The Tonearm Presents: Spotlight On Arthur Russell, with writer Richard King

Join Spotlight On host Lawrence Peryer in conversation with Richard King, author of Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, A Life, available now from Anthology Editions.

Travels Over Feeling paints a portrait of Arthur Russell unlike any that have come before, revealing a true picture of one of the most distinctive and influential artists of the last 50 years. The book combines largely unseen visual materials, including handwritten scores, lyrics, photos, letters, and drawings, pulled from Russell’s archives at the New York Public Library and personal collections of close confidants, alongside new texts by King and extensive original interviews with Arthur’s collaborators, contemporaries, family, and friends.

From his pioneering compositions as part of the Downtown NYC avant-garde scene to his genre-expanding disco productions, Russell created enduring and foundationally influential work spanning new wave, art pop, and folk until his premature death in 1992. He remains a seminal, influential figure to multiple generations of artists and listeners, in New York and beyond.

Register now for this free event and Watch the video below to hear Richard King discuss Russell’s extraordinary life and legacy, his impact on music across multiple genres, and the author’s own journey publishing this book.

TRANSCRIPT:

Lawrence Peryer: Hello everyone and welcome. We’re here today to speak with Richard King about his wonderful book Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life. Arthur Russell was an Iowa-born cellist, composer, and producer who created some of the most innovative music of the late twentieth century—from avant-garde compositions to underground disco classics to intimate folk songs.

Russell worked across genres throughout his too-brief life, which ended in 1992 from AIDS-related illness. Our guest, Richard King, spent considerable time in the Arthur Russell Archive at the New York Public Library to craft his landmark book. Richard brings a unique perspective as both a writer and music industry veteran.

He co-founded Planet Records in Bristol in the 1990s, releasing music by artists like Movietone and Flying Saucer Attack. As an author, some of his previous books include Original Rockers, which was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, and How Soon Is Now, which was named Sunday Times Music Book of the Year.

Travels Over Feeling combines archival materials, photographs, and extensive interviews with Russell’s collaborators, friends, and family to create a portrait that sometimes supports and sometimes challenges many of the myths that have emerged since his death. Today we’ll explore Richard’s research process, his findings about Russell’s complex life and work, and why this enigmatic musician continues to fascinate listeners and inspire artists across genres.

Thank you so much for joining me, Richard King.

Richard King: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Lawrence Peryer: Before we jump in, I just want to let our audience know that if anyone has questions, they don’t need to stand on ceremony. They’re welcome to drop questions into the comment thread and I’ll keep half an eye on it and we’ll pull things out as we go along. No reason to wait till the end if there’s anything anybody wants to jump in with.

But Richard, I would love to start with the origin story of this project. If you don’t mind, could you tell me a little bit both about what drew you into Arthur Russell’s music, but also about him as a subject worth investing your time in?

Richard King: Sure. I think in my experience, most people who have a relationship with Arthur’s music have a simultaneously private, almost secret relationship—especially if one has an affinity with some of the more song-based material, which is of quite a personal nature. But there’s also a sense of the exultant about Arthur. There’s a sense of joy, particularly in what could loosely be called the dance floor recordings—a sense of collective joy. Obviously the dance floor is often a source of collective joy.

So I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a dichotomy, but there’s a multifaceted relationship I think most people have with Arthur’s music due to the fact it was itself so multifaceted. Historically, there was coverage of Arthur’s music while he was alive. It centered around mainly New York media for obvious reasons. When he had music released domestically—not exclusively, but mainly domestically in the UK—there was coverage around World of Echo and the other release on Rough Trade Records. But given that so much of his music has been released posthumously, the relationship the listener has to Arthur’s music is pretty bespoke. It was largely unmediated in his life.

As a consequence, that makes him a very rich subject. His life and his music probably suit analysis, and certainly in terms of the musical output. But in terms of someone who was enigmatic certainly while alive, but not unknown—although there’s no sense that a complete portrait of Arthur emerges when he’s alive, a portrait did emerge.

