MEDIA  &  PICTURES:

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28JUN10
"Extreme Behavior:
Jim Skafish was too punk for Chicago to handle. Will he finally get his place in history?"
by Jake Austen

SKAFISH
+++
Dear ONO FANS:
This is a link to a TimeOut article about Skafish sent to me by P.Michael as required reading.
P.Michael has seen, and admires, Skafish. As usual, I missed the boat bearing the Musicians.
(P.Michael's 1982 ONO outing to see Klaus Nomi still stokes my day-to-day sense of play.)
Imagine, then: On 19JUN10, how humbled was I to receive a lovely FB post from Mr. Skafish.
I am pleased to share Jake's article, as ONO is mentioned in such musical company.
I feel fairly certain P.Michael will shortly poke me with a Skafish listening list. Sincerely. =travis

". . . . And in the end, the real Skafish appreciators turned out to be
a disparate group of nonpunks that ranged from
art-rockers
ONO
to popsters Cheap Trick
(the latter of whom pays tribute by authoring the What’s This? liner notes). . . ."
Jake Austen

Read more: http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/music/28152/extreme-behavior#ixzz0sD8MUoNx

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21JUN10
ONO  Interviewed by  LIAM WARFIELD
Secret Beach #2

21st Century ONO


(ONO 1985: Ric Graham, travis, P.Michaael Grego)

I hesitate to brand ONO
anything so specific as Queer—they defy any such neat classification.
More to the point might be lowercase queer, and I’ll borrow definitions from
Merriam-Webster: differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal; eccentric; obsessed; touched.
Differing from what is usual or normal—indeed!
ONO inhabits other realms entirely, not so much a band playing music
as a vessel of divine witchcraft and sensual incantation.
ONO!
They came across my sky like a thunderclap. It was last November, at a cavernous,
smoke-filled warehouse in Chicago called the Mopery,
where I’d come to play a show with my band. We walk into the place with our little rock and roll equipment
and there’s this striking man—this older black man, dressed head-to-toe in flowing, messianic white;
hair long, white and braided, wearing a bow-tie and spectacles, looking at first glance like some voodoo priest,
or a messenger from the far reaches of space—and he’s hanging pieces of sheet-metal from the ceiling.
Turns out he’s in the opening act, and as I’m loading in equipment I’m anticipating something at least unique,
totally unprepared for the force of nature which is about to come screaming through the Mopery.
I was entranced—I hardly remember a thing.   ONO!
There was a ferocious roar, and the sound of metal on metal; there were great, earthy clods of primordial bass,
and scraps of sonic debris whizzing through the air, and a booming, prophetic voice towered above the fray,
shouting down the walls of Jericho.
I guess they were a band, but I didn’t know what the hell was happening—something was being invented
before my eyes, conjured, a world made new.
I do remember their final song was an epochal version of Lou Reed’s Heroin
that made the original seem like a game of patty-cake.
The singer—the messenger from space—convulsed on the floor, writhing around
in a gut-twistingly real fit of Agony and Ecstasy that was thrilling and terrible to behold.
I mean, Lou Reed just sang the song; these guys detonated it.
I had to be peeled off the floor after they were finished.       Not only that—
my band had to follow theirs! With our dinky little rock and roll songs!
I was mortified. I meekly approached the members of ONO later in the evening to
pay them my compliments, and they responded not only with graciousness, humility and
compliments of their own—they liked my band!—but with an invitation to lunch on top of it all!
The band practiced every weekend, they said, on the far South Side, preceded each week
by a communal meal, and I was welcome to join them some week.
How often have you told someone you liked their band and they invite you to lunch, right off the bat?
Who were these guys?
They’d been doing this, they said, since 1980—literally as long as I’ve been alive.
I wasn’t quite able to wrap my head around it—that a juggernaut like ONO had been lurking in my
own backyard for three decades and I’d never encountered them, or even heard of them.
I hobbled home, my head irrevocably skewed.
It took me six months to accept their invitation, over the course of which I had the pleasure of seeing ONO
play on several occasions at a variety of venues, from dive bar to nail salon. I had a look at their website;
their website, actually, swallowed me whole and spit me back out several hours later, panting.
It contained not only the bio and discography that one might expect from a
band’s website but a long and painstaking history of the group from 1980-present—where they’d performed
and on what date, who with and at what time, what the band wore and what songs they played,
how the audience reacted—not to mention free-floating passages of philosophy, manifesto and avantgarde
poetry. The sheer quantity of unusual facts and startling juxtapositions called for slow digestion;
I mean these guys were serious legends, unsung punk deities from a weirder planet.


