“Which is more important today: the use of cars as means of transportation, or their use as expression of our unconscious yearnings for personal freedom, sexual release and the final liberation of sudden death?”
—Ivan Illich
[Discussed: Mobile venues, motors, synchronicity, precarity, touring, spiders, Hale Zukas, Occupy, privilege.]
___________________________________________________________________There is plenty of mythology about John Benson, and most of it is true. He invented math rock. He can rip a phone book in half with his bare hands. He once fell inside of a beached whale.
In college, John was a member of Berkeley’s infamous Barrington Hall student co-op, a holdover from the hippie era known for open drug use, nudity, and acid punch. He never used drugs or alcohol, though there is some speculation about his inadvertent digestion of LSD around this time. Benson went on to help found the squat- turned-coop The Purple House (then the Pink House), in North Oak- land, which still exists today.
He has toured extensively as bassist for groups A Minor Forest, Hale Zukas, Evil Wicked Warrior, Living Hell, Black Dog, and more, in a series of precarious vans and buses. He sometimes creates music using a vibrating, amplified drum full of milk and pig’s blood.
For over 20 years Benson has repaired and hand-modified wheelchairs for disabled residents of Oakland and Berkeley, both on location and from a series of cluttered workshops, stuffed with assorted parts and motors.
John Benson is a skilled storyteller, but he isn’t one to boast about his achievements. He rarely seems to pause. His experiments and inventions tend to aim stubbornly and dangerously forward, in the direction of autonomy and freedom. These pursuits involve many failures, plenty of maintenance, and the occasional glorious triumph.
Picture John climbing aboard his repurposed AC Transit bus. It is plastered in parking tickets and orange warning stickers. He is already late to a chain of destinations. Benson calmly removes the tickets and place them in a nondescript pile in the passenger seat. Turns the ignition, tugs at the ear. It is tempting imagine Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the a hill. The boulder, the wheel, is outfitted with a series of triggers and relays, its amplified surface crackling loudly through a portable PA system, Benson smiling upward toward some unknown summit.
John would likely feel uncomfortable claiming much ownership over the events described here. In some ways he is little more than a passenger , or caregiver, to the machines themselves. It seems appropriate, instead, to traverse his chaotic history using the lives of the physical vehicles, which often evolve independently of their “owner.”
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[The recording begins as John is already describing a recent Twitch performance in his wheelchair shop below ground in Downtown Oakland. He describes wheelchairs and walkers outfitted with microphones and amplified strings...]
I had the sound coming through this little tin horn. [I was] just rolling it through the parking garage and getting it all echoey, and creating a drone. And then I took the tin horn and swung it around. I had the camera/microphone thing kind of far away, so you could get the effect of the parking garage. I was really into it, really serious about it. Turns out the audio wasn’t coming through. [Laughs.] I was like, ‘Yeah, that went really well!’
And people could see the visual but they couldn’t hear anything?
Right. They could see me pushing these walkers around, [Laughs] and balancing strings next to the speakers or whatever, and taking the horn and getting it closer to the guitar. But they couldn’t hear anything. And then, on top of that, that was the first BLM protest, where the Target at Broadway and 27th got smashed and looted. After it was all over I packed up all my gear in this parking lot, which is right on 27th street, and I was about to drive away. There were all these riot cops and fires, and the protesters were there. I was like, ‘Oh, I really missed an opportunity right here. I could’ve just had a little show—have people come down into the parking garage and hang out.’ [Laughs]
So that’s where you work out of usually?
Yeah, it’s this big gothic looking church right at Broadway and 27th. There’s a parking garage underneath it, and I have a storage under there full of ventilators and commodes and hospital tables. I’ve done a couple of performances under there: One was just for people that wander by, and then I did that Twitch livestream thing that had no audio.
Shit.
It was fun though. I was trying to be really optimistic that this was gonna catch on, the [distanced] live thing. People could do it from their bedrooms.
Yeah, I remember being kind of excited about it, and then something shifted. People seemed eager to do it, and watch it. I don’t know if it’s fallen off, or if I’ve just stopped paying attention.
I do watch Almighty Op on Saturday nights. He’s down in Los Angeles, and he has a bunch of marionettes, but they’re actually just kind of found objects. You never see him, but he has a looper pedal and a guitar, and he’ll make these songs. Friends Forever, they were all, ‘You gotta watch this, John. It’s right up your alley; you’ll love it.’ He just kind of sets up all these puppets and they’re really chaotic. He tries to manipulate them all into playing music, and they’re always falling down. He has characters within all of the puppets. Sometimes his dog comes in and starts getting everything tangled up, and it’s just this beautiful attempt at trying to precariously hold something together. I feel like your shows are often like that actually! [Laughs]
What whet your appetite for these kinds of projects when you were younger? Building, tinkering, all of that.
In Ohio and Illinois everybody is tinkering with their cars—or certainly in the 70’s, everybody was tricking out their car in the driveway. And my Dad had a Harley, and he was really into the whole Harley culture where you were constantly working on your motorcycle. So I grew up in that Midwest culture. I definitely had a lot of experience working on cars.
My Dad was also a heavy drinker, so I was driving at the age of 9. He would get really wasted and give me the keys to the car, and I would drive him home. [Laughs] We had this Model A Ford that he got in a scrapyard. It’s like the old Ford that had a rumble seat, and it had a hand clutch. It was like a tractor, basically. You had to squeeze a hand grip to change gears and ratchet it back, kind of like you would drive a tractor. There were four pedals on the floor, different braking systems.
My Dad was drunk, and I was driving this Model A back home. And, you know, we were in farmer world. There’s no stop signs or anything like that. So it was totally safe. [Laughs] No problem. But the cops pulled us over, and I was terrified. When I was a kid I wouldn’t talk to strangers at all; I was super, super shy. My Dad was just like, ‘Yeah, I’m really wasted. It’s safer if he drives.’ And the cop was like, ‘No! What is he, 10?!’ So the cop says ‘Move over, I’m gonna drive; we’re gonna get you home.’ And he couldn’t drive the Model A. There were too many complications. So one of my early, early childhood memories of driving was me driving a Model A with the cop sitting next to me and my dad passed out in the rumble seat in the back. And just having a conversation with this guy who’s like ‘so, how’s school? [Laughs]
Were you able to reach everything?
Bless my dad, he actually had 2x4s screwed together. My bicycle was the same way, where there were blocks on the wheels. So I had an adult-sized ten speed, but I could reach the pedals, because my Dad put these blocks of 2x4 there so I could reach the pedals. He thought it was hilarious. He thought it was the coolest thing ever that I could drive the Model A. It was kind of like a toy. It was really fun. He would let me take it out into the dirt roads and bring it back.
BEASTIE BOYS’ HYDRAULIC PENIS:
[Recording cuts in and out as Benson describes one of his first large-scale creative gigs in the Bay Area, working for a friend, building sets.]
His whole thing was building these big stage sets. Like, Dio had a castle door, like a drawbridge that would come down, and this dragon head behind it. When my friend first got hired they were building that. I was so in awe. It was like, ‘Oh my God, really? I wanna do that!’ I thought I was gonna build some kind of dragon head or something.
But instead they said, ‘Cool, you’re on the Beastie Boys project’ ?
[Laughs] Yeah. A mechanical penis for The Beastie Boys’ stage show.
So it would become erect while they were performing, using hydraulics?
Yeah. It would slowly go up. I don’t remember if it actually did anything else... It might’ve.