Musician, writer, painter, horse breeder, beekeeper, and dealer of antique weaponry–Charlie Nothing was a little bit of everything. His ultimate undertaking was Charlie Nothing himself: an elaborate persona forged in concert with his dingulators, sculptural stringed instruments welded from American auto parts.

Too earthy for the beatniks, too vulgar for the hippies, and too sentimental for the punks, Charlie fashioned his own inscrutable brand of bohemianism across forty years in California, winding through circles of artists and outcasts, making friends as well as enemies, and ultimately forming his own renegade cosmos in and around Santa Cruz. The dingulators were a weapon in his war on conformity, at once an instrument for spiritual reflection and an armament for social sabotage. Their extreme atonality seems to mock the very notion of a musical philosophy, but, explored in the context of his other creations—chapbooks, artworks, novels, fliers, manifestos—they become a key to the mysterious cosmology of Nothing.

It was already months into my hunt for Charlie’s dingulators, which had scattered since his death in 2007, and I had managed to find only one—a big, rusty specimen slung up on the chicken coop of an eccentric country musician named Charlie Tweddle. But I had also found a stash of 7" records by Charlie’s band the Superfabulous Dingulators, which proved useful. I gave a copy to my friend Bennett, who played it on his radio show in Santa Cruz with open call for new leads. Rather surprisingly, a young man named Garwang Lama called in to say his mother Maya kept a dingulator next to their fireplace. Bennett forwarded the information, and the following week I drove to Maya’s house with high hopes.

Maya was a small woman with a lingering New York accent and a direct way of speaking. Her hair was dyed black, and she wore a knit sweater over a thick turtleneck. We sat in her small living room to talk. When I asked about her first impressions of Charlie she quickly corrected me: “His name was Charles. That’s what I called him.” They met in his final years, after Charlie had reclaimed his birth name—barring musical performances and public mischief. Charles, I came to understand, was the last in a long line of bohemians that Maya called her friend. Before becoming a Lama in Tibet, she lived in Tangier with beatnik poet Ira Cohen, and together they moved to New York where she befriended the underground music legend Angus MacLise—whom Charlie likely met when his first band, the First Uniphrenic Church and Bank Band, played with Maclise’s the Velvet Underground at the Village Gate. It was around this time that Maya, under the pseudonym Panama Rose, printed the first ever cookbook of hashish-based recipes. It remains a paragon of proto-hippie publishing, but she declared her radical years a thing of the past.

Maya recalled early hesitations about Charles: how he was often surrounded by dubious people and quite visibly on drugs (Charlie claimed that he had “done more acid than Leary and Ram Dass put together”). She described him as a “Yang” character—masculine and dominating, with a fondness for the shooting range. Maya didn’t seem to care much for his music, which she described as “unlistenable.” But she painted a picture of Charles as a person of unwavering dedication. After every personal hardship or family tragedy, he was the first to show up or take action. With a delicate smile she recounted Charlie’s transformation into Charles—how in the early 2000s he cut his hair, shaved off his beard, donned shoes, and became altogether presentable. That Maya convinced him to wear a pair of dentures was a particular achievement. In the last years of his life Charles visited Maya every Friday for dinner. I wondered if their friendship ever included deeper affections.

Maya showed me her dingulator, kept on display in the living room. It was a perfect specimen. Coiling arms cut deep circles on both sides, and raised welding marks radiated from the sound hole, zigzagging down the fingerboard. The pegs were delightfully twisted bits of heavy wire. Across the bottom of the body I could just make out a soldered inscription: “Nothing 1984”. Charles insisted the instrument never be tuned, a request by which Maya was happy to abide. “He liked the strings to buzz,” she told me, “he said that was the point.” After many cups of herbal tea, I thanked Maya for her time. Before leaving she wrote down the address of another old friend in the area—a woman named Joan Martin.

