post partum thanks giving

Back in the city after the rush of Thanksgiving spent with the old extended family has worn off, I'm left with the usual yearly overwhelming "thank God I live in New York" sentiment, counterbalanced by the disquieting notion that this particular trip might actually have been my last tango in Syracuse...my folks are moving out to California, all my childhood friends are long dispersed in search of greener pastures. And the Salt City at night seemed darker, colder, more inhospitable and Dennis Hopperesque than ever (Edward Hopperesque too)...still, I did manage to retrieve a few photos of my happy-go-lucky ill-spent youth, which I will eventually get transferred from the original slides and post a few here for your general amusement, or scorn (by the way, go back two blogs and check the new photos from Switzerland that webmistress Tanya put up yesterday). There were some good 'uns my sister Bonnie unearthed from the depths, long since forgotten tableaux that would have stayed that way 'cept for my sister's patient dredging them up out of the scrap(book)heap, 2000 shots or so by Dad's estimation which Bonnie assiduously went through, choosing the best with her practiced painterly eye and sorting them out by sibling--I have 3--2 older sisters, Laurie and Bonnie, and 1 younger brother, Stewart--'twas all the rage back in the 50's for middle class Jewish housewives to bestow Scottish names on their offspring, or so I have it on the authority of my mother Adele Lucas (nee Goldman). Hoot mon, Bozo! (One of my favorite highschool trips was spent chuckling my way through a read of one of the Bozo books concerning that most excellent of japester's exploits traveling round the world, wherein each turn of the page was keyed into an acted-out playlet/narrative on an accompanying LP that came with the book...me and my boy Alden Bock the teenage tennis champ of Nottingham Highschool (who played best on grass) laughed profoundly when our man Bozo alighted via rocketship or somesuch other of Larry Harmon's vehicular contrivances to find himself suddenly in sunny Scotland, greeted to the sonorous drone of the bagpipes (remember Rufus Harley?) by a stage Scotsman in kilts with a hearty, "Hoot mon, Bozo!" Scotland has always been one of my absolute favorite places to play, The Magic Band had a particularly good gig in Edinburgh at the Liquid Room last January and we really rocked them in Glasgow this summer...Glasgow was also quite honestly the scene of one of the worst gigs of my career, which occurred during my 1991 solo tour of the UK, one of the few times I have actually been stiffed by a promoter...I will draw a discretionary veil over that particular story right now as it's time for bed.

See you on the flip-side.

xxGary

talking turkey

Hello from Syracuse NY, I'm up here now in my hometown after a day in NYC back from Switzerland. I'm visiting for a few days here with my wife Caroline as the guest of my folks for the traditional family Thanksgiving get-together, made somewhat bittersweet by the fact of my parents' imminent move to Riverside California to be near my oldest sister Laurie and her husband Ezra (and my hipster nephew skaterboy Max). So the old house is now semi-stripped of furniture, with moving vans coming back and forth, and my sister Bonnie (the fantastic painter behind the cover of my Operators are Standing By album) and I are rummaging through scrapbooks of memorabilia, mainly faded photos,through a glass darkly... a shock to confront one's various selves, or various elves, frozen forever smiling, lost in the immense jumble heap of the past. These early photos bring something of a frisson, a shock of recognition, of happy/sad times long gone , I'm reminded of Chris Marker's brilliant, brillig and slithy tothed film La Jetee...also The Smith's "Back to the Old House" ("there's too much memories..."), Dylan's "My Back Pages" comes to mind as well...

more later, meanwhile, we have another winner, Nom De Plume correctly identified "Though Not a Word Was Spoken" as the instrumental album referred to in my last blog as being by The Voices of Walter Schumann-- but he failed to identify the main vocalist, 'twas Marni Nixon, Audrey Hepburn's dubbed-in singing voice in the film of "My Fair Lady"...so as a consolation prize Nom receives a copy of the previous edition of Improve the Shining Hour, which is now a collector's item, replaced by the new Evolver/Rykodisc reissue.


Happy Thanksgiving.

