Performer-writer-provocateur Taylor Mac is pretty much impossible to categorize, and Mac wouldn't have it any other way. But some folks like, say, journalists earn their wages creating images that readers can comprehend. "Ziggy Stardust meets Tiny Tim" became one shortcut descriptor that arose enough to cause vexation. "When people are comparing you, they are sort of passively aggressively saying, 'You're really not as special as you think you are.'" And so, Mac created an evening of David Bowie and Tiny Tim songs, visually and vocally presented far from their origins, titled Comparison Is Violence.
"I had done this play Lily's Revenge [seen at the Magic Theatre in 2011] with 36 characters and five-hours long, and I felt I needed a palate cleanser," Mac said recently by phone. "I was in Australia doing Comparison Is Violence, and I came across this guy who was a big fan of Tiny Tim, and he told me about a fundraiser where Tiny Tim performed for 24 hours. I had been wanting to do a show about how communities are created, and something clicked with me. Here I had felt I needed a break, and I came up with the hardest project in my life."
That project would be A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which Mac will perform in a 24-hour concert later this year. He has been performing decadal segments since 2014 at venues across the United States, and San Francisco will soon get its first taste, or first six tastes if you will, when Mac appears as the final attraction in the Curran Theatre's current Under Construction series with audiences and performers on stage together. Songs from 1776 to 1806 will be performed on Jan. 21-23, and songs from 1806 to 1836 on Jan. 26-27. Each segment runs three hours, an hour per decade, and there will be a marathon performance of both parts on Jan. 30.
"Each decade is about a different community in the U.S. that is being built as the result of going through a dire circumstance," Mac said. "So the first decade is built around the American Revolution, and the last decade we'll do in San Francisco, 1826 to 1836, stems from the Indian Removal Act. I do a lot of research, but I wouldn't come expecting to learn about American history. Come to experience American culture, the weight of American culture, and how that weight is helping us become who we are."
While the specific inspiration for 24-Hour History came from the Tiny Tim-aha moment in Australia, Mac said the truest catalyst goes back to a 1987 visit to San Francisco for the first AIDS Walk. "I was 14 at the time, a little queer kid from Stockton, and for the first time I discovered queer agency and queer pride. No one had ever talked about anything queer to me other than calling me 'faggot' on the playground. People were screaming and furious, and singing and dancing and laughing. A queer community was being built as the result of falling apart in the AIDS epidemic."
The communities that Mac examines can be coast-to-coast or tiny enclaves, and the songs themselves can be widely familiar or obscure tunes that may have been popular in one town's taverns. "It's very hard to establish a lot of these songs to a particular decade, especially the older ones, so I just say it could have been published in that decade or was about a particular event that happened in that decade or was popular in that decade. There are songs we do to the best of our knowledge how the author intended, and there are songs we tear apart and deconstruct and have a great time doing it. It may be a punk version of an old song, or a ballad version of an Iggy Pop song."
Mac figures the show is split about evenly between talk and song, and the audience should not expect to be a passive receptacle of the performance. "You don't just sit there for three hours. We get you up from your seats and get you moving through the space while the performance is happening. We may have the whole audience singing the chorus of a song together or blindfolded or, when we're dealing with World War I, kind of sitting in the trenches. Because of its oddity, you're able to gain access to things a little bit differently than you normally would."
That oddity would extend to pretty much everything about Mac in performance. Each decade requires a different costume, and longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle is always on hand to put Mac into one of his indescribable creations that blend together genders, social references, and items specific to the decade being represented. "During our 1906-1916 decade, that's when zippers were invented, so my wig is made out of zippers, and when we were doing 1846-1856, when potato chips were invented, the whole outfit was made out of potato chip bags," Mac said. "Machine is part of the show, and so he's always there changing me and doing cameos throughout the show."
Mac describes his voice as "a good legit voice, but it's not about vocally 'touching the hem of God,'" as Mac puts it. "I would rather sacrifice polish to expose vulnerability and humanity. No two performances are ever alike."
The eventual 24-hour concert will feature 24 musicians, but during the run at the Curran, Mac will be accompanied by a still-impressive eight musicians. The Curran's Carole Shorenstein Hays is a co-commissioner of the project, and Mac hopes to return with the full show when renovations to the theater are completed.
Queer and gender issues will obviously arise in performances of the more recent decades, but does he look for ways to bring them into segments about the country's early years? "I don't have to, because I'm one of the biggest queers you're ever going to see onstage. I'm like a mascot of queerness. So it's really all about finding the queer door into American history."
Taylor Mac will perform the first three parts of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at the Curran Theatre on Jan. 21-23, and the next three on Jan. 26-27, with a six-hour marathon of both segments on Jan. 30. Tickets are $50-$75. Go to sfcurran.com.