Tom Watkins X (1952 – 2021)

greggkirk · June 27, 2021 at 10:54 am

Here is a comment we received via email from George Stewart…

Thank you for filling in the gaps in Tom’s life after I saw him last at the delaware Art Museum’s celebration of the Newark and Wilmington Art Scene in the 70s.
Below is my memories of those times in Wilmington

Best,
Geo. Stewart
Producer/Host
“Crazy College” and “Scratchy Grooves”
Side Two Productions

Unconfirmed rumors are circulating that Tom Watkins has died. Here is an excerpt from my work-in-progress autobiography, “It Was Fun While It Lasted” about my days with Tom and our art collective at the Rondo Center.

After stretching out my college career past its breaking point, I found myself in Wilmington, part of a very limited and quickly apparent unsuccessful attempted at revitalizing the decaying city. Tom Watkins, Joyce Blabner, Craig Dawson and I were the foundation of an arts collective centered around the Rondo Center whose various parts included Tom Watkins’s studio and apartment, a cinematique, and a comic book store, Xanadu, run by Craig. The 4-story brick building sat on the corner or 5th and Shipley streets and use to house one of the nine newspapers that kept Wilmington’s population well informed (mostly about sports and murders) as the 18th century drifted into the 19th. The building was designed to be functional, with large windows and floors of roughly hewed wide thick planks, spotted and stained by printer’s ink and burned by the splattering of melted lead used to make type. It was on the very top floor that once housed the lino-type machines, which had been hung on iron hooks bolted to a series of mammoth beams that ran across the ceiling.

The Rondo Center itself overlooked Market Street barely perceptible through the two huge grimy windows and was dressed up with a few mismatched chairs, a couch and well-worn pillows scattered along the floor.

Tom and I booked most of the events at The Rondo Center, a casually scheduled series of programs that was eclectic in the extreme. The Rondo Center was named after an obscure 1940s character actor Rondo Hatton who suffered from acromegaly, a rare disease that progressively disfigures its victims, distending limbs and swelling facial features into a grotesque simulacrum of our Neanderthal ancestors. The once hansom actor found as sad sort of stardom as a horror actor employed by a studio pleased to be able to save a fortune in monster makeup in their rock-gut horror films.

He was the perfect mascot for Tom’s biggest undertaking, a major Happening centered around the Rondo center and Rick Jones’ studio across the street in what is now The Queen music venue. Christened The First Annual Sleaze Convention (and so far the ONLY edition of Sleaze Convention) the event brought the nascent New York Punk Scene to Wilmington. John Holstrom and Legs McNeal, the publishers of the Punk Magazine came down and Legs immediately vomited on the studio floor. Soon-to-be super star Debbie Harry also came, having just left The Stilettos for a new band, Blondie. She gave me one of the first pressings of their first 45, “Sex Offender”, which immediately became a staple on Side Two for months before Blondie’s the first album came out with the song re-recorded and retitled to the more acceptable “X Offender.” Sparing much expense, Tom booked all his guests in the fleabag Terminal Hotel, a name never more apt, given its location near the train station and the health of most of its habitués.

The centerpiece of the weekend was the Delaware premiere of John Water’s masterpiece of bad taste, “Desperate Living,” for which Tom had provided a key prop, a rubber prostatic penis that got mutilated in the movie. John was there for the opening night celebration and joined us in one of Tom’s organic buffet dinners that came with the admission.

For the Sleaze Convention, Rick Jones’ gallery displayed a broad selection of outsider art, including a wall-size collage of detritus that I had collected over the years, including a Denny’s face mask, a plastic ice cube with a fly in it, various penny toys from a time when such a thing actually priced as such, all accompanied by and endless loop to crass commercials from local broadcasting stations. “If Corns, callouses and bunions bother you” “If you have a passion for fashion…” “If you didn’t buy your suite from Krass Brothers…” If, If, If…

Later that spring Eddie “The Egg Lady” Massey, John Waters’ second most famous star, came to town for a visit. Tom somehow convinced the city fathers that such a famous personage was a natural to lead the Wilmington Easter Parade down Market Street. It even made the papers: Eddie dress regally with a basket of spring flowers promenading arm in arm in arm with a giant bunny.

The most financially successful film ever shown at the Rondo Center, was a double bill of the TAMI Show and The T.N.T Show, some of the first movies to be shot on high-def video (by Steve Allen’s crew) and then transferred to film. They are seminal documents, unseen for years, of many of the most important Top Forty acts of 1964, including the likes of Chuck Berry, Gerry & The Pacemakers, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, Lesley Gore, The Beach Boys, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. The house was packed.

Over its 18-month existence, The Rondo Center exposed the local cognoscenti to a mixed bag of delights. I was behind the booking of a potpourri film from 1938 called “The Goldwyn Follies,” that featured many of my favorite – and very obscure – refugees from vaudeville, including the Ritz Brothers, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The music was by George Gershwin and proved to be his last film score before his premature death.

A patron of the arts down in Maryland somewhere lent us a tabletop half-inch video deck which I began to explore back at the Rondo Center. That first night I threaded it up and dragged the camera over to the studio’s tiny balcony that looked out on the corner of 5th & Shipley. Framing the neighborhood bar to the right and the storefront apartment next to it for no apparent reason, I began to roll tape on the quite summer’s night. After a half hour Tom became bored and so did I so when he said to turn it off, which I unfortunately did – just as a drunk staggered from the bar and made his way down the street supporting himself by leaning on the buildings. He was doing alright until he reached the apartment’s picture window that was unable to support his weight and gave way dropping a huge sheet of glass on his body as he tumbled inside. The elderly woman who lived there began a long series of defining screeches, which seemed to awake the drunk sufficiently from his stupor that he was able to rise up and toddled away. Why he had not been bifurcated horizontally by this heavy glass guillotine is a mystery for the ages that baffles me still. But they say “God protects fools, drunks and children,” though I could never figure out why the first two would get such preferential treatment.

Like most golden ages it was brief but influential. Tom’s art was years ahead of its time and migrated north thanks to Tom’s studio assistant, Julia Gordon, who had moved to New York. There she was producing with Rick Brown, a true music fanzine, one of the first to celebrate the punk scene, the long overdue reaction to the excesses of progressive rock. Called “Beat It”, it was four- to -six hand-stapled Xeroxed pages with large hand colored picture and minimal copy. Once on a stopover from a brief trip to London she came to America with the Sex Pistols debut 45, “Anarchy in the U.K.” Like a cacophonous coronavirus, it spread quickly and killed off a lot of rock star sellouts. Change was really in the air.

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