Community

Americana Great Jim Lauderdale Brings “Hope” to the Old Pueblo

May 5, 2022 |

Americana pioneer and country legend Jim Lauderdale is coming to town to play songs from his catalogue and his new album Hope. Our correspondent Kathleen Williamson is here to greet him with a wide-ranging interview in partnership with KXCI-FM and Zócalo. Enjoy—and get to the show, which, to judge by past performances, promises to be one of the best of the year.

Jim Lauderdale. Photo by Scott Simontacchi.

Jim Lauderdale and His Band will play at the Hotel Congress Plaza (311 E. Congress) on Saturday, May 14, at 7:30pm. Tickets $28 in advance at www.hotelcongress.com.

Wishbone Ash Celebrates “Argus,” 50 Years On, at the Rialto

May 1, 2022 |

This piece is supposed to be about the upcoming appearance by legendary 70’s progressive rock act Wishbone Ash and their 50 year anniversary/celebration of their epic LP, Argus. As such, there will be thoughts on their signature twin lead guitar sound; what is it that defines progressive rock; and what it was like to be immersed in that very British primordial ooze that spawned bands of similar sensibilities, like early Genesis with Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull, etc.

But mostly, after two phone conversations while he was driving between gigs (he assured me he was on Bluetooth), I find myself fascinated with Andy Powell, guitarist, singer, composer and keeper of the flame (and the brand) for Wishbone Ash since its inception in 1969.

At first, I thought his quiet, thoughtful demeanor to be in such contrast to the sound and power that can drive the music. And then I thought more about the music. And while it’s been a long time since I’ve had me some Wishbone Ash on the turntable, when I did get around to serving up Argus, I was moved by its artistry and the melding of quiet and soft with those brilliant guitar driven melodies. Having heard parts of it twice in two days, I still cannot get “Time Was” out of my head. But I digress . . .

These are but some of the things we touched upon.

Wishbone Ash—the current lineup.

Progressive Rock. When I asked Andy to define the term, he said with a wry chuckle, “It was really just bands playing with more than three chords. We were trying to flex our creative muscles, and really, just trying to be clever.” This led into his thoughts and reflections on the evolution of British music from the mid-1960s on citing bands like Small Faces and the Move and how the British fascination with American blues somehow fused with the psychedelia music of that time.

Argus. “It’s a vintage sound if you listen to the late ’60s 16-track analog. And while you always love every project you’re involved with, yes, we did know this one was special.”

50 Years of Wishbone Ash. In our first conversation I asked him if there was ever a time when he wasn’t doing Wishbone Ash, wasn’t playing or recording under that name. I know it’s not unusual for a classic rock band to reconstitute 15–30 years after its heyday. Or perhaps there was an extended hiatus or two—also not unusual for the genre. When I asked him about this again, he alluded to 1991–94, when he went off the grid, so to speak, working at what’s known as a teaching farm. But even then, he was still doing business and playing the occasional gig. Wishbone Ash sports a discography that includes at least 27 albums spanning more than 50 years, including 2020’s Coat of Arms.

Down on the Farm. In 1991, Andy joined his wife, who was a teacher, in a new job she had where she would be teaching kids on a farm. During this time, Powell deeply reflected on his life and his music career. “I decided I had had it with agents and managers and I’m only going to work with good people.” And so his time and energy would be split between doing chores on the farm and working on rebuilding the name and the brand of Wishbone Ash. “I needed to get real with it; strip it down to the basics and then rebuild. And I loved getting me hands in the dirt and seeing exactly what you’re made of. It doesn’t get any worse than pig shit!” he laughed. This time marked a significant turning point in his life and career. And Wishbone Ash? It was then and there Powell understood how much he needed to reach out and connect to the community of fans that was still out there.

Ahead of Its Time. Powell believes the funding for Illuminations, released in 1996 and paid for by asking the band’s extremely supportive fan base for money, was perhaps the first recording project to be funded in this way. While now quite commonplace, in the mid-1990s, crowdsourcing (Go fund Me, Indie Go-Go, etc.) was virtually unheard of. “I believe we were ahead of the curve when it came to finding new ways in reaching out to our fans. We also had one of the first websites up.” Since the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, Powell has made excellent use of the social media tools available. In another example of being ahead of its time, Powell says it was the early 2000s that Wishbone Ash, teaming up with the band Yes, headlined a musical cruise, again quite commonplace now, but 20 years ago, not so much.

