Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America
Interview with Garry Knox Bennett
Conducted by Glenn Adamson
At the Artist's home in Oakland, California
February 1 and 2, 2002
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Garry Knox Bennett on February 1 and 2, 2002. The interview took place in Oakland, California, and was conducted by Glenn Adamson for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.
Garry Knox Bennett and Glenn Adamson have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Interview
MR. ADAMSON: This is the oral interview for the Laitman Smithsonian oral interview project about American craftspeople, conducted by Glenn Adamson. That’s me. And the interviewee is Garry Knox Bennett. We’re in his studio here in Oakland, and it’s the first of February 2002.
I guess we’ll start, Garry, by just talking a little bit about your upbringing before you became an artist proper. And I’ll just ask you about your parents a little bit.
MR. BENNETT: Okay.
MR. ADAMSON: Where you were born? You know, some of your experiences growing up, particularly anything that might have had a later influence on you becoming an artist.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Well, I went to school under three names when I was a child. My mother was married a lot. So I went to school under “Bennett,” “von Tagen,” “Freeman.” And I guess I should have picked “von Tagen.” It’s a great name.
MR. ADAMSON: It is.
MR. BENNETT: But I picked Bennett, my father’s name. And I was born in Alameda, 1934.
MR. ADAMSON: What does your father do for a living?
MR. BENNETT: He was in the Merchant Marine. Yeah, you should ask me questions, because it’s kind of hard to -- you know, you’re thinking way ahead.
MR. ADAMSON: Sure.
MR. BENNETT: But he was Merchant Marine. My mother was a very bright woman, liked to have a good time. I was raised basically by my grandparents on my mother’s side and went to school. I recall going into high school. My first year as a freshman in high school, I got straight As, but in my senior year I had straight Fs. I had to go to summer school to graduate. I found school just so boring, just so incredibly boring. I took History-A four times. And you know, this is -- Christ, when I was in high school, that would be '50 to '52. I got out in '52. No, wait, '48 to '52. And our history book ended just before the Second World War; [David Saville] Muzzey’s history of the United States [History of Our Country]. I mean come on, you know? Goddamn, the Pilgrims and --
MR. ADAMSON: Incredibly boring, huh?
MR. BENNETT: Ah, boy.
MR. ADAMSON: Were there shop or art classes in school?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, and that’s where I ended up. Alameda High School was set up with X, Y, Z, and I forget the ranking. I think Z, you were a real Dumbo, and the Z, they had three-hour wood shops and metal shops and auto shops in high school. This was a high school that had survived intact from the Depression. I personally had four teachers that had doctorates, and they had been there since the '20s, and they were all fuckups. You know, in the '30s and '40s and '50s, if you had a doctorate, you were hot shit, and these people were teaching high school. And they really were all goofy, man. But, you know, Frank Cummings, Dr. Cummings, was a pretty neat guy. He taught history.
MR. ADAMSON: No relation to the Frank Cummings the woodworker?
MR. BENNETT: No. No, no, no, no. He used to love to recite “Horatio at the Bridge.”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And there was Dr. Vigness. I threw Muzzey’s history of the United States at him. Fortunately, he ducked. It would have decapitated him. That was probably one of the reasons I didn’t get to get out of high school at the right time.
And there was Dr. Ryan, the chemistry teacher. She’d be talking to us, and she’d look out the window -- you know, this big, old, I don’t know what, kind of Roman, you know, that colonnade shit and all that, and big windows, three stories high. She’d start looking out the window, and that was it. You know, 15, 20 minutes her mind would wander, and we’d do whatever we wanted, make explosions and stuff.
So yeah, and I guess I got out of high school and --
MR. ADAMSON: Well, before you leave high school, tell me more about the art classes that you did there. Were you painting?
MR. BENNETT: I had a funny thing happen to me in grammar school. I had a substitute teacher in an English class, and I don’t think she put the seed in my head, but I remember it to this day. She was just trying to be nice and one of those supportive people, and she said “Garry, you have such nice penmanship. You’re going to be an artist someday.” I remember that, you know. But I always wanted to be an artist. I didn’t want to be a cop or fireman, you know. And high school art classes were really dumb. I mean really dumb. They were useless.
I suppose the academics, you know, the English and math and all that was pretty good, and then they had the “Z” guys. And I was just bounced back and forth, between the Xs and the Zs. I’d go into the Zs and I’d be happy as hell, but I’d have one X class, like English or something, and I’d do really good at it, so then, “Oh, no, you can’t do the three-hour shops, you’ve got to go into” -- and, I don’t know, I probably purposely failed that shit so I could get back into the --
MR. ADAMSON: Back in the shop.
MR. BENNETT: -- shops, yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: So you were doing a lot of woodworking in high school, then.
MR. BENNETT: Not a lot. And it was never -- Jesus, it was just three hours you could get away.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: And we’d sneak out. There was a place across the street -- it’s in the book, I think [Garry Knox Bennett, et al. Made in Oakland: The Furniture of Garry Knox Bennett. New York: American Craft Museum, 2001.] -- Brocks, and we’d just hang out there and smoke and bullshit and stuff like that. I must have gotten something out of the woodshops. I can’t look back on anything that I ever made that was any good or creative or anything, but maybe I got the fundamentals of, you know, machinery. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I took a metal shop; you made watering cans, you know? You rolled stuff and rolled a wire in the lip and all that. And I remember all that.
MR. ADAMSON: Was that the first time you felt like you were actually aware of craft processes?
MR. BENNETT: No. Not at all. No.
MR. ADAMSON: You had gotten that already?
MR. BENNETT: Before high school and during high school, but never associated with school, I’d always painted, watercolors or whatever. You know?
MR. ADAMSON: Mm-hmm.
MR. BENNETT: I mean, I’d, you know, as a fuckin’ young kid, go sit down at the estuary and paint a picture of a boat or something. So I always did that. And then when I got out of high school, I went right to work. And a couple years after that -- I spent a lot of time drinking and sailboating, lots of time. I mean, California in those days was pretty good. Unemployment was $26 a week, and Eisenhower came along and gave us another 13 weeks. Shit, boy, I was in pig heaven.
And then the beatnik thing happened, and I would go over to Frisco and paint on the streets. I actually did some pretty good paintings. I don’t have any of them, but I can remember them. They’re not bad. I did actually kind of Thiebaud things, looking down these Frisco streets, the telephone poles, and real, you know, like, “Whoa, that’s a steep street.” Manhole covers being lifted.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah. You’d actually be sitting out on the sidewalk?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I didn’t wear a beret, but, I mean, you know --
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughing.] Everything else.
MR. BENNETT: You do that, boy, and people come by and talk to you.
MR. ADAMSON: Sure.
MR. BENNETT: It was fun. It was cool.
MR. ADAMSON: And I know from the book that you were doing some work down on the wharf, too, hauling barrels around and that kind of thing?
MR. BENNETT: No, that was working at Foster Chemical, probably.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: And that’s when I decided, man, you know, I’m generally the biggest guy in any factory, and they’re going to give me all the hard work. And I said, “I think I’ll go to art school.” So I went to Arts and Crafts. And it was the best thing I ever did.
MR. ADAMSON: This is California College of Arts and Crafts [CCAC]?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Best thing I ever did. I had to work. I went to school during the day, and then I worked nights. I worked swing and graveyard shifts at night.
MR. ADAMSON: Doing what?
MR. BENNETT: Worked at Transit Tanks, a place that stored chemicals. And it was a real easy job. You know, I’d get three or four trucks a night to fill, gasoline or different chemicals, so it was an easy job. Got a lot of free gas. I never bought gas for a long time. Yeah. So that’s about it.
MR. ADAMSON: So when you got to CCAC, were you focused on painting exclusively?
MR. BENNETT: No, I went in -- yeah, yeah. Right. I thought I was a painter.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: But I very quickly discovered sculpture, you know, three-dimensional stuff. They had some good teachers there at the time. Nothing really groundbreaking or earth-shattering, but they had really good academic teachers left over from a long time ago, Louis Miljarak and Harry Krell and a guy named -- did these hyper-realistic paintings -- Ralph Borge. And they were really strong in design.
And I remember Louis Miljarak [1901-1968] classes, where there was all these busts left over from the '20s, these plaster busts, real kind of Art Deco women and guys, you know, Mercury and shit like that. They’d put them on the floor, and it would be a fairly big class, 15 or 20 people, and you drew on newsprint with charcoal. There’s nothing worse than that. The charcoal just slides across that slick surface. But you kept doing that, and then finally the day came he said, well, you could go up and get some paper, good paper, and pencil. But he made you really look at this stuff, you know? And I haven’t drawn in 40 years, but I can draw really good.
MR. ADAMSON: Because of that.
MR. BENNETT: And he made you save one of your drawings per week for a semester. You had to save one. And then at the end of that semester, we took turns and we put our drawings up. And, you know, about the fourth week, “Hey, man, I’m fuckin’ Michelangelo,” you know? You’re thinking it’s really good. Next week. And you put those up, and you see that progression, and you really saw you learned something.
That’s one of the things I find wrong with the few institutions that I go to for slide shows or whatever, is there’s no criticism. We got it, man. We got criticized. Especially Harry Krell. It was a portrait painting class, you know? And you paint. His trick was warm-cool. He had this little system, and it does work. It works very well. Light-dark. You can do a portrait with the cool on the light side, but then you’ve got to go warm on the back side. Or warm-cool. And that gives you a nice three-dimensional quality. And it worked really well. And every once in a while you come across an old Diebenkorn or Bischoff or something, and although they use the big, fat brush strokes, big, globby drips and all that, that’s still there, man. You can see warm-cool. You know?
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: And even on apparently a very flat-looking portrait, it has volume to it.
MR. ADAMSON: I was just going to ask when you became aware of those painters, Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Park, that crowd.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, not until quite a while after. Shit, they were famous when I was in school. I was in art school, I think, from '58 to '61. And, shit, they’re moving out. I was aware of them, but --
MR. ADAMSON: Just through art school circles.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Just, you know, you heard about them. But I did one time, probably before I went to art school, yeah, for sure it was before I went to art school, I was down at the old Oakland Museum at Tenth and Fallon, and it was just this kind of dopey place, you know. And I thought, what the hell, I think I’ll go to the Oakland Museum. I used to like to go to the Snow Museum [Oakland, California], a natural history museum nearby; they had stuffed birds and all that. I went to the Oakland Museum and I walked in on a Diebenkorn show, man, one of his first shows, a whole show.
MR. ADAMSON: Really?
MR. BENNETT: I can’t describe it really good, but it was like Sacramento River stuff, kids playing in the water. And the light! Man, the light was incredible! And he got it with just the barest palette, you know, like yellow, orange, umber, ocher, white. That was it. And black, for gray. Man, they were beautiful! And, Jesus, you know, there’s about 30 of them. And that really knocked me out. But it didn’t affect me immediately, you know. It took me years before I thought the Beatles were any good. I had to wait.
[Telephone rings.]
MR. ADAMSON: Well, were you aware of what was going on on the East Coast in painting at the time?
MR. BENNETT: No, I don’t know, it was -- Jesus. No, not at all. I don’t know; it was a funny time. I wanted to be an artist, and this is way before craft. I really wanted to be an artist. But I wasn’t very interested in other people’s stuff. And to this day I’m not. You know, I didn’t go see Wayne’s show, his retrospective. I should have.
MR. ADAMSON: Wayne Thiebaud?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. It’s funny. I know there’s people that go to every museum show there is, man, or every movie that comes out. I’m just not like that. I’ve always thought it’s kind of I don’t want to be influenced. You know? I’ve seen enough Japanese stuff that I’ve got enough stuff imprinted for life. Not that I -- I love it. I love that stuff, but I don’t want to see any more or I’ll be come a Jap.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: You know? I mean, I’ve just got to take some essential parts of it and attempt to use it. Chinese. Korean. So I’m not a scholar and I really don’t seek things out. I seek technical information out if I need to do something. So I don’t have many influences, because I don’t read or look that much. I mean, Brancusi and Noguchi, I’m sure they’ve influenced me, but those are the two guys that I would say I would like to do what they’ve done.