It is tragic that Arthur died young, but he died on the cusp of youth and middle age, if we could put it like that—approaching his forties, or early middle age. So it wasn’t the death of—for sake of an example that often gets used—it wasn’t like Nick Drake, somebody who died in their mid-twenties. So there is a life that was cut tragically short, but it’s not the life of a youth cut short. Contemporary music does tend to drift towards the tragedy of doomed or lost youth, or did for a lot of the twentieth century.

So Arthur had a very rich life, and it felt like the best way of trying to make sense of it was to see Arthur in his own words. That’s what drew me to the archive.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Richard King: My publisher—I have the same publisher for all my books, Faber in the UK—and my editor is of that generation. For shorthand we could call them the Pitchfork generation that discovered Arthur around 2004, 2005 when Steve Knutson of Audika started reissuing those wonderful records. Very much of that generation for whom Arthur—I know at least four people of that generation who all called their son Arthur. I can’t overstate the connection that some of those people have with him. We felt that there was still space to examine him in book form.

We got talking to Steve, and he’d read some of my previous work, and it was his suggestion that I went to look at the archive.

Lawrence Peryer: Something when you talked about people’s sort of personal relationship with Arthur and his music—it reminds me, although on a much different scale obviously, of how a lot of people felt about David Bowie. He meant so much to people in terms of how they projected, whether he spoke for them as queer people or permissioned them to be different. How that changed—my observation has been generationally, even with Bowie fans, he means something different to people. But that intense personal projection and connection is very fascinating—how people interact with artists that way.

Richard King: Yes. You used the word “projection” there and I think that’s very salient. In Arthur’s life, he didn’t do too many interviews. I think fewer than about twenty-five in print, possibly only around five or six on audio or radio. Really, the footage that is available of him tends to be in performance, and there isn’t too much of that. That’s as close as you can get to a blank canvas, really. That means projection, I think, is inevitable.

So people have—I think before I got very involved in the archive, I was certainly prone to and enjoyed this form of projection myself. The first time I went to the archive, I think I’d already decided what life I was going to uncover and that the narrative would reveal—the narrative I had set would reveal itself by going through the archive.

Included in the book is a rejection letter from Virgin Records—we included that one because I was able to get in touch with Simon Draper, who was the MD of Virgin at the time, and he said, “Oh, there’s no way we ever listened to that. That’s just the letter we sent to everyone.” There were probably four or five other letters from other record companies there. So if someone wanted to construct a life of rejection and failure, those letters were there.

But really what I thought it spoke to was Arthur’s sense of commitment, industriousness—that he got to New York, he mailed everyone a demo tape, he mailed every major record company a demo tape. Like nearly everyone who sent a demo tape to a record company in the first half of the 1970s, he was rejected. But what a lot of people who sent those demo tapes and received those rejection letters didn’t experience was communication from John Hammond or from Jerry Wexler. Those items are also in the archive.

So I was very conscious of that projection. Given Arthur’s sexuality, given the nature of his death, there is a space that opens up for various types of projection. Not in any way trying to suggest a hierarchy of projection or a privileging of projection, but what I have come away with is a sense that for such an unmediated, enigmatic character whose work is so resonant across generations, it’s inevitable that we identify with the Arthur who reveals himself to us on a personal level. Who are we to say that Arthur wouldn’t be absolutely delighted with that outcome?

Lawrence Peryer: Since you’ve taken us to the archive already, I’m going to hold up the book for a moment. Such a beautiful object. Before you even get to opening it and revealing the material inside, it just has such a beautiful feel to it. But I’m curious—you talked about the version of the story you were certain you were going to find or that you came into this with. When you started to make your way into the material, what challenged you? What challenged your assumptions or what was surprising about what you found there?

Richard King: I think that’s a really good question. I found it quite difficult. So on a very technical level, the curatorial staff and the administrative staff could not have been more helpful. At a time when the capacities of the US public sector and state are under attack, I’d like to make a point that my interaction with the New York Public Library was the state in full-blown efficiency and charm and professionalism. They couldn’t have been more helpful.

