Stuart Morris

“We were not music students, and not very interested in being music students. We were artists.”

Stuart Morris was a founding member of the Supreme Dicks, a group of curious young visual artists, filmmakers, writers, & sound experimenters who emerged from the freewheeling environment of Hampshire College in the mid-1980s. Though documents of their earliest performances are not publicly available, participant & eyewitness reports consistently describe them as being marked by eager, youthful energy, spontaneity, improvisation, theatricality, & a sense of discovery. These concerts were often held in public spaces, free for anyone to listen & participate.

Morris recalls, "In terms of the evolution of the Dicks, while I was a part of it, we seemed interested in collectively owning the sound without the hierarchy of distinct and recognizable band roles. This seemed to function as the unifying core concept, and anyone who grasped that would jump in & play. Many who wanted to organize us otherwise were frustrated by our process. This was even evident in the music as it was hard to distinguish who was making what sound. ... We were not music students, and not very interested in being music students. We were artists."

Morris left the group before their music began to be documented & adopt a more formal, though still quite off-kilter, structure (hear the Breathing and Not Breathing box set). Now a Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, he spoke about those heady early times via phone on April 21, 2005. Conducted as part of an unrealized effort to compile a history of the Supreme Dicks, this interview is published here for the first time. - Adam Lore

When I consider your tenure with the Supreme Dicks and what I think I know about the band, I wonder how much we’re thinking of the same thing, because I became aware of the band much later, into the way things are now as opposed to the way things were then.

It sounds like from your questions via email and what you were just talking about, I think you have sort of figured out that the band has been very, very different things at different times, with different people. I think you’re really accurate there. I kind of lost touch with a lot of those people in the mid-’80s and sort of reconnected with some of them here and there. I didn’t play music with them much after...’86 or so. I think a lot of the band as it’s known now is what happened after that.

I was told there was a first "official" meeting of the band in late 1984?

There was a laundry room, often called The Big Room, in the basement of one of the dorms. That was probably the first time we ever thought of ourselves as a band that was performing for people with any kind of premeditation. ...Jon [Shere] and I lived together and we played a lot, just kind of jamming together, and then there was a point at which that seemed to start to get more formal. But probably more than anything it seemed like more than a musical style. Some kind of philosophy was growing. I think that the thing that seemed to really unite a lot of the playing early on was a sense of kind of a joint authorship and sort of an emergence of a sound rather than a lot of forms that we had all been exposed to at one time or another with other people who played music together where it’s sort of like, “OK, I’ll do rhythm, you do lead, you do drums...”

So there was something that happened along those lines that started to attract attention among other people. That [coincided] with a shutdown on campus of the availability of beer for parties. Mod 51, the residence that Jon and I lived in, was sort of an eight-person apartment [that] became a place where we watched a lot of movies and made a lot of music and had beer, in beer balls. More and more people would come for that and it would become kind of a venue where we would play more and more. So it sort of emerged slowly that way. And then The Big Room [meeting] was the first sort of thing that we actually thought about how we’re going to present ourselves.

How much thought was given to the audience? Because it sounds like it was a pretty personal thing between the members of the group, whoever they were, in a lot of the sort of private jamming. And then the introduction of an audience into that, was there thought for what they might be receiving?

Yeah, I think so, a little bit. Yes and no. I think a lot of what we were doing at that time was really based on a sense of energy. A lot of the audience became participants at different times and they seemed to last as participants as long as their energy seemed to be in keeping with what we were doing. ... Actually, that Big Room thing, we had a drummer who kind of came from a more serious band kind of background.

Sam Yusim?

Sam, right. So he was sort of imposing more of a sound structure on what we were doing and that was good, that worked. But there were other people who joined us from the audience occasionally who would want us to, “OK, stop. Let’s all start together.” Often they kind of just didn’t fit in. So in that regard, the line between audience and performance got blurred a lot. A lot of people contributed in a marginal way and some contributed in a very full, all-out way. We all were considering audience, but in different ways. Some people seemed really oblivious to it and would just kind of withdraw into their own world while they played. Other people seemed to respond to the energy of the audience, sometimes. Our gigs were very different. We usually received a fair amount of support from the audience at Hampshire [College] when we were playing on campus, but then there were other times where we received a lot of anger (laughs) so we didn’t usually even play that long at those other places. ... We weren’t very well received at CBGB’s.

Was that the famous show where you "impersonated" Dinosaur Jr. when they couldn't make the gig?

