I'll Take Sweden...

...was the title of Bob "I Love a Man in a Uniform" Hope's 1965 laff riot, and it might well serve as a credo for my recent tour there with the Magic Band, country is so damn nice and friendly and over-all neat and tidy (its vaunted swinging '60's erotic content now muted/dissipated to very low-level background noise) that one occasionally longs for the gritty urban sprawl and squall of less, uh, manicured climes (Amsterdam is the obverse of Stockholm). Still, a lovely hang nevertheless...

Hit the ground running last Monday with a taping for Swedish TV4, where after a couple hours kip at the flat of my friend Bertil we camped out in the dressing rooms of the studio itself all night waiting for our 4am makeup, tune-up and run-through before unleashing our wakeup clarion call to an unsuspecting populace at 8am or so (you can see this clip of us "in the snow for a blow" as they say on my homepage at www.garylucas.com...thank you Ralf Nygard). Then it was a short flight up to Umea, 50 k or so from Lapland, for a relaxed 3 or 4 days of rehearsals and our eventual performance/Night at the Opera House there (northernly most opry house in captivity apparently, obverse of Fitzcarraldo's) as part of the annual Made in Umea Festival, which thanks to the benevolent kindliness and excellent good taste of program director Eric Palm brought in diverse, non-generic musicians from all over the world (including UK darlings the Tiger Lilies, who opened for Gods and Monsters at the Knit here a couple years ago)...

Caught a revelatory set by Swedish multi-instrumentalist/composer/madman Ale Moller (no umlaut on this computer, sorry) who led a fantastically precise and spirited ensemble in a romp through folky funk-inflected acoustic jazz, which made for one of the most enjoyable nights of music ever... percussionist Rafael Sida, sultry Greek chanteuse Maria Stellas, bushy bearded Canadian ex-pat bassist Sebastien Dube, African griot singer Mamadou Sene, and fiddle player Anders Nygard came together then tore it da fuk up, and gave new meaning (and credence) to the much derided (esp. after 9/11) concept of multi-kulti...and good on 'em I say, as a card-carrying One-Worlder and (green) card-carrier enabler (twice in fact)...in the immortal words of legendary under assistant east-coast promo man Juggy Gayles (a/k/a The Jugulator), spaketh at some Gnu Moo-sick Seminar or other re Dance Music: "We should all try and mix it up more--the white and the black!!" (and the reds and the blues and...) ("Make collages!" snapped Dylan to that Time Magazine scribe in "Don't Look Back", in hot pursuit of an accurate rendering of the Truth...which as we all know, can set you free).

And mixing it up Ale Moller and co. did, with gusto... relaxed, beatific, sublime grooves and improvisatory flash and filigree, breathing as one, une musique joyeuse that partook of all the colours of nature and Supernature, and then some...watching them play together so beautifully, so freely, I felt especially privileged deep in my heart to be part of this global community of music. To get to hurl the thunderbolts...

Next night another excellent multitudinous set by New York jazz cat/teacher/Lenny Bruce-head Dave Taylor, bass-trombonist/composer extraordinaire, who led a night of knotty interactions with handsome Estonian virtuoso bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann, a smorgasbord of challenging new music both electronic and acoustic that brought in young Umea symphony players (crack shots everyone of them), a very hot female dancer named Malin with the most sculptured dorsal musculatura who tripped the lithe fantastic round random radio blasts, and a comely female string trio from southern Sweden name of ZilliacusPerssonRaitinen who had the #1 Classical Record in Sweden last year with their interpretations of the Goldberg Variations (they were amused by my account of former Mute Records act the Medieval Babes--good marketing ploy!-- who performed at this hallucinatory festival in Rotterdam Nick Cave and I played as a duo some years ago, Ein Abend en Wien). I was a last minute add-on to the bill that night thanks to the auspices of Eric Palm, and why the heck not...I was given a Swedish acoustic guitar by request (s'funny, I really got good and busy on a Klira 12 string of Swedish origin back around '65), and I performed an instrumental version of "Fata Morgana" (check new mp3 of my band Gods and Monsters blazing through the full band version of this on my homepage) which got juices flowing, and the entire show was taped for Swedish radio... Martin and Dave are playing here in NYC tonight at the Kosciusczko Foundation and I'm going to head uptown to E. 65th Street momentarily...

Magic Band gig went over exceedingly well Friday night in the Opera House, thanks to the support of guitarist Jimmy Agren and Robert and all the great Made in Umea crew who made us feel so much at home all that week-- and then we flew back in a cloud of nylon foam to Stockholm on Saturday, for a riotously received gig at Club Fasching, famous intime jazz keller with pics of Lester Bowie and Chet Baker and other luminaries on the walls of the club and in the dressing room, crowd was (basically, as in Umea) a bunch of oldsters mit kinder, there was a whole table of serious beards, professionals to the man (a brainy mix of engineers, computer scientists, biologists even-- I checked), couple of petunias peeping through in the form of BBC producer Elaine Sheperd and her lovely friend, also one blonde dominatrix-like reporter name of Pia Della Monro (good moniker) upfront in full leather regalia...and I had my own young, intoxicated cheering section on the Left side of the stage, my pink half of the drainpipe, repeatedly yelling "Gary Lucas is a Legend!" throughout the evening (you could say I paid for this microphone-- yeah, with blood, sweat, and years), we killed 'em, and killed them some more...

and, to paraphrase Lenny Bruce on Jesus--

If we come back...

we'll kill them again...

xxLove

Gary

We Are The Village Green

Huzzah! The Village Green Preservation Society (member in good standing I am haha, courtesy civic-minded Danny Fields) has successfully rolled back the vulgarians at the gate threatening to erect yet more steel and glass crackerbox palaces in this fair parrish by successfully lobbying the city to extend the Greenwich Village Historic District to encompass more blocks just out my window (where everyday, I look at the world from...)--a tract stretching from Perry to Christopher Streets, bounded by Greenwich and Washington Streets--this is a sweet, rare victory for the children of the late fondly remembered Jane Jacobs, whose spirit still holds sway in her anteroom at Taverna La Paloma Blanca on 11th and Hudson-- and a decisive defeat for the rapacious gilded greedheads and the aesthetically blinkered architects and developers with designs on our neighborhood...

...from whence I sallied forth this week to the Tribeca Music Lounge (formerly the Canal Room, the New Music Cafe, Smokestacks Lightning, et al, one of those twilight zone mutable NYC spaces) to catch an incandescent short set by the Brazilian Girls (woops, must strike the "the" from their moniker henceforth), sultry siren-esque vocals courtesy of beautiful sweet 'n salty Sabina Sciubba, who has to be one of the hottest performers on the planet right now, her potty-mouth patter between songs merely one flaming arrow let fly from her, uh, quiver, at one point mid-Schau she turned her back on the audience and insouciantly, absent-mindedly scratched her ass/adjusted her panty line through the thick layers of her elegante wraparound silver outfit, which provoked a shocked, smothered titter from the 2 Japanese girls sitting in front of me (hey you think you're gonna read about THAT in the good old Times?)--and as she soared BG's Didi sublimely summoned up the ghost of Augustus Pablo with his melodica on the opener "Homme", and Aaron (lanky rubber-limbed drummer/dish with mucho muscular authority, percussion style a cross somewhere between Artie Tripp and The Pop Group's Bruce Smith), and Jesse (smooth, mathematically complex and accomplished bassist) brought a desultory crowd of weary, jaded Tribeca Film Festival laminate-wearers to their feet, effortlessly (including me, sans laminate...to quote Alfonso Bedoya-- "Botches? BOTCHES?? I DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' BOTCHES!!")...really looking forward to their new album.

Night before (or two) after dining at Miracle Grill in the evergreen West Village Caroline and I accompanied birthday girl/friend Shaista Husain to catch a memorable 1am set by soul rebel-temptress Imani Uzuri at NuBlu (same joint Bazilllllllion Girls emerged from) in the way-down- East Village, a gig that brought back fond memories of 70's nasty gal Betty Davis (the former Betty Mabry, Miles' Mlle.), now revved-up with even harder, more insistent and incantatory mutant funk grooves (she had a really good band with her, and a fine female sax player sitting in), some of Greg Tate's Burnt Sugar crew were in attendance, also our man Richard Porton of Cineaste...not to be confused with Imani Coppolla (lotsa Imani's out there) who apparently made an album that Columbia/Sony somehow never got around to releasing (been there, been done by that...what the hey, right when I got done was when I pulled "Grace" out of my hat) ...anyway Imani U definitely has the spark and the spirit and the drive and the vibe to grow Far...

Saturday night Caroline scored a real coup de theatre at April Barton's Suite 303 in the (still) fabulous Chelsea Hotel by casting a stellar reading of an excellent new film script by "hair dresser to the stars" April B--a reading dominated by Johnny Ventimiglia, a/k/a Artie Bucco from The Sopranos, who gave an amazing, funny, riveting performance (I normally snore--literally--through these things, eliciting a very hard stare once from Dame Judi Dench upon waking from my golden slumbers during the last act of "Amy's View" on B'way a couple years ago)...also on hand for the reading was gorgeous Jersey Girl Drea Di Matteo (the late lamented Adrianna from The Sopranos, who never failed to light up that program, till she was quite tragically offed by Little Steven...or was it David Chase?), also Irish American actress/gamine Bernadette Quigley who was so great in "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and the film "In America", and a spunky, natural young girl who played Johnny's daughter, and who could well be the next Tatum O'Neal (circa "Paper Moon"--and damn if Tatum herself wasn't in the audience for this reading)... great great script and compelling ensemble reading, especially from Johnny V who definitely deserves more airtime on my favorite television show (funnily enough, Peggy Bewkes was telling me just a few days before how she thought both Michael Imperioli and Johnny V had really come into their own as actors this season, Johnny especially convincing on the episode which aired a few weeks back wherein he beat up the young mobster trying to shake down Vesuvio's with a credit-card scam)...

then we all trooped upstairs to a wild wild party in producer Scott Griffin's deluxe suite of apts. on the 5th floor (Scott just produced a Robert Altman-directed play by Arthur Miller for Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic in London), where I ran into legendary Warhol superstar, poet, (and author of the best Times op-ed piece ever, circa '77 or '78, "I Class Up a Joint"), the very Rene Ricard (think Ronald Firbank crossed with Franklin Pangborn), who I hadn't laid eyes on since the first Jeff Buckley memorial at St. Mark's Church in '96...nice goatee, Rene... lotsa good eats there too (chocolate covered strawberries and Jack Daniels went down smooooth yesiree), much comings and goings and troopings and regroupings in and out of the nest of rooms which resembled a film set of a film set in the early 20's heyday of petite Village Bohemia (coulda been Belgravia also), lotsa Maxwell Bodenheimlich maneuverings going down now, later on a glamorous grey dowager-empress type got up to sing "Someone to Watch Over Me" in a classic Madhattan moment, perched next to the piano tinkled grandly by Scott in front of a picture window with a sweeping majestic view of 23rd street, a real party mix of blood latin gay straight and whatever geno-type A personalities, verily we did hear the chimes at midnight and in walked (omigod) my old friend Persian whirling dervish-diva Sussan Deyhim and her saturnine sardonic/cerebral partner (and let us not forget Golden Globe winner for his contributions to the "The Sheltering Sky"), composer/keyboardist Richard Horowitz, and they'd just come from an endless lesbian bar-mitzvah where the rabbi (rabbess?) apparently mentioned the phrase "anal sex" about 50 times in her sermon (I Love New York!), woke up it was a Chelsea evening and we supped and sipped and dished and eventually dashed, Richard up to Harlem, Sussan, Caroline and I back down to the Village, what peerless energy what glorious vibes what a night to dismember...

and now it's time to say good night...

good night...

good night...

(do not go gentle into That)

xxLove

Gary