An Alternate Route: An Interview with Jim Franklin
February 9, 2025 in Austin, TX at Jim’s ApartmentTranscribed and edited for brevity and clarity
Conducted by Tessa Granowski
Jim Franklin: I met Dave Hickey [in 1967] as a result of an exhibit that was set up [in] a new dormitory called the Castilian, which was a high-rise dormitory on San Antonio Street right off of, not on the drag, but a block over from the drag. It was the tallest building in the area for a while. The guy that did the air conditioning at the Vulcan Gas Company was a writer and he was studying at UT, and he installed the air conditioner at the Vulcan, which was really needed at the time, and [he was a] really cool guy. He was doing some air conditioning at the Castilian, and they had this great floor that was up on a mezzanine level, not on the street level. And it was their big community area for that dormitory. So, it was a natural place for an exhibit. He set it up, and I brought the paintings over.
Was it just your paintings or was there another artist?
JF: No, it was just me. And then I met Dave Hickey, who was planning to open his gallery across the street from the Castilian on the next corner. It was very lucky. He introduced himself and said he wanted to use my exhibit as his first exhibit of his new gallery called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. So, we set that up. It was in an old house. We had the whole ground floor. I think he was living upstairs at the time. And he was from Lubbock and his wife at the time had grown up in Lubbock.
Mary Jane?
JF: Yeah. And she said she was at a football game one day and one night or whatever. And Buddy Holly was so drunk that he threw up on her back. What a distinction. I had Buddy Holly's vomit all over my back.
Dave Hickey and Mary Jane at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, c. 1968-1970, unknown photographer
What a claim to fame! I think Dave Hickey was from Fort Worth. But she must have been from Lubbock.
JF: Who? Dave Hickey? Oh, yeah. I don't know where he was born. So that began his gallery and my relationship with him. And I thought he was pretty hip. He seemed to know art, and he wasn't there for any kind of music scene thing, which I had was established with, but not fully known to be.
The Armadillo World Headquarters was not open yet, correct? This was before that. It was still the Vulcan Gas Company. Were you painting in the Vulcan Gas Company?
JF: I was doing art since first grade [in Galveston, Texas]. Art was what saved my butt. I had lost my reading & writing notebook in the first grade… on a Friday. I was terrified about what was going to happen when I had to confess to losing it on Monday. Over the weekend, my father, he's a rancher, and he was into all that outdoor stuff, and he wanted to get me tapped into that. So, he took me down to the pony ride that was on the beach right as you come off the sea wall. There was a big round pen. I remember going into the pen and seeing that horse, this dynamic animal, with big muscles, and no fat. That's one of the impressive of things to me about a horse. There was no fat on this animal.
They're all muscle.
JF: And the contours were easy to see. At the same time, he's taking me into this pen. I'm totally awake, apprehensive about what was going to happen. So, he lifts me up and puts me on the saddle of the horse, and then the horse walks around and it looks back at me. All this time, I'm just completely electrified by this experience. The next day, Monday comes up. I was fearful of what was going to happen when I have to confess to losing my notebook. That Monday, the teacher brings a poster board around to each of our places in the class, a bucket of crayons on the tables, and [says, you can] draw whatever you want. So, I did a drawing of that horse, the view from the rear. It was simple forms. I was just drawing what was still embedded in my vision. And it just was so realistic. The teacher comes, says, James, you keep working on that! You don't have to do the notebook. That drawing was so good! So, art saved my ass.
The horse's ass saved your ass.
JF: And I knew what I was [at that moment]. I was an artist. Because someone said, oh, you're an artist! when they saw that [drawing]. I got the title for my role, as well as the reward of not having to confess to losing the notebook. So, the next day, I remember I overworked that drawing because I was wanting to have it happen again. She said, No, James, you're going to have to do the notebook. So, I had to confess. It was no big deal, but I had built it up in my head. That was my introduction to my own talent as drawing because I just realized I could draw better than most people.
So, you continued to keep drawing?
