Gary Lucas (Club Helsinki, 4/20/01)
By Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., April 21, 2001) - It was easy to get swept up in the extraordinary range of the music and styles that guitarist Gary Lucas performed in his dizzyingly intriguing performance at Club Helsinki on Friday night. On the surface, Lucas seemingly jumped from traditional country-blues to 1930s Chinese pop to Wagner to the Marx Brothers to Hendrixian distortion to his own patented brand of shimmering, psychedelic roots music in a celebration of post-modern juxtaposition or global villagism.

But what was even more impressive was how Lucas effortlessly tied it all together. He did so through sheer virtuosity, through his unique playing style, and through an unflinching curatorial curiosity and intelligence that finds the common connection, the voice of human yearning, between the Broadway kitsch of "Fiddler on the Roof" and a Robert Johnson blues. That Lucas achieves this musical humanitarianism - this ability to highlight the universal in the particular -- without succumbing to naked sentimentality is all the more to his credit as an artist and conceptualist.

He avoided the obvious, finding beauty in the music of Wagner, whom he noted was a gross anti-Semite, and achy blues in Jerry Bock's "Sunrise, Sunset." Lucas juggled three guitars throughout the evening - acoustic, electric, and dobro -- often using more than one instrument per song. He made skillful use of looping and effects, so that at various times his guitar sounded like a keyboard, particularly an organ, an orchestra, or a power tool. Come to think of it, in his hands a guitar is a power tool, but one he wields with deft authority and delicacy for the most part, and appropriate excess when such is called for.

Early in his set, Lucas played Blind Blake's "Police Dog Blues" on dobro, which showcased what someone once aptly called his "exploding note" technique. Lucas's notes don't get played so much as they burst, like popcorn or fireworks, and his harmonics were rich and resonant.

An early highlight of his 90-minute set was his composition, "Rise Up to Be." The piece was originally written for the late rock singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, who collaborated with Lucas in his band Gods and Monsters, and formed the foundation of the title track of Buckley's memorable album, "Grace." A kind of mini-rock suite, it built to a fierce power-rocker, with shades of Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page, before morphing into an ethereal, transcendent mood piece, in which Lucas didn't so much play notes as he released them into the air, figuratively tossing them up and out from his guitar like white doves. It was a beautiful gesture, as much dance or performance art as it was music, and utterly deserving of the title that Buckley gave to it.

Lucas's version of a 1938 Shanghai pop hit from the film "Angel on the Street" instantly established a relationship with American delta blues, which he underlined by following it with a bit of Captain Beefheart-style country blues. He followed with a ferocious display of English-style blues rock a la Jeff Beck on a version of Howlin' Wolf's "I'm Built to Hurt You Like the Police," in which he looped the rhythm guitar portion and accompanied himself on lead.

By the time he closed his set with his recent composition, "The Opener of the Way," from his marvelous new album, "Street of Lost Brothers" (Tzadik) he had come full circle on this musical journey from gut-bucket blues to transcendent, spiritual psychedelia, as had his appreciative audience, a little wearied from the exhaustive, exciting trip, but renewed and inspired by the suggestive potential implied by Lucas's humanitarian muse.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 23, 2001. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2001. All rights reserved.]