Interview by Icky A. in MRR#280, Sept 2006
Bill Daniel took photos of the Texas punk scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (this is a bit of an understatement as I think he said he has like 10,000 negatives from that time period). They’re great photos and enough to warrant an interview, but Bill has kept busy since then working on art, zines, political pranks and (mostly) film. He has been touring behind his newest film project Who Is Bozo Texino?, a beautiful documentary on graffiti and underground train culture. It’s well worth checking out, with footage he’s accumulated over 16 years (and it’s just awesome to see and listen to a 70 year old guy walking the tracks tagging boxcars). So here goes…
Who are you? Where are you from, and what do you do?
My name is Bill Daniel. I hail from Dallas, and what I do is take pictures, make movies, observe possibilities.
As a youth in Texas you were involved in the punk scene?
I came across punk late, age-wise for myself, and maybe late in the scheme of what was going on on the West Coast and East Coast. I was going to school at the University of Texas, in business school. I grew up in suburban Dallas in the ‘70s, and I moved to Austin in ‘77, and it was a real laid back hippie town, actually a really groovy place at the time: great live music, easy place to hang out and drink beer, go swimming. Then Raul’s club opened up on the drag. Even for a kid like me, who was in business school, I was aware of what was going on. That club was kind of notorious from the get-go. Everybody kind of knew what it was, even though hardly anyone was going there except from some crazy art students and also some crazy people and real totally wild experimental type of people.
Was it mostly local groups playing there?
Yeah, yeah, it was all local bands. This was like ‘79 or ‘80 and I think the club opened in ‘78 or ‘79. There were like five local bands.
What were the first local punk bands you remember seeing?
The Foams, Standing Waves, a lot of new wave stuff, before the distinction was really made. Terminal Mind, who were really cool and arty and bizarre. The Skunks who were more rock-y. There were a lot of bands who were more power-pop rock; real three chord stuff that we were really into, because I came from a more heavy metal background, but the Big Boys, that was the real breakthrough, for me and a lot of other people. I’d see them around, like at the one record store, so I was aware of who they were. The first time we saw them was an outdoor show. Then you know, it was The Dicks and MDC, those were the three main hardcore bands, and it wasn’t even called hardcore then, but it was stuff that we were drawn to.
Were you aware of the older Austin garage bands, like the 13th Floor Elevators?
Yeah. Austin was loaded with those kinds of characters. They’d been around for a long time and they were these legends that you knew were around somewhere and you’d see them on posters every once in awhile. Roky was one of these Austin legends. He was definitely this kind of shadowy figure from history that at that point we hadn’t seen that much of until he started hooking up with the Explosives. The Explosives were great. They were like Cheap Trick, this totally brilliant pop thing. But once we started going to punk shows, we really started getting focused on that—our minds kind of narrowed. It was like, “I don’t go to blues clubs anymore. I’m not interested in anything that smacks of this old Texas,” although I grew up on Jerry Jeff Walker and that kind of stuff, but there was a feeling of excitement with punk that was like, “fuck that stuff,” it just wasn’t as much fun.
Did that first wave of Texas punk bands stand out as something exceptional? To me they sound like Texas, but did it feel that way at the time?
When things were really starting to gel, each band was so different that I didn’t see it as a Texas sound, but more like, I don’t know, a family of orphans. Like, we’re all brothers and sisters but everybody looked different and everybody was into such a different style and sound. I knew we were different than the things in New York and the things in LA. It seemed natural to me that different places all had their own sounds, but I didn’t necessarily think like, “boy are we weird in Texas.” Like you know, compare MDC and the Buttholes, so different but all so together in it. Then, I think as hardcore developed there were definitely towns that had their “chkc chkc chkc,” their cadences and vocal styles.
What was the scene like at that point?