(Jesse Thomas)

They’d been around the block and back again;
they’d played shows in the still-smoking ruins of burned-down houses,
they’d played at the University of Chicago and smeared mashed potatoes over
“everything, everywhere! Even in the grand piano”;
they’d played with Naked Raygun and nearly started a riot at the Cabaret Metro.
I mean, they turned the city upside-down!
I also struck up a little email correspondence with travis,
the singer of the band, who proved to be a colorful and courteous letter-writer.
We became friends!
It was at travis’ insistence that I finally made it down to 98th and Cottage Grove;
seeing that I wasn’t getting my ass in gear to do it before leaving for Germany,
he finally pinned me down for a Saturday afternoon visit, going so far as to send me
an advance menu for the day’s meal:
zucchini tomato frittata and cheesy cornbread, served with a Coastal Shiraz.
For a white kid from Evanston, 98th and Cottage Grove is practically
the edge of the world—an awfully long bike ride, at least. But
when I arrived lunch was just being served, every bit as savory
as advertised, and I sat down to eat with the band—travis, cofounder
P. Michael Grego, and relative newcomers Jesse Thomas
and Rebecca Pavlatos—feeling very much welcome and in good
hands. After lunch and a tour of the grounds (travis’ house is
spilling over with artwork and artifacts, and his backyard garden
is expansive, containing a number of exotic and poisonous
plants) ONO began practicing. Though lacking the visual and
performative elements so integral to their live show, they were
dense and in great form and I was thoroughly transported. Jesse
and Rebecca then had to split, but I got travis and P. Michael to
sit down for an interview, and over wine and leftover cornbread
I was treated to some chapters and reminiscences from the saga of ONO.
21st Century ONO
Beginning at the beginning, then: travis, the eldest
member (though his tireless energy exceeds that of a schoolboy)
was born in 1946 in Itawamba, Mississippi, a county remote enough
that electricity had not yet arrived. His mother was something of
a wild woman. “Badass Rejetta,” travis laughs: “She bad. She
was wild even then. I was born out of wedlock, and my mother
had no intention of marrying my father. I was born in the same
house as her and my grandmother. And then she immediately,
two days later, goes to St. Louis and joins a female basketball
team. The first time I met her, after I was born—she comes
to Itawamba and she’s with her boyfriend—they come on a
motorcycle. Nobody had ever seen or heard of a motorcycle there
before.” His mother did eventually marry, but travis’ stepdaddy
was something of a rolling stone, and in 1959 Rejetta took travis
and his sisters and moved to Akron, Ohio. “In Akron life was
very different,” he remembers. Even as a teenager, travis had a
queer flair that must have raised some eyebrows in 1950s Ohio.
“I wasn’t aware that I was any different from anyone else—and
I don’t think I am now,” he says, “But thinking back on it, I
had these great phases—I would wear only green for a whole year. I had a green suit, green shirt, green
shoes… if it wasn’t green, I would paint it green! I’ve always liked uniforms…”
He would soon put on an entirely different type of uniform, joining the navy in 1963.
“I joined the military because I wanted to see the world,” travis explains.“I was from Mississippi!”
He remained in the navy for six years,
serving on the USS America and earning a small pile of medals.
The America he returned to in 1969 was a country in flux—the rules had changed, its soul had been
