South by South by Nathanael West

Been holding off writing up a definitive account of our trek to Austin, Texas for ye annual rock supermarket known as South by Southwest until now, and now it can be told: this was my second excursion into (hardly) the American heartland (more like a Blue city in a Red state); deep in the heart of Bush country lies a slacker's paradise of clubs and bars and barbecue joints that once a year turns into a music biz megalopolis populated by wayward itinerant moosicians, lovers of the Big Note, and bidness guys and gals. This year 1300 or so bands performed over a few days in late March, the majority of them squeezed into the myriad clubs, hang-outs, and honky-tonks that line 6th Street that give it an air not unakin to Dublin's Temple Bar district. This (Charles) Whitmanesque panoply of populist entertainment (Exiles on 6th Street) by Day Two starts to resemble scenes out of the closing pages of "Day of the Locust", when the great swarm of rubbernecking music aficionados and industry folk start careening crazily from club to bar to club in a great alcoholic stoned stupor and one has to gingerly sidestep the mongrel hordes clogging the street for fear of being trampled underfoot (or treading on their various remains and belongings...)

In short, a Kermesse, a whirling pageant, a riot of sounds, big fun of the don't-stop-the-carnivale variety (hurry, hurry, see the Thai punk band, step right up and and see the New York Dolls come to life once more right before your very eyes, check out 5 count them 5 Japanese bands of the female gender) and so on...disorienting, sure, an adrenalin rush, yes, and pleasurable...well, most times, depends on your stamina/appetite for novelty/threshold of attention paid put...in '96 I played there solo acoustic and stuck it out for the full 5 days, come Monday morning I was pretty well surfeited with music non-stop and welcomed the pause that refreshes (no music!).

This trip I was in tow with my own personal flying circus, the expanded edition of Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters, my ace rhythm section of Ernie Brooks and Billy Ficca augmented with Joe Hendel and Jason Candler on trombone and alto and Amica and Michael Schoen on vocals, plus assorted helpmates Igor Cubrilovic (my Igor) on guitar tech and Julia Crowe (logistics and general repping), so it was quite the little 9 person entourage that made its way from NYC via Atlanta to Austin...and of course first things first, we naturally hit the (highly touted) best barbecue in town, Hoover's, on Friday evening directly after we pulled in, and we naturally hoovered up everything in sight (the smoked pork ribs were particularly piquant, as was the fried okra--thank you Ed Ward for the tip!)...then it was off to wander the streets in search of the Vibe, I took in a few bands here and there and sure 'nuff the party had already started, same seething lurching crowds, same festivo flavor, nice upper 70's temperature a big improvement on the weather we'd left behind us in New York...

Next day we checked out the main exhibition hall and I ran into many old friends from various vectors and sectors of my past lives, made some new friends, had a rooftop lunch observing the shambolic never-ending parade down below (o the humanity!), then we pretty much all repaired to our hotel to get ready for the evening's performance...and at 5 o'clock the heavens opened forth, and hail the size of moth-balls rained down on the parched flatlands (first rain in a long long time someone said, with the hail a very good sign indeed for our show--I love freak meteorological events like this before playing, it supercharges not only the ozone but one's self and makes performances extra-intense subsequently)...and it was duly noted that one base of the rainbow in curved air festooning the skies over our astonished heads was firmly planted not far from our hotel, and that the main body of the rainbow shone forth in a great arc that traveled its way 5 miles or so over the highway to plunk down its nether region in the very vicinity of our designated venue, The Drink on 6th...niiiiiice!

and sure enough when we hit the stage around 11pm we had a great big enthusiastic crowd before us...and we played like fire...and we got them cheering and yelling from the first number...and when we came off dozens of fans came up to shake my hand and rave about the set, it was totally life-affirming--to get a response like that whenever I hit the road makes it so worthwhile...and I saw old writer friends like Billy Altman and Ed Ward in the crowd and my guy Keith Cahoon from Tokyo who used to manage the largest Tower Records in the world there (where I played a solo instore performance in '96 in front of a bank of tv monitors displaying the image of me playing live, very weird), and who wrote up the following review for HotwireJapan for my Japanese fans:

Extraordinary guitarist Gary Lucas who's based in NY had a good concert. Lucas made his name as a guitarist of Captain Beefheart, and has taken part in many projects, also covering Chinese and Middle Eastern music, so he has many unique ideas and thoughts. Gary and Gods & Monsters helped shape Jeff Buckley's talent into something brilliant, and Buckley's solo album included co-written songs by Lucas. Lucas brought down the new talented guest singer Michael Schoen for this SXSW, he covered Buckley's songs "Mojo Pin" and one more. Bass: Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers) Drums: Billy Ficca (Television). Lucas is also a song writer, and has co-written with David Johansen of New York Dolls. Lucas has played in Japan before in 1996, and plans to return again.

