by John Lurie
They decided to have a screening of Down by Law and announced in the paper that I would be there to present the film and sign autographs. Of course, no one asked me until forty-five minutes before the screening. I told them that I had sound check and could not go. They said that I had to go. To which I responded that I didn’t have to do anything but play. They kept people waiting for two hours in the lobby for my arrival, but I never showed. No wonder the whole country ended up hating me.
They continued to argue about me on the front page of the papers. Stephen spoke perfect Brazilian Portuguese, or as Erik called it, “the sexy language with all the beige in it.”
Stephen translated an article to me that said, “The sax player/actor John Lurie was completely lost at the register trying to buy a beer. Like a monkey with a huge amount of Brazilian currency in his hand. He was confused by the money and the language. A Brazilian actress and her musician boyfriend took care of him so that he wouldn’t feel so Stranger Than Paradise.”
Val and Stephen started hiding the papers from me. Stephen later said, “We had to protect him, like Nixon.”
Even the stuff they were writing that was supposed to be favorable was annoying. O Globo said, “John Lurie—Saxual Orgy!”
At the end of the week, Estado had a big photo of me on the front page. Underneath the photo was the caption “JOHN LURIE: PATHETIC AND IGNORANT.”
The amazing thing was that there was no article to go with it. Just the photo and the caption.
Perhaps Tad Friend should move there.
36
Voice of Chunk
The Gregg Popovich of Music
There was love in it.
We wouldn’t say it out loud, not then, but it was like that. There was love in it. It was strong and exciting and exotic and nothing remotely like it had ever existed before and there was love in it.
This music was amazing. Now I wanted to record it. There was a two-year period where I decided to just go on tour and play. No more acting. No more trying to get a record deal.
I wanted what the Gnawa musicians had: A tribe that traveled from town to town and played music. Music that worshipped and exclaimed the beautiful weirdness that is this life.
This music was ready to be recorded, and if I waited too long it would be in danger of going stale. Of course the last thing I wanted to do was start shopping the idea of a new Lounge Lizards album to record companies. Take something exquisite, alive, and precious, and lay it before soulless dolts in fancy office buildings and then wait for them to assess it, to tell us whether or not we are worthy of being recorded? Oh hell, no. It didn’t make sense. I just couldn’t do it.
So while Evan and Liz took the money that we’d inherited from Uncle Jerry and bought the homes that they still live in today, I took almost all of the money I had inherited and brought the Lizards into the studio.
We had a band meeting. We all sat on the floor of my place on Eighteenth Street and Kazu brought out beers, which added something nice in the air. Kazu always brought out something nice in the air.
I saw it as something I was doing for all of us. But I wanted to make sure, before I took a risk like this, that they felt the same way and at least we would have a band when the record came out. That they would commit to keeping the band together for a year or two. I mean, I was about to take ten times more money than I had ever seen before and invest it in the hopes of making something beautiful and special.
But that does make sense, doesn’t it? What else are you supposed to do with money? For that matter, what else are you supposed to do with this life?
I would give them each a certain amount for the whole record—I think it was three thousand each for five days’ work—and they would get a royalty in the event that it ever went into the black.
Everyone was there and into it. Completely into it. And of course, each of them would be a member of the band forever, if that was what I wanted.
Except Marc Ribot didn’t show up for the meeting.
Being in the studio with nine musicians is expensive. A studio that is large enough to accommodate so many musicians playing live is expensive. You need separation in the sound, so that one player doesn’t bleed onto another player’s mic. You need a large room with many booths and baffling, which is expensive. A studio capable of providing that many separate headphone mixes is expensive. The engineer is expensive. Tape is expensive. Recording these days is not so expensive, but recording a large band, live, even now, with the ability to have overdubs is really expensive.
Expensive. Expensive.
Almost any time that I’ve been in the studio, I’ve been in the position of anxiously watching the clock because of the allotted budget. The music loses something because you are trying to play without making mistakes. You don’t go all out. You are much more about playing it safe, to make sure that you have everything without some ghastly mistake in a cut that you cannot afford to rerecord.
This time there was no budget. We could do it until it was right. I had only the slightest trepidation that the money would get out of control and run out. God was on my side. It had to go well.
Making a record is a very artificial thing to do. You are trying to encapsulate, in sound, this thing that is a little moment of soul. This thing that, initially, has come to you like a child’s prayer. Then it blossoms with the musicians in rehearsal and then explodes into life when you play it.
It has been beautiful in the past, and for the record you want it to be as exquisite as it has ever been. You want it to be perfect. The best time, ever, that that song is performed live, you want it recorded. That is really all that will do: the best this song is ever played.
That time the tempo picked up really slightly after the B section in Kyoto, you want that. But you also want the section after that to be played a bit slower, like that one time in Munich, where you nailed it a year ago.
