1 of 5
Photographs by Tony Favarula & Ashley Heifner
2 of 5
typewriter
3 of 5
typewriter
4 of 5
typewriter
5 of 5
typewriter
1882
Angels appear to Boston dentist John Ballou Newbrough with instructions to locate a new invention: the Remington No. 2 typewriter. Through automatic writing, Newbrough produces Oahspe, which includes “The Book of Thor” and “The Book of Sue.”
1906
Royal Typewriter enters the market.
1914
Novelist William Seward Burroughs is born in St. Louis.
1952
Burroughs composes his stream-of-consciousness novel Naked Lunch in Tangiers to purge himself of the “Ugly Spirit” he claims possessed him after the accidental shooting of his wife, Joan. Burroughs’
messy heap of notes is typed up by Jack Kerouac, onetime speed-typing champion of Boston.
1971
Timothy Jordan is born in Kirkwood, the birthplace of poet Marianne Moore. Her typewriter of choice: the IBM Selectric.
1974
Six-year-old Shawn Lapin appears on the cover of Newsweek after his family helps pioneer facilitated communication, a controversial practice wherein the arm of an autistic individual is steadied over an alphanumeric board (which, with its YES and NO and I DON’T KNOW running along the bottom, looks like a benevolent Ouija board) allowing them to “type” messages. Autistic people are not retarded, Shawn will say. Please tell everyone.
1983
William Burroughs moves to Lawrence, Kan.
1992
Timothy Jordan begins his third year of art school in Lawrence.
William Burroughs drives from Lawrence to St. Louis with six friends in tow, including Allen Ginsberg, to conduct a ritual to exorcise the Ugly Spirit. Accounts vary—some have the men placing live coals in their mouths; some swear that the ritual was conducted by a Sioux shaman, but others say it was a Navajo. In any case, all agree that “the operation was a success.”
1993
Jordan drives home from Lawrence to attend his grandfather’s funeral. He is in Kirkwood, doing laundry in his mom’s basement and thinking about death—and his impending college graduation: What the hell will he do with a fine-arts degree? Paint billboards? Art-direct toothpaste commercials?
He looks up to see a shaft of light, sparkling with dust motes, illuminating his mom’s old college typewriter. It is a Royal Quiet Deluxe, bright turquoise. Dropping the laundry, Jordan goes into “a kind of trance,” and words flash through his head:
This is the key.
When my grandfather was crossing over to the spirit world, that’s what he gave me: He told me to play the typewriter. At that moment, staring at my mom’s old college typewriter, freaking out, I saw my life flash before my eyes. I ended up taking that typewriter back to Lawrence the night I had the vision, the day after we buried him.
Two weeks prior, Jordan had signed up for an open mic at the Hockenbury Tavern in Lawrence with no idea what he’d do—but now he has a purpose, a plan. He arrives with a typewriter and an old fan, which drones in the background as he weeps and percussively types his grandfather’s nickname, “Fo Fo,” over and over again.
“I had a dream last night that somebody played the typewriter better than I did,” Jordan says, rubbing a slightly scruffy chin, “and I was worried.”
The man known as “Typewriter Tim,” whom the St. Louis Post-Dispatch once described as a sort of industrial shaman with the power to “transform the typewriter into a musical instrument of tribal profundity,” has been back in St. Louis for a month and some change. His hair is still long but shaved underneath, pulled up in a ponytail. It’s a more urbane look than the one he sported in the early ’90s with the Typewriter Band, when he wore the uncut locks of a flower child and sometimes performed wearing a porcelain codpiece shaped like a human brain. (It’s gone forever—fell off and shattered onstage during a “jazz-funk typewriter frenzy.”) Today he’s wearing black lobe plugs that look a little bit like typewriter keys without letters on them, a leather jacket, jeans, a black T-shirt. After five years spent marinating in the ozone and bad orgone of Los Angeles, where he dated an ex-porn star who became an ex-ex-porn star (and, consequently, his ex-girlfriend), he is glad to be back in St. Louis, recovering.
“I went out there to make music and write some movies and pursue my dreams as an entertainer,” he says, “but I was working 60 or 80 hours a week just to be there.” Unlike teenage dreamy hopefuls who hop Greyhounds in Iowa and end up as jittery- eyed hustlers on the Strip, Jordan had a pretty good shot at making it; he even had a Lollapalooza appearance to his credit. The St. Louis Night Times called him “a curious, charismatic mutation of Anthony Kiedis and Jim Morrison,” whose use of typewriter percussion is “neither a crutch nor a gimmick”; the Post described the Typewriter Band as a combination of Laurie Anderson, George Clinton and Stomp. The University Daily Kansan simply insisted: “There is no typical Typewriter Tim performance.” That Lollapalooza appearance in 1996, for instance: Swaddled in an American flag, Jordan crawled around for hours with typewriters chained to his ankles, then climbed onstage and performed a fiery recitation of Where the Wild Things Are.
