by John Lurie
We get to Geneva. No sign of Evan and no hotel rooms. There’s a sports convention in town and there are no rooms to be had.
Now what? We have no money, we’re hungry, and Rene’s legs are getting cold. This is also only the second day of the first tour these guys have done with me, and they’re all looking a little nervous. I also find out that this isn’t really Meissonnier’s tour. He’s sold it to another promoter I’ve never heard of in Switzerland.
It’s now about midnight. We’re cold, tired, and hungry. We’re just standing on the street with our instruments. At about two a.m. I think that it would be better to be in jail than just standing here on the street. So we take out our instruments and start to play. Tony’s got his acoustic bass, Zummo is on trombone, and I’m on soprano. Dougie is smashing a metal railing with his drumsticks. We play a New Orleans kind of blues.
We don’t get arrested, but out of every alley, from all directions, drunk bums are appearing. They are all dancing, flailing their arms and legs around. Almost like they were waiting for this moment.
Now we are surrounded by our new friends. We can’t understand anything they’re saying. Rene can speak their language but won’t talk to them because they are bums.
Morning comes and Rene wants to take a train. I insist that we fly. “We haven’t slept, we haven’t eaten. Even if we fly we’re going to be a wreck. If we take a train it’s hopeless.”
He has to approve it with the new promoter but can’t reach him. I force Rene to get the plane tickets with his credit card and we fly.
Evan somehow figured out that he had to switch trains and managed to move all thirty bags by himself. When he gets to Vienna, there are people from the festival to pick us up. Evan unloads all the bags from the train and waits there, not knowing what else to do.
The people from the festival are waiting for a band. Once everyone has left the station, there is just them and Evan standing on the platform. Evan goes and asks them if they are there to meet The Lounge Lizards and they say, “Oh, oh.”
We get maybe an hour’s sleep before we have to soundcheck. We’re on a bill with Joe Pass, who plays solo and is amazing, then Benny Golson, who is also amazing.
Freddie Hubbard is playing with Tony Williams and seems like he wants to kill him, with Tony Williams playing over everything.
I’m really tired and getting loopy. We get up onstage in front of some five thousand serious Viennese jazz fans and they’re not loving us. Which is fair because what came before us, with both Joe Pass and Benny Golson, truly was amazing.
I tell a joke to the audience. In places like Vienna and the bigger cities in Germany, I can talk to the audience—they understand enough English—but I’m pretty fucking loopy and my jokes are obscure. I tell a joke and five thousand people sit there in silence. I can hear Tony giggling behind me. I tell another joke, five thousand Viennese jazz fans sit there in silence. I can be very obstinate and weird. I tell more jokes, I’m not going to stop. Tony is doubled over, he’s laughing so hard. He’s not laughing at the jokes, he’s laughing from exhaustion and he’s laughing at me.
After the show they have delicious hot dogs, the best hot dogs, served from chuckwagons by very pretty Austrian girls who smile. A TV station asks if Evan and I can interview each other. So we do it as close to Bob and Ray as we can:
“How do you find the audience here in Vienna?”
“Well, when I’m at the piano, they are just to my right. They are usually just standing there in front of the stage. They aren’t hiding.”
The people from the TV station don’t know what we’re talking about, but we manage to crack each other up quite a bit.
Rene comes running over and says we have to leave immediately. We have to check out because we’re taking the overnight train to Holland. We all start to complain but there is no other choice. This apparently has always been the plan.
Rene says, “Don’t worry, we have sleeper cars.” This sounds very exciting to me and Ev.
Pretty much nobody has slept except for Evan, but put a bunch of young guys in a train car right after a gig, and there is sure to be a certain amount of fooling around.
Dougie goes right to sleep. Dougie is little and can scrunch up on a chair and fall asleep. Over the years I have grown extremely jealous of Dougie’s ability to sleep anywhere, at any time, and usually wake him up out of spite.
Tony and I develop a game called Kick In The Face. We sit across from each other with our feet up, each poised to kick the other one in the face. On the count of three we are both supposed to kick each other in the face as hard as we can. We count to two and then laugh hysterically.
We finally all manage to fall asleep. The trip is over twenty hours, so we can sleep all afternoon. I’m not asleep an hour when the door to the compartment comes smashing open and it’s an enraged German conductor screaming that we have to get up immediately. At least, we assume that this is what he’s saying, we’re not really sure. The only thing that is completely clear is that we can’t sleep anymore or he’s going to continue to scream at us. A little frightening as our first moment of consciousness ever in Germany, and every Nazi movie starts flowing through my head.
We get to Holland and then have to take vans to the North Sea Jazz Festival. This is an enormous festival with hundreds of acts. There are a lot of great people playing and we’re excited to be there. We’re also excited to prove ourselves in this environment, because we are seen with a great deal of skepticism by a lot of the jazz world, most of which has probably never even heard us play.
The North Sea Jazz Festival, unfortunately, has all the charm of a car show. There is music going on everywhere and the vibe is somehow very sterile.
We’re playing on the roof of this building. We don’t get a sound check. We go out to play and the sound of each note just disappears like it’s sucked off into a void. We haven’t slept in three days, we’re very tired, and we play horribly.