Yeah. ... a lot of it depended on the audience, whether or not we were paying attention to them or thumbing our nose at them.

What were you doing in the band? Were you a guitarist?

Yeah, primarily. A lot of us moved around a lot in terms of instruments, but mostly guitar.

I heard that you built some handmade gear, altered instruments, amplifiers, or things of that sort?

Well, I think we were resourceful and broke at different times, so I don’t know how much of that was in the spirit of exploring sound and how much of it was just trying to stretch the dollar. But we were looking at people like Fred Frith and listening to their music, trying to understand how they were getting pick-ups to work that way, moving them around on the instruments, putting clay on the strings and seeing what that would do, messing around with stuff like that. I don’t think we ever tuned together, though. Jon and I would, occasionally. But there were very different styles of sound that emerged during those periods. There was kind of a very different sound, I think, when Jon and I would play more or less alone, sometimes [with] Steve [Shavel], and then sometimes the public thing would change that a lot.

Can you tell me a little bit about the differences between those sounds?

The other stuff seemed more personal or more lyrical and more intertwined. It was a lot of note play. We were usually listening to each other more then. I think that in public different personalities would react in different ways to being on stage and dealing with an audience.

...The thing though that I remember about CBGB's was, you know, that place is so full of people who look like they should be there and we just didn't really look like we should be there. And then we made music that offended them, which I thought was just really brilliant. Because, you know, we looked really normal compared to them. ... It was really interesting to have people who were so practiced at being not normal saying, "You aren't normal." ... I just remember looking at them and going, "Man, you guys dress like freaks but you don't think like freaks!" I just remember feeling very proud at that moment. You know, wow – we are it, we're not wearing it.

later promo photo, Homestead Records era

Are you familiar with the Workingman’s Dick collection of earlier recordings?

Only a little bit.

Did you play on any of that material?

I don't think so. ... I think [Jon] mentioned that there was one thing on that album that had come off of a tape that they still had, that they did a mix on. But you know the funny thing is, when we were playing well, it was really hard to determine whose guitar was whose. At least, that was always my sense, so it would be hard for me to decipher any of that stuff. I don’t think I’m on any of the recordings, though.

I got kicked out of school and went to work and I could not maintain the schedule that they were on. I had no means to kind of hang out as much as they needed to. For a while I tried to. I was working in a welding shop and trying to get back into school, but I was working from eight [in the morning] until some nights seven o’clock. I would hook up with them and try to play with them, but often they didn’t get around to even making music until four or five in the morning, and I just couldn’t...After a while, there wasn’t enough payback for me on it. I missed a lot of that and I missed being around them to a degree, but it got to the point where I had to feed myself, so I kind of dropped out of what they were doing. And that was right at the point when they started, I think, getting more serious about recording and traveling and that kind of thing.

Did you have an inkling of their shift to more song-structured material?

Yeah. I’ve talked to Jon here and there. I’m aware sort of how [they’re] split between east and west coast factions of the band and all of the internal turmoil that they talk about, but I have not really listened much to the music. ... There are people in the band who were not in the band when I was involved with it and the sound has sort of moved in a very different direction, I think, following a lot of their desires for where the band should go, where the sound should go.

I’m pretty interested in both improvised and social musics, and I can see both of those things in the Dicks: how it involved different groups of people, its inclusiveness to try and encompass many things, the joys and discord that comes from that open philosophy, and the embracing of the element of chance into the performances and involving the audience in that.

Well, it’s a very interesting area. I work as a visual artist and I teach art and design. A lot of what I do in my own life now is I work with communities and I do public artwork, working with community groups and helping them sort of realize their visions. Often I function as a facilitator and whether I’m working in that capacity as an artist or a designer, I’m usually sort of in a position of being ... almost a medium in terms of understanding or gaining an understanding of what people’s needs are, then trying to address them using art.

It’s been interesting, actually, in responding to some of your emails, because it’s probably put me more in touch with this. I didn’t realize the depth to which this kind of philosophy of making art for me extended all the way back to the Dicks. But when I started trying to respond to some of your initial questions, it made me very aware that back when Steve and Jon and I were sort of messing around with these ideas, we were starting to create an art form that had lots of opportunities for other people to contribute to it, so that it wasn’t a closed forum. It wasn’t encapsulated. It actually had sort of a permeable membrane. None of us really stood out as the icon or the figurehead of the band or the star. ... We seemed to, at that point at least, share a need for that. I think people often read [that] as being cryptic because people would ask us a question and we couldn’t answer it unless we all agreed on it. As a material artist now, I run into the same sort of thing because I do a lot of collaborative work with other artists and people think you’re putting ’em on when they ask you a question like, “OK, which part did you do?” and you say, “You know, I don’t know which part I did, but the three of us did all of it together." Often audiences and critics don't get the fact that actually the vision wasn't really owned until it was outside of all of us, you know? It wasn't like one of us created the vision and then made it happen using the other two people, which is I think a very Western paradigm for art making, and music making for that matter. The composer ... or "artist as genius" kind of thing.

I respond very much to what you're saying because for me that was a lot of the interest in the band: the way in which it created community and extended itself into the community, and it became a movement more than an art form. People either had to kind of accept the way it was working or not become involved. It was a strange kind of democracy, in a certain sense. I think it has mutated and morphed.

I started up a collaborative arts group after leaving, probably in the early '90s, we called it Snath. Again, it was another sort of ambiguous name, like Supreme Dicks, and people created splinter groups in the same way that seems to be happening with the Dicks. There are splinter groups now working under the name Snath who are people that I don't know, but I know that me and another guy created the name and the group. It's very interesting to me because it's kind of like you passed something on and there was something to the philosophy of it. But there was a group of us in graduate school who worked together under that name and we would do a lot of kind of cultural activity, art kind of stuff. Then other people who would become exposed to it would want to know what it was, and we would tell them, "It's part of a Snath project." They would work with the project and then they would consider themselves members of Snath. Then they would go off and do their own projects. Then they would sort of initiate other people and five or six or seven years later, not unlike this situation with this interview, I get calls from people who go, "Oh yeah, there's a Snath project in Miami. You want to come down and be a part of it?" It's like, “Hm, that's really interesting. Who's involved?” Often you'll find out that you can figure out the degrees of separation. I find that very interesting.

Stuart Morris / Snath, Iowa City Press Citizen, November 13, 1993

There was this kid I grew up with who unfortunately killed himself, but one day he took ... ten dollars worth of quarters and painted them all red. He put them back out into circulation, [and] he wanted to see how long it would take until they came back. There's something about that sensibility that is really intriguing to me. For me, that was a lot of what the original band was about. It was about people coming together and doing things and going out and engaging other people. I think that the band as it functions now, again I don't know that much about it, but it seems to function in slightly different ways. But I also am very interested in the fact that there is still a sense of inclusiveness that is carried on with the myth and the reality of what it is.

Are there any points about the band or your experience with it that you don't feel like we've touched upon?

I think the essential thing [is] that I think it's gone through a lot of changes, that thing that you were talking about early on. I probably don't have a lot of insight into what's going on now. I hear about it, that's about it. I miss playing with them. I especially miss playing with Jon and Steve and Mark [Hanson], but that was pretty much the band as I knew it.

My favorite playing was [when] we used to play in a lecture hall on Hampshire campus, just alone. We would get really lost in the music there occasionally. Some of those would go on and on and on.. ... Usually security would find us, though, and ask us to leave.

I think there's a joy in letting go of the wheel and seeing where you go. Some people have that built in and some people don't. Some people can develop the bravery to kind of do that and some people can't. ... I always find that I go much more interesting places if I just let go of the wheel. Otherwise I go to the same place every time. And I work with a lot of people, in terms of pedagogy with students, we're dealing with it all the time. That's what I'm always telling them, "Just let go - see where you go."

Going way back to that question that you asked long ago about sort of song format versus non-song format, I think that's always the inherent argument: how much are we going to really let go and see where we end up? That is the joy and thrill of it.

The other side of that, which I've heard many an improviser say, is you can wonder how free you really are sometimes, in terms of how much you're going to, as you said, that same place again. If you're playing 300 times a year, you're not going to do something different every time.

No, but you make some new mistakes that you might learn from. ... I think that that has a lot to do with what the band has sort of been and is probably still wrestling with to a certain degree. I mean, from my understanding of it, it seems like there's some guy on the west coast who's sort of made himself the producer of the Dicks or some such thing?

Yeah, Dan Kapelovitz. I don't know much about him, but he's got his own website so if people search for the Dicks, that's what they'll turn up.

That's him. I think it's interesting. I mean, I think that's all part of the history, too - to set something in motion and to see where it ends up. I guess what I'm saying is that I think the history of the band is improvisational in that sense, too. There is no one really at the wheel. Different people grab the wheel for a while and not only does the music itself go in different directions and become different things, but the actual history of the band and all of that goes that way, too.


* Thanks, Jon Dale