0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 9/12)

An autopsy lent something of a tragic twist to what had become an increasingly comic story: It turned out that Bobo had an extra female chromosome, caused by a little-known condition called Klinefelter’s Syndrome.

Upon his death, Bobo was given to the University of Washington’s Museum of History and Industry, which stuffed him and put him on display. He stands there still. “Alive or dead, Bobo is still a terrific drawing card,” noted the Seattle Times . Visitors flocked to the Museum, which had hitherto been a little-visited, arcane institution, to pay homage. “Some Bellevue teenagers,” the Times reported shortly after his posthumous debut, “burst into tears upon seeing Bobo.”

Humphries and Invisible Seattle, in honoring Bobo, understood that they were paying homage to a beloved Seattle that was vanishing against its will. In posing the question why a city bent on sophistication would be so in thrall to something so lowbrow, Humphries observed, “But that’s what makes Bobo interesting: he was a reflection of ourselves, of the city in which he lived. In the 1950s and 1960s, Seattle was filled with families with children, and the kids had this big, childlike, show-off gorilla to look up to. With the declining birth rate, we have no need for such heroes now. We’ve gotten more worldly and grown-up. But in Bobo’s heyday he was a lot like Seattle: friendly, growing, unsophisticated, a little clumsy, good-hearted, and gladly willing to entertain visiting relatives.”

When not mourning Seattle’s past through Bobo worship, Invisible Seattle was looking to the city’s future with some trepidation. Across the nation, rock music was moving from disco to mindless, formulaic pop that eventually would take the form of inartistic exuberant male big-hair extravaganzas. The country as a whole was moving—largely through the spread of television—to a uniform popular culture that was rapidly eroding the nation’s separate and distinct regional cultural traditions. Seattle, in spite of its boosters’ desire to meld with the American mainstream, had a thriving rock-and-roll countertrending underground in the early 1980s, and I often joined Invisible Seattleites in forays to the Rainbow Tavern, in the University District, where we took in the act of the best of these groups, Red Dress.

Fronted by a skinny, bald Roosevelt High School graduate named Gary Minkler, Red Dress sported a loud, aggressive, thundering, intricate and angry sound that merged punk and 60s rock in a musical melee that had its audiences screaming, leaping, and bouncing off walls and each other in a frenzy. The Red Dress themes, both sonic and lyric, tended toward darkness, futility, and cheerful fear for the future. One song, entitled “Bob Was a Robot,” was a wailing number sung by a boy to his girlfriend, who has left him for a robot; another, “Teenage Pterodactyls,” grafted adolescent angst to dinosaur myth; and a third, “I’m Not an Astronaut, I’m a Nut,” screamed out a Seattlesque take on the American lust/hatred for celebrities: