and make stuff. There would be comic books, and I would watch TV, and there would be cartoons, and robots, and all that stuff, and I said, "This is what I want to do." And I would spend hours just copying the robots - and this is before there were VCR's or anything like that - so I had to reall try and look at things, and get them memorized in my head, how everything looked, because - especially the show "Force Five" - it was giant robots, five days a week - there were five different shows: the Monday show was Danguard Ace, Tuesday was Star Ninjas, Wednesday was Spacekateers. I loved those robots, and I would try and draw them, just stare at the screen really fast, because you wouldn't get to see them again until next Monday.

00:09:18

So, that has actually helped out with the way I do things, because growing up, it seemed like nobody ever wanted their photo taken, nobody ever wanted to pose for a drawing, best friends … like, you know, I know lots of really interesting-looking people, and they would never want their picture taken. I wanted to draw them, so I really had to train my own mind-eye connection thing to look at people, try to get all the details down without staring at them or anything like that, and just notice things fast, and remember them. Especially if you don't have a sketchbook with you, because then you can't just sit there and draw them, or come home quick and draw them, like, say, you're in class - especially Mass Art class, which were four and a half hours long each.

So there were plenty of times when I was little, where I was like, "I want to do this for a living," and I just never wanted to do anything else. I feel really lucky, but I just have always known what I wanted to do. It hasn't been easy at all, but I'm glad I stuck with it. Because now I get to do whatever I want, and it's really fun. I sit at home with my slippers on, and my dog, and I have no boss, I have no commute, you know … if it's all snowy and crazy out, I don't have to go anywhere, just take the dog out, and just keep drawing and painting… it's very nice.

00:10:52

I took art classes when I was little, and they were weird because even then I used to want to do stuff more from my head than copy stuff, and it was all about copying, copying. You could never bring in anything that you had drawn yourself, or just start drawing or painting from your head. You had to bring something to copy it off of; just getting everything down to look exactly like the other thing. Which is a good way to learn, but after a while, you're just like, "I hate this."

00:11:18

LA: [laughter]

00:11:19

MR: "I'm going to draw my own things!" And it was even that way in college. I had teachers who, on the first day of class, they would just write it on the board: "Where do you get your ideas from?" and it would be - all these kids would say, "Oh, from a movie," or you know - whatever. And the teacher would shake her head, and she wrote, "Copy or steal" in big letters. And it was eye-opening to me, because that seemed very uncool to me, and she brought in all her own stuff, and it was like copied from other people's drawings, copied from other people's everything, and I was like, "You're my teacher?" You know? Towards the end of the year, she finally showed us her own work, and I thought it was really bad. I thought it was awful. I was like, "I don't want to listen to any of your critiques anymore," because - that was another thing with her - you'd bring something in that you liked, and she'd say, "I don't know about this…" and she'd say, "What do you think, class?" And the whole class would say, "I think you should do this. I think you should do this." And it was - there's a phrase for it - but, it's like the whole majority counts …

[noise]

00:12:25

My dog is eating the wire, I'm wicked sorry. Get away from that.

[inaudible]
00:12:30

LA: It's fine, I think.

00:12:31

MR: Sorry.

00:12:32
LA: No prob.

00:12:39

MR: So, um. I'm - I never took any psychology classes or anything, but I totally believe that all the stuff that you see, or are exposed to, or think about when you're little makes a big, very big impact on what you end up doing later on. When I was little, I could not get enough of Halloween and ghosts, and monsters. When I was really little, still in my crib, I saw a ghost come out of the closet. My closet door opened, and I was like, in my crib, and this thing came out, and it was all … it had, like, a white sheet on which makes me question it now, but (because ghosts, they wear the white sheet…), but whatever… But he was horrible looking. And the way that Pebbles from the Flintstones had a big bone through the top of her head, he looked like he had a big bone through the top of his head, underneath the sheet. His head was all misshapen, and his mouth was just hanging open, and he stared at me for a long time. And then, he backed away from the crib, and kind of dissolved and shrunk into this little hole in the baseboard. And so I was all freaked out about this [inaudible] in my room. And so my whole family is very short, and everything in the house is teeny, and all my friends from college were like six feet tall, and they'd come home and be like, "You live in a little munchkin house!" So, I was always next to the closet, no matter where I put my bed. It was like, there was the closet. The door didn't fit into the frame right, and it was really drafty, so in the winter, when it was all windy and crazy outside, all the draft would build up inside the closet, and the door would come booming open, and we'd be running and screaming, and my feet wouldn't even touch the floor, because the Bone Head ghost was after me. That was the name I gave it, because he was little, and he had the bone through his head. And everyone was like, "What a stupid name for your bogie man," or whatever, but I was so terrified.

00:14:37

But, during the daytime, I would spend all my time on my hands and knees, staring into this teeny hole in the wall, trying to see if he was in there, just hanging out, all little, and if he saw me he'd come out and get big again. I could not get enough of it, though. The "Creature Double Feature" show ever Saturday, some of those movies were really scary, but I would beg to watch them, and at night, I would be too scared to sleep. I'd just be laying there, trying not to move at all, and I would see, like, faces and stuff, and all the patterns on curtains, and they were watching me. I was afraid of everything. I think that's why, when I started to get the huge bags under my eyes as a little kid. There were like these big, dark hollows under my eyes.

00:15:24

We didn't have trick-or-treating in Haverhill, where I grew up. It was pretty grim. There was like lots of vandalism, and my dad was a teacher, and a lot of his students lived in the area, and they were just bad news kids. Our house was always getting egged, and baloney on the house, and my Dad had his car stolen like three times from the driveway, and they set our porch on fire. It was awful. So there was no trick-or-treating, because it was really violent and crazy outside. So this is kind of cool - no, it's really cool - but it's also kind of sad, but in my house on the bottom floor, you could go from room to room to room to room, in a big circle, with no doors in the way. So we would get dressed up in little costumes, my sister and I, and we'd go into a room, and my Dad would be sitting there with a weird hat on, and he'd be this imaginary neighbor, and his name would be "Mr. Smith," or something, and we'd be like, "Trick or Treat, Mr. Smith!" and he'd give us candy. And we'd go into another room, on the other side of the house, and my Mom would be like, knitting with some weird mask or wig on, and she'd be like, "Mrs. Jones," and while we were doing that, my dad would be in the other room, and he'd be putting on a weird hat in the other room, and we'd just do it … we were like, forced, kind of, to be really imaginative. There weren't many kids our age in the neighborhood, and to be honest, a lot of them were just kind of crazy. Just crazy kids. And my parents were like, "Don't play with them." And they would really - they broke all our toys, and they were just … it was weird. So my sister and I lived in our heads most of the time. We drew a lot, and painted a lot, and made up games around each other. There wasn't much going on.

00:17:12

I think that made us who we were, kind of. We were the weird kids who drew a lot and painted a lot. One thing I still think about is, one Halloween, my Dad went outside, and I was little - I was really little - and he said he was taking the trash out. And he wasn't. He had put this sheet on. And we had all these pumpkins and stuff in our windows, and he came banging on the window! And our yard was all grim and scary, and there were, like, leaves blowing everywhere, and there was this thing outside, banging on the window! And I freaked. I went crazy. And he was like waving to us, really slowly, and I was like, "The only thing that's separating me from this friggin' monster outside is this pane of glass!" And as he's waving to us, he comes up the back steps and comes into the house. And he starts walking right up to us. And I was like, even then, I knew that there was just, like - there were no boundaries anymore. This thing was in my house, it was right next to me, and I was dead. And then, he took the head off, and the sheet. and it was my dad. And I went crazy. And my Mom actually had to pull me off my Dad, because I was like biting him, and punching him, and kicking him. I got him right in the crotch, and he doubled over, and he was crawling all over the floor, like seriously in pain, and I was so angry that he had done that to me.

00:18:44

And at the same time, even now, all I can think of is, this thing just standing outside, banging on my window … [noise] … Sorry for all the background noise, my dog just grabbed a soda bottle. [To the dog] Oh, Frank.

So… another thing that is from when I was little, is I was obsessed with dogs. We could never have dogs. My Dad said it was because our kitchen floor was wildly un-level, and when the dog would "piddle" on the floor, it would go under the refrigerator, because that was the lowest point of the saggy kitchen floor, and it would start a fire and electrocute all of us, and we would die. And so my sister and I gave up, because we didn't want everybody to die. And then in fourth grade, I got this weird, mysterious lump on the side of my neck, and it was really big and tender, and I went to all these doctors, and none of them knew what it was, and my parents were really sad all the time. And suddenly, we had a dog. And, now that I think about it, I thought they just figured that I was just going to die, and that we would all die together in this fiery mess when the dog piddled on the floor. But as soon as we got the dog, I got all better, and it was weird. Nobody knew what had happened, but we had a dog, and it was really cool. I spent all my time, when I wasn't drawing monsters, drawing dogs. I was crazy about dogs my whole life. And then, over the last few years, I've become really obsessed with these flat-faced, bug-eyed dogs, like Boston terriers and French Bulldogs, and pugs. There's something about them that's really hilarious. They always look very anxious and stressed out. But they're really not.