But they had inevitably had to file the archive. The way they had filed it was vaguely chronological. I think more just out of expedience than any sort of sense of wanting to build a sort of definitive archival route. Uncovering the material for the first time through the system they had used—the filing system they had used—tripped me up.

What I realized was there is a chronology. I think the standard of Arthur’s work throughout his life was unbelievably high. One of the most celebrated pieces still is “Instrumentals.” That’s effectively—in another composer, that might be called an early work or similar. Equally, the songs—some of his most beloved songs are product of his musical creativity from the start. Yet the work he made both towards the end of his life and in the middle is of just an incredibly strong quality.

Yes, he lived chronologically through time like we all do, but there’s no sense to be made, there’s no through line to be made of his creativity. An example I give of this is that later on, at the end of the eighties and the early nineties, he was constantly looking for collaborators and remixers to work with—people like Graham Massey from 808 State, William Orbit. There’s phone numbers from Louie Vega of Masters at Work in the archive.

It’s not that in the early eighties he was going through a dance phase or a dance period that he grew out of, and then moved into the World of Echo phase. It’s just essentially this creativity on all fronts, and that wasn’t something that could be mapped onto a timeline essentially.

The I initially stumbled at the idea of how this could in any way be contained in a way that would make sense to the reader or indeed to myself. Partly that’s to do with the fact that Arthur kept nearly every scrap of paper. There are cab receipts, there are scraps of phone numbers, there’s everything. So obviously one tends to want to find a buried treasure going through an archive like that. Then you realize none of it’s buried because it’s all there and it’s all treasure. So if someone keeps everything, one scrap of paper’s no more significant than another, then they suddenly all take on this enormous significance.

So I had to unpick quite a few assumptions I had, including the sense that the things he would’ve hung onto would’ve been the most meaningful to him. When there was a taxi receipt—although there was one taxi receipt from Smith Street in Brooklyn and I showed it to Tom, Arthur’s partner, and he did say to me, “What the hell was he doing there?” jokingly. So maybe every taxi receipt tells its own story. I expect he was—who knows what he was doing.

But there is also a lesson for me about how archives work, how we have to be at first remove when finding material, and how we have to question our motives. Are we looking for the pot of gold that explains the essence of Arthur? Or are we treating each document, each item on its own terms? I think by the midway through the second visit there, once I familiarized myself with everything, I did get a sense of actually, this is just a life, in all its mess and resonance.

Lawrence Peryer: I’m curious about your narrative construct—the combination of the archival material, the interviews, your own narrative that you build a skeleton or that you thread through it. I’m really curious about your decision to approach the book that way, but also some of your choices about when to let the material do the talking versus when you felt you needed to be a little more—maybe add more exposition or things like that?

Richard King: Yeah. I made the decision—I worked very closely with Steve and with Tom and to a slightly lesser degree, but Arthur’s sister Kate was also involved—so I did work closely with them and had overview of what we might do. There was a degree of collaboration there, but I took the decision quite early on that if I wanted to speak to people, I wanted to keep it quite narrow in terms of the voices, because I did feel it was quite an intimate project and it was going through the minutia of someone’s life.

To that end, without being sinister, but to that end, I did think I would mainly speak to people who visited Arthur when he was sick. So people who’d been quite constant in his life, which actually was, give or take a few, most people. So I spoke to his first partner, his first girlfriend Muriel, because her letters to each other, which are very evocative of first love. She was in San Francisco when Arthur was there, which seems like a very interesting period in his life. I tried to get in touch with his former Buddhist teacher, who I believe when I was working on it was still alive, but I tried and tried, but there was no response from anywhere.

I also realized that if I kept it quite close and tight and kept the community around Arthur in my conversation with the archive, it meant that when I spoke to say Peter Zummo, who’s been interviewed many times about Arthur and obviously is generally agreeable to the idea, it meant that I could be very—so rather than not in any way dismissive of anyone who’s spoken to before or will again, but rather than say to him, “What are your memories of the chord charts for ‘Go Bang,'” we could look at a flyer together on screen that in some cases, something like a flyer or a score or a photograph that, in most cases, Peter, for example, hadn’t seen for thirty, forty years.