pyschedelicized—and travis felt restless. “What do you do after you’ve spent six years in the military?
After Vietnam and all that, the rest of the world becomes absolutely useless and unnecessary.
The things that people worry about become so insignificant.”
He returned to Ohio to attend Akron University. “I’m working on my first undergraduate, and everything is just so dull.
I’m so bored. And I go to Cleveland, which is nearby, and—kids are having a good time and all that, but their values
are all somehow... irrelevant to my world. So while in Cleveland I join the Ram Dass ashram and start studying to become
a Kundalini Sikh. And of course everybody is freaking out because of the way I dress—I was much more outrageous then.
Much, much, much.
Everybody thought I was a tranny or a queer or something.
I could have been—but I hadn’t thought about it.
I was just doing whatever it is I did.
So I’m in this ashram. In the ashram you wear the same thing all the time; you’ve got the turban, you’ve got the
white cotton everything… except, I discovered this store that sold women’s shoes in my size!
I wasn’t trying to be a tranny or anything; I just liked the feel of them! So I wore my holy robes
with these… red leather, high-heeled, open-toed pumps!
So I got to the point where they’re wondering, what to do with Travis.”
“By that time I’d seen all these rock and roll people,” he continues. “Because in Cleveland—everybody came there.
And I was doing poetry performances”—with proto-punk greats like Pere Ubu—“and all this, and it was a lot of fun,
but I’m thinking… what else is there? So off I go. And I decided that I really did like Kundalini Yoga,
so I decided to go to the ashram in New Mexico and completely surrender my job, my life, my everything. And
I’m driving across the country, and I come to Chicago, and I’m driving down Lake Shore Drive and it was so beautiful;
and I just decided—I think I’ll stay here for the summer.”
After trying and failing to find secretarial work at mainstream black magazines like Ebony and Jet—he could type
a flawless 99 wpm but says that the more old-guard editorial staff didn’t approve of his personal style or comportment
(“They treated me like shit,” he hisses)
—travis was hired at the Northwestern University Law School, where he could dress as outrageously
as he pleased. “Some theater students came down and made a film called A Day in the Life of Travis—they filmed me,
actually for a whole week. In the bathtub, at the law school, the whole
nine yards. They were shocked that I went to the law school in a
wedding gown. I mean, 25 feet!”
travis ended up sticking around, and it was here, in
the late 70s, that he met Cathy Brooks. The daughter of one of
travis’ co-workers, and an early member of ONO, Cathy was a
Shakesperean actress who moonlighted selling pig-ears from a truck in Bronzeville. She had a wild streak to match,
and she began showing up at travis’ house in the middle of the night with a machete,
dragging him out of bed to go dancing at La Mere Vipere, a north side gay club which was home to
the city’s nascent punk scene.
Cathy soon introduced travis to her friend P. Michael Grego.
P. Michael recalls one of their early encounters—they’d gone to meet travis at the Park West for a performance by
John Waters’ legendary go-to actress, Divine:
“From across the park, in the distance, we saw this man… he was naked up to here, and he
had on panties and some military boots and this long, flowing lace or something that was flying in the wind.”
The three were soon running around town together, checking out bands and reading each other’s poetry.
“Starting a band was P. Michael’s idea,” travis says.