00:20:31

So, I've started to do tons and tons of dog portraits for people who have these dogs, because - I'm totally jumping ahead of myself now. But, I'm sorry. [To the microphone] I'm fighting with my dog this whole time … [inaudible]. And so I do dog portraits all the time, and it cracks me up. People send me pictures of their pugs, and Boston Terriers, and Frenchies - little French Bull Dogs. I think the thing that I like most about them is they look like bats. Especially the black ones, with the pointy ears … they just don't have wings. I've actually made fake wings for a bunch of my friends' dogs. But, trying to get them to keep the wings on and not eat them is always a nightmare. But - ever since I was little, I've been crazy about dogs.

00:21:22

The stuff that I was so into when I was little is the same stuff that I'm into now. Sometimes I feel like everybody's a little kid, and then they grow up, and I grew up, and decided the adult world kind of sucked, and I liked stuff I liked when I was little better, so a lot of the stuff I draw and paint is very juvenile. But I think it's funny, and a lot of people like it, so I'm just going to keep doing it. I feel like I lost track of all these, "Where I'm supposed to go with my life" stories, you know.

00:22:01

LA: On the website [Reusch's website], it mentions that you had a high school teacher … Susan Paradis? Can you talk about her? I don't know anything about her.

00:22:13

Sure. High school was amazing, because I had to go to this really awful Catholic school for eight years, where everything was bad, and the nuns would seriously beat the kids with a ruler, and I just … I just hated it. We had art one hour a week. And then we had to do these "washes," with these crappy Crayola dried watercolors. This nun was obsessed with washes. And you're supposed to draw, like, a leaf on top of all these layers… you know. It was just horrendous. I hated it. I got in trouble all the time because I would always draw other neat pictures and stuff. So when I finally got to high school, I had art every single day, with a professional illustrator who did kids books, and all kinds of huge jobs, and she was making really good money doing this, and she just decided she'd like to teach too, so she would teach all day, and then draw all night … it was amazing.

00:23:21

She totally has been so influential and encouraging to this whole generation of people. She just retired. She was Rob Zombie's high school art teacher, too. She was really … eye-opening after eight years of being the weird kid who got to draw one hour a week. It wasn't until I got to college that I realized how amazing our high school art program was, because there were classes for ceramics, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, illustration, all kinds of stuff. We had models, and we had all kinds of… I might have to put my dog away, I'm really sorry.

00:24:05

LA: Don't worry about it.

00:24:06

MR: I'm totally just like, rambling, because my dog wants to play. I'll put him away.

00:24:12
LA: If you want to put the mic down for a while, that's fine.

00:25:13

MR: I'll put him away.

[Pause, and then talk about readjusting the microphone's position.]

00:25:32

So, my high school art teacher was amazing. In the high school, I was taking almost half of my day, every day, down in the A Wing - it sounds like Star Wars, planes - but that was the art wing. And I took every class they offered, and some of them more than once because I ran out of ones to take. It was weird being, like, the one kid in class who liked to draw and was kind of good at it, and then to go to high school where there were lots of kids who were good at it. Her best advice was, just because you've done something, it doesn't mean that you're done, or that it's good, or anything. So really, we've got to think more about how to make our pictures better. In a weird way, it was almost like problem solving. You're coming up with good solutions to what the assignment was, especially the illustration classes that she gave us. She was just great. We stay in touch all the time, and I had an art show over the last week, which she came to. She's always trying to hook me up with her clients, and her publishers, and stuff like that … she's just great. It's weird that you go to school, and you have a teacher, and then afterwards, you become pals, and hang out at each other's houses, and drink beers… it's great. It's really nice!

00:26:55

Coming from middle school, it was like the best thing in the world. Like, no uniforms, lots of kids, after eight boys and fourteen girls for eight years. But, I should say, I've been best friends with this guy, Tom Pappalardo, who's great. And he does my website, and it's amazing, we've been friends since we were little. We were like the two weird kids, growing up. We'd draw, paint, make stuff. We'd skateboard, and we didn't hang out with any other kids. We got beaten up a lot and stuff. Until, I think, I snapped in sixth grade. I was like this little na�ve kid who just didn't get that somebody was going to tackle me - I didn't get any of that stuff? - and I just went crazy in sixth grade and got in a lot of fights, and afterwards, nobody bothered me, and it was cool - unless they really wanted to see something crazy, which was, me go crazy. That was a drag.

