The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  Leisa and I would go to the Mudd Club every night. The Mudd Club was infinitely cooler than Studio 54. It was wilder and there was a better mix of rich and poor, and black and white. We’d go to a gallery opening or some other function, eat all the free cheese and hors d’oeuvres, and then go out to the Mudd Club, and Leisa would finagle us drink tickets and cocaine.

  I had discovered 1940s clothing in the thrift stores and would go out looking all fancy in my three dollar baggy suits and slicked back hair.

  The most absolutely willful person, Leisa had the ability to make a room full of people get up and go to a different party on a moment’s notice. I have to give her a lot of credit for pushing me to persevere when I was feeling down about running the band. She was largely responsible for getting the band off the ground. She could network.

  Leisa was incredibly sexy and energetic, and she was smart. David Byrne, Brian Eno, Larry Rivers, and a host of others all had crushes on her. That Talking Heads song, “This ain’t no Mudd Club, this ain’t no CBGB, this ain’t no fooling around,” whatever the name of it is, and some other songs they did were also apparently about her. At least, Leisa claimed that this was what David Byrne had told her, and by the way he acted around her, I think it was most likely true.

  The Lounge Lizards had a song for her too. It was called “Leisa’s Too Short to Run for President.” And another: “I Want a Basketball, I Can Bounce,” which was written in yearning homage to her incredible ass when we had split up for a day or so.

  Leisa brought me into the world of glamour and cocaine. Then later into heroin. She insisted that I shave every day and hold cab doors open for her.

  * * *

  —

  After Men in Orbit, I wanted to make a real movie. I was working on ideas for a film that was going to be called “Fatty Walks,” stories of the odder occurrences that I had had in New York. I watched Eric Mitchell and others run around desperately with scripts, trying to raise money, and I didn’t think this was going to be any fun at all.

  This was before The Lounge Lizards started. Instead, I was going to write and record the music for the movie, then bring the music in to the money people and play it while I explained the story. This would be more real and exciting, and I’d get the money easily.

  Yes, I realize this was naïve.

  While I was in the process of writing this music, Jim Fouratt asked me who was a good band to open for Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra on a Monday night at Hurrah, a club on Sixty-second Street.

  I said, “Oh, my band.”

  “You have a band?”

  “Of course.”

  I didn’t have a band, but Evan had just moved to New York. Arto Lindsay and I had been having these great jams with Seth Tillett and James Nares, and sometimes Eric Mitchell. We had played in front of an audience once for Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party. We did Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t.” James played drums and Arto and Seth thrashed wildly about on guitars. I played the alto and actually played the head of the song over the confusion they were conjuring. All the girls rushed to the front of the stage and were screaming. This is very nice, when girls do that.

  We only knew the one song, so when it was done and the girls kept screaming, we played it again. I was in the cab with Leisa and some other people on the way home, all full of exuberance. We passed a hardware store with a big sign that said “Rotating Power Tools.” I called James when I got home and said, “We should call the band The Rotating Power Tools!” James liked the idea, but then we never played again.

  So The Lounge Lizards, on June 4, 1979, were: Arto on twelve-string electric guitar, a Danelectro that I think he got at Sears; Evan on Farfisa organ; and me on alto and soprano. Arto brought in Anton Fier to play drums, and I called Steve Piccolo, who had been in my band Crud in high school, to play bass.

  Steve Piccolo was a bona fide genius. His IQ was 170 or whatever number makes one a genius. At twenty-four, he was already a vice president at Merrill Lynch on Wall Street. Steve was incredibly musical and just an inch behind Paul McCartney in his ability to write melodic bass lines. He showed up for the first show in his Wall Street suit and carrying his bass in a plaid plastic suit bag. Piccolo was so stiff and so straight we used to joke about putting heroin in his coffee. Six months later he was strung out and dealing, with syringes in a cup on his desk like one that would normally hold pens.

  We had one rehearsal. Everybody brought something big to this situation. I had written the melodies already, but what everybody added—Arto, with his cataclysmic guitar, Evan’s odd choices on the organ, Anton’s solid drumming, and Steve’s melodic and harmonic sense—really made it something unique and special. I had learned something from James Chance and the Contortions that had freed me up a bit. The undercurrent roar of wild dissonance by part of the band helped it escape the drudgery of what jazz had become. My heart and roots were mostly in jazz and classical music, but after Coltrane, I felt there had been nothing, no big voice to push it along. Now jazz was played to people eating their dinner. The word jazz had become synonymous with boring. It seemed anachronistic to think about trying to do something really musical in this world.

  The rehearsal was a little vague and shaky. What was this? I didn’t really know what it was or what it was supposed to be, and it didn’t fit together. The night of the gig, we pitched in and bought a gram of coke, which we snorted at my uncle Jerry’s place around the corner from the club, while he was out of town. The music, magically, forcefully, came together onstage. It really came together, and I am sure that it was helped by the reckless force of the communal cocaine. Though cocaine ruined dozens of subsequent gigs, it certainly solidified the first one.

  We are in the dressing room after and the door flies open. People are freaking out. Smashing things. Nobody had ever heard anything like it. There hadn’t been anything like it. Leisa has done what she is great at and gotten everyone down to see it.

  “What do you call this music?”

  And I say, without giving it any thought, “It’s fake jazz.”

  At that moment, I thought to myself that that was pretty good off the top of my head, just throw that out there. But it stuck, for twenty years. It stuck—for forty years, it stuck. It is still stuck. When the music had nothing to do with any notion of fake jazz, 2,473 lazy journalists would look up The Lounge Lizards and see it and go, “Oh, that is colorful, I’ll call it that.” That stupid tag of fake jazz stuck like some horrible gum in my hair.

  Peter Gordon did the first and last generous thing that has ever happened to me in the music business. His band was the headliner and we were supposed to get like a hundred bucks. But, because we were so good, and because he realized that so much of the crowd was there to see us, he gave me an extra $75 out of his own money. Might sound like nothing, but it was a big deal and incredibly generous.

  We were in all the papers. It was very exciting. I remember walking with Arto a couple of nights later. We were glowing in our success.

  “If we could just get two hundred bucks for the band, each gig, and play once a week, we’d be all set.”

  We started playing around. Tier 3, Hurrah, Squat Theatre. We used to play for thirty-five minutes. That was our set. That was all we knew. I made the whole band dress in thrift store suits. All the white shirts and ties were crumpled. It was kind of elegant but it was also off; for example, if there was gray gaffer’s tape holding your black shoes together, that was better than if there wasn’t.

  Lisa Rosen was standing in the audience one night next to a man who looked at us, five very white, emaciated guys, and said, “My God, they look so unhealthy.”

  Lisa said, “I know! Isn’t it wonderful?”

  There was Lounge Lizard Madness. Lines would go around the block with people scrambling to get tickets. Andy Warhol would be in the front row.

  It is amazing how fast one becomes arro
gant.

  The cocaine had worked so well the first time, we kept using it. I was also so shy that I couldn’t imagine getting up onstage without the help of drugs and alcohol. But coke, which had worked so magically on the first gig, never seemed to work as well after that. In fact, it ruined a lot of shows. I’d be up onstage gnashing my teeth. I’d feel that nice thing of the coke dripping down into the back of my throat, but then my mouth would go numb and I couldn’t control my lips, and the mouthpiece would come flying out. We’d play everything too fast. “Too fast” isn’t even a way to describe it. It was frenetic and often as confused as it was powerful. It should have been called “Car Crash Jazz.” Melodies hopping out of great smashing turmoil.

  Cocaine is a bad, horrible drug.

  Sometimes we were great, but not consistently. We didn’t really know what we were doing yet. One of the most important things about playing music live is hearing yourself onstage and knowing how to cope with monitors and dealing with what you cannot hear. It is a constant problem, especially with loud bands, at least the poor ones, and we were very loud and very poor.

  Despite the inconsistent performances, we were getting a lot of attention from the press. Record company people would come into the dressing room and we’d tell them to get lost.

  “Hi, John! I’m from Columbia Records and—”

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  Guy would stand there in his fashionable hair and outfit for a second, looking confused.

  The whole band would just scream, “Get the fuck out of here!”

  I wish we had never stopped telling them that.

  Leisa and I were broke. The band would play sometimes, but then after a week, we wouldn’t have any money left. They kept turning off the electricity or the phone. I had a bag full of sunglasses that I had bought to give out to the audience at the Leukemia piece at Squat Theatre but never organized it. So I had about a hundred pairs of cheap sunglasses. Leisa painted them and got $3 apiece from the local punk stores. She scampered home with $300 in her hand.

  We never ate enough food and drank too much. Liquor was usually free, but food was harder to come by.

  * * *

  —

  I met Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club. He was just a kid—couldn’t have been more than seventeen—with a funny haircut. He used to grin with absolute delight while he danced. I called him Willie Mays. It wasn’t so much that he looked like Willie Mays, which he did a little, but how much he enjoyed his silly dancing.

  In 1949 or 1950, before I was born, my family was living in Minneapolis. They had a minor league baseball team before the Twins. A young Willie Mays came through there on his way to the pros, and my dad used to go see him play. He said they were all heartbroken when Willie Mays got called up to the majors because he was so wonderful to watch. And part of what was so wonderful was the ease with which he played and the joy that emanated from him. Jean-Michel’s dancing wasn’t graceful or elegant—in fact it was awful—but he certainly enjoyed it, immensely, in an abandoned way. Because of this I dubbed him Willie Mays, and he called me Willie back.

  Jean-Michel and Danny Rosen used to sleep on the floor in my front room. It was called the John Lurie School of Bohemian Living. We would stay awake for days and then crash. They didn’t seem to mind sleeping on the carpet. I had splurged and spent $100 on carpeting for my front room. I don’t remember either of them ever bathing. After being out all night, I would make Jean-Michel come out and shoot baskets with me at six a.m., in the morning light. He never liked shooting baskets, but I made him come anyway.

  When Jim Jarmusch was making his first film, Permanent Vacation, I let him use my apartment to store the film equipment in the front room. Jean-Michel was asleep on the floor after being awake for days.

  He was often in their way and they couldn’t wake him up.

  Jim and two crew guys finally picked him up and moved him to the side of the room to get at the equipment.

  Kind of pissed me off, how they grimaced with disgust when they had to touch him and moved him like he was a stinking homeless person.

  But, damn, Jean-Michel slept right through it. I cannot tell you how jealous I am of someone who can sleep like that.

  Jean-Michel and I would smoke marijuana and paint and draw all night. I had a box of oil pastels and we would paint on anything. Cardboard. Shopping bags. Anything.

  Jean-Michel made a portrait of me out of a catcher’s mitt that I really liked. He had taken a catcher’s mitt and painted on it, held it up, and said, “This is John Lurie.” He also made me a big button that said, “Hello My Name is Lee Harvey Oswald.” Which he also claimed was a portrait of me. I have no idea where these things are.

  I still have one thing that we painted on a card together, but I took it to a gallery one day to see what it was worth. They took it to some expert who then declared it was not by Basquiat.

  Who are these experts?

  He was really messy and would leave his stuff everywhere. I kept telling him to do something with his drawings, but he never did.

  But damn, the kid just had that thing. He was compelled to make the stuff. It wasn’t even work. It was a thing. Like the autistic kid who has to spin the cardboard box in circles over and over. It was that thing.

  There has been so much bullshit about him, in films and books and stories told. Attempts by so many to aggrandize themselves or make a living off his legacy, by people who were not there or barely there. I don’t want to address it. Cheap is cheap. I don’t want to visit cheap.

  * * *

  —

  Arto came up with the idea that we should use our newfound underground buzz to apply to do something at the Kitchen for their fall season. The Kitchen at that time was almost on the scale of a small Brooklyn Academy of Music, as far as being a prestigious art place. Arto wanted to do it because it paid two hundred bucks per show.

  I asked, “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s do a dance performance.”

  We laughed so hard at the idea that we had to go through with it.

  We proposed a modern dance piece entitled I Love a Tornado. To my amazement we were accepted, I suppose because we were in all the papers as the hip new thing. We really just wanted the $400 that we would get to perform there two nights, and to stick our tongues out, as far as they would go, at the hopelessly serious and untalented world of bureaucratic art.

  In the program it said, “John Lurie and Arto Lindsay premiere their new modern dance work, I Love a Tornado.

  “Two lanky fellows jump up and down for their money. Come for comfort and fun.”

  We came out in cowboy outfits and just stood there, against a sunset projected on the wall, trying to look tough and squinting. We used the great spaghetti western music by Ennio Morricone.

  We stood there for a long time. When the music changed to a cloppity-cloppity piece for percussion and banjo, we pretended we were on horses and pranced about for a bit. Then we changed into white shirts and black pants and did five minutes of contact improv that we did not rehearse. It probably looked more like a two person mosh pit. Arto and I would hold a posture that we assumed was dancerly and then smash into each other.

  After that we had a tape of a severe wind. We were supposed to have a wind machine, but it was broken and only sputtered out a small stream of anemic air. When the wind started, we built a tornado shelter from junk we had found on the street fifteen minutes before the show and then went inside.

  We hid inside there for a few minutes, shaking the shelter now and then, to the sound of the wind. That was the end. The whole thing took twenty-five minutes. When we came out of our shelter and bowed, a confused and somewhat depressed audience just sat there. There was no applause, no sound of complaint, nothing. When they realized it was over, they picked up their coats and left. />
  Evan came over to us after the show. He smiled and said, “You guys have a lot of nerve.”

  It actually left me with a bad taste in my mouth, to do something that was intentionally not good. After each show, I went and bought an enormous steak and washed it down with expensive whiskey.

  * * *

  —

  The upstairs level of the Mudd Club wasn’t officially or legally part of the club. It was more like a sprawling, illicit VIP room. There were two bathrooms without locks on the doors. Neither was designated for men or women, as they were only used by people fucking or taking drugs. One night, Leisa actually had to use the bathroom for real. I go in there with her to hold the door. Wendy Whitelaw is also in there putting on makeup.

  There’s a pounding on the door. This always happened, as people were very impatient to take their own drugs. I tell them to wait and a voice comes from the other side saying, “No men in the women’s room.”

  This is ridiculous because there is no such thing as a women’s room upstairs. I’d been in these bathrooms a hundred times, and if I didn’t know which was the women’s room, then nobody did.

  I tell him to fuck off and continue to block the door. We’re in there for at least another five minutes. Now both girls are taking their dainty time putting on makeup, as the door pounding continues, this in the true fashion of Rebels Without a Party Dress.

  Finally, when I open the door, I see four or five guys standing there. They are all the same shape, five foot ten, two hundred ten pounds, and all have the same mustaches and the same suits.

  They see an emaciated wise guy leaving the ladies’ powder room with two beautiful women. I guess this seemed unjust to them. As I came down off the stair, one of the Mustachioed Security Men grabbed my arm. I laughed and said to the girls, “They all look alike.”

  I’m thinking, Nothing can happen to me at the Mudd Club.