Oulman’s Way

The Jon Oulman Gallery and Salon sits in the limestone shadows of the old Grain Belt Brewery, which towers above Northeast Minneapolis like a blue-collar San Simeon. Across a set of train tracks, where 13th Avenue dead-ends at the Mississippi River, Oulman’s stylish clientele have, for the past three years, been stepping into the brewery’s renovated Keg House for facials and foil highlights in the very space where guys named Larry and Vern once threw out their backs moving pallets of warm beer.

On a recent summer afternoon, Sufjan Stevens’s latest CD is cooing on the salon’s sound system. In the adjacent gallery, floral still lifes by the American painter John Bowman are blooming on an exposed brick wall. Taking it all in is Jon Oulman himself, sitting in one of the salon chairs, a smock snapped tightly around his neck. He works one arm free of the smock to wave me over. It’s past closing, and a lightly tattooed stylist is swirling some sort of magical goo through her boss’s short locks. It’s a reassuring sight, like catching an off-duty chef ordering the special in his own restaurant.

Like professional wrestlers, professional hairstylists live and die by their oversized personas. Success is sometimes less dependent upon ability than upon the attention generated.

Aveda founder Horst Rechelbacher, for instance, doesn’t merely cut your hair; he enlightens it. He’s the Deepak Chopra of Chop. For those captivated by New York cool, Oulman has been the stylist of choice during his twenty-seven years in the Minneapolis beauty market. Think of him as The SoHo Scissors.

At fifty-three, Oulman is tall and classically handsome. He bleaches his hair platinum and throws it back with a gentleman’s part. In a town where most men still schlep around in pleated Dockers, Oulman stands out in his eccentric vintage suits, which he wears nearly always. “Dressing is about paying attention,” he tells me. “Any opportunity you have to be creative and express yourself shouldn’t be ignored—otherwise you’re just lazy or ashamed. I can’t remember the last time I went out without a jacket.” He says this casually, not snobbishly. Like the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts, he’s simultaneously uptown formal and downtown cool.

In the short time I’ve been around Oulman, I’ve seen him wear absurdly bright colored shirts or paisley on paisley just to prove he can clash. Today, he’s wearing a seersucker suit with drugstore flip-flops. “I’m not happy with my summer shoes,” he explains with a sigh. “Sometimes you just have to put up a poster instead of leaving the wall bare.”

Oulman’s gallery and salon is a reprise of a business concept he operated successfully in the Gorham and Wyman Buildings in downtown Minneapolis during the 1980s and 1990s. Along with the burgeoning First Avenue nightclub, the New French Bar, and lots of stylish ad men, rockers, and hangers-on, Oulman’s gallery made the Warehouse District cool before it became the province of drunken frat boys in search of lap dances. Oulman wants to bring something of that old right-brain magic to his Northeast neighborhood, so much so that he dares to talk in high-minded phrases such as “creating cultural community.”

In addition to running a gallery and salon, Oulman owns the nearby 331 Club building at the corner of 13th and University, next to the Modern Cafe. The 331 used to be an exclusive club, but not the kind you’d ever want to join. One of the most notoriously seedy dives in the city, the bar was the hangout of a ready-made police lineup of motorheads and meth mouths, with some calling the bar’s upstairs flophouse home, passing out in rooms they rented by the week. In 2004, Oulman bought the building and rebuilt the bar, and today it’s thriving under the watch of his twenty-eight-year-old son, Jarret. With minimal signage and a blazing coat of construction-site-yellow paint on its brick façade, it still looks like a speakeasy, but the kind you might find on Sesame Street. A few of the unthreatening old-timers still hang out there, mixing amiably with everyone from Northeast hipsters to Carmichael Lynch account execs. Now half of the handlebar mustaches you see in the joint are ironic.

