A Man About Town: The Craig Legg Story
A Man About Town: The Craig Legg Story
(Craig Legg outside his home in East Lake, 2024.)
The first thing you notice when you drive up to Craig Legg’s house is the cactus. Lots and lots of cactus, and yucca, among other desert fare, sprinkled in between the native southern flora indigenous to his home state of Alabama. To a normal pedestrian and passerby, it may seem a bit odd given his more mundane suburban surroundings, yet given the man inside, and his life story and proclivities, it makes all the sense in the world. At least to him, and anyone that knows him. A quiet and mild-mannered man in his mid-70s, with a slightly reclusive posture towards the outside world, Legg has created— or rather, recreated— a living ecosystem around his delightfully cluttered property that is intentionally reminiscent of the dry and foreboding landscape of his youth in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Prickly, and filled with little art projects scattered around the yard, all set alongside small, mischievous paths that meander through different areas of his encampment, there’s something that’s both comfortable and mildly uninviting about his tucked away little art lab. That is, if you ever even knew it was there. Set back from the busy street out front, and camouflaged by dense foliage and perimeter fencing, you might not know that one of Birmingham’s most prolific and influential artists lived there. Yet, just past the spiky palm lily fronds, found object altars, pine needles and bottletrees, he can usually be found inside– surrounded by a veritable menagerie of books, art and paper mache masks– most likely painting, and happily consumed by his need to create, even if for no one else but himself. Which is how he’s always been, and always will be.
Having played an outsized role in the creative and cultural life of the Magic City going back well over three decades now, the influence of his unending drive to turn his life into art and art into life has made him one of the central— if largely unheralded— figures of more than a few eras of progressive aesthetics around Birmingham and the surrounding areas. A painter, poet, puppet master, concert promoter, mask-maker, photographer, collage artist, amateur historian, aspiring novelist, bookstore guru, recycling maven, and all around mutant multi-tasker— there are few hats Legg hasn’t worn at one time or another, and occasionally all at once, which is one of the endearing qualities he’s carried with him all of his adult life. With a work ethic and attention to detail that eclipses all but the most laser-focused of human beings, his ability to see both large-scale art events and minutiae-obsessed micro-projects to fruition, and inspire others to do the same, has made him something of an urban legend among those who operate on the fringes of acceptable society here in his hometown. It’s an area he’s always thrived in, going back to his hippie days at the University of Alabama in the late-1960s– and later during a highly influential period at the center of the Austin underground punk and literary scenes of the late-70s and early-to-mid-1980s– and one that has found him creating more than a few rogue and far-reaching waves along the way.
A charmingly subversive provocateur who has always strived to create communal spaces for wayward-leaning aesthetes, Legg’s work is the kind of yeoman’s battle against mainstream mediocrity that keeps a city’s cultural life pushing forward in new and unexpected ways, and ultimately pays hidden dividends revealed by the long arc of history. Having helped foster a wide range of artistic endeavors over the years— from art exhibits and Sun Ra celebrations, to poetry readings, Day of the Dead events, and more recently, a folk art-inspired Birmingham music history trading card series— Legg is the kind of quiet visionary whose mark can be felt more in the vapor trail of inspiration he’s left behind than any sort of self-aggrandizing monuments commemorating his many and varied exploits. A silent agent of change, an engine for constant ingenuity, and a DIY craftsman of the highest order, Legg is the type of humble human dynamo that serves as both the support beams for those around him, as well as the pied piper leading the charge, and usually while no one is looking.
(Craig Legg reading poetry at the Chez Lulu Love-In, 1996; L to R from back row: Jason Slacksmith, Craig Legg, Ned Mudd, Davey Williams, Matthew Layne, Carole Griffin, Joyce Hudson, and Matt Beckman at the Brown Recluse Hotel, 1996; Craig Legg reading poetry at a Sun Ra celebration at Bottletree Cafe, 2013.)
I first got to know Craig Legg, or at least the legend of him, as a teenager growing up in Birmingham in the early-1990s. A central pillar of a small but vibrant underground music, art and poetry scene that haunted many of the offbeat spaces I was drawn to as a jaded and wandering adolescent, he operated among a cabal of like-minded older outcasts in town who seemed to be keeping the flame of subterranean creativity alive and flickering for those of us looking for a tribe beyond the confines of Alabama football and, in my case, the doldrums of high school complacency. Tall, wiry, long-haired, and with an obvious affinity for countercultural activities of all stripes, he struck a curious and perplexing figure, and was the type of person you would see around town and whisper to yourself, “I wonder what that guy is up to?” At the time, I was inhabiting an awkward liminal space somewhere between part-time punk and full-time hippie, and in a town where it was hard to find heroes of my ilk to look up to, Legg and his tight-knit group of merry pranksters immediately drew me in as emissaries of the obscure and avant-garde, giving me hope that there were others out there like me in search of a good home, or at least a good hang, here in the Magic City.
And whether it was through his association with inspired artisans like baker and restauranteur Carole Griffin and her French bistro/makeshift art salon known as Chez Lulu, experimental music titans like Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, or the unwieldy spoken word/performance art gang who operated under the moniker of the Kevorkian Skull Poets, Legg always seemed to be at the center of all that was fun and interesting when it came to unique happenings taking place around the city. Too young for the bar scene they inhabited at the time, I would usually catch glimpses of their collective madness at all-ages events and festivals around town, or hear rumors of their endeavors through local publications or word of mouth, attracting even more interest on my part as something I wanted to be a part of some day when I got old enough to participate. Much like earlier childhood heroes from Birmingham like Lonnie Holley (aka- The Sandman) and Willie Perry (aka- the “Batman of Birmingham”), Legg and his crazy cohort had a certain mystique about them that seemed to be larger than life. At least for a wide-eyed teenager whose mind had been transfixed by the seemingly far away worlds of the Beats, 60’s psychedelia, and the CBGBs punk scene. And although I kept up with what they were doing from afar, it wasn’t until my college days, and a stint spent working at Chez Lulu in the late-90s, that I would truly become immersed in their world.
As one of a small handful of gathering spots where Legg and those in his social circle would congregate to eat, drink and be merry— with lots of music and poetry and riotous laughter thrown into the mix— what started out as a way to make a little money in the service industry, ended up turning into a world class education in not just gourmet food and beverages, but art in general, in all of its various forms. With late-night visits from local wrestling legends (and opera aficionados) The Great Kaiser and Dr. Johnny Peebles III, members of the Sugar La-Las, Verbena and Primitons milling about on any given day, and spoken word performances taking place that felt straight out of a mid-50’s reading at City Lights Bookstore, it was hard to not be enthralled by it all. Especially when you believed these were the types of things that only happened in bigger cities like New York, San Francisco or LA. But certainly not in your hometown of Birmingham, Alabama.
But just who were these people? And why were they making all of this joyful noise to begin with?
I was just starting to find out, and would eventually become a close confidant and friend to many of the scene’s main participants, but had little idea what a significant role Legg had played in its existence until later in life as I became something of a local historian and cheerleader for underground arts and culture in Birmingham and around the state of Alabama.
Was Craig Legg even his real name? And where did he come from exactly?
In some ways, it all goes back to the cactus of his youth. And Texas.
(Craig Legg in his home studio, 2024.)
Sports Jocks and Hippie Rock
(Craig Legg school picture from 1956; Craig Legg with brothers Jeff and Rel, 1950’s; Legg family photo from 1950’s, L to R from back row: Craig, Ferrell, Dorothy, Jeff , Rel, Crystal and Dottie.)
