[FM] Bon Voyage Ianniello (Or: E Pluribus Iguanaland)

[Mark Humphreys]

Tom Ianniello is leaving Los Angeles.  Family obligations are removing
him from our presence and into another desert, to the east, to Arizona.
He is leaving his larger family behind, and we are stunned.  He can't do
this.  Not yet.  Things need to be put in order first. Things need to be
said.

Tom Ianniello is leaving Los Angeles, where he somehow managed to land,
after leaving Rochester, New York, where everyone he knew was either
working for Eastman Kodak or looking for a way to get out of town so
they didn't have to work for Eastman Kodak.  He got out.  And came to a
different kind of wasteland.  And found it wanting.  And turned it into
a garden.

Tom Ianniello is leaving Los Angeles, where somewhere, deep beneath the
glossy glare of Hollywood and the commercial culture it blares out to
the rest of the world, exists a realm of artists undaunted by the canned
magic speeding by them in their daily lives.  It is a realm that those
artists made themselves.  A realm where anything is possible.  A realm
where exquisite pain and unfettered joy are true, identifiable
boundaries between which every single human emotion and spiritual
connection can actually be confronted, caressed, cursed and bargained
with, without having to ask first if it's safe.  And Tom is its
Godfather, its Boss, its reluctant Prime Minister.  The unelected,
benign dictator and President of the People's Republic of Iguanaland,
Los Angeles, USA.

And now he's leaving Los Angeles.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to wait for some funeral twenty-five or
thirty-five or however many years from now to say some nice things about
him.  Come to think of it, after he finds out I've said so many nice
things about him, he's sure to have me offed and dumped in some landfill
in the South Bay anyway, so it hardly matters.  So here goes...

This message is going out not only to those who know Tom, but to four
separate "folk" lists, for two reasons---1) Because if you don't know
Tom Ianiello personally, I want to tell you about how he influenced so
many of us here in La La Land who engage in that broadly-defined "folk"
arena; and 2) Because there's probably a Tom Ianniello right near you,
and that person/those persons deserve to have their praises sung too,
and I hope you'll be inspired to sing them.

More on that in a moment...but for now, here's one very spare, three
chord (okay four, with the minor 6 in the bridge) ode to Thomas ("The
Pliers") Ianniello:

*****     *****

There are plenty of places to go to play your music or read your poetry
or try out your comedy or just hang out if you're fresh off the bus (or
the freeway) in our fair town, whether you want to be the Next Big Thing
or just a working artist.  Some are excellent places to meet the people
on the scene.  Others offer opportunities to perform in open mic
settings.  A lot are harder to get into as a performer, and require some
experience and time among us.  Unfortunately, just about none of them
are free of a certain kind of cynicism and cool detachment endemic in
the culture out here.  I call it The Attitude.  If you have no soul, you
can thrive on The Attitude.  If you have a soul and understand it, you
can work your way around it.  If, on the other hand, you have a soul and
can't understand it (as is the case with most artists), it can kill
you.  Or worse, force you to allow your art, and then your talent, to
shrivel and die.

And so it was only natural that at some point something had to give.  In
the late 80s and early 90s those of us who refused to let our souls (let
alone our art) be trampled upon made a decision to Not Care About It
Anymore; meaning that we would, for the most part, ignore how the rest
of the Entertainment Machinery runs and just start Doing What We Do.  We
started playing and reading and dancing and writing and singing for
ourselves, and began to carve out a separate, working environment from
which, eventually (we hoped), we could provide our own way to success,
as defined by no one but ourselves.  But the real definition, the sense
of place and home base, was missing until Tom came along.

The Iguana Cafe in North Hollywood was everything our new internal
society demanded of itself.  Physically, it wasn't much.  A small
stage.  A darkly lit room with a few tables.  A cooler with sodas and
snacks.  A coffee pot.  Some books.  Some knick-knacks behind the
counter which ranged from headshop-funky to Woolworth's-tacky.  And lots
and lots of independently-released CDs and tapes.

>From the psychic point of view, the place was something else
altogether.  It was The Difference.  And this is what Tom himself
brought to the Party.

It was the only place in town back then where any artist, no matter how
freaky (or "commercially normal", for that matter) had an absolutely
equal standing when they first walked through the door.  There was a
total lack of cynicism or hipness about the Iguana.

The first time I met Tom was in early 1994, when I walked in off the
street, on my way home from work, dressed in my dowdy paralegal sweater
vest and tie.  I was 37 years old---fat; gray around the temples; about
as un-hip and unworthy of Record Company Attention as a person could
get---and totally convinced I could still make a living as a performing
songwriter.  Stupidly headstrong (and equally as vulnerable to abuse), I
had decided that I didn't care about being a Star anymore; that I just
wanted to make records and play my music because it was what I had to
do.  So I put out a CD on my own label and was going to start performing
again, even after having losing any semblance of performance chops
during ten years of hard drinking and staring into space for hours at a
time.

And here I had the audacity to walk into one of the hottest folk clubs
on the West Coast and ask for a gig.  Thank God it was the first place I
walked into.  If it hadn't been the first place, I may never have walked
into any other place.  I might easily have given up.

There, as I entered, sitting at one of the tables, was a short-ish
fellow with long gray hair (grayer even than mine) and a beard, drinking
coffee.  As I handed him five copies of my first (and extremely flawed,
artistically and performance-wise) CD, telling him I hoped he'd sell
them, and asking for a booking to play my music, he never---not
once---smirched or flinched or treated me in any way other than as if
everything I asked for was reasonable and ordinary.  He told me to play
some songs at the Sunday night open mic, so that I could be heard in
front of an audience, and after that we could talk about a booking.

