Life and Work
Travis Dickerson was raised in Michigan, where his father, Burton Dickerson, was an arts teacher at the Central Michigan University. When Travis was ten years old, his father exchanged a painting for an old piano and Travis got it to work again.
Together with his brothers he early made some musical experiments, first recordings and later moved to Los Angeles where he met the punk band X. In his new studio in Chatsworth a bunch of the band's releases as well as some solo projects were recorded. Singer Exene Cervenka introduced Dickerson to Viggo Mortensen, starting a long friendship. Nearly all of Mortensen's albums since then were recorded or distributed by TDRS.
In 1994 Dickerson played keyboards on County Fair 2000, an album by Phil Alvin (of The Blasters) and in 1998 he appeared on Shocking Pink Banana Seat by singer–songwriter Susan James. He also wrote the liner notes for the anthology Beyond And Back by X in 1997.
Buckethead and Dickerson met in San Francisco, and Buckethead being disappointed of major record labels found a new home for his many releases in TDRS. Dickerson played keyboards on several Buckethead recordings and in 2001 they formed Thanatopsis, a band combining jazz and rock styles. Released as a Buckethead album, Population Override likewise featured a large contribution from Dickerson in both composition and performance in 2004. Chicken Noodles, a series of jazz-influenced jams, followed in 2006. Additionally Dickerson remastered the early Cornbugs albums, a fun project Buckethead ran with actor Bill Moseley and played on the last two recordings of the band before they split up.
In 2009 Travis released his highly anticipated solo album which has been said to have been in the works for years. On one of Buckethead.tk's annual Binge Support Days, Travis included a special CD with two unreleased tracks, one of those two tracks will be released on this album under the name of Legerdemain. Some participating artists include Buckethead, Bryan "Brain" Mantia, and Cameron Stone.
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Famous quotes containing the words life and/or work:
“In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.”
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“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
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