Beneath Ariel Pink’s (Ariel Rosenberg) drug-hazed façade and mop of tousled blonde hair – sometimes dyed pink – emanates a beam of persistence and songwriting virtuosity that has been active since he was 10. That’s when he first began recording music, laying down more than 500 original songs onto hundreds of cassettes.
Pink describes two of his earliest, “One More Time” and “Messing With My Head,” as “very Guns N’ Roses.”
“I started at ground zero,” he says. “I had no proper skills.”
He may have lacked skill but he had natural intuition and ingenuity: “Modulate,” a song Pink wrote when he was 15, employed the sound of his Apple IIGS printer turning on and off – he captured it on a small handheld recorder – to manufacture a synthetic rhythm section. He would play the recording and sing over it. “The startup and shutdown sounds were just crazy melodic,” Pink explains before trying to emulate the recording using his beatbox skills. “I was very into experimental music so it gave me a sense of possibility since I didn’t know how to play any instruments.”
Moving into adulthood, Pink spent nearly a decade releasing rough-cut records on numerous indie labels to minimal notice, though Animal Collective championed him. Everything changed in 2010 when Before Today (released under his group name Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti) grabbed the attention of the hipster mainstream: It placed number 9 on Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2010. Former Girls frontman Christopher Owens deemed Pink a “mad genius and the best songwriter of our time.”
Before Today – mostly comprised of material that Pink had been sitting on for more than 10 years – is a wonderfully bizarre oddity comprised of ludicrous song titles, Frank Zappa’s flair for bringing quirkiness and complex arrangements, and wildly infectious fluff evocative of ’80s TV theme songs. Tunes like “Butt-House Blondies,” a non-sequitur cyclone of hair band distortion and vocal effects, and the cheeky gender-bender “Menopause Man,” helped elevate Pink as a modern-day godfather of lo-fi and one of the movement’s pioneers – he embraces the juxtaposition of smoggy abrasiveness and gleamingly catchy psych-pop. Many successful acts, like MGMT and Neon Indian, have used Pink’s formula as a blueprint.
The Beverly Hills native didn’t lose any steam on the more polished – and just as brilliant – 2012 Mature Themes.
“I’ve never felt bigger than I was in my own mind already,” he says. “I’m definitely in a better situation than I was but I’m 35 years old now and I’ve been releasing records since I was 24. I’m a pretty slow mover in terms of success.”
Pink says his show on Monday at the Henry Miller Memorial Library will be a mixed bag of material spanning his entire catalog – so you may find yourself grooving to something that was originally written by a 10-year-old boy.
ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI performs at 8pm (gates at 6:30pm) Monday, May 20, at Henry Miller Library, a quarter mile south of Nepenthe Restaurant on Highway 1, Big Sur. $44. 667-2574.
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