It’s like that classic line; they were like the greatest shows ever—for the twenty people who were there. If you look at them like a show now, it would be like, “oh well,” but back then that’s all there was. I mean, even still, I know there are totally amazing twenty people shows and everyone there is having a great time and not wishing there were more people there, but then it really felt like that was it. And then y’know by ‘80, ‘81 it got big enough to be different scenes, things started kind of splitting off and it got kind of fractious—which wasn’t necessarily bad. It was exciting drawing your lines and saying, “this is my crowd and this is our music, and this is what our music says.” It was partly critical of other scenes maybe, and we were probably trying to be more radical.
How did you start taking pictures at shows?
I was just kind of nerdy photo student doing photo assignments, like night photography, and time exposures, just kind of technical tricks. Or you know, like taking pictures of cars that I thought were cool looking—just dumb stuff. My brother and I had always taken pictures of ourselves on bikes: BMX-ing, jumping and crashing for the camera, and I used to shoot motorcycle races too, which was the first time I had a real passion for what I was shooting. That was in junior high and high school. By the time I was going to college and taking these classes, going to shows was the first thing that really sparked me, I was like “ah, this is something.” It drove me to take pictures, and a style kinda came out of it for me and once that style developed I was really, really engaged with it. I saw the way I was trying to work with photography as akin to what people were trying to do with the music. The way I was using the camera and the flash, to me represented how I felt about the music, and the scene, and the way I was interacting with the room, with the audience, and the band. It felt like it was engaging the same set of rules.
Did you have this documentarian kind of impulse with it? That this needed to be recorded?
Definitely. I definitely wanted to document it and put it in the record. I felt that it was special and needed to be recorded. From the very beginning I thought, “nobody will know about this,” about what it looked like or felt like. I mean looking back, at the time I never would’ve believed that now there’d be much interest in it, but I did want the future to know about this, like Black Flag. When they came through, I took those pictures and it blew my mind. I felt like I was witnessing something historical, but I also honestly never thought many people would pay it any mind, because people weren’t back then.
What did you do with the photos at the time?
I did a few things for Big Boys album covers. I did things for zines. My friend Michael Not designed this zine called Western Round Up that had this ‘50s dude-ranch style. It was really design-y. It almost had a new wave feel, even though it was fast and sloppily put together, but it wasn’t like punk cut-and-paste-anarchy style. It was definitely going after a funny arty metaphor. So I shot all the photos for that, and it was cool because the pictures were all my style and choosing, and the design was all Mike’s thing. It was definitely apart from what other zines looked like, especially hardcore zines. There was a zine out of Houston called Hymnal, and that was an awesome zine. It was huge and had really aggressive graphics. It really set the standard for a punk publication in Texas. There were lots of other cool zines: Zyphoid Process, King [Coffee] had Throbbing Cattle when he was still in high school up in Ft. Worth, there was Cattle Prod, lots of things picking up on Texas themes. You know, Texas was such a different place, you could fuck with the Texas myth and it was fun. I can’t imagine playing with that iconography for kicks anymore—just destroy that image and the whole idea of being a cowboy, but in the early ‘80s we were still in this last naïve sense that being from Texas is kinda neat. (laughs) It’s not funny anymore, but it was great time to be a punk there and have plenty of aggressive culture to push against, but it didn’t seem so life and death as it does now.
Were your skateboarding pictures from around the same time?
Definitely the same time. I was working at a skate park called Flow Motion and I’d take pictures of my friends skateboarding. I also had some friend in Dallas, Craig Johnson and the Zorlac crew and whenever I was in Dallas I would go skating with them. The Clown Ramp and the Blue Ramp, Whip and Dip, some cool ditches up there. So I was always taking pictures of skating too, but the skating pictures never really clicked like the punk photos did. For one thing, at shows I was shooting with a flash, so I was getting a whole different look, really reductive and minimal. Whereas with skating, I was shooting outside in full light, the photo could be good, the trick could be good, but it’s still just a picture of somebody upside down over a piece of concrete. In a sense skateboarding didn’t carry the same context that music does, but it conveys a lot of the same attitude that the band shots did. Like, “we’re together in this thing, we do this and it is outside of, against everything else,” but also the skating I was shooting wasn’t that rad. If you look at my skating shots compared to what Glen was shooting in southern CA, the skating doesn’t even compare. There was no way to keep up with what people were doing with vertical in California. Not saying that we didn’t have really good skaters, but you know…
When I skateboarded to a show once this older punk guy from Eugene went off on me about how skateboarding ruined punk, that it brought the whole jock thing in, the metal, and drove out all the true freaks, you think there’s truth in that?