00:28:02

Tom and I were the misfit kids, and now that we're grown up a lot, it seems like the kids who have pretty stressful or unhappy childhoods, or whatever, they end up being the ones who make cool stuff as adults. It's like, all those old kids, those popular kids, they all have jobs they hate, they're bald and fat, and have lots of kids - not that family life is bad or anything, but Tom and I are having a blast. We make all kinds of stuff. He does comic books, he does web design, he's been in a band forever that's toured, they make their own music, they have their own studio that they built. He's, like, the coolest guy. He has his own site, standarddesign.com, he's a big Kung Fu freak, so his band's called No Shadow Kick, which is a Jet Li move, where you kick somebody so fast you don't leave a shadow, and half the time, the stuff on his website is just hilarious stuff. And they do book reviews, like they're back in school, and movie reviews, and so I'm really glad I went to that school, just so I met Tom.

LA: Was it a public school?

MR: No, it was a catholic school, which we were miserable at.

LA: Oh, I meant your high school.

MR: Oh, yes. Haverhill high school.

Ms. Paradis was just a life saver. She helped me build this portfolio strong enough to get into the Boston Globe Scholastic Art Awards, two years in a row, I think, and one of the judges for that was actually one of the admissions people for Mass. College of Art, so that helped out a lot. And this is weird too, but both of my parents were teachers, and they had that whole "Do your best" thing, and lots of times, I wasn't allowed to go to the party, or go to the thing, because they knew I had a test, or something. And to be honest, I really didn't care about math, or science - I was always bad at that stuff - even history, which is good to study so you don't make mistakes like people long ago did, I just couldn't care about that stuff. But I did do my best, because I wanted my parents to be all proud of me, and I was all boy-scouty. But it worked, because I got tons of scholarships and awards and stuff when I graduated, and that way, I didn't have to pay as much when I went to the college that I wanted to. I was lucky - I only applied to one college - it was Mass. College of Art. I wanted to live in Boston, it was the cheapest school around, and I had some friends who were going there, so even though I didn't really care about the high school stuff, it paid off. And I got to go where I wanted, and I didn't pay as much. So that was good.

00:31:02

LA: That's great.

So I guess, moving along chronologically, college? How was that?

00:31:19

MR: College was good and bad… there are times when I feel like I learned way more from the other kids, and all of the stuff they brought with them to college - all the books, and the music they were listening to, and artists they liked… than a lot of the classes. I definitely learned stuff in the classes, from the teachers, but a lot of it was really frustrating because I really knew what I wanted to do. I loved drawing and painting, and I wanted to do it. Like, all the stuff that I liked, I wanted to be the guy making the stuff. I wanted to be making the skateboards, and the band posters, and the T-shirts, and the comic books, and the kids books, or the young adult horror novel things like I liked. I just knew what I wanted to do. And as I was going through … I forget what it's called, but it's basically, your first year and a half, you have to prove that you can do every single thing on earth before they let you go on to your chosen major. There were a lot of times I knew I was never going to use this stuff again in my life. Interior design, and you had to build chairs without nails and stuff like that, a lot of these projects, even on the last day of class, when they gave you the little passing grade, they'd be like "You're never going to use this again." I was shaking with rage, I was like, "I know! I know! I just wasted all this time!" And I could never do any of the stuff I wanted. But I finally got to where I wanted to go: the illustration department. And I met this crazy guy named Floyd Covert. That was his real name. And he was my teacher for the two and a half years I did illustration. He was amazing. He was very hard - he was crazy. He was really talented, and he really beat it into us that just because you drew a picture, doesn't mean your assignment's over, or you did a good job, or anything. You'd have to do, like, twenty sketches before he'd be like, "The twentieth one is the one that makes it."

00:33:30

Like, lots of times, personally - not to disagree with Floyd, but - the first idea you get is The One. You come up with all these other ones, but they aren't as successful as that first idea that got you excited. He and this other teacher, Linda Brook, are also teachers that - they were your teachers, you were scared of them - but later on, you hang out with them, and they send you presents in the mail and stuff. You begin to become pals. It's really nice. For a long time, in Boston… I was depressed, because kids I knew went to other colleges, other campuses in the woods, and all these very isolated things, and in Boston, you lived right next to this ghetto, and if you weren't going to school, you were an angry guy who mugged people, like my friends were stabbed in the back, and a lot of them dropped out … there were always people shooting guns … It was really eye-opening. You really felt like you were alive in that city, and things were bad. There were always people shooting, right outside our building. Cars, and police cars, and people crashing into our building with their car when they were drunk. It was weird. I mean, to grow up and not - to be this country kid, you know, in the big city. And it's kind of been that way ever since. Like, I lived in Boston for 10 years, and then I moved to Rhode Island. I don't know. When I go out to the north, or to Maine, it's so idyllic and pretty and everything. And yet, there are still really bad people who just show up to … be bad. It's weird. So, after a while, I couldn't be jealous of my other friends in college, because they had plenty of jerks out there too.

