Celebrate Life: Todd Lockwood

Description

From Gary De Carolis:

Five words that describe Todd: Inspired, Curious, Creative, Grounded, Optimistic

Todd Lockwood was born in Philadelphia in 1951, the second of five children. At age 5, Todd developed a keen interest in electricity and began drawing electrical schematics to illustrate how electrical things worked. When Todd was 12-years-old, he built a shortwave radio and listened to broadcasts from around the world. He also built an FM transmitter that allowed him to broadcast to nearby FM radios in his neighborhood. His unofficial radio station came to life every afternoon after the school bus dropped him off. Also around this time, Todd developed photographs for the first time in his middle school’s darkroom. When the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a boil in the early sixties, the Lockwoods built a fallout shelter in their basement. But after the threat had passed, Todd transformed the fallout shelter into a darkroom. Eventually, he realized that he had a knack for shooting portraits, a skill that he would develop over the next five decades.

In 1965, the Lockwoods moved to Lake Placid. Todd enrolled at Northwood School and quickly became the school’s official photographer. During his senior year at Northwood, Todd created photographic portraits of his classmates for the school yearbook. That portrait series won him a special award at his high school graduation.

In 1969, after attending the Woodstock Music Festival, Todd entered Rochester Institute of Technology as a Professional Photography major. After seeing his portfolio, his photography professor told him that he might be wasting his time there. His high school photography portfolio was unusually advanced. Todd’s professor suggested that he work on a series of self-guided projects as a “special student.” That approach defined Todd’s next four years at RIT. During his senior year, Todd co-produced and directed Liberation, a short film that took Best of Show at a Kodak-sponsored film competition. After college, Todd moved to the Denver area and opened a photography studio where he did portraits of writers, artists and musicians, and also produced corporate slide shows.

In 1977, Todd moved to Vermont and rented a house in Woodstock. He decided to set his camera aside for “awhile.” During that pivotal year, he took up the piano which he had played in elementary school and hated. Now, at age 27, he dove into it with a vengeance, playing and composing for hours a day. He also began writing short stories and getting them published in an arts weekly in Lake Placid. By the time Todd moved to Burlington in the fall of 1978, his piano playing had developed enough to begin playing in public. He acquired a six-foot grand piano and got the piano dealer to teach him how to move it. That piano appeared in numerous locations around the region, including Burlington’s City Hall Park and Battery Park, The Black Rose Cafe in Winooski, and the Band Shell in Lake Placid.

In 1980, Todd began assembling a home recording studio in his carriage house apartment in Burlington. His initial motivation was to record his own songs, but before long, he was getting requests to record demos for Vermont bands. Todd learned the craft of music recording by doing it. He also learned by renting studio time at some major recording studios and grilling the engineers with technical questions. The parallels to photography were striking to him. Todd needed a name for his studio, and in a mystical moment, the name appeared. He was driving south on the Adirondack Northway when he passed an albino crow standing next to the guardrail. White Crow Audio
became the name of his studio.

In 1985, White Crow Audio moved into a renovated warehouse building in the Pine Street neighborhood. This move was followed by a major equipment upgrade, raising the studio up to national standards and greatly expanding its reach to include record companies based in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. In a stroke of luck, the band Phish rented office space in a building one block away from White Crow. As a result, the studio recorded Phish’s first two albums for Elektra Records. Those successes inspired other record companies to come to White Crow, bringing such artists as Alice Cooper, Odetta, and Dinosaur Jr. Todd started a local record label, called BurlingTown, to capture some of the local music scene. In 1987, he co-produced the infamous Bernie Sanders folk album, featuring Bernie with a 5-piece band behind him, as well as a 20-voice chorus consisting of singers from all over Vermont. The album features songs by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. It was re-released in 2015 and landed Bernie on the Billboard Charts.

While White Crow was in its heyday in the late eighties, Todd launched another passion he had dreamed about for years. While in college, a friend had introduced him to the writing of Richard Brautigan. In one of Brautigan’s novels, there is a wonderful little library that only allows unpublished books on the shelves. Todd had reread Brautigan’s novel every year for 15-years, wondering when someone would take Brautigan’s library idea and bring it to life. He assembled a board of trustees and six months later, The Brautigan Library opened on lower College Street in Burlington. Unpublished manuscripts arrived from all over North America, and the library became a story of stories for the national and international news media.

In 2007, thirty years after putting down his camera, Todd’s 13-year-old daughter suggested that he start shooting portraits again. After mulling it over for a few weeks, Todd pulled out his Hasselblad camera and dusted it off. For the next two years, he created some of the most dramatic portraits of his career, focusing on friends in the arts and humanities. He called this portrait series, One Degree of Separation. The exhibition opened at the Coach Barn at Shelburne Farms in 2008. One Degree of Separation has been shown in numerous locations around the region, the most recent one being the new South Burlington City Hall Gallery. In 2011, Todd released his first self-published novel, Dance of the Innocents. In 2014, Todd published an online novel, Julia, which is a blend of a memoir and a novel. Julia was polished and republished in 2023 at JuliaTheNovel.com. Also in 2014, Todd founded the Herb Lockwood Prize in the Arts in memory of his late brother. This is Vermont’s largest arts prize, and it is awarded annually to a Vermont artist, writer, filmmaker or other creative individual. There is no application for the $10,000 prize, and artists do not know they’re being considered for it. 2023 marks the tenth time the Herb Lockwood Prize has been awarded, and it was won by film director and impresario Jay Craven.

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