You know, it’s really difficult. I think I’m an odd duck. I just don’t look around that much. I look at friends’ stuff and all that, but I mean, I go to these shows, you know, Furniture Society puts on and stuff like that, and I just don’t see much I like. When we did the last thing we did in Arizona there, the one thing of the invited stuff, there wasn’t much in there that I liked. I bought the two pieces out of that show that I liked, Po Shun’s chairs. They’re down there in the back. They were prototypes.
MR. ADAMSON: These are chairs by Po Shun Leong?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. And we have a fairly extensive chair collection. Oh, obviously, you know, there was things there that were really good, but it just doesn’t turn me on that much.
MR. ADAMSON: To get back to CCAC before we leave that topic, you said that you started getting into sculpture while you were there as well.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: Was that in wood? Metal?
MR. BENNETT: Metal. There’s a piece that I did --
MR. ADAMSON: The early one that’s in the catalogue?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. It’s back around the corner there.
MR. ADAMSON: Right. I saw it when we were coming in.
MR. BENNETT: That’s a good piece of sculpture, but Jesus, where the fuck was my head? You know, there was a war and famine and crap. You know, The Jewish Museum [San Francisco, California] still owns a piece of mine to this day that they’re just -- I’ve never seen it “in situ.” Is that how you say that?
MR. ADAMSON: “In situ,” right.
MR. BENNETT: But I guess they’ve built a whole thing around it. It’s a piece of steel.
[Audio break.]
And what they never realized is, what motivated the piece was I saw a TV documentary -- this is just ironic as hell. I saw a TV documentary on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
MR. ADAMSON: You’re talking about the piece in The Jewish Museum?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. And it was, you know, Palestinians. And a guy named Seymour Fromer, hell of a nice guy, was in the studio, and he saw that, and he said, “Oh my God, that explains our plight.” So they bought it. But it’s universal, okay? The image is universal. It could be Biafrans or Somalis or whatever. But the inspiration for it was the Palestinians’ plight. [Laughs.]
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: Terrible. But, you know, it doesn’t take away from the piece. And the other one in here is watching the Germans retreat from Stalingrad. You know, their own dogs are eating them, which is pretty far out.
Anyway, Arts and Crafts blah, blah, blah.
MR. ADAMSON: Well, you must have had an instructor for your metal sculpture.
MR. BENNETT: Kind of, yeah. Elah Hays [1896-1986]. Marvelous. I got more out of her -- I mean, she was buddies with Archipenko and people like that, you know. But she was a real '20s sort. And she was quite old even when I was there. She was a little lady, very quiet. But she’d just say -- I remember one piece. I was working in clay, which I’ve never done any clay, and she says, “Oh, Garry, that’s quite nice, but, you know, you ought to look at that curve.” And I’m talking into a microphone here and I’m describing to you a curve, though. It was just like this. [Gesturing.] It had nothing to it.
She says, “You know, if that curve just came up and took another little hook, it wouldn’t look like it’s dying and drooping.”
“Oh, okay. Oh, far out!” And I remember that. She didn’t teach me welding. They had oxyacetylene there and a bunch of scrap steel, and I just, “Boy, that’s it.” That’s quick, man. That’s real immediate stuff, welding. But this is gas welding, which is different now. But I learned to gas weld pretty good.
MR. ADAMSON: At school?
MR. BENNETT: At school, yeah. Just self-taught. Basically, I’m totally self-taught. Everything that I do I’ve noodled out.
MR. ADAMSON: Were there other artists working with welding when you were there?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Jon Sagan, a couple other people. A guy from Hawaii. I can’t remember his name right now. But, yeah, it was good, man. I mean, it was a good environment. They didn’t have any goddamn English classes. When I left, the rumor was they were starting an art history class. I said, “I’m outta here. I’m outta Dodge.”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: There was no fuckin’ -- there was no, like, reading and pencil and paper, or pen and paper, and turn in something. Turned in drawings, copious drawings. “Okay, go out, I want you to come back Monday with -- you know, go around your neighborhood, draw, whatever.” I had some great teachers. Charlie Gill. I wonder if it’s not so much thinking, but looking. I’m sure it’s the same thing, but they didn’t put a lot in your head. Not a lot of theory and all that sort of crap. It’s like, look at something, look at it and do what your gut tells you to do.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: Again, it was academic, you know? That’s the best word I’ve got for it. It was pretty much an academic sort of art education. Now it’s totally different. Aw, Christ, man. I go over to see what these people are doing, and they’re lazy. They’re basically lazy. And you know my attitude towards [James] Krenov, it’s well-known.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: And his towards me. But there have been a few people come by -- I get a lot of people by, you know -- but a few people have come by, and I’ve recommended that they take his class, that they go up to his school, and not to tell him that I sent them -- or even mention my name, or they won’t get in.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: But there’s people that need to know how to use hand tools. In painting, you know, the craft is not taught. “Oh, well, I’m going to make some Rauschenbergs or some Jackson Pollocks” or whatever. And the same for a long time in furniture. “Well, here’s the button, turn the switch on, this is the saw, saw your wood, put it together.” I know Gail and Wendy were really heavy on that.
MR. ADAMSON: That’s Gail Fredell and Wendy Maruyama.
MR. BENNETT: And I know Rosanne [Somerson] is, too. So that’s good. You need to know that. But you know, you get some rich kid in there that’s paying the dues, paying the tuition, he don’t want to spend two years sharpening chisels.
MR. ADAMSON: Sure.
MR. BENNETT: You know? And the same as painting. They don’t want to spend a couple years learning how to draw, how to look. I spent a year with black paper. And you could have three colors. The first couple weeks was red, yellow, and blue on black paper. And you could use triangles, circles, or squares. And you cut those out and arranged them, any size, any way, you know, and put them down. What a great lesson that was! And I got into it, I mean, you know, as dumb as it sounds. I could see people in the class going, “Oh, gee, this is really dumb shit.” I got into it because I started really getting challenged by it. And then Fran Moyer says, “Okay, you can use all the colors you want.”
“Oh, boy!” You know, still doing 8-1/2-by-11 piece of black paper with all these cutouts on it, but “Oh, geez, thanks, Fran!”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And so that was the design class. You know, probably if I’m criticizing this, I probably should go over and see how they’re doing it. Maybe they’re doing it back to the old way, but I doubt it.
MR. ADAMSON: I don’t think so.
MR. BENNETT: I doubt it, man. I see some of the work that these kids are turning out. An institution, I’ve realized in the last couple years -- well, last 10, 15 years -- an institution wants bodies, and bodies equal money. But, you know, some institutions don’t care what level the bodies are turning out when they’re all through. They’ve got their money, these people have got their MFA or whatever you call those things, you know? “Hey, I’m an artist.” And they don’t know shit! They don’t know color theory; they don’t really know -- they don’t understand design or anything like that.
And it would be very hard to start a school. You’ve got to be dead serious as a student and as a teacher, say, in our area, the woodworking, to say, “Okay, you’ve got a year now. You’re probably not going to make a Philadelphia highboy in the first year. You’re going to learn to sharpen tools, this and that, and maybe we’ll get to a stool.” And I believe that’s the way it should be.
MR. ADAMSON: It’s funny, because I think most people imagine you as having a very intuitive sense of design, but it’s interesting because you’re saying really you learned it at a young age.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, but it’s intuitive like two times two is four. Pretty soon, you know, I mean, you don’t have to think.
MR. ADAMSON: You don’t have to think about it, yeah.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I gave somebody an example the other night of -- I’m trying to think of what I said, but it was to the effect -- and I’m not calling myself Michelangelo, but apparently Michelangelo was so good at carving marble, just intuitively, that he was better than families that had done it for hundreds of years in Carrera. I mean, he could do it. And somebody explained to me one time, you know, we see these Victorian marbles; they’re all white and they look kind of nice, but that’s because all the crystals have been smashed. They’ve been improperly carved. The good marbles look like stone; they’re carved; they’re not rudely smashed off or chiseled off. And marble will carve if you know what you’re doing, and that’s the difference.
MR. ADAMSON: The fundamentals.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. So I think, you know, I probably have had it as a kid. I’m trying to think back what I -- I can’t think of anything I made.
MR. ADAMSON: But you always had the knack.
MR. BENNETT: I guess so. I could make the best slingshot in the neighborhood or rubber gun in the neighborhood. I could certainly make some good bongs. Ooh.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.] Speaking of which --
MR. BENNETT: No, no.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: What?
MR. ADAMSON: After CCAC.
MR. BENNETT: Oh. Yeah, okay.
MR. ADAMSON: Unless there’s anything else you want to say on that topic.
MR. BENNETT: No. CCAC, man, it wasn’t even work. It was a lot of work, but it was fun. I mean, I was into it. And again, it might be different than it is now. We’d sit in that cafeteria, man, the painters and the sculptors, and we’d argue. We’d argue about religion and art and everything under the sun passionately, you know? And that was one of the best parts of school, was, you know, feedback. And I think it was a good school.
And some of the instructors would sit in, and they were just people sitting in. You know, if they wanted to talk, it wasn’t, “Ooh, Charlie’s talking.” They had to muscle their way into the conversation. Now everybody gathers their books and their laptop, and they head for their Miata. You know, they go down and have a cappuccino.
I don’t know. I can’t blanket this thing, but I don’t know, the seriousness is not there. But also, the world can’t take all the art students that are pooped out.
MR. ADAMSON: That’s for sure.
MR. BENNETT: They’re going to be selling shoes or --
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: -- cars or working in an office someday. But God bless 'em, they’ll appreciate what the other guys are doing out there.
MR. ADAMSON: That’s true.
MR. BENNETT: And that’s a good thing about an art education, I think.
MR. ADAMSON: So on that note: You get out of art school, you have an art training, and then what do you do?
MR. BENNETT: Well, I didn’t get out. I didn’t get a piece of paper or anything. I decided to move up to the country.
MR. ADAMSON: So you didn’t actually graduate from CCAC with a master’s?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, no. No, no, no, no. But I got good grades. I think I got straight As.
MR. ADAMSON: You just decided to stop?
MR. BENNETT: But that was easy. I mean in those days, again, that was a school that they needed your money.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: You know? It was a failing school. Good spirit, failing school. And since these new guys have taken over now, it’s become a very successful school -- and I’m very happy for that -- and, I’m sure, a good school.
No, so Sylvia and I -- I guess I got married. Yeah, I got married and we moved up to the country and I built a house.
MR. ADAMSON: You had met Sylvia a few years earlier but --
MR. BENNETT: Oh, I’d known Sylvia in high school.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: But God bless her, man. One day I’m sitting in the living room of my grandparents’ house -- it had Dutch doors with a window in it -- and I’m sitting there. I don’t know what I was doing, probably drinking. God, I’m sure I was all of 21 or 22. There was a knock at the door, and I looked in the glass window, and there was Sylvia. I got up. “Hi.”
“Hi. Thought I’d come by and see you.” And that was it.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: That was it.
MR. ADAMSON: Off to the races.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Yeah. God bless her for that. Jesus. You wonder, all the time you wonder what you would be without, you know, something. You know, without diving off the diving board and breaking your neck and being a paraplegic in 1953. Or, if I hadn’t met Sylvia. It’s too complicated, even, for me to comprehend. I mean, it doesn’t equate. I wouldn’t be what I am, that’s for sure. And that’s not being patronizing or anything. I just wouldn’t be.
You know, tremendously supportive. Living up in the country, we were poor! We were poor. And, you know, it’s just like, “God, Hon, I’m sorry, you know?”
“No, that’s all right. I know someday you’ll do really good. Everything will be really good.” You know, one of her birthday presents was eight pounds of butter. I had $8, and butter was a dollar a pound. And I went into town and got some wrapping paper and wrapped it up, and that was her birthday present. Greatest birthday present she ever got.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: Because we were living on margarine. I mean, we were really poor. I built this house for an ex-stepfather, and I got to live in it.
MR. ADAMSON: I’m sorry? For Annette’s [sic] stepfather?