Yeah, yeah, sure to a degree. As something grows and more people come to it, obviously the people are gonna change, the scene is gonna change, and minority factions are gonna get smaller and a lot more marginalized. It’s like there were certainly a lot more teenage boys going, “let’s beat the shit out of each other for fun,” even if they were rebellious and skaters. So yeah, they move into a scene and displace all these other things, and in Austin the scene was definitely small enough where you could say that hardcore put a clamp down on what was acceptable and killed some of the playfulness that was there.
Are there morals from that time that you’ve kept with you?
Yeah, for better or for worse, sure, that success is bad, classic punk thing, and I got a bad case of it.
How do you make a living doing your work and at the same time stick to your ideals?
That’s something I’m always battling and navigating. Those values of not selling out and not working for the man. Keeping your own control. A lot of these ideas I got from punk are truths that I believe in and definitely will carry forever and try to maintain, even when it’s hard. It’s funny cause they’re ideas that came to us through stupid nasty rock & roll in the ‘70s. And not that they necessarily originated from there, but you see the same in ideas in green politics, in political movements nowadays, so when these same ideas sprout in completely different fields, there’s gotta be some truth there.
At what point did you stop taking pictures of bands and shows?
I moved from Austin to Dallas in ‘83, and I thought I would quit cause I was moving away from this great scene. At that point I was trying to work on commercial photography. I was working in professional studios, and I thought, “now it’s time for me to grow up,” but I would still go to shows at this really cool club in Dallas called Liberty Hall, and I was shooting and saw some great shows. I actually changed flashes in those years. I borrowed one from the studio I was working at. It was way more high powered so the photography got a little more contrast-y. Formally for me it was really cool, and it was a small cool scene in Dallas. At shows it would be 40 people in the audience, instead of 100, and they were all friends. So, like the pit in Dallas was way more friendly and funny and people were more likely to clown around, more dancing and less about a big turf battle on the dance floor. That was ‘83, ‘84. Then we had Rock Against Reagan, and there was a big demo in Dallas and a bunch of bands played, and he got re-elected and I got really disillusioned. At the same time I was also starting to listen to a lot of other music, and I thank punk for opening me up to it. I listened to bebop and old African music. I started to follow other ideas, and by the time ‘85 rolled around I felt like I was done with punk and started doing other kinds of photography.
Like what?
I was doing this industrial photography. I was listening to Zoviet France and that kinda stuff and that was influencing my pictures at the time, a lot of urban landscapes. I was living in a warehouse district in Dallas that hadn’t gentrified yet and I would take a flash out at night, and just walk around empty warehouses, crawling through burnt buildings, shooting a lot of that kinda stuff. Kinda cliché industrial stuff. Having fun doing it and experimenting with the process, thinking about rhythm and texture as opposed to the human form or narrative or documentation. I also started to shoot Super 8 film at the time.
You’re still showing the punk photos, but not this stuff. Is that your own choice or is that just what people are interested in?
The industrial photography, while good for me as an artist and craftsman, really doesn’t have anywhere near the weight that the documentary work does, and that’s part of my personal values. Being fulfilled as an individual or as an artist is good, but more important than that is the idea of community and service and making sure that the world you live in is just. Documenting punk bands and the punk scene related to that, it showed, here were some kids who got together and made their own thing completely outside of the restraints of consumer culture. Those photos were way bigger then me, it was about the bands and the ideas and the scene.
