Stranger than Frank Zappa and weirder than Captain Beefheart, the deranged songs of Wild Man Fischer made him a cult figure at the outer fringes of late 1960s pop culture.
In an era of experimentation and breaking with convention, in which being an oddball was often considered enough to warrant a recording career, Fischer takes his place alongside the likes of Moondog and Tiny Tim in the pantheon of outsiders. Arguably, the most way out of them all, Fischer is often referred to as the “godfather of outsider music”.
Discovered by Zappa wandering around Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, offering to sing songs to passers-by for a dime, his 1968 debut album An Evening with Wild Man Fischer granted a strange and often disturbing glimpse into the world of a mentally ill street musician suffering from schizophrenia. Aptly enough, the album was released on Zappa’s own label, Bizarre, and even achieved a degree of radio exposure. John Peel, predictably enough, loved the record and played substantial chunks of it on Radio 1.
Further albums followed at sporadic intervals over the years and Fischer played a suitably strange role in the birth of the Rhino Records label when in 1975 he recorded the song Go to Rhino Records to promote his favourite Los Angeles record store. Demand for the single was so strong that it persuaded the store’s owners to start producing records as well as selling them. Fischer went on to record three albums for Rhino.
The extremity of his work has divided opinion over the years. To some he stands in the tradition of the noble savage, a naive genius offering a rare and invaluable insight into a different perception of “reality”. To others his shouty voice, lack of conventional melody, hooting and hollering and simple repetitive lyrics are nothing more than the unlistenable rantings of a madman. Yet others direct their criticism at those who chose to put someone with an obvious mental illness into a recording studio, accusing them of pandering to the worst aspects of human voyeurism.
Advertisement
Lawrence Wayne Fischer was born in 1944 in Los Angeles. From an early age he displayed what is today recognised as bipolar disorder. When in an “upswing” he was creative and strange songs poured out of him but there were also plenty of destructive ”downswings”. At 16 he was institutionalised after he had attacked his mother with a knife during a manic “downswing”.
There were several more periods in hospital and he was given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and manic depression. By his late teens he was out of hospital, living on the streets of Los Angeles and fantasising about becoming a famous singer. When Zappa discovered him in 1968, he took him into the studio to record the double album An Evening with Wild Man Fischer.
The strange but at times oddly compelling recording featured Fischer shouting wildly on a set of mostly a-cappella “songs” such as MerryGo-Round and The Leaves are Falling, both of which he also sang to widespread bemusement on television during an appearance on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. On one song, Circle, Zappa provided a full psychedelic rock backing over which Fischer screamed incomprehensible lyrics such as “How can I walk around your house like a circle without you knowing? I am invisible. You can’t see me, baby!”
But other tracks, such as The Wild Man Fischer Story and Larry Under Pressure, in which he chronicled aspects of his mental illness, invite accusations of voyeurism, compounded by Zappa’s decision to pose Fischer on the cover holding a knife to an elderly woman. The image would surely have proved impermissible in today’s more politically correct times.
Zappa himself may have come to regret the image when Fischer subsequently threw a bottle at Zappa’s wife, Gail, which narrowly missed their baby daughter. The incident led to the end of their working relationship and Zappa’s widow, who inherited the rights to the recording, has since refused to reissue the album on CD. As a result, original vinyl copies of An Evening with Wild Man Fischer exchange hands among collectors for substantial sums.
Advertisement
Fischer reappeared in 1975 with the single Go to Rhino Records, and he subsequently recorded three albums for the Rhino label, Wildmania, Pronounced Normal and Nothing Scary. The last two were produced by the comedy rock duo Barnes & Barnes. He also recorded an improbable duet with the 1950s singing star Rosemary Clooney on the 1986 single, It’s a Hard Business.
In 1999 Rhino released The Fischer King, a limited-edition two-CD set containing 100 tracks and a 20-page booklet, which sold out within weeks. Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Wild Man Fischer, a documentary film about his life and music, appeared in 2005. By then Fischer had been placed in an assisted-living facility for mental patients, where he remained for the rest of his life. In recent years he had been suffering with heart problems.
Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, singer, was born on November 6, 1944. He died on June 16, 2011, aged 66