The History of Bones

by John Lurie

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  After the recording, I took a vacation with Kazu, Glenn O’Brien, and James Nares in St. Barts. That was a nice combination of people. Kazu and I slept in the same bed but weren’t having sex.

  Glenn thought I was a pervert to not be having sex with Kazu.

  I have been afraid of flying for a long time now. I don’t remember when it started, but I must not have been afraid then. To get to St. Barts back then you had to take this odd, skinny propeller plane, which sat about twenty people, from St. Maarten. Even before the propellers started, the woman behind me begins making this weird, high-pitched noise.

  The plane sputters and lurches down the runway but does not get up enough juice to get off the ground and get up over the mountain directly in front of us, so the pilot slams on the brakes and we skid off the runway onto the grass.

  The woman behind me had to be let off the plane. But I didn’t think anything of it. And today I am scared shitless to fly.

  The next morning I woke up really early, like four a.m., before it was light. I went and climbed up on top of this hill that was next to the house. Caribbean turquoise water. I felt pretty good. To get that recording in the can gave me something. I felt this at other times later in my life when I finished a project that meant something to me, but not like this.

  It was like something had been added to my essence. My soul weighed a little more.

  I just sat there and watched the water for a long time.

  I had my best vacation ever in St. Barts. Snorkeled and fished and ate well, and St. Barts wasn’t as creepy as it seems to have become now.

  We had a jeep. Kazu and I would stand up in the backseat as Glenn drove. We’d sing at the top of our lungs, “Why can’t the French people be like me? Happy and holy and living free.” I have been cheerfully irritating people for a long time.

  Val was worried about all the money that I had spent on the record, so she talked me into accepting this job composing the music for a TV show that Aaron Lipstadt had done, which I forget the name of, some horrid police thing, and then Mystery Train for Jarmusch. So when I got back from St. Barts, I had to write and record the music for both of these projects before going in to mix Voice of Chunk.

  Mystery Train was the last work I did with Jim. He wanted the same instruments that they had used in Elvis’s Sun Sessions, which was a nice, limited palette to work with. I bought a great Gibson, a hollow-body guitar, through the mail. I thoroughly expected that it would be a piece of shit, but when it arrived it was this beautiful guitar with a deep, throaty sound when you played it through an amp.

  It was just me on lead guitar and harmonica, Dougie on drums, Tony Garnier on bass, and Marc Ribot on rhythm guitar. Marc was there mostly to help keep a glue on things in case my guitar playing went haywire. I had never played guitar in the studio before. I don’t think that I had ever played guitar anywhere but on my couch before. So who knows what might have gone wrong. I didn’t know how to sit or stand and be comfortable playing. I was so used to slumping down on my couch or playing in my bed, it seemed odd to actually be sitting up and playing.

  Mixing Voice of Chunk, like any recording that I’ve cared about, was a nightmare. I had spent so much more money than the budgeted hundred thousand, but I wasn’t getting the right sound in the mixing studio.

  Mixing. I can’t stand mixing. It’s like taking the purity out of the music and then trying to cram it back in again.

  You want the music to have the wild energy of the rough tapes, but you also want to refine it. Make the trombone louder in that part, fix the piano in this part. There is a long period of time while the engineer is doing stuff with the machines that I do not understand. Before beginning to mix each thing, there is a three or four hour period while the engineer is working furiously, and there is nothing for me to do, except do drawings on whatever paper is in the studio. I hear stuff a certain way and want to keep it like that, but the next time the song plays, it is gone. And there is no real language to explain what has to be different. “The attack on the snare doesn’t have enough boing in it anymore.”

  On the record I want the horn to sound like it does to me when I play. This is, for some reason, hard to capture. I had one engineer tell me that my skull resonated when I played and that is why it sounded better to me. But in order to recapture the sound that I wanted to get, we had to add stuff from outboard equipment, which seems beyond unholy to me.

  Maybe that is partly true, but I know for certain that with the saxophone, a whole series of overtones tend to get lost. With each note there is a series of overtones that give the note its fullness and warmth. To me it is one of the problems with digital music in general, these overtones are often missing. In the old days there was just one mic in the middle of the room, and I think that, besides the fact that they were wonderful players, this is the reason players like Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges or Lester Young sound so full and rich.

  For some reason that I do not understand, in order to recapture the natural sound of a lot of the instruments, they have to be fed through all these machines. One tiny turn of the knob that got the sound right on the piano made the horns sound plastic. Add a little treble to the snare drum and suddenly the bass sounds like it was played on an old synthesizer.

  The hundred thousand for the record was all used up. I wasn’t getting the right sound in the mixing studio and was spending more and more money trying to get it right. In the meantime, all the unrest in the band was fermenting. I was in the mixing room on Broadway and Bleecker for fourteen to sixteen hours a day, had spent all my money, and felt very unappreciated and lonely working on it.

  We were working on the song “A Paper Bag and the Sun,” and I went outside to buy cigarettes at five in the morning. There wasn’t a soul around, and the buzzing streetlights on Broadway were intoning the song back to me. For some reason it reminded me of a line from a Rimbaud poem, “rain soaked bread.” And that was how the song got its title. It was very much like a message being sent to me through the streetlights, which made me want to go on.