Born Craig Underwood in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1950, Legg began his life about as removed from the man he would ultimately become as one of five children from a classic mid-20th century nuclear American family. The son of an insurance executive and loving mother with a slight artistic bent, Legg describes his early childhood as a living embodiment of Leave It to Beaver— with him starring as the Beave— with all of the requisite accoutrement that went along with it. Centered around the home, and filled with wholesome activities, it was the kind of Norman Rockwell existence that most middle class citizens at the time craved, except his happened to be set against a Southwestern backdrop. And although he did not live in New Mexico long, its arid landscape and attachment to indigenous cultures would prove to be a spectral force that would shape him in unforeseen ways in the decades to come.
Moving to a pleasantly suburban suburb of Birmingham known as Homewood in 1956, like many boys of his era he would become deeply immersed in sports. Especially baseball and basketball and the de rigueur trading cards that accompanied them, turning him into an aspiring jock from a very young age. With athletics and girls of primary concern during his adolescent years in Alabama, although it wouldn’t take hold until much later, he also began developing a nascent love for the written word, and could occasionally be found at his local library checking out books to read as a means of escape and light entertainment.
Graduating from Shades Valley High School in 1968, after having played varsity basketball and been an official Home Room Officer and part of the Spanish National Honor Society, Legg would soon move to Tuscaloosa to start an undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama. Unsure of his path forward and initially drawn to fraternity life, over the course of the late-60s, as the counterculture movements of the era made their way to his home state, he slowly began to get radicalized— as many a good red-blooded American did during that time period— in ways that would ultimately see him turn against not just fraternities and sports, but really the entire suburban Leave It to Beaver mythology that he had grown up in. With second wave feminism and the Vietnam War pushing him even further towards progressive causes, and the heady music and drugs of the era reorganizing young people’s priorities in new and exciting ways, he quickly realized the straight life wasn’t for him. And never would be again. Fueled by the evolving horizons in art, music, politics, and literature made possible by psychedelia and the Civil Rights movement, he started to plunge himself ever deeper into the new existentialism of the era and signed up for his first art class to see where it might take him.
It would be the one and only art class he ever took.
“I didn’t get very far because the first thing I learned is you gotta have money to buy all of these materials,” he says today looking back on his time in Tuscaloosa. “The art supply store was the only place in town [to get supplies], and came out with this long list of stuff, and I said, ‘I can’t afford to be an artist if I gotta buy all this stuff.’ So I only took that one course and then I got into the English Department and decided maybe I should be a poet. All you need is a pencil and piece of paper.”
Taking literature and creative writing classes— and doing a deep dive into the world of Russian writers like Dostoevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy, as well as the French symbolists and other, more modern fare— he soon realized that he wasn’t being taught what he wanted to learn about, and probably never would, and eventually dropped out for a semester to go work at a local library in the town of Monroe, Louisiana. An opportunity to read and indulge himself in the things he wanted to, rather than waiting for academia to catch up with where he wanted to be, the move turned out to be a major jumping off point for literary exploration. Coming across the Beat writers, and the wild “on the road” counterculture they helped create and inspire, he would soon embark on a personal journey into their texts and worldview that would send him further down the rabbit hole of bohemian living, and ultimately inspire him to drop out of the University of Alabama for good in 1971.
But not to move to San Francisco or New York as one might expect. Instead, he decided to join the Navy.
“When I was in college I decided I didn’t want to end up in academia,” he says now looking back on that era, “I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t really know anything, and my first efforts at creative writing were atrocious. I didn’t know what to write about because I had never done anything but go to school and grow up in suburbia. So, I thought maybe I should see the world. And then, after the weirdness of Vietnam and Kent State and all that calmed down, I decided the hippies may not have the answer, so I decided to join the Navy. So I dropped out and joined the Navy and went off to see the world to get me something to write about.”
Disillusioned by the illusion of his mid-50’s upbringing, college life, and the oftentimes hyper-idealistic thinking of 60’s counterculture, starting later that year he began what would prove to be an ill-fated excursion into the world’s greatest maritime fighting force. Flying out to Hawaii to be stationed at Pearl Harbor, he ended up doing just one tour of the Orient aboard a torn up destroyer while seeing combat, before being returned to the island to stay landlocked in Honolulu, with a little bit of surfing and partying on the side, until 1974. As he humorously recalls about his time as a sailor, “It was like being on acid for three years. It was just totally weird every step of the way. And it did give me something to write about. I got a 250-page manuscript out of it.”
(Craig Legg in the Navy, early-1970s.)
Having become jaded from his time serving in the armed forces, and in a way that radicalized him even further from mainstream society, to the point of registering as a conscientious objector while stationed there, it proved to be one of the most defining experiences of his entire life and one that would help permanently solidify his outsider status in his own mind. Returning to Birmingham that same year, and somewhat aimless, he would utilize the GI Bill to help get himself back in school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham as an English Major, but once again determined he was not cut out for the academic life. Quickly dropping out after just one tortured semester, he did yet another 180-degree turn and found a bartending job at a local hippie record bar known as the L&N Cafe. One of, if not the only, Grateful Dead-inspired bars in the state of Alabama at the time, it’s a move that would not only provide him with a steady paycheck and a chance to listen to the music he loved and live a “rock and roll lifestyle,” it would also prove be a stepping stone into the next phase of his life as a venue manager and concert promoter in Austin, Texas just a couple of years later.
A popular haunt with the hippie set that would see drunk and stoned twenty-somethings come down to take their shirts off and shake a tail feather to the happening albums of the day, it was a wild scene that would provide Birmingham with one of only a few venues in town for up-and-coming local musicians to show off their wares after having built a small corner stage for budding singer-songwriters and the like to plug into. Allowing him time to familiarize himself with how bars were run, and more importantly, how bands were booked and promoted, he would take lessons learned at the L&N and push them to new heights in Austin after eventually picking up and leaving town again in 1977.
A fateful decision that would ultimately pave the way for everything that was to come, his time in Austin would prove to be pivotal as not just a music fan and promoter, but also in terms of his later literary career and love of multicultural aesthetics, all of which he would eventually bring back home again to Birmingham in the late-1980s. Arriving at the dawn of the punk scene in town, Legg would not only embrace the emerging youth culture surrounding it, despite being a good bit older than most of its participants, he would also learn invaluable lessons about DIY art-making that he would translate into his own endeavors going forward.
Austin City Limits: Big Boys and Slackers in East Texas
(Craig Legg in Austin, TX, 1980; Craig Legg at first public poetry reading at the Chilimpiad chili cookout in San Marcos, TX, 1980; Craig Legg with his mother Dorothy, brother Rel, and father Ferrell outside the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, 1979.)
In one of the great, and revelatory, songs about the transformative power of punk, “History Lesson Part 2,” the Minutemen’s D. Boon sang about how, as teenagers, he and Mike Watt would pretend to be their heroes— the great John Doe from X, Joe Strummer from The Clash, or Richard Hell from Television/Heartbreakers/Voidoids fame— searching for a way to reinvent themselves as a means of escape from the chronic domestic boredom of their hometown of San Pedro, California. Waxing poetic about how the power of a simple name change— an act of personal, if seemingly silly, catharsis— could allow someone to become new again, Boon would ultimately make the case that, for the Minutemen’s radical populism, their “real names’d be proof” that their band, and really any band, could be your life. Or anyone’s life, if they wanted it to. But that was after punk rock had already changed theirs.
