Listening to (Gary) Lucas
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 10, 2000) -- It’s nearly impossible to summarize or encapsulize Gary Lucas’s music in one neat package, although the recently-released “Improve the Shining Hour: Rare Lumiere 1980-2000” (Knitting Factory) does a pretty good job of showcasing Lucas’s diversity as a recording and performing artist (many of the tracks, most of them previously unreleased, are live concert recordings).

“Improve” ranges from the solo, singer-songwriter folk-rock of “Coming Clean” and “In a Forest” to the steel- and slide-guitar underpinning of Lucas’s Grammy-nominated composition for Joan Osborne (sung here by David Johansen aka Buster Poindexter) to the “exploding note” electric guitar solo on “Flavor Bud Living” (from a live Captain Beefheart show) to the ominous soundtrack work on “Judgment at Midnight Theme” to the DJ Spooky electronica collaboration “Golgotha.”

What unites this dizzying array of styles and genres on this beautifully-annotated retrospective package is Lucas’s virtuosity and originality - he seems constitutionally incapable of playing a cliché chord, riff or lick - yet, strangely enough, his idiosyncratic stylings, which are anything if not avant-garde, are also surprisingly accessible. Never has weird, experimental music been so generously melodic and inviting. Even more accessible is Lucas’s 1998 album, “Busy Being Born” (Tzadik). Released as part of John Zorn’s “Radical Jewish Culture” series (the avant-jazz saxophonist plays on three cuts), the recording is ostensibly a Jewish-themed children’s album, and with its mixture of sing-alongs, show tunes and Marx Brothers-inspired novelties, it certainly works on that level.

But the album is also a slyly subversive bit of in-your-face “Radical Jewish Culture,” forcing thoughtful listeners to rethink their visceral, knee-jerk responses to the hymns and “Fiddler on the Roof” kitsch they happily left behind on their way to the country club. Lucas subtly drives the point home with a reworking of the “Abie the Fishman” bit from the Marx Brothers’s “Animal Crackers.” This seminal “outing” moment in popular culture at once reveals the Marx Brothers to have been forerunners of “Radical Jewish Culture,” while empowering a new generation of children of all ages with a new, radical playground chant.

“Skeleton at the Feast” (Enemy) is a mostly live, solo guitar recording, showcasing Lucas’s technical virtuosity and stylistic innovation. Lucas is a veritable scholar of styles - in just a few phrases of “Strong Seed” you can hear the Delta blues merge into Jimmy Page, but always filtered through Lucas. That’s typically the case - while Lucas is firmly grounded in a host of traditional folk, jazz and classical idioms, they never come out sounding quite like “styles.” Lucas’s music is sui generis - a style unto itself. The album hints at Lucas’s far-ranging interests with its tribute to acoustic Delta blues (the impishly titled “Robert’s Johnson,” which also throws in a lick of banjo-like picking from the theme to “Deliverance”), some Bernard Herrman film music for Alfred Hitchcock, and a Christmas medley that morphs into Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced.” While plans are in the works for a full-length “Golem” soundtrack, as of now “Skeleton” is the place to find Lucas’s “Golem” music - the album includes nearly a half hour’s worth.

Lucas has recorded several other albums by himself and with his band Gods and Monsters, and he is also heard on dozens of compilations and as a guitarist on others’ albums. For more information visit the excellent website, www.garylucas.com .


[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 13, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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