The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  Someone says, “Look, the hotel!” This is a joke. This building is so awful that it has to be pointed out and ridiculed.

  But the driver pulls into the driveway. This is the hotel.

  “Drive away! Drive away!”

  “Nooooo!!”

  “No fair!!”

  We check in and most of us decide to walk to the beach. We are white. White as paper. Most of us haven’t been out in the daytime in months.

  The people on the beach are all perfectly coiffed and perfectly bronzed. They are wearing perfect bathing suits.

  Roy doesn’t have a bathing suit, so he’s wearing his white BVDs. Every molecule on him is white. He is more than pale. He shines pale. Roy is a hundred yards away on a massively crowded beach and I can easily identify him as the ultra-white speck amid all the perfect bronze specks.

  * * *

  —

  There is something that we call the Toronto Trick. This happens a lot in small towns in Germany or Austria: Bremen, Ravensburg, and Saarbrücken come to mind. The audience, not wanting to seem like a bunch of rubes, sit with their arms folded and scowl at us while we play. I don’t know what they’re thinking…this way we won’t get over on them? I don’t know, maybe they’re just living like that, sour.

  We finish a song and there is a smattering of applause. You get nothing back, just nothing. Show ends and you leave the stage. They go berserk, demanding encore after encore. The weirdest thing is that it felt like they hated you while you were playing, and then you stop and they go crazy. Maybe they just want to make sure they get their money’s worth. But it really seems like all of a sudden they love you.

  Next we play Paris. We’re playing on a double bill with Wayne Shorter, at this enormous place called La Villette. I have a lot of interviews to do, so they put me up in a big fancy hotel near the Louvre. They put the band in some stinking place with broken windows and no phones in the rooms.

  I don’t have a girlfriend anymore. Every night, after the concert I am engulfed in beautiful women. It is like they are having a social for us night after night, town after town. This is fairly consistent, except for in Italy and for some reason in London, but Paris, well, that is just nuts.

  Check into the room and the phone rings.

  “Miss Petra is downstairs.”

  Petra is a young woman I met in Berlin on the tour before. Spend a couple of hours with her, have room service, and then she has to go to some modeling thing. She’s not gone ten minutes when the phone rings again.

  “Miss Isabelle is here.”

  “Okay, send her up.”

  So then that happens.

  That night, we haven’t made plans, but Petra is waiting outside the dressing room. That’s too bad, because Cecelia shows up. Cecelia is a Swedish model I know from New York. When she doesn’t understand what you have said, she says “Pern?” instead of “Pardon?” She is pretty much the dirtiest girl I have ever been with, in a very wonderful way, and quite beautiful.

  Cecelia wants to go to Les Bains Douches. This is the last place I want to go, but we go long enough for her to score some coke. Go back to my room and it lasts way into the morning. At nine a.m. I have her over my knee and am spanking her with her hairbrush out on the balcony. The front desk calls and asks us to please take our activities inside the room. They are getting complaints from the passing motorists.

  Starting at noon, I have to do the British press. I have done articles for the New Musical Express before with this guy—I think his name was Roy Carr—who was smart and respectful. But these guys they send over from the two leading music papers are creepy, self-important poseurs. Makes you afraid to say anything in the interview, because you know the article is going to be about them and not you, and certainly not the music.

  We get to London and are playing the ICA. It’s not much fun. We’re getting used to playing these really nice halls in Europe for a thousand to two thousand people. This place holds five hundred or so and the audience is sitting on bleachers. They look most uncomfortable. It isn’t nice and it isn’t wild. The crowd can’t drink or smoke. If it isn’t a beautiful theater with plush chairs and an exquisite sound system, they should be able to drink and smoke. I don’t know why on earth Island has insisted we play here. It’s not horrible, but it just doesn’t make any sense.

  I go into the big record store in Piccadilly Circus. I am in line to pay and the guy in front of me asks if they have the new Lounge Lizards record. The clerk tells him that they don’t have it.

  I step up to the counter and ask, “You don’t have the new Lounge Lizards record here?”

  “You’re John Lurie, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, why don’t you have my record?”

  “You tell me. We keep trying to order it, everyone is asking for it, but we can’t get it.”

  “You mean it’s not out here yet?”

  “No, no one in London can get it.”

  So why the fuck are we here, losing $5,000, to play the ICA to promote a record that is not available?

  * * *

  —

  We fly to Sardinia. We are looking forward to this. Four days in Sardinia. The ocean. Stephen Torton is going to meet us there. I have brought a Super 8 camera and we are going to try to make the music video.

  We arrive at the airport in Sardinia and they have one van for the nine of us.

  “Well, it’s a small island, can’t be that far.”

  We spend four hours hunched in this tiny van with no air conditioning. It is 104 degrees. Knees, elbows, and irritation are everywhere. And sweat. We’re tired and hungry as the van swerves and lurches around hairpin curves.

  We finally arrive and our legs can hardly unfold out onto the pavement.

  A truck with a loudspeaker drives around blaring, “STASERA, JAN LOOREEE! JAN LOORREE!”

