Hello, friends, I just found out that Bingo Gazingo (born Murray Wachs) died on New Years Day. He was struck by a cab on his way to perform his weekly show at the Bowery Poetry Club about a month ago.

If you love Bingo as a person and an artist as much as I do, I encourage you to spread the word about his music to people and let them know how awesome he was. He’s got a myspace page where people can appreciate his music and comment:

http://www.myspace.com/bingogazingo

BINGO GAZINGO

The first time I saw Bingo was in a UK documentary about outsider artists in America. I watched his segment over and over again, and resolved to try and work with him. Within 20 minutes of emailing the show’s producer I was on the phone with Bingo and he had launched into spirited transatlantic renditions of his soon-to-be worldwide hits, “J-Lo” and “I Love You so Fucking Much I Can’t Shit”. His raging ambition to be famous worthy of a man a quarter of his age, his joyously demented inhibition, and what I suspected to be a hidden awareness that he was destined to remain an outsider – all of these endeared him to me immediately.

I got to know Bingo (he was always Bingo, never Murray) a little better over the next few years. He made a guest appearance on my album “The Unrest Cure”, with “2000 Years From Now” – an impassioned rant against all the people who had held him back in life (‘I knew I was better than all those jerks put together’). Although I was sorry never to be able to give him the news of a hit that he demanded in a subsequent series of letters written in his trademark capitalised spidery scrawl, I think he was pleased that on his song, at least he had Brian Eno singing backup.

Bingo visited my East London studio in 2006 while he was in town with My Robot Friend. He started performing the moment he got in the door, reciting poem after poem grabbed at random from plastic bags, coat pockets, and often from the murky recesses of his memory. He wanted to concentrate on what he saw as ‘the hits’ – mostly highly libellous celebrity-themed pieces. But I was intrigued by some of the other material that slipped through, that seemed to offer tantalising insights into his past, and that blurred the line between Bingo and Murray. Many of them were about his late wife. Frequently he would veer from tender to scatological in the space of a couplet, snapping out of beauty and back into a sneer.

On the car journey back across town that night, my friend spontaneously ordered me to stop the car outside The Foundry, a squat and a popular venue for art, poetry and music. She led Bingo inside and he walked straight onto the stage and took the assembled crowd of young trendies by storm. A large group of them followed him out to the car afterwards, huddling around him and asking who he was. The look of quiet satisfaction on his face was one I’ll never forget. I saw it a few more times, and that look remains one of my favourite memories of Bingo.

Later that year I filmed the video of “2000 Years” with Bingo in Central Park. After telling off the cameraman and I for taking a taxi instead of the subway from Queens, he zipped around the park on a sweltering summer’s day with abandon, dancing with a salsa band and defiling a playground with cries of ‘I want to put my iTube in your YouTube’. He was willing to do anything in the name of promotion, but after several hours even he got tired, and abruptly said ‘ok, that’s enough’, before shuffling off.

Nobody did more for Bingo than My Robot Friend, Howard. He gave Bingo an outlet, and brought his voice to many more people than would otherwise have heard it. Both Howard and I will keep endeavoring to bring all Bingo’s recorded work to the attention of the public, but no longer – in the words of the great man himself – to that of the ‘fucking record companies’.

In one of my favourite songs of Bingo’s entitled “What A Life Some Shit”, he makes some very fair observations: ‘Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God bust our balls? Even if you have the talent, you have to be gallant’. Bingo definitely had the talent, and despite his propensity for bellowing profane poetry at startled strangers in the street, I found him to be nothing less than a perfect gentleman. He had a fiery but generous spirit, and despite his uncompromising nature he didn’t take himself too seriously. The mainstream may not have taken him to its heart, but that’s because the machine that drives it doesn’t have one.

In “The More I Love You More”, he writes ‘You are the last page of my life, you are the last poem I’ll ever write. Here’s to you with love, and here’s to love with you’. Quoting that is the best memorial I can offer. I feel extremely lucky to have known him, I smile at the memory of such an inspiring person, and I miss him. Please spread the word!

You can follow responses to this entry with the RSS feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.