While $3 bottles of beer are flying off the shelf in the bar, $15 bottles of shampoo are proving a tougher sell in Oulman’s salon nearby. Since signing his lease in the Grain Belt Keg House, Oulman hasn’t been able to recruit more than six stylists to staff the dozen chairs he installed. The lack of foot traffic has been a liability. Thus, by the time you’re reading this, Oulman will have gutted the second floor of the 331 Club and moved the gallery and salon to the relatively smaller space upstairs.

“I was a little overambitious with the Keg House,” he admits.

I ask Oulman about a black-and-white photograph positioned above his tiny desk in the salon. It was shot, he replies, at a “happening” in late 1968, at the Mount Curve mansion/gallery of George Shea and Gordon Locksley,  owners of the old Red Carpet Salon on the Nicollet Mall. “Gordon Locksley was the mentor I never met,” Oulman says. “Christo wrapped nude women in cellophane that night.” From one corner of the photograph pops one of the all-time signature hairstyles: the unmistakable platinum bob of Andy Warhol.

 Before Jon Oulman cut hair for a living, he cut meat. Really. In the 1970s, after graduating from high school and marrying his high school sweetheart, he was a reluctant union butcher at the IGA market that he owned with his father, Eugene, in Anoka. Despite their partnership, relations between father and son, according to the son, were as chilly as the store’s dairy case. “He had a lot of blue-collar shame,” Jon says. “He resented other people’s success.”

Eugene and Carolyn Oulman had raised Jon and his younger sister, Joni, in nearby Blaine, where he was an Eagle Scout. Jon, however, won’t be joining Garrison Keillor in fond duets about the good life in a small north-metro community. “Blaine,” he says, “rhymes with plain. There was no ethnicity there. We were all the same grasshopper in that field.” He credits his mother with helping him develop a certain appreciation of aesthetics. She would take him to visit Gallery 12 in Dayton’s, where she worked as a sales associate in junior sportswear. “She was really into crafts,” Oulman says. “She would collect what she called”—here he pauses and lowers his voice for effect—“conversation pieces.”

During his short-lived career as a meat-cutting grocer, and an equally short-lived marriage, Oulman and his wife had two children: Jarret and Laurie, who’s now twenty-seven years old and is a stylist at Oulman’s salon. As Oulman’s marriage faltered, his attention was drawn increasingly to the downtown scene around Uncle Sam’s disco (now First Avenue). “I was wearing lots of scarves and brooches,” he recalls. He mimes cinching his waist and adds, “And then ya belt it! Imagine if Stevie Nicks and Adam Ant had a love child. In outer space. On a horse. Hopefully, there aren’t too many pictures out there.”

Oulman—separated from his wife—moved into the basement apartment of one of the IGA cashiers. He relays this part of the story not as a painful one, but as yet another entertaining tale in a life filled with entertaining tales. “I remember her name!” he says suddenly. “Debbie Katina.”

Luckily for Oulman, a couple of his gearhead buddies—Oulman loves classic cars—were about to show him how to get back to ground level. North-metro pals John Antle, a sheet-metal worker, and Rick Rust, an iron worker, had improbably started as hairdressers at the Scissors Circus on Hennepin Avenue in Uptown. Long-time Twin Citians will remember the salon’s two-story exterior mural of jumping women in black leotards, a banner of 1970s freedom. “[My friends] thought, ‘Why bend metal when we could be bending hair?’ ” Oulman says. Antle and Rust were now dressing with sophistication, going to fabulous parties, traveling to happening places, and dating gorgeous women. Oulman, who was still coming home at night wearing eau de flank steak, was inspired. He sold his share in the IGA, all but told his dad to kiss off, and plunked down $1,200 for nine months of beauty school at the Horst Education Center in Minneapolis. (Eugene Oulman passed away six years ago, not long after reaching a rapprochement with his son. Carolyn Oulman lives in Coon Rapids.)

