Interview: Dustin Huth on the road between Denver and Boulder

You might have seen, on more than one occasion, an orange Greyhound with the words “Worland Warriors,” on the side, and perhaps you’ve even been so lucky as to observe the group of 20-somethings in band T-shirts and arty/ragamuffin garb step off, talking about how one really ought not to purchase The Communist Manifesto with a credit card, and then maybe you’ve wondered to yourself what-on-Ginsberg’s-angelheaded-hipster-grave (may he rest in peace) this whole thirty-nine-foot-long oddity is about. Allow me to expound: the bus is actually a service provided by The Basics Fund, a one year old non-profit founded by Boulder-area artist/musician/writer/bus driver, Dustin Huth. Huth drives gallery/music/poetry reading-goers to various events between Denver and Boulder for a donation that ranges from $5-25 (usually based on distance), the proceeds of which go to paying for sponsored artist’s health insurance. The bus is a work of art, itself. Forget rows of sticky, plastic chairs and awkward silence between passengers. On Huth’s version of a bus there’s a keg, couches, art collaged to the interior, and plenty of new friends to be made. This Saturday, April 26th, from 10pm-4am, Huth will be celebrating the first birthday of his brainchild, as well as welcoming a third artist into the circle of his sponsorship, at The Spot in Boulder. The event will feature poetry readings, music performances, and live-painting. Huth recently gave me an extensive tour of his gallery-on-wheels, then sat down to converse about where he’s been, where’s he going, and what to do if you want to hop on his bandwagon.

Q: Given that you’ve been involved in music, writing, and painting, to name a few artistic disciplines, do you consider the bus an artistic medium of sorts? Is the bus your sole brainchild, the product of a lifetime of experimenting?

DH: Yeah, in the arts, I dabble in a bunch of stuff, but lack technical training in anything except writing. But, yeah it's definitely my brainchild in the sense that it was conceived and brought to term in my head, but I still don't know for certain who the daddy is. When it gets a little older I may do some DNA testing of a few likely candidates. The Universe, God, Fate, and Neal Cassidy are all in the running. Overall, though, I do kind of consider this to be my artistic medium of choice...action on life; or contribution on society. Honestly, I have a strangely detached artistic perspective on this project and I consider the bus and The Basics Fund as a whole sort of experiment in relational aesthetics. That’s what I love most about all of this, is just getting to kick it with so many different types of people and catch little glimpses of what they are passionate about and why. There are so many stories.

Q: So tell me a few stories about the bus. How did the program start?

DH: I started The Basics Fund in May of last year. That’s when I got around to getting the paperwork done, at least. Technically I guess we started out in April, when we published a book for playwright-turned-novelist, Jonson Y. Kuhn, and then sent him and singer/songwriter, Eliza “Cowgirl” Boote on a tour of the Midwest. This was our first event, and those were our first artists. They drove from town to town in an old beige Vanagon and performed collaboratively at all kinds of venues, from coffee shops, to back yards, to The Green Mill in Chicago, birthplace of Slam Poetry, as a special guest of Marc Smith (so what?!!!!!), to opening up for rock bands at rock venues in Lawrence, Kansas, and then after partying at William S. Burroughs’ estate. The tour was called The Midwest Travels of Cowgirl Boote and her Bitter Buffalo. Bitter Buffalo is the name that was given to the main character in Kuhn’s book, The Trails of Bitter Buffalo, (East-to-West), by the crazy, clam-chowder-dosing, cat torturing, Indian chief, after BB requests that they watch something other than The Tyra Banks Show, while they trim the leaves from buds. Then, in June, I bought the bus. I didn’t even really know why at the time. I didn’t have a car. My lease was almost up. I got a good deal. I wanted to be homeless and travel, like Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac…and I guess, now me. In the back of my mind, I guess I thought we’d be using it for tours for the artists, once things took off to that level. The bus used to be used for the Shades of Gray ski videos, to take the skiers to mountains to be filmed. It’s actually a main character in 3 of their videos, all named after the mascot of the High School from which the bus was originally purchased, the Worland Warriors. But eventually they stopped doing that so I bought it and drove it to Bonnaroo. If it hadn’t been for Bonnaroo, none of this ever would have happened. That trip out to Manchester, Tennessee was a gift and the whole thing felt like fate. On the way in we picked up kids that we sort of knew who had broken down in some tiny little town with a gas station and a bar and not much else. It was in Missouri, or maybe, Kansas or some place that you can only get to at night when its pitch black except for a little moonlight and the roads are made of dirt and dust. They spent the time making friends with the owners of the local bar as well as all of its regulars, until we arrived. When we pulled up, Kyle, the guy whose car it was took out a screwdriver and unscrewed the license plates from the car and he left it there and later sold it to the town mechanic for one or two hundred dollars. One of the license plates is still hanging above the door inside the bus, as a tribute to that extraordinary meeting.

