Traveling Riverside Blues

The whole Fam-damly (left to right back row: my sister Bonnie, brother in law Ezra, Uncle Billy, sister Laurie, cousin Bob, Bob's kids, Bob's wife, yours truly; left to right bottom row: my Dad, Aunt Ruth, my Mom and Verdi, Caroline), Riverside California Thanksgiving Reunion 11/24/05

left to right: Aunt Ruth, GL, Caroline, Bonnie

Click to enlarge (hosted by flickr)

This is gonna be a quickie as I am out here in Riverside California visiting my folks for Thanksgiving, just polished off a phenomenal meal courtesy of world's greatest chefs my mom and dad. And I'm off in 2 hours for LAX to fly to Melbourne Australia, where I will arrive due to crossing of the international date line on Saturday morning, to be picked up and driven directly 3 hours outside Melbourne to a giant festival site where I will join my compatriots in Future Sound of London's live thingy Amorphous Androgynous at this outdoor rave wingding the Earthcore Global Carnival. Will soundcheck and then we hit at 8pm and play till sunset; hope I get time to at least shower and change my duds when I get there as hitting the ground running to perform after 12 hours journey on a plane can be kind of, uh, strenuous...but I've done it before, although not after such a long flight. The adrenalin kicks in and jet-lag be damned (hell, isn't Australia where they filmed "The Road Warrior"?)

Did a great broadcast back in NYC last week, from midnight to 3:30am, with the legendary Bob Fass on his Radio Unnameable show on WBAI, NYC's longest-running freeform radio station; it's up and archived at the WBAI website under Thursday Nov. 17th (click here to listen). Bob is a hero of mine and has been broadcasting this show since 1963, and he's still going strong...there is a bootleg circulating of an incredible show he did with Bob Dylan in '66 during a brief hiatus Dylan took from working on "Blonde on Blonde", when he and Neuwirth came back to NYC from Nashville. Dylan fields listeners' calls for a couple hours or so in his best manic speed shpritz; it is quite a piece of theater, and if you dug Bob in "Don't Look Back" demolishing interviewers right and left then this here radio session is yr meat. Bob Fass is a natural treasure and is right up there with Jean Shepard, Studs Terkel and Symphony Sid in the annals of American broadcasting. First DJ to spin "Blood on the Tracks", too.

Had lunch with my friend ex-Reprise Records supremo and full time political activist Howie Klein and famed rock photographer Richard E. Aaron in LA at a lovely sushi joint in Studio City a couple days ago called Katsu-Ya (fantastic!), then dinner at The Ivy in LA the other night with Caroline and my old college friend Harry Hamelin. Harry was named the "sexiest man alive" according to People Magazine in 1986 during his "LA Law" days, and now his son Dimitri is picking up the mantle apparently as well as following in his Dad's acting shoes. Harry is thriving as always, entertaining lots of acting offers, running a string of boutiques with his wife Lisa Rinna, and working on developing alternate energy sources as a concerned citizen.

That's it, gotta go shmooze with the family, next dispatch will be from Down Under...

love

xxGary

Party Down!

Saw "Abigail's Party" last night, in previews on Theater Row here, Mike Leigh's savage/banal whiplash-across-the-face-o'-bourgeois-London-life circa 1977, I caught this originally in a West End revival a couple years ago, this was a better production all round thanks to Scott Elliot's superior direction and incendiary ensemble work sparked by the phenomenal transformation of Jennifer Jason Leigh into a grating, suburban, proto-Chav hausfrau. We're in Pinter and Albee territory here, and Leigh evokes the spirit of Python and Fawlty as well in the maddening sing-songy cadences of the various British high&low accents on display here ("I staggered through your chitty dining room..." sang Ray Davies so aptly once in "Berkeley Mews"), although Leigh probably would never cop to this; in fact, the Leigh Man himself (remember the Fawlty Towers episode with the dead guest Mr. Leeman?) made an unscheduled appearance in the actual corporeal flesh after the final curtain for an impromptu Q & A with the audience and brusquely, with a whiff of what it is my sad duty to report came off to this citizen as a slight tincture of condescension, nyahed nyahed and stone-cold frustrated some poor soul who wanted the low-down on his famous technique of transforming weeks of improv into set-in-stone scenarios; he also scornfully told some young female questioner, "You don't look like you're 20!" after being informed by another audience member that a group of 20-year old fledgling theater goers were inda house...tant pis, I still like most of his films, especially "Naked" (anyone else out there ever notice how much David Thewlis channels Mark E. Smith to evoke his Mancunian anarcho-intellectual-punk character Johnny in that one?). This production will most likely be a hit, and any reader Manhattan bound for the holidays should see this.

