As founding guitarist of Austin's Big Boys, Tim Kerr helped invent a distinct flavor of punk-funk in real time, fusing a DIY aesthetic with skater energy and horn-driven grooves that influenced everything from grunge to garage rock, a history that is documented in the new film, You Can Color Outside the Lines. In this episode, we explore Tim's kinetic path through different musical outfits . After Big Boys broke up in 1984, he played in the gospel-inflected garage blues of Poison 13, the raw alt-funk of Bad Mutha Goose, the garage-blues swagger of the Monkeywrench (alongside members of Mudhoney and Gas Huffer), plus Jack O' Fire, Lord High Fixers, and his current old-time and acoustic folk project, Up Around the Sun.
The other area that cannot be ignored when having a conversation with Tim is his parallel — and arguably primary — identity as a visual artist. An art-trained outsider painter and photographer who studied under Garry Winogrand, Kerr has built a raw, primitive-style body of work spanning album covers, gig posters, skateboard graphics, and gallery paintings shown in museums worldwide, much of it collected in a career-spanning art book reissued by Monofonus Press. We talk about why music and painting have always just been the same impulse toward self-expression, an urge that is as natural as breathing itself.
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