About: Todd Schroeder Boom Boom Click (Stagger Lee)
In a truly basic sense, 2 things came together: a song and a highway road sign.
The sign was along highway 40 going through the mountains in Tennessee. It was the kind of sign that can be pulled around behind a truck and moved from place to place. The words/word on the sign was CAUTION stacked 3 times high. The structure of the sign was of a grid and the structure of the letters was light bulbs lit up relative to that grid to construct the letters. I was not driving, my wife was, I had a little notebook and made a quick little drawing of the sign.
The song has its origins in the Delta blues; at least I think it does (maybe it goes back further?). The song is often titled something along the lines of “Stagger Lee”, though the spelling varies and so does the title (“Ballad of Stagger Lee”…). I had been listening to a version of the song that was recorded a few years ago by Nick Cave (of the Bad Seeds), a hugely powerful version, very sparse and intense. I was (and am) struck by how incredibly married form and content are in this version. Though at this point I wasn’t thinking about connecting it to my production at all, but I kept coming across different versions of this song in the most random of places: hearing some R and B band play a live version in a cocktail lounge, listening to The Clash’s London Calling album for the 1st time in years and noticing the narrative with in another song…on and on. The song seemed to be pushing itself on me.
This evolved (way down the line of evolution) into a wall drawing that I have done 2 times now. The structure is relative to music and to the construction of language. The language is relative to music and the narrative of the song. The form of the narrative migrates and changes as does the formal arrangement of the music. Though there is a connective tissue to the entire history. That is where my thinking is relative to this piece.
The painting, untitled (oh no there goes Tokyo), follows along that same logic, but connecting to a 1970’s Rock and Roll song by Blue Oyster Cult. It is about the connections between form and language, music and story in a similar fashion as the wall drawing, Boom Boom Click (Stagger Lee).
Todd Schroeder Feb 15 2011