In short, we had a blast--and so did the crowd!

After coming down from the adrenalin rush (all life in a day crammed into a 35 minute set) I managed to catch most of the Brazilian Girls set afterwards across the street (I love this group!) and some of Jesse Harris acoustic (he sounded great--both he and Norah Jones attended my 20 year retrospective show at the Knitting Factory in NYC in 2000), and then we headed back to our ranchero... I wish I could have seen more music there but we were scheduled to fly back to NYC early the next day...damn!

Next stop, Gods and Monsters play World Cafe Live in Philadelphia in the main room on Thursday April 21st, opening for us are the legendary Note Killers...

xxGary

Mama Kangaroos Make Good

Sorry guys, another belated post--but better late than nada, here's the lowdown on the Mama Kangaroo cd release celebration held in Philadelphia last week at the sumptuous new World Cafe Live complex, adjacent to NPR's WXPN studios. First off, the actual CD "Mama Kangaroos: Philly Women Sing Captain Beefheart" has been 4 years in the making and is the brainchild of Michael Villers, a local Philadelphian fixture in the progressive music scene there, and it is finished but not yet in releasable (ie manufactured, with full cover art) form, but should be soon, through Michael's label Genus Records. I'd heard about this album awhile back through the fireparty.com Beefheart chat group and was intrigued to ponder the notion of specifically female artistes interpreting the music of Don Van Vliet, as Don was always one to underscore his (at least in his eyes) absolute connection to the female head and heart, ie, "Women understand my music, man!"

Anyway my old friend Deerfrance touted me on it (she was John Cale's backup singer and released a fine album in her own right last year) and another old friend Essra Mohawk (former Bizarre Straight recording artist and songwriter supreme) played on it, and I have to say, the advance copy sent me by Michael really knocked me out. The variety of interpretations on the cd, from drum and bass versions to old timey to camp cabaret to bloozy rawk 'n roll, is stunning, and what a pleasure to hear women's voices in all their glory ring some new changes on the already decidedly twisted Beefheartian songbook. It is a really wonderful record, with twenty different female-fronted ensembles driving the engine of difference, and it gets better and better on repeated listenings, I couldn't cite a favorite track but Sweetie's electro jungle-style version of "Where There's Woman" is a revelation; Jane Gilday's haunting "Sugarbowl" takes one deep into the dappled hills of Appalachian country; and Kiss Kiss Kill Kill's thriftshop Manhattan Transfer-esque take on "Lick My Decals Off Baby" is a hoot and a holler (not unakin to the GTO's "Captain's Fat Theresa Shoes")...would also like to mention Janet Bressler's soulful "I'm Glad", Essra Mohawk's
kicking "Party of Special Things to Do", Global Transmission's mesmeric triphop "Witch Doctor Life", Thorazine's punk-thrash "Frying Pan"...hell, they're all good!

So Michael asked if I would play as a special guest at their record release party, which is why I schlepped down to Philly last week with Deerfrance and her boyfriend Paul and had the most delightful evening, enjoying several superlative acts from the "Mama Kangaroos" album strut their stuff-- including the aforementioned Kiss Kiss Kill Kill. a thoroughly charming concatenation of eccentric frou-frou girls 'n boys fronted by 2 front-women who were ringers for Edith Head and Betty Page, respectively; Mia Johnson, a fierce bluesy mama indeed with a sizzling male slide guitarist who did an excellent "Crazy Little Thing"; and Jane Gilday, a revelation on treated guitar and cracked, gnarly voice who in a way, to me, embodied something perhaps closest to the spirit of Van Vliet's music-- not so much in form but in depth of content with her gender-bending original songs (I confess I sat in with Jane on National steel, alongside Deerfrance on backup harmonies and Paul on oddball percussion). I played solo acoustic to a very appreciative crowd and was gratified to see so many old faces from shows I've done over the years in Philadelphia coming back to say hi, it 's stuff like that that makes it all worthwhile (including seeing my childhood friend Bruce Waltuck in the audience, who I last saw in November 1980 when he turned up at the Venue in London to see me play with Beefheart!) I missed the last act as it was already 1am and time to get back to Manhattan, which is long enough of a drive, not to mention that Deerfrance and Paul live in Montauk which is another 2-3 hours from my place...and needless to say we got thoroughly lost in the byzantine maze of Philly's suburban environs, trying to find Route 95, so lost that I didn't barge in on Caroline until around 4am (she slept through my noisy entrance, lucky for me!)