A common mechanism utilized across the punk spectrum from the mid-1970s, well into the 1980s, and beyond, changing one’s name— sometimes provocatively, sometimes in more self-referential terms— was just part of what made the whole scene fun, but also subversive at the same time. You could be anyone this time around, as Timothy Leary once famously said, and maybe just change the world along with you. Or at least that was the hope.
Stepping into Austin in the late-1970s after his initial return to his hometown of Birmingham, Legg, still going by his birth name of Underwood, would quickly find himself at the center of a sonic and cultural maelstrom that would not just change his life, but that of the entire Austin music scene in general. Witnessing the birth pangs of Texas punk just as the Ramones and Iggy Pop had recently blown through town and inspired the first small wave of DIY acts like the Violators and the Skunks, over the course of the next few years, Legg’s time at the L&N would help find him ungainful employment at some of the city’s hippest underground music venues, most of which were starting to cater to, or at least put up with, the emerging punk and hardcore scenes.
“Austin back then was just like a big Tuscaloosa,” recalls Legg. “It had a laid back vibe and a lot of hippies and, of course, music, and just emphasis on art. And the whole emphasis was on having a good time. It was a magic place back then. I got a job my first night there at a bar that would later become one of the legendary rock and roll clubs.”
Referring to the famous Liberty Lunch concert and comedy venue in Austin, which had just recently opened its doors in 1976, Legg would immediately find himself at the heart of the coming musical revolution, just as the scene’s aging cosmic cowboy clientele was turning toward new, and more extreme and socially disruptive, forms of music. Only lasting a little over a year at the venue, it would prove to be the first stop on an evolutionary chain of jobs that grew his status as an important member of the underground music community there, and would eventually gain him entry into more cultural happenings around the city. As he recalls, “I was named manager after having been there a year. But mainly I just flipped burgers, and then they put me in charge of booking bands. But I told them I don’t know anything about Austin bands, so I turned that over to a buddy of mine. So I just kind of managed this loose collection of hippies that was the staff.”
(Front door of Liberty Lunch in Austin; Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers outside Liberty Lunch; Marquee for Liberty Lunch. All photos by Craig Legg.)
“These were like the pre-Slacker years,” he says now, referring to the epoch-defining Richard Linklater film about Austin’s disenchanted and stunted youth culture at the time. “But I was kind of living the life of a slacker, just going around poking my nose in here and there, seeing what was going on. It was just a real interesting town. People were doing stuff on all levels— literary, art, music, politics, Latin American community— it was all right there. Of course, it already had the World Armadillo Headquarters, so it was already on the hippie map. Willie Nelson was already there, and the cosmic cowboy scene had come out of there. But when I got there, all that was kind of dying. The hippies were dying and the cosmic cowboys were dying. So everybody was just kind of waiting around for the next thing. So that was kind of interesting, and then the next year the next new thing hit and that was punk rock.”
Having pitched himself to the Austin Sun as an events writer to do a weekly “man on the street” column called Walk Around Town, in the spirit of the era, he decided to change his last name to Legg to tap into the punk ethos he now found himself surrounded by. And although he ultimately didn’t get the job, the pen name stuck. Falling in love with a young female poet from the area around the same time, it was through her that he would also find his way into the burgeoning literary scene in town, and ultimately toggle back and forth between his life in music and what was quickly becoming a renewed interest in the written word. The beginning of a new phase and emphasis on his own writing, he would also start a new job at the Ritz Theatre in 1982 that would see him promote both local bands, as well as touring punk acts who were making their way across the country and were looking for places to play in Texas.
“I got in on the initial hardcore wave of punk in Austin and did shows with the Big Boys and the Dicks and Butthole Surfers, and all those great early Austin bands,” Legg says. “And then they were all connected to California and New York bands. So through them we got to book people like Black Flag and Dead Kennedys and the Misfits and Minor Threat, and that first great era of hardcore.” Adding, “That scene spoke to me because these were rebellious youth, and I had been a rebellious young one, even though the music didn't speak to me. They didn't have anywhere to play, basically. Most of the clubs were run by hippies, and old Austin hippies hated the punks when they first came up, so they weren't gonna give them any gigs. Poor Tim Kerr and Randy Biscuit [from Austin punk legends Big Boys] just would go all over town looking for a gig. But basically, based on my experience at the L&N, I knew that I could handle gigs and handle a venue. So, like I say, I was a venue person and I booked my rock bands both at the Ritz and then another underground place called Voltaire's Basement. I was just kind of a weird uncle, you know, and an older guy. I didn't hang with them or anything, even though I went to some of their parties and stuff. I could have if I wanted, but it wasn't really my scene.”
(Craig Legg onstage with Billy Pringle from the Jitters at the Ritz, 1982.)
Starting at Voltaire’s Basement in 1984, located under a used bookstore that occasionally had punk shows in the bowels of its building, although he wasn’t a huge fan of the music in and of itself, he did enjoy some of it, and was deeply impressed and influenced by the youthful DIY spirit and attitude that most of the bands and their accompanying art embodied, and saw within it a path forward for his own vision and projects. Although those weren’t quite formulated yet. At least not in terms of what they would become years later in Birmingham.
“I didn't do much in the art side, but I was deep into the literary. And at one point I got a job in a used bookstore that also had a performance space in the basement,” he says about his time at Voltaire’s Basement. “Back in Austin in those days, if you had a little corner over there of a store or something, some punk would eventually come in and say, ‘Hey man, can you book my band over there in that corner?’ Those people would just do a gig anywhere. So none of those two jobs— both the Ritz Theatre and Voltaire’s— they weren't real venues, but we made them into venues. You know, hang a bunch of string lights and put a pallet down there, and boom! You got a venue. It was just total DIY. But that was the spirit. I love that spirit of early punk, and it was DIY to the max.”
Familiarizing himself with the used bookstore scene, while continuing to hone his chops as a poet, he would also delve deeply into Texas’ multi-faceted Chicano culture while there through a girlfriend at the time, and would be introduced to a sacred indigenous holiday and festival that would go on to play an outsized role in his life in the form of Día de los Muertos (aka- Day of the Dead). A colorful and irreverent celebration honoring the recently departed, and known throughout neighboring Mexico where it originally began, the festival utilized elaborately decorated altars— or ofrendas as they are known in Mexican culture– covered in personal artifacts, flower petals, Virgin Marys, crucifixes, and other related bric-a-brac, to pay homage to those on their journey through the afterlife and to help eventually guide them back to their loved ones. Filled with other cultural adornments and observed rituals and practices, the festival also prominently features what are known as calaveras, or decorative skulls made out of sugar, that could also be translated into larger paper mache masks, and either be left at the altars themselves or worn by participants. Paying respect to not just the dead, but the transformative spirit of death, the festival would become an inspiration for Legg in ways that he couldn’t possibly imagine. At least not at the time. Also learning about the DIY ‘zine and chapbook diaspora while in Austin, he would start to assemble a small arsenal of skill sets and experiences that would eventually help fuel a creative explosion back in his home state of Alabama.
(Craig Legg writing poetry in Austin; Craig Legg with his father Ferrell and poet Chuck Taylor outside Paperbacks Plus in Austin, 1984.)
