A GOD AND A MONSTER Gary Lucas (Pt. 2)
Jun 07, 2011
On working with
Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley, on composing film scores and his Jewish
heritage, plus future plans.
BY A.D. AMOROSI
We continue our discussion with guitarist and composer Gary Lucas, whose band Gods and Monsters recently released their latest album The Ordeal of Civility. Go here to read Part 1 in which he outlined the dynamics of the group and the making of the album as well as his connection to legendary Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe.
BLURT: OK, the Beefheart stuff: I know you saw him very early in your guitar playing career, like '70 or '71. Where were you aesthetically when you saw him and what changed about you or your playing after that first show? Funny aside - I met him at a show in New Jersey where he grabbed me and brought me backstage to draw me as I was wearing an insanely loud red suit. He kept calling me the "red devil"... Oddity, or everyday occurrence?
GARY LUCAS: Yes, he would have liked your suit and would have liked to draw it. That was totally normal!
I was drawn to his music first, but the whole thing came together after seeing him perform live in NYC at a little club here in Manhattan called Ungano's in early 1971. Ungano's was a little club on West 72nd Street that was only around for a year or so. It literally changed my life. I thought to myself, "If I ever do anything in music I want to play with this guy." It was that inspiring and life-transformative. The thing of it that got me was that it was so unconventional, powerful, artistic, and humorous. I wanted to be part of that free spirit. To me, it was like running away to join the circus.
How exactly did you go from seeing him in 1971 to playing with him in the mid-‘80s? And what was it like working with Van Vliet - especially in the studio - other than radically demanding? I'm not looking for dirt. I'm looking for joy
I basically interviewed him for Yale's radio station a few months after seeing him and bonded with him over the phone and later in person when he came up to play at Yale. He was enormously warm and friendly and charismatic. I stayed in touch with him then and made a point of going to see any show of his in proximity to New Haven for some years after that. Then I lost touch when he lost his deal with Warners and made those albums for Mercury.
But then he came to my hometown Syracuse in spring of '75 with Zappa on the Bongo Fury tour, and I met him backstage at the end of the show [and] took him out for midnight ribs at an underground barbecue pit in the black ghetto - in a guy's backyard; it was "Tobe Erwing's Barbecue," and Tobe was packing heat in his apron. And there and then told him if he ever put the band back together I wanted a chance to audition for it.
"Why didn't you tell me you played?" he asked me. Well, I didn't think I was good enough, but I had secretly been practicing his music, so... the time felt right. He invited me to audition in Boston after another Zappa show that week and that was it. I was in. It took a few years to realize, though, as I had a ticket to go to Taipei and work for my old man for a couple years, which I acted upon, as he was rather vague as to a timetable or a plan of action at that point. And then I contacted him few years later. Eventually he invited me to play with him in 1980
I've heard that he composed in a manner closer to a painter and a sculptor than a musician. Discuss please, if you can. And tell me how you think it affected your compositional skill up through to the present.
Yes, he did exactly do this, by either whistling, scat singing, or playing parts himself on piano and sometimes on guitar, bass and drums - and then having you tape his "through-composed" compositions and learning them note for note, tic for tic, mistake for mistake. Though he didn't believe there were any mistakes. Like Allen Ginsberg said, "first thought, best thought."
He then would further sculpt these parts, modify them and edit them and put them together in an assemblage - kind of like a collage, or sometimes it would feel like a free-standing mobile spinning in air - and alter them further surgically in rehearsal so that by the time we hit the recording studio these were very meticulously played parts which he had drilled into us and which we reproduced like a well-oiled machine, with no improvisation whatsoever allowed. He then would record them and go back in and put a melody or spoken word vocal line on top and also harmonica or sax - and on these parts, he of course was allowed to improvise. We were the canvas that provided the support for him to fling his own paint on, like an action painter.
What the heck made you want to manage him? Did you have that skill set? Do you manage your band now?
I never wanted to manage him! I just wanted to play with him. Managing him was his idea! But after my then-wife Ling and I went out to visit him in the Mojave Desert - where I was instructed to apply his "Exploding Note Theory" to his guitar solo piece "Flavor Bud Living" which you can hear on Doc at the Radar Station, and which put me on the musical map - he rang us up and begged us to manage him. Why? "I don't trust anyone else!"
And as I loved him - we both loved him - and wanted to help him, we agreed to do so out of a sense of trying to help an artist we thought wasn't getting a fair shake in the world of music and who deserved to be better known. I told him, "I am not really a manager, you know," and he said he understands but that he believes and trusted we could do a better job of it then anyone he'd had previously.
