FRED BACHER: MAJOR STATEMENT MAN

In the 1980s and early '90s, multitalented artist Fred Bacher launched a long insurrection of more than 20 multimedia assaults on Hallwalls and other galleries and clubs in the U.S. and Canada. His early solo performances, mixing writings and improvised rants, original songs, and his own experimental films, gained international attention from audiences and critics. In solo and ensemble works such as Vomit, Serenade to CNN, Contest of Phantoms, and The Hunchback of Television which he created and performed at the height of that era's performance art explosion in Buffalo, Toronto, and NYC, Bacher shared affinities with a group of experimental artists (Finley, Anderson, Bogosian) who were reshaping language for new theatrical and electronic environments. Like them, and on some of the same stages, Bacher developed dramatic or musical personas that were rich in pop culture references, smashed the boundaries between mass media and high art, and could be at times even more in-your-face political than theirs.

A powerful and haunting work three years in the making, Major Statement Man is a collection of 15 original songs dealing with the major political events of our era: the events and aftermath of 9/11, recent corporate scandals, and anti-WTO protests in Seattle and elsewhere. These works are not simply "protest songs" in the traditional sense. Their music forms intense and complex poetic structures blending punk, rock, mock country, and cinematic soundtrack elements.

The Major Statement Man of the CD's title is, of course, Bacher himself, he reveals, "but told through a cross section of the pop music of the last 30 years. Imagine telling your life through the corpse of rock and roll and you got it. So much that is being sampled today is just musical form, sonic texture. That sort of bores me. I always thought it was supposed to be about history and psychology, things that really hurt. Eminem is on the right track. If he would just read some history he would be an absolute genius instead of what he is, an asshole genius."

"We have all imagined ourselves as the hero of a movie. Major Statement Man is someone who has fashioned from his own personage a rupture-machine unloosed in commercial movies (basically what I used to do on stage). One day Major Statement Man wakes to find that he has exhausted both film and theater. He is not even a real person anymore, just some stupid rupture machine. He wakes alone with his guitar. Where does he go? He goes into his radio and disappears. He wants nothing to do with the avant-garde ever again, nothing but pure sound. But like the aged Michael Corleone in Godfather III, every time he tries to get out of the avant-garde, it keeps pulling him back in. So Major Statement Man decides to record this CD called Major Statement Man, which is about finding his own voice through various pop events, such as the collapse of punk rock in a room at the Chelsea Hotel. Sort of Forrest Gump as a musical, only not as hokey.

"I have one long song called "The Ghost of Sid Vicious" that is something like the memory of punk music told through a slow hangover of Rostropovich. There's definitely that shot-of-vodka-over-the-Siberian-snow-at-midnight kind of string section, with those factories-closing-in-your-pint-of-Murphy's-at-the-pub kind of guitar. Though it's dead misery to listen to, I think this song serves to remind us that revolution is still possible in our lifetime if one is really committed to drinking vast amounts of alcohol in Buffalo, New York."

Bacher has received numerous awards, fellowships, and grants from arts agencies and organizations in Canada and the U.S., including NEA, NYSCA, Canada Council, and Ontario Arts Council. His work as a performance artist and as a fiction writer earned him separate fellowships in different years from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). For many years a resident of Buffalo, he currently lives in his native Canada

Some publications related to this event:
October, 2002 - 2002