You want it to be free and loose but concise and mistake-free.
You want all of that.
But now you are in an artificial environment. The drummer and the percussion player are in booths. You can’t see them, just the tops of their little heads.
Everything comes to you through headphones. You can’t feel the bass or the drums. You can’t feel the guy standing next to you when he stomps on the floor in the middle of his solo. There is no muscle, no sweat. Just little ticks of information in your ears, coming through a machine, into wires, into your headphones.
People think that music is sound, but truth be told, music is vibration.
So many nights, we played in rooms with bad sound or where the sound onstage was untenable, but halfway through the show we had conquered the room and intuitively found a way to make it glow. It has nothing to do with science and everything to do with something else that cannot be defined. You never really learn anything for the next time. It is just about finding the vibration of the room. I was half-watching this thing about Quincy Jones on TV, but when he said that when he goes into the recording studio, he always takes a moment to let God in, then I sat up and paid more attention, because that is what it is.
Something that starts as a warm tickle in your brain. A little bubble of light. A gift. That is now being recorded and traveling through wires to other musicians and going through more wires into big machines and recorded onto plastic and sent through wires to more plastic, then mass produced by the tone deaf in a factory in New Jersey. And that little, pure bubble of a prayer is supposed to still be there and organic. But you want the thing to be heard; you want that inspiration to travel, to be a beacon. You want to send it out into the world, in the pure way that it came to you. And if you can accomplish that, you will make the world a better place.
I was getting ready to go to the studio. I was excited as hell to record this music. I was on a mission.
Kazu made me breakfast. She came marching through wi
th her big floppy alligator-faced slippers that I got her as a present.
The phone rang and it was Ribot. He stated that he wasn’t going into the studio to be paid one lump sum for the record. He had to get whatever the union requirement was. The union requirement was based on three-hour increments. I think that back then, it was $250 for every three hours.
Not only did he insist that he had to be paid union wages, the entire band had to be paid like that.
But I had calculated that money. What I had offered them would end up being more than the union session rate for the time they were going to put in. So it was ridiculous for him to be arguing for them to get less money.
But I wanted them all there. To all be into the making of this thing. And I didn’t want to be recording with one eye constantly on the clock, calculating that if I let the horns go home in half an hour when we overdubbed the bass parts, I could save $1,200.
I just wanted to go in, allocate a certain amount of money to the project, which was a lot of fucking money, and then work on the music, all together, as a unit, until it was great.
It was really rubbing me the wrong way how ugly and aggressively Ribot was standing up for his principle. He was angrily and steadfastly defending the sanctity of the union, as though Karl Marx were his uncle.
The whole thing pissed me off, because Marc had not made it to the meeting and had not even called to say he would not be there. He ambushed me on one of the most important days of my life. I thought it was an important day in all their lives.
Forget about movies. Forget about record companies. Just have a tribe that goes from town to town and performs this ritual.
Maybe somehow in a way that I don’t and didn’t see, I was not true to this. But if that was the case, I really do not see it. Even today. I know my heart and intention were in the right place.
Something not good was happening. There was this faint rumble of dissent. Slightly uncomfortable glances. We were supposed to be trying to document this thing of love that we had created, and now something was poisoning it.
* * *
—
The second day in the studio, Curtis was late. Several hours late.
He finally called. His place had been robbed.
I felt bad for Curt. I knew he was going to be a mess when he finally arrived. He didn’t do well with this kind of thing. But then it occurred to me that now I was going to have to pay all the guys while we waited for Curtis. Two hundred fifty dollars per person, every three hours, if we did it Ribot’s way, which still hadn’t been resolved.
There was an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. A wedge was growing between me and the band. I knew that the whole movie star thing was difficult for them to take. No matter how hard I tried, no matter what it said in the contract about not using just my photo or not calling it “John Lurie and The Lounge Lizards,” we would arrive in a town and there would be an enormous photo of me with “JOHN LURIE! FROM THE MOVIES!” and hardly a mention of anyone or anything else. And damn, Evan was in the band. How did that make him feel? Evan wasn’t a sideman. None of them were.
I also knew that every time one of them met a woman on the road and would be in a hotel room in Berlin or Rome or Paris, just at the moment they were unhooking a brassiere, they inevitably would be asked the question, “What’s John really like?”
Fuck, I would have hated me too.
But there was another thing going on as well.
On the tour before, Marc had discovered a piece of paper, in the tour manager’s room, with a breakdown of who in the band was being paid what.
It looked to Marc like I was making more than the entire rest of the band. What was not taken into account was the enormous amount of expenses that I was being reimbursed for—airline tickets, rehearsal studios, salaries for sound people, hotels on days off, and just on and on.