  The promoter comes up all smiles.

  “Chow, John Lurie!! Chow, John Lurie!!”

  Ribot declares that I am dog food and finds it funny for a little too long. It is amazing how the Italians greet you like everything is wonderful when it is anything but wonderful. Two of the guys in the band are vomiting in the parking lot, next to the van, because of the drive. Wonderful.

  Before we left New York, I called the guys in the band and said that if they had stolen the cotton kimono robes from their hotel rooms in Japan, they should bring them with them on the tour for the video. They all swore they had not stolen the robes. I brought a couple of extra robes just in case, but of course every one of them had stolen his robe.

  We shoot the video for the song “Big Heart” mostly on our one day off in Sardinia. Torton is wonderful.

  We find a steep hill, overlooking the sea. A steep, rocky incline that is really more a mountain than a hill. The band all wear the Japanese robes and venture down a twisting, dusty path that goes all the way to the water. Torton stays at the top with the camera. I say, “Go!” and we march up the steep incline, legs high, muscles straining toward Torton, who is some two hundred meters above us. Get halfway to him and I say, “Okay, let’s do it again.”

  There are grumbles. It is over one hundred degrees.

  “Come on! This is fun!”

  We do it again, this time walking all the way up to Torton.

  “How was it?”

  “Okay. I want to get it from that other cliff as well.”

  “Okay, everybody back down!”

  More grumbling.

  “Come on! This is fun! It’s going to be on TV!!”

  We go back down.

  The basic idea behind the video is that we are insane monks, with Roy carrying a boombox on his shoulder like it is a sacred item. Everyone’s face is really solemn. We come up the hill, through some ruins, and reverently place the boombox down, then wait, erect and unmoving. At a certain phrase that happens twice in the song, we
all dance wildly. A kind of Muhammad Ali shuffle that we do facing one another in two squares for four bars, turn right for four bars, and then back.

  It is the silliest thing ever made and I love it.

  29

  When Life Punches You in the Face, You Have to Get Back Up. How Else Can Life Punch You in the Face Again?

  For years, I never left the island of Manhattan, unless I was on tour. And on tour you only see the inside of the plane, the airport, the van to the hotel, the hotel room, the venue, and the tour bus.

  The only time you ever get any fresh air is when you step out of the tour bus onto the tar parking lot when you stop at a restaurant on the highway.

  Otherwise, for years there had been no fresh air.

  But fresh air is very good for you. You tend to forget that if you never get it.

  Green things are good for you.

  Evan and I rented a nice house in Killington, Vermont, to write the music for the next Lounge Lizards record. Val hooked the house up and got a piano moved in. She was amazingly good at getting stuff like that done.

  For some reason I couldn’t write a note of music.

  I fell into a sort of coma. I suppose I needed to do this. I had been going at full speed, round the clock, for years, without ever stopping. Or maybe fresh air is actually bad for you.

  Evan had discovered Astor Piazzolla and it had hit him really hard. He began working on his tango stuff for bandoneón all day long.

  I don’t know how Piazzolla came into Evan’s view. I had not heard of him. Now, to me, that anyone who cares about music at all has not heard the music of Piazzolla is just wrong. Particularly a record called Tango: Zero Hour.

  I feel similarly about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who Evan also introduced me to. He took me to see him at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It started out with harmonium and a bunch of guys with mustaches sitting on the stage, singing almost like they were not really interested, more like they were mumbling.

  This went on for quite a while. I turned to Evan and said, “What the fuck, Evan? Why am I here?” as the men with mustaches sat on the stage sort of singing.

  But it built and built. And then it built more. Over a long period of time, it just slowly built, and somehow you were inside it. Hypnotized by it. And then Nusrat started hitting these lines that ripped into my soul. It was like I had been transfigured.

  As the proper, polite people sat there in their seats at BAM, absorbing their culture as people of their class are supposed to do, it hit me so hard that I jumped up and started screaming in approval, “Fuck you! Fuck you!! Motherfucker!! Oh!!”

  * * *

  —

  Anyway, we were in Vermont and I could not write a note.

  I went fishing, shot baskets, and slept a lot. Ev cooked and there was one restaurant nearby. Uncle Jerry and my sister, Liz, came up to visit for a couple of days, but nothing much else happened. I slowed to a halt, which I needed way more than I had realized. I was hoping that they would let me see Liz at Marathon House, which was close by in New Hampshire. In a way, that is why we went up there, but that didn’t happen.

  I drove down to New York to direct a music video for this Japanese singer I liked named Sion.

  Then I went back up to Vermont and tried to write music. Nothing happened and then I just stopped. Evan was getting a potbelly. Evan, who had always been as thin as a rail, was putting on weight around the middle and seemed proud of it. The only physical activity that he would do with me was canoeing, which we did every day at sunset. Evan said he could go canoeing because it wouldn’t affect his paunch. So we would rent a canoe and paddle around the outskirts of a lake. It was quite pleasant. We would say the kind of things to each other that brothers do and find incredibly funny. Things that would be lost on the rest of the world.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back to New York, I moved into a big prewar brownstone. A garden duplex apartment on West Eleventh Street that would have cost a fortune, but they charged me about half the normal rate because they were selling the place and had the right to ask me to leave on short notice. Also, they had the right to show the apartment while I lived there, which led to constant wars with real estate agents who would show up with no warning, which was not supposed to be the deal.