We could discuss that both what it related to, which was usually fairly self-evident, but also where it fitted in with the culture around what we might call new music or the Kitchen or the culture of earning a living. As Arthur put it, trying to keep your head above water, above Midtown. Certainly the two Peters, Zummo and Gordon, have exceptional memories for people who’ve been so active and busy and probably played thousands of concerts between them. I felt by doing that we had a dialogue with Arthur, with the archive, and with the world and the place and the spaces they occupied.

That became quite a dominant modus operandi. I did find it incredibly edifying, the manner in which the archive allowed people to talk about mainly Manhattan at the time, in the late seventies, early eighties. Personally I find that more interesting than where Arthur might have gone cruising. So I’m not in any way being prurient about that, but to me, that was far more interesting than Arthur’s sex life.

So that was—and there’s quite a lot of, there is some kind of smutty or bored daydream, sexual fantasies in the archive. They’re in the book, there’s Arthur in capital letters just writing “HORNY,” and I say in my introduction that he writes about sex with the same authority as Prince or Betty Davis, and I think it’s an underappreciated factor of Arthur’s music, the way he sings songs about sex and does so in a fairly unique way, but I wasn’t after the kind of the gossip of whether he went to the Anvil or not, basically.

Lawrence Peryer: Tell me about the East Twelfth Street apartment. If you could maybe give us a little bit about what that place was and what you got from going there and standing before it.

Richard King: Yeah. So it was between First and A on East Twelfth Street. Arthur first moved there around 1975 and shared an apartment with Rhys Chatham, both of whom were involved in the Kitchen at the time, both of whom had been musical directors of the Kitchen. Then pretty soon Arthur took an apartment on the top floor and was a four-floor walk-up. That’s where Arthur lived for the rest of his life in that apartment.

On the first floor, Allen Ginsberg had two apartments. I think some work had been done that made them pretty expansive. In the Allen Ginsberg archives there’s lots of mention of people like Harry Smith, the filmmaker and archivist, living there for a while as well as various of Ginsberg’s poetic associates.

To this day, Richard Hell still lives there in the building, and you’ll know better than I do that every seven or eight years, either the New York Times or the New Yorker will interview him and talk about rent control apartments still existing in the East Village as a totem child for rent control.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Richard King: There’ll be a picture of his nice wooden floors. Lucy Sante lived in the apartment and I really enjoyed talking to her about her memory. Obviously Lucy’s written one of the great works of history and memory about the Lower East Side. Just talking to her about life then—she’s also written very vividly about that area when she and Arthur were both living there. But talking to her, she has an incredible memory and a wonderful cultural, historical eye. Really brought it to life for me.

Obviously Tom lived there for twelve years, from 1980 to 1992, and lived there on his own after Arthur died for a while, for a good few years. One of the things that really struck me when I stood outside there was the fact that I worked out that in his life, Arthur didn’t play that often outside of New York, maybe not that often outside of Manhattan. Certainly under his own name, Arthur Russell, maybe five or six times. But obviously Arthur played a phenomenal amount of concerts, and I was really struck by the fact that he carried his cello up and down those four flights of stairs all his life.

Not wanting to romanticize or overdramatize things so much, I did stand there thinking, “Gosh, Arthur probably played on average to twenty people a night for most of his life.” What sort of person walked back having played to twenty people again, ten years on, and carrying his cello back up the flights of stairs? So it was very evocative.

Obviously the historic material circumstances of New York in the seventies and eighties meant that it was one of those rare moments—not many in the twentieth century. There’s Paris before and after the First World War, New York in economic trouble in the seventies and eighties. But there were moments where people could live in the middle of very exciting cities and work to live, not live to work. They could work to live a creative life.

One of the things I find poignant about this book and talking about it is that so many young people love Arthur’s work. The kind of life Arthur lived—putting aside the support he got from his parents, but just the fact he could live with very low-cost rent in the middle of New York and play regularly and experiment and develop ideas without the pressure of finance bearing down on them—that’s a life unavailable to young people now. That’s really struck a chord with me.