About the same time, Oulman paid his first visit to New York. At GG’s Barnum Room on the city’s East Side, he looked across the dance floor and realized he was boogying in the same space as funk legend Rick James. It was, he says, the moment when he knew he had permission to be his eccentric self. “And Rick James really did wear those thigh-high boots,” he adds.

In the late 1970s, Lower Manhattan, where Oulman was staying, was an alcohol- and drug-fueled free-for-all. Transvestites catwalked the streets. Blondie rocked CBGB’s. Fresh off an airplane for the first time in his life, Oulman was in town to visit his friends, the fashion designer James Reilly and Myron Johnson, who was dancing for The Edge Dance Theater. Reilly and Johnson wanted to give the aspiring hairdresser a jolt—and they succeeded. “I was shocked and amazed,” Oulman says. “They made me cross-dress. I looked like Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot. What the hell. It was a party. I like playing dress up.”

“He was pretty naive,” recalls Johnson, who’s now artistic director of Ballet of the Dolls in Northeast Minneapolis. “He was kind of a farm boy. But in New York at that time, you didn’t know if someone was a farm boy or just playing the role of a farm boy. There were men who had decided they were suddenly princes. You had to call them ‘Prince Anthony’ or whatever.”

Oulman went to parties, saw fabulous art, and exorcised his middle-class suburban past. It was the beginning of Oulman the aesthete, the arts impresario, the showman. And, as a result, Oulman announces sardonically, he will not be running for public office any time soon. “I did have sexual relations with that woman,” he says, doing his best Bubba imitation. “I did inhale.”

 In 1981, Oulman opened his own modest salon in the Gorham Building on 1st Avenue North (the property since replaced by Target Center). His early clients were local artists, scenesters from First Ave. across the street, and strippers from Goofy’s. He used a small stepladder as a barber’s chair. A loft at the rear was just large enough for a mattress and a wok. The space didn’t come with a shower, so every morning he’d put on his coat and walk down the street to a friend’s apartment above the New French Café.

Oulman had just graduated from the Horst Center and had been a member of  Rechelbacher’s small creative team in the latter’s burgeoning Aveda empire. He assisted in photo shoots with Timothy Lamb, Horst’s photographer of choice, as well as with industry shows that Oulman describes as “pep fests.” “Jon stood out as a student,” Rechelbacher recalls. “He would stand out in Paris. He has the ability not to be average. He’s a rule-breaker, not a rule-maker.” “Horst gave me the courage to get up in front of people and take risks,” Oulman says. “He was the first one to put me onstage.”

The Oulman salon was a lively location, thanks in part to Allen Beaulieu’s studio next door. Beaulieu, like Oulman, was squatting in his own commercial space. He was also spending many days doing studio shoots for Prince. (We have Beaulieu to thank for the Dirty Mind cover shot of Prince in bikini briefs and a studded trench coat.) “[Prince] would come in for his shoots on Sundays, when he knew no one would be around,” Oulman recalls. “In those days, his shoulder pads were as wide as he was tall.”

Prince usually traveled with a phalanx of sex kittens. One morning, Oulman was surprised to discover that one of them, a budding star known as Vanity, had made an appointment at the salon. “It was 11 a.m. on a Tuesday,” he says, “and I poked my head out the window and saw Vanity coming up the sidewalk in a black body stocking and—are you ready for this?—a cape.” Oulman says the appointment wasn’t all business. “She was interested in me. When I asked whether I could get her anything, she purred, ‘I like warm milk.’ ”

If you ever watched one of those sketchy get-rich-quick infomercials and wondered what kind of person actually picks up the phone and calls the 1-800 number—well, one of those persons is Jon Oulman. In the late 1980s, on a self-improvement kick, Oulman purchased and listened, albeit skeptically, to Carleton Sheets’s “No Down Payment” cassette program.

