Locals Only

Scene Stealer

by John Ross

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After midnight, a crowd has formed deep in the red neon that gives Skully's Music Diner the vague sense of being transported from Europe, but Zachery Allan Starkey is gone.

Some near the bar have seen him tonight, they think, or maybe yesterday. He was dancing near the stage, maybe, or upstairs, or out back where people smoke.

Like Buckeye Donuts, the Blue Danube and Used Kids, Skully's is one of the places that Starkey always could be, one territory he's claimed with an unrivaled ability to seem everywhere at once.

I ask a few more people, and they kind of shrug, cocking their heads to think, but can't be certain. A good-looking record promoter tells me he was here earlier for a while. A girl standing nearby isn't sure who I mean until I describe what Starkey, on a nice Saturday evening like this, would be wearing.

She sighs knowingly when I tell her what he looks like (she's seen him a million times), but she can't be sure it was tonight.

Starkey should be here.

He should be dancing happily, his outlandish image reflected in the mirrors along the walls, or talking about Columbus to whoever will listen, or playing records in the DJ booth that stands like a sentinel above the main floor.

Starkey should be here.

I planned to compare him to Gil Mantera's Party Dream, the Youngstown duo who've begun to dance through a drunken, fatalistic mating ritual on stage. I've mapped out a scene to describe how the band's keyboardist will sing through a talk pedal wearing a leather vest and fake vampire fangs and somehow, impossibly, Zachery Allan Starkey will be even more out there.

But he's not here: People have seen him, but he's gone.

You've seen him, believe me, if you've ever been along High Street, where he started coming when he was in junior high and living in a poor neighborhood on the West Side.

In simplest terms, Starkey looks like Cure frontman Robert Smith forced to attend a lifetime of board meetings: a crown of long, frequently dyed hair standing on edge; a round, cheery face; and an assortment of dark business suits, artistically (some say comically) small.

It's a vibrant look, literally—the way, as a kid, you think you'd look if you stuck a fork into a light socket.

Likely it's this series of garish, avant-garde fashion statements that has forced him to remain one of city's most ubiquitous but mysterious figures. He's a person everyone has seen but few know beyond the ability to point him out in a crowd.

On Friday, Starkey will release his debut record, Solitaire, with a show at Skully's that will feature rap duo the Lab Rats and antagonistic noise trio the Unholy Two. Power-pop quartet Nuclear Children and DJ Dave Espionage, both somewhere in the middle of that twisted spectrum, also will play.

Attend the show, and you'll hear original dance music influenced irreparably by New Order, Public Image Ltd. and Depeche Mode.

New wave to the core, the record shows Starkey's love for both the music of yesteryear and an idyllic image that dance tunes done right can move people in many ways. It's also the local project closest to Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy: a full-length epic that was squeezed out, after three years of recording and three producers, by the city's most controversial figure not involved in politics.

And if you stay afterward and shake his hand, he'll smile widely, talk in a voice that raises pitch when excited and surprise you as one of nicest and most normal people you'll ever meet.

 

Neighborhood "Nerd"

 

The West Side neighborhood of Franklinton is a giant cup of earth that flooded so many times over the years people stopped caring. It sits along West Broad Street, between the Scioto River and the Hilltop, a part of town which, mostly by comparison to Franklinton, seems nice.

Starkey, who's now in my living room eating a turkey sandwich and some grapes, talks about the place—his hometown—with a reserved fondness. It's the way a poor kid who doesn't want pity describes his past; he doesn't use it as a merit badge, but there's a subtle pride in having made it out of a dingy little 'hood where even going to community college is an accomplishment.

They are blue-collar people, the Starkeys.

When Starkey was growing up, his mother was a secretary, his uncles worked at factories, and his dad took on freelance contract work, going to local businesses and enforcing fire codes. To earn a few extra bucks as a kid, Starkey would come with him and scrape away inches of grease caked around extinguisher nozzles at run-down Chinese restaurants.

He wasn't unhappy, even when his parents divorced when he was eight, but by middle school, he came to realize that such a place didn't hold much for a kid into the film scores of Danny Elfman and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

"There was no one interested in the same music or books or movies," he says. "I was a dweeb, a nerd. Everyone beat me up, so I hated myself. I had no friends."

Kids can be cruel. They can sniff out an eccentric peer who's best friends with his grandfather. They can encircle someone in a parking lot and kick in his teeth.

But then two things happened, and these things, Starkey will tell you, were the most important of his life: His movie buff grandfather gave him a copy of Citizen Kane, and a friend he met doing youth theater near Olde Towne East, Miles Curtiss, turned him on to the Sex Pistols.

The film, one of many challenging flicks his grandfather introduced to him early, was important to his development as a professional photographer who, as he likes to cite, has had over 58 gallery shows.

But it was the music—that snarling, angry sound of poor people struggling to matter—that made the most lasting impression.

"The fact that I didn't fit in, that I was from a blue-collar background, that I was smart but not into the same things as everyone else—all of sudden, that didn't matter," Starkey says of hearing the punk rock that led to his beloved '80s dance music. "When I first heard it, I was proud of who I was."

The whole process seems somehow impossibly romantic, but after hearing the music, Starkey wanted something more.

So he started coming to Campus and Downtown and Clintonville. He would walk or bike or take the bus to the places that offered the rock shows and coffee shops and record stores that offered him glimpses outside a world of people who work first, live second.

