`I had no idea I’d be mayor one day. I just wanted to live in the most beautiful place on Earth.”
There still is a trace of amazement in the voice of one-time New Wave rocker and Chicago native Phillip Kent Bimstein. Since 1988, he has lived in Springdale, Utah, an artist-friendly town of 350 at the gateway to Zion National Park. In that short time, Bimstein, 47, has gone from being Springdale’s newest resident to the town’s highest elected official, the mayor. Now, in addition to writing music, he also chairs council meetings, meets with local business leaders, lobbies with the state and takes part in public events and dedications.
“When Zion National Park opens its new bike trail, I’m there officially to represent the town,” he says.
That seems a world away from Bimstein’s Chicago identity, yet in tune with his personal drive to find art in the most unusual places.
In the early 1980s, Bimstein led a dual life. By day he was a respectable young executive at a Chicago publishing house. He had the salary, perks and career expectations. He also had a briefcase full of original songs looking for a showcase. So at night, he donned a second identity as leader of his own rock band, Phil ‘n’ the Blanks. He worked the Chicago music scene with them, armed with his original tunes, irrepressible energy, a half dozen videos (even landing on the nascent MTV), and a respectable set of record releases (three albums and two singles).
Through 1985, Phil ‘n’ the Blanks gave Bimstein the chance to bring his new songs to a live audience as fast as he could write them. Titles such as “Autosex,” “Punctuality (Is a Virtue),” and “Black Is Not a Color (It’s a Situation)” were among the crowd favorites.
“There would never have even been a band without Phil’s songs,” says Blanks guitarist Eric Kister, now a computer-graphics consultant. “His music gave me incredible freedom of expression as a guitarist. It was `melody with an edge’–Phil had the melody, I had the edge.”
The group also had the edge in self-promotion. Rather than spend money on expensive demos that would probably go nowhere, they set up their own record label, Pink Records, keeping the artistic control and the cash within the group. They did most of their own bookings and pushed their record releases hard on the college radio scene. On a short East Coast tour, they found that the work had paid off: Hundreds of fans lined up, calling out requests for their favorite songs.
“Phil knew just what he was doing,” says Joe Federici, who directed all six of the group’s videos and now runs a successful video-production company. “He understood the business end, from copyrights to promotion. He had realistic expectations and took advantage of every promotional opportunity.”
Bimstein remembers the band’s level-headed promotional approach. “We were very business-minded. By the last days of the group, we were taking home more money than ever. Ironically, that’s when I decided to end it. I still feel somewhat guilty about that . . . but it was getting too comfortable.”
“These days I still miss the band. If they ever moved West or I moved back to Chicago, I’d love to reunite.”
He did continue with one band member, fellow lead singer and occasional co-writer Blanche (a professional stage name that fit so well she eventually adopted Blanche Blacke as her legal name). The two were married shortly before making some major career moves. Bimstein at last quit his publishing job and the two took a trip to Los Angeles–he as a composer, she as a performer. A graduate of the Chicago Conservatory of Music (majoring in theory and composition), Bimstein enrolled in a summer composing class at UCLA.
“It was a pressure cooker schedule requiring a new piece each week,” he says. Afterward, to unwind, he stopped off in Springdale for backpacking at Zion before rejoining Blanche in Chicago. That’s when he saw a Springdale house and property for sale. He fell in love with it and put in a bid the next day.
“People in L.A. always dream of `someday’ moving away. I thought, let’s do it now. Throw your hat over this tall wall. Now, you have to go and get it.”
Settling in, going to work
That was in 1987, and within months, Bimstein realized Springdale was where he wanted to live. “I am in love with the land. It is literally a stone’s throw from the national park,” he says.
Fortunately, as a composer, Bimstein found he could pursue his career quite well from Utah–thanks to fax machines, modems, overnight delivery and occasional trips out of town. He scored the NBC-TV movie “Murder in High Places” at home, using a videotape copy of the rough cut. Bimstein used digitally processed sounds generated by his studio door for his composition “The Door.”
He drew on his next-door neighbor (and the sounds of that neighbor’s cows) for one of his most popular recent works, the musical-text piece “Garland Hirschi’s Cows.” It was performed by several companies in the U.S. and ended up being choreographed by London’s Transitions Company, which toured the work in Europe and Asia. The original recorded version aired on National Public Radio and Pacifica Radio. In 1994, “Cows” also was included on a New Music compilation CD.