My buddy Cineaste editor Richard Porton and I caught a preview screening of "The Libertine" this morning, and I dunno, while Johnny Depp is still about my favorite young actor he really falls back on trotting out his Capn' Jack Sparrow schtick pretty much throughout this murky, poorly lit (guess they were probably going for a touch of ye olde "Barry Lyndon" here) farrago which apparently lost its financing on the eve of production and as a result is fairly studio hide-bound (some occasional exterior shots of the English countryside circa mid-60's Hammer films come as a breath of, well, fresh air). John Malkovich in an unusually restrained performance for him actually steals the show, what there is of it, from JD here-- watching Johnny Depp as 17th century roue the Earl of Rochester swive his way through a succession of whores, get the pox, and slowly wither away is basically not my idea of a good time at the movies (although his strap-on silver prosthetic nose in the court scene at the end is a jolly nice touch). The director, hitherto unknown to me, confects an uneasy mish-mash of "Marat/Sade", "Tom Jones", Michael Reeves (there is one scene where they are almost surely trying to go for a "Witchfinder General" look), and various Peter Greenaway films (evoked by the usage of Michael Nyman as composer). Tim Roth actually makes a better fop than Johnny Depp (pace "Rob Roy"). Samantha Morton is wasted here; in fact the film cries out for a female performance on the caliber of the great long lost lamented Caitlin Cartridge (whose spirit is summoned here by one of the whores moaning "Johnny! Johnnnnny!" ala her character in the aforementioned "Naked").

And at this point, where characters and actors collide, I will rest my weary, media-saturated brain and sign off...


xxGary

But if you try some time, you just might find...

Well, guys and gals, the results of my last contest came in fast and thick and furious and the mighty Chris Dee was the first to correctly identify Traffic's song "Giving to You" (the title of one of my blog postings, hah) as the source for "But I mean jazz!"--"Giving to You", that mainly instrumental romp from their superb "Mr. Fantasy" album, featured a sputtering, pilled-up, Pete Meaden-esque Mod at the head and the tail of the tune yammering about his enthusiasm for le jazz cool, the voice of this speedster belonging, it turns out (courtesy of a recent interview with Dave Mason) to their producer Jimmy Miller, whom Traffic shared with the Stones, yes, "Mr. Jimmy" himself, who, as we all know, "looked pretty ill" down at the Chelsea drugstore when Mick went to get his prescription filled...

Nice as always to know there are many of you out there alert to the psychic phenomena I like to illuminate from this blogstand in the form of these little quizzes. A copy of "Diplopia" is now winging it's way to Chris, and onwards and upwards...

Special mention should be made of the excellent new live throwdown in preparation in south London organized by my good mate Garry Cobain of Future Sound of London, who has assembled a band (of which I'm part of, along with the masterful blind sitar player Baluji Shrivastav, multi-instrumentalist Stuart Rowe, and an intense young singer and brand new drummer who incidentally is the son of Yes guitarist Steve Howe) to realize live in Australia soon the prismatic vision of Garry and Brian Dougans' ever-so-many-years-in-the-making new double album "Alice in Ultraland" which is out now on EMI Harvest under the group name Amorphous Androgynous--EMI reactivated the original Harvest label for this album, which is a wonderful thing indeed, as the new album is very much in the mind-manifesting shape-shifting tradition of the classic output of that venerated label, and definitely of the same high sonic quality. Many of my most pristine musical memories of the late 60's coalesce under the yellow and green banner of the Harvest imprint which to me, always signified something rare and beautiful and hypnagogic in the form of myriad albums by folks like Kevin Ayers, post-Syd Pink Floyd, and the fantastic Third Ear Band (digression: their percussionist Glen Sweeney gave me a gift of the actual shooting script for Roman Polanski's "Macbeth" on my first trip to London in '73, when I had arrived there en route from playing electric guitar in the European premiere of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" in Vienna...I remember making my way as a young fledgling music writer for Zoo World Magazine to Blackhill Enterprises off Portobello Road, meeting Peter Jenner, and then spending a long afternoon visiting with Glenn and his wife in their flat in Ladbroke Grove)--the Third Ear Band's "Music from Macbeth" soundtrack album, which contains eerie haunted music that ploughs the ancient/modern instrumental nexus like a UK forerunner of Popol Vuh, gives me chills to this day and includes contributions from British arranger/instrumentalist Paul Buckmaster, whom Miles Davis later drafted into working on "On the Corner", plus a lovely sung version of Chaucer's poem "Merciless Beauty" (uncredited unfortunately to the great poet in both the film and the soundtrack), performed in the film by the also, alas, uncredited youth who plays Fleance, Banquo's young son--here he sings this song at Duncan's final feasting before Macbeth screws his courage to the you know where and doth murders sleep--and of course, Duncan. This album, perfect music for dark mornings, rainy afternoons, or midnight visitations, was unfairly castigated some years ago as one of the worst albums of all time in MOJO-- like Polanski's film itself, it is in fact one of my favorites, a perfect marriage of powerful, evocative music to the funereal vision of Shakespeare's blackest play (well, blackest maybe after "Titus Andronicus")-- and if you dig my stuff, very much worthy of your attention.