“I wasn't publishing. I was more of a performance poet,” he says about first getting into the publishing side of the spoken word scene. “I was really into performance poetry and reading it on stage and working in the oral tradition. ‘Cause, like I say, I had rejected academia and didn't want to end up like those professors in college. I got my very first poem that I ever sent off published and I said, ‘Wow, this is going to be easy!’ And then it took me 10 years to get my next one published, but I just wasn't into it. The whole thought of sitting alone and writing something down and sending it off and having it published, or read by someone you don't know, it just didn't turn me on. I'd much rather get up there and read in front of people, and then you can get immediate feedback, and they'll let you know if you're any good or not. I was more into the live performance of it. And this was right before the slam movement came in. The slam movement didn't get there until after I'd already left. That wasn't going to come in until the late-80s. But the slam movement was all about the performance of poetry and it showed poets that you could kind of be a rock star in that world. So that's what a lot of us were looking for. But the whole thing of being a published poet never really turned me on. But those were the early years before computers and desktop publishing. So I learned how to make little handbooks and publish my own little booklets, which would later lead to desktop publishing of the 90s. So I did some of that.”
Adding, “The main thing is the DIY: do it yourself, do it your own way, but just get out there and do it and don't wait for someone else to do it for you. Or don't necessarily plug in to what's already there. If somebody is not doing something in that town where you are, whether it's Austin or Birmingham, and you think that it should be done. Like the poetry slam is a good example. Or Day of the Dead is a good example. Both those were things that I experienced or learned about out there.”
Embracing DIY print culture, music culture, and event culture, Legg would end up inspired to take the lessons learned in Austin and apply them in a new setting, and one that was calling him back to both his family and the town he had called home during his adolescence. And although he didn’t realize it at the time, some of those experiences, in particular the Day of the Dead, would go on to change the cultural landscape of Birmingham forever. But that was a horizon that had not yet appeared in the distance.
“At one point I had to make a decision whether I was going to stay there or not, or come back here,” says Legg about his impending return to the Magic City. “And the main thing is, I said, ‘Well, there's too many people moving to Austin. I'm part of the problem, too. I moved here. So why don't I just take what I've learned in Austin and go back to Birmingham and see if we can use it there.’ So that's a life lesson that I kind of learned there. I was kind of floundering there and not really sure if I wanted to stay, and then my dad died suddenly in ’87. And my mom had gotten diagnosed as diabetic, and she needed some help. So I kind of said, ‘Well, I'm not doing anything important here, I’ll come back and help you, and we'll see how it goes.’ And then I didn't really know if I was coming back permanent or not. But that's what brought me back here, and then I decided to stay.”
It was a decision that would change not only his own life, but that of a large swathe of Birmingham’s creative community over the next three decades, as he employed Austin-style creativity and punk attitude to his artistic endeavors that would have far-flung consequences for those he would get involved with that no one could quite envision at the time.
Books: Back to Birmingham
(Print ad for Craig Legg’s bookstore, 1995.)
Moving back to Birmingham following the death of his father, with Austin having run its course, upon his return he would be surprised to find that his re-adopted hometown had actually started to catch up with the original music and arts scene he had been enamored of, and ensconced in, in Texas.
As Legg remembers Birmingham at the time, “It had changed, and it was in the process of big change. A lot of things seemed to be percolating and happening. And I did the same thing, basically, as I did in Austin. I just started going around poking my nose in here and there and seeing what was happening, and I was quite satisfied with what was going on: a little bit of this, a little bit of literary, some art, a lot more music. I’d been gone ten years, so there was a lot more music happening, but it was on a level that I equated with the original Austin of ’77 or ’78. In other words, it was about 10 years behind and I said, ‘Well, there's enough here to keep me happy.’”
Snooping around town and reacquainting himself with the new landscape, after settling into life without his father, Legg would soon get a job at the local recycling center where he would work alongside local writer and musician Ed Reynolds. Heading up the mostly thankless, but in their minds, important job running what was then a relatively new eco-friendly enterprise in the Magic City, after a few years in the trenches separating plastic and glass from one another he would get the itch to reconnect with his literary and bookstore roots in Austin.
“I’d learned the used book business out in Austin,” he says now reflecting on his transition back into life in Alabama. “And there wasn’t a good used bookstore to work in here in ’87, but one opened in either ’89 or ’90 on Highland Avenue, the Highland Booksmith. It's now the Alabama Booksmith in Homewood, but it started off on Highland Avenue, and I was one of their first employees. So I worked there a couple years, and then in ’95 I opened my own bookstore. I was really into books and book-selling and all aspects of the book business: reading them, writing them, and sewing them.”
Having hooked up with a small but influential group of likeminded writers and artists over the course of the late-80s and early-1990s, and eager to apply the DIY lessons learned in Austin to Birmingham, he opened what would become a short-lived, but highly influential bookstore and gathering spot in the Glen Iris neighborhood of Birmingham called simply, Books. Filled top to bottom with the literary figures he had begun devouring going back to his college days in Tuscaloosa, as well as Tejano and Southwestern-inspired decorations, the store would quickly become a central hub of literary activity in town for anyone looking for a place to read poems, share in the great tradition of the salons of yore, and maybe have a little fun along the way. Slightly anarchic, open to all, and encouraging of others to let their freak flag fly in a non-judgmental setting, it would prove to be the beginning of a much larger cultural evolution that would soon expand beyond the doors of the bookstore itself.
One of those early adopters was a burgeoning young hippie poet, now turned award-winning spoken word artist and librarian, Matt Layne, who would become an integral part of not just the bookstore, but Legg’s life in general. As Layne recalls upon first coming across the space, “He had rented this place out, built a bunch of bookshelves, put his entire book collection and things that he had collected on the shelves, and just put it all up for sale. There were rugs on the floor— very DIY bohemian— paper mache skulls, Mexican serapes, and all sorts of things hanging around. I immediately fell in love with the space.”
“Well, I wanted to use it as just part-time income, or full-time income, so I could support myself while I was writing my own books,” says Legg about opening the bookstore. “It didn't work out that way, because I didn't sell enough books. But we started a poetry series— spoken word series— every Friday night. And we probably had more fun than any group of poets should ever be allowed to have. We didn't sell much books, but we sure had a lot of fun. And it was a real small place. Twenty people would pack the place. But eventually we'd get thirty or forty that wanted to come. So we started doing events that got popular, and then we'd go out to a restaurant or a pizza joint, or look out for other venues if we had something that was more interesting. But like I say, we just cut up and had fun and drank and smoked pot. And we'd throw birthday parties for dead people like Janis Joplin or John Coltrane or something, and later Bukowski. We just had a lot of fun and that was real infectious. People like to be around fun.”
“People were showing up for it in ways that I had not seen at other poetry gatherings. So it was a really, really fun thing to be a part of,” adds Layne.
(L to R: Charles Tortorici, Matthew Layne, Carole Griffin and Christophe Nicolet outside Craig Legg’s Books, 1996.)
Charles Tortorici, another aspiring local poet and writer, who had actually come across Legg back in the late-1970s without realizing it as a patron of the L&N Cafe, would also quickly be drawn into its inner sanctum and circle alongside Layne and others. Inspired by its everything-all-at-once hippie Beat punk attitude, and the sense of freedom it embodied among those that became regular attendees at the poetry readings, Tortorici immediately recognized Legg’s loudly quiet, hands off, pied piper leadership for what it was.
“The bookstore only lasted for a year,” says Tortorici. “Not that it was a revenue generating kind of thing, ‘cause it was almost an anti-capitalism bookstore. So you're not going to make any money. But Craig recognized the fact that if indeed whatever he had been doing in Austin, this, for him, it was just a continuation. He was in that tradition of being that kind of person that spurred on this kind of literary gathering— had the vision, provided the space, all of that. However temporal or impermanent it was in the moment, was all that it was, whatever was going on. And we were trying to express that.”
