¡Colores!; 513; He Who Stands in the Sun: The Paintings of T.C. Cannon; M. Lord Int

That's it. Everybody get a nice birthday, you like the jacket? Oh good. What jacket? I bought him a leather jacket first from LLB and one of those bomber jacket ones, you know, neat. It looks really good. Actually, I was thinking, well, if it didn't fit him in a second, I'm going to ask him. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, I said backwards. 8, 7. Well, if you get a chance, get him, read that book that I gave him. I think he took it with him. That's one of the book. It's called Cities of Gold. Have you heard about this? About these? Oh, it's a hoot. It's about this guy from Santa Fe who is a Harvard Hift story and who thought it would be a fun thing to do to retrace Coronado steps from the Arizona border to here on horseback. So, we got this... So, state your name and occupation. Seriously? No. Okay. The only thing I want you to do is, and any kind of thing that I

do, I always, I like people to express how they feel about something. So, if they have a strong point of view, I think it makes a really good TV. Okay. So, if you really like TC and you know things are bad at him and there's some way you can tap into that, that's going to make it a ten times better show. If you can forget a little bit about the camera and educate me, that's probably the best way to solve that problem. Okay. So, bear down on me or tell me things. I think we'll have a much... We'll get what I'm looking for, that kind of point of view. What's the first question? I don't know, I never know where to start with these things, so I want to start with something kind of general. How do you describe TC? As an individual or in... As you know... As I know TC, TC Cannon was a guy who... Well, you threw me a hard one right off the bat. Who wasn't TC Cannon? TC

Cannon was a very talented artist. He was a person who was very, very fond of humanity, all parts of it, all types of it. He was almost like well -rodgers, you know. He never met a person that he didn't like and he always was interested in people where you came from, what you did. He loved the outdoors. He liked the indianness of that, of being outside of... He and I used to... A lot of what we did was camping and... As I said, I was teaching him to fly fish at one point in time. Remember, I don't know anything. I know, I understand and I'm rambling just from time. What did you meet him? I got to know TC in 1974. No, heck, it was way before that when he started over again. I got to know TC Cannon in about 19... When did he graduate from IAA? I'll come back to it in a minute. 64? No, it was 65, because I gave him a little knife. I

met him in 64. I had come back from the University of Notre Dame and was giving guitar lessons around Santa Faye. Somehow, I can't remember how I got asked to teach a guitar class for a bunch of young students at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and that's where I met TC. Let's try it slowly. Okay. I was teaching guitar, and I... Okay, well, I was teaching... No, I understand, I understand. I was teaching guitar at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1964, 65, and met him along with a lot of the other art students that were there at the time who had a passionate interest in folk music. What did you think of when you first met him or when you first got to know him? Well, I'd never really had any friends that were Native Americans before, and I never really knew anything about Native Americans other than, you know, they... I grew up in Santa Faye. They lived in the Pueblos. They were on the plaza, and that was

really about my some experience. So, he and I had a very, very strong like for Bob Dylan, and at that particular time, not that many people cared for Bob Dylan because that's when his stuff was very rough and unpolished, and... But we liked the lyrics, and so I think that's probably the thing that drew us together, because I knew how to sing Bob Dylan songs, and he wanted to learn how to sing Bob Dylan songs. And he sang Bob Dylan songs just like Bob Dylan at that time. His voice was the same, and he did not know how to play the guitar that well. And so, that's really probably what drew us closer together than anything else. What do you think of when you met him? I just noticed, you know, he was a nice guy, and he spoke very well. And, you know, maybe that surprised me a little bit because at that point in time in my life, I don't know that I thought of Native Americans as being very well spoken. But, you know, he did. He spoke well. He understood the meaning of some of the lyrics and

that kind of thing. So, you know, that really probably is what drew us closer together than anything else. And then from there I went into going into the studio and watching him paint and, you know, realizing that he could do some things that I was never going to be able to do. But it was a real fun time there, then, with all those people. Because I just discovered that Native Americans were as warm and friendly, and, you know, probably more real and genuine than a lot of the people that I'd met prior to that time or up to that time. Okay, for that. I'm always interested in trying to put it all into work for him. It's interesting that you could kind of give me a portrait of him from the Earth's parents, but you know, when we were sitting in the office the other day, you just had lots of things to say about him. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's hard to sit there and go ABCD, you know, because these kinds of free flowing discussions, things will pop

into your mind, et cetera. But, you know, there's everything from his passion for the oppressed. I mean, he felt very strongly about the peoples of the world that did not have a fair shake, and he knew about them, and he was interested in them. He loved women. I mean, he really did. And he always was not involved with specifically, but friends with one or two or three women at any particular point in time. He, let's see. Keep talking, yeah. Well, maybe we should do some stories. Can you remember getting together with him and having fun? What are some of the kinds of things we did? Well, no, what are some of the stories? I mean, you had some great stories. Oh, the story of the opening, okay, the TC's first art exhibition in Santa Fe, which I, oh, in