But no one mentioned this piece of paper Marc had found to me. And it was just assumed that I was ripping off the band. And I had always taken great pride in treating the musicians as well as possible. And if we were struck by any of the infinite ways the tour could lose money instead of making any, like the biggest concert being canceled or a train strike or whatever, I paid them what was promised and took the loss myself.
Years later, I kept hearing about this piece of paper that Ribot had found that made it look like I was getting rich. Every musician in Manhattan seemed to have heard that I ripped off my musicians. Like it was Lower East Side musicians’ lore. And I never got a chance to explain it. Bothers the fuck out of me. I lost a fortune on that band.
Despite all the tension, there was so much magic in that music that It, the Magic, kind of went: You guys can act like a bunch of babies, but I am still here. I am Magic and cannot be denied.
I recently had a conversation with Evan about musicians and how disappointing they can be as human beings. It was specifically about going through cancer treatment, and though people knew I had cancer, I only heard from three of the eighty or so musicians who had been in The Lounge Lizards at one time or another.
When you share that kind of love with people, it is something really disappointing and confusing when the love is needed and isn’t there.
Evan said this amazing thing, and I wish I had written it down at the time to get the exact quote, but he said, “When you are playing music with people and it is really what music is supposed to be, that is their deepest essence that you are communicating with. This is not always who they are in their daily lives.”
* * *
—
I was scarfing down some food, listening to the takes from the day before, trying to get all my shit together for the studio, and arguing with Ribot on the phone about union scale again, all at the same time.
Ribot hung up on me.
I was furious.
I was about to go out the door in a rage when I heard the tape that was playing behind me, in the living room.
And it hit me.
It was the song “One Big Yes.” It got its title because someone had posted a personal ad in the back of The Village Voice that said, “John Lurie, your music falls on me like they say love should, with One. Big. Yes.” The music on the tape was so beautiful. It hit me that it was so much more than this fight, and I slumped to the floor in the hallway and wept.
I could feel Kazu watching me cry, having no idea what to do.
Earlier that year the band had been in Brazil and had recorded a few of the songs because we had a lot of time off and the studio was incredibly cheap.
The studio was up on a hill above that enormous statue of Jesus. There was a Ping-Pong table outside, and while we played, Ribot would play a note on the guitar every time the ball hit the paddle or the table. Pink pink ponk pink. The band was always having moments like that. We were fun as a band.
The only thing that was usable from Brazil was the song “Uncle Jerry.” I had had the engineer run a cable down the hall and into the bathroom, where I did my solo. When I was warming up, walking around the house/studio, I had noticed that there was a great naturally resonant sound in the bathroom.
After recording the song, with me in the bathroom and the guys in the studio, I came down the hall and into the big room with the rest of the musicians. Curtis smiled at me and pointed one finger toward the heavens. Like, Yes, John, you nailed it.
The song “Voice of Chunk” was conceived on that tiny electric keyboard in a fifteenth-century church in Sicily. Then Erik came by my place on Eighteenth Street and added the bass line. A simple six-note line that powerfully, exquisitely, held the whole thing together. We recorded it in Brazil, and though the band was solid and Ribot’s solo ascended perfectly, the recording really wasn’t good enough quality to use. So we redid it in New York.
But something was wrong. The groove had lost something. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but Dougie had clearly ch
anged his part. I kept asking Dougie and Erik to come by my house and compare the two versions, but they really didn’t want to. They didn’t want to bother.
Finally, Erik and Dougie begrudgingly came over to listen and see what I was complaining about.
They understood the problem immediately and agreed that the New York groove was not as good, but said that it was fine.
But it wasn’t anywhere near as good as it could be. I had to cajole each musician to come back into the studio for a quick two-hour session to redo the song. With everyone complaining, “The tapes are fine. We don’t want to go back into the studio.”
I was baffled. Everyone agreed that the Brazilian takes had a much better groove, something that Dougie had changed in the couple of months in between the recordings but didn’t want to bother to go in and do again. That they had done enough work on this album and it wasn’t great, but it was fine. I couldn’t understand their attitude. Why wouldn’t they want to come back in for a few hours to make it better? It just didn’t make sense to me. This was the version of the song that would last forever; it had to be done right. “It’s fine.” What the fuck is that?
I was determined to make this record as good as possible. I was amazed that they weren’t. I pushed them really hard to get it how it was supposed to be, with everybody whining about this and that. I was at war against anything that stopped this album from reaching the thing. The world does not need another album. But the world can most certainly use something that, when heard, makes chills go up your spine.
Most of the stuff we got. In more than moments, it’s there. The material and the memory we had of it, the love, carried over. Despite the squabbling and the whatever, mostly it is there.
I can almost listen to it today and enjoy it. But not really.