One day, Rechelbacher gave Oulman, an avid stereophile, $5,000 to update the former’s personal sound system. Oulman did what any good Carleton Sheets student would do: He used $2,500 to purchase two rental properties in Minneapolis, closing on the deals at the end of the month. The next day, he banged on his tenants’ doors and collected the rent, recouping the money he needed to deliver the new sound system on time. “I can’t remember whether I told Horst about this or not,” Oulman says, eyes shifting back and forth cartoonishly. (Rechelbacher says he has no recollection of the incident.) The sale of the properties about fifteen years later would allow Oulman to purchase the 331 Club.

Oulman decided to run a gallery out of his salon almost as soon as he opened it. His first serious show, which opened in 1983, on his twenty-ninth birthday, featured the photographs of Timothy Lamb, John Schlesinger, and Audrey Glassman. Martin Friedman, Walker Art Center director at the time, showed up, and, according to Oulman, pulled the young entrepreneur aside and told him, “You’re going to be very successful.” Oulman sold two Schlesingers—one to the Walker and one to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Then as now, Oulman’s ideas about art were distinctly unacademic. He has an old-fashioned belief in beauty, which in today’s critical theory–based climate, sounds almost New Agey. “Art can influence the moment you’re in,” he says. “You want people to bubble up [when they come into a gallery] and reflect on what got them there.” From the beginning, his taste has been fairly classic New York School: tasteful and urbane paintings and photography, usually modest in scale and not particularly avant-garde or conceptual. It’s the kind of stuff—sometimes the exact same painters—you’d see in the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan. He’s been a great supporter of local artists, including the figurative work of Duncan Hannah and the brainy, Twomblyesque abstracts of Philip Barber.

As Oulman will tell you, the situation is very different now than what it was in the early ’80s. The corporate money that fueled the earlier era’s art-buying binge has dried up. And, he says, our major museum directors aren’t as involved in the local arts scene as their predecessors were. “They look outside rather than inside our arts community now,” he says. What hasn’t changed is the local attitude toward visual art. “People are so value-conscious here,” he says. “Someone who spends $1,500 on vacation airfare without even thinking about it will blush at a $1,500 painting. People here find a lot of shame in art.” It’s one of the ironies of the Twin Cities’ reputation as an arts mecca, he suggests. We may have world-class museums, but a painting without a duck in it is still a tough sell.

In October 1997, Oulman’s long run in the Warehouse District began to end when he was diagnosed with an epidermal form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His first reaction was fear and denial. “I started doing some hippie shit,” he says. “Acupuncture. The chiropractor.” Eventually, his daughter told him it was time to get serious. As he often does when making big decisions, Oulman leaned on trusted clients with good contacts.

“Hairdressing is about relationships,” he says. “I know people. You see someone once a month, you start to get tight.” It was venture capitalist Mike Winton who turned him on to his first specialist, Arthur Ide. Oulman thought he was going to die. “At my first appointment, the doctor asked me if I had insurance,” Oulman remembers. The doctor was referring to medical coverage. “But I said, ‘Life insurance?’ ” Oulman was subjected to powerful radiation treatments. He lost his fingernails, toenails, eyebrows, and hair, and his skin turned orange. “It was like having an inch-deep sunburn,” he says deadpan. “I had a very deep base, a savage tan. The good news was I got to wear brighter colors.”

As his body battled the disease, Oulman’s beloved Warehouse District was struggling with its own cancer: sports bar chains and strip clubs. The infiltration was relatively swift, and galleries began to close. “Suddenly, it was all beers, boobs, and burgers,” he says. “And the city helped. They moved all of the adult entertainment from the neighborhoods and dumped it downtown. It became Rush Street without any retail. You look around now and it’s all tribalism—guys in ball caps and hussies from Melrose Place.” By September 1999, Oulman had had enough. He slid his key to the Wyman Building under the door and disappeared. For the next five years, he styled hair exclusively out of his home.

On another visit to Oulman’s current salon, I notice a second black-and-white photo perched on a shelf above his desk. This one is of Oulman in a crowd in 2003. He is seated, his head tilted back slightly, with an expression of pride and reverence on his face. In his lap, he is holding a portrait of the late, lamented Warehouse District gadfly, photographer Gus Gustafson.