He met local music legend Ron House. He saw bands like the New Bomb Turks and the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments. He found a way to redefine himself.

Eventually, he made peace with those at Westland High School, and figured that the hard times were over once he decided to head to Ohio State, as the first in his family to attend a four-year college.

"I mean I was always nice to everyone, and once they got past the fact that I was a bit eccentric, they saw that I was just a nice guy," says Starkey about his senior year, during which he was elected class president. "It kind of fooled me because after that last year of high school, people were cool.

"I thought that's how people would be in college."

Naked Ambition

 

In 2002, after he had been in college for several years, Starkey hosted a solo show of his black-and-white photography at BLD Gallery, a rickety old art commune on the East Side.

No one would've cared much—BLD visitors are no stranger to conceptual art of the weirdest order—except that every shot he hung was a self-portrait.

And he was naked.

In most of the shots, his hair had been sculpted into a long, wild, electrified halo. Often, he posed erotically, lips puckered, making him look like an outcast gigolo from another realm. Kind of like Ziggy Stardust—except more gay.

No one gave a damn that it was a send-up of the rather vicious names people threw at him growing up, or a parody of pinup culture, or an analysis of gender specifics.

People saw noir shots of a naked kid. Over and over and over, some amateur artist with no cred and a weird look was bold enough to take off his clothes, set up a camera and display the results in a gallery.

Not many saw the show, but some still cite it—and similar ones that stand as cogs in Starkey's powerful self-promotion machine—as why they, if anyone asked seriously, just can't stand the kid.

A lot of people who don't know him—the many who actually think he's a 33-year-old homosexual from Germany—couldn't care less whether he's busy hanging band fliers, sending out regular MySpace.com bulletins or insisting righteously that people appreciate his work. (For the record, he's American, 24 years old, has a girlfriend and doesn't smoke, drink or do drugs.)

But others—many he's never met—have tried diligently to stifle him, incensed that he puts so much into putting himself out there.

"People say that I just want attention, but I dress like this because I want to dress like this. I wear my hair like this because I like to wear my hair like this," he says. "People don't get that I'm an actual person. I have an apartment. I go the grocery store. I go out to eat.

"I don't think I'm outrageous. I really don't."

When asked about his peculiar position within music and art scenes that accept people much more abrasive and outlandish, he often resorts to the assumed humility of a Calvin Klein ad: He's just trying to do his art, be himself and get by in this cruel, unforgiving world. And to some extent, he plays the part of the wrongly accused martyr that people so vehemently detest (one message-board poster once put his face atop a crucifix).

On the other hand, try to name another kid so hated just for being eccentric. Try to find another group of strangers on MySpace.com picking on someone they've never met. Try to find another local musician parodied on fliers by a Columbus band. Try to find a civilian in Columbus who has no fewer than five recognizable nicknames.

The hate mail, the slashed tires, the direct threats that occur when people discover his home address—they're nothing compared to the sustained citywide campaigns to parody Zach Starkey.

"I've heard all the names—Zachery Queerhair, Troll Doll, Walking Haircut, Human Cartoon," he says with a shrug. "When I see people with a different haircut, I don't go online to bitch about them."

 

Dylan of the Dance Floor

 

I knew him as Edward Campus-hands, and three years ago, that's how I referred to him exclusively.

Now we're in the studio taking his picture. He's an excellent model, of course, dressed to the nines, and I can remember seeing him back when I went to Ohio State.

His hair was longer then, formed into angular spikes, and for some reason (I always forget to ask) he wore a black armband. Wherever he went, he walked quickly, as if late for something very important.

Here, in this empty office we've transformed into a portrait gallery, he seems relaxed, more toned down, and he's itching to talk about his record and forget, even for a moment, the notoriety sitting atop ears he fears are too elfish and a head he thinks is too big.

Whether he admits it, Starkey thrives on his image and its ability to attract attention, but his bizarre persona, he knows, also threatens to crush him. Its ubiquity is something a lot of people never get past.

So he tries often to redirect the conversation to his music, the vintage electronic dance soundtrack one could imagine plays constantly when he walks.

Of all the statements that Starkey has made over the years, his debut record is about as bizarre as anything. To record anything but a guitar-and-drums album in this town is always a political act, and Solitaire is about as far from Columbus tradition as you can get. (My research has yet to yield a previous new wave record released in Franklin County.)

"Columbus is very rock. It has a great history of punk and rock," Starkey says. "That's cool, but that's not the music I want to make. I like dance music, so that's the kind of music I make."

The 12 tracks stand as an homage to the late '80s by a musician who one day would like to become, as he says in the goofy manner he adopts when comfortable, "the Bob Dylan of the dance floor." What it lacks in forward thinking it makes up for in sheer complexity: Nearly every song contains numerous drum lines, guitars and a crushing number of keyboards and synthesizers.

"A lot of bands go for a lo-fi thing, and that's cool," said Starkey, who programmed drum machines, layered keyboards and mastered the final mix. "I wanted [the record] to sound like some big, expensive studio in L.A., even though it was produced in someone's living room."

There's a big-city feel to much of it, though that's not what will surprise most listeners.

What will be somewhat shocking is that this collection of dance songs—delayed so long, surrounded by so much hype and hate—is pretty good.

"Who Zachery Allan Starkey is, that's part of my album," he says with a rare glint of gravity. "I have a lot more than my haircut. I have a great job. I have my photography. Now I have my record."

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April 26th, 2007

 

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