Underrated Icons: 10 Underground Creative Pioneers

It might be much harder these days to exist in the fringe or the underground – the Internet has a way of getting your message out to the masses at a rapid pace – but the small pockets of music, art, food, literature and beyond will always exist in one form or another. Icons are not always the Madonnas or the Kerouacs, they’re pioneers of the stuff that makes our world great, no matter how big or how small. From guitar makers to sign painters in Texas, here are some of our favorites.

It’s rather likely that no one else on this list would have been a follower of Sylvester Graham, a dietary reformer born in the late 18th century, who preached an emphasis on a vegetarian diet as a cure for alcoholism and sexual urges. His followers, who were referred to as Grahamites, practiced abstinence from alcohol, frequent bathing, vegetarianism, daily brushing of teeth and a generally sparse lifestyle. Though his lifestyle choices were a bit on the conservative side, he was responsible for inventing graham flour and the graham cracker, and his focus on nutrition was a big influence on the Kellogg Brothers, whom we assume you know pretty well. So even if you don’t practice abstinence and constant bathing, you have Mr. Graham to thank for cereal and s’mores.

During World War II, Nathan Daniel served as a civilian designer for the Army, founding a shielding that would prevent the noise that jeeps and motorcycles made from interfering with the reception of critical battlefield radio messages. When the war was over, Daniel opened Danelectro (coined from “Daniel Electric”), an amplifier manufacturing business in New Jersey. He made amps for Epiphone, Montgomery Ward and Sears, which sold them under the now infamous Silvertone name. By 1954, Danelectro was making electric guitars with their signature “lipstick tube” pickups, known for supplying our young men and women – like Jimi Hendrix, who learned on a Danelectro – with low cost and high quality instruments. Danelectro would allow generations of youngsters to be able to pursue rock-star dreams without shelling out rock-star prices.

Steve Albini has fronted bands like Big Black, Shellac and Rapeman, but he’s making this list as an “audio engineer.” (We put that in quotes because Albini, who is actually a record producer, insists that his name not show up on liner sleeves. If the record company insists, they credit him as an engineer.) Since the mid-1980s Albini has worked on some of the best and most influential underground records that have ever been made, all out of his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. Albini’s laundry list of clients include Slint, The Pixies, The Breeders, The Jesus Lizard, Nirvana, Superchunk, Smog, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Magnolia Electric Co. and many, many more.

When Saul Leiter was 23 years old, he left theology school and moved to New York City to pursue art. Painter Richard Pousette-Dart encouraged him to take photographs, so Leiter started snapping black-and-white shots of life in the city. Leiter would soon switch to color, but kept most of his street life photography to himself until he started printing again in the early ’90s. Considered a part of the “New York School” of photographers during the ’40s and ’50s, Leiter stood out from his contemporaries by producing photographic compositions with painter-like quality. Now that anyone with a cell phone can be a NYC street photographer, it’s important to recognize the originals.

In the 1940s, while making nature films, Dan Gibson started to learn how to record wildlife sound. He would eventually design pioneering audio equipment, including the “Dan Gibson Parabolic Microphone,” which he used to record LPs in the ’50s and ’60s. In the early ’80s, Gibson founded Solitudes, a label dedicated to the sounds of the natural world. While today the albums might be associated with helping you sleep, many of Gibson’s recordings are eerie and dark, putting you right in the middle of a forest on a cold night with an hours worth of coyote howls.

Bill Hicks was considered a comedian, but had very little to do with the Jerry Seinfelds and the Jeff Foxworthys of the world. His act was dark, often criticizing all aspects of pop culture and religion, eventually leading to a highly publicized incident on the “Late Show with David Letterman” where his set was pulled from the show’s broadcast. Hicks was one of the smartest comics to ever grace the stage, a true original, always challenging the audience with a cigarette in hand and misanthropy in his voice.

Sign painting has become a thing of the past, but there are still a dedicated group of folks in our great land dedicated to keeping the lost American art alive. Norma Jeanne Maloney has been at it since 1984, when she started painting signs for the race tracks in Lexington, Kentucky. Since attending the California College of Arts and Crafts in the early ’90s, Maloney has been painting signs all over San Francisco, Nashville and her current home in Austin, influencing a whole new generation of young artists dedicated to making our towns unique.

Henry Darger lived in a small Chicago apartment and worked as a janitor while creating his masterpiece, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which consisted of hundreds of illustrations that used traced images from old magazines and catalogues. Since the discovery of the 15,000-plus page work shortly before his death in 1973, Darger has become one of the most revered examples of outsider art.

Alan Watts moved to the United States in the late ’30s from England and began Zen training in New York City. He then attended Theological Seminary outside of Chicago, and after moving to San Francisco, developed a following while working at a radio station in Berkeley. He wrote over 25 books on philosophy, ranging from Zen Buddhism to human consciousness, and conducted countless public lectures on seminars before he died in 1973. Watts was one of the first people to popularize Eastern philosophy and religion for a Western audience.

You might know him better as “Sailor Jerry,” but whatever you call him, he’s one of our country’s greatest tattoo artists. In the late ’20s, Collins set up in Oahu, tattooing the sailors who would stop in Hawaii for a quick 48-hour shore leave. He combined classic American designs with the Asian culture and art that he had become obsessed with during his travels. It’s more than likely that you or one of your friends has a tattoo that’s a direct descendant of his original style.