But most of the people I spoke to got to know through exploring Arthur’s work just all seemed to be incredibly grateful to have enjoyed this moment. Obviously some of them have Keith Haring works on their walls and they’ve carried—they have things to show for living through it all. But I generally find people to have had their lives changed by the sense of community more than anything else.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. The book really evokes for me—and I read the book shortly after reading John Lurie’s memoir, and it just, those two back to back, you realize how small the scene and the community was. Everyone literally knew each other and played together or slept together or drank together or whatever it was. But it was not—people think of New York as being a big metropolis, which of course it is. But downtown it’s only a few square blocks, really. It’s called The Village for a reason.

Richard King: Yes. Peter Zummo was a Lounge Lizard for a while. That’s right. Which speaks to that. Yes. I think it was for—it wasn’t for a very long period. One of the revelations to me actually as a British person—I do have family who live in New York, and I did visit New York when I was quite young. I would’ve been there just when Arthur was still alive. So I didn’t go there in the eighties, but I did go there in the early nineties. So I caught maybe the very last vestiges of some of this. Certainly I remember being in a cafe near the East Village and being told by one of my family that so many people had died in the area around me, because of HIV/AIDS.

But one of the revelations to me as a British person was—pre-internet, unless you were absolute record nerd like myself, of which there were many, but the received wisdom of what represented certain parts of America came through the UK music press. That tended to be through American bands represented, released in the UK. From the late, mid to late eighties onwards, if you read the music—not if you read things like The Face, but in other places—it was very much the kind of no wave, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, and then things like slightly more obtuse noise bands.

But one of the revelations to me was—don’t be dismissive of people, but there’s a big difference between people screaming into the void of nihilism. People from Connecticut screaming into the void on stage at CBGB making a kind of existential howl. There’s a huge difference between people doing that and people who’ve moved to the East Village because they want to hear Puerto Rican rhythms or they want to eat Ukrainian food and they want to basically get away from the jocks and they want to live in an America of the imagination where everyone’s welcome and they want to live the kind of life unavailable to them. Certainly unavailable to Arthur in Iowa.

Thinking of New York at the time in that sense was a real—as someone who was conditioned to thinking about it as noisy people screaming about the end of the world over feedback and guitars, that was a real moment of revelation for me.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. Yeah.

Richard King: I do like Sonic Youth, so—

Lawrence Peryer: I appreciate the clarification. Yeah. It’s funny hearing you—I love your characterization of that mindset. I’m one of those people from Connecticut who—I moved to, I lived a block away from that apartment, so I lived on East Eleventh between First and Second in the mid-nineties. So I just—I was chasing what had just ended. Sure. But as you saw, when you were there, there were still the remnants, right? You could see people in bookstores or cafes or still hear the rumblings of, everybody remembered when, or there were still junkies dying on the street. Those things that seemed like they were somehow an important part of the experience, but they were really real people’s lives.

Richard King: Definitely. There’s some footage of Kon, who in many ways might be the band that encapsulates all this, including the fact they never quite got it together to release records on one label or make an album, but had Madonna dancing in the early video. I don’t think it was Dance interior. It might have been Club Lingerie. I’d have to check anyway. At an East Village adjacent club. They’re playing in Tompkins Square Park in the Bandshell in about, I think ’84, ’85. Perhaps that was the kind of apotheosis of this kind of thing with a band just playing Cuban rhythms, playing, having a horn section. The difference between the people on stage and the audience is fairly indistinct and everyone’s dancing and it’s free. No one looks like they’re wearing real expensive clothes, but everyone looks very stylish.

I think Arthur might have wandered over there, but he might not have. As well as wanting to try and evoke this area or lead the reader to the moments in the archive that evoke this era, it was important to try and communicate the sense that Arthur was within it and was active. Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. You evoke it so well in the book where you talk about when Arthur would go to clubs, it was really to be around the dancing and to watch the people and watch the music or even to hear his music through a sound system. It was less about him going out and raving and partying. It was—he was back observing.