Joan was stylish and convivial, with perfectly parted grey hair and blue-rimmed glasses that matched her dangling earrings. She lived in an attractive house near the center of Santa Cruz that overlooked a gulch following the San Lorenzo River. Mandala-shaped lacquer paintings by her late husband, Don Martin, covered the walls of the living room, and in the yard one of Charlie’s dingulators sat on a bench between potted plants. Joan welcomed me into her dining room, where she had prepared chicken salad sandwiches and a bowl of pickles. Over lunch she told stories about meeting Charlie in Los Angeles during the 1960s, when she and Don ran with a group of artists and mystics that included Wallace Berman, Cameron, and George Herms. Joan remembered Charlie as a kindred spirit–part jester, part shaman–but noted that he also rubbed shoulders with to a swankier crowd and was married briefly to Nat King Cole’s eldest daughter, Carole “Cookie” Cole. After lunch she rose from the table, shuffled down the hallway, and returned bearing proof of Charlie’s rumored affair with Debbie Harry: an interview that Blondie gave to New York’s Goodie magazine, where she related her memories of the First Uniphrenic Church and Bank Band. Charlie, I was told, left Debbie for Cookie—a detail related with a restrained delight reserved for only the juiciest gossip.

Years later, in the 1980s, Joan crossed paths with Charlie again in Santa Cruz. He was living in an elaborate tent built around a tree and was raising horses in the neighbouring fields. Joan explained that Charlie had become a fanatical writer, and showed me copies of his self-published novels, with titles like Starworms, Dragonslime, and Adventures of Dickless Traci. There were also two memoirs: The Life And Crimes Of Charlie Nothing and Speeding Through Satori. But another book caught my interest: the cover showed a pile of human skulls and the title, written in English and the Khmer alphabet, read Goodnight Cambodia. I was told that this book was the personal account of a Cambodian doughnut shop owner, Vibol Ouk, whose family was massacred by the Khmer Rouge before he escaped to America. After befriending Ouk, Charlie volunteered to help tell his story, transcribing Ouk’s account, publishing the book, and even hosting readings at local bookstores. A review in the County Sentinel described Goodnight Cambodia as “too painful to read,” but it became a local sensation and made the evening news. Joan explained how Charlie was surprisingly proficient with the emerging technology of desktop computers and built his own word processor to self-publish these projects. He even converted old beekeeping equipment into a perfect-binding machine. How exactly this was accomplished, I did not understand.

Like many of Charlie’s friends, Joan also apprenticed as his beekeeping assistant, joining him on trips to the town of Freedom, California, where he kept his apiary. Charlie’s love for bees was contagious, and Joan soon traded him an upright bass for one of his hives. I asked her if she knew Walt, Charlie’s other beekeeping helper who I had met previously, but the name was not familiar. “Charlie seemed to have a lot of friends up here,” Joan said, “but I don’t think I knew most of them.”

Joan told the story of Charlie’s memorial service. A surprising number of people attended, but few of them were acquainted. She described the feeling of being surrounded by strangers. Some called him Charlie, some Charles. Some remembered him as an open book, others as hard to read. Some declared him magnanimous, others laughed at his arrogance. When one person reminisced about the sound of his laughter, another swore he never laughed at all.

The more time I spent piecing together the story of Charlie Nothing, the less certain I became about who he was. I think Charlie would savor this conundrum. He was a shape-shifter, always just beyond the horizon of understanding. The music of the dingulators is mystifying in a similar way. “I’ve remained faithful to that ‘other’ music, non-music, or whatever it is,” Charlie said, “and am still a perpetrator, still invisible and unknown.” He was deliberate in this slipperiness.

There were other people I met along the way—Charlie’s goddaughter Heather, his last girlfriend Maria, John Kertis of the Superfabulous Dingulators and his wife Zeneta. Each of them described a different Charlie; what they shared was adoring bewilderment. Maybe this is why he called himself Nothing—it captured his infinite elusiveness. Dieter Roth once wrote, “To name a thing: to turn away from it.” In other words, defining something limits its ability to be otherwise. Charlie Nothing never stopped pursuing the unnameable, and there was nothing, it seems, he couldn’t become.

Charlie Nothing: State Of The Ding is out now. Read Britt Brown's review of the publication in the forthcoming August issue of The Wire, available to read from 14 July.

Adler is also selling original dead-stock copies of the Charlie Nothing Dingulator Band’s 1980's 7" Ain’t No Fascist to raise money for a Charlie Nothing exhibition.