"The Host", the Ghost, the Most...

...Holy-O? ("He rolled around in Oleo"-- variant lyrics to the celebrated Van Vliet ditty).

Is "The Host" really the Most Holy-O of Monsters?

Well, not if you stack it up against the almighty Yog, the Monster from Outer Space (that's Goy backwards)...or against one of Jim Danforth's lovingly articulated creepy-crawly little Zantee Misfits, from the original "Outer Limits" series...or against even the talkative diminutive rubber-shower-capped head-in-the-Petri-dish dish of "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" ("What a PUNY monster!" was Beefheart's dismissive comment...though no hooves to compare there!)

Not sure really how I stand on this a-here bouncing blubbery monstrosity as featured in the okay, definitely better than average new Korean cine-shocker "The Host", currently making its slimy loathsome (but engaging) way round the art-houses here and probably soon the multiplexes there--it's certainly not as cute and cuddly a monster as some of the reviews make out (Caroline for one was pretty grossed-out by its tenticular carnivorous antics)...which is not necessarily a bad thing...the film as a whole is one big post-modern nudge nudge wink wink cop-a-cine-phile from the whole history of fantastic cinema (not just the obvious "Them!" tropisms, a precursor film set "down in the sewer" which has been cited in many reviews...but hey hey hey what about Inoshiro Honda's "The H-Man"? Great Japanese 1958 color sci-fi flick featuring a similar shape-shifting deliquescent ball 'o slime inhabiting a drainage sytem (in Tokyo, not Seoul, admittedly--but not that far afield, as the ice cream for crow flies)...

..and more obviously, how any reviewer worth his or her laminated press pass missed the obvious lift from the fabulous "The Horror of Party Beach" 1964 camp-fest (a film so audacious in its supernal idiocy that it garnered its own fumetti type one-shot commemorative mag from Warren Publications back in the day), which sported sea-faring rabid gill-men-type monsters created from a similar rum admixture of radioactive chemicals, salt water, and live sea-monkeys (actually human skeletons--but still!), growed up all wrong and runnin' wild on a bevy of bikini bustin' beauties (was Jeff Beck's former paramour beach bunny/psycho-daisy Mary Hughes in this one? Coulda been...'cept it wasn't shot in Malibu, 'twas actually filmed in Gutzon Borglum Studios in darkest Stamford Conn....yeah!)

In point of fact the original Edison "Frankenstein", which some hero finally unearthed last decade or so, which for years existed only in the form of a much-reproduced still photo of its hideous hirsute glowering monster, his deranged mug leaping right off the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine to scare the heck out of me as a boy (film's provenance? New Jersey!), boasts a terrific transformation sequence whereby the rag, the bone, the hank of hair that is Dr. Frankenstein's creature template/armature under pressure of the doc's ministrations begins to acquire fleshapoid characteristics (the animal flesh comes creeping back...)

Anyway, I rather liked "The Host"--I'll take another Jun-Hoo Bong hit!--good fun all around, not the least that my friend the great NYC character actor Paul Lazar (no relation to John "Ze-Man Barzell" Lazar) has a cameo in it as the goofy American white-smocked doc who attempts to trepan the dirty blonde-tressed male lead (Paul in real life is the cool choreographer Annie-B Parson's hubby, the 2 of them used my arrangement of the 1930's Chinese pop hit "Please Allow Me to Look At You Again" in their production of "Antigone" a few years back at Dance Theater Workshop here, Paul directed the show and did a swell dance to this music--Paul is the next Steve Buscemi, or should be)...

plus there's a couple good cheap shots at US military hubris in "The Host" (and why not?)-- similar to "Babel" in that way, also the usage of Asian school girl jail-bait as protagonist, which seemed almost a non-sequitur/cynical ploy on the part of Alejandro Inarritu in "Babel", a casting calculated to warm the, uh, cockles of many a jaded male film reviewer's heart... but here seems unforced and natural, part of the landscape you might say...film's way, way better, and much more entertaining, in any case, than "Pan's Labyrinth" (I wouldn't inflict that particular sadistic gore-fest on kids, for sure...neither would I "Happy Feet"-- go figure!)

CHANGE OF KEY-- Recently performed several solo acoustic songs for my friend Steve Paul on his Puppet Music Hall show, which you can view on his hip new internet channel downtownTV.com--see part 1 with "In a Forest" (from my album "Improve the Shining Hour") and a version of Arthur Russell's great "Let's Go Swimming", and part 2 with "Secret Agent Man" and Donovan's "Mellow Yellow"-- both parts feature Steve's friend Edgar Oliver on puppet backup vocals and general silliness.

I had a ball making them, hope you enjoy 'em.

xxLove

Gary

Goin' Down South (I Got a Right)

Just back from SXSW, best batch yet for me and my boys from the point of view of performance and venue(s) to play in...morning of departure started out just right, ran into my pal Lou Reed on the street getting coffee, we had a friendly sit-down/stop and chat (in Larry David-speak) before departing for the airport, weather was fair and spring-like, Jetblue flight last Thursday was fast and smooth, our gang immediately hit the clubs and caught a delightful set at the Central Presbyterian Church (where we were due to play Sat. night) by our friends the penetratingly soulful Nina Nastasia and drummer extraordinaire Jim White...then caught 4 songs from the incredibly still gorgeous voice (and face) of Vashti Bunyan, who I really wish I had seen at Pop Montreal last fall...saw all sorts of folks riding the tides of lustforlife throughout our 3 days in Austin, surfing the chaotic sprawl out in the streets and inside the convention center at the panels during the day-- including my man Sandy Pearlman, Grammy guy Scott Goldman, Billy Altman, Ed Ward, Mitch Myers, Charles McCardell, Andrew Loog Oldham and his son Max, David Fricke, Jim Fouratt...

Iggy Pop shook my hand before going on with David Fricke as interlocutor for an interview with him and The Stooges (sans Mike Watt) on Friday, wonder if he remembered the last time I "gave him some skin" at a show in Waterbury Conn. in '73 when the Igster was opening for Blue Oyster Cult and playing with the fantastic, very much-missed James Williamson (one of the best guitarists/collaborators Iggy ever had, he may never had a better one unless you count Bowie, who only played piano not guitar with him anyway)...after rapping with the guy about Egyptian mythology backstage, Iggy proving tres conversant with Isis and Osiris and whatnot, I produced a quaalude (mea culpa, mea culpa--hey c'mon, this was 1973) and I'll be damned if Iggy didn't just snatch and grab it out of my hand and pop it on down the hatch Commander Whitehead style without so much as a how-do-ya-do, then went out and did his dance wearing nothing but a grass hula skirt, baiting the rabble with insults that more or less stopped the show cold (including the unforgettable "Fuck you, you fucking son of an Italian pushcart vendor")... glad to see he still hasn't lost his beyond-the-law edge, Iggy waxing philosophical during his Frickian discourse about an early career dalliance with "a horny female magazine editor" (Gloria Stavers) which netted him the cover of 16 Magazine back in the day, he also gave big props to Danny Fields for getting The Stooges signed to Elektra (hear hear), rolled his eyes when discussing first Stooges producer John Cale looking like "the antagonist from 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls' " (John Lazar, a/k/a Ze-man Barzell), "wearing a Dracula cape" and dragging Nico along to the recording sessions "where she sat and knitted", told a story about Cale trying to get Ron Asheton (who introduced the band in German in Waterbury when I first caught them) to turn his guitar down from 10, Ron compromising at 9 1/2--yeah!! All aboard for Funtime!

Anywho, Gods and Monsters with Jerry Harrison on board did a secret gig Friday night thanks to my man Dusty Wright (Mark Petracca) of webzine Culturecatch.com, glad he hooked this up as we received the best damn reception we ever have received anywhere--I mean LOUD sustained cheering and screaming from a midnight post-prandial crowd at the Canvas Bar and Gallery on 5th, including a posse led by Eddie Vedder's brother who went berserko for us, recording portions of our set on his cell phone to send to Eddie...also saw Dave Schulps from the late-lamented Trouser Press who was really high on our music, also Jennifer Leimgruber from Clear Channel's Premiere Radio Networks who told me it was the best thing she'd ever seen (really!)--great crowd, we really dug in and let 'er rip...

Next night at the church, I paced around downstairs in a dressing room for literally hours getting psyched for my show, kibbitzing with my guitar tech/sound guy Kris Anton and the super friendly staff of the church (very very difficult for me to hear other music before I perform--no offense to the other fine artists who were on the bill with me), my brooding only interrupted once by a surprise pop-in from my friend Walter McDonough, ace attorney for the Future of Music project based in DC, who had graciously sought me out there to wish me well-- and after well-received performances by Jandek, One Umbrella, Bill Callahan (I love Smog's "Cold Blooded Old Times", and told him so backstage in the Green Room, where he was hanging with gal pal the lovely Joanna Newsom), and Tommy Morello a/k/a The Nightwatchman, I received a standing ovation when I finished playing with The Golem...Yes!! One of my best performances in fact, it's a toss-up whether I played better there than at the Bergamo Jazz Festival in lovely Italy a week earlier, or at Pop Montreal last fall...

Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters at SXSW, Central Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas, 3/17/07

photos by Jonl | click to enlarge

Finally Gods and Monsters took to the altar...and played a great meaty set which suffered only from lack of warm bodies there in the church at that point, as we were programmed directly against The Stooges' set at Stubbs--what can ya do but then play on, which we did in spades--my friends Alison McGourty, Sarah Hoffmann, Michael Ackerman, several Chronicle writers/editors (read a wonderful review by Jim Caligiuri from the Austin Chronicle here) and many other hardy souls hung there with us --special thanks to Jay Trachtenberg for making us his pick for the night (the only other Chronicle midnight pick that night outside Iggy--thank you Jay)...

and then it was over, and home and away on Southwest Airlines, had to fly from the summery balm of Austin in to the sub-frigid icy wastes of Islip airport om Long Island, rent a minivan, and drive everyone home due to air ticket availability (or lack thereof)--but it worked out fine, upon entering the van I immediately tuned to Little Steven's Underground Garage show on the FM radio which at that point was blasting the Flamin' Groovie's "Shake Some Action" (the second, superior Dave Edmunds mix--so fine!)--and merrily we rolled along and eventually rolled in to the West Village around 2am happy and exhausted--and I've gotta stop now...but special thanks to Andy Flynn, Kimberly Tortorice and Craig Stewart at SXSW for making this year's festival the best one ever (my third to date)--and to Sandy Pearlman for hooking it up after the deadline had already passed (Sandy is definitely one of the Good Guys...and his appearance on the panel of "Recording Studio Do's and Dont's", chaired by my friend Rick Karr from NPR, was one of the highlights of SXSW for me, I love to hear Sandy's erudite brilliant mad patter in full effect--he's a compelling, authoritative shpritzer worth listening to, a quality he shares with my friend Andrew Loog Oldham--and I was happy to introduce them to each other at one point over the weekend...oracles both of them...listen up...)

xxLove

Gary

Golem Italian Style/Hey Ya! (Hi Ya Ho Ya Hi Ya!)

Just a few words on the way to packing for SXSW...

My gig with "The Golem" on Sunday afternoon at the Bergamo Jazz Festival came off like a dream--an absolutely sold-out Teatro di Piazza della Liberta, 500 souls sat spellbound in the packed theatre absorbed in my little kinosthetic whirl of music and images from a forgotten world, transported through time and space via interplay of guitarissimo with the flickering shadows, thrown on the walls of the cranial cave ( i wuz doin' time in the universal mind)...and gave me the warmest reception at the end--I love playing in Italy!-- special thanks to Mario Guidi the Bergamo Jazz Festival director and his assitant Giampero Stramaccia, my pal the fantastic Uri Caine who curated, and also Barbara Crotti and Angelo Signorelli, director of the Bergamo Film Meeting who co-hosted the event and who provided an exquisite crystal-clear print tinted according to a secret original Italian colour film process developed in the 20's, with super-titles in Italian running underneath the screen on a separate scrim--bellissimo! The acoustics in the theater were also superb, and the conjunction of these several favorable conditions really fired me up and inspired some of my best playing and improvisation to the film ever...such lovely fans as well who came forward at the end to chat...I must also mention that I caught some great music by Branford Marsalis' group, Steve Bernstein's Sex Mob, William Parker's free improv band, soaked up some of the beautiful medieval vibe of old Bergamo, and enjoyed my first real arancini since the last time I played Sicilia, found some in a cool pizzeria nearby the Hotel Mercure where they put us up--arancini being the golden-brown, deep-fried, crumb-crusted rice balls the size of an orange (hence their name) filled with a hot ragout center of tomato sauce, peas, and shredded beef--YUM!...I could eat this delicious little fast-food Italiano treat just about every day, washed down with a Chinotto (I adore Italian food accompanied by this tart, bracing Italian soft-drink with a strong herbal and fruit flavour-- looks like coca-cola, but is decidedly unsweet--kind of the Marmite of sodas... now it also comes in a can under the name of Chino which I'd never seen actually before this trip-- I've always loved the little ice cold bottles courtesy of San Pellegrino, who manufacture the stuff--Chino in the can seems to have more carbonation than the bottled variety....definitely chinosthetic!)...

Anyway this Golem performance followed on the heels of my Oklahoma performance with the film last week in Claremore for Prof. Hugh Foley, in the splendid New Deal deco-ish lines of the Will Rogers Auditorium of Rogers State University, with a great bust of America's beloved wry and plain-speaking sag in the lobby and that too was a joy...

I should mention that while staying with Hugh in his imposing stone house in Stillwater he played me some recordings he's made of amazing, transcendental Creek Indian religious line-singing--a style akin to American shape-singing-- that runs back hundreds of years, music he recorded in the field at several rural Indian Christian churches, mesmeric incantatory vocal choir music that Hugh calls "Muskogee Hymns": hypnotic Native American a capella devotional music rarely if ever heard by most folks anywhere in the world, actually believed lost by many ethno-musicologists but found fully preserved and still ringing out, you could say flourishing ("singing strong in the choir") in several of these tiny rustic Oklahoma tabernacles--albeit practiced by a very small number of adepts-- and now archived and codified for posterity by my man Hugh (Hugh's wife Geri is a full Creek Indian btw, and they attend services at many of these rural churches together regularly)...it's music that to these ears sounds on a cursory listen like a cross between the mass basso profundo of the Tibetan Buddhist monks as recorded by David Lewiston (subject of an earlier blog), and Gregorian Chant--the first referents that came to my mind when I sat transfixed by Hugh's tape...

Somehow word of Hugh's research and discoveries reached the educated ears of Prof. Willie Ruff, the pre-eminent scholar/ jazz musician par excellence (cat plays a mean French horn) who teaches a well-known longstanding Afro-American Music course at Yale (I took his class when I was an under-grad there, Willie brought in the great Tony Williams to speak, and showed a film he made of Tony drumming in the African veldt--incredible stuff)--and the upshot is that Hugh has been invited to lecture at Yale on April 19th and 20th, and will be traveling there with about 20 Creek Indian church members to perform these Muskogee Hymns for the first time in public outside the confines of their Oklahoma country churches...absolutely not to be missed if you are a lover of great American music and find yourself anywhere in the area--this is living, breathing, spiritually uplifting music--Amazing Grace, indeed...

Have to split now and finish packing (heat) for a jaunt down to Austin with Gods and Monsters, where the estimable Jerry Harrison will join up my already inter-stellar crew of overundersidewaysdowndeep drivers Ernie Brooks, Billy Ficca, and Jason Candler for the expanded Gods and Monsters in full effect (wish Joe Hendel could be there too)... plus we're taking our new sound-stirrer-woofer/tweeter-tweaker Kris Anton with us --see ya at the Central Presbyterian church on 8th Street this Saturday (St. Paddy's Day--my Dad's birthday too, hi Dad!) where I will perform solo with "The Golem" at 11am--followed at 12:15am with the Whole Sick Crew (coulda said the Whole Slick Crew--or J. Crew, for that matter-- what with our Yale/Harvard connection)...but I prefer the former moniker...

Find it, amigos!

xxLove

Gary

Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain

Writing this now in the lobby of the Days Inn in Claremore Oklahoma, not too far from Tulsa (maybe 10 minutes, definitely not 24 hours from...)(thank you Gene Pitney)...

I'm here to play a show for my friend Prof. Hugh Foley, who used to be the music director at WNYU FM back in the days inn which I used to hang out down at their mad lab on the 6th floor of the Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway ('sfunny because the late Larry Tisch--he of the Tisch dominated Loews Corporation-- was just then presiding over the mass downsizing/dismembering/bloodletting of CBS Inc., where to be "tisched" was a synonym for you-know-what--and it was at CBS Records where Tisch was rumored to be stalking the corridors/sharpening his butcher knife that I was still semi-gainfully employed in the late 80's... just about the same time I was playing under Tisch's absentee patronage on WNYC FM, and launching my solo career at the Knitting Factory, more on that later)(Don't fear the reaper, indeed!).

Hugh was the program director there for awhile and a major fan of my work, he used to play my earliest recordings frequently on the air when they existed in only cassette monitor mix forms (especially "King Strong", a fiery instrumental track which eventually got written up in Billboard due to his relentlessly playing it, a track I cut with Keith LeBlanc and Skip McDonald from The Sugarhill Gang, later Tackhead)...

He also invited me to play live in the NYU studio, which is where I first encountered Jonboy Langford and Sally Timms from The Mekons, former-Fall guitarist and current BBC Music6 DJ Mark Riley, The Sugarcubes en masse, and great WNYU folks like Colleen Murphy (now DJ Cosmo, my fellow collaborator in a new DJ project called Wild Rumpus, Colleen and I performed in London and in Hyderabad India last summer), Jason Candler, who's played alto sax in Gods and Monsters for almost 10 years now, Leigh Lust, Marlene Goldman, a whole slew of cool people who comprised my earliest support group in town until I started gigging regularly at the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street, which became my base of live operations in NYC for many years...

Think it was June 11th, 1988, the night of my first ever gig there (basically did this solo show on a dare, after securing a booking from Michael Dorf, who thought it would be a coup to have "Beefheart's guitarist" play his joint)... and sure enough, the signs and augurs didn't bode well once I made the booking, they handed me a Tuesday at 9pm slot, not a great time to debut, and somehow my name was mysteriously left out of their ad in the Village Voice that week... but I persevered, bootstrapped myself, rehearsed like a madman and put posters around Downtown...

and I'll be damned if I didn't sell the joint out! They turned Matthew Sweet and Skip McDonald away, the audience loved it (Verna Gillis was there--hi Verna!), I did three encores and they handed me 6oo bucks off the door...

and that night was a honest to God turning point in my life...I went home elate, and determined from that point on to hit Music as hard as I could...which I did...

and at my next Knitting Factory show a month later where I played as part of their "What is Jazz?" Festival, a rep from the New York Times was present, and a feature review ran shortly thereafter the headline of which was "Guitarist of 1000 Ideas"...

shortly therafter I was invited to play the Berlin Jazzfest, where I stunned the audience into silence, and then cheers, with an impromptu solo guitar fantasia entitled "Verklarte Kristallnacht" after Schoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht"...it was a piece I decided to play once I got to Berlin and realized that my performance coincided with the 50th anniversary of that dreadful event--a musical statement of first principles, as such-- it caused a scandale (lots of dirty looks from some folks)and yet received an ovation--and it went out live over WDR radio... the next day the Berlin Morgenpost ran my photo next to a live review and the caption "It is Lucas!" And thus I began working regularly in Europe...as the lone stranger, and also as part of several Knit Fac barnstorming package tours with folks like Blood Ulmer, Thomas Chapin, the New Klezmer Trio, Hasidic New Wave...the Knitting Factory definitely helped get my career going, God bless.


And so it was delightful to revisit and commemorate and pay my respects to the "old Knit" at Town Hall last Thursday night... while Bill Clinton and Bono were chowing down at the The Spotted Pig about a block from my house in the West Village I was uptown on 43rd Street at Town Hall hanging with "the mishpocha" as John Zorn put it, schmoozing with old friends I hadn't seen in ages, and digging great performances from the aforementioned Zorn and Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Ikoue Mori, Lee Ranaldo, DJ Spooky, Marc Ribot, Calvin Weston, Steve Bernstein, Jennifer Charles, former God and Monster Oren Bloedow, Rebecca Moore, and many others, I jammed with Medeski, Martin and Wood (well, Trevor Dunn subbing for Chris Wood, who had family matters to attend to) near the end, it was big fun and there was a really good party upstairs afterwards, there's a clip on Youtube of the ad hoc Sgt. Pepper theme/jam at the end which gives a flava--a damn good night, a benefit for The Stone, with lots of good memories of past gigs and those crazy European tours (each a little novel in themselves), some of which I shared with Michael's brother Josh, who I hadn't seen in years, and also Ed Greer, Michael Dorf's right hand man for years, without whom the whole thing (the tours, the club in general) would have literally fallen apart in the old days--I remember Ed helping to schlep a 16mm projector for me on trains and planes and up and down venue stairs when I performed with my 16mm print of the silent film "Der Golem" in 23 cities across Europa as part of the first JAM tour in 1993...

Nowadays I carry the film on DVD (much easier), which is what I'm going to play to tomorrow night, as by an eternal ricorso I find myself here now in Oaaaak! La Homa!, my homies, ready to play at noon tomorrow for my man Hugh at the Will Rogers Auditorium (visited the Will Rogers museum today, also saw actual ghost town remnants/revenants off a dirt road on the way over from Stillwater, where Hugh lives with his lovely wife Geri and his son Nokose and in the beautiful stone Rock House where I bunked last night, Hugh making me feel quite at home with his 24/7 pirate radio station busting out Gary Lucas music all night to his neighborhood to commemorate my visit)...

also visited the tennis court in Yale, Oklahoma where photographe/director Bruce Weber faked a sequence with Chet Baker's kids for his documentary on Chet, "Let's Get Lost" (when oh when will this ever come out on DVD??); also checked out Cain's Auditorium in Downtown Tulsa where Bob Wills ruled the roost for many years,great faded old photos of Hank Snow and Roy Acuff and a permanent beer aroma hanging over the oaken dance floor on springs-- Yo La Tengo are coming in there April 10th)--

after the film tomorrow I'm scheduled to lecture for Hugh's Introduction to Cinema class on making music for films (btw, my pal Judd Ehrlich's film "Mayor of the West Side", which I scored, is up for an Emmy this year for Best Documentary), then perform a solo concert at 7pm (guy's got me singing for my supper for sur... but hey I don't mind, as I love playing out here!)

Returning to NYC Thursday night before heading off in the opposite direction Friday to play the Bergamo Jazz Festival in Italy, thanks to Uri Caine who is curating the festival (and invited me to bring my Golem with me)...

Almost 9pm now and time to head out for some Barbecue at the Rib Crib down the road apiece, ribs so succulent and fine you can smell them almost in this antiseptic lobby environment... I'm quite looking forward to my trip to Austin Texas next week to play SXSW with both "The Golem" and Gods and Monsters-- not just for the music and cameraderie...

but for the 'cue!

Cue end titles...

xxLove

Gary