But in Los Angeles, city of wagons hitched to stars, city of schadenfreude and “we’ll call you”—well, talent is a dead currency without invites to the right parties, and then it’s still a matter of luck whether or not the glitter happens to rub off on you.
“Someone once told me that there are more vampires in L.A. than anywhere else in the world,” Jordan mutters, shaking his head. “Totally, totally true. Terrible place. Thank God for Steve Ewing.”
Ewing, as local music fans may remember, fronted the Urge (otherwise know as the ska band that almost took over the world). The two bumped into each other (“on a fluke”) on the Santa Monica beach; Tim recognized one of Steve’s tattoos.
“I was always an Urge fan,” Jordan says. “Me and Steve were friends, back in the day.”
“He’s the same Tim I knew in St. Louis, the same performer,” Ewing says. “Some people have a guitar ... he has a typewriter.”
“I love typewriters. I blowtorch them in half and weld them back together as sculpture. I pour glass through them. I couldn’t tell you why. I just love them so much.”
Though the Police’s Stewart Copeland played the typewriter before Jordan did, no other person has pushed its percussive capabilities to the same limits he does. He uses both the bell and the roller, even crumpling the paper as part of his repertoire of sounds. Though his influences include Copeland, Jim Morrison, rap, hip-hop and Native American shaman chanting, the result is entirely Tim Jordan.
“A lot of it came from a long time ago,” he says. “I couldn’t afford a drum set.”
Jordan’s relationship to the home keys slowly alchemized during those 80-hour weeks in California. He worked for Jay Nolan Community Services, a supportive- living organization for people with autism, and communicated with his clients through “facilitated communication,” which involves the use of an alphanumeric keyboard. When you’re autistic, Jordan explains, you have a hard time controlling your body, which makes talking hard. Writing, too. But typing, with some arm-steadying, sometimes allows the words to get through.
“I wrote these lyrics about what it might be like to live with autism for my friend Shawn Lapin, who has autism,” Jordan says. “He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, so at that point I challenged him to write a song. He can’t talk, but he uses F.C. ... I made lyrics out of what he said. I took a lot of quotes from throughout his life, basically things he wanted to make sure people knew, and I made rhymes out of them. Steve wrote the music; I wrote the lyrics with Shawn; and then Steve sang on it. It’s about Shawn and his need to communicate and how important it is for him, and now me, for people to know that people with autism are not retarded. It’s just they can’t control their bodies.
“That song is called ‘Type With Me.’ The irony is that it’s the only track on the CD that doesn’t have typewriter on it.”
The universe is full; all things are members. Speech they have: bid them speak. The recorder of the words be thou. Such is Panic language, the first language. What saith the bird? the beast? the stars? the sun? All? It is their souls speaking. The soul hear thou, and repeat it.
—Oahspe
“I feel I’m being rewarded on a daily basis for coming back to St. Louis,” Jordan says. “I haven’t even been back six months and I’m meeting the bangers of this community—the artists, the people doing the cool stuff. I’ve got club owners getting in contact with me. I’ve never had that happen. Usually I have to hound ’em.”
Jordan’s first discipline is art—he draws typewriters in charcoal, assembles typewriter collages and builds sculptures made from typewriters—and the gallery owners are showing initiative, too. Baseline Gallery on Washington offered Jordan a show before his heels had cooled from L.A., and on a violently windy night in April, a sparse but steady stream of folks from the downtown art walk wander in and out of the gallery to listen to a sneak preview of Jordan’s upcoming CD, Stranger Than Fiction, check out his art, and drink free beer. (Jordan, who bartends at the Schlafly Tap Room—where he sometimes orbits the floor in a Chicago Bulls JORDAN jersey—charmed his employers into providing a keg.)
“The typewriter represents so many things to me, things that people in the audience would never get,” Jordan says. “It symbolizes my rebirth, taking an old machine and doing something different with it.”
Last week was intense, Jordan says: He passed his massage-therapy board examination, freaked out over the death of his car, borrowed a truck and transported all of his work to the gallery to hang it, including three enormous abstract canvases that he painted onstage while performing with the Typewriter Band.
“I love typewriters,” Jordan says. “I blowtorch them in half and weld them back together as sculpture. I pour glass through them. I couldn’t tell you why. I just love them so much.”
He admits that his passion has its cons: “Typewriters get heavy. That’s why performance art works for me. If I painted as much as I want to, I would need a warehouse to store it all. For performance art, I just need my bag of props and I can put out a good show. When I walk out of there, there’s nothing left over. But I’m an Aquarian ... I have to express myself.”
Between bumming over his car and hanging his show, Jordan has managed to produce three or four new pieces. The palette is milder than in his earlier paintings, which were electric with red, yellow and blue. Looking more closely, you can see the soft outlines of—no, not typewriters—rabbits.
I was directed to get a typewriter, which writes by keys, like a piano ... One morning I accidentally (seemed accidental to me) looked out of the window and beheld the line of light that rested on my hands extending heavenward like a telegraph wire towards the sky.
