Sunday, March 06, 2005

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

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