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The reversal of Fortune issue

The phone rang not too many months after I'd moved into one of the apartments above Guy P. Lockwood's three-car garage ("no loud music and no wimmin stayin' overnight") at the edge of Nashville. Said he was an illustrator, the voice on the phone did, and had found No Depression on a newsstand, spotted my address, knew I was new in town. I'm not sure what all Tim Shawl said to convince me to look at his work (probably: that he would work for what we paid at that point), but that he was familiar with my friend and mentor Art Chantry's contributions to graphic design doubtless went a long distance.

We became friends, in the modern way: Over the phone, via e-mail, occasionally in person. We both had children, moved further away.

Tim's always been the guy I went to with the most impossible dreams. Build a folk art construction that looks like Dolly Parton (I made it too small on the cover). Hand-draw awards for the Americana Music Association (you should see the guitar he created for Buddy Miller!), paint me a mandolin in the style of Picasso for the Sam Bush opening spread.

There's a disparaging term in illustration for people who don't have their own style. They get called wrists, and over the years I've worked with some really good wrists. Tim's not a wrist. Back in college I briefly dated a gal who drove a Datsun two-seater MG knock-off with a dual carb and, at the time, a defective water pump. One of my stepbrothers is an especially gifted mechanic, and, now, an engineer. An inventor. He hadn't gone back to college when Rose had her Datsun, but he was headed that way. Anyhow...he stood there one day with a screwdriver in his hand and his ears open and tuned those dual carbs just right. We left the car at the shop where he worked with unknown ailments, and he simply built a new waterpump rather than waste time finding one on the parts market.

Tim's like that. There's not much he can't do, because he understands in real practical terms how things were done, how art was made. How art can now be made.

In the making of this present issue, I knew it was almost certainly to be the next-to-the-last one we would publish. Peter was writing a cover story in which we both believed deeply, one of several occasions on which one of us has found something and the other one has ended up writing about it; he didn't remember, but I pretty much stole the Drive-By Truckers from him, and he was way ahead of me with the Bottle Rockets, though I wrote their first cover story...Peter got the second. Once Peter finally heard Crooked Still, it was time for me to get out of the way.

We had zero chance of a photo with all the various band members in it. I tried, briefly, to get them to submit photo booth images, but nobody did. And so I spent weeks banging around for some kind of visual that worked. I looked at a handful of photographic still-lives, thought of setting one up. Kept thinking. Until one day I found this image online:

Now, I was looking for that image. Not that one, exactly, but I was wading through somebody's online archive of Fortune covers, though I couldn't say why, because in that moment I had the instinct that a solution was to be found there. And it was. Later, in a moment of graveyard whimsy, one of us dubbed this the Reversal of Fortune issue.

Other than the cover, there's not much design inspiration in this present issue. I mean, it's fine. The photos are good, the illustrations are good, even one of the two I did under my pseudonym (I'm not an illustrator, make no mistake) is tolerable. But the weight of the gathering sadness got in the way of anything more than reflex and instinct. Which is why one tends craft and hopes for inspiration.

Not the point. The point is this: It's one of the best things Tim has ever done for me. For us. It's a cover no other magazine on the newsstand would even think about doing, mostly because most designers don't look past yesterday for inspiration and in large part because I'm fairly certain every newsstand consultant in the U.S. would tear it to pieces.

Hit it where they ain't, that's my theory.

(By the way: Tim did it all on his computer. It just looks handmade.)

Our covers have never looked like anything else on the newsstand, and it's not because I can't. It's because I won't. (And maybe because I can't.)

Here's the point, though. Whatever transition to the web happens may be fun and good and interesting and challenging. All those things. But it won't involve Tim. It won't involve the other really gifted illustrators who make our pages interesting to look at. And it won't involve the two heaping handsful of extraordinary photographers who make the magazine look the way it looks every issue.

Maybe figuring out how to produce a podcast will be interesting. Maybe I'll even like it.

But I've been putting things in print since I was in ninth grade, back when I started typing carbon copies of the Streaker's Digest, my junior high school foray into muckraking (let this be an overdue apology to Ann and Joy, who suffered too much at my hands). I believe in print. I believe it's a better way to communicate a range of ideas than the web is. The web is a great way to communicate a fact. A news item. But the full tapestry of the printed page sings to me in ways the web never will.

I'm finally playing the bloody Dan Tyminski album, like hearing an old friend while I type this morning. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful beyond words to the photographers and illustrators who have made ND such a distinct magazine and a distinct pleasure to create. I'm grateful for the 75 issues we've had together, and hope I can manage some dignity for #75. Some inspiration to go with the tears you will hopefully never see.

But I know what's being lost. I've spent my entire adult life getting to this point -- assembling these people and this work in this one singular place -- and it's about to be gone. It will not come my way again, and I have been truly fortunate these last many years.

The question, then, is what's to be found in its place?

I don't know.

I don't know.

But I didn't know ND was coming, either, 13 years ago. Hoped, but didn't know. And, per my earlier endorsement of Obama, I'm big on hope this year.

And one never knows who will be on the other end of the phone.

Posted by grant on March 2, 2008 11:01 AM | Permalink

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