  We were finally getting the sound right when Dougie announced that he was leaving the band. He had signed a deal with his rock band, World at a Glance. He was going to be a rock star because Island Records was finally getting behind his band and he had to quit because he would have time commitments.

  Hadn’t we just had a meeting where all the musicians said that if I put up all this money to make the record, they were staying? That they were committed to this band’s being a band?

  And for fuck’s sake, at one point Dougie had quit Iggy Pop’s band to play with The Lounge Lizards. A huge and courageous leap.

  World at a Glance lasted about six months. Torton called them Band at a Glance.

  Then I got into a war with Erik on the writer’s credit. I had given him a share of the publishing on songs in which I felt he had greatly enhanced the basic nature of the piece, like “Voice of Chunk.” How it normally worked was that I would come up with a melody line and maybe a guitar part, and usually the bass part or something else. I would have three or four things mapped out before bringing the stuff into rehearsal for the band to kick around. We would try this and try that, with the musicians adding stuff—amazing stuff—as it went, and I would direct it: “Try that later, maybe up an octave, and wait till the horns finish their first line.”

  It was a really good way of working. It was a way of weaving their exceptional and idiosyncratic talents into the compositions. And I think perhaps my greatest talent is finding the beauty in a musician’s idiosyncrasies. I am the Gregg Popovich of music.

  It was a creative process that we were all part of, but I directed it, and the basic concept was always mine. When it came time to record, I would hand out credit to the guys for their participation, but it was difficult to really quantify. If someone had come up with something great, I would give
them 20 or 25 percent of the writer’s credit, but usually on the more open pieces I would just try to make sure that each of them got some credit and money to make them all feel like part of it. This was absolutely not something that I had to do. I had written the music, and if someone added a B flat on the end of a line, that was really not deserving of a writing credit.

  Well, suddenly Erik thought that he had written everything. There were two songs that I only had the melody for, and he’d come by my house and added bass lines that made the whole piece come into shape, and for these I gave him a writer’s share, a well-deserved writer’s share. But there were songs now that had actually been finished pieces before there was any bass on there at all. They really did not need his part. Erik wanted credit for these, and I felt like I was getting robbed.

  It made me really angry. I loved Erik, and I think that this was just part of that momentary insanity that bands go through, but it was at the perfectly wrong moment.

  I was Captain Ahab chasing this mystical thing. And I caught it. That record is magic. If you can’t hear that, I feel bad for you. But what I had to do to get there, that ferocious push, I don’t know, I guess that is just what it costs.

  I was shocked that the guys weren’t going to rise up with me. There was a cheapness of spirit.

  Why are you playing music if you have this opportunity and you are okay with its not being as good as it can be?

  I guess it was some Matthew 26:41 shit.

  I loved the guys in that band, but when it came down to making the music right or my relationship with them, well, the guys weren’t going to win. That band could turn a room upside down. That is the shit. That is absolutely it.

  I loved that band. I just loved the music more and had to protect it.

  37

  Rasputin the Eel

  Nobody wanted it.

  When Voice of Chunk was finally finished, I hired a lawyer to shop it to labels in the United States, but we couldn’t get anyone to touch it. “Record sales are very slow right now. The industry is in trouble.” Good! For the shit you’re putting out, it should be in trouble.

  Of course, it is hard to know if the lawyer I was paying was actually doing anything. They often don’t. You pay them but have no idea if they have done anything. But it really did seem like nobody wanted it. I sent it out myself to a couple of places and got no response. I thought, This isn’t possible, it’s so beautiful. Even an idiot can hear that. How can they not want it?

  We got some distribution deals in Europe and Japan, where the band was much more popular. But in the United States, nobody wanted it.

  After recording the Voice of Chunk album, that band had broken up. I felt like it was time to push Ribot out of the nest. He was doing all these amazing things onstage but played his parts differently every night. The problem was, Evan’s parts on the piano and Ribot’s parts on the guitar had to lock into each other. But live, Ribot couldn’t hear what Evan was doing because the piano was so quiet onstage. So every night, Evan would have to change what he was doing to hook into Ribot. I didn’t like how Evan’s genius was forced to be led around by the whims of Ribot’s brilliant insanity. To me it seemed the only path for Ribot was to be a leader. That way he could go out there and do what he did and people would have to try to follow him.

  So it seemed best to give him a friendly push to start his own thing. We met at a bar and I explained how I was feeling and he talked about where he was at and it seemed like an amicable separation. But I guess it wasn’t taken like that.

  A few months later Marc had a party, either for his birthday or an album release, and Val and I were conspicuously not invited. I was hurt and thought that it wasn’t right, so Val and I were having breakfast outside at Café Orlin on a beautiful day and we decided that we would send a Strip-O-Gram to Marc’s party. It was just supposed to be a joke. We didn’t intend it as something mean.

