The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  Three guys sitting about halfway back are heckling me. I play a phrase and a big sound comes from under the guy’s coat, which is covering his face. Tonight it is going well and I’m pissed to be heckled. I need to redeem myself in my soul for Paris. I am not going to put up with this.

  They make another farting sound and I stop playing. I lay the horn gently down on the stage, then hop down into the seating area, walk out into the audience, and stand in the row in front of the three guys who are making all the fart sounds. They are about twenty, not big but not small either.

  “If I hear one more noise from you, I am going to come out here and fuck you up. Est-ce que vous avez comprendu, you petite assholes?”

  They look terrified. I mean it and they can see it. The audience applauds wildly.

  After the show I still cannot eat, and every time I try, I throw up. I’m by myself in Europe, and as much as I am enjoying the excitement of this, something is wrong. The college kid who has promoted the event comes back and says he forgot to make posters, so nobody knew there was a concert. Would I mind taking half of the money?

  “Yes, I fucking mind. You have to pay me the whole thing.”

  He calls me an American businessman, says I’m not an artist, but he finally pays me. I’ve got one more concert to do, in Geneva.

  I arrive in Geneva and they are expecting the artist/patron relationship. I am invited to dinners at the houses of incredibly wealthy people. Very snobby, they have to be the first to meet the new hip thing from New York. And they are stiff. Sometimes when I meet these kinds of people, who are so frozen behind the idea that their money makes them better than other people, they are so stiff that I wonder how they manage to procreate.

  So, I can’t eat, and I appall everyone at these dinner parties by asking if they know where to get heroin. I am convinced that I am dope sick.

  But even if I weren’t sick, I never did well in these kinds of situations. Every painter I know—and if you look at a list of top-selling living artists, the people I’m thinking of will be four or five of them—I won’t name them, but that is their real talent. They can go to dinner with these people and be patted on the head and smile. It doesn’t matter if they are good painters or not. It just matters that they are wearing the right clothes with the right hair and will bend over at the right moment.

  I am vomiting all the time now and I don’t know how I can possibly play. But I have to play this concert because they are paying my flight home, and if I don’t play, God knows what will happen to me. Sometimes I wonder if most of the homeless people one sees are musicians whose tours went bad and they got stuck somewhere.

  There are a lot of people in the dressing room. I am not paying attention to them. I wish they would leave. I am playing at the New Morning in Geneva, a nice big jazz club that is sold out.

  I play for about a minute and then have to rush offstage to vomit. I come back out and start to play. I have modified what I am playing so that there are enormous gaps in the music. I introduce a phrase, then play it again with notes left out, then again with more notes left out, until I am just standing there in silence for ten and fifteen second intervals. This actually has some theatrical and musical merits. I think I might be the first in “it is about the notes I am not playing.” But what is really happening is that I am looking down at my shoes and trying not to vomit right out there on the stage. So that they will pay for my ticket and I can get home.

  You ever had a tough day at work? Imagine trying to not vomit onstage while playing saxophone or you will end up a homeless person in Switzerland.

  I get through it. It is a bizarre success. Some famous poet even writes a poem about how odd and saintly I am in the dressing room after the show. How I just stare at the ceiling as annoying people try to talk to me.

  * * *

  —

  I call Leisa from the hotel.

  “Get some heroin! I get back tomorrow, I’m dope sick. Get some coke and some heroin and meet me at the airport.”

  So there is Leisa, on the other side of customs. She is bouncing around in her buoyant way. When I finally get through customs I start to run to get to her and they stop me. If I am running I must have something to hide.

  They want to go through my suitcase. I tell them that I am just excited to see my girlfriend and, “See…?”—for some weird reason I pull out all the press I acquired in France and show them my photos in all these magazines. I guess the idea is, “See, I’m famous, I can’t be smuggling anything.”

  Well, this, believe it or not, works, and they let me through.

  As buoyant as Leisa was a minute ago, she is now slumping over in the cab. She suddenly does not seem so excited to see me.

  “You’re high!”

  “Yes, when you told me to get coke and heroin, I bought it last night, so that I could get to the airport in time. Then once I had it in the apartment I couldn’t just let it sit there.”

  I’m a little disappointed that she didn’t wait for me, but this is a fair explanation.

  We get back to Third Street and get high. I feel great. The band has a gig on Thanksgiving, which is tomorrow, and they are rehearsing without me. The idea being that I’ll be too exhausted from jet lag to make it, but now I feel fine. So, I go over to Anton’s house to rehearse with them.

  About an hour into the rehearsal there is a call from Leisa.

  “The apartment is on fire.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, the firemen are here now. They want to smash everything with hatchets.”

  “Well, stop them!”

  “There might be fire still in the walls.”

  “No, stop them, I’ll be right home. You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes.”

  I tell the guys I have to leave and rush home. I see the fire truck pulling away from outside my building as I come up the street. I see the firemen slumped back against their truck with the satisfied, satiated look they get out of a good, big meal or unnecessarily smashing a lot of stuff with their hatchets.

