Manitou Springs artist Don Goede back from the brink and from creative destruction | Arts & Entertainment

Don Goede, aka “Jack Medicine,” aka “Chaos,” night-napped maybe four hours on the couch, but to him that’s like hibernation (“I used to never sleep, never.”). A full day of office work already in the rearview on this late-July afternoon, he was sock-clad and guitar-slung in the kitchen of his Manitou Springs home, suddenly launching into song and just as suddenly shrugging off to find his pick and getting distracted by a large, capped Mason jar, half-full of sand and garnished with a giant rubber shrimp.

Art. That’s why we’re here: To talk art, and the end of it.

“OK, let’s do this,” he says, and does, leading a tour through the many rooms and multi-stories of his cliffside abode, full of rooms and hidden nooks where a literal lifetime of works and pieces-in-progress have convalesced for years awaiting their moment.

So what happens when you’ve spent half a century amassing and creating — but not finishing and only reluctantly, rarely selling — hundreds upon hundreds of drawings, paintings and sculptures, a voluminous body of work that’s highly personal and largely bizarre?

What happens when your unrivaled creation and collection drive — your need to process everything through art and fundamental belief that everything is art — is compromising domestic navigation?

If you’re Don Goede, you wait ‘til your wife’s out of town, drag everything out into the open, and curate a final hurrah you can’t come back from. You vow to turn the page, still the spinning plates and kaleidoscope, ADHD brain and settle into a more streamlined existence.

Like you’re supposed to when you hit “middle age,” right?

“I think there’s something wrong with me … I don’t mean, in a bad way, just that there’s so much I don’t even know where to start. I just have stacks and boxes and boxes of all this stuff, and I don’t want somebody else to have to deal with it,” Goede said, months after a series of health scares and diagnoses provided an existential reality kick, and a week before his envisioned “final” show was set to open at Manitou Art Center.

He’ll display it all, cycling through and changing things up on a daily basis, then send everything on its way — from this plane, and into the metaverse.

“Nobody’s going to want this crap … I’m not sure they want it now,” Goede said. “I want to do something weird and fun and cool with it all, and just move on.”

Nothing will be for sale. He’ll earmark the pieces family and friends would like to hold on to.

The rest? “I’m going to burn it, and what I can’t burn I will find some other way to destroy,” he said in July. “If I never do an art show ever again, that’s OK. This is my finale — my ‘retrospastic,’ I call it, of everything I’ve done since grade school. I will take lots of photographs and video, but then every physical manifestation will cease to exist.”

Call it the not-so-gentle art of Manitou Death Cleaning.

Blame it on a moment of clarity from a guy who — no matter how hard he thinks he’s trying — just can’t not go big.

Works on display

If you don’t know Don Goede by name or musical aliases, if you live in Manitou or Colorado Springs you’re likely familiar with his work, evident throughout the southern Pikes Peak Region in fixtures such as SunWater Spa, which he co-founded and co-owns, and his work with Smokebrush Foundation for the Arts and Manitou Heritage Foundation, to name just a few.

Those are his day jobs, the mantle he assumed when he returned to the Springs area from New York City in the years after 9/11, got domestic, and settled down with his Cheyenne Mountain High School sweetheart in the once-condemned, since remodeled house they now call home.

“There are many times that I bite my tongue because I want him to live his biggest, best self, and it can be daunting to come home to a room full of stuff that maybe I don’t understand the way he does,” said Goede’s wife, Jeana Farrell. “But we’ve made it work for 21 years, so we’re doing something right.”

Goede looks like the slow-aging indie musician he is at 56, skinny, grinny, a little geeky, with a shaggy salt-and-straw mop that flops when he rocks out, which he’s done for more than three decades with a mind-spinning array of bands (and the occasional aforementioned sobriquet, Jack Medicine), including an iteration that opened for Sonic Youth at a show in Los Angeles in 2014.

Simply put, the list of things Goede hasn’t mastered, tried or considered is shorter.

In an earlier chapter, he lived in New York City and was the tour manager for the late cult musician and artist Daniel Johnston, with whom he developed a bond that lives on after Johnston’s untimely death, in 2019.

“The whole Daniel Johnson thing is people don’t realize he was his tour manager for many years, and he took care of him and kept him alive and made sure he had the right medication and got him to gigs and sort of made his career possible,” said Goede’s longtime bandmate and friend Michael Kimbrell. Goede is now among the keepers of Daniel Johnston’s multipronged and lucrative legacy, and has penned a documentary and almost a dozen episodes of a series based on Johnston’s life, all poised to drop as soon as he has time to get them over the line.

Music and visual art have always been inexorably intertwined for Goede. A recent Springs gallery show of drawings he’d made over the years to celebrate lost loved ones included a soundtrack — original songs, written and performed live, to accompany each piece.

“I was that guy walking around the gallery with a guitar, getting in people’s faces with my death songs, and they’re like, ‘Who let this guy in?’” Goede said.

He won’t give up the music entirely, but starting a new band can be exhausting. “I’ll still play occasional gigs, and openings, but not like before,” he said. “After this show I’m going to focus on composing … filmmaking and writing.”