MR. BENNETT: An ex-stepfather.
MR. ADAMSON: Oh, for an ex-stepfather [A former husband of Garry's mother].
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Good guy. Homer Freeman, a guy I admire a lot. I admire him more than my own father. My own father was a really nice guy, but Homer was a real man, real strong. He taught me a lot about working. You know? I’m sure he gave me my work ethics.
MR. ADAMSON: Tell me more about him. What did he do for a living?
MR. BENNETT: He was a farmer, a rice farmer in the Sacramento Valley, in Lincoln. And his childhood was, you know, the Depression. Not childhood, his young manhood was the Depression. Joined the Navy. Got out of the Navy. I think he trained as an electrician in the Navy and then worked at Judson Pacific-Murphy as a chief electrician there, met my mother and got married, and they spent a couple raucous years together. But he was from Kansas, a real down-to-earth guy, you know? Good guy. Good guy. Hardworking. I used to go up -- well, he started --
[Pause for incoming telephone call.]
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. We were just talking about some other stuff here, but I wanted to put this in here. I think we wear out. And I think I’m wearing out, you know? I mean, you know, I’m just not -- I’m not willing to make some of those moves. Like I said, “Aw, fuck it, no big deal,” you know, “I’m just going to go for it.”
And so I’m getting pretty goddamn conservative. You know? I know I am. And I’ve got some ideas. And I want to ask you about something later about somebody that carves chair backs, so kind of keep that in the back of your head. I’ll remember it because I need some help.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: But, you know, I go to a show now and I look at stuff and I say, “Boy, that’s really good.” Some of it’s really good, you know? But I know, back in the '80s when I’d enter a show, I know people were saying about my stuff, “Man, that’s really good.” And I could go into a show and walk around and say, “Yep, I got the best piece in here.” Now, not necessarily so. So, I don’t know, I’ve got to get my shit together.
And my problem is my studio, because I’ve had to move all my wood inside; long, complicated story, and I just feel so constricted in there. I can’t make anything big. I don’t have the room. And I don’t have the strength anymore; I really want to work alone. I can’t -- this hand, the right hand is just screwed. Arthritis, you know. And I try to pick something up, and I’m worried about it. So, yeah, I think we wear out, you know? I mean, all creative -- except for -- you know, musicians don’t wear, but they get less good. But, like, you talk about blues guys; they still got that.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: But I think writers wear out, and artists wear out. I mean, look at -- well, how can we possibly criticize de Kooning, but, he’s wearing out. And I’m realizing that. So I’ve got to start thinking a little more. And I want to do a whole chair series. There’s one, there. I want to do a series of chairs, and I got some cat’s-ass ideas for chairs. But the problem is, I can’t put them in Scotty’s gallery [Leo Kaplan Modern, New York, New York] or a craft gallery; I don’t think they’ll be appreciated.
MR. ADAMSON: Scotty’s gallery?
MR. BENNETT: Leo Kaplan.
MR. ADAMSON: Oh, Leo Kaplan.
MR. BENNETT: You know? So I’m toying with the idea of inventing another name and seeing if I can approach a gallery in, like, Chicago. I really like Chicago. I think it’s a neat town. I don’t spend much time there at all. But see if I can get an art gallery to --
MR. ADAMSON: You mean anonymously? Not telling them who you are?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, no, I’d tell them who -- I would have to use my “bona fides,” so to speak, so that they realize I’m not some sort of nut. And when you do that, if you have them, then people -- we’re all impressed with certain -- so they look at it a little differently, you know? I’d like to do that. I still haven’t signed any of these turnings, and I’m trying to think of a name. Everybody will know who did 'em, but just -- you know, “Earl Turner” or something like that.
MR. ADAMSON: Well, we should probably return back to the history part of it.
MR. BENNETT: Yes, let’s go for it. Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: Otherwise our listeners will get confused.
You were talking about building the house up in Lincoln. So you built your own house as well as Sylvia’s stepfather’s house.
MR. BENNETT: No, no. My ex-stepfather.
MR. ADAMSON: Your stepfather’s house.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. He let me build a house because we moved up there, and then I was -- I think he had plans for me too, because I used to work up there in the summer, and I was a good worker. You know, I was strong. And I think he had plans -- I could have been a farmer in Lincoln. I would have gotten the whole thing, many millions of dollars. You know, a lot of land and all that.
And so we went up there. I built this house on his property. He paid for it. It was his. But after a couple years, he realized that I had other fish to fry. I worked in the spring planting and the fall harvest, and the rest of the time was just, you know, drudgery work, and he had guys on the farm that could do that. But I ran the rice dryer for him, which he never had anybody that could do that because, you know, he was paying a dollar an hour. And finally one day I said, “Homer, lookit, you’re paying Smitty a dollar and a quarter an hour to drive a truck, and that guy’s got about a 65 I.Q. I’m running this thing for you; I’d at least like a dollar and a half an hour.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: “Well, okay, Garry.” Dollar and a half an hour. Geez, I got 25 cents an hour more than Smitty.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: So, yeah. It was all fun. I mean, you know, we lived off the land. I mean, I’ve eaten enough jackrabbit in my life now in just four years that I don’t ever need to eat any more jackrabbits.
MR. ADAMSON: And there’s a story about you eating the rice and getting sick?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah. It’s the absolute truth, man. You know, we dried rice, and we had a little tester there that you could hull rice with. So, shit, while I’m sitting around waiting for one batch to change and all that, I’d just hull up four or five pounds of rice, you know, polish four or five pounds. And I was polishing off all the vitamin B, the brown. You know, I polished it really good.
[Pause for incoming phone call.]
Anyway, you know, Sylvia was pregnant at the time, so our doctor had given her vitamin pills, but I mean we were really eating pretty poorly. We’d have people save bacon grease for us, the people in the neighborhood. Well, it’s a farming community. But I just got really ill. Geez, I’d stand up and fall down. I said, “Ooh, fuck, man, something’s really wrong.”
And we had a quack in town, Dubin, and he just had this whole community buffaloed, you know. So finally I went in to him and he tested me and all that, and he says, “Well,” he says, “Geez, Garry, I think you have” -- this is a doctor! -- “I think you have rheumatic fever or an allergy.”
I says, “Oh.”
He says, “Here, lookit. Take this prescription and go down to the pharmacy; go down to Bert’s and fill this prescription and call me back in a week.”
So I says, “Okay.” So I remember going down to the pharmacy, man. The prescription was for 12 pills, one a day, and they were some sort of allergy pill or whatever it was. And I went in. Dr. Dubin owned part of the pharmacy, which is really questionable, and Bert, the pharmacist, was a pretty good guy. He had a fairly good soul. And I gave him the prescription and he gave me the bottle, and he says, “That will be $24.” And he could see the look on my face. I didn’t have 24 fuckin’ dollars.
He says, “Oh, geez, Garry, I know they’re kind of expensive, but this is what Dr. Dubin said you need.”
I said, “Okay. Well, can I pay on time?”
He says, “Yeah, sure.” So I went back home and took one of those pills and nothing happened. The next day I took one and just got violently ill.
So I said, “Sylvia, I’m going back down [to the Bay Area]. I’m going down to my doctor down there,” Riggall, a doctor I’d had a long time. It’s a funny story. So I fuckin’ hitchhiked down here [to Oakland], phoned Riggall up, said I’m coming in. “Yeah, okay.” I’ve got a friend of mine, John. I’d phoned John, and he would drive me back up. So I hitchhiked down, John drove me back up.
But I went to Riggall and he gave me all the tests and everything. And he said -- you know, after he stuck his finger up my ass and all that, he says, “Okay, well, put your clothes on.” Well, he gave me a full physical. He says, “Put your clothes on and come into my office.”
I says, “Okay.”
So I put my clothes on, you know, went into his office, and he motioned me to sit down on the other side of the desk. And he had a real stern look on his face. We both smoked at the time, and he shoved a pack of cigarettes over to me. He says, “You better have one of these.”
And I’m thinking, “Oh, God!” My brain is just imploding. “What?!” And I’m trying to light this cigarette, and he starts laughing. My own doctor, he starts laughing. And I says, “What are you laughing at, you sonofabitch. I’m dying.”
And he says, “No, you aren’t.” And he opens a drawer and he pulls out a bottle of vitamin pills, and he says, “Take one of these a day, you’ll be fine in about a week.”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: I had beri-beri [vitamin B1 deficiency]. And I had him over a while back, about a month ago, for dinner. And he’s so proud of that. It’s the only diagnosed case of beri-beri he ever had.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughing.] Still to this day.
MR. BENNETT: And he nailed it, man! I mean, I told him what was wrong and all that. You know, but he’s a doctor’s doctor. I don’t have him anymore, he retired, but I ended up with one of the great doctors. He was a pulmonary guy. So, yeah, I had beri-beri.
MR. ADAMSON: That’s crazy.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, it’s just absolutely crazy.
MR. ADAMSON: Now, did you have a sense that you were participating in something when you moved out into the countryside and sort of --
MR. BENNETT: No.
MR. ADAMSON: Not at all.
MR. BENNETT: I thought an artist could get out in the country and be an artist.
MR. ADAMSON: And you thought it was your idea.
MR. BENNETT: What? To be an artist?
MR. ADAMSON: Out in the countryside.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Shit, I thought, yeah, you know, an artist needs urban, not suburban or rural. He needs urban, goddamnit. Man, you need this shit.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: You know, we had a sculpture society group over here, real nice people. We had about 35, 40 people here the other night. And we were out in the back, and I realized the people just loved this place. You know, but it was night. There’s the freeway. You can see the freeway there. And people were just, “Oh, God, this is” -- and I realized why I like this place so much. It’s kind of like New York. Sirens, brakes, you know? I like the urban way. It’s a pain in the ass. I mean, I’ve got people that shit and piss in my doorway, and cars take my parking places, but, you know, that’s what you gotta put up with.
MR. ADAMSON: One more question about Lincoln. The house you built, it’s a weird house.
MR. BENNETT: It’s an A-frame, yes, a dumb thing to build where it never snows.
MR. ADAMSON: But really it’s a triangle.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Right.
MR. ADAMSON: All the way to the ground.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: So where did you get the idea for that? Did you just say this is what an A-frame looks like?
MR. BENNETT: Well, I think it’s like you ask the guy that’s built a cement boat where he got the idea.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: Well, he got the idea from somebody that doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and that’s the same place I got the idea for an A-frame. Because you only build those where you have a hundred feet of snow a year or something. But now, engineering, shit, you can put a flat roof on a building in all the snow you want. You know, it seemed cheap. And it kind of was. With a footprint of 30 by 60, what’s that, 3,600 square feet. Hey, pretty big house, huh? No way, man. Those walls come in on ya.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: So you’re really dealing with maybe 2,000 square feet.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: You know?
MR. ADAMSON: And it was one story?
MR. BENNETT: No, I had two lofts. I had two lofts in it. One we never used, and the other one we had our bedroom up there. And it had a bedroom down below and a kitchen and bathroom. Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: So it was actually a pretty ambitious building, since you had never built one before.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, it was very ambitious. I’d never built a thing in my life. Somebody’s going to take that apart someday, and they’re going to --
MR. ADAMSON: It’s still standing?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yes. Oh, it will be standing for a long time. They’re going to take it apart, and they’re going to look at the end walls. And all the studs are let-in to the plate. I mortised the studs in. I didn’t know you just toe-nailed a goddamn two-by-four to the plate! I cut 'em all in with a backsaw, chiseled 'em out, dropped 'em in. I mean, it’s embarrassing. It’s absolutely embarrassing. And the sub-floor -- and at the time it wasn’t terribly expensive -- the sub-floor is two-by-six vertical-grain fir. Perfect fucking wood. Tongue and groove. Perfect wood.
And Homer, I couldn’t understand why he was asking me, “Well, why do you want that kind of wood?”
“Oh, it’s got to be a good floor,” you know.
“Okay.”
MR. ADAMSON: This is the sub-floor, not --
MR. BENNETT: The sub-floor, yeah. And then I had three-quarters of an inch of oak tongue-and-groove flooring over that.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: But the crime is that fuckin’ vertical-grain fir in that floor as a sub-floor. It’s a crime!