Becoming part of a loose-knit group of spoken word and performance artists known as the Kevorkian Skull Poets, most of whom were centered around activities at the store, including people like Layne and Tortorici, Legg slowly but surely started to build a reputation as one of the leading lights of a new and wild-eyed literary scene in Birmingham, and one that built off the legacy of earlier spaces like Apple Books in Five Points and Dennis Hunt’s Invisible Reading Room series at the Fifth Gate Art Gallery in Crestwood and other venues around town. Also taking part in anarcho-musical performances alongside people like free improv guitarist Davey Williams, Charlemagne Records guru Jimmy Griffin, and local madcap eco-lawyer Ned Mudd, as The Kevorkian Effect, Legg would find himself at the heart of a new gang of outsider aesthetes who delighted in wrecking the rule book of what music, art and poetry could and should be.
“I’m pretty sure that moniker came from Ned,” recalls Layne about the Kevorkian Skull Poets name. “It was the time of Jack Kevorkian, and it just sort of fit what we were doing. We were kind of about death and resurrection and bringing an artistic form to people that, for the most part, weren’t particularly interested in and transmitting it in new ways. We were all inspired by Sun Ra, who had come to town for the first time in decades. ’88 I think was his first visit here, and Craig had photographed him at The Nick. He played Grundy’s Music Hall and several other gigs around town in the ensuing years. I got to see him at The Chukker at a three-night stand. So I think we were all kind of inspired by that improvisational scene and what we had going on with Davey and LaDonna here in town. And when Davey and LaDonna would do their Improv Fest, then we were usually involved with that as well. And Davey would show up some nights at the bookstore.”
Taking direct inspiration from Sun Ra and his freewheeling live performances, as well as the growing worldwide reputation of Williams and Smith on the experimental music circuit, the group stood as torchbearers for a new generation of extemporaneous artists who wanted to not just live in the moment, but be the moment itself.
“That happened plenty of times where people were just kind of inspired by the moment and then would get up and rap something,” says Layne. “And there were crazy magical nights. One of the ones that really stands out is Goin’ Out West, which has its own chapbook. Craig was getting ready to take his first vacation in a while and was headed out to the Taos Poetry Circus with Charles [Tortorici]— and I think they went out to California— but he did a play on Tom Waits’s ‘Goin’ Out West' and recited this long poem, and he came out in a sombrero and serape and nothing else. And then, at some point in the poem, whipped off the serape and just read in front of the crowd in the nude. It was fantastic, and so beautiful, and naked. It just felt like a precious moment. And it felt like the poetry was flowing, that there was no such thing as writer’s block.”
(Front and back cover to Craig Legg’s “Waiting on the Brady Bill” & the Bookstore Cowboys chapbook, 1997.)
Fueled by crazy nights of music, text and revelry, the group of friends would also go on to participate in the first ever Day of the Dead event in Birmingham, which was spearheaded by Legg and inspired by the events he got to be a part of in the 1980’s through his girlfriend back in Austin. Having learned how to make the paper mache skull masks that were such an integral part of the festival while in Texas, it was a skill that he not only excelled at, but would teach others how to do to great effect back home.
“I learned it out there. Because I had a girlfriend who was a Chicana, and big in the Latin American community, and her organization brought Day of the Dead to Austin,” Legg recalls, “And she and her sister had learned it from Berkeley, so you can see the connection. It's going from Berkeley, and then they started it in Austin. And actually, I'm the one who started Day of the Dead in Birmingham. I did the first public Day of the Dead celebration out of my bookstore in ’95. And then I did a second one downtown in ’97, which Tracy Martin [artist and daughter of legendary Civil Rights photographer, Spider Martin] came to. And then Tracy basically started the Bare Hands [art gallery] Day of the Dead a few years later. But yeah, I basically learned it in Austin and brought it back here.” Adding, “The Skull Poets came out of the bookstore and out of that Day of the Dead thing, because some guy called them ‘pumpkin heads,’ because they were the size of a 12-inch balloon. And then we just put a slit in the back so you could wear them. So we wore them in performances. We didn't do a whole bunch of gigs, and we weren't like a coherent group or anything, so they probably get more press than they earned, but we had a lot of fun doing it.”
The humble beginnings of an event that would later go on to become one of the biggest multicultural festivals in both Birmingham and the state of Alabama, it would be Legg’s familiarity with, and adherence to, not just the idea of the celebration, but the meaning and spirit it had for the actual culture it came from that made it so endearing to people. Always one to pay respect and reverence to the roots of such a uniquely Latino event, and fully aware of his place as a middle class white man from Alabama transplanting it in non-native soil, Legg would set the standard for how the festival should be run, which would ultimately make it one of the most well-known events of its kind in the region. Which was no small feat given that it was taking place in the deepest part of Dixie at a time when Birmingham was still not seen as being a very welcoming place to anything other than white, Euro-centric life and culture.
But before that could happen, Legg and the Skull Poets would become well known for something far more scandalous. At least for the time period, when they decided to participate in another local festival in 1996— this one much bigger and better known than the nascent Day of the Dead they had just earnestly started at Craig’s bookstore— at an event called City Stages.
(Charles Tortorici and Craig Legg at the first Birmingham Día de los Muertos festival, 1995.)
Día de los Muertos: From Skull Poet to Skull Prophet
As Birmingham’s premier multi-day– and family-friendly– music festival, City Stages was the kind of civically-minded event that had engendered a renewed sense of pride in the Magic City in the late-1980s and early-1990s, and had helped put it on the map in terms of becoming a destination concert town for the burgeoning music festival circuit. With an eclectic booking policy that highlighted both big name national acts and up-and-coming local bands, as well as roots and world music from all over the state, country and globe, City Stages would prove to be both the apex of the Kevorkian Skull Poets’ activities, as well as the beginning of their downfall. At least in terms of being a slightly unhinged, and mildly coherent, collective.
Invited to perform by a younger artist and poet who had recently come to town named Hunter Bell, who had become a part of the bookstore’s early hip clientele and convinced the festival to let him produce a spoken word stage that year, the Kevorkian clan jumped at the chance to take their art and performances mainstream by agreeing to appear at the event. A fateful decision that would not only enrage the festival, local cops and concert-goers alike, it was an appearance that would subsequently stir a citywide debate about the protections of the First Amendment when it came to the limits of free speech in the state of Alabama.
Taking the stage on the last day of the festival— a sunny Sunday in the buckle of the Bible Belt, no less— Legg and the rest of the Kevorkian crew dressed up in their usual bohemian-inspired intergalactic garb, along with the requisite masks, and began what started off as a fun, if decidedly ‘out,’ series of spoken word and performance art pieces that had most people just scratching their heads. But not much more than that. That is, until a poet named Lori Lasseter decided to read a poem containing a few extravagant f-bombs that didn’t quite go over well. But even then, only a few heads were turned, and maybe some young ears muffled.
And then Craig Legg got up to read.
As Layne remembers the scene, “I had gotten married at dawn that morning, and so Carole [Griffin] and I had come down, and we were still in our wedding garb— I’m in a white tuxedo and Carole’s in her wedding dress. And Craig had made all of these paper mache masks of different endangered species and was doing this poem on the Cahaba [River]. Now, before that, I think Lori Lasseter had done a poem that had some fucks in it or something that pissed off the powers that be. And so Craig did his poem, that was really, as I recall, a kind of meditation on how we were there in the Harbert Plaza and there were all these animals that were being wiped out basically by our development. So there were drummers drumming, and Craig was rapping, and somebody I think tried to burn a vinyl flag— an American flag. And I think that was not really successful at all, but was of note, and then he went into a poem dedicated to Carole and myself on the occasion of our marriage, and that’s when they pulled the plug. So Carole and I got up next to him, and we were on either side of him reading the poem from the page, and just shouting it out with no microphones. I think Ned got them to plug things back in a few minutes later for a bit, but it didn’t last too terribly long.”