(P.Michael Grego)

P. Michael was a native south-sider who’d grown up in an old Hyde Park mansion with an extended
mixed-race family. He and his siblings were kept mostly at home, amid eccentric
relatives and their unusual habits; his grandmother and aunt, he says, practiced
a bizarre, quasi-Catholic religion and read fortunes, and his grandfather was a
Panamanian who played the Spanish guitar and loved American country music.
There was music throughout his early life. His mother played classical piano and
his father played Latin jazz on the saxophone.
In his early teens the family moved further south, and P. Michael was suddenly steeped in the world
of south-side soul—he’d see Jackie Wilson and Curtis Mayfield around the neighborhood,
and Calvin Carter, of the legendary Vee Jay Records, was a neighbor. He began putting together
a succession of R&B and rock bands, playing any gigs he could get—strip clubs, heavy metal bars—
his musical consciousness expanding ever-further as he was exposed to more
fringe elements like Iggy Pop and Funkadelic. By the time he hooked up with Cathy and travis, P. Michael
was ready to tackle something new; the infant punk scene hinted at wild new vistas
of creative possibility, and he wanted action.
“I had a vision. I said it was going to be a fusion of poetry and art, and visuals and sound,” he says.
“Punk theater—threatening punk theater.” For their part, travis says, he and Cathy just sort of hopped aboard
for the ride. “It was up to P. Michael to tell us what to do. We had no idea what this was about.”
travis did, however, coin the band’s name, an abbreviation of ONOMATOPOEIA.
“I wanted to be able to write things that didn’t necessarily mean anything to
anybody in the whole world, but the very sound of those phrases,
and the voicing of those phrases, impacted you.”
The nascent band picked up a guitar player almost by accident.
“I was roller-skating from my house to my office every day,” travis says, “And one day I ran into this kid—this wild,
insane German who’s running into everything, and I’m getting a drink, and he’s comes—boom!—running up and says,
I have nobody to skate with me! Will you skate with me? So we go skating—it turns out he has this art exhibition on display,
so we go to his art exhibition… and so Mark then becomes our guitarist. He’d never played guitar before in his life.”
Their first show was with
Al Jorgensen’s pre-Ministry group, Special Affect,
and a young Naked Raygun,
in October of 1980.
ONO would, by default, find a home of sorts in the city’s punk scene,
playing frequently with bands like End Result and the Effigies, but from the beginning the group’s outlandishness
relegated them to the margins.
ONO takes the stage;
creates a pyramid of 100 watt amps—plus, at the edge of the stage,
three altars of chains, hubcaps and metal pipes, to open our set with “Danger,” reads travis’ account of a “typical”
ONO performance. Was it my white wedding dress with train and veil or our amplified metal/”noise” that frightened away
the hecklers? Nor did their music bear much resemblance, aside from sheer volume, to the 1-2-3-4 whiplash of
hardcore punk groups like Naked Raygun.
ONO described themselves as an
Experimental Performance, NOISE, and
Industrial Performance
Poetry Band,
Exploring Gospel’s Darkest Conflicts, Tragedies and Premises
—a formula expansive enough to encompass liturgical chanting, freeform noise, negro spirituals, found poetry,
patriotic hymns, junkyard percussion and repurposed rock and roll,
but not one designed to win many fans among white, suburban punkers.
“We never really fit in with the punk thing,”
P. Michael readily admits.
For ONO, in fact, the music was often
an afterthought—queer spectacle was the thing.
“I have never liked music,” travis insists, with a provocative grin.
“I don’t care about music. I have no interest whatsoever in music. None.”
Not to say that ONO went unnoticed.
They were the subject of a 1983 Chicago Reader feature titled Chicago’s
Best Kept Secret, and released an LP on Thermidor Records called Machines That Kill People.
They meanwhile picked up a new guitarist, Ric Graham, and continued to put on a
tireless succession of increasingly extravagant performances at increasingly unusual venues—a
“psychedelic dance party” in upper-crust Wilmette; in an elevator at 850 N. Lake Shore Drive, at Navy Pier’s
Chicago International Art Expo, where travis, naked but for a jockstrap, was dragged through the
audience in a steel cage—though they never toured any further than Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Ever-interdisciplinary, ONO also collaborated constantly with filmmakers, painters and poets
from the city’s artistic fringes.
By the late 80s things began to slow down for ONO as a proper unit.
Neither travis nor P. Michael talk about the band having ever broken up;
it seems they more went into hibernation, as other paths and projects came to the fore.
travis returned to school, pursuing performance studies with Dr. Dwight Conquergood
while continuing to work full-time at the law school. He got involved with, and eventually became vice-president/treasurer
of American Veterans for Equal Rights, an advocacy group for LGBT vets.
And in 2001, after a visit to the Royal Museum for Central Africa, an ethnographic art museum in Brussels,
travis began painting. He paints daily, and his house is literally filled with paintings, floor to ceiling,
lushly primitive bursts of expressionist color and form; his art has been featured in numerous solo
and group exhibitions. He struggles, however, with the black art establishment, who find his work “too dark”;
his website, travistravis.com, proclaims he’s been rejected and despised by black galleries.
The band and its legacy had fallen into something of a state of neglect by 2007, when Plastic Crimewave featured them
in his Secret History of Chicago Music comic, which appears weekly in the Chicago Reader. travis and P. Michael were,
he says, “hard as hell” to track down, but once he did his interest convinced them to start playing again, initially as a
one-off for his Million Tongues Festival. They’d been palling around and sporadically collaborating with
keyboardist Rebecca Pavlatos and guitarist Jesse Thomas (of the End of the World band),