So at what point did you make that jump from photos to film?
At first it was all really experimental stuff, it came out of the industrial photos. I was experimenting with camera movement multiple exposures, pixilation, things that were really based on rhythm, form and texture and not at all about content. Every week we’d have shows in my friend’s studio and project what we’d shot the week before because you could get a roll of film for two bucks and get it processed for two bucks at the drug store. That was fun. But it wasn’t until I saw a Les Blank film in ‘86 that my mind was really blown for documentary film. Les Blank was a documentary filmmaker from the Bay Area who specialized in really pure documentary of southern culture: Cajun culture, conjunto culture, border culture, really into indigenous food and music and cultural identity. His films are really beautiful and really pure. Their form is what he sees. He’s probably done 100 of them. He’s still around. Still in the Bay Area. So I saw this and I thought, “wow.” This is really beautiful and awesome and by this filmmaker doing this I get to see this thing I would never have seen, or even knew existed.
What was the first thing you tried to do like that?
It wasn’t really until I moved to San Francisco. At that point I knew I wanted to make film, and for me San Francisco was the place to be. I started making Super 8 documentaries of people I’d meet, like a panhandler or a performance artist. I didn’t make many of those, maybe ten or something. I made a couple about bike messenging, about messenger culture. I made a couple of Super 8 films. One called A Bad Day Cycling is Better than a Good Day at Work and one called A Bikeman’s Holiday which is about the annual Russian River ride, where a bunch of messengers all ride up to the Russian River—it’s kind of like a pedal powered Sturgess run. They were fun to make, but were really clumsy because Super 8 sound is so hard. They are nice documents, especially at this point, the messengers’ bikes then were all like Schwinn cruisers with five speed hubs put on the back and big baskets—almost nobody on a road bike.
At what point did you start working on the Bozo Texino film?
Before I even got into film really, like ‘83. It started when I was in Dallas. My studio was right next to a rail yard and when I was poking around looking for industrial shots I started seeing this graffiti on the trains and I was immediately fascinated by it, thinking, “This is awesome what the fuck is it?” I didn’t start shooting film until I moved to San Francisco. I was shooting train graffiti, trains and train culture. So Bozo Texino started as like a twelve minute Super 8 sound film. Then it just grew out of control.
You’ve been working on it for a long time. What happened that you would walk way and then come back to it?
Different things, but mostly money. At one point I found myself writing a humanities grant for it. Good grief, I’m lucky if I can keep my car license tags up to date. At that point I thought it would be a straight academic documentary, but the film was never meant to be that. So at some point I’d get money, work on it, get disgusted, run out of money, work on other things, and that went on for 16 years.
So what is Who Is Bozo Texino??
It’s a personal film. It’s a documentary in that everything I filmed is pretty much as I saw it, and it’s a black and white one hour travelogue.
What’s it about?
It’s a history of hobo and rail worker graffiti. It’s a history in a way, but there’s no historical footage in it. It’s a film about rail mythology and outsider identity, and how tramps and workers spin these identities for themselves out of boredom or out of wanderlust or this projected fantasy of living, and really, in the case of tramps, they’re living in a radically different way, they are making their way across the earth in a completely different manner.
You made the film in a way that there is no over arching narration to it leading you along. Was that deliberate or did it just work out that way?
When I was working on the film at some point I was fooling around with the idea of the voice of god, of having some kind of narrator that would lead you through different decades, and I was gonna use historical footage, but I scrapped that. I was also playing with the idea of using a first person narrator, so it was more personal, that would talk over the top and move the film along and give it some kind of personality. I love those corny first person narrative like Endless Summer or On any Sunday, the motorcycle film. So I love that form, and wrote tons and tons of narration for the film, but it came down to my writing, and I felt that I was less interested in what I wrote, and more interested in what these guys had to say. Let the material do the talking, you know. What kind of film could I make with only the material that I have?