JF: Yeah, it was my thing. I learned in the first grade, that was my thing. It's got a name: Artist. And there's never been any doubts the rest of my life about what I was going to do. Other kids would be asked, What are you going to do when you grow up? What do you want to be when you grow up? I said, I'm going to be what I am, an artist. I never had to worry about what I'm going to do when I grow up.
You already knew.
JF: I just wondered how I was going to possibly grow up.
My favorite artist of that era was Franz Kline. In fact, the day of graduation from high school, Life magazine had an article, a full-page picture of Franz Kline who had just died. I was weeping. Everyone thought that I was weeping because I was graduating from school. No, I was weeping because I'd lost my favorite artist. I couldn't explain that to anyone because they didn't know who the fuck Franz Kline was. They didn't know what the fuck art is. They think it's Walt Disney. So many kids wanted to be an artist so they could do comics. That was their goal in their art life. That was the only art they ever looked at was in comic books. Well, if they could have learned to draw like that... One of the things I couldn't stand about that art was the fact that you have to draw all these little frames, all these compositions to make a story. Then you read the story, then you throw it away. Mentally, you throw it away. It's just a temporary That excuse to look at a story.
My art that I was tuning into was the famous stuff, the real stuff. Da Vinci, Michelangelo. Those guys weren't doing comic books. And so I found I was a rare creature on a desert island or an island that was isolated from the rest of the mainland. I had to find my own way around that island, and I really got to the center of it. But it was only because of my own staggering around and copying it. I didn't copy the artist. I just copied their styles. I did one painting of the copy of Goya's self-portrait, but I did it as if Rembrandt was painting Goya's portrait. It was very interesting layers there.
Based on very little exposure to art. So that all set you up to leave La Marque (Galveston)? How come you didn't go to New York?
JF: I did go to New York. First, I went to San Francisco, Art Institute in San Francisco. My Aunt Viola lived in Bakersfield, so I was able to spend the summer [there] leading into the fall courses. I [took] two courses in the summer, Painting and Drawing. The first day, I'm painting, everyone's got their easel, and most of those guys didn't know what the fuck they were doing. But I was painting. I went right on in and did it. Started doing paint like I did at home. The instructor comes by, and he was a good artist himself, and he came by the first day and said, Well, I can see you're not afraid of paint. I said, No, I've been doing it for a while. So, he never stopped at my easel for that whole course. Then at the end of the course, he stopped and explained why he had not been stopping to talk about my work. He said, I felt like your painting problems are such that you can handle them on your own. Because I had been handling them on my own and learning how to see; how to look at one thing in relation to another.
You measure the space on a still life. You measure the space between the object as well as the object itself. You view everything you're going to paint as a framework. You've selected a frame of reality that you're going to make a picture of. That's the process. If you're focusing on that, and you're getting all those lines in the right place… when they're in the right place, it all works.
I remember the first time I tried to do a portrait, and I didn't have it. Oh, I did such a beautiful rendering of that eye, but it was in the wrong place. I thought, well, if I could draw a portrait, I'm a real artist. That first failure was just really depressing for me. Then I found a sketchbook, an instruction book that my stepmother had because she had taken some art courses in Pasadena, Texas. So, she understood what I was trying to do. And she provided encouragement as well as materials. Once I got that, I was leaping ahead of anything else.
That was my activity. I didn't want to play games. I thought games were good, but not for me. But painting was real. It was serious. I took life seriously.
Did you get to visit any of the museums? Did y’all ever go to Houston?
JF: Oh, yeah. I'd go to Houston as often as I could. I would get on the bus and go to Houston, spend the day at the Museum of Fine Art or the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. That's where I saw James Havard's work for the first time, or Rauschenberg.
Did you ever meet Rauschenberg?
JF: Actually, I did. Once, it was later, there was this print gallery in LA... I can't remember the name of it. He was making a print there and wasn't having an exhibit or anything, but everyone was there to see him.
I remember an elder dowager woman, she wanted to talk to him about doing a print for the opera. And he said, well, it'll be $100,000. He said, I might be a whore, but I'm not a cheap whore. He knew how to price himself where they could pay and don't give them any cut rates. You price yourself as the master, and you get respected as the master. Otherwise, you're just another doodler. That was an interesting lesson. It was an interesting to see how those things were working.
Can we go back to Dave Hickey?
JF: That Castilian Exhibit it was this great big, new facility and big walls. It was a big open space. My paintings were large, five-foot dimension in each one of them, at least.
Do you remember what kind of paintings you were making at that time?
JF: I was doing abstracts, non-objective abstractions at the same time that I was doing the impressionism. Because it's all the same thing. You're creating forms on a canvas, and you're either inventing a form or you're copying a form you're looking at. Why is it that art has to look like something else when the painting is the object? You're creating a new object. You're not copying an object that already exists. So that was the approach to art where I was working on those two levels, the stuff that I could see and stuff that I could imagine. I realized that the stuff that people can see, that's what convinces them that I'm an artist. Otherwise, they think I'm just doodling. It's been that way ever since. I mean, I’ve painted a lot of abstractions in the last 20 years.
Original “picture-of-a-picture” postcards from Jim Franklin’s One-Man Exhibition at Dave Hickey’s gallery, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in Austin, TX in 1968
Where was your studio at this time? Where were you painting? Do you remember?
JF: Sometimes I have a difficulty remembering where the studios were because most of the studio was just where I was painting. I was doing landscapes and on-the-site paintings. I rented some studio spaces in Galveston. In fact, one building I rented was upstairs. On one side of the top of the stairs, you go to the left, and there was a ballroom that was for dancing, and it was like a stage room. You go the other side at the top of the stairs, and you come into this cotton buying room where they displayed cotton to be sold to wholesalers. It had a skylight. It was the only skylight of the studio I ever had. It was really a great studio. I was only paying $40 a month because the commercial artist friend that I knew, Don Davis… He was sharing that space with a couple of photographers, and they would get a nude model to come in. And so, they were using that space for that. And then I came in, and I took over, and they stopped coming.
Was this before you moved to Austin?
JF: Oh, yeah. I was still in Galveston. That was a great studio space. I did a lot of good paintings there.
Then in Austin, you painted a lot in the Armadillo World Headquarters. That was later on.
JF: I met the Austin guys in Galveston. There were five guys. They came down for the weekend, and I met them at a little Beatnik coffee shop on the sea wall. This couple had been in Mexico the previous year. They came to Galveston and opened this little coffee shop. I used to hang out there almost every day, but that weekend, these guys from Austin were there, and Travis Rivers was on stage improvising poetry. I thought, Man, these are my guys. Where have you been all my life? I write poetry, too.
You're speaking the same language.
JF: So, I came to Austin and looked up Travis and crashed on his couch for a month or so. And then he went to San Francisco from there. He was a mover in the scene, one of the arch Beatniks of the scene. He knew what was going on in San Francisco, as well as New York City. And those were the key places for the Beatnik scene. He invited me to come to Austin. So, I did. And I was actually planning to go back to New York. And Travis said that if you really want to go to New York, you can get rides off of the bulletin boards in Austin. I never bothered with the ride to New York. I'd found my place. Austin was the place.
Much shorter ride to Austin than to New York.