Favorite Albums in the Post-Argus Era. Post Argus simply means anything after 1980. “I’m very proud of Illuminations. I feel we were very successful in making a slick, American style rock album.” He also cites Elegant Stealth (2011), Blue Horizon (2014), and the most recent Coat of Arms. I would love to have heard him expand on his takes on what made each project so memorable.

I finally asked Andy if anyone had ever approached him about writing a book as his stories so well blended the precision of detail with the richness of the times. “Oh yeah, I’ve done that! My autobiography is called Eyes Wide Open.”

Not one who is generally a fan of older, iconic bands with multiple personnel changes, I am excited for this show.

Wishbone Ash plays the Rialto Theatre, Tuesday, May 10 at 8:00 p.m. Tickets range from $30 to 42.

A Homecoming for Lisa Morales

November 5, 2021 |

It’s almost impossible to write about Lisa Morales and her upcoming show on the Hotel Congress patio without writing/talking about her sister and lifelong singing partner, Roberta, who succumbed to a three-year battle with cancer a scant three months ago. “It’s still hard,” she said in a recent phone interview as she prepares for her first tour since the advent of Covid.

“I was with her in the hospital every day for three months, after the initial diagnosis,” she said. Following chemo and radiation, “she fought, and she won, for a while. We were hoping she might sing on the [new] album. Obviously, it’s still pretty raw.”

Native Tucsonans and members of the extended Ronstadt clan, Lisa says, “we knew we had something special since we were little girls when our father used to take us to sing at La Fuente [on Oracle Road] with the mariachis.” In time, as their individual musical personas developed, Roberta eventually joined Lisa’s already established band, and their new group, Sisters Morales, was born. Relocating to San Antonio, where they set up shop, they recorded six albums and toured the world. Their unique blend of homegrown Arizona/Tex-Mex, fueled by their original compositions and stellar harmonies, melded roots steeped in traditional Mexican music with a contemporary flair for Americana and blues. This original brand of Southwest gumbo, so hard to define but so easy to love, made them a must-see act on the road and festival circuit throughout the country and abroad.

While their visits to Tucson were too few and far between, they did play a memorable show the El Casino Ballroom in the early 2000s while also headlining the Tucson Folk Festival in 2005. Following the death of their mother in 2011, the sisters decided it was time to part ways musically, although, “of course, we were still very close.” 

Since then, Lisa has produced two solo albums and is on the cusp of releasing a third, She Ought to be King, due out next spring. In its first single, “Freedom,” Morales sings about the power of loving each other as a mother does and speaking up when we see injustices. “It’s a very simple message,” she says. “Love one another, be kind, do the right thing, be honorable and help one another.”

Musically, “Freedom” retains a percussive Latin feel, although it’s not like anything one would associate with the sisters. Clearly her growth as an artist continues to be reflected in her solo work. It’s a ride that has allowed her to rub elbows with everyone from Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys to Rodney Crowell. “Freedom” also boasts the services of original Santana and Journey alum Gregg Rolie on keyboards and backing vocals.

When she takes the stage at Hotel Congress, it will be the second show of a tour that follows a hiatus dating back to early 2020 and a welcome reprieve from a series of Zoom and other online offerings. In dedicating this show to Roberta, Lisa will be fronting a four- or five-piece band in a homecoming that no doubt will be as comforting as it may be bittersweet.

The Lisa Morales Band plays the Hotel Congress outdoor patio on Saturday, November 13, at 8:00 pm. Doors open at 7:30. Tickets are $20 general admission, $25 reserved.

The Tucson Shootings, Ten Years On

January 8, 2021 |

It seems hardly believable that 10 years have passed since the event that has come to be known, blandly, as “the Tucson Shootings” occurred. Yet 10 years have indeed gone bye, and with them the world has changed. For one small measure, Gabrielle Giffords’s husband, Mark Kelly, now represents Arizona in the United States Senate, part of a political transformation that would have been hard to foresee in 2011. For another, we have become increasingly aware that something urgently needs to be done to curb the violence that so radically changed Gabby’s life, and ours with it.

But much remains the same. We face a novel plague, but we also battle three interlocked epidemics that have long been with us: a surge in untreated mental illness, courtesy of the so-called libertarians who scorn spending public money on those in most need; a general mood of free-floating rage, often politically oriented, as is evident by the scenes playing out at the Capitol even as I write; and a flood in the number of weapons specifically meant to kill humans, thanks to the ministrations of the NRA and other tools of the gun manufacturing lobby. We cannot let this anniversary go by without observing that almost nothing has been done about any of these scourges—and that until it is there will be other shootings, other victims, other vigils.

We invite you to join us as we revisit some of the moments that followed the Tucson Shootings, marked by a suite of photographs of events surrounding the shootings and their aftermath. Please visit our issue of February 2011, also found at the bottom of this portfolio.

—Gregory McNamee

Ringed with police tape, the Safeway at Ina and Oracle where the shootings occurred stands empty. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
As seen on January 12, 2011, a makeshift memorial near the Safeway where the shootings took place. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
At the Safeway entrance. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
The marquee of the Fox Theatre expresses the feelings of the community. Photograph by David Olsen.
President Barack Obama delivers a powerful speech at Together We Thrive: Tucson and America memorial on January 12, 2011, at the University of Arizona. Photograph by David Olsen.
The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.
The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.
The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.
The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.
The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting. Photograph by David Olsen.
The growing memorial at the University Medical Center a few days after the shooting, heavily attended by national media figures such as Lester Holt of NBC. Photograph by David Olsen.
The UMC memorial at night. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
Memorial outside of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s office in Tucson, a few days after the shootings.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords being transported to a medical air transport for travel to Houston, Texas. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
The EMTs who responded to the shooting, attend Together We Thrive: Tucson and America memorial on January 12, 2011, at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Peter Rhee, the attending trauma physician for Congresswoman Giffords, attends Together We Thrive: Tucson and America memorial on January 12, 2011, at the University of Arizona. Photograph by David Olsen.
Ron Barber and family on stage at the March 10, 2011 benefit concert for the Fund for Civility, Respect, and Understanding, in support of the individuals and families affected by the Jan. 8 shootings. Photograph by David Olsen.
Scenes from the March 10, 2011 benefit concert for the Fund for Civility, Respect, and Understanding, in support of the individuals and families affected by the Jan. 8 shootings: Jackson Browne and Joey Burns. Below Alice Cooper; Graham Nash and David Crosby. Photographs by David Olsen.
The first anniversary of the Tucson Shootings is commemorated at the University of Arizona on January 8, 2012. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
The permanent memorial erected at the Safeway as seen on the eighth anniversary in 2019. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.

The Only Nutcracker in Town

December 18, 2020 |

This December all live theater and dance events are canceled in Tucson, but you can still take in the Nutcracker at El Toro Flicks drive-in theater (198 S. Granada Ave., 520 449 4468).

On December 21, Danswest Dance Company presents a new, original staging of the classic ballet. Written and directed by Danswest owner and professional tap dancer Megan Maltos, Not Your Ordinary Nut features dancers aged 7–18, plus a few courageous dance dads. NYON is entirely choreographed by Tucson artists, three of whom grew up dancing at Danswest.

The show incorporates elements of all of Danswest’s styles—ballet, yes, but also acrobatics, tap dancing, jazz, even hip hop, and plenty of heart. The dancers had six weeks to learn the choreography before it was filmed in October. Danswest will offer two screenings at 6:00 pm and 9:30 pm. Tickets are $40 a carload. For more information, contact Megan.maltos@gmail.com, (520) 240–2476.

Tucson Mask Makers

July 12, 2020 |
Camouflage mask by NAK

Mask up and shop local! Tucson mask makers and shops are helping to keep our community safe by offering face coverings in a range of designs and styles. Here are a few makers and places that caught our eyes.

ADIA JAMILLE

Adia Jamille is a textile artist who explores heritage and self through embroidery and quilting. In addition to home textiles and hand printed items such as baby blankets and hand dyed silk scarves, her triple layered face masks come in a range of modern prints. Her masks are 100% cotton and washable and they feature a pocket for a filter and a wire in the nose for a tighter fit. There is an option to purchase a mask and hand sanitizer duo (the hand sanitizer is made by Latina owned, Medicine Nuestra). 