We’ve played at the North Sea Jazz Festival twice, and they are two of the absolute worst shows that the Lizards have ever done. I remember every bad gig we ever did, and these were two of them.
That tour taught me to study the itinerary months in advance to try to avoid whatever obscene tortures the tour promoter might have in mind. It got more and more gruesome as it went on. There was no time to sleep. We would finish a show and get back to the hotel, when there was a hotel, really late, and then have to get up in an hour or two, pack, and then travel for fourteen hours to the next gig.
We were exhausted beyond exhausted. Tony and I would go in and out of bouts of hysteria. We were somewhere in Germany, driving through the countryside, and U.S. fighter jets were flashing across the sky, doing test flights.
Tony would put his head out the window like a little kid and yell, “Jets! Jets!” and then collapse on the floor of the van laughing.
“Jets, they’re so beautiful.”
Right before the show a couple of radio journalists came into the dressing room to interview us, live, on the radio. Anwar Sadat had just been assassinated. They wanted to know what we thought about it. Tony and I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to tell them. Must have been something else to hear that over the radio.
* * *
—
The tour was really hideous, everything about it: the travel, the hotels, most of the venues, the equipment, the food. It was unendurable. Because Meissonnier had sold the tour, we didn’t even know who to blame. Rene kept saying that we would meet the promoters when we finally played in their town, that they would make it up to us, that we would probably get some kind of a bonus.
We finally get to their town—I can’t remember where it was—and we have dinner with these assholes. There is this big, six-foot-tall, sexy young woman who is positioned to sit next to me at the dinner table. She speaks no English and is not interested in putting up with my attempts at
French. Her eyes are pinned. Halfway through dinner, she puts her hand on my thigh and runs it up into my crotch. This girl is not interested in me one bit and I don’t know what to make of it. Then it occurs to me that she has been hired for me.
She’s the bonus.
Her pupils are just two tiny dots. I am sure I can get some dope out of her. We go back to my room. She pretends she doesn’t know what I am talking about.
She takes off her clothes. She is incredibly sexy as she stands there. A sex beast.
But at the same time, she’s totally uninterested in me. And really what I want is a fucking line of heroin.
So, of course, I have sex with her. I’m not sure why. I didn’t really have any desire to. She was like a nonperson.
An hour later, I have to check out because we have a ten-hour train ride to Brussels before we fly back to the United States. The train is packed and we have to stand next to the stinking bathroom the whole ten hours.
Get on the plane and I don’t feel so good. This is a super cheap flight and the food is bad. I am really nauseous. Maybe I’ll feel better if I vomit. I get the airsick bag out and go to open it. There is someone else’s vomit already in it from another flight, which is now all over my hand.
When we arrive in New York, Zummo’s wife and Garnier’s girlfriend are at the airport. I see their mouths move from a smile to a gaping exclamation of shock when it registers on them just what horrible shape I have returned their men in.
14
Look Out! The Anteater!
I met Jim Jarmusch on the aforementioned corner of Fifth Street and Second Avenue. I had known him only vaguely before. He had been the bartender in Eric Mitchell’s movie Red Italy, one of the films we made for the New Cinema. I was in the scene, first as part of the band, and then later on dancing in a spaz attack. I didn’t think much about this white-haired guy; in fact, we sort of sneered at him. “He’s a film student, ick.” That really was unacceptable to us.
“If you want to make movies, then make movies. You are going to school for it? Are your parents paying your rent?”
But I ran into him late at night, outside Binibon, and he started talking to me, seemed nice enough and very sincere and thoughtful. He had some hash, and we went and sat on a stoop on Fifth Street and smoked it. He talked about Nick Ray.
We became friends and started hanging out a bit. Then he paid me $200 to store his film equipment at my place when he was shooting Permanent Vacation and I gave him some music for it. He used my apartment to shoot the scene where Chris Parker is dancing. I am also in the movie for a moment wearing some very white shoes, playing the saxophone.
Soon after I met Jim and his girlfriend, Sara Driver, I ran into Sara on the street. She was with this tall girl with blond hair who was so movie star beautiful, it made me a little shy. She seemed shy, too. She kind of hid behind Sara and smiled out at me.
That was María Duval. We got together shortly after that.
María was light-skinned Cuban, tall with phenomenally generous lips. She had a real apartment on Seventeenth Street near Park Avenue. Maybe it wasn’t that nice, but compared to the squalor I was living in, it was completely civilized and dazzling. I was getting high a lot. María was very straight, a little on the Mary Tyler Moore Show side of things. Polite, proper, and very serious about her acting career. I would come to her place late, fucked up, and show her a bit of how the wild people do it.
She had been the lead in a couple of plays, and though they had been successes, I felt bad because I just couldn’t get behind it at all. I thought they were corny and predictable.
The band was rehearsing at Squat Theatre and I went upstairs to make phone calls. I called Jim, because he had been working on a futuristic script called “Garden of Divorce,” which was going to star María and me.
It was a futuristic sci-fi romance. He had been working on it forever and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The idea seemed fairly forced and not particularly inspired. He was trying to finish the script but was stuck. For months he was stuck.
Wim Wenders had given him a half hour of black and white film that Wim had left over after The State of Things. But Jim didn’t want to do “Garden of Divorce” in black and white. He didn’t know what to do, and he was agonizing over it for quite some time. He was paralyzed.
“So, what do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure.” It really sounded like this was causing him pain.
“Let’s just use the film from Wim and make a little movie.”
“Oh…I don’t know.”
“Come on, man, what’s wrong with you?”
“Oh…I don’t know.”
“If you made a little movie, who would you want to use?”
“Ah, you and Eszter.”
I had known Eszter Balint since she was twelve, when she was the very bright daughter of Pisti Balint, one of the heads of Squat Theatre. Now she was a seventeen-year-old, wisecracking terror.
“How about this: I’m a low-level gambler. Eszter is my cousin and she comes to New York from Hungary. I get a call from my aunt saying Eszter is coming and I have to take care of her. I don’t want her there, and I especially don’t want anyone to know that she is my cousin or that I am Hungarian, though I am quite taken with her after a bit.”
“Um. Okay, I guess.”
“So let’s just shoot that and see what happens.”
“Okay. I think you need a buddy.”
“Okay, we’ll figure it out later, I gotta get back to rehearsal.”
That really was pretty much the conversation verbatim. Not like it was some earth-shattering idea that I had come up with, but that was the seminal moment of Stranger Than Paradise. Right there in thirty seconds. Perhaps proving this is the credit right before the copyright: “Part One from an idea by John Lurie and Jim Jarmusch,” in such tiny little letters only a dog can hear it.
But really here the credit goes to Eric Mitchell. This was what I had gotten from Eric: Just shoot it. Just do it now. You have the film? Just make something. Roll up your sleeves and attack. Kamikaze style.
Funny how credit works, but I can tell you for certain that without Eric Mitchell’s influence on me, I would not have influenced Jim and pushed him the way Eric had pushed me.
So, all you film school students, understand that Stranger Than Paradise would have never existed without Eric Mitchell, because Jim, to this day, would be sitting in his apartment, smoking joints and rewriting “Garden of Divorce” and saying, “Um, um, I’m not sure.” Would seem truly bizarre a couple years later when he was declared an auteur.
I recommended Christopher Wool to play the part of my pal, but we met with him and Jim thought he was wrong. Jim was probably right—I think Chris would have been a little tight. Richard Edson has seven sides to his nose, so he got the part.
We shot in Jon Ende’s Second Avenue apartment, right around the corner from me. I think that it just took three days. Acting seemed a breeze to me; I didn’t think much about it. There was one scene with Eszter where I get mad at her, and when I saw it, I didn’t like the way my face contorted, but otherwise it seemed fine. I wore the Borsalino hat that I had bought with Danny and Piccolo. It had shrunk a little and fit the dopey character.
I was playing saxophone solo, the same three nights we were shooting, for a play on Forty-second Street. I wasn’t going to get paid anything from Stranger Than Paradise, though Jim had promised me three points of the gross, should it do anything.
I’d grab my horn after we finished shooting and rush out to get seventy-five bucks for two shows a night for this improvised theater thing. I played along behind a curtain, mixing with the actors.
I thought that the title was Monologues, but Torton would laugh at me and say that the name of the play was something else. I’d get a little high before the shows and then a lot high after. I was s
traight when we shot Stranger during the day.
Torton was around all the time. He has the best mind, full of great ideas. He also had the capacity to make things happen, not for himself, but for other people. He was helping out on Stranger and it seemed like if Jim had said, “I need a fire engine,” Torton would bring one back with ladders and a Dalmatian fifteen minutes later.
On the other hand, it can easily be said that Torton has the worst mind. He is a complicated fellow.
The first half hour of Stranger Than Paradise was shot in no time, and I didn’t think much more about it, while Jim went off to find the money to complete it.
I was working on various things and Torton was helping me. We made a pretty good team. But he is as nuts as he is brilliant.
* * *
—
The band is playing the Purple Barge, which is exactly what it sounds like: a barge painted purple that had a sound system. The deal is that instead of the normal thing where the club pays you a flat fee of—I think we were getting five hundred per show at that time—the Purple Barge is going to pay us a percentage of the door from dollar one. As I’m up on stage, I begin to realize that we are going to make a fortune. I think we were getting two-thirds of the door—I don’t remember the figures—but it seemed clear to me that we were going to make two or three thousand dollars, if they didn’t screw us on the head count. And they didn’t.
Stephen Torton was recording the show with an expensive tape recorder and mics that he had commandeered from somewhere.
Stephen and I were getting high on and off then. On this night he was very, very high. I looked out at the crowd to try to surmise how much we would be making and saw Stephen standing in the middle of the crowd. Each hand was holding a mic a hair more toward us, but basically straight out above his head and to the sides. His eyes were closed and his mouth was wide open, you could fly canaries in and out and he would not have noticed. He’s standing, nodding out in the middle of the crowd recording the show. This lopsided V-stance makes it look like he has been crucified by some very incompetent crucifiers who have put the hands too high and the body has slumped down.
