Buried Musical Treasure on Anacapa Street

It all started with “Cinema.” I am minding my own business, wrestling with the steady flow of deadlines in my journalist mode and sneaking in music-making on the side, when the email arrives with an enticing blast of music attached. I get scores of such emails in my line of music scribe work, but this one was extra special — a beautiful, layered, and, yes, cinematic 11-minute electronic piece of unknown vintage by my longtime friend and musical ally Dick Dunlap.

“Stop the presses and other reality matters,” my ears told me. “We’re on the brink of something very good.” Several months later, Household Ink Records has released an 11-track collection of similar uncategorizable archival gems, opening with “Cinema,” and closing with the album’s title track, “Arlene Rising.” The Arlene in the spotlight is Arlene Dunlap, gifted pianist/piano teacher and Dick’s wife of 60 years, who passed away on November 27 of last year. (See her obituary here.)

The enlightened spark of an e-missive was sent by Glen Dunlap, nephew and caretaker of Dick, in failing health as he approaches his 86th birthday on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Glen had been an obsessive sleuth, trolling through piles of musical fragments and finished pieces lurking on piles of tapes — of different formats through the decades. To date, he has uncovered dozens of pieces, and he wondered if Household Ink might release “Cinema” as a single, with possibly a few more tracks adding up to an EP. But my curiosity and hunger for more led me to urge for a full, hour-ish-long feast of an album. 

Enter the diverse sonic platter of Arlene Rising, which also includes a lovely brief minimalist solo piano piece, “Song of the Sea,” written and performed by Arlene.

The unfolding, unhidden collection has amounted to a particular and specialized archival treasure trove on Anacapa street. More specifically, it lives in the Dunlaps’ longstanding home, with a carriage house/music and art studio/mad cultural laboratory down below.

I first met Dick with my journalist hat on, entranced by what I heard and saw with his 1981 multidisciplinary installation Intersphere, at the McCormick Gallery of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He was a uniquely talented musician, painter, and conceptual and sound artist who had shown and performed in Europe and been featured in LIFE magazine. In the McCormick Gallery, Dick would perform a daily half-hour piano improvisation, with echoes of what Keith Jarrett had been up to. I was hooked.

I encountered him at various times, in a story on significant sound artists for the Los Angeles Reader and once for the respected, now-defunct Artweek. On that assignment, I showed up at his house to find him ignoring me while quickly writing out a check. He then handed it to me, in the amount of $12,602.36, in a deadpan, semi-Dadaistic notion of a bribe. A wry, quirky sense of humor is never far from the surface of this guy.

Who could have imagined that, a year after Intersphere, he would agree to team up with me, drummer Tom Lackner, and bassist Chris Symer to create the oddball and hopelessly eclectic group Headless Household. That band/head space would go on for 36 years (through a SOhO show in January 2020, just pre-COVID clampdown), many concerts and gigs at Baudelaire’s, Center Stage, and elsewhere, and produced nine albums on its in-house Household Ink label.

And it all started with rambling rehearsal and rambling jam sessions in Dick’s carriage house hang zone. Out of our collective improv wanderings, the first piece we considered a “piece” was “Day One: Winning of the White Hats.”

Meanwhile, Chez Dunlap was a famed house of music and learning for a broad swath of Santa Barbara’s for decades. Upstairs, Arlene was one of the city’s most serious and supportive piano teachers around, with a largely classical focus. Those students with a more casual, playful, or jazz leaning would be sent downstairs to study with the more Bohemian loose spirit Dick.

Countless young and not-so-young students passed through the Dunlap house portals, including the children of Independent Editor-in-Chief Marianne Partridge and of Santa Barbara–based film director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive, Holes). Partridge remembers having her daughter Elizabeth studying with Arlene, while Justin headed downstairs to Dick, who at one point showed the curious youngster the innards of a piano. Partridge recalls that “to get his attention, Dick took a piano apart to show him how it works. They were a lovely couple who seemed to devote their lives to music.”

One of Dick’s student success stories is Benny Lackner, now based in Berlin and working on his third album for the esteemed jazz label ECM Records. Benny — now Benjamin in his ECM persona — paid tribute to his beloved mentor with the lyrical tune “Anacapa,” from last year’s album Spindrift. (Listen here.)

Circling back to Arlene Rising, one of Dick’s creative specialties was drawing on his skill and evolving fascination with developments in synthesizers and electronics in music, combined with his organic aplomb as a jazz and new music man. We would periodically get tastes of Dick’s painterly electronic creations, which were occasionally flown into Headless Household albums, or heard in conjunction with art exhibitions such as History of Animals, a sight-and-sound installation at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies in 1990. 

“History of Animals” is one of the fascinating and more complex tracks on Arlene Rising, a composite of sound and musical sources, like “Collage,” but Dick’s innate experimental side is counterbalanced by a strong sense of lyricism and melodic contouring. For all the album’s challenging moments, it plays in a fluid fashion, like a maverick model of ambient music: Dick keeps head and heart in check, right through to the gentle reverent sigh of a finale, “Arlene Rising,” to close. 

Mystery surrounds the vintages of each song on this album, although we can sometimes get hints from the textures of the synth and sampling sounds. But that X factor adds to the timeless ambience of the music, in parts and as a whole.

Glen’s sleuthing instincts have paid off richly and also opened the floodgates of curiosity about what else is lying in wait on Anacapa. A sequel or two may be in order. The Dunlap mystique lives on.

For more information, see householdink.com/dickdunlap, and to hear Arlene Rising on Spotify, see bit.ly/4oQODtC.