Cost: Child $8, Adult / Large $10. Shipping is available. 
IG: @JamilleTextiles
FB: Jamille Textiles
www.AdiaJamille.com/face-masks  

Mask by Adia Jamille

DESIGNS BY MW

One night in between studying for finals, Michelle Willis stayed up and taught herself how to sew masks using her mom’s sewing machine. Inspired to give back to her community, she donated over 700 masks in Sahuarita and Tucson while balancing nursing school and parenting. Now her masks are available to purchase through her Facebook page and on Etsy.  

Cost: $10 for adults and children. Custom orders available. Local pickup available or $5 flat rate fee. 
FB: Designs by MW
www.Etsy.com/Shop/DesignsMW  

Masks by Michelle Willis

LAURA TANZER ATELIER

Her first series of masks were made from scraps from her own garment production. She uses natural fibers such as cotton and instead of elastic, uses two pairs of ribbon, one you tie behind your head and the other you tie behind your neck.

Laura makes sure small droplets are not coming in from the sides or below the chin or around the nose, so she has engineered her masks to include some insulated copper bell wire across the top of the mask so you can fit to your nose, eliminating the gap that can let in droplets, and also great for glasses wearers. She sews in Filtrete 1900 air filter material, between the interior cotton layer and the exterior cotton layer. The result is not medical grade N95, but it is much better than cotton by itself.

Learn more at https://lauratanzerdesigns.com/we-are-in-this-together/
410 N. Toole Ave
520-981-9891

Laura Tanzer, right, in her shop.

MILDRED AND DILDRED 

This popular toy shop offers stretchy cotton face masks for toddlers and kiddos in a range of kid friendly prints, made by their local seamstress team. 

Cost: $8.50 for all sizes. Offers delivery, curbside or store pickups.
520-615-6266
IG: @MildredandDildred
FB: Mildred & Dildred
www.MildredandDildred.com

Space Dinos mask by Mildred & Dildred

NAK MASKS 

Shauna Smith had recently opened Needles and Knots, a sewing and design school when the shutdown occurred. Soon customers were requesting masks and so within a few weeks she developed a mask with a unique style, the NAK M820 and a lighter weight version, the NAK M1720 “Swoosh”. With a minimalist design and modern prints, her masks are comfortable and use a sliding bead to easily adjust the fit. 

Cost: $15 for adult and kid sizes. Free local pickup is offered as well as priority shipping. 
520-261-9548
NAKMasks@gmail.com
FB: NAK Masks
www.NAKMasks.com

Cactus Stubble mask by Needles & Knots (NAK)

POP-CYCLE

This women owned shop is a beloved favorite for gifts, featuring locally made art and goods, often with recycled or quirky elements. Recently their team has been busy sewing masks with fun and gender neutral patterns available to purchase or donate one to someone in need. Over the last several months they have donated masks to the Navajo and Tohono O’odham Nations. Their masks are made with 100% cotton and elastic straps and available in two styles. One style has 3 layers with a wire sewn over the nose but a string can be added if a tie on mask is preferred. This style is a tad wider and can accommodate a bigger nose or face. The second style has two layers with an opening for a filter. 

Cost: $14 for adult and kid sizes. Shipping is available.
520-622-3297
IG: @PopCycleShop
FB: Pop-Cycle Shop
www.PopCycleShop.com

Pop Cycle Masks

QMULATIVE 

Known for his hand crafted pocket tees, Quinlan Wilhite has turned his Phoenix Fashion Week Designer of the Year sewing skills towards masks. His masks are cotton with a filter pocket, elastic hoops and they are washable. When you purchase a mask, he will donate a mask to an individual in need. 

Cost: $15 for ages 6 and up. Shipping is available.
IG: @Qmulative
FB: Qmulative
www.QmulativeBrand.com

Masks prints by QMULATIVE

SWEET NOLA BOUTIQUE 

What started out as making masks to donate to frontline workers in Tucson evolved into an effort to make over 4,000 masks sent to the VA Hospital, Banner, Emerge Women’s Center and other facilities and community front line workers across the country. Now masks are available to individuals for purchase or by donation to organizations and facilities that need them most. Their masks have 3-layers with 100% cotton face covers and 3 styles are available: pleated, face conforming or rope tie. Custom requests for wording, logos or embroidery are welcome. Random prints are sent for online orders. If a donation is needed please email riapatino09@gmail.com for consideration and pick up arrangements. 

