Charlie Mcalister
“Bear in mind, this is all hearsay. He’s a man of legends. Then you meet him and you’re equally certain and uncertain that it’s all true. He’s a practical guy who always wears a cut off t-shirt sleeve on his head to catch his sweat in humid Charleston. And his eyes hint at a life lived for the opposite of practicality—for adventure.”
RJG is on the #ArtHunt for works on paper by Charlie McAlister, for a private collector. Inbox us if you want to #SellYourARt. Note that images are ©️ Rebekah Jacob Modern, LLC and are not intended to share.
As a musician, Charlie McAlister’s records have been sent to Brooklyn, New Zealand. As an artist, his pieces hang in Baltimore and Chicago. But in Charleston, where McAlister is from and has lived the majority of his life, too little of the population knows his name.
Just like his music and art, one can collect Charlie McAlister stories. There was this one time at SXSW in Austin when McAlister came out on stage not to perform in the regular musical way, but instead he melted a bunch of things in a skillet. The wine and cheese he serves at art openings is hooch and Kraft singles. He stays up till 4 A.M. recording records at his house in McClellanville, SC, long after the band has called it a day. He plays music with a potato sack over his head. He works on a boat, and if you flub and drop your keys over the side, he’ll spend 30 minutes fishing with a magnet to help you.
Bear in mind, this is all hearsay. He’s a man of legends. Then you meet him and you’re equally certain and uncertain that it’s all true. He’s a practical guy who always wears a cut off t-shirt sleeve on his head to catch his sweat in humid Charleston. And his eyes hint at a life lived for the opposite of practicality—for adventure.
McAlister’s most accessible art are his chapbooks* and Sardine Magozine. (Yes, that’s an “o.”) Sardine includes product reviews, parking tickets, destruction and flooding in the city, and photos of open fields with the caption, “What they gon’ build?” He says, “I named it Sardines because I was kind of getting into eating sardines at the time.” But it has to mean more, right? The symbolism of how sardines are packed into a vacuum-sealed can seems to pair perfectly with the major theme in his art: according to him, the development of Charleston.
McAlister illustrates his point with a simple business example: “Everybody I know is talking about it. Those guys on the docks! Shem Creek is the perfect example of how this city is changing. These paddle boarding companies have come in, and they charge $40 to rent one for four hours. That’s how you can make money down there. It’s tough for the shrimpers to make a living on those docks now.”
Then he goes into this great story about a baby manatee knocking a girl off a paddle board.
Recently, McAlister started showing his art at Rebekah Jacob Gallery, which seemed completely out of character for him, but it makes sense too. “I’m tired of my art just sitting around. And I’m getting older now. 45. It’s time to just let things go. They’re nice folks, and they have a nice space.”
RJG hangs a combination of hard edge painting and ink on mylar. They have cucumbers with “ME” written on one side and “MAYOR JOE RILEY” on the other. McAlister leaves what they mean up to viewers. He says he just grew vegetables that were too big to eat, so he found another use.
And, again, this is what good artists do: give it to you straight, but leave you questioning everything.
*Chapbook (noun.)
1. A small book or pamphlet of popular tales, ballads, etc., formerly hawked about by chapmen. 2. A small book or pamphlet, often of poetry. Origin 1790-1800
words: Elizabeth Bowers
“PARADISE”
By Liam Baranauskas | November 19, 2019
I once read that alchemists considered their discipline to be the opposite of philosophy—while philosophers tried to clarify the obscure mechanisms of human consciousness, alchemy was about taking simple ideas and making them so complex that they took years of study to understand. This isn’t elitism (at least not wholly), but generosity. We’ve all got something holy inside of us, say the alchemists, but you’ve got to do some work to see it. That lead ain’t gonna change itself into gold.
Keep this in mind if you’re hearing Charlie McAlister for the first time. It might sound like kitchen-sink music at first, seemingly made with whatever junk was lying around and played by whoever happened to be there. It might seem off, even uncomfortably so. But listen closer. The warble of stretched tape, the loose tuning, the home-recorded hiss. It’s all a disguise. At heart, lots of his catalog is strange, charmed pop music, wry without being goofy, ineffably simple, personal and universal at the same time.
Not that he made it easy for audiences to hear that, any more on stage than on tape. McAlister, who attended the Art Institute of Chicago for a year (he lost his scholarship when he painted over another student’s work), specialized in a knowing, Dadaist antagonism—cooking clams during a performance, for example, or setting up tins of sardines in front of electric fans to blow the smell into the audience. Once, he played a set of abstract musique concrete at a frat party, setting up his tape loops and a Moog synthesizer behind a bedsheet with projections of medical slides on it (the show ended with someone throwing a half-gallon of bourbon through the makeshift screen). He released a CD on which he intentionally silkscreened the art on the wrong side of the disc, rendering it unplayable.
McAlister lived most of his life in Mount Pleasant, a small beach town in suburban Charleston, and, outside of a small circle of like-minded friends, he wasn’t ever in step with the larger culture there. He found his audience instead in a sprawling pre-internet community of musicians and labels located in bedrooms and dormitories, people who shared an enthusiasm for all things Xeroxed, high-speed-dubbed, and otherwise self-marginalizing. McAlister released scores of tapes on almost as many labels, through what would come to be known as the Cassette Underground (as well as several issues of a bizarre collaged publication called Sardine Magozine), even scoring a (very) minor hit with his 1997 album Mississippi Luau, which charted on college radio. When he toured for that release, he played the set dressed as Colonel Sanders beside a “time-traveling teepee” made of aluminum foil. Rob Carmichael, who put out the album on his Catsup Plate label, told me he saw McAlister tear apart a fish at a Swarthmore College show “because there was a fortune inside,” whittling an audience of around a hundred down to single digits. (“The people that were into really out-there theater were just, like, blown away by it,” Carmichael said.)
Remember, this was all alienation by design, McAlister deliberately complicating simple sentiments, like the refrain on “Paradise,” which goes, “This is paradise, and we are never going to leave.” It’s sung without a sneer to telegraph easy irony, but it doesn’t seem like the line’s meant to be taken completely at face value either. It guts me because it sounds so hopeful and hopeless at the same time.
His brother Jamie said that Charlie felt frustrated living in Mount Pleasant but that “he never really complained about it.” Then he told me Charlie always kept in touch with friends he’d made from “his tape-trading days,” writing them letters and sending them new music. Carmichael said the same thing. Though Charlie may have only met most of them no more than a handful of times in person, they were able to help him make a place for himself, one not on any map but somewhere in the liminal gaps of the telephone and the U.S. Postal Service, far from the supposed paradise where he lived.
I first heard of Charlie McAlister a few days after his death in 2018 at age forty-eight, when a friend posted a song as a memorial. My wife and I were about to have our first child, and I was learning how the combination of joy and fear can make you feel very alone, even when you’re surrounded by people you love. And like alchemy, part of the magic of hearing Charlie McAlister’s music hinged on its being hidden. I was listening to it on YouTube, but the song sounded like a cassette tape with a handwritten insert. It sounded like I’d been friends with him all my life. It was a small miracle made from the stuff of the everyday, an aluminum foil teepee that actually could transcend space and time.