Arthur Russell has become a cult figure over the past three decades for his work as a musician and composer in New York during the 1970s and 1980s. Like many polymaths of that fertile period, such as Patti Smith or Andy Warhol, Russell experimented with many genres that reflected an eclectic set of interests. However, in contrast to these figures, he passed away in relative obscurity in April 1992, suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, just as his career was gaining wider notice.
Trained as a cellist, Arthur Russell was part of the avant-garde and disco scenes of the time. His friends, mentors, and collaborators included the poet Allen Ginsberg, the jazz musician Peter Gordon, and David Byrne of Talking Heads. Further reflecting the diversity of his taste, Russell recorded under the names Loose Joints, Indian Ocean, and Dinosaur L, among other stage monikers. Yet, he released only three albums during his lifetime: Tower of Meaning (1983) and World of Echo (1986) under his name and the disco LP 24→24 Music (1981) as Dinosaur L.
Numerous posthumous releases have been issued since his passing, exponentially multiplying the material available. Russell recorded compulsively in a variety of styles, including folk and country music, such as Love Is Overtaking Me (2004) and Iowa Dream (2019), and post-punk/dance music, as found in Corn (2015). His best work remains uncategorizable by virtue of his uncommon cello playing and haunting vocals. The recent Picture of Bunny Rabbit from 2019 captures this quality, though this ghostliness was present early on with World of Echo, which convened an unlikely mix of no-wave, post-punk, spoken word, and acid jazz elements together.
Appropriate to its subject, Travels Over Feeling is also a genre-defying work. Part biography, a work of criticism, and a visual portfolio of Russell’s oeuvre, author and Planet Records founder Richard King has synthesized an unusual collection of photographs, interview excerpts, personal letters, music composition sheets, and other ephemera drawn from Russell’s papers at the New York Public Library. The result is a beguiling mix of the public and the personal, simultaneously revealing and adding mystery to his life.
Born to a prosperous family in May 1951 – a facsimile of his birth certificate is included in Travels Over Feeling – Russell grew up in Iowa with little indication of his future as an artist. However, by the time he was 16, Russell was already expressing interests in John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, and Buddhism, as mentioned in a letter to a friend. Shortly thereafter, he absconded to San Francisco, where he fortuitously arrived at Haight-Ashbury in time for the summer of 1968.
Part I of Travels Over Feeling recounts this childhood and young adulthood period. Manifesting his teenage musings in Iowa, Russell lived in a Buddhist commune, Kailas Shugendo, and studied at the Ali Akbar College of Music. Indian raga and other global music traditions soon became part of his repertoire. Not least, he met Ginsberg in 1971, who became an important mentor, calling Russell’s work “Buddhist bubblegum music”.
Indeed, Ginsberg assisted Russell in his pivotal move to New York City, where he began studying at the Manhattan School of Music in 1973. Part II of Travels Over Feeling addresses his early years in New York, where he became involved in a new world of avant-garde artists and musicians in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, including Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass.
Money was a constant issue, though the city was more affordable then. “We used to joke that the same $50 got passed back and forth between us,” composer and musician Peter Gordon recounted this period. “There was no dividing line between money and the community. It wasn’t like anyone was making any money… Monastic is an apt description of his [Russell’s] life, both in terms of his past experience but also in his complete and total belief in his music and nothing else was going to get in his way.”
These excerpts from interviews with people who knew Arthur Russell drive the narrative of Travels Over Feeling, giving it a strong mnemonic feel along with the reproduced archival materials. The general effect is kaleidoscopic, with the fragmentary nature of the book reflecting the circumstances of his multifaceted life, the versatility of his music, and the frenzy of art-making itself. Russell’s ambition kept him active. As Steven Hall, a fellow musician and collaborator of Russell, remarks, “One quality the few people I think are geniuses have is that they literally cannot help themselves from constantly working.”
A stabilizing presence in Arthur Russell’s life was his partner, Tom Lee, who moved in with Russell in 1980. They remained together until the end of Russell’s life. Part III of Travels Over Feeling documents their relationship until 1986, when Russell was diagnosed with HIV. During this intermediate period, Russell began a return to his Midwestern roots, starting a project called the Singing Tractors. He also continued other musical projects like Dinosaur L and Bill’s Friends at venues like CBGB and The Kitchen, sharing the stage with acts like Swans and Sonic Youth.
The year of 1986 proved pivotal. Not only did Arthur Russell confront HIV, but his first major solo album, World of Echo, was released. (Tower of Meaning from 1983 was instrumental.) A moment of long-held aspiration coincided with recognition of his mortality. Part IV of Travels Over Feeling traces these conflicting circumstances. Like many gay men of the period, Russell had kept his personal life largely private, including from his family. Given the stigma of HIV/AIDS, news of his illness emerged slowly.
Unsurprisingly, Arthur Russell continued with this work through his illness. “He never came and said it to me, that he had AIDS,” musician Joyce Bowden remembers, another collaborator of his. “I had to bring it up, that mortality, that living, wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be and the bridge between the two worlds is nothing to be afraid of.”
In this interpersonal way, King brings Travels Over Feeling to an affecting close. The fated nature of terminal illness and the unavoidable messiness of its loose ends come through in the final pages. Russell’s life was emblematic of so many others with HIV during the 1980s and 1990s. It was a time when HIV/AIDS struck down many significant artists and musicians. The writer Lucy Sante, another acquaintance, recalls, “I lost 40 percent of my social circle in those years.”
Travels Over Feeling consequently serves as an elegy for an entire generation that died too soon, with figures like Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz among those lost. Similar to the memoirs of Patti Smith, King’s book is also a requiem for a vanished New York, which sustained younger artists and musicians and has all but disappeared.
Travels Over Feeling ends on several grace notes. “After my brother died, my parents had no one in the town, even their closest friends, that they could talk to,” Kate Russell, Arthur’s sister, recollects. “When the world around Oskaloosa, Iowa found out that Arthur died of AIDS and was gay, particularly after he became somewhat noteworthy, people reached out to my parents and said, ‘Oh, my son is gay and he’s a musician.’ That was the first time that my parents really started to feel part of another community, a community of parents with children that they had lost to AIDS.”
Russell was cremated with his ashes scattered off the coast of Maine, where he and Lee spent summers. “We boated there, clambered through the brush to the opposite side and tossed his ashes into the Atlantic Ocean,” Lee reminisces. “I wondered if they might someday reach the shores of New York, alongside his favored Staten Island Ferry, or maybe somehow make their way to his boyhood Gull Lake.”
Arthur Russell has the final word in Travels Over Feeling, drawn from the lyrics of “Close My Eyes” from Love Is Overtaking Me.
“Down where the trees grow together
And the western path comes to an end,
See the sign, it says clear weather;
I’ll meet you tonight, my friend.”