I played that open mic, and I sucked.  I sucked for a long time after
that.  But, unlike every other place I tried to play back then, Tom
actually gave me weeknight slots to play, where I had the freedom to
make mistakes and get better.  While other venues in town snickered at
me while demanding that I bring 25 people to any show they booked me
for, I was given full sets at the Iguana with no prerequisites of any
kind other than an occasioinal "tell your friends about it if you can."
I shared those weeknight shows with the oddest and most twisted
collection of poets and writers and comedians imaginable.  And it all
worked.

And here's the thing:  Some of us were obviously incredible talents
fully-grown; others (like me) were still working on improving our act;
others were so unique and/or bizzare that they would never fit into
anything resembling Commercial America's vision of "Prime Time," but we
were all---every last one of us---great.  Because Tom Ianniello---by his
silent, unspoken trust in us---allowed us to be great.  Where everywhere
else it was the same dirty race for time on stage, Tom just gave us our
slots and let us do what we did.

So we flourished, and most of us found ways to sustain our voices so
that we could use them anywhere, anytime.  And in the process a true
community evolved.  We became a family, in real terms, a couple hundred
former outcasts whose lives inevitably intertwined with each other.
Some of us were distant cousins or uncles or aunts we talked to only
occasionaly; others were siblings as close---or even more so---than any
brother or sister our biological parents bore.  We gained and lost
lovers; we gossiped and quarreled amongst each other; we ultimately
stood by each other without fail. And in some cases, we even met our
Life Partners in Iguanaland.  My wife and I could never have met
anywhere but there.

And through it all, Tommy kept the space open---the physical and the
spiritual place---sometimes at real cost to his own immediate comfort
and family life.  He maintained an image of Somebody You Don't Want to
Mess With---hence the nickname "Pliers."  But while that was certainly
true enough (I once saw him physically intimidate a particularly onerous
pillhead twice his size, who was trying to cause trouble before one of
the Sunday open mics, with nothing more than a well-placed "cocksucker"
and a glare), he was, and remains to this day, your basic, average
radical pacifist hippie who once dreamed of being a rock star; who still
plays some mean guitar licks when the moment moves him; who still truly
believes all that stuff he learned in the 1960s about the dignity of a
single human soul, its longing for self-expression, and our moral
obligation to allow it to sing.  And Tom loves hearing it sing.

All of us have moved on, and things have inevitably changed.  After the
Iguana closed in 1995, Tom tried a new venture a few years later that
strived for much of what the Iguana accomplished---but it died
financially, mostly because there were so few of us left who had the
time to support it.  This is nobody's fault, and really, in my opinion,
just another version of the old bromide that "you can't go home again."
No, what the Iguana was in real time back in the early 1990s cannot be
duplicated in today's time; it lives as a testament to itself, in the
way those who were part of it remain connected, even though we don't see
each other as much anymore---and in its legacy, personified by those of
us who have careers today because they were allowed to find their way at
the Iguana.

Most importantly, Tom's model has spread around Los Angeles, and today
there are many more places to play without having to deal with The
Attitude than there ever were before Iguanaland was born.  The
singer/songwriter community in Southern California, as just one example,
has become far more cooperative and self-supportive than anyone could
have imagined ten years ago.  Sure, nothing's perfect, but whatever has
changed for the good in L.A.'s "Acoustic Underground" over the last
decade can be directly traced to the existence and example of the Iguana
Cafe.

Putting it simply: Tom Ianniello, by just doing the only thing he knew
how to do, begat other Tom Ianniellos.  And maybe that's the best anyone
can ever hope for in one lifetime---to create something so meaningful
that others will want to duplicate it.

Which brings me back to why I am sending this message to so many other
people outside the scope of the Iguanaland Family:  To let you know that
right now, somewhere in your town, there is a Tom Ianniello (or quite
possibly more than one) who is either operating, or in the process of
creating, physical spaces and spiritual homelands where art can flourish
without restraint, comment or fear of failure.

Somewhere right near where you live there is someone who will welcome
the poet who was beaten up and tossed aside as a freak in high school,
and invite her to read her work onstage so that it can lift the spirit
of others.  Someone who will not laugh at the quiet drunk who walks
through the door with five new pages from the manuscript of his life
story, but will instead offer to try to publish it when it's done.
Someone who will not scoff at the painter whose work has been hidden in
her bedroom since childhood for fear of rejection, but instead hangs the
art on the walls and puts it on sale.  Someone who will accept at face
value the worth of an aging, frumpy songwriter who believes in himself
enough to go onstage and be bad, because he knows he can get good.

These people---the ones who provide the oxygen for artists to be
themselves---are necessary, and must be sought out, nourished and
encouraged, however they require it.  Notice these people.  They are
rare and they are essential to the continuation of art in this mightily
screwed-up culture.

Tom, wherever you are as you read this (and before you call on your
thugs to come and break my legs for saying this), please know that you
are one of those people.  That dozens of artists are out in the world
right now carrying your love and respect in their gig bags and notebooks
and sketch pads.  No matter what else you do the remainder of your days
(and I'm guessing there'll be a lot more of the same to come), what you
have done so far is enough for a hundred lifetimes.  Thank you.  Safe
journey.  Love to your beautiful partner, Erika.  Love to you.  We miss
you already.  Come home soon.

*****     *****
Mark Humphreys
Singer/Songwriter
c/o Trough Records
P.O. Box 8174
Van Nuys, CA 91409-8174
Phone: (818) 994-3210
Fax: (800) 856-4520
Web: http://www.markhumphreys.com
E-Mail: mailto:markh@trough.com