  Leisa answers the door, and her hair, which is normally blonder than blond and tied tight back against her head, is now jet black from the smoke and expanding in Don King rays in every direction. I crack up. She looks hysterically funny to me.

  Leisa bursts into tears. I go into the apartment and see that she has actually had a close call. The mattress is burned. The walls are burned. There are ax holes in the walls.

  Having been up all night, Leisa nodded off with a cigarette in her hand.

  “You okay, hon?”

  “Yes,” she whimpers. Then we have sex on the burnt mattress.

  The next day is Thanksgiving and Leisa is going upstate to her grandma’s. Her grandma is elegantly old-style black. She used to call me Fandooley, because I reminded her of a pimp named Fandooley she knew in Harlem in the 1930s.

  I still haven’t eaten, and Leisa walks with me up Second Avenue to Schatt’s Appetizing Treats so I can get food for myself. She feels bad that I am going to be alone, but I am perfectly happy. I’ve got money from the tour—otherwise we would never be able to afford to go to Schatt’s—and this roast beef and stuff looks delicious.

  Leisa goes off and I settle in to watch football on my little black and white TV with all the fancy delicatessen stuff spread out before me like a picnic.

  I’m hungry. I eat a ton of different stuff—pickled herring, roast beef, smoked salmon—and wash it all down with ginger beer. I’m having a wonderful time. Then I get up and puke my guts out.

  I go to sound check and then do the gig with the band. Some people come back to my place after and we smoke opium until the morning. I go to sleep around seven a.m.

  I wake up and can’t tell what time it is. Clock says eight. Shit. I must have slept thirteen hours.

  But it’s not dark out, it’s morning. Wh
at’s going on? Have I only slept an hour?

  It’s Saturday morning. I’ve just slept twenty-five hours.

  Raging Bull opens today and I am going to go and see it. I’m the last person in line and it’s sold out. Roger Grimsby, the local anchor person on the news, is in line ahead of me, but they only have one ticket. He’s pissed because he is Roger Grimsby, and can’t they let him in with his date? No. So I end up getting the ticket.

  The only seat is in the front row. I get some popcorn and a Coke and watch this great, great movie. The movie ends and I can’t get up. I am honestly just too tired to stand up. So I watch Raging Bull a second, and then a third time.

  Monday morning, Leisa takes me to the clinic on Second Avenue to see what is wrong with me. We run into Marc Cunningham, who says, “You look pretty yellow. Maybe you have hepatitis. Pull down your eyelid.”

  Marc looks under my eye and sees it’s the color of a legal pad.

  “Yep, you got it.” Then he smiles and walks off.

  We go to the clinic and the next day the blood work confirms Marc’s diagnosis. I have hepatitis.

  12

  Udder and Horns

  I have hepatitis. My apartment is burned out. I am supposed to stay in bed for at least a month. Maybe two. The bed—the little foam pad, really—is burnt. The pillows are burnt. A lot of stuff is still soggy. There are ax gashes in the wall. None of this really bothered me at that time. I actually kind of liked the ax gashes.

  But as I write this, I cannot believe how unbearably grim it must have been. Yet I never once thought about it being grim.

  While I was sick, Lisa Rosen did one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. Robert Rauschenberg, the painter, had a fund for artists who were ill and unable to make a living. Lisa applied for me and got me $400, which got me through the next couple months after the solo tour money was gone.

  Leisa had a job at an architecture firm with a friend building miniatures of the places they were working on. I bet she was really good at that. She’d stock me up with food and leave me at home in front of the little black and white TV perched on the floor in front of my foam pad.

  But she kept coming home later and later, and I knew she was fucking some guy at work. Since the hepatitis, my cock just lay there, like some squishy newborn puppy. But her excuses for being three hours late from work were just becoming too ridiculous.

  One day, I threw a plate at her. I couldn’t possibly have gotten up, so I hurled a plate that went sailing through the air like a Frisbee and hit the wall. The plate remained perfectly intact, but a huge section of the wall crumbled to dust. That can’t be normal.

  I mean, it was all fair. A few months before this, one night I had slept with Maripol. The next night I was at the bar at the Mudd Club with Leisa, and Maripol came running up. She said in a loud voice so that at least thirty people must have heard her, “I sucked your cock! Why?”

  You need the full effect of the French accent to really get the impact of this wonderfully strange moment.

  After a couple of months I was well enough to play with the band on New Year’s Eve 1980 at Squat Theatre. We decided to play “Auld Lang Syne” to open the set at midnight. We worked it out in sound check and it sounded great. It’s a beautiful melody, actually.

  We get up onstage and are sorting stuff out, getting ready to play. We are going to count it down, “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!,” and play “Auld Lang Syne” right at midnight.

  I walk up to the mic and say, “Okay, who has a watch? What time is it?”

  “Twelve oh three! It’s twelve oh three!”

  “We missed it?!”

  * * *

  —

  Anton (Tony) wanted to make a record, whined about it, said we’d get better gigs. But I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to let those people into my life. Piccolo finally convinced me that it was just a way of documenting what we were doing.

  Tony wanted us to go with EG Records, a British label, because he knew their New York rep, Ed Strait, and said we could trust him.