And in fact, as difficult as it was, I am very proud of the job I did for him in that capacity: including setting up his last US and European tours; setting up the publicity for his last two albums by getting all the important critics and writers in NYC to come over for listening parties at my apartment, including Lester Bangs (who gave me the best compliment of my playing career up till then: "Which part are you playing Gary, the top or the bottom" he asked after hearing "Flavor Bud Living." "No Lester, that's me playing both parts simultaneously, in real time," was my reply); getting him on David Letterman twice; getting Ice Cream for Crow going as an active recording project with Epic Records since no one at Virgin Records had informed Epic A&R that Beefheart was still an active group on their roster - ridiculous, as there was a Virgin/Epic imprint in the US; getting the "Ice Cream for Crow" video made and then getting into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art when MTV rejected it as "too weird"; getting Don on the cover of Musician magazine and then profiled in People magazine.
I was recently on a panel at SXSW where someone remarked that "everybody who knew Don managed him at some point or another." Well, I let the remark go in passing, but I'd really like to know what those reputed "managers" actually did for him. So did I have that skill set? Ling and I tried to do the job as best we could, which wasn't easy, especially with a difficult artist like Don, and I'd like to think I rather rose to the occasion when he asked me to do this for him solo when Ling and I split up. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.
And yes I manage my own band now, by default - for the same reason.
You were an integral participant in getting him art exhibitions in Manhattan. You ran tributes to his music before he passed. He really got under your skin in a good way.
Yes, I think Don has had a beneficial and lasting effect on me in a good way, especially on my sense of irony and overall world view. As he was able to see so clearly through the games people try and run on you, and that really rubbed off on me. But I especially adored his sense of humor, and have tried to keep that whimsical side within me.
And what I remember the most and prefer to recall rather than any particular negative incidents, which various Magic Band members have exhaustively harped on in books in a rather "sour grapes" tell-all mode - I mean, why did they stick around him for all those years if he was so bad? - would be his overwhelming sense of humor and enjoyment of life and the natural world around us. That was precious.
How does that feeling compare to the one you have for Jeff Buckley whose career you launched?
Well that's a whole different kettle of fish, and I would hate to make comparisons. Jeff was one of a kind and the most gifted young musician I have ever worked with and the best collaborator I've probably had to date. But I knew Don Van Vliet a whole lot better as a person, and spent a lot more time with him, and had a much closer bond in the period I worked with him. I loved Jeff dearly though - that's for sure.
Do you think it is a positive thing that Sony keeps re-re-releasing Buckley's past work? I know that "Mojo Pin" and "Grace" were but two of your compositional collaborations - it seems impossible to believe that more stuff may be in hiding.
I don't know. I haven't paid much attention to their re-releases except to note that I seemed to have been summarily "disappeared" out of their official narrative of Jeff's career, particularly on the three Grace box set re-issues which Sony issued - and why three?. Which, except for the pro forma inclusion of my name in the writing credits for those two songs and the inclusion of Jeff's special thanks list from the original Grace album where I am cited for "magical guitarness," there is not a mention of my name nor a photo of me in any of the critical essays that come in the booklet or any real presence in the videos included with any of these reissues. Which hurt me.
I mean, the very first note of the "Grace" album is my guitar, in the clear, on "Mojo Pin." I wrote the original music for the first two songs on this album - they began as my solo guitar instrumentals "And You Will" and "Rise Up to Be," which became "Mojo Pin" and "Grace," respectively, after I sent them to Jeff and he added lyrics and vocal melodies to them. I composed the basic harmonic structure and building blocks of these two songs, which are considered anthems in the Buckley canon. There are people all over the world who believe that Jeff wrote the guitar riffs that are the basis of these songs. I guess that's the impression that the "powers that be" wanted to foster by leaving me out of the liner notes. Not very charitable, is it?
As far as reissues, I really don't know if Sony have anything left in their vaults. But I have hours of good stuff , including five as yet unreleased songs I co-wrote with Jeff that are killer, some as good as Grace I reckon. Also cassette mixes of Grace that Jeff sent me from the Bearsville sessions that are superior to what they eventually decided to go with on the Grace album.
Are you an easy collaborator? Early on in your solo career I may have thought of you as happily isolationist.
[It] depends on whom I am collaborating with. With Jeff, and also with the Indian vocalist Najma Akhtar with whom I made the album Rishte a couple years ago for Harmonia Mundi and which went to #4 on the World Charts, it was so easy, as I could give them both finished guitar instrumentals and they would return with perfect vocal melodies and lyrics that fit like a glove over them, I didn't really have to do anything else! With other artists it hasn't been so easy all the time.
But I like collaborating, of course I do! There is no better feeling than hearing the fruits of a great collaborative effort, as you know that the work you mutually created is most likely bigger and better than what you could have accomplished on your own. When I heard the playbacks of the demos for "Grace" and "Mojo Pin" I knew these songs would shake the world! And I don't think my own efforts to have finished them solo without Jeff would have resulted in such world-beating songs.