Q: There’s something very “Denver” about your whole program. The Beat-influences. Your artists who genre-bend traditional western/folk art into a hybrid, contemporary texture. How do you see your program as being involved specifically with Colorado-related aesthetics? How do the adventures on the bus influence area-artists, yourself included?

DH: My love for writing landed me at The Mercury Cafe in Denver where I met some of
the city and the nation's best poets and writers, and it was through time spent with these gifted people that I realized that there was a need for something like The Basics Fund. As for my own writing, I read at open mics. Poetry mostly. The bus is my muse a lot of times. The experiences that I've accrued since starting this have given me a gritty, diesel, blue-collar perspective, and I think that strengthens my writing, and gives it credibility. And the conversations I've had, and the people I've met and observed on the bus make for great characters. I have a concept for a play that is set on the bus. The plot is more or less the story of starting this whole thing from scratch and all the obstacles that I've had to overcome, but it's primarily conversation driven. Based mostly on the time I spent living on the bus last summer and fall with the writer, Jonson Kuhn. He and I would do the bus trips and at the end of the night, we'd find a place to park it--at the old abandoned sugar mill in Longmont, or the scenic overlook between Boulder and Louisville, or the baseball fields out in Lafayette--and we'd sit down at the table on the bus and have a beer and a smoke and just talk about life and the way it was all going to be one day. Jonson was working on a book, and I was building the business. Those were the early days when the struggle was intense. We were living on the bus for God's sake, because every penny I had was going into getting this thing off the ground, and paying rent was really not an option, but it was beautiful because everything was unknown, and we both had so much hope for our respective missions, and so much faith in what we were doing and yet there was this looming doubt, like what if it doesn't work, and it was rarely acknowledged, but always present. And actually, I could see doing it as a short, or a pilot for a TV show, eventually also because it never ends with this bus, Murphy's law is in full effect. It's always an adventure, and it's always growing and changing with each episode, life continues from where it left off. And with the bus, each trip builds on the last, because that's how life is. But whatever the medium turns out to be, the story of the bus will one day be told.

Q: Future plans for year two and beyond?

Future plans for the bus: Get more buses so that we can do trips to all the music and arts festivals and still maintain what we are doing in Boulder and Denver. Get another bus for Fort Collins. Convert to veggie oil and bio-diesel. We are currently working on the logistics for a weekly diesel-powered, mobile poetry reading on the bus. We also want to reinvent the parade. The parade is a medium that could stand to have some new life breathed into it. We want to do a never-ending parade that travels from town to town, participating in all kinds of art-related events and then moving on, switching out buses when necessary, picking up new travelers and dropping off others, with the total number of vehicles always fluctuating, but at any given time there would always be at least one bus carrying the torch.

To charter Huth’s bus or see where it’s rolling next visit www.thebasicsfund.org

Interested in attending the fundraiser on the 26th? Check out a ut o nomic presented by Sauce Productions at www.everybodylovessauce.com/home.html