Flame On!

Tom Hazelmyer may not be the first guy you’d think of as an art gallery owner. An ex-Marine and gun collector, his greatest claim to notoriety is Amphetamine Reptile Records, the Minneapolis-based punk-rock label he founded that defined the angriest and most abrasive wing of the hardcore movement of the 80s and 90s. AmRep built its reputation on furious, working-class acts like Helmet, the Melvins, and the Cows.

Hazelmyer lived and breathed the DIY ethic, not just running the label but designing most of the artwork. And one of his marketing brainstorms—putting the AmRep logo on a Zippo lighter—grew into a full-fledged side business: FlameRite, which distributes Zippos that have been embossed with designs chosen by Hazelmyer from a who’s who of underground artists including Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

As age, boredom, and the death throes of grunge made AmRep a chore, Hazelmyer scaled back to a nearly 100-percent back-catalog operation. Instead he concentrated on raising his three kids and the family business—the three Grumpy’s bars in Minneapolis and Coon Rapids. FlameRite continued as much for fun as anything else. But with his instinct for spotting a cultural trend, he soon realized he was onto something bigger—the ground floor of the burgeoning “low-brow” art movement, a pop-culture melange of collectible toys, retro commercial art, motorcycle decals, underground comics, graffiti, and Japanese anime. Many of the names most often checked—Shepard Fairey, Frank Kozic, Kaz—also grace FlameRites.

It’s art, to be sure, but from artists who drink Budweiser because they like to, not because they’re trying to be ironic. Putting their work on a lighter wasn’t just a sales trick, but part of the whole point. “Merchandising in any art was, for god knows how long, just verboten,” said Hazelmyer when we looked in on him the other day.

This style of art wasn’t getting much play in local galleries. But Hazelmyer’s always been good at punk rock’s Andy Hardy routine: If your favorite work isn’t getting seen, put on the show yourself. “Like Kozic. For years he was doing shows across the entire world—Europe, Japan, Los Angeles, New York. Totally accessible guy, and no one ever bothered to bring him to Minneapolis,” Hazelmyer grumbled. “He’s a friend of mine, and I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. We’ve got the bar downtown, we’ve got the side room.’ I just started doing it.” And in March, he moved the art showings to Ox-Op, a tidy red-and-white gallery converted from garages in Grumpy’s back-lot in downtown Minneapolis. (“The rent is right,” he notes dryly.) He’s also recently collected the FlameRite designs in the trim and groovy book Scorched Art.

Hazelmyer has gleeful sarcasm for the mainstream gallery world’s tendency to enshrine “a piece of string with a rock on the end of it” as a major work. But graphic design has always been a big part of his life, and of course punk’s look is nearly as important as the music itself. In that sense, the move from punk pioneer to gallery owner is a completely natural progression, with the Zippos as the bridge.

“The two have gone hand in hand, doing the art gallery and the lighters,” said Haze, running a finger down the gallery’s upcoming schedule. Most are artists with whom he’s created lighters. “They trust me, they know I’ll pay. I say, ‘You want to come to town and do an art show?’ They go, ‘Shit, no problem.’ Versus just calling somebody up in L.A., they have no idea who you are, and you’re trying to talk them into coming to Minnesota in January. Not an easy task. I always promise them lots of liquor and we’ll go shooting.”—Christopher Bahn


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