JF: I just settled in to being in Austin. I realized that there's places where you need to be in the art world if you're going to get ahead. And New York was one of those places, and San Francisco was one of those places. I'd already spent a year in San Francisco. And my father, if I wasn't going to go to school, he wasn't going to support me. So, what I did was spend most of the days wandering up and down Market Street. I found St. Anthony's Dining Hall, which was a church-run feeding place, and it was famous. I mean, everyone ate at St. Anthony's. And it kept me alive for a year. And then when I went to New York City, I looked up the welfare mission there, and it was a piece of shit! The food was just…
And at that time [back in San Francisco], Winterland had just gotten started with Bill Graham, and The Family Dog was doing the Avalon Ballroom. They were the real Beatniks. And Bill Graham was a hustler. And of course, he had business on his mind. He built Winterland as a major venue. But there were two venues there in San Francisco. One was the Family Dog, and one was the Winterland. And I went to both of them. In fact, I saw Ike and Tina Turner for the first time at the Filmore Auditorium, which was a black neighborhood, and it was an all-black audience when I saw Ike and Tina. She came out in her leopard-skin mini-skirt. It was just radiant heat. It was amazing to see her perform. I'd already been listening to her records on the radio, and the stuff I liked, her funkiest stuff, was the best. Then they got psychedelicized, and she lost that raw edge. That was Ike Turner's company. He was a major producer. He's the one that discovered Muddy Waters.
The record company had him as a talent scout to go through the South and find the entertainment to record because they realized there was a big interest in recording the Southern folk music. The so-called folk music. I might say, the real music.
That’s like Chris Strachwitz too. Did you ever meet him with Les Blank?
JF: Yeah, I did meet him. Les was hired by Leon Russell to do a film.
Did you meet Les through Leon?
JF: Yeah. Leon asked me to come up and paint his studio spaces in Oklahoma, and that was when he built his studio out in Disney, Oklahoma. Outside of Tulsa.
Jim Franklin with his pool mural at Leon Russell’s recording studio in Disney, OK (Film still from A Poem is a Naked Person, by Les Blank)
JF: He built cottages for everyone to stay in when they came out so they wouldn't have to drive back to Tulsa. But they drove back to Tulsa anyway. They didn't want the cottages.
But I got to see Freddie King record in that studio out there. I got to know Freddie pretty well because I'd gotten to know him before Leon. He was playing the Vulcan and the venues in Austin. He was our hero in a way because we could always fill a house with him.
He seemed to have great energy. And you did a lot of album covers and posters for him, right?
JF: I did two album covers. Yeah, a lot of posters.
Erica McCarthy: Do you remember the first time you ever saw Freddie King?
JF: I think there was a show that someone was doing that was at a park by the river. But he played the Vulcan the night before. Freddie was a regular, and we all regarded him as a superstar. And you know, we knew about Freddie King before anyone else did.
Jim Franklin’s painting of Freddie King (with Leon Russell in the bottom corner), 1971-1983
It seemed like you were able to connect with a lot of the musicians at the Vulcan and Armadillo.
JF: Yeah. At the Vulcan, our policy was to book as many of these old blues players as possible. We couldn't afford the top acts, rock and roll acts. With the blues, we had this stream of classics, Sleepy John Estes, Fred McDowell was one of my favorites. I remember going down to Houston with Houston White to book Lightnin’ Hopkins. We wanted to book Lightnin’ at the Vulcan. So we drove down there and we went to Dowling Street, found out where Lightning was hanging out. He would sit in his car outside of a bar on Dowling Street. That was his court. That's where he met people and did all his business out of his car. They parked out in front.
Probably wearing sunglasses at night.
JF: He was cool. And so, we got him booked. Then when he comes to Austin to play the gig, and he had his cousin Billy Bizer, who I had met in San Francisco the previous year.
In San Francisco, there was a street, Grant Street, where all the folk music clubs were. Then the jazz clubs were down on the intersection of the West Broadway. And I got to see some really great... See, I altered my driver's license, so I'd be 21. And at that time, it was easy. I just took an X-acto knife and took the little of the three off of 43 and made it a zero, and then penciled it back in. It was undetectable.
Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, photographed by Les Blank (copyright Les Blank), both of whom played at the Vulcan Gas Company and the Armadillo World Headquarters
You have the artist hand to help.
JF: I got to see all these great jazz performers because I was underage. The only club that provided for underage was the Black Hawk, and they had a caged section for the underage. I got to see incredible people there. Miles Davis, Coltrane. Man, it was just a feast of jazz in San Francisco at that time. It's amazing. Jazz was more than rock and roll. I remember seeing Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
You seemed to be in the right place at the right time.