fact, there's another story that goes along with it, was it a gallery in Santa Fe that I can't remember the name of now? But the first story that has to do with that exhibition is that we were taking paintings from his house over to the gallery, and we were using my car, and I think he had an old red pickup truck at that point in time, and his truck. And we had put a couple of paint, we had paintings leaning up against the side of the car, and we had paintings kind of on top of the car, and we were putting paintings in the car. So I got in the car, and we drive over, and get there, and we're unloading the paintings, and TC said, well, where's such and such, and so and so, two paintings. And they were gone. And we said, oh, my gosh, we must have left them on the roof of the car, and I said, well, I'll go back and get them, and TC said, not, I'll go back and get them. They're probably, they weren't that good anyway, I don't really care, and we never did. And so somebody found them, I'm sure, and somebody has them, and if they're watching this, I hope that they know what they've got. If they found these paintings somewhere in downtown Santa Fe in 19, that must have been about 19, maybe

72, 73. The rest of the story, yes. Absolutely, I thought, you know, wow, just like that, and he said, no, no, he said, they weren't that good. And he did that, I mean, he would give away, there's probably one tenth known of what he did, because everywhere he went, if he'd stay with somebody, he'd give them a little sketch or a little drawing, or if somebody said, boy, I really like that painting, he'd just give it to him. And I know he did an awful lot of that, everywhere he went, and it would be interesting sometimes to see if you could find out exactly what is out there. How about the second half of the story was that T .C. decided to serve at this opening concoction called Punk a Punch, which was basically equal parts of grain alcohol vodka and grape juice. And he had a great big bowl of this, big punch bowl of this stuff sitting on this table. And so people came in and they started sipping the

punch. And in about 15 minutes, the noise level in the room was just, I mean, at an all -time high, and about 45 minutes after that, the place was empty and the show was sold out. I mean, people just came, got up, you know, got to that point, spent their money and went out the door, and that was it. It was all over, but he sold every painting in that show. And then these little revengeers? Well, yeah, he, you know, he just, I don't know that he did it intentionally, but that was one of the most potent alcoholic things I'd ever seen in my life. And, you know, people certainly remembered what they'd done the next morning, I'm sure. That's a great story. You're going to have to be quiet, I'm sorry. Okay. Because I'll pick up you on his audio track. I can tell you another quick little story that, when he had his studio in what is now the San Busco Center in Santa Fe, but it used to be a warehouse, basically. And he rented a studio in there, and you really had to crawl back through the

bowels of this place. And in order to find him, you had to go find the guy who ran this warehouse, and you had to ask for Fred C. Dobbs. And Fred C. Dobbs, if you remember, was Humphrey Bogart's character in Treasure this year in Modvrey, which T .C. always thought was just a terrific movie. So, if you knew how to ask for Fred C. Dobbs, then you'd get taken to a studio. And if you went asking for T .C. Cannon, no guy'd say, well, I don't know who he is, you know, he's not here. I can't help you. So. What kinds of things happened to, and I, you say you saw something happening with the students? Well, there was, I think, that particular time in Native American Indian arts was one of the most significant synergistic things I've ever seen. There was so much raw talent there, and there was an attitude of total freedom of expression. The students could pretty much do anything they wanted to do, and they were encouraged to do it. And they borrowed ideas from one another, and they collaborated on things, and they were all involved in

music, a great many of them were. And it was a very, very close -knit community, and of course, you know, some of the finest of today's Native American artists came out of that place at that time. But it was just an explosion of stuff. I don't know that there's ever been anything that intense since. I still go up to Santa Fe periodically, and I'll go to the shows of the students that they have every spring. And it was so new, and it was so exciting, and you know, in the context of the time, it was the late 60s, you know, America was being burned down and torn apart from within. And then right in the midst of all of these, you had people who probably prior to that point in time had not been given total free reign. It also marked a change in the way I think that Native Americans were educated in terms of, you know, instead of us telling you, this is what you have to learn

how to do, and this is what you're going to do. They basically said, you just go do whatever you want, stand back, and we'll just watch and see what you do, and boy, what they did. So it really was, and today I still have a sense of what was going on at that place, and it was really neat being involved in it and being in the middle of it. What do you think T .C. fit into that? The only thing I know about T .C. Cannon, and I can only speak for him because of experience with him, was that when he got interested in his art, he started to study everything that had anything to do with anything that he might be thinking about painting, whether it was historical, whether it was, I mean, I remember him pouring over a book of Victorian furniture because he was wanting trying to paint a chair and a particular painting of his, and he wanted it to be exactly the way that it should have been. So he was studying Victorian furniture. So he really applied himself to his craft. I know when he came back from Vietnam, he felt that the first thing he had to do was go

