Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan just posted a message for Robert Wilson, who passed away at 83.
For more than four decades, Waits and Wilson worked side by side, making wild theater and music together—like that time in 1989 when they teamed up with William S. Burroughs to turn The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets into a stage show, which later became Waits’ album The Black Rider in 1993. After that, they jumped into a Lewis Carroll-inspired opera called Alice in 1992, then circled back for Woyzeck in 2000, which was based on Büchner’s unfinished play. There was talk in 2010 about another project, but it never happened. Wilson also got creative with Philip Glass, Lady Gaga, Laurie Anderson, and Baryshnikov, just to name a few.
Fans sometimes wish we could see inside these artists’ heads just for a day.
Waits said, “Over 40 years of loving Bob and still he astounds… his vodka paintbrush of absurdity, vaudeville, heartbreak and forgiveness and imagination of the infinite is still wet and painting backdrops backwards behind the Mirror into the wee hours of the morning of his opening night! We will always be suspended in his orbit…”
Nobody could use light the way Bob did—he worked with lighting designers who followed his every detailed idea, even if it meant working from day into night, just to get things right. Sometimes, I wonder if anyone else could ever find the strange places he found, between the “membrane and the weathervane.”
He was the kind of artist who saw and heard things most people miss, and he wanted everyone else to feel that too, to be caught in the same floating space between breaths.
Bob set out for places nobody else could see, bringing together brave and talented artists, crews, and fans, and he helped open up so many hearts and eyes. He had to be all sorts of things—bold, bossy, curious, sneaky, playful, a little bit delusional, smart, charming, imperfect, political, and always ready to stand up for his ideas, no matter who doubted him, whether they meant well or not.
