TulsaNow

As the Tulsa Metro Chamber of Commerce tries to build a “comfortably cosmopolitan” brand for the city, two artists are finding remarkable beauty in Tulsa’s decaying fringe.

“Dont forget this fact, you can’t get it back.”

Tulsan J.J. Cale recently emerged from his self-imposed obscurity long enough to release a new collection of songs, “To Tulsa and Back,” and to allow German director Jörg Bundschuh to document his recent tour and pilgrimage back to his home town. The resulting DVD records a wistful homecoming and a musical reunion with old friends, culminating in a rousing performance at the Cain’s Ballroom.

Throughout his career, Cale, who is most often credited with creating a signature “Tulsa Sound,” has seemed to shun the celebrity he’s helped so many others obtain. He’s written songs that became hits for Eric Clapton (“After Midnight,” “Cocaine”), Lynard Skynard and the Allman Brothers (“Call Me the Breeze”), the Band (“Crazy Mama”), and others – but he’s satisfied himself with a small but rabid following and the admiration of his peers. (When asked in a recent issue of Vanity Fair what living person he most admired, Clapton answered without hesitation, “J.J. Cale.”)

In “To Tulsa and Back,” as Cale wanders Tulsa’s deserted downtown streets, sings lonesome songs in an empty parking lot, and loiters at the rusted gates of the Sun refinery, he reflects on a time when Tulsa was still the “Oil Capital of the World,” and when a kid from the wrong side of the tracks could make an astounding 30-year career finding beauty in low things.

“Each location is filled with the weird beauty of decay.”

As Cale reminisces on a long career, young Tulsa photographer Alison Zarrow has recently published her first book, “Abandoned Tulsa," a haunting catalogue of urban decomposition. Zarrow’s photographs of moldering Tulsa landmarks, from the Camelot Hotel to the Rose Bowl, capture both mundane and magnificent artifacts in various states of waste.

In her Forward to the book, Julia Solis praises Zarrow and other urban explorers, who don’t confine their expeditions to pre-packaged tourist destinations:

In an increasingly brand-oriented world, a resistance to cultural homogenization has doomed a great number of formerly thriving buildings.... Luxury hotels, department stores, office towers, and other remnants of a downtown grandeur, once organic components of a distinctive cityscape, now inhabit ghostly silhouettes, whose residents have fled to the safety of uniform suburbs. But to those who care to look, the vacant buildings are treasure chests of social artifacts, each offering a poignant record of urban development and demise.