Richard King: Yes. Will Socolov, I’m not sure whether I put it in the book, but he said when Arthur danced, his words were, “it was truly horrible.” Like he had this weird internal rhythm. He’d go to Paradise Garage and he had a VIP membership card, but he wasn’t a VIP kind of person. I’m not sure, looking at the historical data, that Paradise Garage was that much of a VIP kind of place anyway, beyond wanting to press records into Larry Levan’s hands while he was DJing. But I think he was there to hear the music, to hear how his music sounded through the PA—is often very critical of how it sounded.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Richard King: But also I think he was really intrigued by how people reacted to music, and you can hear that same interest in reaction in “Instrumentals” as you can hear in “Go Bang.” I’d argue the choice of who’s playing what in “Instrumentals” has the same sense of inquiry that the collapsing in on itself crescendos of “Go Bang” have. You know, who’s in charge? No one really. Everything’s up for grabs.

Then I include a letter written in the last—during the last year of Arthur’s life to Steven Hall, his friend—he’s actually writing a letter from a club and he’s talking about “Gypsy Woman” by Crystal Waters coming over the PA and he’s talking about young kids voguing. Yeah, Arthur was the sort of person who went to a club and wrote a letter. There you go. I think if someone was trying to—not that it’s possible, but to try and define Arthur, I think that gets you quite close.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. Yeah. You spoke earlier about the incredible quality of his work and what might be a lesser work for him is a major work for someone else, I think. But you can’t help but juxtapose that against the fact that—or perhaps these two things are intimately entwined—the fact that he let so little of it out into the world in a recorded fashion while he was alive, yet was ridiculously productive. I left the book still wondering about intention on his part, and I’m wondering if you got any insight into that.

Richard King: Yeah, I left the book wondering about his intention too. I think that is probably the mystery at the heart of Arthur. So if one were just being very prosaic, when he was most active in terms of recording in the 1980s, if you found a lane and you stayed in it, there was—there were careers to be had, there was money to be made. There were people around who could make that happen for you. Now there were people around Arthur who did that, several of whom were friends and colleagues at the Kitchen. Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson to name but three—those were people who, I don’t mean this in any way critically, but focused on their creation of a certain type of composition. It worked really well for them. What Steve Reich didn’t do is then make some charming introverted country pop songs or make some epoch-defining dance floor records.

Lawrence Peryer: So I’m still waiting for the Laurie Anderson Americana record.

Richard King: I don’t think we have to wait too long. But so it’s not a question that you have to be commercial or you had to be pop oriented. Those opportunities were there within what could loosely be called the avant-garde as well.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Richard King: So being prosaic, you could say if Arthur had stuck to one thing, that would’ve given him more of a chance. If he had found a manager or a business partner or an accountant or if he himself had been the type of person who could coordinate the career up to a point where a professional can come in and take over, then who knows what would’ve happened.

Now I don’t want to discount those notions because I think they’re useful to remember that it could be—Rough Trade, Jeff Travis was incredibly supportive of Arthur, incredibly supportive. They had a really good working relationship as far as Arthur’s working relationships went. But Jeff isn’t the sort of A&R person who’s going to say, “We need this tape mastered by second quarter next year, or else.” Now if he’d been signed to Nonesuch or if he’d been signed to ECM, things would’ve been different. They’d be—I’m not saying they’d have been completely different to working with, say, Jeff Travis, but they would’ve been different and there’s—it would’ve been a different way of working.

So there is an element that Arthur never had that relationship with a manager, a record company where things had to be done by a certain date and hit the street and off we go and book the tour. He just didn’t operate in that world. So one reason why we didn’t hear so much of this music has to be because he wasn’t in those kind of schemas of the record industry.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah, that’s fair.

Richard King: Then we get onto the more—then we’re into the realms of projection again. Was Arthur—and this is, did he have a certain personality that meant trying to finish a piece or saying it was done? That came hard? Did that come hard to him? Did he have an enduring—was the influence of Buddhism enduring to the point where the activity was about the composition?

