Charlie Tweedle
Better than Normal!

Curated by Zully Adler

June 6 - July 12, 2025
Reception Friday, June 6, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.

You say you have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg.

- Charlie Tweddle

Charlie Tweddle believed his many pursuits were one single project—an expression of his “higher self”—but his reputation was well-divided.

Some knew him as a purveyor of cowboy hats, many embellished with ornaments made from ethically sourced animal parts (roadkill, mainly). Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, and the Eagles were among his clients. Reggie Jackson allegedly owned thirty hats. Tweddle’s prices seemed steep to me, but I’m told they were reasonable given his craftsmanship. Few others could mount full birds on the front of the hat, and fewer even thought to mount the bird’s tail on the back.

Other people knew Tweddle for Fantastic Greatest Hits, a record of eccentric, lo-fi country ballads. The title is an obvious gag. With a different approach, Tweddle could have strummed into regional fame. Instead, he let the sounds of frogs and pigeons take over half of the album.

Some might remember Tweddle for the dentures and crowns he made while working as a dental technician, a vocation he was less than proud to remember, but his patients are probably all dead by now.  

Not so many people remember Tweddle for his sculptures and paintings. Even though art, more than hats or music, was his most abiding venture, from the time he studied at Kansas City Art Institute in the 1960s until he died in 2021. He even believed his pigeon coop was a “sculpture with living things flying around inside!” The art department at Stanford University supposedly offered Tweddle a faculty position, but I find this hard to believe. His work is too deliberately provincial and sentimental for an institution like that. He painted ducks, plough hands, and other subjects found on the walls of saloons. Some pieces include pictures of his family framed by hearts or cast in the light of the Virgin Mary. One assemblage has a little portrait of Tweddle smiling with his guitar, like poorly placed self-promotion. With this folksiness Tweddle never parted, even forty years after he had left the South for Santa Cruz, California (his pigeons in tow).  

Given Tweddle’s disregard for high art, his flying saucers might be seen to safeguard whimsy. It is as if he wanted to ensure that nobody took him too seriously. Tweddle definitely believed in UFOs. He swore he saw two of them shoot over the night sky on his way out west. But he also confessed that his first thoughts of flying saucers came after blacking out in a bar fight (the other guy started it). And he saw a connection between his religious upbringing, long-undiagnosed brain tumor, and extraterrestrial sightings.

 Unsurprisingly, his spirituality was unusual. After what he called “seven years of atheism,” Tweddle found his way to something like Christianity laced with Buddhism. “God is Mother Nature and Father Time,” he often wrote. Like others who journeyed to California in the 1960s, he was searching for a devotion beyond religious distinctions, privileging solitude and tolerance. As it did for others, this endeavor eventually turned into a preoccupation with self-improvement. But Tweddle exchanged new age remedies for hillbilly proverbs. Across the walls of his home and studio, he left notes on bits of paper that read like the sayings of an old-timer rocking on a homestead porch: “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always got!”

When I first met Charlie Tweddle, he was wearing a baseball cap with a pig’s snout sewn onto the crown. As we shook hands I felt his finger tickle my palm. If he didn’t have such a bushy white beard, and if his smile wasn’t so comforting, I might have found it creepy. But Tweddle radiated an old timey decency found in places like Pinckneyville, Kentucky, where he grew up on a watermelon farm. The way he spoke—slowly, with oval-shaped sounds, drawl intact—made him instantly avuncular. He could have unsavory opinions. For better or worse, I avoided the subjects of rap music and the war in Afghanistan. In other ways his thinking was surprisingly contemporary. He understood very clearly that his music was a strange brew of Americana, field recordings, and tape manipulation, and he wasn’t surprised when invited to play with indie bands. He saw the similarities between his assemblages and the Funk movement of the 1960s, but insisted, rightly, that his work was a little too country for beatniks. Like many of my favorite artists, Tweddle threaded a fine needle between cultural obliviousness and utter self-awareness, making it hard to tell if he was performing the rube.

There was certainly a time when being avant-garde could not live comfortably with being country, however much some conceptualists liked to play with tractors. The times have changed, but when Tweddle started riding the line fifty years ago he took an interesting risk. Could he have mimed rustic backwardness to mock hierarchies, or even empty out the idea of artistic merit? I imagine his answer would have been a proverb in the manner of Jimmie Rodgers or Shunryu Suzuki, or both. But I never asked him, regrettably, so I’ll probably never know.

- Zully Adler