Read the first part of Kris Needs’ Fifty Outsiders, a departure point for your own investigation into outsider artists.
1. SUN RA
Claiming to come from Saturn, Sun Ra was an outsider all his life, whether experiencing abhorrent racism growing up in Alabama to fearlessly reconstructing jazz, pioneering the modern independent label releasing (literally) countless albums on his El Saturn imprint. Ra left this planet in 1993 but is increasingly hailed as one of the last century‘s greatest musicians and composers.
2. MOONDOG
Through the 1950s and ’60s, blind New York street legend
Louis Thomas Hardin, AKA Moondog, ’The Viking of Sixth Avenue’, stood imperiously at his midtown spot in his self-made finery, topped by a horned helmet. A towering example of outsider rising above their handicap.
3. JOHN FAHEY
Although revered as steel-string acoustic guitar pioneer, Fahey was a punk outsider who stoked the ’60s blues revival while despising folkies, magnetised hippies but hated them and contemptuously lurched into ear-bleeding musique concrete when hailed as New Age pioneer. His chaotic life was dogged by woman trouble, alcoholism, illness, poverty and precarious mental state.
4. JOHN CAGE
Cage appeared in late-1940s New York with his mathematically-approached chance music which influenced the likes of Zappa, Eno, Aphex Twin and Stereolab. The NYC experimental school also included La Monte Young’s Theatre Of Eternal Music, which galvanised the young John Cale.
5. GENE VINCENT
Often overshadowed by Elvis and fellow foot-shooting wild-man Jerry Lee Lewis, but, ultimately, Vincent was his own worst enemy. His Blue Caps were the baddest boys in rock ‘n’ roll, burning down motels, wrecking cars, often ending up incarcerated; their primal rock ‘n’ roll too greasy for conservative America. By 1971, he’d drank himself to death.
6. ANDY WARHOL
Warhol didn’t look like he’d fit into New York’s hip arty set when he staged his first exhibitions in the early-Sixties, courting the ordinary then shocking as subject matter for inspiration, changing the course of art, while surrounded by his circus of freaks and superstars.
7. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
By the time the Summer of Love was in full bloom, the Velvet Underground’s flowers of evil were spitting daggers from New York’s subterranean underbelly, aided by Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, but with their own manifesto of heroin and sado-masochism over ear-bleeding rock ‘n’ roll primitivism.
8. JOHN PEEL
Radio One’s Peel resolutely played the music he loved, often heard nowhere else, giving several generations a soundtrack for the rest of the rest of their lives (the only DJ airing many on this list). The greatest champion of the underdog this country has ever produced.
9. CAPTAIN BEEFHEART
Don Van Vliet is one of the few to actually merit the genius tag, accelerating beyond the psychedelic blueprints of the ’60s, mating Delta blues, avant-jazz, field hollers, bizarre skits and complex musical dogfights.
10. SYD BARRETT
Starting 1967 as Pink Floyd’s prodigiously-talented psychedelic pin-up, ending it falling into a lysergic black hole he would never crawl out of, Syd’s solo endeavours took the singer-songwriter genre to outer limits of raw mental turbulence.