All in all, a great night out of Manhattan. World Cafe Live is really a spectacular joint, lots of good musicians coming through to play there from all over the globe, the food is pretty decent ('cept they stop serving too early)--and I'm scheduled to return, to play the big room (this party was upstairs in the cafe) on April 21st with Gods and Monsters in tow. Now off to Austin on Friday for South by Southwest, we play The Drink on 6th on Saturday night, see ya soon I hope...

xxGary

"Holman, Come Down!"

One of the great moments in "The Sand Pebbles" was when Steve McQueen, playing Engineer with-the -soul-of-a-poet Jake Holman was hectored by his shipmates aboard the U.S.S. San Pablo, repeatedly chanting his name to demand that he give himself up to the Chinese rabble calling for his head. Last Saturday night the hard-scrabble rabble present at the Bowery Poetry Club repeatedly invoked the name of Bob Holman, an actual genuwine poet, a supporter and enabler of the arts and artistes that still walk the earth around this parrish (who else would give Taylor Mead a weekly residency?), a whole man (and a half) indeed presiding over the bohemian bacchanale running riot at his very own joint that brought forth the splendid human flotsam and jism that still lurks in the otherwise tweezed and manicured playing fields of present day Manhattan. Here last Saturday night in the intimate precincts of the BPC flourished a sizeable contingent of outsiders and weirdos, the likes of which I haven't encountered since the JT Leroy party chronicled in an earlier entry; though the free admission for the night occasionally resulted in the momentary intrusion of wholesome bridge and tunnel types out trawling the neighborhood for...what? An expensive Moroccan restaurant? A quickie tattoo? Nostalgie de la boue? Whatever, they quickly swooped the scene and left the concatenation of outsiders to their own devices, which included enjoying a Piscine variety show em'ceed by the lovely Leticia Veloria, who flew the colors of freakdom with honor (and displayed her tats!) in a whirlwind flurry of costume changes and variegated wiggery that embodied a shapeshifting Mae West devolving into Foxy Brown morphing into Lil' Kim slithering into something Rusty Warren by way of Mrs. Miller, summoning up a veritable bevy of killer shrews and then some. She sang, she shrieked, she drove the crowd mad while a friendly female beautician/mohel snipped snipped snipped with her scissors giving out free haircuts in the back, an enterprising slacker coalition sold trailer trash sandwiches of hot dogs hot out of their portable toaster oven on white bread with French's mustard and hawked homemade profane t-shirts, and the Bowery staff (5 of which are Pisces) handed out tasty cakes to the ravenous throng. Next up a leather-clad silver-pierced dread-locked riot grrrrl bumped and ground her rounds in time to loud lewd metallic rock while brandishing flaming skewers blazing at the business-end, very "Fire Maidens from Outer Space", and actually deep-throated and extinguished the lit braziers in a spectacular fire-eating dance that recalled Salome shedding her veils crossed with Gerard Malanga's infamous Whip Dance from Exploding Plastic Inevitable days at the Dom, with moves hitherto seen in these parts since the glory-hole days of Wendy O. Williams (btw, The Plasmatics are available for repeated viewings on the SCTV Vol. Two DVD--which also features John Candy taking The Tubes out fishing in an episode of "The Fishin' Musician" which surely must have been the genesis of and template for John Lurie's "Fishing With John" series). (Sorry, John). There were several other folky singer/songwriter turns, a salute to the wild West Village frontiers of the Meat District (I mean, Heinekenplein, as I believe it's been re-branded since the advent of Pastis) and its legendary Hogs and Heifers nonsense in the form of strip teasing go-go dancers on top of the bar comprising 2 scrawny female ecdysiasts and 1 porky long-haired dude.