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.] It really is.
MR. BENNETT: And I remember what it cost. It cost $260 per hundred board-feet at the time.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: Regular-grade two-by-six at that time would have probably been about 30 or 40 cents a board-foot.
MR. ADAMSON: But you wanted it to be good.
MR. BENNETT: Boy, it is good. Crazy. Absolute. But that’s not knowing, you know?
MR. ADAMSON: And the whole house was like that? It was all built --
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, it’s very, very strong. Very strong. It will take a lot of snow right out in the middle of Lincoln in the Sacramento Valley.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.] Right. Right.
MR. BENNETT: If it ever snows a lot out there --
MR. ADAMSON: No problem.
MR. BENNETT: -- no problem with that bugger.
MR. ADAMSON: So who owns it now? People you know?
MR. BENNETT: Well, Homer died a number of years ago, and then Donna --
MR. ADAMSON: Donna’s his wife?
MR. BENNETT: That was his wife, who -- you know, I can’t remember if she just died -- but somebody told me -- we got some cryptic message from somebody -- yeah, I think Donna died. But she had some relatives in Chico, and we got some cryptic message from somebody that knew them, that said Homer had asked her to make sure Garry’s taken care of; whatever that means, you know? But that did not come to pass. Donna would not do that, nor would her relatives. And Homer had no family. So there’s some relatives up in Chico that are pretty fuckin’ wealthy now. We’re talking a lot of land, a lot of valuable land.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah. And that all left the --
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I know the last time I saw Donna, I stopped in and saw her, Sylvia and I stopped in, and we were sitting around talking. We’re talking about this and that, and Donna just, after about 10 minutes, just turns to Sylvia and says, “Who are you?” You know, so she obviously was going. The synapses weren’t getting together.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: And I had to explain, and she says, “Oh, yeah.” She was a pretty cold fish, I mean, but not bad. But goddamn, man, she was one of these people who couldn’t throw anything away. They’d go fishing. They used to like to go salmon fishing. They’d get a bunch of salmon. Do you think they’d give us a fresh salmon? No. But when she cleaned out her freezer, “Oh, you want some salmon?”
“Oh, yeah, great.” Oh, boy, you’d love some. You’d get this fuckin’ “King Tut” salmon, man, this fuckin’ mummy. You know?
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: You know, just all the juice is gone from it. It had been in the freezer for a year or two, not properly packaged. We just used to have to throw it out. We gave it to the chickens.
MR. ADAMSON: You had chickens?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I had White Fang. I had White Fang, man. I was driving down the road coming home one day, and there was a white fuckin’ chicken in the road, whatever they are, leghorns or -- no, the white ones, whatever they are. I walked out there and grabbed that fucker and put him in the car, took him home, put him in the chicken coop. But we just locked them up at night. They just ran all over the place.
Well, this was a goddamn tough chicken. He grew real long spurs, and dogs wouldn’t get near him. He’d go -- [making noises like an aggressive chicken] -- right after a dog, man, and jump up! Big dogs, and they’d split. And finally he got Josh [son] on the ground one time when Josh was just a little kid, out in the backyard. So White Fang ended up in the fricassee.
Actually, he didn’t. I always accused Sylvia of killing him. That’s right, I found him really fucked up one day out in the back.
And I said, “Did you mess with White Fang?”
And she said, “No.” And Sylvia couldn’t kill anything like that. So an animal got him. The end of White Fang.
MR. ADAMSON: That’s tragic.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: Great chicken [Note from Sylvia Bennett: We buried him under
our apricot tree and the next year the tree died!].
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. ADAMSON: All right. So you basically get sick of living out in the country.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: It wasn’t an event that caused you to want to leave?
MR. BENNETT: There was an event that caused me to leave.
MR. ADAMSON: There was an event.
MR. BENNETT: Because I was getting sick of living in the country, but every morning -- you know, this is like 4:00 in the morning -- I’d get up to go in and run the dryer, and instead of getting Sylvia up at that horrid hour -- this is in the fall -- I’d go down to Homer’s and we’d have breakfast every morning.
Funny little sidebar is -- they ate margarine, so I thought. So every morning we’d have this weak coffee, a cup of weak coffee, black, and Homer would make -- we each had two buckwheat hot cakes with margarine and syrup. And one time I said to Sylvia, I says, “God, they can afford butter!” Butter was a big thing to us, you know.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.] Apparently.
MR. BENNETT: “They can afford it.”
“Oh,” she says, “oh, they eat butter all the time.”
I said, “No, they don’t. They eat margarine.”
She says, “No, no, no. When they have company over, they put the margarine out.” Just the reverse of what any civilized person would do.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: You have company over, you bring the butter out, you know? So anyway, we’d have this breakfast, kind of talk about the day and how much rice was coming into the dryer and that. And we got into an argument about something. I don’t remember what it was. But Homer said the magic words to me. He said, “Well, if you don’t like it here, you can leave.”
And I says, “I’m out. I’ll be gone after your New Year’s party.”
He says, “Now, wait a minute; don’t be too serious, now.”
I said, “Nope, I’m outta here.” I just needed -- I couldn’t --
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: Because when I grew up with my grandparents, when I’d piss my grandmother off, she’d say, “Well, if you don’t like it here, you can leave.” Well, my mother’s in Guam; my father’s drunk somewhere, you know? Where am I going to go?
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: What, pack a little valise, 11 years old, walk down the street, get a hotel room?
So, you know, that’s what precipitated that. “Well, if you don’t like it here, you can leave.” And he regretted that till the day he died.
MR. ADAMSON: Mm-hmm. Because you took off.
MR. BENNETT: Because I took off, but because I was kind of running [the operation] -- you know, I took a great load off of him.
MR. ADAMSON: Sure.
MR. BENNETT: I mean, he had good workers, but they weren’t thinkers.
MR. ADAMSON: Right. You could help him run things.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. And so then I had to borrow $500 from my cousin to get a truck to move back to the Bay Area, and we moved in with Sylvia’s mother [Mildred Mangum] in the smallest -- a three-bedroom house that’s 860 square feet.
MR. ADAMSON: Was this here in Alameda?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. And, I mean, I could touch the bedroom walls if I stretched my hands out. So we had Sylvia and I and Aaron and Josh.
MR. ADAMSON: So you already had the two sons.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, I had two kids. Yeah, two boys.
MR. ADAMSON: So they were born up in Lincoln?
MR. BENNETT: Mm-hmm.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: Sacramento, actually.
MR. ADAMSON: But when you were living in Lincoln?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. And so we moved back here, and I did all sorts of stuff, man. I had started making roach clips up in Lincoln. I had some friends -- this was a milestone in my life, in a way. I had some friends, Jon Sagan and Jerry Hoff, and they were in the record business, and they would come up and visit, because they liked to go to the country. They’d leave stacks of records, you know, sample records. I had no idea what they were. Rolling Stones. Beatles. You know? All this stuff. Well, we found out we could get baby-sitting; when we had the money to go somewhere, to a movie or something, we could get a teenager to baby-sit the kids for a week for one unreleased Beatles or Stones record, which is, you know, talking big shit here.
So Jon phoned me up one time. He says, “Hey, I got a friend. I got a friend, Alan. He’s a junky and he’s having a hard time. We want to try to clean him up. Can we leave him -- can we bring him up to your place for a week or so and see if he’ll straighten out?”
I says, “Yeah, sure, no big deal.” So they came up and they brought Alan, and you know, he had a bad jones, the real jones. I’d never smoked marijuana, you know? I’d been around it, but I’d never smoked it. They brought a big bag of weed with them for Alan. Well, fuckin’ marijuana won’t help a junky out one bit.
MR. ADAMSON: What did they think, it would help him come down or something?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Yeah. Would just give him some sort of narcotic.
MR. ADAMSON: But he’s not going to care.
MR. BENNETT: No, it’s nothing.
So they left that night. We put Alan on the couch. I took his shoes and his shirt so he would stay, and we got up in the morning and he was gone. You know, he had gone out, barefoot, five miles from town, probably hitchhiked back to the Bay Area. We had nothing to steal; there was nothing he could take with him that would be worth anything. But what I ended up with was the bag of marijuana, and I started smoking that shit.
And it was classic, you know. “Okay, Sylvia, write this down.” She wasn’t smoking, “Write this down.” You know, at night.
She says, “Really?”
“Yeah, write it down.” I’d say something. The next morning I’d be drinking my coffee, and she’d put this thing in front of me. I said, “What’s that?”
“That’s what you wanted me to write down.”
“That?! That’s really stupid!”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: She said, “Yes.” But in smoking that marijuana, I truly, truly independently invented the roach clip. Now, they’d been made well before I’d made my first one. The slide, you know, the little slide thing.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: Because I didn’t have any alligator clamps to use. So I made a bunch of them, and then Jon and Jerry, these record guys, they came up and they saw it. “Oh, geez, far out, man! Can you make some more?”
I said, “Yeah, sure.”
“Hey, we’ll be back up next week. Make a bunch.”
I said, “Okay.”
MR. ADAMSON: What were you making them out of?
MR. BENNETT: Brass. Braising rod, you know.
MR. ADAMSON: That you could get locally somehow?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I was doing some braising down at Bob McDonald’s [the next farm]. He lent me the milk shed. It was half the size of this -- fuckin’ guy. So I had braising rod.
MR. ADAMSON: Wait a minute. Why were you doing metalwork in the milk shed?
MR. BENNETT: Because it’s the only studio I had. Bob lent me this room, you know, and it was really small. I mean, it was probably eight feet by 10 feet. But I had oxyacetylene, and I was welding.
MR. ADAMSON: Just because you wanted to keep with the metalwork?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah, I wanted to keep working, yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: So the whole time you were in Lincoln, you were making stuff.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I was reading and making stuff. I did some painting, had some shows in Sacramento, read for three years. I read everything. I mean, I’ve read it all.
MR. ADAMSON: You mean like --
MR. BENNETT: Nietzsche --
MR. ADAMSON: -- philosophy.
MR. BENNETT: -- fuckin’ the Bible, you know. I started out, you know, “Oh, well, you gotta read” -- and I still like Dostoyevsky -- but you gotta read this stuff. Because I had never read, you know? And I read and I read, and I read and read and read, read everything. God, I read everything. All the philosophers. Didn’t understand much of it. And when I got all through with it -- I had always read Steinbeck, even as a kid, and Jack London. And when I got all through with all this reading, I realized, hmm, Ian Fleming is just about as good as Nietzsche.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And it is, for my mind. And that’s why more people have read James Bond than Nietzsche, because, you know, you get something. And Steinbeck is marvelous. And Jack London’s a marvelous writer. You know, there was some poet here the other night, and his wife said, “Oh, Morton’s a poet and a playwright” and all that.
I said, “Ah, poetry. I don’t know much about poetry.” I looked up at him and I says: “Din! Din! Din! Though they beat you and flay you, By the very Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.” And he looked at me like I’d fuckin’ punched him in the nuts.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And I said, “Rudyard Kipling.”
He says, “I know.” And he walked away.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: So that kind of tells you where I’m at. Okay?
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: Because I think Kipling’s a great -- it’s great stuff. It’s great, romantic stuff, you know. Anyway.
MR. ADAMSON: So anyway, you’re doing --
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah, roach clips.
MR. ADAMSON: You’re doing roach clips in the milk shed.
MR. BENNETT: So a couple of weeks later, Jon and Jerry come up, and I’d made a bunch of roach clips, every one different.
They said, “Oh, man! Oh, those are great!” You know, because they’d give them to all their buddies and stuff.
“How much you want for ‘em?”
I said, “Geez, I don’t know.” And I had, like, 20 or 30 roach clips.
“I’ll give you 200 bucks for 'em.”
I said, “Really?!” That’s more money than I’d seen in years. “Want any more?”
“Oh, yeah, keep making 'em.”