And pull the plug they did. Surrounded by a group of enraged officials from the festival, along with a group of local police officers ready to put a quick end to such an outrageous display of foul-mouthed anti-patriotism, the Skull Poets and their ilk would be unceremoniously asked to leave despite pleas to honor their First Amendment rights, but all to no avail.
“After that, all I know is I went and danced. I think King Sunny Adé was playing, but it was a crazy wild day,” adds Layne. “So, it was weird seeing cops kind of storming the poetry stage. And it was certainly not the first time the word fuck had been used on a stage at City Stages. I guess it’s just something with poetry. It does feel scarier to people. And to hear language upset somebody enough that they felt like the stage needed to be shut down.”
(Kevorkian Skull Poets at City Stages, 1996.)
Sparking a series of op-eds in the local papers that bantered back and forth about a citizen’s right to both protest and speak freely, even if at a city-sanctioned music festival, the event brought an unwanted spotlight on the group’s activities, and in some ways was a precursor to Legg ultimately folding up the bookshop. That, and the fact that he never really made any money from it to begin with. Never one to rest on his laurels, despite having to give up his dream of running an independent used book store, and the subsequent literary scene that sprang up around it, the spark had been lit for not just the next phase of Legg’s wily arts career, but also that of the poetry scene in general. In fact, despite that year’s onstage commotion, the Spoken Word Stage would continue on, with Legg and Bell’s involvement, for another four years, and would also lay the foundation for a new poetry slam scene that would do events around the city.
“Me and Hunter became partners, and we started the Birmingham Poetry Slam [following City Stages],” says Legg, “So, all this was going on, one right after another, and then the Poetry Slam ran concurrent for the first few years of the Spoken Word Festival. I think that City Stages Spoken Word Festival lasted five years. So, we had five really good years there. And then the BAA and the improv scene was going on at the same time, and we would just come in and out of each other's scenes.”
Referring to the Birmingham Arts Alliance, another DIY arts organization in town Legg would be a big part of through the late-90s, it was there that the Day of the Dead festival would lay the groundwork for a new and bigger phase through the efforts of Tracy Martin. It’s also where I happened to attend my very first Sun Ra celebration in Birmingham, headed up by Bell and Legg, and featuring performances by Davey Williams and the Arkestra’s Jothan Callins, a fellow Birmingham native. A mind-blowing concert that I was taken to by Skull Poet Charles Tortorici, it was a night that proved to be a fateful moment in my own life, and one that would ultimately lead me to not only work with Williams extensively over the course of the next two decades, but also create a lifelong love for the music and spirit of Ra, who I had only just begun to understand as a jazz artist.
“That was the hub of kind of the avant, cutting edge art group in town,” says Legg. “It was before Bare Hands. LaDonna and Davey were in that scene, and they were bringing people to town, and there was a literary aspect of that scene. So we did a lot of stuff in conjunction with them and their improv scene for a few years. And that's actually where the Sun Ra tributes started. They came out of that.”
Featuring all manner of art, music and spoken word happenings, the BAA would prove to be another fertile space for Legg’s creativity, and one that would be a transitional venue for what would ultimately become the Day of the Dead festival people in Birmingham know and love today.
“After the bookstore he was working at the recycling center,” recalls Layne, “but he was also working with the Birmingham Arts Alliance. And they used to have a couple of different spots downtown on the north side when I was coming up through my 20s. But it was just an artist collective, and they had an actual physical space that they would rent out and have different art shows there. So Craig served as the curator for that area, and then he started doing paper mache workshops down there, and he would make entire calavera skeletons for folks. So he would set them in industrial vegetable cans with concrete— he’d put a stick and do a chicken wire covering to create their bodies— and then make paper mache skulls for different people.”
It was through his work at the BAA, and his second Day of the Dead festival there in 1997, that Legg would inspire Martin to take up the mantle and run with it following her father Spider’s passing in 2003. Introducing her to the sacred spirit of the festival, the meaning behind its symbolism, and showing her how to create the altars, masks and skeletons that are such an integral part of a traditional Mexican celebration for the deceased, it would be through her subsequent involvement that the festival would become not only one of the most beloved events in Birmingham, but also an actual Latino-oriented holiday, as it was originally intended.
“Tracy definitely came down to BAA.,” remembers Layne. “And when Spider died she wanted to pay tribute to him with a Día de los Muertos ofrenda. So she used the alleyway out behind the Bare Hands art gallery, and used lights and photographs, and all sorts of fetishes, and things along there to represent her dad, Spider Martin. Who was a Civil Rights photographer who was present and witnessed and photographed what happened on Bloody Sunday down in Selma. And those photographs went out across the world and really helped bring world focus on the injustice that was happening in Alabama.”
(Tracy Martin, Carole Griffin and Matthew Layne at the Día de los Muertos festival at Birmingham Arts Alliance, 1997.)
Utilizing the downtown art space to their fullest ability, Martin would enlist the help of gallery owner Wendy Jarvis to not only assist with putting on early festivals, but also eventually run with it on her own and create a professional nonprofit organization around it all, Bare Hands Inc., which still runs the festival today. Helped out later by beloved Mexican restauranteur Guillermo Castro, who had a massive hand in creating outreach between the festival and the Latino diaspora scattered around town, the Day of the Dead celebration would grow in leaps and bounds over the course of the next twenty years. Accompanied by Craig’s watchful eye and diligent DIY spirit by their side, the group would make a lasting impact on Birmingham’s cultural life that continues to this day and is now one of the city’s most respected and well-attended cultural events. And not just for the well-meaning gringos that originally started it all, but also an under-served Latino community in Birmingham that had never had an authentic event like that to call their own.
“Well, our main relationship ended up being Day of the Dead,” says Martin looking back on that early period. “And I didn’t know Craig all that well. He did a piece at a Birmingham Arts Alliance Day of the Dead show [in 1997], and I had an altar in it. And I think I went over there for maybe a party or whatever. But I had no idea how prolific he was as a visual artist, and was even way back then. I mean, the amount of work he’s amassed, there should be some sort of documentary for sure. I think he's, in so many areas, so creative, and he's got one of these minds that are just constantly spinning.”
“I’m completely, wildly, blown away. I never imagined it would end up like it is today,” she adds. “I mean, 20 years later— I had no idea. It was still very grassrootsy, arty, for the decade or so at our original spot [Bare Hands]. And, you know, it was just looser and it was more intimate and we didn't have any real restrictions or anything like that. But the restriction was that Craig and I both wanted it to be as authentic as gringos possibly could and be respectful. And try to get the Hispanic community to come and be part of it. And it took a while for that. We had to fight people a lot to educate them because there’s so much misinformation about doing something like this where people want to see the dark side only, or judge. You know, not associated with Halloween and anything sinister or whatever.”
Fighting some of the same conservative forces that brought the collective hammer down on the Kevorkian Skull Poets in 1996, the festival had to fight ingrained cultural assumptions around the city to finally break through and make it a true community-wide event. And now, having made it well into the 21st century and moved to one of the largest event spaces in Birmingham, the iconic Sloss Furnaces, Day of the Dead in Birmingham has become something of a national sensation.
