In 2016, Taylor Mac performed a one-time-only, 24-hour immersive theatrical experience in front of a live audience at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The concert offered an alternative take on U.S. history, narrated through music that was popular from the nation’s founding to the present, with Mac transforming hourly by changing into elaborate, decade-specific costumes by Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle. The HBO documentary directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, TAYLOR MAC’S 24-DECADE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC, captures Mac’s marathon performance in New York, alongside footage from other shows on the tour, which played throughout the world, and interviews that offer insight into its creation. In the show, Mac and 24 musicians interpret 24 songs, from “Yankee Doodle” to “Gimme Shelter,” “Born to Run” and “Gloria,” with one performer leaving the stage each hour, until Mac is on stage alone in the final 24th hour.
With Emmy voting now underway and TAYLOR MAC’S 24-DECADE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC now streaming on Max, Taylor Mac speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about his inspiration for the epic work and collaborating with Epstein and Friedman on the film.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: You mention in the documentary your memories of going to the first AIDS Walk in San Francisco in 1987. What impact did that have on you and how did it become the impetus for 24-Decade History?
Taylor Mac: “Until then, I’d never met an out homosexual, at least one that was out to me as a kid. Back in 1987 there was this fear that children would be exposed to queerness, to anyone gay, so anyone who was out and gay didn’t come out to children. I also lived in a pretty homophobic town in Stockton, California, but it was about a two hour drive to San Francisco. So I went to the first ever AIDS Walk when I was thirteen. The first time I saw one out homosexual, I saw thousands at the same time. How it influenced me was, I’d never seen queer agency or queer pride or any kind of sense that there was queer history before. That day, I witnessed that there was queer history because all these people were together. I saw my first drag queen that day, who was a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, which had a deep impact on me. Actually, I was recently sainted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”
“Why I remember her is because she gave me a condom. Imagine being just a teenager and being given a condom at that time to save your life. It was something that my mom certainly wasn’t doing, or any of the teachers at school or any of the adults in my life were taking responsibility for. It was an event that showed me that we don’t have to take things as they are and I think that changed my entire life. Seeing something en masse like that, injected with this agency, with this pride and this sense of you don’t have to accept the reality of people who want to oppress you, had a big impact. That changed everything.”
“In terms of 24-Decade History, the whole piece was structured to be kind of a metaphorical representation of that event viewed from my childlike perspective, so everything’s just a little bit bigger. There’s all this history and stuff crammed all together within that within a 24-hour period. There are lots of people that you’ll think you’ll see again, and maybe you do, maybe you don’t. There is lots of audience participation because the parade obviously had lots of participation. There was lots of chanting and people dancing in the streets and protesting and group activities and people getting up on megaphones and shouting something which everyone then started shouting back. There was directing people in traffic, so moving bodies around in space. All of those things influenced the work.”
“Mirroring that to this film, the first film Rob won an Oscar for was The Life and Times of Harvey Milk which has that candlelight vigil scene at the end. Then he went on to make a documentary about a gay pride march in Washington DC. So the the idea of Rob and Jeffrey making this film was part of that lineage, part of that storytelling and part of the the idea that we gather together in order to resist and to build a better world and to rise and that we do it because we’re in a place of being torn apart as a culture and as a people. Because of being torn apart, we gather and we make something bigger than ourselves. So it’s about our survival, essentially. That’s why it’s all intertwined in there.”
By the time Rob and Jeffery came on board you’d already shot all the footage of the shows hadn’t you?
“We didn’t have the interview material yet, but we had the footage from the 24-hour performance and also from when we did the whole show, but broken up into four segments over two weeks in Los Angeles. We also had all of our rehearsal footage from those times. We performed the show in eight act performances over two weeks, so we had footage from all of that too. So there was so much footage!”
Were you always gathering that with the intention that someone would make a film using it?
“Absolutely. We didn’t really have the funding to film it properly when we made the 24-hour show, because we were still trying to raise the money in order to do the show itself. Imagine 200 people in a show and we’re independent theatre-makers and it’s a non-commercial project. It was a lot of work just to fund the show itself. But luckily we got some in-kind work and cinematographer Ellen Kuras, who is quite extraordinary, called in some favors so we were able to film the 24-hour show. Then when we got to LA, the 24-hour show had happened and had gotten all this notoriety, so we were able to raise even more money in order to actually film it properly. We had an eight-camera shoot in Los Angeles and a whole room with monitors. It was all organized.”
The show footage looks incredible. How did your collaboration with Rob and Jeffrey work?
“We made it together. It’s their film, but it’s my baby. I wanted to make sure that the film was its own piece of art and that it wasn’t trying to just be the stage show or a big ad for something that you’d missed, it needed to have its own arc. That’s why it was important to work with Rob and Jeff and when they wanted to do it I leapt at the chance. When you watch this film in relation to their body of work it’s deeply profound because it’s the next generation coming up under them going, ‘Where are my forefathers? Where are the people who would have passed the baton to me?’ They were missing. But then you see that they were there the whole time making movies like Common Threads that influenced my understanding of what it means to be a queer adult, all the way back from when I was a kid seeing them on PBS. So it’s all part of the art of it, intermingling their work and my work all together. So we were part of the process together.”
Given the length of the work, Rob and Jeffrey had a lot to cover in the film. One really poignant thing that they focus on is the symbolism of one band member leaving the stage each hour. What did you make of the way that that’s conveyed in the film?