So, they’d come up, and, you know, that was our income, because I was being paid $50 a month to work for Homer. We figured out I made, like, $1,200 a year. So I said, “Well, $50 a month until November, and then give me, however it figures up, for Thanksgiving and Christmas $200 each time,” so I had some money. So, shit.
And then I used to go in town and play poker, you know? And, poker’s a difficult game when you don’t have any money. But nobody else did either. So I’d go in. I can honestly say -- I lost sometimes, but if I lost five bucks, I was a goner; I was out of there. I would win 10, 15 bucks every night. I remember one night I came home, and Sylvia always used to wait up for me, Saturday night. She always waited up for me. And I walked in and I’d won $60.
So I walked in, and just before I got in the door, I put a big, long face on, walked in, and she says, “How’d you do?”
I says -- [pretending to be discouraged] -- “Oh, Jesus, oh, God, I really got” -- [then exclaiming jubilantly] -- “I won $60!!” And I pulled this money out of my pockets and threw it in the air. And we were counting it, you know, and had piles on the table, a lot of dollar bills and stuff.
I appreciate the poverty I went through, but I also know how lucky I am, a smart white guy. Okay? You could take the smartest poor black motherfucker, and he can’t get out. I always knew I could get out. I’m not making a racial thing; I’m being very empathetic to certain people. A guy with one leg or blind or something, you’re fucked.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: And I wasn’t fucked. I chose it, you know, in a way. But when Homer said, “Well, if you don’t like it here, you can always leave,” I was out of there. And I could go. I mean, nothing depended on it, you know?
MR. ADAMSON: Well, let’s go back down to Alameda then. You’re living with Sylvia’s folks, right?
MR. BENNETT: Mother.
MR. ADAMSON: Just her mother?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: And is that when you started going into the full-time metal plating business?
MR. BENNETT: No. At that point I was trying to find some kind of studio -- a friend of mine gave me a -- what would you call it? -- at Tenth Avenue [Oakland, California], a whole building to use, like 20 by 30 feet, that was full of toilets and urinals. What would you call that?
MR. ADAMSON: A lavatory?
MR. BENNETT: A lavatory. It was for the shipyard that had closed down. He said, “Hey, it’s a studio for you.” So goddamn it, I had to beat out all the toilets, tear down all the partitions, but I had a studio. I took all the urinals out except one. That’s where I pissed, you know. Wasn’t thinking about where I’m going to take a shit. And I started making roach clips there and doing a few commissions. I think there’s a picture in the book of the dragon.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: I made that down there. And it was just, you know, I mean, it was tough. Times were really tough, and I believe Sylvia went back to work on the catering truck. Her mother’s house was so small, as soon as we could, we rented a house on Eagle Avenue, $125 a month. Nice house, you know? And I was making more and more roach clips. I was going to craft fairs, local ones, selling jewelry and roach clips.
MR. ADAMSON: When did you start making the jewelry, when you were living in Alameda at the lavatory/studio in Oakland?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Yeah. Because what I was doing with the roach clips really lent itself for wire jewelry anyway.
MR. ADAMSON: Sure.
MR. BENNETT: And then Squirkenworks just happened. You know? I just started selling more and more roach clips. When I was selling them to friends who had a store in Oakland -- in Berkeley -- I couldn’t make enough, you know? Well, I could make enough, but I realized that some other people asked for them, so I made a series. I met a guy, Rick Street. No, I did this before I met Rick Street.
But I had 10 different roach clips, and so what I’d do is I would go around and buy all the Free Presses [Berkeley Free Press, an underground newspaper]. I’d go up to Berkeley and buy the Free Presses from Arizona or New York or whatever, and I’d get the names of head shops. So I’d make a packet up of, like, 10 roach clips of, you know, a certain design and send them to them with a bill in there. “If you want these and you sell them and you want to pay me, you owe me $18.” I think that was the wholesale price. “If not, send them back or throw them away or whatever.”
And I sent these packets out all over the country. And goddamn, about a week later I started getting these letters with checks in them. And checks for $100. “Okay, send me 24 number 17s.” And checks. Nobody burned me. I mean, a real entrepreneurial -- [interrupting himself to speak to someone else] -- Oh, he got it working. So where did that come from?
MRS. BENNETT: Home.
MR. BENNETT: [Returning to the interview] And so that’s how Squirkenworks started.
MR. ADAMSON: Where did the name come from? Did you come up with that?
MR. BENNETT: A friend of mine, Jon Sagan, the little [six-foot-four-inch] record guy --
MR. ADAMSON: He was also at CCAC? Same guy?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. We knew each other in high school and all that. We were very close. We’re not now, unfortunately. I hired a friend. When Squirkenworks really started going, he said, “God, I need a job, Garry.”
I said, “Jon, I don’t want to hire you; you’re a friend.”
He said, “Oh, no, that won’t” -- and it did. It totally affected the relationship.
But he had made a piece of sculpture one time called the Squirkenwertz. And when I needed a name for this thing, I said, “What about Squirkenworks?” In itself for the time, that was brilliant. You know, sending the stuff out free, unsolicited; I think that was a great entrepreneurial move. And “Squirkenworks,” people didn’t forget it. Spell my name right, that’s all. You know?
So now we’ve changed the business. I’ve changed the name to Gold Seal Plating because, for instance, working with Hewlett-Packard or something: “This is Squirkenworks.”
“Who?” You know.
“Gold Seal Plating.” It sounds better.
MR. ADAMSON: Maybe we should talk about the growth of this company sort of as a separate topic from this point on, because you were starting with the roach clips, and you very swiftly moved into doing the peace symbols, I know.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. They were a natural. God bless the hippies.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah, right.
MR. BENNETT: God bless those ugly buggers.
MR. ADAMSON: But you didn’t consider yourself a hippie, really.
MR. BENNETT: No. No, no, no.
MR. ADAMSON: Because?
MR. BENNETT: If I’m anything, I’m a beatnik.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay, because you --
MR. BENNETT: Hippies, I didn’t like their art, you know? I really didn’t like -- it was just fun, man, “hippiedom” was fun at the beginning. Now I’m married, so I don’t need to go around screwing everything, you know, with a pussy. But they had no aesthetic. Their aesthetic was really fucked. The beats had poetry and they were painting and they were arguing and they were playing chess and drinking. You know?
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: The hippies, it was, “Hey, man; peace, love, brother.” You know, they were nothing. And well, you can see the aesthetic of the day was pretty abysmal.
MR. ADAMSON: Sure.
MR. BENNETT: And there is virtually no hippie art worth talking about. There’s a lot of beatnik art in poetry and writing and music and painting that you can talk about. No hippie art.
MR. ADAMSON: So you really didn’t respect it on a kind of fundamental level.
MR. BENNETT: No. It was just perfect timing for me because I can’t make money with my head, you know? And I’ve said a couple times I’m probably that last generation that could make a living with these [his hands]. I’m holding up my hands. But it’s true. I mean, after the '70s or '80s, you had to be into electronics or something like that. Yeah, it’s like the Rust Belt.
MR. ADAMSON: Right. So how did that company go from being Squirkenworks, the small, sort of hippie head shop, to --
MR. BENNETT: Well, it actually wasn’t small. At one time I had 65 employees making roach clips. [Laughs.]
MR. ADAMSON: Oh, my God.
MR. BENNETT: [Laughs.] I know.
MR. ADAMSON: So you were selling them all over the country, then.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, God, yes. England. Yeah. No, I was the roach clip mogul of the world for a while. And I could never figure out why everybody tried to make pipes and stuff; nobody really made roach clips. And a pipe is a hard thing to make. A roach clip is a goddamn piece of wire you smack. I had 11 punch presses going at one time. I had one punch press just dedicated -- one little, two-ton punch press just dedicated to -- you put a roach clip, the wire body part of it, you’d put it in there and hit the foot pedal, and it stamped “Squirkenworks” in there. I had the smallest little goddamn thing etched, you know, to put in the punch press. And you set it up just right, and “ba-dink.” If you have good eyes or glasses, you can read “Squirkenworks” there. I didn’t need to, but I did.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: So yeah. No, I had 65 people there at one time. I counted them.
And then Nixon came in, and I saw the writing on the wall. I mean there were head shops being busted and all that. At that time I had my partner, Gary [Spencer], and we’d put the plating shop in. And I said, “Lookit, Gary, this roach clip thing, this is going to go. They’re busting head shops in Arizona, in Texas, in Florida, and we’re going to be out of business here pretty quick.” So that’s why I put the plating shop in.
MR. ADAMSON: This is Gary --
MR. BENNETT: Spencer, my partner. He’s still my partner.
MR. ADAMSON: Right, the business end of it.
MR. BENNETT: And we were making jewelry at the time, you know, through-hoops [a type of earring] and necklaces and stuff. But the roach clips were the really big part of the business. And I had put the plating shop in. That’s how I got Gary. I’d put the plating shop in, and then in the '70s, you know, I think Nixon -- when did he come in, '72?
MR. ADAMSON: That’s when he went out, I think [1974].
MR. BENNETT: Out?
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah. He came in in '68, 69.
MR. BENNETT: Okay. Well anyway, things started to get clamping down on the drugs and all that.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah, sure.
MR. BENNETT: The Vietnam War was winding down, and people were sick and tired of hippies and drugs and shit like that. So we had the plating shop in, and we were plating all our own stuff. I said, “Gary, we’ve got to stop making roach clips.”
He said, “God, we can’t do that.”
I said, “Yeah, we got to.” So I said, “We’re pulling the plug. We’re phoning the distributors. We’ll close out all this shit.”
He said, “What are we going to do?”
“Well, we’ve got some jewelry.” And we were doing a few plating jobs for other people. They found out we were plating. I said, “We’re just going to bite the bullet, and goddamnit, we’re getting out of this paraphernalia business.” At that time we had got more efficient. We were probably down to 30 people, you know, just through efficiency. And we went down to bare bones. There was a time where it was Gary plating, me, Gary’s brother, and Kam Yee and Kam Ha, two Chinese ladies. And we kept them. And I remember we had no work, and we had them paint, you know, the inside of the building, those Chinese ladies. They were young in those days. They’re still there, and they’re now old. And then another plating job would come in, another one, and every month it grew. And so, you know, in about two years, that’s what we are, platers.
MR. ADAMSON: So you were just plating things and not fabricating them anymore?
MR. BENNETT: No. And I think that’s the best move I ever made. We’re at the end of the food chain, like a grocery store.
MR. ADAMSON: I see.
MR. BENNETT: You gotta have us. You know, the guy that’s growing the groceries has got to have us to sell it. The guys who were making stuff, they had to have us plate it, and therefore they had to pay us. You know, it’s kind of brutal, but it’s true. We were it if you wanted plating; we were the only ones that were doing it.
MR. ADAMSON: There wasn’t a lot of competition.
MR. BENNETT: And we certainly weren’t ripping people off.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: Everybody’s always said we’re very fair and reasonable and all that sort of stuff.
MR. ADAMSON: And you would do gold plating and silver --
MR. BENNETT: Gold plating. That’s what we specialized in.
MR. ADAMSON: Just gold. Okay.
MR. BENNETT: No, we did nickel and copper and stuff like that, but our specialty has always been gold.
MR. ADAMSON: And where is the operation now? Still here in Oakland, right?
MR. BENNETT: Just down the road. Where we did the tape recorder thing, we were just two blocks from it.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: I probably should have taken you over there.
MR. ADAMSON: That’s all right. So that’s been a source of income for you ever since.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, it’s all right. There was a couple of years it was a great source of income. It’s tougher now. Gary runs the business and runs it a lot better than I could. You know, the daily stuff. We talk about any move we’re going to make. I am very fortunate that I have known from day one that if you can possibly afford it, buy the property that you need to make your living in. So I own all that. And I don’t make a lot of money anymore, but no big deal; I don’t owe a lot of money either.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: That’s what’s really good.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah. So was there a period at which you feel like that business really sustained your ability to make furniture and clocks and that sort of thing?
MR. BENNETT: I have another analogy, and that’s the Beatles. The Beatles were good from the get-go, but when they started making tons of money, they got better. They could hire the London Philharmonic. “Okay, you blokes just sit here for a week.” You know, $40,000 a day or $100,000, they didn’t care. Because they were so good, they could use that. They didn’t have to put their monies together and, “Okay, let’s phone Charlie up and see if we can use them.”
