MUSIC SOUND CHECK
f e at u r e
Frenetic fortitude Consummate artist, compelling storyteller and generous spirit Tyson Meade is this year’s recipient of Gazette Music Awards’ Lifetime Achievement honor. By Christine Eddington
Tyson Meade is not a tortured, taciturn artist. He’s the antithesis, a charming, smiling, happily creative soul. On this particular day, he blazes into the coffee shop a few minutes late, a flurry of apologies. He’s concerned about being an inconvenience, but he never is. He’s gracious and courteous and an engaging conversationalist.
Prolific creator
WIN 4 T I C K E T S TO
BRETT ELDREDGE FRIDAY,
APR. 29 | 2016 FIRELAKE
ARENA
ENTER TO WIN OKGAZETTE.COM/GWW GAZETTE’S WEEKLY WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED EACH WEEK IN THE TABLE OF CONTENTS PRINTED WINNERS HAVE 7 DAYS TO CLAIM TICKETS
MUST GIVE EMAIL, FULL NAME & PHONE NUMBER. 44
a p r i l 6 , 2 0 1 6 | O kg a z e t t e . c o m
Wearing an Andy Warhol T-shirt under a blazer with jeans and driving moccasins, he could almost pass for a hipster dad headed to his middle school carpool in a snappy little silver BMW. But those moccasins are the giveaway. They are covered with bright paint spatters, evidence of the longtime musician’s most recent avocation. “When I paint, I’m inspired by Jackson Pollock, but my style is much more aggressive. I run at the canvas, throwing paint. I injure myself,” he said as he rolled up a pant leg and showed a fresh welt. “It’s kind of like primal scream therapy with paint.” These days, Meade is a prolific visual artist, and commissions roll in faster than he can produce paintings to fill them. His management team is in preliminary discussions about a potential art show at Six01 Studio, a Los Angeles think tank/ art gallery owned by a group of his admirers (who also happen to be music and movie producers). “I like to paint large, like 8 feet by 9 feet,” he said. “[Painting is] new enough to me that I can’t manage the process like I can with writing songs, so it’s at once both frustrating and liberating. I start layering in one section and build and add until I know I’ve got it.” The Six01 Studio show is tentatively set for this fall, and if it happens, he hopes to feature 20 of his works. “I’ve got to start stopping taking commissions,” he said. “I keep saying this is my last one; no, this is my last one.”
Tyson Meade relaxes in his Oklahoma City home. | Photo Garett Fisbeck
Full circle
The other thing about Meade is that he is widely considered a godfather of alternative rock. His bands Defenestration and, later, Chainsaw Kittens were among the first to create a compelling, hybridized sound that borrowed from everything that came before it. As a musician, Meade influenced a generation of acts including The Flaming Lips, The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan was a Kittens fan, and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was shaped by Defenestration. For all of these reasons and more, Meade was recently told that he will receive this year’s Gazette Music Awards Lifetime Achievement award. In his typical, charming, self-effacing fashion, he expressed both humility and humor. “I’m just really happy to get an award,” he said. “I was so excited [to hear I won something] that I didn’t even ask specifically what it was for or why I was getting it. I just thought, ‘Wow! That’s great!’ and said yes.” Born in Bartlesville, Meade is the youngest of five children. His parents didn’t plan to have more children, and Meade described his conception as a happy accident. And in a way, the surprising but cheery happenstance that surrounded his entry into the world also propelled him through several conPhotos provided
tinents and multiple careers. He eventually landed back in his home state and lives in a modest, paint-splattered bungalow in Oklahoma City. For a while, he worked for a major ad agency in New York City. He hated the job and quit. His most seemingly incongruous incarnation was as the headmaster of a boarding school in China, which he said he absolutely loved. He worked there three years before making a move to Saudi Arabia, where he taught English. A “slightly scary” situation there ultimately helped catapult him back home and back into music. He also started painting, which he said both exercises and exorcises his mind. “I’d thought — for whatever reason — that music wasn’t something I could do forever and that I’d have to do something else when I got too old to play music in a band,” Meade said. “When I was little, I wanted to work as a headmaster at a boarding school on the East Coast, and that’s what I did, only it was the real East Coast, as in China.” The other catalyst that propelled him (thankfully) back into music was one of his students in China who goes by the moniker Haffigy. “When I was headmaster of the school, I had a student who would come into my office and ask me lots of questions in English,” he said. “I thought he just wanted to practice his English, but one of the teachers told me that he was also an accomplished violin player. I asked him to play for me, so one day, he brought his violin and played. It was magical. “I had stopped doing art at that time. My heart knew I was just marking time until my head got past the idea that I had to give it up and have a career. I wrote a