Other works, commissions and lectures took Bimstein throughout the U.S. and overseas, from Aspen, Colo., to New York’s Lincoln Center, from Austria to Bali. These included such pieces as “Dark Winds Rising” (about the Kaibab Paiutes Indian tribe) “Koulangatta” (a collaboration with Corky Siegel accompanied by a string quartet) and collaboration on “180 Lights” (in Ubud, Bali, then documented and presented in Holland).
What did not work in Utah was Bimstein’s marriage. He and Blanche were divorced in 1990, though they remain best friends, still talking by phone several times a week. She writes her own material but continues to include some of Bimstein’s songs in her performances. Recently, she returned to Chicago.
Festival leads to politics
In Utah, Bimstein was building his reputation on another front. Besides expanding his repertoire as a composer, he became active in a number of national arts organizations, especially those dedicated to promoting new composers.
Increasingly adept at grant proposals and commissioning pitches, Bimstein scored a major coup in 1990 by persuading the New Music Festival to include smaller communities in its 1992 mix of 16 cities–specifically, his new hometown of Springdale. That success put Springdale in the company of such cities as Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago and Los Angeles. It also meant that Bimstein had a new responsibility as founder and executive director of the New Music Utah Festival.
The three-day outdoor event was a tremendous hit, as was its sequel in 1993. The repeated success of the festival helped cement Bimstein’s image as not only a creative force but also a savvy businessman. He was asked to consider running for mayor in fall 1993.
“That really surprised me,” Bimstein admits. He says he spent time soul-searching, eventually drawing inspiration from human-rights activist and artist Vaclav Havel, who became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. “I thought it was great that an avant garde playwright would be involved in politics. I realized that instead of regarding political office as a conflict with my life as a creative person, it could actually be a different manifestation of my creative side.”
One of the main issues of the campaign might sound familiar to Chicagoans who experienced Council Wars in the 1980s and who saw the rancor following the death of Mayor Harold Washington in 1987. The people of Springdale were looking to restore a sense of civility and order to the town’s political process.
“At the time, town meetings were packed with people shouting and screaming at each other–there was no trust,” Bimstein explains. “People were suspicious and worried about protecting their interests.” There was a lot of litigation, including a suit by the former mayor against his own town council staff.
For many people, the New Music Utah Festival had been one of the few examples of positive news about the town. In his campaign, Bimstein cited that success and promised to bring a sense of professionalism to the mayor’s office. He sometimes described his presentation as “an aggressively `agendaless’ campaign. That is, I felt we needed a mayor who had no personal agenda, but one who would resolve conflict.”
`Different voices’
In November 1993, Bimstein won a three-way contest with 60 percent of the vote. Since the election, Springdale’s rhetoric has cooled considerably. Litigation has been settled. Council meetings are more orderly.
“It wasn’t just me–the people wanted it to work,” Bimstein says. There are still disagreements, but they are handled differently, with Bimstein stressing the process of open dialogue.
He uses musical composition to explain his approach.
“Different voices, `dissonant notes’ outside the mainstream, make for a more interesting score,” he says. “They just have to be orchestrated to work together. Done right, you have an emerging piece, a constantly evolving composition.”
Now well into his second year as mayor, Bimstein finds the “composition” going well, and is looking ahead. “I see Springdale as a model `gateway’ community, maintaining a healthy relationship with Zion National Park,” he says.
The best example of that involves working with Zion to deal with the ever-growing number of visitors and vehicles, a problem increasingly common to national parks. Plans call for a shuttle bus system from the town to the park, closing Zion to auto traffic for six months of the year. Bimstein would also like to see a bike trail from Springdale connect directly to Zion’s new internal trail. The “dissonant notes” inevitably revolve around expansion and development, the same as in any other city.
Bimstein also has to save more time for his own composing career. As in many small towns, the office of mayor in Springdale is not salaried. He and the city council members receive a token amount for each meeting, hiring a professional town manager and small staff to handle the everyday business and legal paperwork.
Bimstein is preparing a CD of his work, as well as pursuing a number of commissions. After another successful staging of the New Music Utah Festival in 1994, he has put that event on hold for a year. “Even with tremendous volunteer support,” he says, “it was an exhausting event for me–from fundraising and booking to the staging and cleanup.
“Besides,” he diplomatically adds with a wry smile, “I’m sure it’s going to rain that weekend in 1995.”
BIMSTEIN STILL AROUND
Phil Bimstein’s compositions can be found on several CD compilations, including “From A to Z” (with “Garland Hirschi’s Cows”) on Starkland Records, P.O. Box 2190, Boulder, Colo., 80306; and “Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues” (with “Koulangatta”) on Chicago’s Alligator Records. Music by Phil ‘n’ the Blanks is not available on CD, though the original vinyl can be found in used-record stores.
