by John Lurie
Years later, when I started my own label for the Voice of Chunk record, I tried to get on Letterman to promote it. But they said, “I’m sorry, but we have it in our records that you did not show up for your pre-interview in 1984.”
“Wow, that was six years ago. You guys are like the FBI.”
24
The Stick, to Whom All Praise Is Due
For the most part I’ve left heroin behind. I thought that I needed it to write music, but I don’t. I’ve got things to do. The music is something special now. I can’t disrespect it.
The band plays in New York and it is starting to be great. It’s wild and soulful and pretty much a blast.
It is hell running a band this size, especially when there is so little money. But the music makes it worth it. Makes it way beyond worth it.
William Morris wants to take me to the Russian Tea Room to discuss being my acting agent. This seems big time, the royal treatment. My uncle Jerry used to talk about the Russian Tea Room like it was a place that indicated something special.
The strange thing is that no matter how clean I look in the mirror at my apartment, when I get to the William Morris offices, under those lights, I am somehow fetid and soiled.
William Morris, which has pursued me like mad, once they have signed me, convince me that nobody has a clue who I am. They manipulate me into auditioning for dozens of the worst movies ever made.
I am bad at auditioning. I don’t have acting chops. I can act if I am in something and find the character’s skin. But there is no way that for five minutes in an office, sitting across from a casting agent, I can possibly do that. I don’t want to be good at that.
Years later, I learned that my subsequent agent, Kevin Huvane, hated my guts. Like I had done some horrible thing to him. And I cannot, for the life of me, understand what that can be about. I was really only interested in the music. My blood was in the music. Acting was something that would be nice if the right thing came along. If I got an awful script, I wouldn’t go in. And they were usually awful. But apparently Kevin Huvane still actively hates me to this day. I tried to call his office a couple of years ago to find out what that was about, but he wouldn’t take my call.
Sitting there waiting for three hours to meet John Landis is not how I want to spend my time. I just cannot do that.
* * *
—
I would never have said this out loud to anyone, but my life goal was to find and express God through music. I was living in a culture that would scoff at this idea, and with all the sex and drugs this probably seems suspicious, but that honestly was my goal.
I met with the Coen brothers for the lead in Miller’s Crossing but didn’t get the part. I have a lot of respect for the Coen brothers and would have liked to work with them.
I didn’t bother to go in for the meeting for Reservoir Dogs. The dialogue in the script seemed so silly because of the characters’ names. Mr. Pink says this. Mr. White replies this, Mr. Pink says this, and Mr. Black says this. The way it read was ludicrous.
Other than those two movies, there really was nothing I was sorry that I was not in.
* * *
—
I go out to L.A. to do press for Stranger Than Paradise. Say more too-open stuff to The Hollywood Reporter, am misquoted and embarrassed again.
While I’m out there, William Morris sets up a meeting with a casting agent for a western with a bunch of stars in it. It has been impressed on me that this woman is very, very important. I’m out standing in the hallway, waiting to see her, the producer, and the director.
My stomach is upset, from breakfast at Duke’s. It’s gurgling and it burns.
As they call me in, a memorably horrendous fart rises up inside of me.
I think that it’s fine, I’ll leave it in the hallway. But this molten horror fart stays in the cloth of my pants.
It enters the room with me. It wafts into every corner, burning chips of paint off of the ceiling. Scalding the eyes of the casting agent’s assistant.
Nearly everyone dies. I begin to sweat.
I think that fart ended my acting career, right there.
* * *
—
I call Rudy but his phone has been disconnected. I call his job, but they are weird on the phone, say he’s not there, but there is something hidden in what they are saying. Call the next day and get the same evasive treatment, odd pauses in their responses. Something is up. The third day, when it happens again, I ask to speak to the supervisor.
“I’m a good friend of Rudy’s from New York and this is the only number I have for him. When I call here I get this weird feeling from the people I’m talking to. Can you tell me if something is wrong or can you give me his home address?”
He doesn’t know what to say. Legally he probably should not give me the address, but the guy is very human.
“If you’re really his friend, maybe you can help him. I think he needs help.” He gives me Rudy’s address.
At seven p.m. that night, I’ve finished my interviews and I’m getting ready to leave my room at the Chateau Marmont. The news comes on as I look for the car keys. They are talking about thirteen murders that have happened in the last week. Right where Rudy lives. This neighborhood has erupted in bloodshed and they don’t know why.
I start to drive out there and it is freaky. A guy crosses the street looking straight ahead, he pays no attention to my car as it approaches. His left arm is down by his side and he is nonchalantly carrying a ridiculously large handgun. He is hiding it from no one.
At the next stoplight a prostitute is standing there waving at me. She’s completely naked but for a white towel, half pulled around her waist and half falling to the ground. A purple high-heeled shoe on one foot. She has the grinning leer of complete madness. At every corner there is more mayhem. Illicit insanity is everywhere.
It is the first week of crack.
There should have been banners: “WELCOME, CRACK!”