Gary

Alfalfa Switzer-land

Gary amongst the Giger

Gary in Gruyere

Marcel Papaux, Gerald Zbinden and Gary in Henry Meyer's Studio Artefax, Lausanne

Click on a photo to enlarge

Sunday Blessed Sunday... and Gerald and I along with genial engineer Bernard Amaudruz are now in the control room trawling through 4 days of running wild in Studio Artefax here in Lausanne. And it is sounding really really good (what a relief, as making such music always entails the risk of boring everyone to pieces...no more so than ourselves...). We augmented one session with batteur spasmodique Marcel Papaux who perfectly complemented our spontaneous Appel-like creations, mad whirling symphonies of strings strung taut and stretched to the breaking point, electroacoustique guitar gambols across lunar landscapes, frozen tundras, the cool green hills of Earth, whirlpools of molten lava...it's all been digitally captured to perfection by Bernard as part our sonic playbook from the last few days. Some of it sounds really demonic, some like the whisper of angels in the belly of the Beast, "although not a word was spoken" (first reader to email me and correctly identify the female artist featured on this classic 50's instrumental album wins a copy of my just reissued career retrospective "Improve the Shining Hour").

And we were doubly blessed with the constant presence at the studio sessions of visual artists-in-residence Henry Meyer and his partner Anne Wilsdorf. Henry is a mad painter and sculptor and Zappaphile whose studio adjacent to us is brimming with a swarm of his 3-D creations; totemic creatures, part animal part mineral, wood and metal and canvas painted assemblages resembling miniature Watts Towers, primitve Gods, walking shadows, the tenticular green head in the boule neige from the original "Invaders from Mars"...a guy after my own heart in other words (plus he had 6 of my cds in his collection! Plus one of his chair sculptures is in H.R. Giger's private art collection in the Giger Museum in Gruyere, alongside Joe Coleman's oil portrait of Charles Manson...Joe is the former squeeze of sadly departed Legshow editrix Dian Hanson...but I digress). Anne is an internationally published children's book writer and illustrator, and the two of them provided us with much visual stimulus in the form of their fantastic artwork as well as their good European bohemian bonhomie for the duration of our stay (they also provided some fantastic communal vegetarian cooking... I am a grease and coca-cola kind of guy on the job as it were, something goes off in my brain whenever I'm on the road that craves such questionable sustenance, so thankfully these cravings were sensibly countermanded at least some of the time here by lentil stews, new salt potatoes in butter--well I had to have SOME fun--fresh salads...also Gerald's wife Danielle was a very good cook indeed back at the ranch up the mountain).

Yesterday we had in a film crew to document the proceedings courtesy of Gerald's son Alexandre and 2 of his young friends, with a view towards releasing a dvd visual analogue to what could well stretch to a double or triple album release, it sounds that satisfying (to our ears anyway) as we listen back to the shapeshifting atmospheres here in the control room by the waning winterlight of chilly Lausanne (a light dust of snow for the last few days on the Jura mountainside, a sunshine-and- snowflake delight to behold as we made the hour or so drive from Gerald's chalet up on the mountain near Gruyere each day along the magnificent primeval sprawl of Lake Geneva and environs (where we stopped for occasional forays into the villages of Montreux and Vevey).

I have plenty of pictures of our studio sojourn and some more of us frolicking out in the countryside (at swim 2 birds) but there are just too many to boot up right this minute, we have to try and listen to everything back now (perhaps I can bribe webmistress Tanya with 5 kinds of swiss chocolate when I get home tomorrow...)


xxGary

switzerland

Gary in beautiful Switzerland! Click on a photo to enlarge

Greetings gang, I am writing this after a superb evening meal at my guitar buddy Gerald Zbinden's cosy chalet about an hour outside Geneva and about 1000 meters up a mountain, with an incredible view of the Swiss Alps and the nearby city of Gruyere out the window (yes, that Gruyere, where the delicious soft cheese originates). I am here at Gerald's invitation to record a free improvisational "dueling guitars" type of album -- we first locked horns at the SKIF Festival in St. Petersburg last spring. Today we laid down some very cool tracks that were spontaneous, totally off the cuff voyages into deepest space in the extremely user friendly studio Artefax in Lausanne, about an hour down the road apiece, and we have another 4 days of recording and mixing ahead of us. Gerald is a very adept guitarist who is a mainstay of the Swiss avant-garde scene and like me is not averse to a little sound modification in the form of multitudinous black boxes...

