Golem guitarist Gary Lucas busting out of the avant-ghetto
by Seth Rogovoy
By Seth Rogovoy
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 4, 2000) -- To call guitarist Gary Lucas a bundle
of contradictions is a whopping understatement. For starters, this most
unlikely figure of the downtown avant-garde is a Grammy-nominated pop
songwriter (he co-wrote the Joan Osborne hit, "Spider Web").
Labeled a "guitarrorist" for his shrapnel-like, exploding-note attack and
his habit of composing scores for news documentaries about murder and
violence (among them "Unabomber," "Who Killed Martin Luther King?" and
"Rebirth: Untold Stories of the Oklahoma City Bombing"), he is also the
creator of a gentle, quirky album of children's songs based on Jewish
holiday and cultural themes.
The last guitarist and manager for Captain Beefheart -- the iconoclastic,
rootsy art-rocker who quit music in 1984 to paint under his given name, Don
Van Vliet - Lucas made his professional concert debut as part of an
orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein in the European premiere of his
"Mass."
This Yale University-educated English major is a musician with a cult
following
and a denizen of cutting-edge nightclubs here and in Europe who spent 13
years as an advertising copywriter for Columbia Records, churning out hype
for the likes of Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and the Clash (his was
the pen which produced the legendary phrase about the English punk group,
"the only band that matters").
So who is Gary Lucas?
Beefheart tried summing him up in the immortal phrase, "Man can play
guitar!" which the Frank Zappa acolyte can be heard uttering on the new and
excellent "Improve the Shining Hour," the dazzling, 20-year CD
retrospective of Lucas's work.
But that was in 1980, and since that time, playing guitar, while still an
essential element of Gary Lucas, does not begin to describe even half of it.
Since 1988, when he first burst out on the avant-garde scene as a solo
performer, bandleader and composer, Lucas has been making up for lost time,
carving out a niche for himself as a significant and influential figure in
pop, rock, jazz and experimental music, even as mainstream recognition
eludes him.
Local audiences will get the chance to hear Lucas perform one of his
earliest and most important and enduring pieces of work when he accompanies
the classic German Expressionist horror film, "The Golem," with his original
score in the Cinema Courtyard at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary
Art in North Adams this Saturday, July 15, at 8:30. [See below for more
info.]
The list of artists with whom Lucas has recorded and performed reads like a
secret or subterranean history of the music of the past 20 years. Besides
Bernstein and Beefheart, the list includes John Zorn, Jeff Buckley, Nick
Cave, David Johansen, Sophie B. Hawkins, Joan Osborne, Lou Reed, Peter
Stampfel, Patti Smith, DJ Spooky, Iggy Pop, Matthew Sweet, Graham Parker,
Dr. John, the Mekons, Bryan Ferry, Bob Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Hasidic New
Wave, Pulnoc, Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman.
But early on, Lucas's musical experiences tended more towards the
mainstream.
"I heard a lot of Broadway music growing up," said Lucas in a recent phone
interview from his apartment in New York's West Village. "My parents were
big on light classics like `Scheherazade' and the `1812 Overture' and
musicals like 'My Fair Lady.' Plus I listened to a lot of top-forty radio in
the early Sixties."
But even as a youngster, there were hints of the eclectic, genre-defying
experiments to come. Early obsessions included Duane Eddy's guitar solo in
"Dance with the Guitar Man" and a desire to play the theme song to "Exodus"
on the guitar (a wish that would finally be realized on his 1998 album,
"Busy Being Born"). And for Halloween, he and his childhood friend, Walter
Horn - who would later collaborate with Lucas on the score to "The Golem" -
would prepare tapes of spooky sound effects and electronic music to frighten
trick-or-treaters.
When Lucas was nine years old, his businessman father came to him one day
and said, "Hey, how would you like to play an instrument? How about guitar?"
Except for a brief, unhappy period playing French horn in elementary school
- "I was miserable on it because I barely had an upper lip; I couldn't
develop a good embouchure" - guitar would be Lucas's constant companion for
the better part of the next four decades. He played in bands back when they
were called "combos," and soaked up the riffs and licks of the white English
blues-rock guitarists like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green.
It was as a college student, however, that Lucas glimpsed his future, on a
fateful road trip from New Haven to see the New York debut of Captain
Beefheart and His Magic Band.