00:35:33

I would go to concerts a lot… When I was in high school, I would go to shows at the big - like, Centrum, stuff like that, where you have to pay like thirty dollars to see the bands you liked. In Boston, I realized that there are clubs everywhere, bars everywhere, everyone's got a band, and they're all playing every night at the clubs. I was biking around with my friends to shows, and it was a lot of the whole "do it yourself" punk rock thing I got exposed to. You don't have to be on a major label, have a band … you can just … do things yourself. It was nice. That was something I forgot to say about when I was little. When I was little, I really got into rock music and stuff. I would see older kids with their posters, and T-shirts, and like the weird painter hats that they would have? I'm waiting for that to come back … that was a weird fad. But I hated the radio, and my sister got all these heavy metal magazines with these teeny tiny little black and white T-shirt ads in the back, and I would copy them. You know, for like, Iron Maiden, and Metallica, and all these bands I knew nothing about. And that's one really powerful case of where the art sucked me in enough to try and start listening to the music. I was so intrigued by all these scary pictures on album covers and T-shirts, that I wanted to know what these bands where, what they sounded like. Then, I started buying albums … my sister gave me the Iron Maiden double live album for Christmas when I was in sixth grade … I was just lost after that. It came with, like, books of art and all these monster pictures. It was so … it was exactly what I had been looking for. I just loved it. And at the same time, I discovered Stephen King, and all these guys … and I think in fourth grade, I bought an Ozzie tape and a Stephen King Skeleton Crew collection of short stories on the same day at K-Mart. And from then on, I was just like, "Oh, man."

00:35:51

I would go to the library all the time, and it was so great realizing that he'd been writing since the early seventies, and this was like the mid- to late- eighties… and, "There's so much stuff I can read!" You know? All these horror books, and these scary things, and all the bands I liked had been going forever, and it was just, like … it was the best. There was this whole period of realizing that all this stuff I never knew existed - there it was. There was a lot of it, and a lot of it was really good. So that kind of steered Tom and me away from all the other kids in my middle school. And high school too. There was, like, Vanilla Ice, and all these rap people and crappy pop music, and we were just obsessed with all this scary, dark art and music and literature. That was pretty big.

00:38:52

LA: Well, how about the years since then?

00:38:54

MR: Since then, things have been good. I think getting out of school is weird: you don't know what you're going to do … you send samples to everybody, hoping that they'll like your work, and most of the time you don't hear back, or if you do, you get a rejection letter. When I was in high school, I discovered the Boston Phoenix newspaper, I thought it was really cool: it covered all the shows, and art shows, and they'd write editorials about politics and stuff, and it would be filled with swears and stuff. I'd be like, "This is the best!" Like, a real person's newspaper. It's not all fake and stilted and weird. So I wanted to become part of that. So, from late college - I'd say, 1995 was when I graduated - until February of 1996, I just bombarded the art director with these little home made post cards. I would make them at Kinko's. I figured, "I want to get paid to draw what I want," so I drew tons of fun sketchbook pictures, and would shrink them down to four on a page, on heavy card stock, cut them myself, and just sent them every week for nine months. And finally, she gave me a job. And I had to go in and meet her. And she was like, "I've got your postcards here!" And she had this giant box of my postcards. I was like, "Yeah!" And they gave me so much work I was able to quit my job washing dishes in a restaurant, which was great. Because up until then, I had been doing dishes all day,

00:40:33
and the beginning of my illustration assignments at nights, and I was sick all the time. I was just always sick. I got mono twice in two years, which I didn't think was possible, but the doctors were like, "No, you have mono again, and it's a weird kind this time." I was like, "Great!" So, they gave me enough work to quit that. But just before I quit that, they hired a second dishwasher, finally, and he was a bass player for a band, Charlie Heston. It was hilarious; they had just done this huge tour and recorded a new album, and then they all decided to come back to the East Coast and live in one house, which is right near the restaurant …

00:41:10

LA: Which was the restaurant?