Yesterday I was met by Gerald at Geneva Airport at 9am after a fairly smooth flight from JFK on Swiss Airlines (formerly Swissair, until they went chapter 11 after 9/11 and reorganized), met his lovely wife, napped and then was off for a very scenic drive up to the medieval city of Gruyere, perched halfway up the adjoining mountain, after a lunch of (naturally) bread and Gruyere (yes, I've gone native)...Gruyere the village is also the home of H.R. Giger's museum (the crazy artist and sculptor behind the Alien monster, Debby Harry's "KooKoo" album cover, I'm sure you've heard the name/seen his work...) and the adjoining Giger bar, which looks like the bar out of the original Star Wars film, with chairs resembling the exoskeletons of various alien vertebrates, a truly fantastic decor designed by Giger (pronounced Geeger) himself that is almost as cool as a certain bar in St. Petersburg whose name escapes me right now, well, let's just say as cool as Le Lapin Agile in Montmartre...anyway we got a Japanese tourist to take a photo of the two of us in the Giger Bar which I am downloading to webmistress Tanya in hopes she can put it up with this blog, still trying to get the hang of this blogger thingy...note the protruding "howling babies" bas-relief in the wall behind us.

Gary and Gerald Zbinden in the H.R. Giger Bar, Gruyere Switzerland, 11/16/04
Click on a photo to enlarge

We then strolled around the old cathedral up the hill a ways and clocked the spectacular view...Switzerland is just too beautiful, always does it for me, I have very fond memories of solo and band gigs in Zurich, Lucerene, Neuchatel, Chaux de Fonds, Bern, Basel et al over the years and it's always a gas to come back here (only sore spot so far was a surly steward on the flight out who would not help me stow away my steel guitar in the overhead, and muttered a sarcastic "I'm Swiss, not AMERICAN", which to me implied that in his worldview Swiss people would not deign to help Americans, these days (!)...I gave him the hardest of stares and a quick "and which charm school did YOU graduate from?"

other than that, it has been a lovely trip so far...

xxGary

We have a winner!

Hi guys--just want to announce a winner in my contest: Robert Kennedy of NYC correctly identified "Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" as the new film sharing the "Don't Say We Didn't Warn You!" tagline used to advertise "Carnival of Souls" in 1972 for my Yale horror film society, co-founded by Bill Moseley, now a big-shot horror film star in Hollywood (soon to be seen in the sequel to "House of 1000 Corpses").

And also to say that I had a ball sitting in last night at the Knitting Factory with Project Object, those wacky Zappaphiliacs led by madman Andre Cholmondley. Along for the ride was the one and only Ike Willis, the legendary Napoleon Murphy Brock, and my young buddy Joey Hendel who plays auxiliary trombone in Gods and Monsters when he's not off cracking the books at Yale. This was my 4th or 5th appearance with these dudes and they are really something else: my guy Denny Walley, who plays with me in The Magic Band, recently sat in with them in Atlanta in their never-ending cross-country peregrinations (and it's funny, because I was meeting Nappy for the first time in 29 years, last time was in Syracuse my hometown when Frank's Bongo Fury tour rolled in to play the War Memorial (horrible name for a venue!) there which is where I hooked up with Don Van Vliet and told him after 4 years of friendship that I, uh, played guitar and wanted to audition for his projected next edition of The Magic Band (which was at that point defunct after devolving into the Tragic Band...but we won't go into that). Was also the first time I met and hung with Denny, who was in Frank's group at the time, and whom I also much love to play with. Anyway I joined the PO boys alongside Napoleon and we tore through a gutbucket version of King Kong, I had brought along my '66 sea-foam green strat for the occasion...what fun, the fans mobbed me afterwards, including the Doctor Dark boys down from my old college town of New Haven.

Night before I was out and about at the Deitch Projects Gallery on Wooster Street with my guy Ernie Brooks, longtime God and Monsters bassist, and our buddy Jerry Harrison, hit record producer (Live, Von Bondies, new Kenny Wayne Shepard album) and former Talking Head keyboardist, and we were checking out lit wunderkind JT Leroy who was having a reading in his honor (JT is currently the hottest young chronicler of the seamy soft white underbelly of American teenage gothic hijinkx--don't say I didn't warn you!"), In attendance were JT's bandmates Thistle from SF (JT writes lyrics for them), and readers Lou Reed, Tatum O'Neill, Garbage's Shirley Manson, our boy Jerry, poet Mary Karr, and a bunch more icons, all strung together by bon mots courtesy of MC Casey Fischer (of the band Fischerspooner)...it was like a big love-fest/happening not seen in these parts since the 80's gallery hey-day. The after-party was pretty cool too at the Tribeca Grand. You would have dug it be. Jerry Harrison's just mixed a track for me for the forthcoming Gods and Monsters new album...stay tuned!