I find Rudy’s place and knock on the door. He answers it, and his smiling face is so gaunt that I just stare at him in disbelief. He has easily lost a hundred pounds. That Buddha countenance is still there, but he is skinny as a rail. He doesn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me.
His apartment is tiny. People keep knocking on his door to see what is going on, if he has anything. They have seen this white man arrive.
Everyone refers to everyone else as “scandalous.”
His phone’s cut off, they’ve taken his car, and he is going to get evicted in a couple of days.
He seems fine with it all. He is still somehow in that Buddha light of acceptance, but his body is addicted to crack. “This is where I am right now. This is my path.”
Instead of trying to talk him out of anything, because there is no point, I just got high with him. Even though I had interviews in the morning and had vowed to be sharp. It seemed the least I could do. We went to the liquor store to get some rum to use instead of water in the pipe. The guy in the liquor store, as he handed me my change, said, “Sometimes the pipe talks back to you.” Wow, the whole neighborhood was like a crack ashram.
At around five a.m. I said good night to Rudy. I realized that I would probably never see him again. I was so fucked up that I had to drive right in the middle of the taillights of the truck in front of me. I was lucky, very lucky, that that truck had the same exit off the freeway or I would have had to drive all the way to the ocean, not having the ability to see, drive, and read the highway signs to pick an exit all at the same time.
* * *
—
I went back to New York and was about to go on tour. Jean-Michel decided that he wanted to give me a giant going away dinner at Mr. Chow’s. It had something to do with the Voice article, which had touched on all of my various projects up to that time. He amazed me when he admitted that he was je
alous of all the things that I had done. That was very much not his style.
He was so tough and so sensitive at the same time. He always shocked me like that. He would be competitive past the brink of cruelty when he was ahead and then show enormous warmth and vulnerability a day later.
His idea was that we should join forces and each invite ten of the most interesting people we knew. At the time it seemed contrived, but the dinner really was incredible when I look back on it: Wim Wenders, Francesco and Alba Clemente, Julian and Jacqueline Schnabel, Joe Ende, Boris Policeband, Steve Rubell, Bianca Jagger, Tony Garnier, Andy Warhol, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, me and Liz. This dinner is where Jim Jarmusch met Tom Waits for the first time.
Andy Warhol was so impressed that he later said in his diary that it was the best party he’d been to in ten years. That he was going to start hanging out with artists because they were so much more interesting than the kind of people he had been hanging out with.
Now, in a certain way this is a big deal. Your party is the best party Andy Warhol has been to in ten years.
But, of course, when Andy’s tapes were transcribed into what later was released as The Andy Warhol Diaries, Tom Waits and I were mistakenly turned into John Waite, who had a hit song that year.
John Waite would send letters to my office saying thank you for turning him into one of the cool people.
* * *
—
On the plane to Europe the movie is Sweet Dreams, the film in which Jessica Lange plays Patsy Cline. The movie is going along and then abruptly ends. A completely unresolved, nonsensical ending. Ribot starts laughing and saying loudly, so anyone within five rows of him can hear, “Patsy Cline died in a plane crash! I guess they didn’t want to show that part on the plane!” And then laughs really loudly some more.
The first night of the tour is in Berlin. There is a church in Berlin that stands from before the war. The outside walls are riddled with bullet holes from World War II. The first time I walked by it, picking up someone from the train station late at night, I was moved almost to tears. I didn’t expect it, it just welled up in me, to feel what actually happened there.
We’ve arrived from New York that morning and we’re trying to stay awake until a reasonable hour to try to slip past the jet lag. We go for dinner and then a bunch of us go for a blurry walk. By the train station, by the zoo, and then just as we get to the church, I see a tree branch lying on the ground. It is fairly straight and about the length and width of a long broomstick. There really is absolutely nothing special about it.
I rush and pick it up. I hold it over my head.
I yell, “The Stick!”
Dougie yells in response, “The Stick!”
I yell, “The Stick!”
Everybody yells, “The Stick!”
“Bless The Stick, to whom all praise is due!”
“The Stick!”
So I carry The Stick and bring it back to my room.
The next morning at breakfast, I come down in the elevator with The Stick. A bunch of the guys are sitting having breakfast in a large, crowded buffet room. I stand on a chair at their table. The faces of the dining Germans look almost ill.
I yell, “The Stick!”
Dougie yells, “The Stick!” and stands up and waves his spoon at it.
Roy shakes his head and smiles. Ribot laughs.
I storm off, stop halfway across the dining room, and turn to face them. “The Stick!”
They all stand, brandishing spoons and bowls of oatmeal.
“The Stick!”
Then I swing The Stick violently in the air, with the whooshing sound filling the buffet hall, which is now mostly people staring at their food and not speaking for fear of becoming involved in this horror the Ugly Americans have brought to their breakfast.
The Stick is entrusted to Pascale, the tour manager. She was there when The Stick was discovered. The Stick travels on the tour bus with the guitars and horns. It is given a place of honor at all times.
