Wild Man Fischer, Outsider Musician, Dies at 66 By MARGALIT FOX Published: June 17, 2011
Wild Man Fischer, a mentally ill street musician who became a darling of the pop music industry in the 1960s and as a result enjoyed four decades of strange, intermittent and often ill-fitting celebrity, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 66.
The cause was heart failure, said Josh Rubin, a filmmaker whose documentary portrait of Mr. Fischer, “dErailRoaDed,” was released in 2005. (The film’s title, taken from one of Mr. Fischer’s songs, is a word he coined to describe the radical dislocation he often felt.)
Mr. Fischer, whose first name was Larry, had lived with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder since he was a teenager. Since 2004 he had resided in an assisted-living facility for mental patients in Van Nuys, Calif.
A singer-songwriter, Mr. Fischer was sometimes called the grandfather of Outsider music, but he was an outsider even by Outsider standards.
His voice was raspy and very loud. There was little tune to his melodies, and his lyrics had the repetitiveness and seeming simplicity of nursery rhymes. His singing, typically a cappella, was punctuated by vocal effects like hooting, wailing and shouting.
Whether Mr. Fischer was a naïve genius whose work embodied primal truths, or simply a madman who practiced a musicalized form of ranting, is the subject of continuing debate.
But he attracted — and retains — a cult following, which over time has included well-known figures in the music business. Among them were Frank Zappa, who produced Mr. Fischer’s first album; the child actor-turned-musician Bill Mumy; the radio host Dr. Demento; and the singer Rosemary Clooney, with whom Mr. Fischer recorded a duet.
Mr. Fischer made several albums, toured sporadically and performed occasionally on television, including, in 1968, on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.”
I've never heard of Larry, but his story reminds me of Moondog, who was a blind and homeless musician. I think he lived in New York City.
[Edited 6/19/11 19:36pm]
You can take a black guy to Nashville from right out of the cotton fields with bib overalls, and they will call him R&B. You can take a white guy in a pin-stripe suit who’s never seen a cotton field, and they will call him country. ~ O. B. McClinton
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