00:41:12

MR: It was called Penardi's. It's closed, now. It was only open for a little while. But we were the dishwashers, and he gave me an advanced copy of their CD, and I loved it - it was so weird and different from the stuff I listened to. So with my new time off, I started doing band posters for them. And since so much of the stuff I did for the Boston Phoenix was heavy, dark, almost always black and white pictures that had to go with these heavy, depressing expos�s and news stories about really bad things going on, the band posters were just like bright and crazy. And I knew all these kids who worked at print shops. I was every band's dream fan. I would make their posters - for free- I would get them copied for free at my friends' places, and I would bike around Boston and around to all these places, leaving them everywhere, so I would get in free to the shows, and all these PR tickets, and free merchandise and stuff. It got to the point where I was doing up to four posters a week, and I had to start charging, and then I was, like, the Jinx guy, because every band broke up, and I stopped getting work. It was really sad. But for a while, that was my life. Just drawing pictures for the Boston Phoenix, and then … I didn't know that they had a Providence Phoenix, and a Worcester Phoenix, and a Portland, Maine Phoenix. I started doing stuff for all those guys, too, and the band posters. Since then, I've done 500 pictures for the Phoenix, and about 70 band posters. So those were like my steady jobs.

00:43:02.

It's all freelance; it's all working from home, but … that's what I did. For a while, there was a whole e-commerce boom thing, and there were tons of magazines that were just about computers, and e-commerce and all this stuff, and a lot of my friends from college became art directors, and they started hiring me for all these brand new magazines. And it was crazy - there were rules where you had to have as much content in the magazine as advertising, and so many of the magazines had advertising people throwing money at them, so they were like, "We need you to write a story about something. I don't care what it is, and we need a picture to go with that story! We don't care what that is either!" So I got all this work, and it was great, and then it all just died, and I got left getting screwed over by a bunch of these people who owed me money for all these pictures I drew, and they had gone bankrupt. So, it was kind of depressing. But one of the guys, actually, who hired me - his name is Jerry Business - he was a bike messenger. I went to college with him, and he was a in a band called Bastard Squad that was really big out here for a while. Then he moved to San Francisco, and he decided he hated being a bike messenger. All the hills and stuff? He'd been bike messenging forever. So he made up a totally fake r�sum�, and he applied to this magazine called Industry Standard, which has now gone under. And they hired him, they loved him … and then it came time to actually do stuff, and deadlines, and he didn't know how to do anything. And they went crazy. They went, "You lied to us, get out of here." And he went back to being a bike messenger. And then they came back to him, and said, "We thought you were awesome. And you fooled us. So we're going to pay for you to go to art school, and learn-" and he had already been to art school. But he had done illustration. He hadn't done much computer stuff, and that's what they needed. So they paid for him to take all these computer classes, and learn how to do everything, and then they re-hired him.

00:45:11

And he was the art director forever. It was great! He gave my friends and I so much work. And then it went under. So he's just doing freelance stuff too, and he has a new band up there. It's interesting what all the kids that you go to school with end up doing. Some of them, I know, have worked for Punk Planet, which is like this huge world-respected punk magazing - they were the art directors for that - some of them make films, some of them are musicians - like ______ Welles, I'm trying to think … I was going to talk quickly about band posters, and the whole "anti-silkscreen" thing there was at art school. That killed me. I was at Mass Art; they had amazing facilities - a whole gym converted to this print shop - it was amazing. And I really wanted to make T-shirts and posters and stuff … not even for bands, just for myself. And then, this total taboo thing. "Verboten! You can't do that!" It was awful. It was considered low-brow, and commercial, and awful, and it was so depressing. And there were a lot of these little cliques. Like, the painters hated the illustrators, and the sculpture kids were the crazy indie kids, and everyone just … I knew people from all the different groups, and we got along, but in general, it was just like everyone hated each other. And the illustrators, which I was part of, they were considered "prostitutes who just had no soul, and drew whatever somebody would tell them to…" And yet, you'd go to these painting openings, and all the painters, they would just be wining and dining all these rich patron people that they hoped would start becoming their patrons. It was … gross. It was weird. Everyone hated each other. And in the print shop, there was this one big heavy-metal guy, who always looked like he was into Metallica - he had skulls on everything - and when he was a print monitor there, he would allow me to make T-shirts as long as I gave him one of everything that I did.

00:47:30

So it worked out. I would go there at midnight, when he would go on his shift, I would make the stuff, and give him stuff … he was always, like, he'd take it so seriously, like, "You were never here, make sure you didn't log into the book, no one can know about this…" it was awful. And the critiques at the print shop would go from nine in the morning to one-thirty in the afternoon. And everything was etching, and aquatint and everything. It was great. Sometimes the teeniest microscopic detail, like someone would make a line on their etching plate, and they'd make a million prints of it, and people would just go on about that line, and the texture of the line, and what does it say. Some of that stuff's valid, but after a while, I just wanted to slit my wrists, just go crazy. I liked doing other stuff. But that was all frowned on, making [inaudible] and posters. Very, very serious, academic, and (to me) really boring. So I paint the posters that I do now, but most people who are successful poster makers screen print them. And I couldn't do that, I found, unless I stayed … I'd go out there at midnight, and when the guy wasn't there - sometimes he wasn't there- I'd have to leave. But one thing I thought of, too, is band posters… a lot of them …

