"Victor had been writing to me, telling me he was playing music with some guys, and he came out to the Mojave shows, and I met him for the first time," Licher says. "Later, he sent me a tape. It was fun stuff, but my first reaction was, 'This is kind of weird, but it doesn't seem like anything I would work with.'"
Camper regrouped, recorded another tape and addressed it to IPR. "It was very much improved. I said I'd be glad to get it out, so we printed up 1,200 copies of Telephone Free Landslide Victory in '85, and it just took off. I did a second edition with a hand-printed cover, and it got to the point where I couldn't keep up with it, so we licensed it to Rough Trade [Records]."
In addition to the knowledge that he acted as midwife to Camper's success, Licher still gets "a royalty check for a couple hundred bucks a few times a year. It's not much, but it helps." Three years after Savage Republic called it a day, Licher formed Scenic, a band cut from the same experimental cloth as SR. But where his previous group could go shopping for instruments at a junkyard, Scenic sticks to more traditional apparatus: guitars, mandolins, bass, drums, even a harmonica. The music on the band's debut CD, Incident at Cima, was conceived as a soundtrack for the eastern Mojave Desert (think Ennio Morricone meets Brian Eno), and is as evocative of that barren, direct landscape as is Licher's accompanying cover art.
"I don't think they're in any way unconnected," says Jack Rabid of Licher's music/art addiction. "I think that he approaches all of his projects with both in mind. I think it's so important that the two be commensurate that it's part and parcel of him, period."
Hank Williams Jr. is responsible for Bruce and Karen Licher moving to Arizona. At least the boxed set of Hank's music that IPR did the art for provided the money that got the couple out of wicked, ugly L.A. "It's true," says Bruce, shrugging. "That was the job. When they were preparing to do this box for Bocephus, they wanted a Forties look, so they called me up. Though I haven't listened to it yet."
Certainly a drastic move--from a downtown neighborhood where people snort crystal to a pine-scented land where people worship crystals--but Licher was fed up with the earthquakes and crime in the City of Angels, and Sedona presented a bucolic option. "For years, when we would go on vacations, we'd visit small towns and say, 'Could we live here?' But I had family living in Sedona, and another advantage is that a lot of our friends want to come visit; it's a place people want to come to. I think it's also good for business. It's got a name."
Licher's work is developing a name, as well, to the point of the supreme compliment: People are stealing his look. "Just in the past few years, there have been several new studios set up where it has been fairly obvious that they've been influenced or inspired by what I've been doing," says Licher, who is humble but no fool. "I have mixed feelings about it at times, but it also pushes me to try new things and not to get stuck in one style."
Yet Licher's style, in a broad sense, has not changed. What sets it so distinctively apart--both in music and in design--is the interweaving of old and new, baroque and fundamental, loud and soft. It doesn't parade as "art" with a capital A, but it is not meant for mass consumption, either. Licher's work is personal; his business isn't named Independent Project for nothing. "I'm just trying to create something interesting that isn't already out there," he says. "If it's already been done, I don't see any reason to do it.
