that stayed with him, however, is the mood of the time: The gleaming veneer of innocence and goodness, the dark forces pulsing beneath it, and the covert sexiness that pervaded those years are a kind of cornerstone of his art.
“The neighborhood where Blue Velvet was shot looks very much like our neighborhood in Boise, and half a block from our house was a creepy apartment building like the one in the movie,” said John Lynch. Blue Velvet’s opening sequence of idyllic American vignettes was drawn from Good Times on Our Street, a children’s book that permanently lodged itself in David’s mind. “The joyride in Blue Velvet came from an experience in Boise, too. David and a few of his buddies once wound up in a car with an older kid who claimed he was going a hundred miles an hour down Capitol Boulevard. I think it was frightening, this crazy older kid with a hot car driving dangerously, and that memory stuck with David. He draws on his childhood a lot in his work.”
Lynch does reference his childhood in his work, but his creative drive and the things he’s produced can’t be explained with a simple equation. You can dissect someone’s childhood searching for clues that explain the person the child grew up to be, but more often than not there is no inciting incident, no Rosebud. We simply come in with some of who we are. Lynch came in with an unusually intense capacity for joy and a desire to be enchanted, and he was confident and creative from the start. He wasn’t one of the boys buying a T-shirt with an irreverent drawing on it. He was the boy who was making them. “David was a born leader,” said his brother, John.
IT’S NICE OF my brother to say I was a born leader, but I was just a regular kid. I had good friends, and I didn’t think about whether or not I was popular and never felt like I was different.
You could say that my grandfather on my mother’s side, Grandfather Sundholm, was a working-class guy. He had fantastic tools down in his basement woodshop and he had these exquisitely made wooden chests, all inset locking systems and stuff like that. Apparently the relatives on that side of the family were expert cabinetmakers and they built a lot of cabinets in stores on Fifth Avenue. I went to visit those grandparents on the train with my mom when I was a little baby. I remember it was winter and my grandfather would stroller me around, and apparently I talked a lot. I’d talk to the guy who ran the newsstand in Prospect Park, and I think I could whistle, too. I was a happy baby.
We moved to Sandpoint, Idaho, right after I was born, and the only thing I remember about Sandpoint is sitting in this mud puddle with little Dicky Smith. It was like a hole under a tree they filled with water from the hose, and I remember squeezing mud in that puddle and it was heaven. The most important part of my childhood took place in Boise, but I also loved Spokane, Washington, which is where we lived after Sandpoint. Spokane had the most incredible blue skies. There must’ve been an air force base nearby, because these giant planes would fly across the open sky, and they went real slow because they were propeller planes. I always loved making things, and the first things I made were wooden guns that I made in Spokane. I’d carve them and cut them with saws and they were pretty crude. I loved to draw, too.
I had a friend named Bobby in Spokane who lived in a house at the end of the block, and there was an apartment building down there, too. So, it’s winter, and I go down there in my little snowsuit, and let’s say I was in nursery school. I’m in a little snowsuit and my friend Bobby is in a snowsuit and we’re going around and it’s freezing cold. This apartment building is set back from the street and we see that it has a corridor that goes down to these doors, and the door to one of the apartments is open. So we go in there and we’re in an apartment and no one’s home. Somehow we get this idea and we start making snowballs and putting them in the drawers of this desk. We put snowballs in all the bureau drawers—any drawers we could find, we’d make a hard snowball and put one in there. We made some big snowballs, about two feet across, and set them on the bed, and put some more snowballs in other rooms. Then we got the towels out of the bathroom and laid them in the street, like flags. Cars would come and they’d slow down, then the driver would say, “Screw it,” and they’d drive right over these towels. We saw a couple of cars go over the towels, and we’re in our snowsuits rolling more snowballs. We finish up and go home. I’m in the dining room when the phone rings, but I don’t think anything of it. In those days the phone hardly ever rang, but still, I’m not panicked when the phone rings. My mother might’ve answered, but then my father took it, and the way he’s talking, I’m starting to get a feeling. I think my dear dad had to pay quite a lot of money for damages. Why did we do it? Go figure . . .
After Spokane we moved to North Carolina for a year so my dad could finish school, and when I hear the song “Three Coins in the Fountain” I’m a certain height and I’m looking up at this building at Duke University and there was a fountain there. It was sunny 1954 light, and it was incredible with that song going in the background.
My grandparents Sundholm lived in a beautiful brownstone on 14th Street, and they had a building that my grandfather oversaw on Seventh Avenue. There might’ve been some storefronts in the building and it was a residential building, too. People lived there, but they weren’t allowed to cook. I once went there with my grandfather and the door to one of the apartments was open and I saw a guy cooking an egg on a flat iron. People find ways of doing stuff. It’s true that going to New York would upset me when I was growing up. Everything about New York made me fearful. The subways were just unreal. Going down into this place, and the smell, and this wind would come with the trains, and the sound—I’d see different things in New York that made me very fearful.
My father’s parents, Austin and Maude Lynch, lived on a wheat ranch in Highwood, Montana. My father’s dad was like a cowboy and I loved to watch him smoke. I came in wanting to smoke, but he reinforced that desire. My dad smoked a pipe when I was real little, but then he got pneumonia and quit. All his pipes were still around, though, and I loved to pretend to be smoking them. They put Scotch tape around the mouthpieces because they figured they were dirty, so I had all these scotch-taped pipes, some curved, some straight, and I loved them. I started smoking when I was really young.
My grandparents had a ranch, and the closest big town was Fort Benton. At a certain point in the fifties they moved from the ranch to a small farm in Hamilton, Montana, where they had a farmhouse and quite a bit of land. It was real rural. They had a horse called Pinkeye I would ride, and I remember Pinkeye taking a drink out of a creek and it took everything I had not to slide right down that horse’s neck and head into the creek. You could go out and shoot a gun in the backyard and not hit anything. I grew up loving trees, and I had a strong connection with nature when I was a kid. It was all I knew. When the family drove anywhere across the country, we’d pull over and my dad would set up a tent and we’d camp—we never stayed in motels. In those days there were campsites all along the roads, but those are gone now. On the ranch you had to fix stuff yourself, so there were tons of tools for everything, and my dad always had a woodshop. He was a craftsman and he rebuilt people’s musical instruments and made ten or eleven violins.
Projects! The word “project” was so thrilling to everyone in my family. You get an idea for a project, and you get your tools together, and tools are some of the greatest things in the world! That people invent things to make things more precise—it’s incredible. Like Peggy said, my parents took it seriously when I got ideas for things I wanted to make.
My parents were so loving and good. They’d had good parents, too, and everybody loved my parents. They were just fair. It’s something you don’t really think about, but when you hear other people’s stories you realize how lucky you were. And my dad was a character. I always said if you cut his leash he’d go right into the woods. One time my dad and I went deer hunting. Hunting was part of the world my dad grew up in and everybody had guns and hunted some, so he was a hunter, but not an avid hunter. And if he killed a deer we’d eat it. You’d rent a freezer and every once in a while you’d go down to the freezer in the basement