It was early afternoon on a day in late December. It was warm, like it had been most of that December, and as I ran along Halsted Avenue to the Iguana Café, I began to sweat. I was late for a meeting with Usama Alshaibi, the Iraqi-American filmmaker who had recently finished his first feature-length documentary, “Nice Bombs.”
Usama was teaching a class at Columbia College while he directed and produced a rock opera for the Chicago-based musician Bobby Conn. As I passed the window of the café I saw Usama—a slight, bespectacled man in a dark shirt and jeans, sipping a cup of tea, looking very much unlike the producer/director of a glitzy rock opera. A black backpack sat beside him and as I waved a smile revealed a row of very straight, white teeth.
As it happens, music videos and even rock operas are right in line with the kind of work that Usama does. After finishing the commercially-centered film curriculum of Chicago’s Columbia College, he began his career making short, experimental films tending towards the sexual and the violent.
“When I left I knew that I wasn’t going to make it as a commercial filmmaker, so I abandoned my aspirations to become a successful filmmaker, which is really when I became a filmmaker. I started moving away from the mold of what films should look like and from then on that I started making experimental, short, and sort of weird movies.”
It was at a screening of one of these films that he first met Bobby Conn, “I was showing a movie called ‘The Foreigner’ at a party—it was this really over-the-top, sexually dysfunctional movie and Bobby Conn really loved it. It’s funny—everyone else I show that movie to is either really distressed, appalled, or shocked, but he really liked it.”
Soon thereafter the two began their working relationship. Bobby asked Usama to make a music video for him; the resultant “Angels” (from a song on The Golden Age) features Bobby as the drugged-out, glam-rock narrator of a lurid party scene from the past.
“The thing about rock opera is that it’s not very well thought out and this one is no exception. My expectations for rock and roll are pretty low, but there’s something appealing about the concept of the rock opera.” – Bobby Conn
When Bobby began working on his newest album, King for a Day, he found that the collection of songs lent themselves somewhat to a narrative form and decided to tackle rock and roll’s most pretentious creation—the rock opera. “The thing about rock opera is that it’s not very well thought out and this one is no exception. My expectations for rock and roll are pretty low, but there’s something appealing about the concept of the rock opera,” said Bobby. “It’s trying to be some kind of high art, but really it’s something that someone who smokes weed and works on cars can appreciate.”
King for a Day follows the rise and fall of Bobby Conn. Bobby (a.k.a. Jeffrey Stafford) channels his celebrity alter ego to delve into the world of stardom and fame. Besides the obvious influences (David Bowie, Freddy Mercury, Iggy Pop) Bobby says that he also drew inspiration from the likes of Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton.
The video explores celebrity’s “tragic, comedic, and overblown” nature by juxtaposing a day-glo fantasy of stardom and success (roughly the first half of the album) next to a darkly realistic portrait of failure and defeat. “The Bobby Conn musical is a story about life, about ego, and letting go of that,” says Usama.
Bobby credits much of the album’s character to the conditions of its recording, “I recorded it on the same mixing desk where Sly and the Family Stone recorded There’s a Riot Going On, the album he made when he stopped being a fun artist. It was recorded during a snowstorm and I watched ‘Dark Shadows’ [a gothic soap opera from the 60’s] every morning—I was trying to replicate that sense of murk.”
The bright, artificial part of the film was shot with a 1982 JVC tube camera to capture a late 70s candyland for adults feel. In the “King for a Day” segment, Bobby, wearing a tight white sports tunic, gets shrimped (has his toes sucked) at an orgy-like party. Despite the conceit of fantasy, the video conveys a nightmarish feel. The bright lights and happy colors accentuate the ghoulish undertones—the caked-on make-up, boozy kisses, and intoxicated, vacant stares.
“Usama really seizes on the least glamorous aspects of sexuality, the frustration of it,” explains Bobby. “He’s good at capturing the humanity of people in ridiculous situations and the rawness of the glamour world. No one is aware of how absurd they appear. Parts of it turn my stomach where I’m like, ‘Yechk, who is that guy?’”