And so yes, to answer your question, yeah, that just freed me. It allowed me a lot of arrogance, you know, or arrogance of time to not have to worry. I was very fortunate. I mean, up until the last couple of years, virtually everything I’ve made has sold or could have been sold. And I think at times I sold it pretty cheap, but I also knew I didn’t want a big collection of my work. So, you know, people were saying, “Boy, this is not very much.”
I said, “Yeah; it’s good, too, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Okay. Well, we’ll buy it.” You know?
And so the work got out there. And I think that was really important.
I perceived early on it was really important to get my work out. I’d been selling at Gump’s and stuff like that in Frisco, and when I was an artist, I was selling in galleries around here, but, I mean, the market is east. And the market for my stuff, man, just, “bong,” hit. I mean, they’d never seen metal and paint and wood. You know, Richard Kagan, all perfect, and Tage Frid, and all those guys. You know, walnut. Dark wood. Geez, I’d put my stuff in a show, a group show or something, and: “Oh, what’s that?” I loved it. I loved it.
MR. ADAMSON: Well, let’s back up to where you started doing the clocks, which were really the first thing that was sort of like furniture that you did. That would have been in the early '70s -- right? -- when you started doing that?
MR. BENNETT: I think the first clock, probably the date on it, the first one -- I didn’t realize it was so early -- was the clock that the Mint Museum [Mint Museum of Art/Mint Museum of Craft + Design, Charlotte, North Carolina] has, and that’s '73, I think. I’m pretty sure it’s '73. I didn’t realize I had started making them that early. But we had met Julie Schafler [Julie: Artisans Gallery, New York], I don’t know how, probably through Doris Stowens. And Julie came out and, being a New Yorker, couldn’t drive, so she would hire some guy to drive her around, and we met. She came over because we were going to introduce her to some people. And we just got along just like two peas in a pod.
So when I started making these clocks, I was showing them at Gump’s and that to great success, but fuck, they were really cheap, man. Jesus Christ, I’d like to have some of them back. So one time she [Julie] phoned me, and she knew I was making clocks. She said, “Well, would you make me some clocks for a Valentine show?” [“Garry Bennett: Clocks,” Julie: Artisans’ Gallery, New York, February 1977.]
And I said, “Yeah, sure.” So I made 10 clocks, all heart motif. There’s a couple in the book.
MR. ADAMSON: So that’s why there are so many heart clocks.
MR. BENNETT: Well, there’s a lot more other clocks than heart clocks, but that -- and I never sold a one. Never sold a goddamn one from her gallery in New York. And so I got them back, and then they went. I mean, they went to other venues and stuff.
MR. ADAMSON: Here in California?
MR. BENNETT: Probably. I can’t really remember. But we kept one. I still have one. But the clocks did really well.
And then, fortunately, I met [Rick] Snyderman. This is for the -- I’m sure some people will listen to this and all that, and there’s some people that don’t like Rick, you know? I like Rick. Rick’s a hustler. He’s working hard, keeping everything going, and I think he does pretty well. And he gave me my first couple shows.
MR. ADAMSON: This is Rick Snyderman, the gallerist in Philadelphia?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, in Philadelphia. And geez, man, he did really well for me. It was a fight. The problem with Rick is, he wanted to sell everything cheap.
No, I’ll get -- I’ve got a mouthful of Copenhagen [Mr. Bennett referring to tobacco] here.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: You know, as a merchant, he wants to get it out the door. And I said, “Well, geez, I’d like a little more.” And I remember one time I had a beautiful desk. It’s in the book too, the green one with the gold-leaf legs and all that.
And he says, “Well, what should this sell for?” I said -- I think it was $2,400.
He says, “Oh, God, that’s too much, Garry.”
I said, “Well, I think I have a lot of time in that piece.” At that time, I had Dan working for me.
MR. ADAMSON: Dan?
MR. BENNETT: Dan Bennett. No relation, but one of Dunnigan’s [John Dunnigan]. When he moved out here, Dunnigan phoned me. He said, “I tried to keep him, but if you can get him, take him. He’s that good.” And he is.
MR. ADAMSON: So he was a student of John Dunnigan’s at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]?
MR. BENNETT: No, he just worked for John.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: But Dan’s the kind of guy, show him once, that’s it. You know? And he will do it better than you can do it.
So had the show, came back, and Dan’s working, you know. He says, “By the way, what did the green desk sell for, or what did you get for that?” Forty-eight hundred dollars, that’s what it retailed for. Snyderman just -- you know, it’s the most expensive thing, I think, he had ever had in there. And Dan says, “Did the green desk sell?”
And I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “What did it sell for?”
And I says, “Oh, it sold for $4,800.” I was pretty proud of that, you know.
He says, “And you get half?”
I says, “Yeah.”
And he says, “Oh, okay.” I saw him over there figuring. Finally, after about 10 minutes, he says, “Hey.”
I said, “What?”
He says, “You know what you made?”
I said, “No. What?”
He says, “You made $200.”
I says, “Really? That’s what I made?” When I got $2,400, I had made $200. He figured out I paid $1,400 -- or $1,200 to have the legs gold-leafed, and the aluminum and the ColorCore Formica and his wages and that. And he figured it all out, I made $200.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.] So that would have been in the '80s, right?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: So again to back up, when you were making the clocks --
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah. We -- you’re digressing. I’m just rolling.
MR. ADAMSON: [Inaudible.]
MR. BENNETT: No, that’s cool. That’s cool.
MR. BENNETT: When I was making the clocks, yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: But who were you selling through, mostly?
MR. BENNETT: Gump’s. Where else would I have sold clocks? There was a gallery in Chicago. I think it was Esther Saks [Esther Saks Gallery, Chicago, Illinois]. There was a woman, Arlene something, in Frisco. And then I was showing at Zara Gallery also, Joe Chowning [Joseph Chowning Gallery, formerly Zara Gallery, San Francisco, California]. And I was showing some of the clocks there. I think I made clocks, with [the exception of that early one at the Mint Museum] that early one, really hot and heavy for probably about two years, and I think I probably made 50 or 60 clocks.
MR. ADAMSON: So why was it clocks?
MR. BENNETT: Because they were small. And I know the first one I made. You know, I know that clock. I wanted to start -- because I was running this business. It used to be here. The roach-clip factory used to be here. And I was working downstairs, and I just wanted to start making something of my own, you know? And clocks, I don’t know, I just said, “Oh, clocks.” It seemed like a good idea. So that’s how I got into clocks.
And then I got some very rudimentary wood tools; a jointer, radial-arm saw, and a small band saw. Didn’t have a table saw at the time. And I kind of started making furniture. So clocks led -- you know, after I had done some woodworking on the clocks, I said, “Well, shit, I’m" -- and when I was making furniture, I had no idea that there were other people, like Tage Frid, Wendell Castle, Art Carpenter. I thought, oh, furniture would be neat to make. I had no idea --
MR. ADAMSON: Really?
MR. BENNETT: -- no idea that other people were making furniture and showing it in galleries. I had a slight inkling. I had a friend that was down around the corner, Don Braden, and they made furniture, but they did kind of commissions and stuff like that, he and Neal Wehrlie. And Don introduced me to Art [Arthur Espenet Carpenter]. He said, “Well, we gotta go over and see Art someday.”
And I said, “Art? What’s he?”
“He’s a furniture maker.”
“Oh, really? Makes furniture, does he?” So we went over there, and that’s how I met Art.
MR. ADAMSON: Up in Bolinas? But it seems like before you had that contact, you had made a couple pieces, like there are couple of chairs you made for your sons in the book [1964-65].
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Oh, yeah. One of them is so uncomfortable.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I got back here; I had some friends that, you know, wanted me to make some furniture. Well, the tenth Avenue Yard, where the urinal was that I worked in, was also an ex-lumberyard. And they had all this wood out there. No vertical-grain fir in it. But I was welding, you know. I remember this one chair I made, this chair, and I think we finally threw it away. It’s kind of too bad. But it’s beautiful; it’s a beautiful chair. I think there might be a picture of it in the book. We’ve got pictures of it. But the fuckin’ thing weighed 80 pounds and was not something you could sit at the dining-room table very long, you know. I had done, like, a football padded-leather seat, so you’re almost getting goosed by the end of the evening. So yeah, I’d made a couple, but not as a furniture maker.
MR. ADAMSON: I see.
MR. BENNETT: You know, make your kids a chair.
MR. ADAMSON: Just sort of screwing around.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: So do you think that meeting Art Carpenter and getting to know Don Braden, that whole deal, had a big influence on it?
MR. BENNETT: No.
MR. ADAMSON: No.
MR. BENNETT: Because I was off and running anyway.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: And Don would come over and, “Geez, what are you doing there?” I remember one day he came over, and I know the desk -- Foster Goldstrom has the desk. I had just bought this beautiful rosewood, and I had these beautiful rosewood legs on this thing. And I had a bottle of black shoe dye there, and I was dyeing it black. And he says, “What are you doing?!!” I said, “Well, I’m making the legs black.”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: He couldn’t believe it. And that’s what I was talking to you about earlier, you know. In those days I’d do that. I would still do it, I mean, if I had the scrotum, you know. Right now the wood’s too precious. At that time it was really cheap. And when you take that dark rosewood and blacken it, and then you buff back through it with steel wool, you get a richness that is unsurpassed.
MR. ADAMSON: And you just sort of figured that out on your own that you could do that?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t know what ebonizing was. That was my ebonizing. You wanted black wood. And I found out it doesn’t work good on fir, it doesn’t work good on maple; doesn’t work good on oak. It works great on walnut and rosewood. And it gets black, and it gets just really good depth. So, yeah, it was no great epiphany; it’s just you wanted black.
MR. ADAMSON: Where did you buy the wood?
MR. BENNETT: I bought it from a guy named Bob Nichols, who now is a pretty big veneer guy. But he brought in this load of rosewood. And I think there’s a picture in the book of all the rosewood.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: And I just made this deal with Bob; and Leon [Paulos] had the truck, so Leon and I made the deal. We didn’t make any money on the wood, but the deal was I got together all these guys, and we laid all the wood out in front of the studio here and numbered each plank, and then Leon and I were to get the first two picks each. So our deal, because we put the deal together and hauled the wood and all that, we got the first four planks. And I still have downstairs number one and number two.
MR.ADAMSON: Really?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I can’t cut into them.
MR. ADAMSON: They’re like relics, right?
MR. BENNETT: Christ! It will never be seen again!
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: You know?! It’s terrible. I can’t cut 'em. I can’t get at 'em, either.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And they’re so giant. You know, one is 42 inches by four inches thick by 14 feet long. Perfect wood. Not a knot, not a check. Nothing wrong with it. Perfect. It’s not the highest grade of rosewood, it’s Honduras rosewood; but I think it’s as a beautiful as any of it; because it’s almost alizarin crimson. It’s really deep red, and very stable and very consistent. I can’t see anything around here -- I’ve probably got some of it at home -- you know, that I used. And then I bought also from the same guy -- Dan and I went in on a unit of mahogany. And Dan didn’t want the big ones, so I said, “I’ll take the big pieces.” So I have some -- two boards.
Let me show you this. Let’s turn that off.
[Break]
MR. ADAMSON: This is the second disk of the interview with Garry Bennett. We’re just talking about moving from the clocks into the furniture, buying wood and so forth.
You know, one thing that struck me about the photo that’s in the book is that a lot of the members of the Baulines Guild are in it -- Grif Okie, Don Braden, Tom D’Onofrio, some other guys.
MR. BENNETT: Right.
MR. ADAMSON: And I was wondering about your involvement with that organization.