[mini-disc gets changed]

00:49:28

One thing I thought of is about the concert posters I was doing, and how lots of times you don't really know where things are going to lead. I started off doing posters when I was, 21 maybe. It was sort of a favor for friends' bands, because I liked them, and wanted to be involved in that. And then it got to the point where I was doing posters all the time, and I couldn't afford to just keep doing it for free. And sometimes, even now, even as a paying job, I'll be sitting there at like 4 in the morning, thinking, "Why am I killing myself over this poster?" And it was always because I wanted it to look good, because I wanted people to like it, I wanted the band to like it; if I was going to put my name on it, I wanted to like it. And it's never been this well-paying hobby, or anything like that. But it's cool that things you don't expect - like, in the last two years, Paul Grushkin, who did this book called "The Art of Rock" decided to make another one, called "The Art of Modern Rock," that covers the whole big poster explosion from the eighties up until now. And I always used to send my work into those juried competitions, like the American Illustration Annual, and Print Magazine, and in all these, you have to pay for every illustration you submit, and you hope that if you get picked, it will lead to new jobs. But every time I would send out, I would just get rejected,

00:51:02

and after a while, I was like, "I'm not doing this any more." So I heard about this book that was going to come out, and I didn't submit anything to it - I figured it was another buig waste of time, or whatever… and my friend Tom, who I've known since first grade, goes, "You've got to give them stuff! You've got to give them stuff!" and I just didn't get around to it. And then the authors actually called me, and said, "You have to give us stuff for this book!" And they picked twenty-five posters. And I couldn't believe it! I spent, like, a whole month re-scanning all the old posters I had done, color correcting them and making them really high digital files so they'd print well, because originally, I would just hand off to the band or somebody, or do it myself and make these cheapo color copies.

00:51:43

So the book finally came out after two years, and it's amazing. It's 490 pages, and I'm really bad at math, but I did the math, and they said that they had 8,000 submissions, and from that, they picked 370 artists. And it was a 492-page book, I think? And all the little previews they had online, showed these spreads of everybody's stuff. And they were really nice. And I realized, with that many pages, and that many people, not everybody gets a spread. And I was like, "Well, at least you're in the book. That's awesome." So this October, I was in a bunch of Halloween-themed art shows in Salem. And I was a mess. I was always awake, running from setting up each show, and then going to the show, and then going to the opening, and it's time to go take the show down, and I'm in Rhode Island, I don't have a car, so it was my girlfriend doing all the driving, because she has a car … it was very hectic. And at one of the openings, which was about rock posters, the book was there. And I hadn't even seen it yet, and I was a zombie. And my girlfriend saw it, and opened it. And I had four pages all to myself! It was amazing. And I almost totally cried, because I was like just a mess, and just seeing that, after all that time, was just this great validation that all this stuff, all those millions of nights that I had stayed awake painting stuff for my friends' bands for no money - it did matter, and people liked them. It was really cool, knowing that I actually made it to the book, and a lot of people either didn't make it into the book, or they didn't have a lot of pages or anything, or any of that stuff. I was very proud of it, and felt very lucky to actually get into it.

00:53:22

A lot of things in my illustration career, I would go back to forever, and ever, and try and get my stuff on skateboards, and always have people say no, and after a while, I did just give up. So when somebody out of the blue calls, and they totally want what you've been doing, it's this great feeling. It was good. The same thing happened with snowboards. They used to be on that door right there. But they're down now. I used to work on skateboard covers all the time. And they were like, "no," if they even bothered to reply at all. And then, out of the blue, I got a call from Burton Snowboards, and I had sent out skateboards, but I mean Jake Snowboard, [laughs] "Jake Snowboard," Jake Burton is the guy who invented snowboards, and he has the biggest company in the world, and they do all their stuff two and a half years in advance, just to stay ahead of everybody. And they had me do three boards right off the bat, and they were seen at like, the Salt Lake City Olympics, and the X-Games, and anti-smoking TV commercials, and all kinds of stuff. And then they had these helmets, and three more boards, and it's this cool thing when you try really hard at something, and everyone's like, "No! You suck! Go home! You're awful!" And then, eventually, someone does like it, and they give you jobs, and … it's very, very cool. So I've been lucky.

00:54:47

I'm trying to think of other stuff…

00:54:48

LA: I don't know. Anything else? Any other aspects of your life, or artistic challenges? Or fun things? Stories?