Speaking of Polanski, I snagged a copy of his fantastic "Cul De Sac" on DVD while over in London for these Amorphous rehearsals. I last saw this blackest of comedies about 25 years ago, and as it will most probably never see the light of day in this country I urge all my US readers not to stand still but rather run, jump, and go directly to amazon.co.uk to seek it out (but first make sure you have an all-region player that plays PAL, of course, check my blog of Jan. 11th for a real bargain in that department), as it is one of the darkest, most Nabokovian themed films ever, with searing performances by the luscious Francoise Dorleac (Catherine Deneuve's soeur), Donald Pleasance, and the venerable Lionel Stander as a hitman on the run, heavy Freudian kinky hijinx abound and with a screenplay by Polanski and Gerard Brach the film compels in the tradition of erotic 60's psychodramas by the likes of Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, Nicholas Roeg, and Donald Cammell...



xxGary

"But I Mean Jazz!"

What is this thing called jazz? Originally a synonym for the old in-and-out (as in Armstrong's "Jazz Me Blues"), it is, in a word, perhaps the most universally appreciated US cultural export (or would that be hip-hop now? Beats me!). I dunno, really...my own music kind of ricochets around the rock/jazz/folk/blues/electronic/classical/world music antipodes; they stock me in both the Rock and World sections of Tower Records here in the city and in the Rock and Jazz sections of Virgin Records Oxford Street in London and so forth but I never thought to narrow-cast my music for marketing efficacy, I just try and do what I like (Cream shoulda attempted "Do Watcha Like" on this here reunion, well it was 2/3 o' Cream recorded it originally in Blind Faith but a great track nevertheless, certainly more exciting than "Tales of Brave Ulysses" which they apparently revved up for their big Madison Square Garden show recently). Yep I do what I do, I do what I can, and where the chips fall I hope to make bonfires of them thank you very much...

Which is just to say that I REALLY enjoyed my recent stint at the Roswell Rudd organized tribute to Steve Lacy here at Merkin Hall in October, in which I got to play with idols of my youth like Roswell and Dave Liebman (saw him open for Beefheart at the Keystone in Berkeley in '77) and contemporary fave Joe Lovano--not to mention longtime Lacy associates Bobby Few, Jean-Jacques Avenel, and John Betsch. This was a bonafide "jazz" gig and as I was kinda the odd man out, maverick that I am ("luck is the lady that he loved the best") slipping and sliding as I do between various genres it was nice to feel so welcomed by both the crowd and the cats, I played my ancien National steel on a solo bottleneck rendition of "Bone" and it felt gooood, the tune is a bit Monkish/Beefheartian which is to say askew blues with lots of angles and brilliant corners so it was catnip to me and I threw a little Meredith Wilson 76 tailgate trombones in there as well as "This Old Man" and with a knick knack paddywhack gave the crowd a smidgeon of "Dem Bones" (unofficial theme from "The Prisoner"), this was in the second half of the concert, first half what a joy it was to join the large ensemble on "Esteem" with ecstatic stratocaster modal strum and more glass-fingered glissing, whole gig was a lovely triumphant evening, coverage of which typically was blacked-out by the local media (Lacy was given France's highest artistic honor, Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres before he died, and they're out covering Ashanti). We were all asked to give official statements for the program notes on Steve Lacy, here's an except from mine:

"I was first introduced to the world of Steve Lacy through a documentary made by my friend Peter Bull entitled "Lift the Bandstand". Lacy's persona grabbed me right away: terse, astringent, epigrammatic. Just like his soprano sax playing. And man does he swing!

In Steve Lacy's music we have a total melt-down of European, Asian and African influences (a true American). A mediation between head and heart, muscle, bone and grey matter. He wields his horn like an icepick. An elegant assassin."

Thanks to Roswell Rudd and Verna Gillis for inviting me along to pay my respects to this musical genius. Roswell rules--check out his blowing on "Archie Shepp Live in San Francisco", one of the seminal touchstones of my wayward youth (used to love to zoom into various loading docks in Syracuse making after-school deliveries for my old man and cranking "The Wedding" at very high volume). And Verna is a saint of New Music, a mover and shaker who started the wonderful Soundscape club here in the 70's (original forerunner of ye olde Knitting Factory), brought Sunny Ade and his troupe over to play their first concert in NYC in the 80's, etc. etc.--a great lady and a force for good in music.

And-- the first reader who can email me at gary@garylucas.com and correctly identify the provenance of the title of this blog wins a copy of "Diplopia", my first album with lute meister Jozef Van Wissem, who was just in town jamming with me at the Bowery Poetry Club.

xxGary

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