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Richard King: Did he never quite have the hunger to push himself commercially because of his background and the fact he was supported by Tom and his parents? I don’t know about that because certainly the archive just reveals an industriousness that is rare. I think his commitment to his work was total. So perhaps there were elements to having a recording or a recording career that eluded him in terms of knowing when something was finished. But it wasn’t that he was lazy or unproductive. He is working constantly, I think.

I think there is an element where Peter Gordon said this to me very eloquently. He said maybe the best way to think about Arthur’s creativity is that the work were the recordings were the rehearsals and the recording sessions. Especially when there was a full moon. That was the work. That’s when Arthur was creating and that’s what counted. Everything we have is a record of that, but it’s not what we have, particularly the way it’s come out means what we have is a record of that activity, not the definitive release of that activity.

It’s so interesting. Arthur’s music hasn’t been reissued. It’s just been released for the first time, possibly on the whole, not obviously not all of it. But again, this goes back to the fact that it’s fairly unique, so I think probably to answer your question, I think it’s a combination of all those factors, but it took a certain type of character to navigate the music industry in the 1980s. I don’t think Arthur had that character.

Jeff Travis said to me he couldn’t remember Arthur ever making an inquiry about when he was on Rough Trade recording a John Peel session, because he probably didn’t have a clue who John Peel was. He didn’t say, “Can I come to London to play the ICA?” He just didn’t have that kind of—I don’t want to call it ambition because I think Arthur was very ambitious, but he just wasn’t centered around that kind of plotting a career mentality.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. He existed in a very strange liminal space between fine artist and pop artist. His ability to move around in all of it is so fascinating.

Richard King: Yeah. Probably that’s what makes him exceptional. Not many people can do that. The songs are what make him—set him apart from lots of his peers. The fact he could create astonishing works like “Instrumentals.” He could make records for the dance floor, but then that he could step back from all that and write something like “Losing My Taste for the Nightlife.” That’s extraordinary to have talent across all those vectors.

Lawrence Peryer: That’s right. It’s not being a dilettante.

Richard King: No. As I said at the beginning of the conversation, I think the quality of what he did is there across every field of music he was working in.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: I only want to keep you for a bit longer, but I’m curious, Richard—you alluded to the full moon and that came up multiple times in the book. Can you talk a little bit about—it did not, it was not a trivial piece of Arthur’s creative sort of mojo. It seemed like it was—people, it—multiple people pointed out the fact that he was almost insistent on working on the full moon.

Richard King: Yeah. This is really, I think this is where things get really interesting because you—that’s a really good way of putting it. It wasn’t nontrivial, but pro—and he was insistent, if there’s a full moon, he wanted something to happen either as a rehearsal or whenever possible recording session. Nor can they be explained by some gnostic, mystic Baal. There’s something as ever with Arthur that it’s between these two points.

I think he loved the energy of the full moon. Who’s to say the full moon didn’t have—I’ve not been to Iowa, but friends who are from Iowa tell me you can read by the moonlight on certain times of year, and who’s to say that he didn’t once see a full moon over a cornfield, and it didn’t just have set something off in him. It could be that as much as some sense of a sort of lunar ritual. It could be that the full moon reminded him of a feeling he’d had. Here we are projecting again, by the way. But he wanted activity to happen on the full moon.

My way of trying to understand it was the few environments in the twentieth century more urban than the East Village in Manhattan in the early eighties. There’s a way that he’s somehow bringing the cornfield to the city with the full moon. But then, as the theme tune to the film Arthur had it, “When you get caught between the moon and New York City, there’s nothing—”

Lawrence Peryer: We’re going to have to get the mystic interpretation of that film as told through the lens of Arthur Russell’s life and work. Love it.

Richard King: Exactly. Exactly.

Lawrence Peryer: A couple of other quick things. I’m curious in your travels through the archive—were there any pieces that stood out for you? I don’t want to define the question too much, but I guess what I’m trying to get at is something that was special or resonant or perhaps in the realm of favorites for you, and if it makes it easier to answer at all.