(Rebecca Pavlatos)

and before long ONO had become a fully-functioning four-piece,
Rebecca bringing a sort of deconstructed classical training to her noisy, surging organ playing and
Jesse filling things out with a supremely tasteful palette of spiky guitar abstractions.
I know what you’re probably thinking;
if you’re anything like me,
you’re deeply suspicious of rock and roll “reunions”,
wherein the wild, sweet innocence of youthful noisemaking is inevitably neutered and sanitized to the point of hideous
self-mockery—think the Sex Pistols as a bunch of flatulent sexagenarians, squeezing every last dollar from their safely
shrink-wrapped legacy.
The reemergence of ONO, I assure you, is nothing of the kind. Not only do they continue to perform with
absolutely undiminished intensity and inventiveness, but they seem to have found, in 2010, a far more diverse,
open-minded and artistically-inclined music community in Chicago than the rigid, four-on-the-floor hardcore
scene that they’d drifted away from in the mid-80s. Could the world be catching up?
It’s also clear that they’re enjoying every minute of it.
“When I’m on stage, I am having more fun with myself—it’s like masturbation, baby. I am having a good time,” says travis.
But his tone changes when I ask whether there aren’t more serious intentions at work as well.
“I am deadly serious in everything I do,” he says flatly. “Always.”
He’s very much attuned to the challenges and idiosyncrasies of not only playing in a dense,
performative noise band but being queer and black as well, and he’s not shy in voicing his frustrations with the shape
of this cultural context. “If we were truly interested in our culture, as an American culture, or a black culture,
you would see more black artists, more black galleries, more involvement,” he laments.
“Instead, you get it in a band called ONO.”


(travis)

He talks of recontextualizing black traditions, such as the gospel diva:
“You get a sense of what these gospel divas are like… if you look at the gospel divas and then look at an ONO show,
there is a relationship there. I was thinking of this last month—I was in my basement, thinking what am I going to do
with all these clothes? I should start cataloguing them. So I started counting them and putting them in order;
I have seventy long frocks. And I looked at them and I thought: Mahalia Jackson…”
“There’s also this concern that I personally have about the relationship
of the entertainment industry, especially the black entertainment industry, to
the queer community,” he continues.” The idea of there being a black, queer
male just terrifies people. And when I come out in a gown, people assume a lot
about me that is not true. I wish it were sometimes! But I’m not going to deny it—I would never deny it.
Simply because—it’s important to me that queer culture be represented in who I am,
because I have never made a distinction between queer culture and straight culture. Even though it’s been
beaten into me ever since I got to the north—and it was worse in the south! Because there, it didn’t exist.
That’s not possible—there’s no such thing as sodomy.
You would never say that word in decent company.
And so, you have this image onstage of a black male who—
I have no compunctions about wearing… I love a good frock. And for me—I’m playing!
I’m having a good time!
At age 64, anybody who says I can’t have a good time can kiss my ass!”
“I’m not going to get in people’s faces and say here’s what we are and here’s what we are not,”
he says, reflecting on the sometimes-uncomprehending crowds who have borne
witness to ONO’s feral flights of fancy over the years.
“If I can get into their world by being their gimmick now, maybe I can
influence their children later.”

21st Century ONO

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11MAY10
ONO @ CHICAGO  MUSEUM  OF  CONTEMPORARY  ART
^ ^ ^
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Live Review:
ONO at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Text Mr. Nitetrotter  - May 12, 2010

Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch Chicago 80's noise punk legends ONO at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  
If you haven't heard of them they were played with bands like Naked Raygun back in the 80s to mixed results,
they were also labelmates of the Birthday Party and Flipper.
You can buy their original LP Machines That Kill People for approximately 300 dollars on Ebay.

This was my third time catching ONO live.
The other two times were in completely different settings of diy punk shows with the average crowd.
This on the other hand was in the fancy cafe of the Museum right off of the Magnificent Mile.  
I walked in a little late following the dark noise to see ONO frontman in a white gown and headdress
performing a unique dance with a hundred yuppies paying complete attention.

He freely roamed the room and even went outside the windows
via a few loops around the revolving door to change dresses.
He looked these people in the eye and was dead serious.

The crowd was all sipping overpriced drinks
as if they just got off their jobs in the loop
stopping by at the museum for free Tuesdays. 

The show was part of a series of concerts
with art displayed by Plastic Crime(Steve Krakow)
who is the man behind the
Secret History of Chicago Music
comic strip series in the Chicago Reader
among other amazing pyschedelic activities.
He did well by picking out ONO to play this.