“I am amazed. I’m very, very proud of it, too,” says Legg. “We get compliments from people from Austin, LA, San Francisco— other places. It's gotten almost too big. I think LA at last count has 45 different Day of the Dead celebrations, so it's really caught on around the country. So yeah, I'm really proud of what we've done there.”
“It’s a beloved festival,” beams Martin. “I’ve had so many people, some of the musicians who came from out of state, just tell us— one in particular, Flaco Jimenez, who Craig has been a real fan of his, he’s an Austin guy— and he called it a ‘soul festival.’ So we love that. Truly, Craig is the one who would sort of champion doing all the ritual things, not just for the public, but for us in terms of having reverence and observing what we needed to observe. Like the day before when the souls were coming back and we were there to welcome them. And we did this sort of privately. We feasted with them, we celebrated, and we listened to music. We played music and drank, and had our festivities, and then carried on to the next day and brought the public in. And so, I think we always got a great reception and good feedback. It started word of mouth. I mean, there's so many Hispanic people that are in Birmingham— a huge community that never got to do anything like that and celebrate themselves.”
A testament to Legg’s unwavering commitment to excellence and detail, and working with whatever materials are available to him and teaching others how to do the same, Day of the Dead is just one of the examples in which he has left his mark on Birmingham in ways that most people don’t realize, even today.
“Give him credit for the original first Day of the Dead events for sure,” says Martin. “Again, to this day, I still am flabbergasted about how prolific he is. I mean, we've done Day of the Dead for 22 years, but I knew him before that, so we had a solid relationship in the beginning of Day of the Dead. And then he would come up with things for themes for who we were going to do like a feature altar for, and then he would practically produce all the artwork himself. It was epic stuff.”
It was also through Day of the Dead that Legg would launch his next epic adventure. This time returning to the art form he had tried out and quickly left behind back in the late-1960s in Tuscaloosa.
(Craig Legg at Día de los Muertos, 2010.)
Pictures Worth A Thousand Words
Having worked primarily on Day of the Dead celebrations through the early-2000s, as well as at Reed Books in downtown Birmingham, following his mother’s death in 2010, after having spent several years as her caretaker, Legg found himself in need of new direction. Burnt out and wanting to find some sort of art therapy to help ease his mind, he decided to try his hand at painting again in earnest. Having spent countless hours making masks, skeletons and altars for others over the preceding years, it was through his experience with the festival he helped create that he built up the confidence to embark on his next large-scale endeavor.
“The painting started to come in during Day of the Dead, because I was around a lot of artists, but I was intimidated because I'd never really painted,” says Legg. “But I was making a lot of signs and doing a lot of spray paint. And so through that, I basically saw a whole lot of bad art, and I just said, ‘Well, I could probably do that good if I wanted to try my hand at it.’ So, eventually— I forget exactly— I started doing oil pastels, ‘cause they're just like big boy crayons or something. You can just rub them with your hand and get on your knees like you're a little kid. And so I started off on oil pastels. But it wasn't until after my mother died and I had quit caregiving and I was ready to get back into the scene again after not doing much for five years except Day of the Dead. That was the only thing I kept in touch with and kept doing while I was caregiving. So, I had quit making the chapbooks. The technology had changed, and I hadn't changed with it, so I didn't do any more of those. So, at one point, after I settled my mother's estate, I just said, ‘Well, I'm gonna sit down and teach myself how to paint.’”
Starting off doing a few small thematic shows at places like Rojo and the T Rex Gallery, Legg would put his considerable work ethic and research capacity to great use by creating in-depth looks at subject matter ranging from the history of Mexican artists, to the interplanetary worlds of Sun Ra. Untrained, but with a style similar to other Southern folks artists like Georgia’s Rev. Howard Finster, Legg began to develop a visual vocabulary all his own that had an endearing naive realism to it, but filtered through the eyes of a world-weary adult. Selling his paintings immediately upon debuting them, he soon discovered that not only did he enjoy painting, but there was actually a market for it. Slowly building up a repertoire and methodology for his craft, he began to hit on the idea of telling the history of music, and more specifically local Birmingham music, as part of a “trading card” series he wanted to create harkening back to his earliest days as a wannabe jock in Homewood back in the 1950s. Starting off first with a series actually dedicated to baseball, the idea would quickly morph into an ongoing, and sprawling, artistic concern that continues to this day.
“Artists are big on having theme shows, and some of these people drive me crazy because they come up with these names, but the show is nothing about it,” recounts Legg. “So, I just needed a theme, and something to paint, and I had done the Mexican artist series, so I thought I could do portraits, and then I just hit on the idea of baseball cards. Because, like I say, I was raised as a jock, and all my whole life, or my whole boyhood, we collected baseball cards. And baseball cards were probably the first little art objects I ever really paid attention to. Because they are kind of art objects, so I just hit on that theme. You know, it's a thing: paint what you love. I still love baseball. So I did the history of baseball and that was first trading card series. And I had a lot of fun doing it. So then I went on to history of football, and then I did a history of dead Birmingham artists, which was a Day of the Dead project. Because we always did themes with Day of the Dead. And then I had done a jazz series at one point. And then I pinpointed in on Birmingham and did the history of Birmingham jazz. And then the rock and roll [series] would eventually come out of that. So, I’ve done ten trading card series. The rock and roll was probably number eight.”
(Craig Legg’s Sun Ra Arkestra Exhibit at East Village Arts; Travis Morgan and Russell Gulley from Muscle Shoals rockers Jackson Highway at the History of Birmingham Rock and Roll Exhibit; Craig Legg’s tiny painting gallery at East Village Arts, 2024.)
Driven to create intricately detailed histories of the subjects he’s investigating with his brush, it’s not just big name artists that Legg highlights in his work. In fact, most of his material is inspired by countless lesser known bands and musicians he has come across, through both memory and research, and turbocharged through relentless reading, that make up the majority of his expansive universe. Painting sometimes hundreds of miniature portraits for each exhibit that shine a spotlight on not just artists and musicians, but also venues, club owners, DJs, promoters, and anyone else that might help make a local scene possible, Legg has made it his mission to give voice to the forgotten heroes of the Magic City music community who have brought joy to so many over the years. Even if for just a short while. And whether it’s popular 60’s garage rock bands like The Ramblers and The Distortions, blues acts like the great Boditch and Jerry McCain, local TV personalities like Country Boy Eddie, or towering figures like Emmylou Harris and Sun Ra, he treats them all with the same amount of reverence, respect and research.
“Well, the research runs concurrent to the painting,” says Legg. “I just dive in and I may or may not plan the whole thing. But I just dive in and one thing leads to the next. And the rock and roll started off, I was only gonna do the early years. I wasn't even going to go until 1990, because I knew after 1990 there'd be so much that I wouldn’t know the difference between a lot of the people, so I was going to quit. But, as it went on, I just got so into it, and then I loved doing the research, and then you see where all the little pieces fall, and the big jigsaw puzzle starts to come together. So, I couldn't stop painting on that one.”
Acting as an amateur historian, who just happens to use paint as his medium, he has now created an almost unmatched compendium of local musical knowledge on canvas, most of which hangs at East Village Arts in the East Lake neighborhood of Birmingham. Another DIY art space that Legg helped get off the ground following a brief tenure he spent making art at a rundown ex-porn theater across the street, and now run by Executive Director LaDonna Smith and a small cast of dedicated volunteers, East Village Arts has become Legg’s home away from home, and a place he often goes to paint when not doing work at his cactus-covered abode just a handful of blocks down the street.