00:53:02

MR: Fun things! I can think of one thing. My girlfriend Carrie, whose stage name is Miss Firecracker, we started a horror-themed burlesque troupe last year. Which is, to me, really hysterical. Because - we didn't know each other when we were little, but we both grew up watching "Creature Double Feature," and all these weird beach party movies, where there were like go-go dancers, and swimming, and surfing, and, like, pie fights, and go-cart chases, and all that stuff where it's just crazy. And real life, after that stuff and the horror movies, just seemed really boring. We didn't know each other, but she was crazy about all this stuff, and decided that's what she wanted her life to be like. So she learned all those weird 60's dances, and had been obsessively collecting go-go boots and vintage costumes, and all this stuff her whole life. And I saw her for the first time at this thing at the top of my old street in Boston - this bowling alley / club / bar thing where this band played, too, called the Milky Way, and it was amazing. It was called, like, "Horror at Party Beach," or something like that. And it was basically like this beach party with a guy in a big sea monster suit chasing people. It was amazing. There was a surf band, and everyone had to wear Hawaiin shirts, and there were go-go boxes, and it was, like, the best thing I'd ever seen in my life, and I totally wanted to get involved in it. And Carrie was there, and I didn't know it was her. There was all this neo-burlesque movement thing going on for a little while, and this artist, Shag, ended up doing all these Tease-o-rama posters,

00:56:06

and Exotic World posters, and all this stuff. And it seems like a lot of it's all in California. And I was like, all this cool stuff is going on out here! I want to get involved in that! I want to make the posters for that stuff! So I met Carrie, and started hanging out with her, and we liked all the same stuff. And, you know, the first time she came over, she brought like a whole projection screen, and a projector, and she was all go-go'd out, with the boots, and the bikini, and everything, and I was like, "Oh my god!" and she drove up in her convertible, at my house… you look like you're [inaudible…] . And we came up with this dream project, where it would be this giant burlesque spook-show thing, with all these horror trailers, and gorilla suit guys running around through the audience, and ghosts, and people abducting people in the audience, and we'd show all these trailers from our favorite movies, and we came up with all these acts, and it was like the best thing that had ever happened to me. I came up with acts, I built these giant monster props with flashing eyes that glowed in the dark, our friends' bands played. It was just … it was great. And to be honest, I put my entire life savings into this show. And it was a one-night-only midnight show at this beautiful theater called Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston, very Art Deco, and all restored, and it's been there forever.

00:58:08

It's got huge curtains, and balconies, and it was - we were both basically awake for days. Getting there that night, and setting everything up, there were like hundreds and hundreds of people lined up. I'm getting all choked up just thinking about it. But it was really the best thing! Like, all these people saw in the newspaper, and they came to see it, and it was so successful. And we just started … we were like, "we need to do more of this stuff!" And then, she had been part of this group called the Burlesque Revival Association, or "BRA," and it was all … everything had to be really retro and stuff. She has done all that stuff, but is very bored of it now, and then they started this group called Through the Keyhole, and that all fell apart too. And we were like, "We're good together! We have good ideas, and come up with fun things, and we make exactly what we would want to go see, if we were going out." So we started our own little troupe. And Carrie used to be an undertaker. So there's this other guy, and his name is J. Cannibal, and his partner is named Mary Widow, she's a choreographer. I had no idea about this, but there's a kind of corset called a Merrywidow, so she's Mary Widow - it's a joke - but I had no clue about that, I don't know if most people do. But since then, we've been putting on these spook shows, and we have millions of acts, and I make all these masks for them out of wire and masking tape, and glow-in-the-dark paint, and you can find this stuff on e-bay, like cheap costumes, and we make our own, and book shows with our friends' bands, like Beat Circus, who are half in Boston, half in Providence, and they do circus music.

00:59:55

And this other band, from Portsmouth, called the Monkey Butlers, and they wear butler suits and monkey heads, and they never, ever take them off. And they're just amazing, and they're very garage-y. And there have been plenty of times when we're driving to a show, and totally last minute, we have to do this thing, and we have to jam all these props into Carrie's tiny convertible, and they all have to collapse down so they fit in the trunk, and lots of times they don't, and we have to drive with the top down, and it starts raining, and we're just a mess. But at the same time, my life is really cool, compared to most people that I know, or I went to school with, or whatever. I draw the stuff, and then I get to do big 3-D versions of the stuff, act them out with my girlfriend, and … it's just a very cool life. I never know where my next check is coming from, but things have been going pretty well. And I'm having fun, so that's good.

01:00:51

LA: Great! Well, thank you so much for doing this. I really, really appreciate it.