A lot of your projects that I’ve seen document American outsider culture. For a lot of us I think that’s the saving grace of what America can be. I’m wondering if you think there is hope in American folk culture or dissident culture being able to change America anymore?
Well that’s a doozy. I love aspects of the culture here, and especially dissident culture or folk culture or outsider culture or whatever you want to call it – cultures that value self reliance and independence. Those are values that used to be more mainstream or more heartland values, but in this inverted world we live in now, all that’s on the outs, especially in practice. All the good ideas, all the ass saving ideas are being held by all kinds of marginal cultures. So I see hope; I see great ideas; I see ideas as good as anywhere here but they’re so buried and so marginalized and certainly they’re gaining, but the opposition is totally outpacing us. They’ve consolidated their power so well that we’re completely outgunned. There is hope because Goliath becomes more monolithic and there’s lots of Davids. So I don’t know, maybe we can push him over pretty soon. Yeah, I don’t know really.
You’ve documented people on the fringes. Do you worry about exploiting the people or cultures you are documenting?
When I first started shooting pictures of the train graffiti I was so freakish I wouldn’t show people the footage. I thought this is so pure and rad that I didn’t want to ruin it. To have someone make Bozo Texino jeans or something—it’s just that innate sense that to talk about something in this culture is to partially destroy it or erode it. That’s a big issue in documentary stuff; those who know don’t tell; those who do tell don’t know. It’s just like surfing. If you have a good spot, don’t talk about it. At the same time you want these ideas to be known and appreciated, but because our culture is based on exploitation it’s hard to avoid the mechanics of that exploitation and find an audience. The whole time I was working on the film I was thinking about it, and now I think about it when I show it too. Sometimes someone will say something like, “Showtime will show this,” and I’ll think maybe they would. I could cash in and get a nicer van, and then I catch myself, no, no, no. This is not for those people.
Did you find that people were reticent to talk to you on camera?
When I’m out there I’m pretty low down into it. There were sometimes out there when I didn’t get the camera out. Lots of time what was going was too good and I didn’t want to wreck it. A camera will wreck almost anything. Shooting punk shows was different because they were so loud and crazy and I was in there with my flash, a really bright flash, at F8, and when you get hit by a flash you’d get dazed, but at punk shows it didn’t change the dynamic. No one was mugging for the camera ever because I’d be shooting ten rolls a night. It was a really lucky situation where I could be recording and not changing what was going on, but in shooting the tramps… I did actually get these really beautiful people who were awesome on camera, like they were natural hams and their hamminess was completely in synch with who they were and that archetype, like the tall telling outsider, or they were not fazed by the camera at all.
What’s next? More touring. I’m gonna try and put a book together related to Bozo Texino, because there’s tons of historical material, photos, transcriptions of the interviews—a lot more text and info. Then there’s the Texas punk project. I’ve been working on a book for that for like ten years, and there’s some prospects for getting that thing done I think in the manner of a high school yearbook, which is kind of a way to deal with the whole nostalgia deal with all this. Once I get that then I’ll get back on the road and do a traveling photo show. So that’s all old news. I’m also working on a film thing on climate change, and how we deal with resources. It’s kind of about punk survivalism, desert rats, people living on boats, off the grid-ers. It’s something I’m just really getting started on, even though I’ve been working on it for four years now. My Chevy van is part of that. I took my old Chevy van and put sails on the top of it, canvas sails and wooden masts and I project video on to the sails. That’s a piece called Sunset Scavenger. Maybe I’ll get that back on the road later this year. It’s an ongoing thing and it touches on all these other things I’m interested in, self-reliance and survivalism and whatever…working outside the machine.
Anything else?
Corny but true, punk rock saved my life.
For tour dates, more information about Bill’s past projects and copies of the film see www.billdaniel.net