  Strait was not straight at all. Maybe he was an honorable guy in an impossible situation because his bosses, Mark and Sam, were dodgy creeps, so he had to lie to us or lose his job.

  We had to find a producer. I didn’t know why we needed a producer but we had to have one. We got Teo Macero, who had produced a lot of the more famous Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk recordings. And he certainly knew how to record a saxophone so that it sounded like a saxophone.

  We didn’t know what we were doing. Teo was hardly ever there because Miles was recording in another studio in the same Columbia building, and Teo was also working that project as well. But it went okay. We had only two days to record everything, but we got it.

  Teo kept calling Arto “Crunch” and never learned his real name.

  Now we had to master the record. I didn’t know what that meant. If we went to the mastering it would cost more, and we were told that the record label was not going to pay that and that it didn’t matter anyway, it wasn’t an important part of making a record.

  When the mastering engineer heard Arto’s twelve-string crunching, he thought the sound must be a mistake and turned Arto’s clanging and thrashing into something much more polite and conventionally acceptable. Teo had had Arto up pretty loud in the mix, where he belonged.

  Arto somehow got it in his head that my ego had thwarted him and went to all the press saying that I had mixed him off the record. Which I had honestly not done.

  EG did such fucked up stuff. Evan and I both had ideas for the album cover that they rejected. It was the first time I’d seen things like this, which I later encountered in grand abundance in Hollywood. These guys were saying no to everything we did only because they could. For no other reason than it gave them a sense of power. Then they took the cover that Evan designed, which they had rejected, saying it was no good, and used it as the artwork for another, much more famous band on their label.

  A few years after the album came out, my tour promoter at the time investigated how many copies of the first album had been sold. He reported to me that it was over six hundred thousand. The EG statements reported less than a twentieth of that.

  * * *

  —

  Steve Piccolo changed for the worse rapidly. I was dabbling in heroin, but Steve took up residence.

  He was living with this very sweet guy, Jerry, and his wife and their six-year-old little girl, and he was selling dope out of his room. I remember going to visit him and being disgusted by a glass of water that had about eight filthy syringes soaking in it.

  Before we went on our first European tour, I told Piccolo that he was going to have to kick before we went. I know he was trying but he kept falling off.

  Anton never liked him in the first place. Thought his time was bad. Piccolo’s time wasn’t bad and he was melodically brilliant. No way was I going to fire him, and not just because he was my friend and going through a hard time. He hadn’t done anything to deserve getting fired, his playing was great, and we were going to be humans and stand behind him while he went through this heinous dope thing.

  Anton is basically a sweetheart, but he could also really be a prick, especially back then. In a lot of ways, that’s what allowed us to become a band. He kicked our asses in the early rehearsals, made us work and pay attention and not fuck around so much. Anton wanted to get rid of Piccolo and hire this friend of his to play bass. Felt his rhythm was stronger, but this guy had nothing close to Piccolo’s melodic brilliance, so it wasn’t what I wanted.

  What really upset me was how strongly Arto took Anton’s side. Like he was the great arbiter when it came to rhythm. Arto tries to promote a reputation about himself, that his rhythm cannot be questioned because he is from Brazil. But this is nuts. Just because he cannot tune the guitar does not mean his rhythm is of value. What was of val
ue was his concept and his sound.

  Arto, throughout rehearsals as the music was getting more complicated, would sit there unconsciously strumming along and reading a comic book. Honest, we would be working on a complicated piece of music and Arto would be there, engrossed in a comic book in his lap. Strumming.

  What Arto and Anton did to Piccolo was grotesquely cruel, and I don’t mind throwing a little shit Arto’s way.

  I’ve known a lot of musicians who can be really macho about time. Certain guys think their time is great and some other guy’s time sucks. For the person in question there’s no way to defend oneself or prove your time is good.

  Time is everything in music. Where you place the beat and how your feel is, that’s what puts the soul in it, the sex in it. How you feel the beat is everything. But there is no such thing as someone with perfect time, or if there is, what value is that? A metronome has perfect time.

  And your time in music has everything to do with your confidence and ease in playing. If you start worrying about your time, then forget it.

  * * *

  —

  Piccolo is really wobbly at rehearsal. He’s trying to kick and not doing it.

  We’re rehearsing and I notice that Anton is purposely speeding up and slowing down. Steve is desperately trying to stay with Anton, thinking that it’s him who’s screwing up the tempo. This is one of the meanest things I’ve ever seen. Piccolo’s confidence is completely shaken, he’s trembling.

  Anton throws down his sticks in disgust, says he can’t play with this guy anymore, and storms out of the room. He’s set the whole thing up to convince me that Piccolo sucks and should be replaced.

  Steve is in tears: “I just want them to like me.”

  This could be seen as just Anton being unreasonable, which he often is, but Arto backing him so hard is what makes it ugly.

  Piccolo misses a rehearsal. He claims that he was getting acupuncture for heroin withdrawal and fell asleep on the table. Nobody woke him. When he did wake up rehearsal was already over. His lies kind of go back and forth between things one could just let go and things that make you go, “Oh man, come on.”