MR. BENNETT: Well, you know, they were the only guys, the only furniture guys. I mean, again, I’m over here in Oakland; Don’s here, and Neal Wehrlie and that, but I’m just -- you know, I really was by myself, because I never went to a damn furniture show. “What’s that?” You know? And I’d go to my art friends’ shows, painting shows and shit like that. But they got me into it. And a good group of people. I mean, you know, Grif Okie is one of the really neat guys around.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: And Bruce McQuilkin and Braden and Art and all that. I’m not a joiner, you know? I mean, these people that were here the other night, they wanted me to join. I said, “No, no. I don’t like to join -- I don’t like to belong to anything.” Kind of Groucho Marx Syndrome or something, you know; if they want me a member, they’re questionable. But I have done things with them and that. We’ve opened our house for them for the guild. Nice people.
I guess this probably is -- I don’t know how this is going to be disseminated, but the thing is, a lot of these things are self-serving; you know, “How can we get our membership, the individuals in our guild, more commissions?” and this and that. I’d be really interested in 15, 20 people sitting around drinking and talking about, “What’s all this about?” instead of “Who’s got the money?” or “How are we going to raise this?” or “Who wants to volunteer to sit in the gallery?” So I’ve never been a big part of it, although the people in it are good, hardworking, honest.
MR. ADAMSON: And you have been a member since those days pretty continuously?
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah. I don’t know when I -- they gave me honorary membership,
but I pay dues.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay. So what did you think when you first went up to Art’s
place in Bolinas?
MR. BENNETT: Well, I kind of pooh-poohed it, to be truthful with you.
MR. ADAMSON: Really?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. I said, “Who’s this fuckin’ old guy out
here? A goddamn midget working out in the mushrooms.”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And then I met him a couple more times, and then I realized, you
know, I’m fortunate, you know? I mean, because I went there kind of cocky.
Not cocky, nobody knew who I was, but I knew what I was. Okay? And it wasn’t
what Art was doing. You know, but Art’s infinitely more creative than
Sam. And I love them both, and I respect both of them’s work.
MR. ADAMSON: Sam Maloof?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. But then, you know, you listen to this guy and you listen
to a guy that’s really honest about it; he doesn’t have a factory
making his income for him and shit like that; you know, he’s down in the
trenches, slugging it out. And I think we’re very good friends for quite
a while now, because Don took me over there, geez, I don’t know, 25 years
ago or so. Yeah, at least that. Twenty-five years? Twenty-five would be '75.
Yeah, probably right now 25 years.
MR. ADAMSON: But you felt like -- actually, I’ve always wondered this.
Did you feel like you had sort of moved past what he was doing --
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And don’t put that in there, but that’s
all right. You know.
MR. ADAMSON: I mean, because you --
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, because I come from a different -- you know, he’s one
generation before me. And I have a number of pieces of Art’s that I admire
and I like and I respect. But yeah, I just felt I want to know him not as a
mentor but as a friend, because he’s got a lot of stuff to say, knows
what he’s doing, and is brutally honest. So, yeah, I felt that we would
never have to worry about being competitors, you know. So. I’ve never
felt with anybody, you know, that I’m competing with them. You know, Wendell
or --
MR. ADAMSON: Well, he’s the one that springs to mind, right?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, but Wendell and I, we just don’t compete. I mean, I
think we revel in each other’s successes. You know? And I still believe
he’s probably got as much talent as anybody in the field. But again, we’re
getting old. He wants to secure his old age, so his stuff is getting -- you
know, and Wendell does crank it out, man. I mean, there’s no question
about it. But I showed you that bowl there, and you said, “Really?”
And he’s got it. It’s just that he’s got other fish to fry.
But fortunately, I think he’s -- “fortunately” -- he might
see it unfortunately -- I think fortunately for him, as a friend -- he’s
back in the studio now.
MR. ADAMSON: When did you first meet him? This is Wendell Castle we’re
talking about.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, it’s a great story, man. It’s the greatest story
in the world. I first saw him -- at that point in my life, I don’t know
what year, but I started taking Fine Woodworking. I got the first one,
you know. Somebody said, I think Braden said, “Hey’s there’s
a new woodworking” --
MR. ADAMSON: The magazine.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, the magazine. I got the first one, with a gray cover, you
know, nothing on it. And then I’d wait for those to come, and I’d
read them. And then I’d keep seeing this guy Wendell Castle, Scottsville,
New York, and his work. And I thought, “Yeah, that’s all right.
Not what I’m doing.” Because he’s big swoopy, and I’m
rectilinear. You know?
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And so one time we were invited to Joan Mondale’s place [the
Vice President’s house, when Walter Mondale was in office]. There was
a show at the American Craft Museum. She borrowed a piece of mine, and Wendell
was really famous, and they had to have Wendell. I looked across the room; that
must be that Wendell guy; never talked to him there. Never said a word to him,
then they brought a cake out. Happy Birthday to Wendell, you know; some Filipino
carrying a goddamn cake with 38 candles on it or whatever. And I’m thinking,
“Aw, sonofabitch,” you know? “Goddamnit.” So I never
talked to him. And I think I had just met Sam, so we talked a little. Well,
Sam talked and I listened, as you know Sam.
[Laughs.] [Speaking to the microphone] Hi, Sam. I still love ya. Even though you are a Christian.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: So I never talked to Wendell. But then Dale Nish had that thing
in Provo.
MR. ADAMSON: Provo, Utah.
MR. BENNETT: Another milestone. I don’t care what anybody says, that was
something very special.
MR. ADAMSON: You’re talking about his wood turning symposium in Utah
[“State of the Art '80” Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah]?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. And they invited -- I remember I flew out with Sarah Jaffe
and Art Carpenter. We went out in the same plane.
MR. ADAMSON: Who’s Sarah Jaffe?
MR. BENNETT: She was a local -- is, now back -- she phoned me a while back and
said, “Why don’t you come over?” I don’t know. I don’t
think she’s done very well. Okay? But they had me to give, you know, a
slide show and all that. But I remember, man -- David Elsworth was there. I
mean, for wood turners, that was probably a big deal.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: For me it was just, hey, man, I get to go, show my slides. And
I knew some of the people. I met Will Maloof, you know, who was a weird guy.
Dukhobor. Do you know what Dukhobors are? They’re some Russian religious
sect. They burn books. They don’t believe in books. But he was a big --
anyway.
So I remember they had the opening dinner at, you know, one of the things on campus there, some fairly big hall. You know, roast beef and chicken and iced tea. No booze, obviously. I remember I’m sitting in the back, sitting in the corner, I think with Art, maybe, and somebody else, and I look, and this guy comes in the door. It’s Wendell. It’s Wendell Castle. And that motherfucker saw me, came over, and he stuck out his hand. And he says, “Garry, it’s about time we meet each other.” And that was it. We’ve been solid ever since. That was his initiation. It’s not like him to do that, you know?
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: Because he’s not arrogant. People think he’s arrogant
and uppity. He’s shy. He’s a real shy guy. And fuck, man, I mean,
ever since then we’ve really hit it off. Yeah. So that’s my famous
woodworker first meeting. Well, I’d met Sam.
MR. ADAMSON: You met Sam all the way back in the ‘70s as well, when
you met Art?
MR. BENNETT: I can’t remember when I first met Sam. And when I first met
him, it was probably through Stocksdale; I’ve known Stocksdale for quite
a while.
MR. ADAMSON: Bob Stocksdale?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. And I probably didn’t really realize who he was when
I met him. You know? Again, being totally unsophisticated in this furniture
thing.
MR. ADAMSON: Well, what did you think when you met all these people? I mean,
you probably didn’t even have the phrase “studio furniture”
back then.
MR. BENNETT: No. No. Yeah, right.
MR. ADAMSON: So what did you think of this stuff? I mean, did it ring a bell with you?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: Did you think it was bizarre?
MR. BENNETT: God, we made some -- not we, not me -- I think I did, but I mean
what was going on out here was, quote, the old -- you know, “California
roundover.”
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: But, boy, I mean, there were some -- Jesus Christ, Dale Hollub
made some good stuff.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: Jim Bacigalupi. I tried to buy Dale Hollub’s piece from Helena
Foster, and she said, “No, no, no.” And I tried to buy Bacigalupi’s
piece from Bacigalupi, and he said, “No, no.” They’re classic
-- these are not big names, but someday, you know, we’re talking big-time
Antique Road Show.
MR. ADAMSON: Oh, I know.
MR. BENNETT: I mean, this is the quintessential. So all of my orientation was
West Coast. There was a couple guys up in Mendocino, and there was one -- I
can’t remember his name right now -- but did some beautiful kind of art
-- very beautiful art deco desks and stuff. Beautiful. Worked in a goddamn windy
barn. Man, I mean, the fuckin’ sea just, you know -- God, beautiful stuff,
man.
MR. ADAMSON: Did you know Michael Cooper up there?
MR. BENNETT: I met Michael Cooper through Sal Pecoraro, who taught with him
at De Anza. And before I met Michael, I saw that show he had at the Frisco Museum
of Modern Art. Blew me away. To this day. Gun in Proper Perspective.
It’s a big pistol, and it’s got big swoop to it, so when you’re
looking at it -- a big barrel and then it goes down to a little handle. And
all the motorcycles and stuff. Yeah.
Well, Michael’s a -- I don’t know, I mean, I like his work, but he’s one of these guys -- and I’m sure this is not going to come out in any publication, is it?
MR. ADAMSON: No.
MR. BENNETT: Okay. He’s one of these guys -- I have great admiration, great respect, love what he does -- but he’s one of these guys that when he gets an idea, it’s damn good, but I see a lot of people I don’t think they have a lot of ideas, so they spend a lot of time on one thing that they’re doing. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I can’t imagine spending more than a week on a piece. These guys spend a month or, you know, two months or three months on a piece. And it’s very beautiful, but it’s, like, “Okay, I gotta make this a little better because I won’t have to dream up the next one.” Now, maybe it’s self-serving, like, “I don’t want to work this hard again, so I’m not going to think of the next one,” as they’re making it more and more perfect.
Is this making sense?
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah, it is.
MR. BENNETT: As they get more and more perfect, you know, working harder and harder, then they just, “Okay, well, I gotta do another one,” so then they start another big project.
Michael Cooper did this thing; for a while he did these beautiful busts of these female torsos, you know? And what he did is he got a chick and made a body mold. Okay? So then he was going to make a router, a duplicating router, and he could put the plaster up here, and he’d put the fuckin’ log over here, and it would go, “Vrum, vrum, vrum, vrum, vrum.” Well, the goddamn -- Michael told me the router took him about six months to make. It’s a beautiful -- I don’t know if he’s still got it -- a beautiful machine, I mean, as only he could build it.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: You know, ball bearings and, Jesus Christ, I mean, perfect.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: Then when he built it, he realized his studio was too small to do this in, so he built a big part on this studio. So it took him, like -- he said it took him, like, 18 months to get the router up and going. Eighteen months might be exaggeration, but it was a good six or eight months just to go, “Wreemm, wreemm, wreemm, wreemmmg, wreemmmg, wrmmmg, wrmmmg, wrmmmmg, done.”
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: [Laughing] You know. I mean, done in, like, two hours!
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughing] And he -- was carving -- 20 of them.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah! Jesus Christ! But that’s the way he thinks, man. And that’s cool. You know, that’s cool.
Wendell’s been able to lavish a lot of attention to finishes because he’s always had a lot of people working for him. The few times that I’ve had people working for me, I’ve done the same thing. I’ve got some guy over there sanding, and you give them sanding paper, you know; you say, “Oh, sand the shit out of this.” For me, sanding is maybe one twenty, max. You got somebody working for you, and you don’t want to be interrupted, three twenty. You know?
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: And that’s what it is. So you find yourself giving these people these jobs that are just deadly. You know? But that’s what Wendell can do, because, God, I watched him work with Don one time over there at his place, and Wendell could just walk up to this -- he pulled down this roll of kraft paper. I watched him do a chair, and it’s that chair -- I have it at the house. It’s that one that Silas Kopf did the marquetry on.
And Wendell’s got a facility that -- well, I haven’t been around a lot, but he pulled this down, clipped it on the bottom, got a pencil out, and says, “Okay, Don, I’d like to do a chair like this.” And he starts drawing. “And the legs should come down like this,” he draws, and he’s got probably a full-size chair in three dimensions, I mean, drawn three -- a quarter view, beautifully rendered, no erasures, and he says, “I’d like to do this.” It’s like a little Queen Anne chair, you know?