  Real estate agents in Manhattan can be a tough lot. If they came unannounced, I got pretty good at scaring them away. Or if I was too tired to scare them, I would come downstairs in my underwear, eating a cracker.

  I gave Kazu the apartment on Third Street and moved to Eleventh Street by myself.

  The band was playing at the Bottom Line one night and I was practicing in my apartment, in the afternoon, before the gig. Someone in my posh new neighborhood was yelling out the window from the next building, complaining about the noise. Then he threw a bag of trash into my backyard. I went out and yelled up. Saw someone duck back behind their window, so I knew which apartment had done this. I picked up a grapefruit from the trash that had spilled out all over my garden and threw it right through the glass of his window. It made a nice hole, exactly the size of the grapefruit.

  I bought an eight-foot toy basketball hoop and put it upstairs in the spare room that was painted bright pink. For a while that was the only thing in the pink room. I would play one on one with Rammellzee with a little orange basketball.

  Down by Law opens the New York Film Festival. It is a big deal. There are all these events and dinners.

  There is this guy who calls himself Doc. He thinks that we should be friends. Kind of like the inevitable ex-drummer who comes into the dressing room and announces that because he once played drums, you must now be friends.

  The guy is creepy, and every night that I go to a party for the New York Film Festival, there he is. And he wants to talk. On the third night, at Cafe Un Deux Trois, my friend Lori Singer is sitting next to me. When she gets up to use the restroom, he rushes to plop himself down in Lori’s seat like he is playing musical chairs against invisible people.

  He seems angry. Like, not angry about something specific but as if this is pretty much the essence of the guy. Doc says, “Look, I knew Tom Waits back when he was this nerdy, alienated guy that nobody liked. I knew him before he decided to change himself into the Bukowski persona that you think is Tom Waits. But that is not who he really is.”

  Well, this is somehow worse than the guy who comes into the dressing room and announces that he used to play the drums. This guy is trying to become my friend by exposing something about Tom that Tom would clearly rather not have known. And I want to get away from this guy.

  Then he says, “The Tom Waits that you think is your friend does not exist.”

  * * *

  —

  Damn, another left turn.

  Years later, I had a series of devastating problems, one after the other. In order to try to get my work back or to protect it, I had to go to war with forces far more powerful than myself. It completely disrupted, and almost destroyed, my path as an artist. It almost destroyed my desire to continue living on this planet.

  These nightmares were going to be the bulk of this book and are the reason the title, for a long time, was What Do You Know About Music? You’re Not a Lawyer. I wanted to hold people accountable by shining a light on what had happened.

  But in the end, they are just such unpleasant stories, I didn’t want to write them and can’t imagine who would want to read them. Who wants to watch me turn over a rock to show all the little bugs crawling around? My hope is, as with all my work, that this book will be something that people find uplifting.

  I have decided wherever possible to not even name people.

  I will try to tell these stories here, as quickly and concisely as possible, without going too deeply into the ugly minutiae of each one. But I feel I really do have to tell these stories in order to be as honest as I’ve tried
to be throughout the book.

  Warning—if this shit bugs you, you may skip to the next chapter.

  The first disasters were the making of Fishing with John and Live in Berlin.

  * * *

  —

  Fishing with John was a TV show I shot in 1991 and 1992, where I would go ice fishing with Willem Dafoe or fishing in Thailand with Dennis Hopper.

  I knew nothing about fishing, or next to nothing, so everything would go wrong.

  It was intended that everything go wrong.

  We had a narrator, Robb Webb, who sounded like the voice of God, sharing absolutely wrong and ludicrous information about nature.

  He would say how brave my guest and I were to be embarking on an adventure of this sort. Because Robb’s voice was so solid and so serious, it sounded like everything he said was absolutely, perfectly true.

  Live in Berlin started out as a live Lounge Lizards record that we’d make in Berlin at the end of an upcoming 1991 tour, but then the idea came up of filming it and releasing the film worldwide with the album.

  The concert film was to be paid for by the Japanese company that was producing Fishing with John, which was run by Mr. Okabe, who is a wonderful and honorable man, along with his equally wonderful and honorable assistant Fumiko Horiuchi. I loved these people then and still love them now.

  However, their representative in New York was not of the same character. Like, at all.

  * * *

  —

  Everything was going along fine.

  It was my assistant’s idea to make a concert film along with the live album and get the Japanese company to invest in it.

  She brought in this young film director to make the movie. She told me that Robert Burden had approved the young director. Robert Burden was someone I trusted implicitly. He had edited, and saved, the first Fishing with John episode, as well as The Lounge Lizards’ “Big Heart” video.