Each time I have seen ONO it has been totally different but always satisfying.
This was the darkest and most fucked up I have witnessed them.
It was also the most heavy, it sounded great in that room.
The music backing up Travis' performance art is reminiscent of
Throbbing Gristle or something like that with their own flavor.
You can tell there is a definite Chicago R&B influence
and I can't get over the
African Spiritual style of singing Travis does in the songs.
He is 62 and still killing it!
He is my favorite cross dressing front man EVER!
If you have a chance to see them make sure you do it.
They are certainly one of the Chicago's best kept secrets. 
Posted by NITETROTTER666 at 6:05 PM

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08MAY10 - OPENING
STEVE  KRAKOW
(The Secret History of Chicago Music)

@

MCA CHICAGO

Steve KrakowMay 8-30, 2010

Steve Krakow, The Secret History of Chicago Music (Ono), 2008. Courtesy of the artist

UBS 12 x 12 Artist Talk: Steve Krakow

Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave,
is an artist, musician, and curator widely known for his info strip, The Secret History of Chicago Music.
Comprising approximately 100 8-by-11-inch drawings that incorporate
extensive research by the artist,
The Secret History of Chicago Music has developed into an important study of the
obscure blues, jazz, rock, funk, soul, folk, R&B, and punk musicians from Chicago's rich and diverse musical history.
As Krakow states, the series highlights
"pivotal Chicago musicians that somehow have not gotten their just dues."

Krakow hand draws and writes each installment of the strip
in a style that references such iconic comic artists as Robert Crumb,
while the series itself continues the tradition of
documenting and disseminating America's musical heritage,
as pioneered by Folkways Records and Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.
The info strip is published every two weeks in the Chicago Reader
and is included in a musical segment/show aired every second Sunday on the Nick Digilio show on WGN 720.

For his UBS 12 x 12 exhibition,
Krakow presents a selection of The Secret History of Chicago Music strip, dating from 2005 to the present.
The exhibition also includes a series of Tuesday night performances by musicians
who have been featured in The Secret History of Chicago Music.
The performance series takes place in the UBS 12 x 12 Gallery.

In addition to The Secret History of Chicago Music,
Krakow's Galactic Zoo Dossier, a hand-drawn "psychedelic magazine"
is published by the Chicago-based label Drag City,
and his illustrations have been commissioned for
numerous magazines, album covers, comic books, and promotional posters.
Krakow is also a member of the psychedelic rock band Plastic Crimewave Sound,
and curates the Million Tongues music festival at the Empty Bottle in Chicago.

. . .

Performance Schedule
ONO:
Tuesday, May 11, 7 pm
ONO have been shaking up Chicago audiences since the early 80s
with their curious mix of art theatre, gospel, electronics, and anything else they choose.
Produced by Al Jourgensen of Ministry and label mates to legendary acts like
Flipper and the Birthday Party, they also polarized crowds opening for punk acts like Naked Raygun.
The electric front man known only as Travis and the musical genius P. Michael, continue to impress.

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06MAY10
Dear ONO FANS:
The following article is an excerpt. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
It contains significant Links, including a VIDEO Link to
ONO @ the 666 Show - Chicago - 1984 ).

Thank You Jake Austen

The A.V. Club *Chicago*

Tutu And The Pirates and four other Chicago punk-rock asterisks
by Jacob Austen May 6, 2010
Two of Chicago’s earliest and oddest punk bands reunite Saturday at the Empty Bottle
to celebrate the release of their retrospective albums:
Tutu And The Pirates’ Sub-Urban Insult Rock For The Anti/Lectual and DA’s !.
Their reappearance is a reminder that while Chicago-punk bigshots like
Naked Raygun, The Effigies, and Big Black tended to be aggressive, literate bands,
the city's also had its share of weird and crude punk acts, too.
Whether it was Jim Skafish’s massive nose,
Algebra Suicide’s poetry, or Toothpaste’s cereal-based comedy,
a number of bands had conventions that were irregular even for a punk scene,
assuring they’d remain asterisks in Chicago rock lore.
Before the Tutu And The Pirates/DA show,
The A.V. Club inspected five bizarre acts from Chicago's punk yesteryear and pinpointed
what went wrong.
. . .
ONO (1980-∞)
What was wrong:
This noise/experimental/performance art project was fronted by Travis Dobbs (a.k.a. "Travis"),
a majestic, gay Vietnam vet and sound-sculptor.
ONO combined drones, gospel, theatricality, blackface, Dynasty, and cross-dressing
in ways that drove Naked Raygun fans crazy.
What happened:
Travis became a fixture in Chicago’s arts scene.
In part inspired by interest from Chicago’s psychedelic overlord
Plastic Crimewave,
ONO has returned to Chicago stages and plays a show at the
Museum of Contemporary Art on May 11.
Whether aging '80s scenesters can survive DA, Tutu, and ONO in one weekend remains to be seen.