One of my favorite collections or sets of photos are of him, I think it’s a little bit later in life when he is back in Iowa and he’s in the corn fields. I love those photos. There’s something very intimate. While he seldom is smiley in photos, there’s a lightness to his presence in the photos. He had a very real groundedness. They’re just beautiful. I don’t need to belabor it with words. They’re beautiful.

Richard King: Yeah. No, there’s a sense that he feels at home in that environment. Definitely. I think that there’s—I think there are a few things I didn’t include because I thought they’d be too overwhelming or just push buttons too much. One of them is a note and it just says, “Please wake me up before you leave. Arthur”—signed by Arthur, not “Please will you, Arthur, wake me up.” It says, “Please will you wake me up before you leave. Arthur?”

That’s obviously Arthur writing to Tom. The intimacy of that I found very affecting. It also speaks to the fact that Tom had to get out in the morning and go to work, but I just thought so much of Arthur’s personality—obviously I was reading a lot into every single thing at this point, including cab receipts from Brooklyn. But I was at a point where I could read an awful lot into the fact he wrote “Arthur” and didn’t just put “A,” and there’s just something about him writing “Arthur” like that sort of really brings him to life for me. I can’t quite explain it more than that.

Lawrence Peryer: I love that. Thank you. Thank you. By way of my last question for you, are you able to articulate at all how your understanding shifted, how your narrative and your projection went from “this was a life of failure and missed opportunity” to wherever you arrived at now, however you encapsulate Arthur’s life and work?

Richard King: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think, again, being prosaic, I’m very aware that in America people take things like World of Echo and the instrumental music very seriously. Whereas in Europe, we’re all a bunch of soul girls and soul boys, and we all like the kind of dance floor bangers maybe a little more. I think New York is so obsessed with New York and in a funny sort of way into New York exceptionalism, which I’m all for too. But I think things like “Instrumentals” and the music he made at the Kitchen’s taken very seriously in New York, but—and it’s wonderful that places like the Kitchen and Roulette and, until recently, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, these places still kept going. It’s just amazing.

But I think I realized that the extent to which Arthur got up in the morning and did it again and again, and the fact he carried that cello up and down those four flights of stairs again and again, completely dissuaded me from the idea of a tortured artist or someone who expected the world to come to them. He wasn’t in an ivory tower at the top of that apartment block on East Twelfth Street. He was working really hard all the time. He was prone to go wandering and have the odd break. I’m not saying he was working twenty hours a day, but he was someone who was very really serious about what he did.

I think it really brought it home to me that to be creative is to work is to keep going. We’re so lucky to experience the fruits of that creativity. The fact that he didn’t have quite the commercial success he hoped for didn’t mean that he was always frustrated. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up that output of creation. I think that’s an amazing achievement, and to leave behind, to bequeath that kind of legacy—not many people can do that.

Lawrence Peryer: Thank you for that. Thank you for that. Are you done in that world or is your work complete?

Richard King: I’m actually making a program for Radio 3 for the BBC later this year about the Kitchen and what was then called new music. So I’m not completely done with it. I DJ quite regularly and I play more and more music of that era because it sounds so good through a PA. It’s so well recorded. So I don’t—no, I think I am done with trying to understand it. I just like enjoying it again, basically.

Lawrence Peryer: Wonderful. Yeah. I just to let you know, we had a comment in the chat that said from someone John Rosenfeld who said he worked with Arthur on “Let’s Go Swimming” and World of Echo, Adam’s side. It’s exciting. It’s funny that people come out for Arthur-related things, like he—people were touched, as you said, at the very beginning, whether it was listeners or people in his life. He left his mark for sure. And it’s a growing mark.

Richard King: Yes. I think it’s a kind of—I think his music’s increasingly a place, a sanctuary for many people, these difficult times.

Lawrence Peryer: Richard, thank you so much. What a beautiful work, and thank you for spending time with us and it’s so wonderful to speak with you. Thank you very much.

Richard King: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Lawrence.

Lawrence Peryer: All right, we’ll talk to you soon. Take care. Thank you everybody for being here. Take care. Bye-bye.

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