Cost: $7 for adult and children sizes. Shipping and local pick-up is available.  520-260-0271
FB: Sweet Nola Baby Boutique
www.SweetNolaBaby.com 

Sweet Nola Baby Boutique

TINY & TOOTHLESS 

Tiny and Toothless was started in 2015 by Ruth Latona, a high school art teacher and mother. She primarily makes baby bibs and bandanas, but when the pandemic shutdown occurred, she quickly pivoted to where the need was strongest and started sewing masks. Her masks are contoured with three layers of 100% cotton and ties. Custom made for small children up to larger sizes. 

Cost: $10 regardless of the size. Shipping is $2 to anywhere in the U.S.A, no matter what quantity is ordered.
Tiny&Toothless@gmail.com
IG: @TinyandToothless
FB: Tiny and Toothless
www.Etsy.com/Shop/TinyandToothless

Tiny & Toothless cactus mask

WHY I LOVE WHERE I LIVE 

This popular gift shop celebrating our city, offers a range of fun local goods from clothing and jewelry to stickers, books, toys and games. Their face masks are cotton with elastic hoops and a filter pocket, and are created by their in-house seamstress and for every mask sold, they will donate to a local organization in need.  

Cost: $15, for ages 6 and up. Shipping is available.
520-422-5770 
Info@WhyILoveWhereILive.com
IG: @WhyILoveWhereILive
FB: Why I Love Where I Live 
www.WhyILoveWhereILive.com

Tucson Together mask available at Why I Love Where I Live

WORST WESTERN 

Known for handmade lingerie with an artistic flair and ready to wear garments, Diana Williams, designer and seamstress of Worst Western, believes that learning a trade like sewing not only empowers you but allows you to be of service to your community. She began offering free masks to encourage their use to those who may have been resistant to the idea or for those who are not able to afford one. All masks in the shop are hand printed and pieced together at a sewing machine by Diana. Her masks come in a range of materials and feature elastic straps. Strings can be added. 

Cost: $8 to $25, adult and kid sizes available. Free shipping. WorstWestern@gmail.com
IG: @WorstWestern
www.ShopWorstWestern.com

Black & White Dust Mask by Worst Western

An Excerpt from Tucsonan Lydia Millet’s New Novel

June 1, 2020 |

A Children’s Bible

Lydia Millet has lived in Tucson since 1999, a year before her second novel, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, appeared. In the years since, while working as a writer and editor for the Center for Biological Diversity, she has published 16 more books of fiction for young and adult readers. Of her latest, A Children’s Bible (Norton, $25.95), Washington Post books editor Ron Charles writes, “I swear on a stack of copies that it’s a blistering little classic: ‘Lord of the Flies’ for a generation of young people left to fend for themselves on their parents’ rapidly warming planet.” Alternately dark and comic, it’s told from the point of view of a young woman who grows to maturity in a time that, like our own, is full of threats and terrors—but also great beauty. Copies of the book are available at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.); call 792-3715 to reserve your copy for curbside pickup. Evoking a world of missing things that is all too recognizable, here’s a glimpse inside the covers. —Editor

By late winter all the vegetables we ate were coming from the hydroponic nursery and the indoor garden in the basement (what used to be the squash court). Fresh produce could no longer be ordered online—no refrigerated trucks were running, at least not for the average rich person in our neck of the woods—so we had to eat what we grew.

We didn’t have fruit, of course. We’d planted apple trees, but it’d be years before they were fruit-bearing: that planting was a Hail Mary. No citrus at all, and we missed our orange juice and lemonade. The parents missed their slices of lime.

And we had dry and canned goods, a trove far more extensive than the one in the silo. We had made sure of that.

When the day’s work was done we got into the habit of preparing dinner for everyone, with the help of some mothers whose highest-rated skills were cooking. We’d all sit around in the vast sunken living room of fake Italy, with its wall of glass that opened onto the patio and the pool. We held our plates on our laps, eating and talking about the things we missed. The peasant mother was allowed to recite a blessing. Nondenominational.

She’d turned out to be no one’s mother at all. All she had was the cat. But I still thought of her as the peasant one.