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21APR10
travis interviewed by Clare Fentress:

The Chicago Weekly

travis travis (uncapitalized, no last name) has been a fixture of the South Side arts scene
since he moved to the area ten years ago.
A Mississippi native of black and Native American heritage, he is a visual artist,
the front man of cult noise-rock group ONO, and a computer technician
at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall.
Chicago Weekly:
Do you see any artists or galleries on the South Side that you either admire
or you think have been important forces in shaping an arts community in the area?
travis:
Oh yes. The reality, though, is that most of them are white.
There’s a woman, Rebecca Zorach, here at the University of Chicago. The woman is God.
She goes places on the South Side that black folks won’t go,
and is instrumental in looking at art, not only from an “outside” perspective,
but also as an insider. She has an appreciation for the reality that all art is political.
And that I have deep respect for.
“Art for art’s sake” is not now, nor has it ever been, a value in the black community.
But we are at a great, great point in history.
We can ask, what does it mean to have black art? To be a black artist?
To look at black art and to have a sense of what it means?
How do you read a black work if you are not black?
Rebecca could probably answer that better than most black curators could.
I’m not suggesting that you have to be black by any means, but there’s a black sensibility that,
as Americans, we easily overlook or have no real reason to look for. But it is there.
Another part of that is that there are old, old, black people who are dying rapidly, but who have a lot to say.
Once I actually did art on my lawn, on the street in front of my house.
And these old black women just sat down in the street with me,
and we were creating work out of soil, and paint, mixing soil with paint and stones.
And these women had things to say. I go to the black cemeteries and I talk to the people who are black gravediggers,
and these people have stories, they have unimaginable tales about their relationships to their children;
their values are very different. Well, those things also eventually, or should, fall into art.
Writing is a part of that, and storytelling is part of art.
CW:
I’d be interested to hear what you think about Theaster Gates,
who is doing all this work that he posits as being very specific to the black community,
but at the same time is being embraced by basically a white museum audience.
t:
Theaster Gates is wonderful. He and I put on a show at the South Side Community Arts Center last year.
And last summer—thanks to Rebecca Zorach, who brought us together, by the way—I went to his house
and helped build teepees. Teepees! And some people got so excited, they had the police take them down
because “homeless people might move in.” Imagine that! We might create an art that might be useful!
And it was Theaster Gates who brought that to bear. I love the man’s work.
CW:
You talk about creating art that you think has value and that you find important.
Do you make those valuations as a person, as a black man,
as an artist working in a community—where does that value come from?
t:
Someday I’m going to be old and I’m going to either have to die
or enjoy what I’m doing.
I think that old people should never be bored.
I often tell my friends, “I am too old to be bored.”
And that to me has everything to do with my approach to art.
It has to be something that is of value to me that makes me want to do it continuously.
That’s my response. I put on my art shows, in which I put on my art.
And there are people who are willing to indulge that and play with me.
(Clare Fentress)

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17APR10

ONO @ The MOPERY
VIDEO from Anna Gregoline   &  SAOKOPUNK

ONO "The Model Bride"
ONO "Johnny Angel" Surveilled

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09MAR10

ONO Reviews, via Coach House Sounds
Thank You Matt, Doug and Neal

http://reviewsic.com/2010/03/04/talk-shop-with-coach-house-sounds-matt-baron/

T.S: Thus far into the project, what is the most memorable session that you’ve recorded?
M.B: I’d have to say our session with Ono, who are an experimental art rock band
formed  in the late 70’s.   We also invited Joe Carducci, formerly of SST Records
and now a writer/filmmaker, and having him there, just sort of the grandfather
of this whole indie-rock, DIY thing, and having him in the basement with Ono,
who’s unlike any other band I’ve ever heard,
was just an incredible experience.
Their keyboardist brought these homemade Grecian desserts from a wedding
she had been at the night before and that was really cool.
It was overall just a really good day,
that band has such a great personality; both as individuals and as a band.

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http://www.youmethemeverybody.com/

ONO “I Am An Elephant”
February 4th, 2010
From their Coach House Sounds session. You, Me, Them, Everybody Chicago Music Podcast.