And surprisingly to him, his most recent exhibits for his trading card series have finally brought him some well-deserved, if belated, recognition for his artistic excess and vision. Recently featured alongside his rock and roll trading card series on Alabama Public Television’s Monograph series about impactful Alabama artists, and having been in a new music documentary about Tuxedo Junction and the history of Birmingham jazz called The Almost Lost Story of Tuxedo Junction, it seems like Legg’s day in the spotlight himself might finally be here. Helped by Southern Music Research founder Burgin Mathews, and local music champion Travis Morgan— both of whom have highlighted his work for others over the past few years— Legg is still somewhat amused by the whole situation. Especially as someone who has always shied away from publicity or recognition of any kind.
“Well, I mean, I'm real thankful for it. I'm surprised for it,” Legg says in his usually demure style. “But I will say for this rock and roll show, the credit needs to go to Travis Morgan, because he PR'd that thing. And he's responsible for getting all those people to that opening and for pushing it. And so it really helps to have a good PR guy in your corner. Because I would do these— I would call them tiny openings— because I didn't want to go to a whole big fanfare of making a big deal out of it and saying, ‘I’m gonna have this opening, won't you come,’ and all this stuff. Because I still don't have a whole lot of confidence in myself as an artist.”
Typically self-effacing, one can only hope that this is a beginning of a much deeper dive into his storied output, and even greater recognition for everything he has done for the Birmingham art, music and literary scenes over the years. Because much like the largely forgotten artists he loves to paint, he deserves it, and has made a massive contribution to helping preserve the Magic City’s often underappreciated cultural legacy.
“It's really important for them to get their due, and that's what makes a scene,” he says about his work today. “That's what I learned in Austin. That's one of the main lessons I learned in Austin. Because I was always asking myself, ‘Why is this place so cool and what makes it happen out here?’ First of all, you got to have the talent. So it had that, but talent doesn't exist in a vacuum. You gotta have the support system, the infrastructure. And then in rock and roll, you know, it's everything from record stores to radio stations, to music critics, to venue people, concert promoters— you need all that stuff happening, and all that support personnel to facilitate the artist and the talent. Because without it, it's not going anywhere. And that's one reason for the success of Austin was all of their support system was in-house. It was all Texas and they kind of had to learn that you got to go outside of Texas and get some people from New York or LA or somewhere who really know how to do things in the music world. And then that's how you're going to break out and transcend your own little home scene. So it takes a combination of that, and then it kind of comes full circle where people get tired of that after a while, and then they go back and concentrate on the local, so it kind of goes in cycles. But that support system is real important and it's real important for those people to get their due.”
A Man of Place: The Craig Leggacy
(Original Craig Legg collage work, 1980s.)
So just who is Craig Legg again? And what will his final legacy be?
Although the general public may just be finding out about him and his art, it’s his peers here in Birmingham, and those that have learned at his side, that are the most blown away by all that he has done and accomplished over the course of his life. Including myself. As someone who has constantly tried to shine a light on others, and encourage them to do things themselves, his passing on of institutional knowledge— whether it be with the music history of his hometown or Day of the Dead activities— has become a calling card and symbol of artistic generosity that will continue to reverberate for years to come. Having recently gotten to put together a Sun Ra celebration at East Village Arts this past year with Legg, that in so many ways brought our own story full circle, it was amazing to watch him work, even at his advanced age, and run circles around younger people helping with the project. But even more important than that, was getting to soak up his general knowledge about not just Ra, but Birmingham jazz in general.
“Like, for me, I know a lot of people who are musicians in Birmingham, or were from way back, but I had no idea,” says Tracy Martin, in awe of Legg’s recent work with his trading card series. “He's an encyclopedia, too, in addition to what he can physically output, as far as art goes. Whatever it is he's working at, he does research, he provides information, like stuff to read— history of the person, the area, all the details that go with whoever it is he's focused on. I don't know. I just feel like he's kind of an unknown maestro or something. I wish he had more recognition around the country. I guess he's getting a little of that now, but in terms of being a local in Birmingham, he may still be a surprise to a lot of people. But I'm so happy for him in the last few years he's really been featured and exposed. There should be a book.”
“There's been an evolution over time,” adds Charles Tortorici. “He did masks, he did kachinas, he did a whole lot of Sun Ra stuff, all that. Then he started doing that jazz stuff with found objects. He did all of that before he started getting into all of that historical thing. But he's always— anytime he's done an art opening— he's done a research thing and he'll have something printed out so he's not only giving you a visual thing to look at, he's also giving you a historical or research reference to something. So it's just multi-sensory as far as all of that, and an education thing at the same time.” Musing, “I think he has spurred on, and lit the spark for, or helped fan the flames of, a lot of different people in creative life. Or at least mine. And he brought together a lot of people as a result of that. Yes, he's on the underground, the fringes, partly because that's where he thrives. It's not that he will push away the attention. But I don't know. Only he knows when he gets back to his house and all that, whether he cares about a lot of the attention. I mean, ultimately, any artist wants to at least do okay to pay the bills and make a living. Beyond that, what else do you seek out? I think he continues to court his muse wherever it is leading him.”
“Craig is huge in the Birmingham arts scene on a number of levels,” marvels Matt Layne. “He’s a historian. He loves to research and then share the history of a thing. He has some great pieces on the history of Birmingham poetry that basically follows from Birmingham’s inception to present day, looking at what is going on in the Birmingham art scene. We’ve really seen that historian come out in— for a long time it was written word and spoken word— but in the past several years he’s focused more on his art and creating these postcard remembrances of different types of musicians. And I love that he’s kind of tracing all these different musical genres in Birmingham and making sure these stories are not forgotten. And whether it’s your grandma with a banjo, or Jimmy Buffett, those stories deserve to be told, and I love the visual way that he’s depicting them.”
Adding, “Whether he’s working with neophyte artists down at Day of the Dead, or teaching somebody at East Village Arts, he’s happy to kind of bring people in at all different skill levels in the spirit of creation. And you never know what’s going to come out of it. It’s still part of that improvisational scene that might get something that’s just glop, or you might end up with something totally brilliant when you’re bringing somebody else in to work with you on something. And he’s willing to have those mistakes and continue to create. And ever since I’ve known Craig since the early-90s, he has never stopped creating. Like one art form or another, he is working on it and making it happen. So, it’s really amazing. Pretty fantastic. I’ve been introduced to so many things through him.”
And what does Craig himself think of it all? In the end, in his estimation, he’s just happy to have been a small but meaningful part of his city’s rich artistic history. Whether anyone noticed or not.
“An obscure poet that nobody's ever heard of I once read, wrote a poem that, the gist of it was, that all he wanted in life was to be happy and to become a man of place,” he says now looking back on his unlikely life and career. “Meaning that, he felt good in this place, he had made his peace with where he was at, and he had made a difference, and that's all he wanted. He didn't want to be great, rich, or powerful, or anything. He was happy just being a man of place. So that's the way I feel about it. And then you can look back and you say you've made a difference.”
And make a difference he has.
(L to R: Matthew Layne with Craig Legg at East Village Arts; Jimmy Griffin, Matthew Layne, Burgin Mathews, Gottfried Kibelka and Craig Legg at Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame; Craig Legg and Russell Gulley from Muscle Shoals rockers Jackson Highway at East Village Arts.)
(L to R: Craig Legg’s home studio; Sun Ra painting; Jason Isbell, Patterson Hood and Brittany Howard paintings for Alabama Humanities Alliance. 2024)
(Craig Legg episode from Alabama Public Television series Monograph.)
