Larry Todd & Me

I was visiting the Air Pirates, Dan O’Neil & his band of crazy kids he’d gotten from Seattle; Gary Halgren, Bobby London, Shary Flenniken & Ted Richards, at their new location, a large warehouse/industrial type building south of Market Street, which was an industrial neighborhood in San Francisco at that time. It was owned by American Zoetrope, Coppola’s production company. All the cupboards & drawers in the large kitchen were stuffed with costumes from THX 1138, those androgynous white outfits that the masses wore in that. I was brought in to meet the newcomer there. From the other side of a stainless steel table, a head popped up from where he had been looking through the costumes & said, “I’m Larry Todd, I take drugs for a living!” Drugs are about altered perception; art is about altered perception. Larry Todd was into altering perception. He was unapologetic & unrepentant about his drug use. He mostly kept it under control.

He claimed to go by “Doc”, but when I addressed him as such, he never responded. We called him Todd, because, well… too many Larrys, you know.

When we were living in a cul-de-sac in Rincon Valley in Santa Rosa, in the heart of the Northern California Wine Country, Todd would often stop there on his runs between San Francisco & Willits for days at a time, sometimes he would help me draw some Cherry comics. He helped me paint a mural in the windowless studio we built in the suburban garage, he helped with our model city we had in the living room. He was part of the family.

I had been working with Greg Duncan for 10 years or so doing signage for amusement parks & ride fronts for carnivals. I met Greg through Ron Turner of Last Gasp. Greg would assemble teams of three or four persons & send them to shows’ winter quarters, or midway lots at fairs, to paint mostly what they called “back-end pieces”; funhouses, mirror mazes, & dark rides that were usually clustered around the end of the midway. One day Sharon said to me, “You should take Todd to go see Greg. He could paint rides.” Todd’s ears pricked up. So I did that & next thing you know, he & I are painting a funhouse. I remember we did dinosaurs on it. Todd took right to it. We painted lots of rides in lots of places over many years. These were big things, built on 40 foot trailers with 20 foot flaps that opened up on either side, so there’s 80 feet of sheet metal 15 feet high that’s parked out in the sun & the wind & the rain in the middle of nowhere, or in a really shitty part of town, that we had to apply this solvent based enamel, One-Shot sign paints, to with 4 inch rollers & 1 & 2 inch squirrel hair brushes, cleaning them out with highly toxic lacquer thinner, until they banned that shit in California. It was death-defying art. It was painting really big pictures as fast as possible, it didn’t have to be good art, it just had to be attractive, they mostly weren’t actually rides, they were attractions. For the masses. Ron Henon, owner of some off-beat attractions, said, “The audience is your average drunk teenager”. So it was Folk Art; we were folk artists, you know, like Joan Baez is a folk singer. Todd loved it, we could be pretty much as silly as we wanted to. Todd drove Greg nuts with his futzing around experimenting with different techniques, taking longer than was budgeted, but we were still way faster than “real” artists would have been.

It ended up being a semi-regular gig going to Owen Trailers in Jurupa Valley, just across the river from Riverside, where they built the things from the ground up, welding together frames of one inch square steel tubing & pop-riveting sheet aluminum to them & hinging them so they unfolded like a pop-up book using hydraulics, so they’re still working on it, wiring up lights, running hydraulic lines, while I & Todd & a couple of other guys are going up & down, back & forth on scissor lifts painting on it. This meant we got to, had to, paint the same things over & over again. The Mardis Gras mirror maze was popular, we must have done a hundred of them. “One of them has been spotted in low Earth orbit” Todd said. They were supposed to look the same every time, but of course Todd & I changed it up a little each time. Then there were the Wacky Shacks, the top-of-the-line funhouse with all the bells & whistles, went for around a quarter of a million, they were huge, we did dozens of them. Dark rides were less frequent, & they were different each time. I was never really happy with the way any of the fronts came out, being a cranky old perfectionist, but it was an accomplishment after a week or more of hard work. They were big shiny things. The crews that ran the rides were proud of them, the crew at the trailer factory treated us with awe & respect, even when Todd managed to spill gallons of paint on himself from the overhead scaffolding. We were heroes, with awesome powers.

Eventually the whole carnival show thing, excuse me, I mean the outdoor amusement industry, slowed way down, I finally quit, having become too old, feeble & irritable to continue; Todd kept going for I don’t know how long until Owen Trailers folded after 3 generations of owners.

The paint jobs on these things would last up to ten years of being folded up, hauled down thousands of miles of highway & popped up at hundreds of shopping mall parking lots near you, after which they were painted over, or sometimes the front would be reskinned & the old panels would be pulled off & thrown onto a pile of scrap metal. There are no surviving pieces being preserved & displayed, this was folk art, it lived & died out in the World.