JF: It's a good thing I didn't go to college like my father wanted me to because I would have missed all of that.
Could you tell me about the show that Dave Hickey curated that you were in, called South Texas Sweet Funk. It was at St. Edwards in 1971? Do you remember works that you had in the show or how that came together?
JF: Well, I was doing large paintings. And God, I wish I had photos of all those things. Damn it. I'm going to try and find them. There were some good paintings.
What happened to the paintings?
JF: The thing about doing art is you got to keep it. You have got to maintain it. And if you're living like I was and have been with no space, I was lucky to have a place to paint. I didn't have a place to keep all my work. So, people took it off your hands. Well, it's just I couldn't organize it. I was just having to move all these paintings around. So, I finally just stopped doing large canvases just because it was impractical. If I had a gallery that was really behind me, if my father had been there to help all that stuff, but I was on my own. And I just didn't have the wherewithal to be an artist, but that's the only thing I knew to do in spite of the economics working against me.
Here’s one of your “abstract” paintings I saw earlier today. *showing Jim photo of this painting*
JF: Yeah, that's a good one there. That's a really good one. It's a realistic shape. I did it so it looks like it's not a picture of something. It's three-dimensional. The painting is the painting. I'm creating an object.
So anyway, I was playing with those concepts as well as drawing poster stuff. It was mainly more for helping my musician friends promote their music. Because when I responded to Travis Rivers in Galveston, went to Austin, he was part of the edge of the scene here in Austin.
My favorite is the Captain Beefheart one of the kissing hogs. Do you remember that one?
Jim Franklin, Captain Beefheart at the Armadillo World Headquarters, 1971
JF: Yeah. [Captain Beefheart] had written this little statement, and he put it in the trash, apparently, but someone pulled it out and I repeated it at the bottom edge of the drawing. It said, Honey of two white hogs touch tusks on either husk of the sun and moon… * And I can't remember, but I reprinted the whole statement on the bottom edge of the drawing.
*A whirling dervish, honey of two white pigs bore snoots ‘n touched tusks on either husk of the sun ‘n moon an apple dropped thru membrane arches broke embryonic picked out seed cores
But I use realism to capture the abstract. Because if you just do an abstract, people don't think you're an artist. They don't take it seriously. But if you draw realistically, they'll give it a consideration because they realize the artist knows what he's doing. It may be weird configurations and combinations of forms, but still, clearly, I know what I'm doing. What I'm doing is trying to show how the abstract mind, how abstract the mind is. We learn to use all of our senses to get through life, logically, and not make mistakes. But I realized that dancing is basically being off balance, the art of being off balance. It's like you take your steps as art, then you're being an artist.
I like the way you see the world. Even just yesterday at dinner, when you suggested that I interview the shrimp and get the scoop, inside Jim.
JF: We live in a world of things, and they're all jumbled. There's no organization, really, except in manufacturing and sale. All that stuff is very well systemized.
Did you like any of the other artists that Dave Hickey showed, like Jim Roche?
JF: Oh, yeah. I got to be good friends with some of those guys. I didn't know Terry [Allen] at the time. He was kind of a big-time guy. I mean, he was working with a gallery in Los Angeles that was very high up in the art world, more so than music. I didn't know he did music. I was really excited when I learned what his music was.
Why did Dave Hickey move his gallery?
JF: Well, it was a bigger space. It was like a real modern gallery. And that was when he had an exhibit up, actually, of R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Jim Franklin [myself]. And he had the “Keep on Truckin’” original drawing that was so famous later. I mean, it was for 150 bucks. I could have owned it, if I had 150 bucks.