  Val called some number and among our various options was a stripper dressed as a policewoman. So we decided on that. We would send a policewoman to Marc’s party. I wrote a little non sequitur poem for her to recite. I don’t remember exactly what it said but was something like:

  Who will wrestle the royal commander to his death? Oh I will!

  And on Tuesdays, on Tuesdays.

  Yes! Yes! It will be and flowers.

  Holy divinity of snurks.

  He used to be your boss. He used to be your boss.

  Well, we thought it would be fun. A little mean, but mostly funny. We felt like it was really shitty of Marc not to invite us, but basically we understood. We just wanted to send a little message.

  It really backfired.

  The stripper dressed in a police uniform was a big woman and, from the reports that I got later, very aggressive. She was walking around with a nightstick and pushing people around a bit. Everyone at the party actually believed, for the first ten minutes or so, that she was a real policewoman, investigating a noise complaint. She asked who was responsible there. Marc said that he was, and after doing lascivious things with her nightstick, she pulled him toward her. When she started taking off her clothes and reciting the poem, Marc went along with it because he thought that his girlfriend, Pascale, as a surprise, had ordered it for his party. I guess it was really hideous. And the party was in the afternoon, so there were kids there. Oh fuck, that is really bad.

  When she got to the part of the poem that went, “He used to be your boss. He used to be your boss,” Roy Nathanson shrieked in accusatory horror, “John Lurie did this! John Lurie did this!”

  I am sorry, Marc. I really am sorry. It wasn’t supposed to go like that.

  The Voice of Chunk album was scheduled to come out in Europe in the summer of 1989. I had to do something for the cover artwork and put a new band together.

  I have often been accused of taking too much control over everything. So I thought that I would try not to get too involved in the artwork. I turned it over to a designer who was a friend of a friend; I won’t mention his name. I did a photo shoot with Ari Marcopoulos of my face in profile, which we gave over to the friend of a friend to design the cover around. It was the first time that I’d ever used just my photo, alone, on the front, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea. The band was a band. Period. Even though the band on this recording no longer existed, and probably to use my face was better for marketing reasons, because of the movies and my handsome-like-a-dog face, this wasn’t really what the music was about. It was very much a group that brought out the beauty in this music.

  When I go to see what this guy has done for the artwork, I really can’t believe it. He has taken the photo of my face and blown it up over the entire cover. Just my face with “Lounge Lizards” and “Voice of Chunk” written in. This is a record, not a CD, so the size of my face is enormous. About 30 percent bigger than it is in real life.

  “What’s this? I can’t use this!”

  “No, it’s good. It means that The Lounge Lizards are big now.”

  My brain spun on its axis.

  This guy had been very busy watching and playing golf.

  “This makes me look like I’m Donald Trump. The band is going to think I’ve lost my mind.”

  “No! It’s good.”

  “The only way I can use that photo is if you write, in big letters: ‘HEAD IS NOT ACTUAL SIZE.’ ”

  I have to figure something out quickly because the album is scheduled to come out soon in Germany and then the rest of Europe.

  I’m not sure what to do, but while I am getting a shiatsu massage from Ellen, the genius shiatsu person, some ideas float into my mind.

  We will take three pictures of Kazu’s mouth, and we will need an eel.

  Ari is incredibly adept at helping me implement it. We take the pictures of Kazu’s mouth outside of my house. These are to go, three times, along the bottom of the cov
er, and the eel is to underline the photo of my face.

  The eel has to be pre–rigor mortis so we can put it in a straight line. Ari and I go to South Street Seaport to see if we can buy an eel that has just recently died. There aren’t any. “Maybe tomorrow, probably not.”

  So we go to the docks where the fishing boats come in. No eels. Someone there suggests we go to Chinatown.

  A friend of Ari’s and mine was beaten up in Chinatown just days before. He was yelling at his girlfriend and suddenly these Chinese men appeared from everywhere and stomped him. Apparently the Chinese don’t take kindly to anyone’s being rude or boisterous on their turf.

  We go to a fish market that doesn’t have any eels. Then a restaurant, nothing. We both have to be somewhere else in an hour but the cover is overdue. We walk past a restaurant and see eels swimming in a tank in the window.

  I go inside and ask to speak to the owner. He’s a stocky Chinese guy in a classy old suit. I ask him if I can buy an eel. He says no.

  I ask him again: a hundred dollars for one live eel.

  He puts his arm behind my back and ushers me outside. He won’t look at me.

  We’re out on the street and he starts to go back into the restaurant.

  “Wait a minute, I want to buy an eel. How much do you want?”

  He shakes his head, still won’t acknowledge my existence. He won’t look me in the eye. He thinks I’m a white ghost.

  “I’ll give you two hundred fifty for an eel.”

  No response. He shakes his head and walks in a circle. I’m getting pissed. I want him to at least look at me. I haven’t forgotten about my friend who was beaten up here two weeks ago, but this guy is too rude and I am not having it. He has to at least look at me before I’m going to walk away. Ari looks very nervous as a crowd starts to gather.

  I’m really about to lose it, when a little old lady comes up behind me and pulls at my sleeve. I think that she’s going to tell me to be careful, but she whispers, “You want to buy eel? Follow me.”