“Gus’s death was like sitting shiva for five days,” Oulman says. “I saw all of these characters I had been missing, some whose name I didn’t even know. I’d think, ‘Oh, there’s that woman who always wears hats.’ ” It was Gustafson’s memorial service, which was attended by more than 1,000 people at Theatre de la Jeune Lune, that inspired Oulman.

Within months, he would decide to make a comeback, and the Keg House gallery and salon were born.

To understand the degree to which aesthetics trumps the practical in Oulman’s life, you have to visit his home in St. Paul: a white clapboard, 1920s pool house set precariously on Summit Hill behind a Summit Avenue mansion. There is literally a pool in his house—with a small balcony in his dining room overlooking it. During his exile,

Oulman styled loyal clients’ hair near the pool’s shallow end, next to a working fireplace.

The house is a CenterPoint Energy auditor’s nightmare. The pool leaks, the roof is poorly insulated, the windows are single-paned glass, and an industrial-sized dehumidifier is run round-the-clock to prevent the place from reeking of chlorine. It’s also a completely captivating space—what can only be described as a party pad.

Oulman wears a stylishly mismatched pair of madras-patch trousers and a light herringbone sport coat as he shows me around the exotic grounds as if he were Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island. When he displays the convertible greenhouse he bought to cover the courtyard so his Thanksgiving party can be held outside, I half-expect to discover Tattoo tugging on his shirt cuff: “Bozz, de plane! De plane!” Did I mention Oulman’s huge but docile Great Danes, Jake and Jerry?

Oulman has been linked, as the tabloids would say, to a number of beautiful and talented women, including Twin Cities actress Stacia Rice. His current girlfriend, pastry chef Jacqueline Ayd, is twenty-seven—half his age and the same age as his daughter. Ayd, whom he met when she worked at the Modern Cafe, remembers the first time she saw Jon. “It was that Halloween party at the salon, and you were wearing your Eagle Scout uniform,” she says to him. “I thought you were gay. You know, the whole hairdresser thing.” Oulman laughs in an I know, I know kind of way.

Seeing Oulman in this setting, it’s clear that he’s still every bit the bohemian he was thirty years ago. If you were related to him, you might think he was the kid who never grew up. If you were a friend or a client, you’d probably consider him an inspiration. Tomorrow, Oulman tells me, he’s going to start tearing out the second floor of the 331 Club, making way for his new gallery and salon. “I’m great with a sledgehammer,” he says.

There’s been a lot of nostalgia for the Warehouse District’s heyday, and Oulman can certainly be nostalgic. At the same time, he isn’t trying to relive his past now in Northeast Minneapolis. As his colleague Wanda Flechsig, whose Circa Gallery relocated to Hennepin Avenue near Loring Park in the 1990s, says, “People still look at [the transformation of the Warehouse District] as the end of the gallery scene, but it’s not. The dynamics have just changed. We’re all just doing our own thing now.” Oulman and his friends learned something the first time around, they say. “Some of us have grown wiser after being moved out of the Warehouse District,” says Myron Johnson, who recently oversaw the Ballet of the Dolls’ takeover of the old Ritz theater on 13th Avenue. “We know now. Buy the buildings. Own the buildings.”

Oulman claims to be a dilettante. “I know two things about anything,” he tells me at one point. He also claims to be completely inept at organization. Yet his carefree risk-taking reveals an innate savvy. The bar hedges his bet on the salon, which hedges his bet on the gallery. And he always has his devoted clients to fall back on.

As for that swimming pool in his living room—well, that’s Oulman’s next next project. “I think I’m going to build a floor over my pool,” he says. “It would become—what do they call that?—a great room. Imagine the parties!” 

Dobby Gibson is a journalist and a poet. He profiled poet Spencer Reece in the April issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.