“It’s interesting what film can do that live performance can’t do. Over a 24-hour period, you would see somebody move, but sometimes it wouldn’t be so dramatic, right? Because it’s every hour and you don’t actually know that it’s about the AIDS epidemic for the first 21 hours of the show. But with a two-hour film that all gets brought front and center in a way that I couldn’t have done on the stage show without bringing it up periodically and I didn’t want to do that, I wanted it to be revealed at the end. So that aspect carries its own narrative in the film and the people leaving the stage has more of an emotional impact because you’re seeing them leave closer together than you did in the stage show.”
As you were researching and putting together a history of the United States, did you discover more queerness than you had expected?
“There’s so much queerness in our country. My approach was that I would say that I wanted to talk about something for a particular decade and then I’d go on a hunt for songs about that subject. At one point, it was the 1796 to 1806 decade, I really needed to find a song about a gay ghost from that period. I thought, ‘Don’t be dumb, you’ll never find one’, but of course I found one! It was a song that was popular at that time about this dandy who had died and came back to haunt somebody.”
“I discovered that every decade has many songs that make fun of effeminate men in order to rally people together. That’s something that was not shocking to me, but still suprising in the weird ways that homophobia works and how it’s sinked and seeped into us. That’s all through the history of the country. But one of the things that historians would do is say, ‘Well, the word gay didn’t mean homosexual back then and the word homosexual hadn’t been invented’ so they frame it as if those things didn’t exist. They’ll say that about Lincoln a million times. He slept in the same bed with another man, it was a twin sized bed, and they wrote each other these deep love letters, but because the word homosexual didn’t exist and because he married a woman, that means he wasn’t queer. Well, just show that a movie then. Him sleeping in bed with another man and them cuddling and writing love letters to each other and let the audience decide what they think. But instead, what they do is edit it out and don’t show it and don’t make films about that particular aspect of his life, at least no one has yet. That’s the kind of stuff that I found all the time in our history that I’d see and say, ‘That is queer’.”
“There’s also stuff that I add to it, like you know that there is always some queer person in a bar making a fool of themselves. So the whole decade about the early temperance movement, and how that was affecting the culture in early United States was something that I thought I could be inventive with because I know it to be true because it exists now. I know there was a queen who got too drunk and made a fool of themselves becuase that’s the human spirit. So it was a ‘yes, and’ kind of situation.”
Machine Dazzle’s costumes are incredible, what did that element contribute to the show, especially when you were doing the 24-hour piece?
“We did all the costume changes on stage. Sometimes it would be behind a screen and at one point during an instrumental I went under the stage and changed into an outfit and then popped back up on the stage. But the concept was that I left the stage as little as I possibly could and even with that change where I briefly left it was more about the physical reveal when I returned than that I was going off stage to take a break. I started seeing the costume changes as part of the ritual of going through time. Machine didn’t really work off any kind of historical accuracy on the outfits, but he was inspired by silhouettes and by things that were invented during the time or by unconventional materials to make the outfits. I would see the costume as my entry into the next decade. I’d be shedding one through the course of one decade and then putting on the next decade. It was a way of keeping time and funneling the entire history of the United States through one body.”
In the film, you talk about the importance of the audience, who you involve in the show throughout, and how they were starting to give you energy towards the end of the 24 hours as yours were was waning. How would you describe that relationship?
“The audience in New York had helped us make the show. We’d been performing it for six years in small sections before we did that 24-hour show. They were what we’d call workshops at the time, but they were as full as we could make them and always off-book but scrappy. The audience would keep coming back and we needed them to because, for instance, how do you rehearse an hour of performance which involves blindfolding the audience if you don’t have an audience? So we would do the decades over and over and over again and rehearse with an audience essentially and call them shows. A lot of the people who were in that New York audience had already seen most of the material many times before, so we’d created a kind of community out of that audience over six years. Then in Los Angeles, and in many other places on the road, it was about trying to get the audience into the work within the course of the show. I would say it’s similar with the film. Within two hours, how do we make the viewing audience part of a community that’s understanding of how America moves forward?”
“The show was always intended to be a historical event. Because so much of queer culture has been erased I wanted to make something that was so big that it couldn’t be ignored. Even if it was just a footnote, it had to be in the history books. So we made this giant show. I work in the ephemeral arts, so you do a live performance and it disappears, but what’s so exciting about the film is that it allows it to live beyond just its live performance. So in that sense, it’s like, ‘Ah-ha, we have proof that it happened!'”
I love the Walt Whitman section of 24- Hour Decade, did you consider setting his poems to music and making them songs?
“He actually called his poems songs and we did try a version where I commissioned a couple of people to compose to the poems, but I thought the poems sing themselves, they don’t actually need music. It’s like putting music on music, which maybe is sometimes good, but I felt like the thing that we haven’t really ever heard is Whitman’s poems read by a queer voice. Generally, they’re read by a serious poetry person, who may be queer, but they’re not necessarily expressing that aspect. They’re read by academics and teachers and professors and maybe some actor, but they are rarely ever given the cadence that queer people have. To really understand them you’ve got to get that queer voice in there. I felt that was something that I could add that I hadn’t ever seen before in a Whitman reading.”
“Then I pitted Whitman against Stephen Foster. Why do we think of Stephen Foster as the father of American song when there are all these better options out there? It’s just because he was the most popular, but actually is he really telling the story of what America wants to be? Or is he telling the story of what a bunch of nostalgic racists wanted America to be? Is he telling the whole story of America or an idea of America? Whitman was more interested in telling the whole story of America, of the multitude instead of narrowing it down to some kind of nostalgic thing that can be sold. So that’s capitalism really dictating how we view our culture, which of course is very American but not what I want it to be.”
By James Kleinmann
TAYLOR MAC’S 24-DECADE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC is streaming on Max.