You've worked within the Festival of Radical Jewish Culture, you did a live soundtrack to The Golem, there is a song on the new record, "Jedwabne," that I know from a Polish neighbor of mine with the last name "Jedwabne" was a particularly vicious atrocity toward the Jewish community. Tell me a little bit about that song - and please tell me a little bit about your connection to your religion.
Well, I am very cognizant of my Jewish roots and proud of my heritage - I was really happy, for instance, when Natalie Portman stood up and denounced John Galliano recently for his anti-Semitic remarks. And I began referencing this side of my spiritual upbringing in music early on as a solo artist, first with a performance at the Berlin Jazz Fest on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht - basically, the beginning of "open season" on Jews in Germany in 1938 - with the performance of an improvisatory piece called "Verklarte Kristallnacht" (which translates as "Transfigured Kristallnacht") after the Schoenberg piece "Verklarte Nacht." It went out over WDR national German radio and stunned the audience into silence before they responded with an ovation.
So I would say I was a very early innovator on this scene, and in fact told John Zorn about my performance at this same Berlin Jazz Festival where he was playing with Naked City. Several years later Zorn came out with a piece entitled "Kristallnacht"! My, my...
A year or so later I composed a score for The Golem with my childhood friend keyboardist/composer Water Horn, and I have since performed with this film all around the world in a solo version, in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Melbourne, all over Europe, the Venice Biennale - and in Prague, of course. I recorded two records for Tzadik in Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series which some feel are my best albums.
"Jedwabne" is the story of my family on my mother's side who were wiped out in a massacre of the Jewish community there in July 1941 by their Polish neighbors. Which is why I have no surviving relatives on my mother's side in Europe. In 2001 the then-President of Poland invited the surviving Jedwabne relatives back from all over the world for an official government apology ceremony and I traveled to Poland representing my family. It was a very painful experience to confront the past like that, and in fact, in Jedwabne itself, there were hostile town folk glaring at the procession of Jewish survivors as we marched through the streets of the town to the remembrance ceremony, but incredibly worth it. I met some wonderful people there including the Polish Jewish film maker Slawomir Grunberg, who made a documentary about the events of the pogrom and the official apology ceremony.
I subsequently wrote the song to encapsulate my feelings about it and memorialize the tragedy. So that people would not forget about what went down there, ever.
Talking about your live soundtracks for a minute - what sort of stretch for you is doing those things? I've witnessed a lot of different artists doing such - from a pipe organist in an old department store doing Metropolis to the guys from Luna doing the Warhol shorts. It's a tough haul. You seem particularly attracted to the idea, what with the Spanish Dracula and Jose Mojica Marins' This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse.
Well, I find it relatively easy and fun as I was steeped in film soundtracks and also horror and fantasy films and literature from a very early age. I used to project 8mm horror films such as Bela Lugosi's Dracula, This Island Earth and Bride of Frankenstein in my basement for the neighborhood kids when I was about 8. I later created original musique concrete soundtracks with Walter Horn - to tape, in fact to frighten trick or treaters on Halloween! And my earliest score for a film was for a Rod Serling-narrated documentary titled Aquatic Ecology in 1971.
Plus, I like to improvise, and that is the secret to my accompanying films with my solo guitar scores, that these scores I perform live are 50% composed and 50% improvised, which keeps them fresh as I never play them the same way twice. Through very intense, close-watching of the films I try and commingle with the spirits of the dead actors on screen and personify them through my guitar playing. And I love working with films, as they are basically like having a reliable partner who will never let you down.
How does the new Gods and Monsters record breathe live - especially now that you are already on to Cuba with Haydee and Suylen Milanes and recording there? Is Gods and Monsters live ever embracing of that Cuban sound? Are you cross-pollinating the vibes or is keeping it all in separate boxes key to the Lucas oeuvre?
I am keeping it in separate boxes for the time being, but that is not to say I wouldn't bring Suylen and Haydee into the Gods and Monsters fold in the future. It's just easier for now to record this project in Havana with the cream of Cuban musicians.
As far as how the new album songs breathe live, well, we have been breathing them live for some time now and it feels just great. I hope to be able to bring this music in front of more audiences this time out, but again am hampered by the reality of market forces, as there is no tour support available and I refuse to run my band at a deficit at this stage of my career. Let's hope your good words and support from the media in general this time out will enable people to check out and fall in love with this album, which will hopefully drive sales and enable us to tour more widely and attract bigger audiences.
And if not, I will just keep on keeping on, on to the next thing. I'll always keep running Gods and Monsters, though. I love these guys, and I know how good my music sounds with them playing it.
[Photo Credit: May Lee]
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