"I was just blown away," said Lucas. "I never heard guitar played like that,
ever. These guys were killing me. Zoot Horn Rollo played a solo that night
that knocked my socks off, and I said to myself, if I ever do anything in
music, I want to play with this band."
The next year, Beefheart came to Yale, and as music director of the campus
radio station, Lucas had the opportunity to hang out with him.
"We got friendly and we stayed in touch for a few years," he said. "But I
never even told him I played, because I was nervous. I didn't think I was
good enough.
"Then I finally got up the courage and approached him. He was touring with
Zappa. It was '75, and I had just graduated. I auditioned for him in his
hotel room. He said, 'Yeah, well, we'll have to do something, definitely.'"
Five years later, Lucas got the call, and from 1980 to 1984 he was a member
of Beefheart's band and a featured soloist on tour and on two albums. It
was, to say the least, a formative, educational experience. (Beefheart's
poor treatment of his musicians is the subject of considerable controversy.)
Lucas credits Van Vliet with having been a "father figure" and "one of the
titans of twentieth-century music."
"He taught me the idea that music could go well beyond the veneer of pop,
slick, manufactured, so-called commercial music, and could touch areas of
emotions that usually people don't want to look at or would repress or
wouldn't want to bring up," he said, calling Beefheart's "Dachau Blues,"
from his landmark 1969 album "Trout Mask Replica," "one of the most powerful
evocations of the Holocaust in music and poetry that I ever heard."
"I got quite an education about the value of notes on the guitar," said
Lucas. "He had a theory, called the exploding-note theory, which touches on
the way I play sometimes, like bombs bursting in air. Sometimes disembodied,
where one note has no relation to the one before or after."
After Beefheart, Lucas worked as a producer and session musician for several
years while holding down his day job writing ad copy. Then, in 1988, he was
invited to do a solo show at the newly-opened Knitting Factory, soon to
become the temple of the downtown avant-garde.
The show was a smashing success, and a turning point for Lucas. It proved
that he already had a built-in, cult following - fans were turned away at
the door - and that he could make it as a solo performer - he was brought
back for three encores. Soon, offers started coming his way for follow-up
gigs.
Six months later, he was headlining the Berlin Jazz Festival, where on the
fiftieth anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass (the pogrom in which
thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned business in Germany were destroyed
and nearly a hundred Jews murdered, signaling the beginning of the
Holocaust), he stunned the audience with an unannounced composition he
called "Verklarte Kristallnacht." A knowing reference to Arnold Schoenberg's
"Verklarte Nacht," the piece (which was subsequently recycled into the
soundtrack for "The Golem") ironically juxtaposed the Israeli national
anthem, "Hatikvah," with phrases from "Deutschland Uber Alles," amid wild
electronic shrieks and noise. The next day the papers ran a picture of Lucas
with the triumphant headline, "It Is Lucas!"
Since then, Lucas has frequently performed in Europe, playing theaters,
concert halls and clubs across the continent. He is the subject of an
hour-long TV documentary made for the Dutch Arts Channel, and he produced
and performs with top French avant-rock band Tanger. He is also big in
Japan, where he recently played a month-long club residency in Tokyo.
Lucas's recording career also took off soon after his Berlin triumph, and
his work can be found on several Knitting Factory and Tzadik Records
compilations. In addition to "Improve the Shining Hour," his solo albums
include "Gods and Monsters" (also the name of his band), "Bad Boys of the
Arctic," "Evangeline," "Busy Being Born" and "Skeleton at the Feast," which
includes music for "The Golem."
A self-described workaholic, Lucas, who is married to a casting director who
works with film director Amos Kollek, gets up early each morning. "I don't
waste any time," he said. "I get up and I'm on the phone starting at about
nine a.m. to European agents and writers, trying to hustle gigs and
publicity, to see how my records are doing. Then I hit the phones throughout
the day doing the same thing here. I practice at least an hour a day. And I
run around and do errands, get one of my guitars repaired, take care of
day-to-day living things."
It's not the description of a glamorous life, nor is it the cliché of the
creatively-obsessed artist afraid to get his hands dirty with commerce. "I'm
still going for a wider audience," said Lucas, whose work, although
cutting-edge and iconoclastic, is infused with melody and utterly accessible
to any but the most closed-minded listeners. "I don't want to play to just
the already converted. I want to bust out of the avant ghetto."
