My old friend Robert Cheatham passed away last week after a long illness. Robert had a huge impact on the Atlanta arts scene, which you can read about in this remembrance published in the AJC.
Like many in my circle of friends, I first met Robert via my involvement in Eyedrum. However I already knew who he was, because I had spent many years farting around in the weirdo music scene in Atlanta where he was well known. WREK had a radio show called Destroy All Music that featured all sorts of extreme and improvisational music, and back in the late 1980s that radio show had spawned a similarly themed music "festival" every year or two -- just a room with people doing crazy stuff. Robert's "band" Tinnitus was a perennial presence on that radio show and at those DAM festivals. I'm sure I probably saw him on stage at some point, whether it was at Klang or the TULA arts center or wherever. I knew of him but hadn't met him.
In 2002, Hormuz Minina roped me into joining the Eyedrum board of directors, which is fancier than it sounds. It was just a collective of about a dozen people who were running an arts venue in their spare time -- nobody got paid, we just put on shows and paid the rent. Anyway, Robert was at the first board meeting that I attended, and for me it was like meeting a rock star. OMG the Robert Cheatham is sitting in this folding chair right next to me and we are even talking about stuff! What?!
Eyedrum was primarily run by artists for artists (visual, musical, whatever) so the programming was amazing and unique, but you also needed people to build the infrastructure and make the physical place work. I'm an electrical engineer and quickly saw a lot of electrical work that needed to get done (run power for outlets, overhead lighting for stage, etc.) and got to work on that. Robert had side gigs in construction so knew how to build walls including hanging drywall, and so between the two of us we built out the new space that Eyedrum has leased. To this day, when describing what I did at Eyedrum, I say that if you walked into the MLK space, anything physical that your eyes landed on was either built by Robert or built my me. I put in lighting for the gallery areas, serviced the air conditioning, and built the semi-circular stage in the back performance area. But Robert built the walls, the bar, the office, probably the shelving, and on and on. It was a great collaboration.
When we first got the back space at 290 MLK (an extra 3000 square feet, doubling Eyedrum's footprint), I set to designing a stage for performances. Previously we had been cramming performers into a little floor level spot in the front among the visual art -- actually Robert had built an angled overhang there to ... reflect sound out I guess, I don't really know. But it was going to be a nice luxury to have a separate area in the back where we could build a proper stage riser with more space. Quickly we settled on the back corner as the right place for the new stage, and I liked the idea of a semi circle shape since it seemed like the audience would be spread out. But the key decision was how big to make that semicircle? I mean, you had to pick a number -- a 15 foot radius out from the corner? 20 feet? Several of us met in the new space and had a long discussion about it, and I distinctly remember two things that Robert mentioned. He wanted the stage to be big enough to hold a large ensemble of musicians, specifically a) his Brahvar Music Ensemble and b) the Peter Brotzman Septet. Brotzman had recently been booking a tour across the USA, and Robert lamented that we couldn't book it at Eyedrum because our stage wasn't big enough (and uh we didn't even a stage). So that became my sizing principle for that stage: fit 7-10 music performers on it. Drums, guitars with amps, keyboard player, vocalists ... Cram them all in there. In the end we settled on an 18 or 19 foot radius and I got to building the stage, and Robert built the walls.
Robert was a wonderfully energetic supporter of all kinds of art performance. One particular memory was when we (Eyedrum) held a big fundraiser at the Atlanta Contemporary arts center (the one on Means Street near Georgia Tech that used to be Nexus). We had managed to book Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk band who had already performed at Eyedrum about a year prior (this was waaaay before they got big maaaan). Oh god Robert was absolutely delighted, dancing around and cheering.
I personally was deeply involved with Eyedrum from 2002-2010. I don't recall if Robert left before or after me, but around 2010 we were all getting a bit burned out, and with Eyedrum losing its lease on 290 MLK, it was a motivating force for many of us to move on. But that was especially true for me (and maybe Robert), since I had put all of my sweat equity literally into that space.
Another touchpoint that Sharon and I shared with Robert was that we both lived on Harold Avenue in Lake Claire (an Atlanta neighborhood east of downtown, next Candler Park and not far from Little Five Points). Well, by the time I met Robert, he wasn't actually living there anymore, having divorced his first wife and left that house behind. But I absolutely knew which house he had been in, because it had totally effing freaky sculpted concrete all over the place, from the driveway entrance on into the house itself. As you see in the article, Robert specialized in making outdoor structures out of tufa, a type of concrete, usually taking wild curved forms. We got a plant stand from him and it's been a feature of our front yard for years.
As an experiencing gardener and landscaper, Robert had another funny impact on our front yard. In May 2013, the huge post oak that dominated our front yard fell during a long weekend of soaking rain (exposing the roots that turned out to be rotten). On the way down it pretty much destroyed a Japanese maple tree that was the feature of our corner landscaping, a big beautiful mushroom-shaped ornamental. The crown of the falling oak sheared off nearly all of the branches of the Japanese maple, leaving just one forlorn branch sticking out of the trunk, Charlie Brown Christmas tree style. I cut that one branch off and resigned myself to having to pull the trunk / stump out and start over.
Robert and friend / neighbor Sean were walking by a day or three later, and I recounted how I planned to remove the remainder of the oak. They both pretty much laughed out loud at me, explaining that even though the tree looked dead, it had a perfectly healthy root system that was champing at the bit to push out new growth. Just leave it alone! So I did, and within months I could see that they were going to be right, with littel branches starting to sprout out. Within 5 years it looked like a tree again, and now, 9 years later, it's bigger than ever and is once again the feature of the corner. There was a whole ecosystem lurking down there under the surface, just waiting to shove a whole new tree out of the seemingly dead stump. Amazing.
R. I. P. Robert.
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