Then we’d go through our missings. That was what my little brother called them. We figured it was healthy, for the parents especially, not to try to deny the fact of what had been lost but to acknowledge it.

Someone would mention a colleague or an ex, a grandparent or a bicycle or a neighborhood or a store. A beach or a town or a movie. Someone would say “ice cream” and someone else would say “ice-cream sandwiches, Neapolitan,” and we’d riff on it, go down a list of favorite ice-cream novelties that couldn’t be had anymore for love or money.

“Bars,” a parent would say, and they’d rhyme off the bars they’d been to, the dive bars, the Irish bars, the cantinas. The hotel bars, the bars with jukeboxes, the bars with pool tables or views of parks and rivers. The bars that revolved. The bars at the top of glittering skyscrapers far away. In the once-great cities of the world.Excerpted from A Children’s Bible: A Novel by Lydia Millet. Copyright © 2020 by Lydia Millet. Published with permission of W. W. Norton. All rights reserved.

Zócalo Magazine – March 2020

March 4, 2020 |

Zócalo Magazine – January 2020

January 3, 2020 |

The (Re)Birth of Downtown

December 4, 2019 |

Revisiting Steve Farley’s Broadway Tile Murals, 20 Years On

There’s not much in our city’s history that can be pinned down with a precise date—not the time the first O’odham people settled here, not the week when someone thought it might be nice to build an adobe hut within sight of the Santa Cruz, not the hour when a bureaucrat released the funds to destroy the barrios that lay under what’s now the community center. But it is possible to put a date to the day when, for better or worse, a long-declining, somnolent downtown took the first step toward being reborn: May 1, 1999.

To understand that claim, we need to step back a couple of years before then. Steve Farley, a native of California, was fairly new to Tucson, a transplant from his native Southern California by way of a stint in the Bay Area, where he’d worked for a few years for the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian and then started his own graphic design business. He wanted to get back to drier, hotter country, but Southern California was expensive and crowded. Enter Tucson, a welcoming community for an artist—and Farley was soon right at home here, doing art photographic and graphic design.

Somewhere along the way, not long after he arrived, opportunity came knocking. Farley and his then-wife, Regina Kelly, were working on a public history project with teenagers on the west side, immersing themselves in local lore. Hearing of the project, a resident, Gilbert Jimenez, came to a meeting with a stack of photo albums dating back half a century. The first image Farley and Kelly saw was of a young, purposeful-looking Jimenez striding along Scott Avenue, a pile of books riding on his right hip, headed toward school. Other photographs followed, taking from an angle low enough that the subjects of the portraits appeared to be superheroes out of a comic book, men, women, and children on their way to meet destiny. Jimenez was one, the future his. The pose was much in the vein of the social realist art of the time, but in the half-century since it had fallen out of fashion—and now here it was, with numerous examples to point to.

Farley, who about that time had come up with a new process for printing photographs on ceramic tiles, resolved that one day he was going to figure out a way to incorporate those images into some project or another. Opportunity knocked again, just a few weeks later, when a “call to artists” arrived in the mail from the Tucson Pima Arts Council. Four walls, the call announced, were going to be made available for public art at the new terminus of the Aviation Corridor with Broadway at the underpass under the Southern Pacific railroad bridge, the eastern gateway to downtown. Farley’s idea was to use that space to erect a tile mural highlighting the street photography of the sort he had seen in Gilbert Jimenez’s album. He set about writing a proposal detailing that vision and the processes he would use to print the photographs, a process he calls “more biological than technical.”

“There were a lot of entries,” says downtown art gallery owner Terry Etherton, who was on the advisory board of TPAC at the time. “We narrowed it down to five. I didn’t know who Steve was, only that he was new to town and that he’d never done any public art before. But his proposal was so well grounded in history that it seemed like he’d been here all the time, and it was so well thought through, down to the tiniest detail and the last penny. Really, it was the smartest proposal I’d ever seen, and nothing honored Tucson’s history like his did. I supported the project from the get-go. Twenty years later, I’m glad I did.”

The other judges for the competition were unanimous in agreeing with Etherton, and they awarded Farley $171,000 to complete the project—a sum that sounds comfortable until you calculate the costs of making the art and spread it out over the number of hours required to make that art, at which point Farley might have done better to take a straight job.

He didn’t, but the race was on: From the time he started in earnest until the unveiling wasn’t much more than a year, and in the meanwhile there were photographs to find and tiles to make. The word went out that Farley and Kelly were on the hunt for street images from downtown’s golden age, back when all the city’s barrios were alive and the city center was where you had to come to buy shoes or a soda and see a film. Images began to turn up. One photo of an impossibly thin, impeccably dressed young man, a young god whose shoes gleamed whiter than the sun, turned out to be beloved musician Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero. He joined in the cause, performing at a benefit concert at which Linda Ronstadt made an appearance. Consciousness raised, the word out, people from all over the community began to turn up with images, and where there had been a desert before there was now a flood.

Meanwhile, Farley, Kelly, and the budding researchers with whom they were working began to find out more about the street photographers themselves, who freelanced for a downtown druggist with a charmingly simple operation: They’d snap a photo of an approaching pedestrian, give that person a card with a number and an address at which to pick up the shot, then develop the film and deliver it. A package of eight prints went for a buck and a quarter. The work was artful, capturing downtowners and visitors in midstride as they went about their day. The ploy worked, too. The photographers took as many as a thousand shots a day of the people whom Farley called “heroes and neighbors,” doing a thriving business until downtown slowly began to board up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, as shops moved to new centers such as El Con and Casas Adobes and the north and east sides exploded.

(Steve Farley at the mural dedication in 1999. Photo by Andrea Smith.)

Anyone who’s listened to Steve Farley make a political pitch in the years since knows that he knows that the devil truly is in the details—and that he’s a detail man par excellence. Finding those street images was a monumental undertaking in itself, one fraught with difficulties, for, as Farley says, “There’s always a risk of putting real people in public art.” No one ever complained, he adds, and as it turned out, it was just as difficult to narrow the number of images down once a mountain of them had been assembled as it had been to find and identify them.

In any event, rounding up all those images involved coordinating the efforts of many people and reaching out to many more, making cold calls, knocking on doors, talking and talking, fundraising, meeting, planning, delivering—in short, doing politics. Farley completed the project on time and under budget, but, as he says, “the bug had bit.” It wasn’t too long before he was running for public office, serving as a state representative and later senator, mounting runs for governor of Arizona and, this year, mayor of Tucson.

Working with longtime partners Rick Young and Tom Galloway, Farley has since gone on to do public art projects in cities all over the country. (See www.tilography.com for more on them.) Fifteen years after the Broadway Underpass mural project, the modern streetcar came onto the scene in Tucson, something that he’d been promoting—and scrapping for in the legislature—for years. That added a whole new layer to the downtown he envisioned as a newcomer, one that, at least in its better manifestations, is the one we have today.

As for the murals themselves, Farley points out that, unlike most available surfaces in this town, they’ve never been seriously vandalized. That might be the luck of the draw, but more likely it’s a sign of the respect that everyone in the community has for the army of ghosts and elders who inhabit those walls. A few tiles have been damaged here and there, and the city hasn’t done much to correct it, about the only downside that Farley finds in the whole project. The city, he says, has long since fallen down on its contractual obligation to maintain the project, a matter of some caulk and a few hundred dollars.

That would be money wisely spent, for the Broadway Underpass mural project is among the best known and most heavily visited sites of public art in the state, framed by Simon Donovan’s striking Rattlesnake Bridge on one side and a growing, constantly evolving downtown on the other. Great-grandchildren come to see their great-grandparents enshrined in tile, standing ten feet tall. Their great-grandparents oblige, looking like demigods—more than ordinary mortals, at least—in their crisp new blue jeans, their Stetsons and fedoras, their nearly pressed wool dresses and brilliant white shirts. Abuelas look at themselves as young girls, old men as boys out for a lark on a hot Saturday afternoon. Developers walk alongside artisans, cotton farmers, and window shoppers, lost and now refound in time. As Farley said in his speech marking the opening of the mural, “we have enough monuments to lizards and ocotillos. We have too few celebrating the everyday Tucsonans who built Tucson.” 

Call it May 1, 1999, then, the day when Tucson, with a wall of art 18 feet tall by 158 feet long, took a giant step toward remaking a moribund downtown into the space it is today. “The murals were an intentional way of reminding people that downtown was and can be the heart of the community,” says Farley, 20 years on. “And they honor a past that we should always remember.”