And then Holman and I hit the stage and he mutated into a werewolf while I went into outer limits mode, summoning up the sprites und undines that live in the interstices of the eeeeeeelectricity I traffic in (and under the bridge of my guitar). He declaimed his poetic rants in the proud Village boho tradition harking back to Maxwell Bodenheim, marinated with a hint of Marinetti and a soupcon of Rimbaud, and I improvised an abstract counterpoint to his verbal spew punctuated with some silvery bottleneck blues on my National steel. And ye we were in synch, and the rhythm ebbed and flowed as one, and time stood still (if only for a moment...).

"Holman, come down!" indeed.

"Let It Come Down!"
--William Shakespeare (and Paul Bowles)

We need more of this madness in these parts.

Right here and now.

(Next up, dateline Philadelphia, I spill the beans on the "Mama Kangaroos: Philly Women Sing Captain Beefheart" concert I took part in last night...

xxGary

The Real Gary Lucas

Gary and Jozef Van Wissem, Bowery Poetry Club NYC, 2/25/05

photo by Jack Vartoogian | Click on a photo to enlarge (hosted by flickr)

"Waitin' around for my shell to crack/After that they can't hold me back" rapped The Jungle Brothers on their super 1988 opus "Done By The Forces of Nature", and in truth I've been done by a bronchial bacillus for almost a fortnight, the little bugger hung on tenaciously and caused endless days and nights of misery necessitating the eventual intervention of an antibiotic...but now "I'm back/ to show you/ I can really put 'em down" (Isley Brothers, "Do You Love Me?") So while I wasn't on the blog due to such a debilitating bout with an upper respiratory pirate jolly rogering my membranes I was on the job anyway (the show must go on...I remember Don Van Vliet gleefully telling me on the 1980 final Beefheart European tour when he observed me coughing my guts out in Holland, "You can't get sick, Gary...you're in SHOWBIZ!"). And feverish or not I played several superb shows here over the last couple weeks, particularly outstanding was an evening with my Dutch lute playing friend Jozef Van Wissem at the Bowery Poetry Club wherein we performed extracts from our latest opus "The Universe of Absence" to a crowd that included The New Yorker Magazine's poetry editor Alice Quinn, and also Deborah Dickson, the editor and co-director of the Maysles Films documentary "Lalee's Kin" which I scored for HBO a couple years ago. The gig was picked with a photo in Time Out NY (see below) and Jozef and I really had our axes working overtime and many magic notes were plucked and hit to ricochet wildly and shimmer around the dark intimate confines of the BPO like June bugs. Michael Schoen and I did a solo acoustic gig at a great new club on the Lower East Side called The Rockwood Music Hall, and played for an enthusiastic crowd of local scenesters and aficionados including hot young singer songwriter Kristin Diable. Gods and Monsters also played a benefit for Tonic, the East Village club in danger of imminent extinction, and then a Thursday night throwdown last week that was probably our most fun and cooking show ever, it was that good, with the full cast and crew including Billy, Ernie, Ami, Jason, Joey and Michael, and we are quite looking forward to moseying on down to Austin Texas soon to play South by Southwest on Saturday March 19th at The Drink on 6th at 11pm, come on down and say hello all ye who happen to be reading this and are planning to be there. Fast 'N' Bulbous got a wonderful writeup in the Village Voice by jazz honcho Frances Davis (see jpeg below) and our album is doing well and making waves internationally.
Time Out NY pick:

Click on the Village Voice article to enlarge (hosted by flickr)

And on another high note, The Magic Band is coming back to romp and tomp (to quote Little Richard on Jimi Hendrix) in the UK at the end of May on a new tour guaranteed to rip yr face off--confirmed dates and venues should be announced imminently. Plus we have a live double cd in the works which should be out in a couple months, featuring John "Drumbo" French, Denny "Feelers Rebo" Walley, Mark "Rockette Morton" Boston, and yours truly, along with auxillary drummers Robert "Wait for Me" Williams and Michael "Swamp Monk" Traylor. And don't forget our live DVD available at subdiva.co.uk--there is an NTSC edition planned that should be available soon to complement the PAL version currently available.

Lastly, here's a couple shots of the "real" Gary Lucas, courtesy of Bob Jacobson who has been outsourced back to the US from his cushy computer gig in India.


xxGary