Have to catch a plane for Geneva now, more sooner than later....

a blog is born

Greetings to all who have followed my career to date by way of my recordings, live appearances, and website (www.garylucas.com) which has been up and running 8 years now thanks to webmistress Tanya Weiman. I am now about to embark on writing a running blog account of various goings-on in my life and music which I hope will be of interest...don't say I didn't warn you! (a phrase I originally coined at Yale along with my partner Bill Moseley with whom I established the horror film society Things That Go Bump in the Night, a Yalie institution circa 1971-74--we used it to promote a screening of my fave horror flick "Carnival of Souls"...I recently saw this same phrase used in the ads for some current film here in NYC...anybody who knows which film it is and writes me at gary@garylucas.com wins a copy of my new album with Jozef Van Wissem, "The Universe of Absence"). Tanya helped drag me kicking and screaming into the digital age (it wasn't until the late 90's that I even had a home computer, much less knew how to operate the damn thing) and now she's helping me finesse the blague (GOOD OLD LOGORRHEA).

First topic herein is the new lineup of Gods and Monsters, my longtime band since 1989, which over the years included fantastic talents such as Jeff Buckley, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Richard Barone, Rolo McGinty, Keith LeBlanc, Tony Thunder Smith, and other luminaries who joined us in the ranks. I have streamlined the band for the last few years into a core power trio, with occasional guests Amica on vocals, sax maniac Jason Candler and trombone virtuoso Joey Hendel. Today Gods and Monsters consists of myself on guitars, effects and vocals, Ernie Brooks from the original Modern Lovers on bass and vocals, and new member Billy Ficca from Television on drums. Billy fills the drum chair previously held down for a dozen years by the mighty Jonathan Kane (Swans, Rhys Chatham), who has gone on to concentrate on his own music projects, and I wish him the best as he is a truly great player. Billy is certainly up to the challenge of filling Jonathan 's shoes and he in fact has reinvigorated the band with his fabulous polyrhythmic groove. I have wanted to play with him for years, and we've been friends for a long time...I brought him in on the sessions in the south of France in 2000 for the French rock band Tanger, whom I produced for Mercury. He was a good friend to have there in Carpentras amidst the madness (and he more than held his own drumming alongside the hypno-thump of several Gnawa master musicians from Morocco that we brought along for that recording). His playing has added so much to whomever he plays with (don't forget that he was the drum powerhouse behind The Waitresses, a wonderful band led by Tin Huey's Chris Butler and fronted by the late Patty Donahue that should have been much better known outside their cult).

Anyway Gods and Monsters made a pilgrimage last Saturday November 6th to The Stone Pony in Asbury Park to play in the annual Light of Day Charity 3 day charity event organized by Bob Benjamin of School House Records to raise money for Bruce Springsteen's favorite charity, the Parkinson's Disease Association. The band did quite a smoking version of The Boss's "Ain't Got You" from Bruce's "Tunnel of Love" album on a double cd called "Light of Day" that came out a year or so ago, proceeds going to charity, artists like Elvis Costello, Elliot Murphy and other greats abounding. We trucked down to Asbury Park and played it last year and I was paid the supreme compliment by Bruce himself, who told me: "You're a phenomenal guitarist...and your version of my song was phenomenal!" This made my year, to put it mildly...this year we came down there with Jason and Amica in tow and ripped through a set unfortunately truncated due to set-up delays (the band that preceded us removed all the drum hardware after their set, and Billy had to rebuild and tune the drums from scratch). We had an incendiary warm-up gig the night before at the great new Bowery Poetry Club here in the city (where we were joined by What I Like About Jew's Rob Tannenbaum, who read a poem consisting of actual verbatim Bushspeak set to my space guitar improvisation), so we were in top form at the Stone Pony. In the crowd was a whole coterie of Bruce fans who had flown in from Madrid, including Sal Trepat, who had got the Light of Day album project going in Europe through his label Buffalo Records, and they were absolutely bopping along as we cruised through " Ain't Got You", segued into our traditional romp through Arthur Russell's "Let's Go Swimming", and closed with "Lonesome Day" from The Rising, which we first played at a John Kerry rally a week previously at the Knitting Factory (what a tragedy that he lost. It's only made me, and I hope You reading this, to continue to push for change in this country...to quote one of my older songs, don't let the bastards wear you down!)

And to cap a fine night, I got my picture taken (by Jason Candler) with Bruce Springsteen and Amica:

Click on the photo to enlarge

I'm off on Monday to Geneva Switzerland for a week to work on an improvisatory album with the Swiss avant-guitarist Gerald Zbinden, whom I met at the SKIF Festival in St. Petersburg Russia last spring. Hope to keep blogging away to y'all from 1000 meters high up in the Alps.

Love
xx

Gary Lucas