You Can Color Outside the Lines: The Story of the Big Boys documents the weird miracle that was the Big Boys, a genuinely original act in a scene that began to Xerox itself fast. It debuts Sunday in Austin.
Artist Tim Kerr is a member of the Austin skate punk band Big Boys, the subject of a new documentary, Tim Kerr does not make divisions in his art.
The music he made with ground-breaking Austin punk band the Big Boys connects with his lifelong passion for surfing, which turned into skate boarding, which turned into painting skate decks, which fed into other bands, which turned into making music and visual art his entire life without stopping. , celebrates the weird miracle that was the Big Boys, a genuinely original act in a scene that began to Xerox itself fast.
It debuts Sunday in Austin; initial screenings are sold out, but this documentary will likely be a bigger deal soon. Kerr is dealing with a melanoma that has resulted in chemotherapy and a wound that requires outside care. He’s had to cancel some art events, but, as he puts it, “It doesn’t hurt when I play.
”These days, he is playing with Up Around the Sun, an instrumental acoustic affair co-starring banjo player Jerry Hagins and usually a guest or collaborator. They’ve been kicking around since 2013, have produced five albums and their shows draw a small but devout audience. We talked in his art studio, an explosion of color behind the house he and his wife, Beth, have kept since 1983.
Over 40-plus years, he made thousands of paintings here, in addition to producing dozens of records. He sports an international following, from the skate decks of his Big Boys days to his portraits of musicians and politicians — almost always incorporating text. You can tell a"Tim Kerr" a mile away.
The Hyde Park house itself — jammed with the books and artifacts and mementos that speak to a life in punk — has housed hundreds of musicians over the years and became a crucial part of the network that kept punk bands going for the past few decades.
“We were everyone’s favorite aunt and uncle,” Kerr says. “One South by Southwest, we had 32 people in this house and two tents in the backyard. ” Born in 1956 and already a surfing, skating adult by the time the Ramones album appeared, Kerr was a little older than a lot of his hardcore-kid contemporaries, so he was more open to putting non-punk-rock ideas into the music.
Formed at the end of 1979, the Big Boys slapped together the funk Kerr and his pals skated to with raw punk rock, a strong visual aesthetic and a devotion to skating. The Boys’ late frontman, Randy “Biscuit” Turner, was himself a scene legend — a large, extremely out gay man in an era and a national scene that wasn’t known for supporting the same.
“With us,” Kerr says, “you have to have skating, you have to have art in there, and Biscuit was gay. Those three aspects of those three things are just as important as the band itself was. ” The Big Boys were seismic to the underground, but they fell apart in 1984.
Unlike many peers, Kerr kept playing guitar in new and interesting bands. He kept skating. He kept making art. In Kerr’s view, he wasn't doing anything anyone else couldn't do.
As many of his records said on the back: “Your Name Here” and “What Are You Doing to Participate? ” “It was instead of ‘Go start your own band,’” Kerr says.
“It’s ‘You can do something. You can celebrate your self-expression, your clothes, dance, music, whatever. ’”has been in the works for over a decade. A Texas City native, director Joe Salinas has been a professional filmmaker since 2008 and shot amateur skate videos long before that.
Also a punk musician, he knew the Big Boys as an entity, but didn’t meet Kerr until the 2000s. They hit it off immediately. Tim and Beth asked him to take over the idea of the Big Boys doc in 2014.
“They are nicest humans I've ever met,” Salinas says. “The way that he approaches everything that he does, it's good human stuff. The idea that you do acts of kindness without any kind expectations in return. It's just something you do.
And making art for your entire life is possible. ”“In punk,” he says, “everybody shared all the contacts.
‘You want to get up and play a couple of your songs? Cool. ’ That type of thing. In the art world, everybody holds those cards really close.
” But it’s worked for Kerr. Practicing the belief that all art you make, no matter what the medium, is part of one gesture allows for great triumphs and stuff that doesn’t work. You can experiment. You can make things, today.
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