We bring The Stick out onstage before the show and lean it against the bass drum. Center stage. After the third song, which is the first break in the set, I pick it up over my head and proudly yell, “The Stick!”
The band yells, “The Stick!”
Dougie does it the best because he is five foot four and very cute, so when he does something rousing or macho, it’s heartwarming.
I explain to the audience the nobility of The Stick. Some seem to understand.
After about ten days of this, The Stick actually begins to take on a certain aura. There really is something to this stick, because we have invested so much energy into it. It also somehow stands for the band, a ritual for the tribe. An icon without a religion.
When Pascale leaves it behind in Austria, we are all deeply upset. Me, most of all.
The press is relentless. We said in advance to the promoters that no journalists or photographers were to be allowed at sound check, but they are everywhere. It is explained that I will only do press about the band or the music. It doesn’t matter.
It is hard to concentrate. The only safe place is playing music onstage.
The band is great. Getting better and better. We’re finding things.
I finish my interviews in a side room and walk into the sound check at the Metropol in Berlin on the first night. Dougie and Erik have already checked. I say, “Listen to this,” and play them a melody I wrote after finally getting past heroin. It has some heart in it. Dougie adds a kind of go-go beat behind me and Erik starts playing. Erik is perfect at conceiving the simplest, most elegant bass lines, and in about four minutes we’ve written “Big Heart.” It will become our signature tune, the one we close with, for years. That night we play it at an overly packed Metropol, and the crowd goes insane.
I keep trying to call Liz at my place but get no answer and no answering machine. Call at all different hours and don’t reach her.
Finally I call Seth, who is Rebecca’s boyfriend. They are living in my building in Eric Mitchell’s place upstairs. I ask Seth to knock on my door and see if Liz is there. Maybe there’s something wrong with the phone. But I am getting really worried about her.
Seth tells me that my door is open and that there is no one there. I call Seth the next day and my door is still open with no sign of Liz.
I go to lunch with Evan somewhere in Germany. There is a German and English menu. One of the specialties of the house is loin, but they have written “Lion.”
The waiter comes to take our order. Evan says, “The lion, is that a whole lion?”
The waiter stares at him blankly.
We love that. We collect stuff from the hotels, especially in Italy. Destroyed English-language instructions. I have a sign I took from a hotel in Milan that says:
IN CASE OF SMELLING OF FIRE.
LEAVE ROOM WITHOUT MUCH EXCITEMENT.
FROM LINE BY ADVISE OF HALL PORTER.
BID OTHERS HELLO.
The tour manager puts two bottles of Stoli on the floor of the stage every night. They are always finished by the end of the show. That’s what we drink when we’re thirsty. People in the audience ask if they are props, but they most certainly are not. I never, or at least rarely, get drunk during the show. Usually the adrenaline and concentration keep me sober and lucid. A half hour after the show, I am smashed. After all the equipment is packed up, we go to a restaurant, then back to the hotel.
I can never calm down. If I am with a girl, it helps. If there is no girl, I am frantic. Can barely stand it.
And then I get up after an hour or two of sleep, still drunk and smelling like an ashtray. Try to find everything and throw my stuff into the suitcase and take the train to the next gig, which could easily be a ten-hour trip.
It’s all pretty much a blur. When I started writing this book, I
called Erik Sanko to help remind me of stories I might want to add. Erik started recounting stories, all about himself, that had occurred in cities I am sure I have never been to.
After playing in Berlin, the first night of The Stick tour, we were on the train from Berlin to Hamburg. I only vaguely remember this, but Ribot told me about it months later. It was the morning train and it was all businessmen. Properly dressed and all reading their papers. Apparently, I stood in the aisle, swaying with my shirt wrapped around my neck, exposing my hairy stomach and singing at the top of my lungs:
MY STOMACH HAS A BEARD AND IT LIKES TO PLAY WITH OINTMENT!
MY STOMACH IS THE PRINCE OF MANY TOWNS AND VILLAGES!
MY PENIS HAS A FACE AND IT LIKES TO BARK AT GERMANS!
MY STOMACH IS A MAN WHO SINGS THIS SAD SAD SONG.
I’m glad that Ribot wrote down the words and reminded me of this, because I used these lyrics for the Marvin Pontiac album years later.
But we were intolerable. I apologize to anyone who ever had to travel in proximity to us. While flying to Europe, we were trying to establish whether the plane would weigh any less if the whole band jumped in the air at the same time. If my theory was correct, the plane should have lurched forward.
One, two, three! We all jumped in the aisle, making the rest of the passengers very uneasy.
Flying to Brazil, we took turns running the water and observing the sink in the bathroom to see if it would suddenly go down the drain in the other direction as we went over the equator.
* * *
—
I finally get Liz, not a clue what she’s been up to and don’t even ask why my door has been open for five days. I know I won’t get a straight answer. I fly her over to meet us, more to keep her safe than anything else.