A collaboration

Kimbrell met his future bandmate about 20 years ago, when Goede came into the Springs computer shop where Kimbrell worked with a laptop dripping red wine.

“He had hundreds of songs he’d written and art he’d created on there, and he thought it was all gone and was freaking out,” Kimbrell said.

Kimbrell worked his magic and restored Goede’s tech, sparking a friendship that became a musical collaboration that continues to play out in ways that, invariably, are tough to predict or pin down. Goede’s genre-blasting list of original songs now runs into the thousands.

“He’s always into doing something, and it always gets bigger and bigger as it goes along, and it almost always turns out great,” Kimbrell said.

There’s no questioning Goede’s commitment to his craft, or to a bit.

“We once played a gig as two different bands, Electric Illuminati opened for the New Depressionists, and Don shaved his head between the sets and painted his face yellow,” Kimbrell said. “That’s Don in a nutshell. He’s willing to do whatever it takes for the art.”

Don is a focused, but amorphous, force that must be experienced, said his assistant and “project manager” Iraiah Waak.

“With Don, he has all of these beautiful, crazy, absurd and really helpful ideas out in the ether, but really seeing them come into the physical is beyond explaining,” said Waak, the 21-year-old who keeps him on task and helps him wade through, and install, his ocean of ideas. “Don thinks all of his ideas are amazing and he should do them, but that’s not always the best way to go — or even possible.”

Opening night of Goede’s “final” show was on a First Friday. It featured a concert of originals songs, with Goede on lead vocals, backed by Kimbrell and the band.

Those who know the artist probably knew what to expect inside the gallery. Others, not so much.

“Oh my God, is that…hair? And teeth?”

Yes, and yes!

“That’s creepy, but I like it.”

“Wait, is that a real … coyote?”

Mummified and adorned from scavenged roadkill, but yes it is.

Or, no! Now, it’s art!

The giant Mason jar of sand from Goede’s Burning Man sojourn in 2018, potentially full of dormant “fairy” shrimp, has gone from centerpiece to fully formed artwork, finally earning its wings.

Every single element, art and song, channels and honors a moment from Don’s past, right down to the mermaid mimes serving sushi on opening night (an obscure nod to Goede’s NYC art days), Waak said.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like in his head, but I think the show at the MAC is the closest any of us will ever get,” she said. “Every piece of that show is a part or a story from Don’s life that he wants to tell, then get out of his head so he can move on. It’s very much a chaotic cycle of inspiration, amusement and then — once he gets to that part of the show — letting it go.”

Grand destruction

Like all of it, the grand finale was more performance art than gallery stroll, and far less destruction than was originally planned.

But, oh, the destruction was grand. The show played out as it was played in, before a live audience, to a live soundtrack of original songs, in the parking lot west of the Manitou Art Center.

One by one, Goede fed the series of original memorial paintings into the metal burn pit, first dousing them with lighter fluid in the manner recommended by the fire department, for safe and efficient burning of art. Each piece got its own goodbye song.

Those honors complete, an inspired Goede shrugged off his guitar and dashed back inside the gallery, pulling a pair of colorful, abstract ink and charcoal paintings he did in high school from the wall, and sprinting back to the parking lot.

“I’ve also learned in my middle age that you’ve got to learn to let go of stuff, you know,” he said to the audience, as he tore up the totems of his past, and fed the pieces to the fire.

Goede gave away the art he didn’t destroy, to anyone who asked, so long as the piece wasn’t already spoken for. 

“Or, I’m going to, as soon as they’re done,” Goede said in early October, of a collection of claimed pieces — including coyote mummy — that required some final touches before going to their new, forever homes.

“Yeah, I changed the rules of my show a little bit,” he said.

And the rules changed him right back.

Goede is still planning to do all the serious grownup things he said he would — books and films, albums, compositions, day job stuff — but maybe there’s still room for the rest of it, too.

“In some ways, I realized maybe I’m not such a bad scribbler. Maybe people want my scribbles after all,” he said.

Back in town for the opening of the show Aug. 2, Farrell was also in the audience for its closing at the end of the month. On a domestic afternoon a few weeks later, she told her husband she was proud of him for following through on a promise she knows runs counter to his nature.

If it was up to him, every surface in the house, including the ceiling, would be covered in art.

“I thought that as hard of a time as you have getting rid of things, that you did a nice job of purging yourself of things,” said Farrell, prepping a batch of homemade ice cream in the kitchen, while her husband visited with company.

“One wall, one piece of art” may never be the hard and fast rule in their home, but these days it’s easier to see the trees for the forest.

“The one thing I’m sad about was the one you burned for (your brother) Clayton was my favorite,” Farrell said, “… but that’s OK. I have a lot of favorites.”

The ice cream machine turned on, kicking up a chaotic racket so that Goede didn’t really need to whisper: “I’m really thinking about doing some fire experiments, with art and music …”

The machine went silent, and Farrell asked, “What was that you said?”

“Oh, nothing,” Goede replied, as if his wife didn’t already know there’s more to come.

Because, of course, there is.