MR. ADAMSON: Mm-hmm.
MR. BENNETT: And then Wendell says, “Okay, what kind of joint do you think we should use here?” And they discuss the type of joint, and off to the side they’d draw the joint up. That was it. “Okay, let’s make it.” And Don could do that. So I never had that, you know? Nobody that I’ve had here has had that ability. Dan is an amazing craftsman but, you know, doesn’t like to, you know, go off on a -- but I can say, “Hey, let’s do this.” I mean, Dan basically built that Boston Kneehole.
MR. ADAMSON: Really?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, we worked on it together, but he’s the guy that really liked to do everything perfect.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: If I did that alone, it would still be exactly what you see, but those fits and that stuff wouldn’t be that good.
MR. ADAMSON: Well, maybe we should back up for a minute, then, because it seems like you’re getting at something that was really important to you in the late '70s, which is the issue of technique and how perfect you wanted a piece to be when you were going to make it. And obviously the Nail Cabinet is sort of this towering object in that period of time for you, or at least it’s been received that way since. I don’t know how you looked at it when you made it.
MR. BENNETT: I’m tired of it, but I’m glad I still own it, because somebody will get it -- you know, some institution will get it someday. Sylvia and I have pretty well decided some institution will get it. I’d like somebody to pay the kids something for it.
MR. ADAMSON: Before we even talk about the Nail Cabinet, which I think we should do, you know, you were at this point where you were making furniture finally, after going through the clocks and so forth, and it seems like you were taking a really different stance than someone like Sam Maloof, who was making the same chair over and over and over again.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: And from the get-go, it was really important for you to make different things each time you sat down.
MR. BENNETT: Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: Right. And I guess what I’m curious about is how you --
MR. BENNETT: It goes back to how many ideas you have. It’s easy for me. I’ve got more ideas than time.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: So real easy.
MR. ADAMSON: So, not a lot of patience for the technique and fine, finicky details.
MR. BENNETT: No. I think I’m a good craftsman. I mean, I just, if something’s not quite right, I don’t worry about it. I’ve done some dovetails, you know. Not hand-cut. Well, yeah, one hand-cut.
MR. ADAMSON: One?
MR. BENNETT: No, no, I mean a table that’s got four dovetails hand-cut.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: They’re great big dovetails. Shit, man, they’re three inches across and an inch and a half deep. You know? I thought it was hot shit. Knocked that sucker together. Anyway --
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: [Pause.] Oh, I lost it. I just lost it.
MR. ADAMSON: Well, we’re just talking about, you know, the importance of technique in what you do.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah. I don’t care about it. Back to the Michelangelo analogy. I mean, I’m not at that level, but I’ve got enough of it that I can carry my idea. And my use of metal. You know, the way I use metal is not decorative. It ends up decorative, but it’s an integral part of the piece. And I get to get away with all sorts of shit by using metal. You know? I mean, strength issues. And easy joining issues. And again, my work, when you really look at my work, someday somebody will, and they’ll say, “He’s a two-dimensional guy.” I’m drawing. Very seldom do I go around that corner. So everything I do is all line. The curves, you know, the verticals and that.
MR. ADAMSON: You think metal serves your purpose in that respect?
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. It’s also nice material, but it’s strong. I’m looking at this piece over here now. You know, that’s a three-inch aluminum -- square aluminum tubing. It’s really the total structure of that piece that holds it all together, and it’s really strong. And it all comes apart. That’s the other thing. See, Wendell’s chair doesn’t come apart. If I made that chair, it would come apart so I could say, “Oops, geez, that’s wrong,” and take it apart and change something. Very little of my work is all glued together. I can’t think of very much at all. This thing comes apart, totally apart. The drawer cases come off. They unscrew. Because I don’t do any drawings. So I’ve got to be really screwing with it as I go along.
MR. ADAMSON: You really design it through the process rather than previous to the process.
MR. BENNETT: Mm-hmm. I couldn’t imagine drawing a piece of furniture up and say, “Okay, here are the plans” and make it. It’s beyond me.
MR. ADAMSON: Which is what Wendell does, basically.
MR. BENNETT: Mm-hmm. Well, no, I think Wendell will make a very rough drawing. If I’m thinking of Wendell, I’m thinking of fairly big volumetric shapes. So he needs some road map to give to a guy, say, “Okay, glue this up 18 inches, you know, with hollows here and here, and then this thing on the bottom.” And he needs that. And Wendell’s a great carver. Boy, you see him work, man, you know, he’s as good as anybody, get in there, drawknife and chisels and shit.
And an aside: Wendell and I went -- I talked him into going to Penland [Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina, 1994] one time, which is really hard to talk Wendell into anything.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: But he had a good time. He had a good time because he knew he would meet Phil Hanes through me. [Laughs.] So anyway, he kind of enjoyed it. But we made a collaborative piece.
MR. ADAMSON: Mm-hmm. It’s in the book.
MR. BENNETT: It’s really good!
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: The only photographs I have of it, the piece is unfinished. But you know, I’ve looked at that a couple times; I just showed it the other night in the slide show, and our aesthetic is, you know, bang-on. I mean, it’s not two different guys doing something. I would have to admit I couldn’t have made those legs, but he could have made the top that I made, you know?
MR. ADAMSON: But he wouldn’t have, necessarily.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, he might have, but -- yeah. Goddamn, man, I watched him carve those legs. That’s a lot of work.
MR. ADAMSON: So you’re not a carver.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, no. I might be a carver, or might have been if I ever had anybody working for me that could sharpen a chisel.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: I can sharpen a chisel, but it’s just pain and agony, man. You know? I needed a real sharp chisel the other day, so I goddamn sharpened one of my chisels. Got real sharp. But I watched Paul Sasso sharpen his chisels. Ping, ping, ping, ping. Like, two minutes. Razor edge.
MR. ADAMSON: Because he does it all the time.
MR. BENNETT: He does it all the time. Yeah.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah. Well, when you look back at your work from the late ‘70s, like pre-Nail Cabinet work, before we were recording, you were saying that you find some of that -- like the Lipstick Bench we were talking about downstairs -- you find it rough.
MR. BENNETT: Well, it’s slick rough. Turn that off. We’ll walk over. I’ll show you.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
[Recording paused.]
MR. ADAMSON: We were just talking about the original Lipstick Bench, and Garry was comparing it to basically a commission that he’s doing of the same form.
MR. BENNETT: Not a commission. I don’t do commissions. [To microphone] I don’t do commissions.
MR. ADAMSON: [Laughs.]
MR. BENNETT: No, it’s just that Sylvia sold this bench, and then I realized it has a particular significance that I’ll show you also later. It’s quite interesting, actually. So I agreed to make another one.
MR. ADAMSON: But comparing what he’s doing now with the same form to the original construction.
MR. BENNETT: Right. It’s almost identical.
MR. ADAMSON: Right.
MR. BENNETT: And I was just telling Glenn that these top pieces are solid wood, one piece of redwood soft. So if anything falls against it, instead of like a car fender, a rock hitting it and you get a little chip of paint, if something falls, you get a dent because there’s nothing -- you know, it’s very hard paint, lacquer, and a very soft underlayment. The one downstairs, I hope I’ve taken care of by fiberglassing, and you should be able to drop it off the building and maybe get a dent in it. But that one there wouldn’t go very good.
MR. ADAMSON: So you really added to your arsenal of technical expertise in terms of the materials and processes that you’re in control of.
MR. BENNETT: In a way. But you know, I have a friend, Steve Akana, he’s up on all the new technical stuff. I’m a Luddite. You know, I’ll work with what I know and the things that I’m familiar with, but there are materials out there now that are so good, so quick, but that kind of lose that hands-on look. And the fiberglass one, I get to this point -- that’s downstairs -- the fiberglass is starting to lose -- once you do that, then you start to make this perfect, slick surface, and there’s other ways to do it. I’m not too sure what they are, but there’s other ways to do it. So even the one down there, if we’re shooting for a “10,” that one over there is a “5,” and the one downstairs is a “8.” And if I wanted to do a “10,” there wouldn’t be any wood in that sucker at all; it would be all made out of metal, and then licked out and sprayed with emeron paint, catalytic paint. Man, that would go through an atom-bomb attack and it would be perfect.
MR. ADAMSON: But that kind of perfectionism isn’t something you’re interested in.
MR. BENNETT: I would like to be able to send it off to somebody and say, “Do this,” and I’d -- “Hey, look what I made!” -- but I’m working here by myself, and I’m not willing to take the time to paint, plus I’m painting downstairs; it’s real cold, would fill the shop up with lacquer fumes. Kind of good, you get a little dizzy; it’s kind of like you’re high. Well, actually, yeah, sometimes. So, no, it doesn’t interest -- making the thing interests me; you know, “Oh, I’ve got an idea, I’m going to do that!” and then making it. And within the -- ooh, God, this is going to sound corny -- but within the respect of the piece -- you know, what it is -- making it as best I can. And if it’s a real quickie, you know, then things don’t have to be that perfect. Or if it’s, like, just popped into my mind, that Tangarry Chest.
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: You know, I never cared for that all that much until I saw it in the museum, and then I realized really what a good goddamn piece that is. That was a lot of work. That was more than my one-week boredom time, I’ll tell you. That was a lot of work. And I used to wait for people to come by and visit me, because I can’t bend down or squat or anything.
So I’d wait for people to come because I was working by myself and it’s a really big thing. And I remember one time I needed to turn it over, and Leon came by.
MR. ADAMSON: Leon who?
MR. BENNETT: Leon Paulos, friend of mine.
MR. ADAMSON: Okay.
MR. BENNETT: And, you know, I was waiting for somebody to stop by for a visit. We talked a little bit. I said, “Leon, help me turn this thing over, will ya?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, Garry.”
Goddamn it, it was up on sawhorses. Picked this thing up. I says, “Okay, let’s just go this way and we’ll turn it right on over.” We picked it up -- [grunting] -- started over, every fuckin’ drawer fell out. I’d left the drawers in it. They all hit the floor, man. All that satinwood, and dings. And, oh, we just stood looking at each other like Laurel and Hardy, man. You know: “What a dumb thing to do!” It’s my fault, not Leon’s. But anyway, when I saw that thing in New York, you know, I appreciated it. It’s very different than a lot of things I’ve done. It’s all my stuff, but it’s very formal, wouldn’t you say?
MR. ADAMSON: Yeah.
MR. BENNETT: You know? That’s the only thing I ever drew out.
MR. ADAMSON: Really?
MR. BENNETT: It’s the only piece of furniture I ever drew out. And I didn’t draw it out, but I did -- I did know kind of how big I wanted the carcass. And at that point, then I drew it out, and I think I drew it out full size. I got some kraft paper. And then I wanted to proportion the drawers and the doors. I had to. I couldn’t just wing that.
MR. ADAMSON: Sure.
MR. BENNETT: So that was -- I mean, it’s got 27 drawers in it or some God-awful amount. You know, a lot. So that was drawn out, only just proportions for size of drawers and where they went.
MR. ADAMSON: Now, why did you want to make a piece like that, that was so --
MR. BENNETT: I don’t know. [Laughs.] I don’t know.
MR. ADAMSON: It does seem very aberrant in your --
MR. BENNETT: Yeah. Probably it’s when I was at the height of messing with the gold plating with the electroprints and that. And I’d just been farting around with -- and I wanted to do that again here a while back, and I couldn’t remember how I did it. But I had been screwing around with that technique. And basically what started that thing was the doors, the panels. I says, “I want to put this technique in something.” And then I said: “Garry?” And Garry answered: “Yes?” I said: “What kind of wood do you want to use?” Well, I had just gotten a whole bunch of Australian satinwood, “silky oak,” we call it. And I figured that’s a good color with that. You know? And so away we go.
MR. ADAMSON: And it obviously was the culmination of your interest in Japanese furniture design, as well.
MR. BENNETT: Oh, yeah