Tomata du Plenty: From Screamer to Artist
Actor, performer, painter, raconteur. The colorful coast to coast life of Tomata du Plenty has been getting renewed attention lately with the production of a feature length documentary and a series of exhibits featuring his art and work in theater and film in New York City, South Florida, Los Angeles and Seattle. A major retrospective is in the works for a museum in Miami. I knew of Tomata — real name David Xavier Harrigan, (May 28, 1948 — August 21, 2000) since the late 1970s as the lead singer of infamous punk band The Screamers who made heads roll with their unusual no guitar band and vivid logo of a screaming man with spiky hair by Gary Panter.
I finally met him when he moved to South Miami Beach in the early 1990s, drawn by the lure of cheap rents, oceanfront apartments and a thriving art community.
He immediately made friends with all the key people and was soon having exhibits at local bars and fledgling galleries. Perpetually broke, he lived in his small painting studio on Lincoln Road and made money from sweeping up bottles at The Deuce Bar when not selling his art for small amounts, usually $10 to $25. He gave away more than he sold just to be in people’s collections. I ended up with about 5 of his pieces. He made watercolors on pages torn from books and then progressed to painting on wood and cutting out the shape. These grew progressively larger.
He did a mural on the side of the Hamlet Bar, when no one was doing murals in South Beach. I wrote a few stories for the local arts weekly newspaper on his artsy exploits.
Sweet natured, quick to laugh with an impish face, Tomata made friends quickly. He knew a little about a lot, and drew his portraits from figures in the pop culture, music and literary world. I ran into him in unusual places, like the time I was covering a Billy Ray Cyrus appearance at a local circus. There he was on the sidelines, taking it all in as Billy Ray rode in on an elephant.
Tomata never talked much about his earlier life though he careened from careers as a theater troupe founder in the 1960s in San Francisco to experimental punk band performer in The Screamers in the 1970s in LA to multi-media artist living in Miami, Seattle and New Orleans. Tomata seized the day in San Francisco where he joined the Cockettes theater troupe in 1968, then was funded by the city of Seattle in Ze Whiz Kidz , a lip-synch troupe he co-founded with the late Gorilla Rose. After bailing on Ze Kidz circa ‘72–’73, Tomata performed comedy with Fayette Hauser and Gorilla at CBGB in New York alongside The Ramones and the Stilettos with a pre-Blondie Debbie Harry.
Making his way to Los Angeles he made his mark with The Screamers, a band that had no guitars just one ARP Odyssey synth, one Fender Rhodes with fuzzbox, and a minimal drum kit with Tomata on lead vocals. They never recorded an album but became sensations at the Masque, the Whisky and the Roxy with their meticulously polished productions. Tomata was a fierce front man, though he later said it was the unhappiest time of his life.
After the final breakup of the Screamers in ’81, Tomata embarked on a new career as a painter, and evolved into a revered folk artist who worked the storefront-gallery circuit in Seattle, L.A., Miami, New Orleans and San Francisco. He would literally go bar to bar with a stack of drawings and sell them to people for $25 each.
When I was in New Orleans on a book tour with some punk pals in 1996, I mentioned to Tomata that I was reading a new autobiography on Waylon Jennings who I had briefly worked with. A day later he delivered a beautiful detailed watercolor drawing of Jennings to me at the hotel, framed and inscribed on the back. That’s just the kind of guy he was.
Tomata was friends with Arturo Vega before he was the art director for the Ramones. Vega designed early fliers and posters for Tomata in San Francisco. Last Spring I was asked to curate a show based on Tomata’s colorful life for the gallery run by Arturo’s foundation in NYC called Howl Happening.
The New York City included a one night only exhibit and sale of about 25 of Tomata’s watercolors from the collection of Chuck Fulton; a slide show I curated that gives an overview arc of his career from the beginning; and a panel discussion focusing on Tomata’s time in New York City. The panel featured his 70s era off-off Broadway theater contemporaries Tish and Snooky of Manic Panic (the hair color queens); and Jack Rabid, publisher of The Big Takeover who conducted one of the last interviews with Tomata.
The show in West Palm Beach featured watercolors and painted wooden cutouts, a slideshow I created and a panel with friends and former fellow South Florida Art Center Studio artists JC Carroll and Carlos Alves and Rolando Chang Barrero.
Tomata was quite a character, an artist ahead of his time who had cult status that has grown since his passing in 2000 in New Orleans. Art world collectors such as New York’s Robert Miller were scooping up his work for years. He was pre-internet and pre-MTV, both mediums which would have made him a national star, but instead he had to do it the hard way, by actually going from one major city to the next to make a name for himself. Why all this renewed interest? An avid collector explains.
“In the sometimes cyclic nature of renewed interest in past artistic movements a rare, little known gem is unearthed…such is the story of Tomatâ du Plenty who found underground fame in such outfits as the Coockettes and Ze Whiz Kidz before becoming a Punk icon as frontman of the Screamers. Tomatâ’s Expressionist artistic nature led to a career in painting after he left the stage. Tomatâ’s paintings became a documentation of the various cities he called home and of the characters who inhabited those cities while also capturing the pop and cultural icons of Americana with his palette.”
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