R. Crumb, Keep on Truckin’... 1968
JF: And one thing I did was found a cotton mill to buy a roll of canvas and went down there. Cuero was where the mill was. And I drove down there with Bill Livingood, who was also an artist, and who formed Slow Printing—he started printing T-shirts, but he started as an artist, a printmaker. They had rolls that were maybe 20 feet or 30 feet of canvas still on them, but it's too small of a roll to put in the shop. I went by Dave's gallery to get $20 to go buy some canvas, and he wouldn't give it to me. So, I didn't get to get a roll. But Bill Livingood came back with a roll of canvas. [Dave] just treated me like you treat anyone that's not making money in the money world.
But didn’t he end up bringing that Whitney Museum curator to your studio, Marcia Tucker?
JF: Yeah.
Were you in one of the Whitney annual shows before it became the Biennial?
JF: I was an oversize print show. Dave was getting a lot of attention in New York at the time. I remember I met Jack Mims from Dallas, who had one of the only prints that were in the gallery for that exhibit. All the rest of the oversize prints went up on billboards around the city.
Catalogue from the Whitney exhibition “Oversize Prints” - sadly no image available of Jim Franklin’s billboard in New York, or the print itself.
Did you have one of the billboards?
JF: Yeah. *scoffs* Three floors up. You could see it from across the street, Canal Street, it was reduced to an ignorable dot in the landscape. But for the exhibit, Jack Mims' piece had a pornographic scene in it. That's why they didn't put it up on the billboard.
But I got to meet Rauschenberg at that exhibit, and he was wearing a coonskin coat with a babe on each arm, gliding around the gallery. He was the superstar artist, the most famous one. And I told him I was from Galveston. He said, Well, my mother was Ms. Splash days in 1938. I knew he was from Texas.
Yeah, Port Arthur. Do you remember going to the shows at Dave's Gallery? What were the openings like?
JF: Well, they were good. Got to meet people.
I wonder if he ever thought he was going to be a gallerist for a long time or if that was a short-term dream.
JF: I don't know. But he was in New York first, and then he took a job teaching at Nevada.
Yes, in Las Vegas. Did you ever go see him out there?
JF: No, but I did talk to him once and asked him, What are you doing? And he said, Well, I lecture and travel and lecture with the MacArthur Grant. He didn't have to teach anymore. And he was getting a lot of attention from his essays with Air Guitar.
Did you ever read Air Guitar?
JF: No, I never did read it. I don't read very much. I should, but I don't.
When did you make this one? [*pointing to sweatshirt*] Oh, '71. Kind of that time period.
Jim Franklin’s personal sweatshirt with his drawing from 1971, “Alternate Route” printed on the back (that kept me warm during the interview)
JF: Yeah. You know, armadillos have heavy drama with pavement.
It is where they live and die. Is that what you mean?
JF: I have this theory that you could put a 10-foot stretch of asphalt on the moon and put an armadillo on the other side of the moon. And by the time the armadillo wanders around and touches that asphalt, a pickup truck will materialize and wipe them out.
You’re saving them by having them fly over.
JF: Yeah. The alternate route.
What happened when Dave Hickey left to go to New York?
JF: He left everybody behind. He figured that I wasn't New York level.
But he didn't really take his other artists to New York, did he?
JF: No, but he was being established himself. He wasn't establishing other people. Actually, he got the job as an Art in America magazine because of his new superstar status. He became editor of the Art in America, which had a formal style for their cover. It was always a print, and it [had] a border. But during Dave's run as an editor, the art on the cover bled off the edge.
Oh, is it still that way?
JF: Yeah. Artforum was the other magazine. And Dave was writing and doing articles with Artforum. In fact, his exhibit with me was a big write-up in there, his exhibition South Texas Sweet Funk. I did that drawing of the alligators and mattresses floating in the foreground. That was the title piece for the exhibit.
Was it a painting or a drawing?
JF: Drawing.
Do you still have that one?
JF: No, I don't think so. I've had a hard time keeping my shit.
It's just hard to be a human sometimes. Is that your friend?
JF: Oh, that is him. Come to get the painting.
All right. I guess we're done. Thank you, Jim.
His hat says “Je M’en Fous” which means “I don’t give a fuck” in French.