Download this episode

Play this episode in a new window

= = = = = = =

http://chicago.thedelimagazine.com/node/906

Concert Review: Coach House Sounds Night @ The Whistler



" It happens all the time, right?   
You walk into your local bar and pounding drums, swirling organs, and measured guitar.
  You turn to look at the stage there you see a man in a peach dress wearing a sort of headdress
made out of flowers and banging on sheet metal.   
Well, it only happened if you had walked in during a performance by the Chicago legends ONO
like I did last night at The Whistler.   
ONO has been perfecting their wild performance art since 1980,
and completely wowed the crowd.   
Lead singer Travis merged the presence of Saul Williams, the darkness of Mike Patton,
and the fashion of Courtney Love.   
His voice is a frightening crooner that often breaks to the darker side of things.
Following ONO was the psychedelic furry or Moonrises.   
This band was a sonic explosion and they played with passion and plenty of feedback.   
They combine elements of popular acts like Wolfmother or The Black Keys,
but adds a fierce darkness to their sound.
The night was incredible, but I had to leave before the
gentler Lesser Birds of Paradise took the Stage.
Coach House Sounds had done it again, combined inventive music with
live literary reading and created an atmosphere charged with creativity.   
You can catch ONO and witness the madness in person on
Feb 26th @ The Woodlawn Collaborative with Suckling Pigs and Anemrostone."

Published on February 17, 2010 -

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10FEB10

Coach House Sounds Presents ONO

ONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO
"...ONO have the noise-gospel musical genre entirely to themselves." ===Joe Carducci
ONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO

Hello, Thanks to Doug & Neal, we have two new sessions posted on Coach House Sounds today.
And thanks to Joe Carducci,
who posted a photo that he shot and some information on ONO
and their session @ Coach House Sounds on 11/22/09.

See all this on his blog
The New Vulgate.

And thanks to Plastic Crimewave, who performs in Moonrises, for introducing us to ONO in the first place...
We're thrilled to be posting the Moonrises & ONO sessions
in conjunction with our upcoming event at the Whistler...

Tuesday 2/16
7pm (EARLY SHOW) @ The Whistler
Lesser Birds of Paradise
Moonrises
ONO

with live readings by Brian Costello & Jason Behrends
2421 N Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago,           no cover...
------------------- MATT BARON COACH HOUSE SOUNDS

www.travistravis.com                         http://www.myspace.com/onopmichaelono
ONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO
NONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONON
ONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO

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17JAN10

ONO Article by ARVO ZYLO
"IF YOU CAME FOR MUSIC, LEAVE NOW!"

http://musiquemachine.com/articles/articles_template.php?id=159

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THU.,  26NOV09 = Happy THANKSGiving  2009

ONO Podcast - ALREALON UK

>> Series 1 Episode 11 (November 09)
                        Industrial/Avant-Gospel Music from ONO

http://blogs.myspace.com/alrealon

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ONO @ VIADUCT THEATRE
05SEP09 - Curated by John Brearley
Camera by  Anna Gregoline
Live Projections by  Clint Mosling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc1DFyLc_lY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxpfzIhSO7Y

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travis @ PrideParade2009
Wearing running gear deemed too shameless
to carry the American Flag for AVER/Chicago in the Chicago PrideParade
(Photos by E. Zasadil)

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Soul Train Reunion

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ONO Interviewed by Roctober Magazine 
+ 
ONO LPs for DOWNLOAD

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REVIEW of ONO @ ENEMY show:       http://bloodlust.blogspot.com/
"Ono was up next and what a show they put on! Early industrial meets minimal synth
  meets almost surfed-out coldwave guitars meets true Chicago outsider weirdness.
         Travis remains the ultimate frontman, not that there was any doubt in that department.
      Expanded to a four-piece, sans Ric Graham, but with a new guitarist [Jesse Thomas]
    and a new keyboardist [Rebecca Pavlatos], the band has a fuller sound than I recall
           from the 1980s.   And they rocked the room... heads were bobbing, people were smiling.
Excellent! I am looking forward to more. Someday, "Ennui" will be mine... "              

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ONO@ENEMY

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ONO@DustySpringfieldTribute

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ONO@TheORPHANAGE

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travisOpensForFeedbacula

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TEN  (10)  YouTube Viedos From ONO Fans

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MUCH MORE from Feedbacula = Search ONO

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