get better technically. He just did not feel that he even though at that point in time, he was already starting to gain some recognition, but he just felt that he said, I'm nowhere near good enough. I know where have near the skills to mix color and to do all of those kinds of things, so that's why I went back to school just to do that. And he was getting ready before he died, his next step was to go to Europe, and he was going to go spend a couple of years in Europe studying all the great masters and looking at everything that they had done. So he prepared himself a lot. I mean, he was very, very interested in knowing everything he could know about what he was painting about, and about the time in which he lived, and he probably got ideas just from that. He was very stupid. He knew what was going on in America. He was informed in terms of news, and he just paid a lot of attention. What do you think happened with that group of students? We see a change in Native American art. Oh, I

think that marked one of the major turning points of Native American arts from what people used to affectionately call Bambi Art to art that had relevant subject matter to the, that's not right. It marked the change from the sort of primitive Bambi art to expressionist art, to where they were painting and making comments on social situations, and we're doing it without any fear of recrimination. You know, that's about the time that Dee Brown's book, Barry My Heart at Wounded Knee, came out, which I think is one of the main things that sort of woke up America's guilt complex about some of the things that had happened in Native Americans, and then that art was coming out of that same period of time in that same context, and they were writing and painting about those same kinds of subjects. There's some very black TC cannon paintings. There's a painting of, and I can't remember his name, but he was the Indian chief that was frozen in the snow

after the massacre at Wounded Knee, and it's a very stark black painting, but it's very, very powerful, and it says an awful lot. So they were able to express themselves that way in a fashion that they had never done, I think, up to that point, and I'm not a great student of Native American art, but you know, there was such a major change in what they felt they could do in the statements that they could make. They weren't just making pretty things to sell to people to hang in their homes, they were starting to make powerful statements. I don't think TC was a leader in this movement, per se, because there were other people that were doing the same thing. I think that he was able to maybe be more specific in the statements that he was making, and I think he inspired a lot of people by doing that, but I don't think he was the only one, nor was he the one that dreamed

up the idea or thought about it or anything else. How about TC as a person at that time? How would you kind of sum him up and worry what he was developing? I think TC at that point in time was like all of us were at that point in time. We were somewhat disillusioned with the establishment. We realized that number one, there were so many of us, because we were the baby boomer generation, that we could make enough noise to actually get the grownups in Washington to at least acknowledge that we were there. And our music that we listened to at the time demonstrated that, and the kinds of things that we were interested in at the time demonstrated that. And I think TC was caught up in that whole thing to a certain degree. It caught up in the belief that, you know, gee, maybe we can make a difference. Maybe we can make the world a better place. And we really believed it. We thought we could levitate

the Pentagon, at one point in time. So I think that's what he was going through. His experience, I think, was very similar to my own in terms of just how I was becoming the things I was learning about. You know, I was realizing that Native Americans were really nice people, and just as intelligent, and literate, and everything else as I was, and that there was a whole portion of American history that I didn't know about. And I think TC was discovering that, you know, not all white people were these whatever particular stereotype they, he may have had at that particular point in time that, you know, we're all, we can all like each other and get along with each other, etc. Great. Roger Gore? Yeah, probably. I can tell you got caught. No, but I mean it was, it was so fast. You know, remember the scene in Cat Ballue, where, at the end of it, the guy says, I never saw a man get through a day so fast in my life. When he does the thing and he's drinking and all of a sudden, he passes out. That's about what that thing was like.

Let's see, you're still here. Oh, good. I'm here. Okay. What was that for? I think when you become friends with somebody, you become friends with them for a reason. Why do you think you became friends with TC? I think we both shared, we liked a lot of the same things, and we had a lot of the same opinions and attitudes, which was kind of surprising. Again, you know, maybe as much for him as it was for me, that you could get that close to somebody that traditionally, you really weren't supposed to get close to. That's great. I started and then it just goes blank. Keep going. Well, we had a lot of fun together. I mean, you know, one of the things we love to do is sit up until three o 'clock in the morning and drink beer and sing music or listen to music. Sometimes when he was traveling around the country, he would show up in Santa Fe at one o 'clock in the

morning with a case of course beer under one arms and a whole bunch of new records under the other arm. And then we would stay up until the sun came up. It used to put a fair amount of strain on my first marriage when we had a small baby and TC would come rolling into town at two o 'clock in the morning and want to stay up and listen to music and play music and drink beer. So we did have a lot of fun together. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I did. I always did. You can relax. No, it's funny. I'm going on a subject and you know, for whatever reason. I'm not particularly nervous, but the words just aren't coming. Just, you know, if you keep talking to me, we'll get OK. Well, I got so much tape we can make. Yeah, well, I noticed you. I don't know.

When I think of friends of mine, I have friends of the guy because we're certain meetings. Well, some of the most, the best times that I remember with him are the things where we really seem to be the closest. We spent a lot of time in the backcountry of Van Lerner National Monument and it was something that I had done a lot before I knew TC. And it's something that he'd never done until he came to Santa Fe and we used to go backpack. We just go out and spend the night somewhere out in the bush and that place I feed.