—John Ballou Newbrough
It’s a rainy May night, and Tim is carrying his equipment into The Royale: drum stand, Selectric typewriter, headphones, cords and mixer. Tonight he’s performing as MC Type, the DJ version of the Typewriter Band. When asked what happened to the blue Royal—his original instrument, which was signed by George Clinton and everything— Tim gets a wistful smile on his face. “That one hasn’t been around for a while,” he says. “It fell apart a long time ago.”
How did the art show go? OK, he says. There was too much beer left over. But he is cheery: This is his first back-home- in-St.-Louis performance. In February, he canceled a club date he’d booked in a rush of excitement, feeling that he was not in a spot to “knock people’s socks off.” The Hi- Pointe booked him in April as the opening act for St. Louis expat Kristeen Young, she who sang on David Bowie’s Heathen and whose shows at the Way Out (back in the ’90s, when she sported dresses made of Wonder Bread bags) are the stuff of legend. Then Young got a last-minute call from Morrissey’s people: Moz wanted her to open for him in Ireland.
If Jordan is disappointed about the cancellation, he does not show it, and tonight, when a punky young DJ muscles in and starts spinning before Jordan can set up, he shrugs and sits down at the bar, as Tao Te Ching as you please, sipping beer and talking about the screenplay he’s working on, a biopic about his friend Shawn Lapin.
“MC Type” goes on at midnight, just as people are getting their drunk on. With the typewriter mounted on the percussion stand and at the ready, he dons earphones and starts spinning records. But the young punk has forgotten to switch over the mixer properly, and the Selectric is not feeding into the PA; a fellow Tap Room bartender, who’s come to see Jordan play, hops over to see if he can jury-rig it but eventually shrugs and gives up. The problem will eventually be fixed, but before that happens, Jordan steps up to the typewriter anyway, like a true performer. Though Jordan’s a two-finger typist, his keystrokes are accurate and blindingly fast, and he may be the only typewriter player in the world who’s developed a profound sense of what drummers call swing—the ability to lengthen or shorten a beat to give it some life and bounce but still stay in time. One gets the sense that he could play “Flight of the Bumblebee” on the typewriter, even if it were arranged in cattywampus Dave Brubeck–style time signatures.
There are no coincidences and there are no accidents ... I believe that if you run into somebody in the street, it’s for a reason. Among primitive people they say if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.
—William S. Burroughs
Tim Jordan has almost 900 MySpace buddies. Many of them are eyelash- batting ladies, who profess a great love for him and his music. Guys like “Dirty King,” rather than being macho or jealous, give him the thumbs-up, too: “I’m completely blown away! Damn good job! I failed typewriting in High School!”
“I love making art in any way, shape or form,” Jordan says emphatically, “whether it’s typewriters, painting, bartending, anything. I don’t want to be greedy, but I would love to be successful enough to sit back and just create. The thing is, I can’t, with a clear conscience, just sit back and do whatever I want to do. Autism happens to be my thing, and that’s what everybody’s going to get from me, for the rest of their lives.” He’s created a not-for-profit subsidiary of his label, Your Type Records, called A.R.T.I.S.M. (Art Related Therapies Including Sound and Massage) for autistic musicians and painters. Though the cliché of autism—and this drives Jordan crazy—is the phonebook-memorizing, flash-math savant Kim Peek (a.k.a. “Rain Man”), the ability to see and think in patterns is what makes Matt Savage a brilliant jazz composer, Jonathan Lerman an exceptional artist; it’s what allowed Daniel Hammet to learn Icelandic in a week.
“They used to use people with autism as code-crackers,” Tim says. “The Army used to hire them because they could see any pattern.” When asked whether his training as a visual artist, and the corresponding ability to see patterns, helps him communicate with people with autism, Jordan says, eyes wide, “Definitely, definitely, definitely.”
So he’s hard at work on the screenplay, working his connections, trying to find a producer. Like Lapin, who felt trapped in his own body before he could speak through F.C., Jordan is frustrated that he can’t get his message out fast enough. Meanwhile, he has plenty of distractions: He can’t stop painting—or playing that Selectric. Steve Ewing (who’s thinking of “centralizing,” too), has added Typewriter Tim to the roster of his label, Substance and Sound. “We’re pretty much done with the CD,” Ewing says. “We’re just waiting for the right time to release it. We’re shooting for fall. It’s basically a rock record, but we remixed everything hip-hop dub style.”
Rock or dub, Jordan’s instrument will always be the typewriter. “It represents so many things to me,” Jordan says, “things that people in the audience would never get. It symbolizes my rebirth, taking an old machine and doing something different with it.”
As the disc title attests, Jordan’s life is stranger than fiction. He’s one of those lucky people who found his calling early. Not only that, but he also seems to be deluged with coincidences affirming that path, so many that it almost makes you wonder whether Fo Fo, tapping away at some crazy etheric keyboard somewhere, doesn’t have a hand in it.
