Photo by MJC / Courtesy of John Kruth
John Kruth
John Kruth
John Kruth says photographer Dick Blau called and said he was sending him a ticket for an airplane.
Blau wanted Kruth to participate in his Friday, Aug. 21 Rainforest event on Milwaukee’s Riverwalk.
For a number of years, Kruth was a ubiquitous presence on the local scene playing gigs and hosting a Friday morning radio show. Since vacating Milwaukee, John Kruth has spent his time in NYC, Pasadena, CA and Croatia with his wife, the painter Marilyn Cvitanic. When the pandemic hit, the multi-instrumentalist, journalist and biographer, who graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1979, used the lockdown to get back to visual arts.
Photo courtesy of John Kruth
'We Inspire Surrealism' by John Kruth
In addition to the project with Dick Blau, Kruth will also play a show at Linnemann’s on Saturday, reuniting his Atomic Croutons, a band that includes Mike Kashou (bass), Jasper Kashou (sax and flute), Steve Bear (percussion) and Peter Roller (guitar).
On Sunday at 2 p.m. Kruth will present poetry and readings of his music writing at Gallery 218 in the Third Ward with Jasper Kashou on sax and flute.
If Mike Kashou and Steve Bear’s names look familiar, those musicians recently played a Madison gig with their old Swamp Thing bandmates. For Kruth, the stars have aligned again. His third gig will be a collaboration in Madison with Bear, Kashou and Jonathan Zarov on Sunday at Gamma Ray Bar.
Kruth ≠ Slacker
Aside from visual arts, Kruth has published his poetry and written books on Roy Orbison, John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Townes Van Zandt.
Then there’s the dozen or more solo albums, compilation tracks and six other albums with groups TriBeCaStan and The Folklorkestra.
Additionally, he collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Ornette Coleman, Iron and Wine, Sam Shepard, Violent Femmes, John Prine, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Hal Willner, The Blues Project, King Missile, Meat Puppets, Elizabeth Swados, Jim Belushi, Steve Buscemi, Eric von Schmidt, Stan Ridgeway and The Monks of Doom. He has also appeared on recordings by James “Blood Ulmer,” Sex Mob, Lambchop, Die Kreuzen, Victor Krummenacher, Brian Ritchie and The Mercy Seat.
Rainforest
Photo via Dick Blau
Dick Blau
Dick Blau
Kruth’s music will accompany the Rainforest project. Dick Blau describes the show:
“For the last six years or so, I have been photographing the Milwaukee River from the Wisconsin Avenue Bridge, arresting its flow to consider the ways that sun, sky, clouds, wind and currents all interact at a particular instant. The pictures I have made are not representational, at least in any conventional sense. They look at what is there but that cannot normally be seen…except through the mind’s and the camera’s eye.
“I call my larger project The Same River Twice. Using subsets of the maybe thousand images I have—and continue to make—over the years since I began, I have made a number of individual pieces from these materials, often in collaboration with composers and musicians whose work I especially admire. Rainforest is a recent work and one of my most beloved.
