Signatures

(My 7th-grade signature, perfected in class and ready for my appointment as Secretary of The Treasury or – what seemed more likely to me at the time – my becoming a world-famous cartoonist.)

The current mock-hullabaloo about Prez Obama’s nomination for Secretary of The Treasury, Jacob Lew, centers on Lew’s undignified loop-de-loop of a signature:

The Prez made a gentle witticism during his announcement of the nomination, saying, “Jack assures me that he is going to work to make at least one letter legible in order not to debase our currency should he be confirmed as secretary of the Treasury.”

Here, gloriously, are the other signatures Jacob Lew’s will have to live up to if he is confirmed – this graphic shows every signature to have graced US paper currency from 1928 to the present.

I vote for as coolest; but sneaking up behind her is George Magoffin Humphrey (maybe because he also has a cool name.)

By the end of Junior High, in preparation for great fame as a cartoonist and caricaturist (having practiced, to powerful effect in various ways, both good and bad, on the faces of my teachers,) I had perfected my “famous cartoonist signature”:

Time passed, I became wise and austere as a twenty-something painter. Living in grungy apartments with gunshots ringing through the alleys must have made my outlandish cartoon signature seem frivolous. I replaced it in my paintings with the “just-a-guy-writing-his-name” signature, which I continued to use into the early 90s:

Then, moderate fame having struck not through my drawings but instead through my songs, I found myself signing autographs – lots of them – and a complex set of factors led me to the next incarnation. At signings with large numbers of fans lined up for autographs, speed became much more important. Neither my elaborate cartoon signature, nor the deliberately upright painter signature were easy to write quickly. In addition, I disliked the thought of hundreds of Semisonic posters, tee shirts and albums out in the world with my name scrawled illegibly on them. These considerations led to the “I’ll be damned if no one can read my name on this poster in ten year’s time” signature. See it in action next to the signatures of Jmbls Slush and Jh Murisnn (Morrison? Mzzmm?) below:

(Thank you Dan Waite for this picture from backstage at the London Apollo last year.)

Which brings us to the present. My current signature is a kind of hybrid of the three main versions to date. I’m sure it will morph again, but here’s what would appear on the dollar bill if President Obama were in a jam and turned to me as a last-ditch Treasure Secretary nomination: