In 1966, when he was 15 and growing up in Iowa, Arthur (known then as Charley) Russell wrote a letter to a school pal. “All of my former friends think I’m naive and unperceptive. I KNOW I’M NOT!!” Within a few years he had decamped to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, selling countercultural papers, getting busted for possessing marijuana. Later he moved to New York, becoming a labile figure in its downtown music scene, charming and disarming many of those he ran into, but exasperating others. Sighed Sire Records boss Seymour Stein: “That kid is fucking talented but meshuggeneh, oy!”
Before he died of Aids-related complications in 1992, aged just 40, Russell was everywhere and nowhere. He was a “between artist” – a teenage cellist who went on to study modern composition and Indian classical music, a minimalist who recorded powerpop, an obsessive studio technician who was drawn to the soundscapes of disco and early hip-hop. He slid across genres, making desire lines through otherwise gatekept fields. “In retrospect,” observes Richard King in this tapestry of archive and oral history, “his interdisciplinary résumé reads like the exemplary working life of a 21st-century producer‑composer.”