"The Golem"
For thousands of years, Jewish mystics have told stories of golems, man-like
creatures formed of clay not by God but by man himself, with the aid of
secret Kabbalistic incantations and amulets. The most famous of these
proto-Frankenstein monsters -- and the story upon which the film "The Golem"
that will be shown at Mass MoCA on Saturday at 8:30 is based -- is the one
conjured by Yehudah Loewe, the Great Rabbi of 16th-century Prague, in order
to protect the Jews from a state-sponsored pogrom.
The version of the Golem story that will be screened on Saturday, whose full
title is "The Golem: How He Came Into the World," was actually director Paul
Wegener's third go at the Golem myth, and perhaps filmdom's first prequel,
setting out the original story that precedes his two earlier golem films,
which were futuristic fantasies.
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In Wegener's 1920 version, a loose adaptation that takes liberties with the
traditional Jewish myth, the Golem and the handsome but devious Prince
Florian compete for the affection of the Rabbi Loewe's daughter. Once
rejected, the Golem becomes a violent monster, terrorizing the village until
a small child finds the solution.
Wegener himself plays the Golem in the influential film, which ranks with
Murnau's "Nosferatu" and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" as one of the
triumphs of German Expressionism. Other key members of the German
production, which was filmed in Germany on a set built to resemble a
distorted version of the Prague ghetto, included cinematographer Karl
Freund, who went on to direct "The Mummy" and TV's "I Love Lucy," and set
designer Hans Poelzig, an architect who would later design the headquarters
for Germany's I.G. Farben company.
Gary Lucas first presented his original score for "The Golem," co-written by
Walter Horn, as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival
at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, in 1989.
Subsequently, Lucas has performed the score in 15 different countries in
cities around the world, including Tel Aviv and Prague, where legend says
Rabbi Loewe's Golem still resides in the attic of the Altneuschul, the
oldest functioning synagogue in Europe, which oddly enough survived the Nazi
occupation of the city.
"There are a lot of stories about what happened to the Golem," said Lucas.
"My brother heard a story that in World War Two the Golem was unleashed when
Nazi soldiers had entered the synagogue, and they were found torn limb from
limb."
Lucas said performing "The Golem" in Prague was a highlight of his career.
"I felt like I was coming home," he said. "My roots are in Bohemia,
literally - my great-grandfather on my father's side came from that area.
"I've been back since that first time and have performed it several times.
Last time I was there, I went to Rabbi Loewe's grave and put a little
inscription on paper on the grave, like you do at the Wailing Wall, that
said, 'Please let the Golem rise again!'"
Lucas's 1989 score for "The Golem" was a pioneering effort in the growing
field in which downtown musicians compose and perform new scores to classic
silent films. Lucas says that composing for film is a natural for him.
"I find that my music, certainly my instrumental music, is very pictorial,"
he said. "I'm always trying to take people on trips. Plus I have a love for
the fantastic horror and science fiction films - when I was at Yale I ran a
horror film society called Things That Go Bump in the Night.
"Plus I think a bit of this love of the fantastic has blended into my guitar
playing, and that I try to evoke alternative realities and other worlds. And
I think that to take a film like this, which really doesn't take place in
outer space, which is rooted here but has mystical elements to it, it's a
beautiful thing. I'm underscoring the magical nature of this old folk legend
with my music. It just dovetails very nicely."
The Golem legend has inspired countless stories, novels (including modern
adaptations by Pete Hamill, Marge Piercy, Jorge Luis Borges, and Cynthia
Ozick), operas, children's books, plays, films, songs, scholarly books and
articles, websites, paintings and sculptures - including one that still
stands by the entrance to Prague's old Jewish quarter. Other famous versions
include the 1915 novel by Bavarian writer Gustav Meyrink and the 1921 verse
play by Yiddish-American poet H. Leivick.
Tickets to "The Golem" accompanied live with original music by Gary Lucas
are $12 for adults and $6 for children. Tickets are available through the
Mass MoCA
box office at 87 Marshall St. in North Adams from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.
daily.
Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 662-2111 or purchased online
at www.massmoca.org. Doors will open at 7:30 for dinner before the show.
In the event of rain, the film will be moved indoors.
"The Golem" is part of the "Mad Science on Film Festival" sponsored
by Holiday Inn Berkshires and co-sponsored by First Massachusetts Bank. The
series will include one more silent film with live accompaniment, "When the
Clouds Roll By," with Ben Model accompanying the film on a vintage movie
palace organ on July 22.
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 13, 2000.
Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]
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