by John Lurie
So we do. She has a little fish store down an alley. Inside a tank of moldy-looking carp, there are three live eels sticking to the bottom. It’s difficult to catch an eel in the net, as the aerated bubbles gush up to the surface and block your vision. You can’t really see their dark forms sliding along the bottom. It takes her forever but she finally gets one. I give her a hundred dollars and we race for the car with the eel in a bucket.
Ari and I are both late. We’ve got to do this quickly. We get to the Lower East Side and get out of the car. I dump the dying eel out onto the sidewalk. It slithers slowly. Ari tries to take its picture but it’s wrapping around itself. Then it starts to rain.
I ask if we can do it at my house, and Ari says, “Yeah, we can shoot it on the windowsill.”
We race over to my house, park illegally, and run up the stairs. The eel is covered with dirt from the sidewalk and I go into the bathroom to wash it off.
I’m holding the eel in the middle. It is completely dead and lifeless now, just a dead floppy thing, but when a single drop of water hits it, it springs to life!
Unless you’ve been through this, you cannot possibly have any idea how strong an eel is. It’s trying to bite me. Its mouth full of razor teeth goes whizzing by my face. The water has also made the eel so slippery that I can barely keep my grip. But it’s not the slipperiness that is so difficult, it’s the eel’s incredible strength. My arm is flailing around trying to hold it, and there is no way that I am going to let go of this live, slithering creature in my apartment. The slime is indestructible and will never be cleaned away. I will have to move out.
The eel snaps at my face as my back smashes against the corner of the bathroom door.
I am holding on for dear life.
Ari hears the crashing sounds coming from my bathroom and comes to the door just as I am grabbing the eel around the neck with both hands. I can see the whites all the way around Ari’s irises as I strangle the eel to death. It takes a long time and I go on longer than necessary to make sure the thing is dead.
Afterward I feel awful.
“You think it’s bad to strangle an eel?”
“Not if we don’t tell anyone,” Ari says.
We put the eel on the windowsill and snap five or six photos. It looks good. Ari splits and I go into the bathroom to wash my hands, but the slime won’t come off and my bathroom is covered with eel gunk that seems to only get more potent when you apply water.
I can’t get the stuff off my hands and I grab a towel and run out of the house, carrying the towel. When I get home that night the eel is gone. It’s not on the windowsill where we left it.
Later, at about ten that night, when I walk to Seventh Avenue, I see it in the gutter, fifty yards from my house.
Rasputin the Eel was still alive on the windowsill. After falling four flights and climbing up six steps back to street level, it then slithered almost all the way to Seventh Avenue in the gutter before finally succumbing to its death.
38
It Never Hovered Above the Ground
The vibe with the shreds of the band that remained was awful.
Dougie had left. Ribot was gone. Erik and I had had so many arguments about the writing credit that I just couldn’t take it anymore.
So it was Curt and Roy on trombone and saxophones, E. J. Rodriguez on percussion, and Evan on piano. We had to find people to play bass, drums, and guitar for the summer tours that would support the release of Voice of Chunk in Europe. I started asking around, getting lists of names.
We had auditions. Painful auditions.
There was a feeling of sadness and some amount of an anger underneath, because at one point, everybody in the old band had deeply loved each other and the new band didn’t fit together so well.
Maybe I am not Gregg Popovich because his players, as tough as he was on them, loved him when they left or seemed to. And this was sadly not that.
* * *
—
This band is: Roy Nathanson on saxophones. Roy is Jewish, white, and gay. At least he was gay at the time but turned out not to be. Curtis Fowlkes on trombone. Curtis is a shy gentleman, black, and a beautiful musician. Of course, the kind and lovely Evan Lurie, my brother, who is also gay, on piano. Brandon Ross on guitar. Brandon is a thin black guy with a beautiful face. He has sort of an elegance about him, except his dreads smelled horrible. He also seems like he would really have preferred to be on the debate team than a guitar player. Al MacDowell on bass. Al is a kind of person I had never met before. He never, ever loses his confidence. He is never startled. I think this comes from martial arts training. He has a powerful body and the face of a black cherub. Al is an extremely talented wall of granite, with all the sensitivity of a wall of granite. E. J. Rodriguez, who is straight and Puerto Rican, is on percussion, and Calvin Weston, who screams like his body is on fire while he plays. Calvin could turn a room upside down.
Al and Brandon both were clearly well educated and came from the “good” side of the tracks. Calvin came from somewhere else entirely, where things were hard, very real, and the Devil lived right down the block.
* * *
—
Al MacDowell could control his instrument like no one I’d ever seen. We had this incredibly fast tune called “Sharks Can’t Sleep.” This song was really as fast a thing as I could play on the saxophone, sixteenth notes at a raging tempo. Incredibly, Al could play the melody on the bass, no mistakes, no problem. The bass part used to be a fast walk, which is what it should have been. But Al, because of his massively macho skills on the bass, insisted on playing the lead line in unison with me. But it didn’t make musical sense. He was doing it for the same reason that a dog licks his balls. I told Al to play the line as it was and Brandon acted outraged: “You have Al MacDowell playing a walk. You are wasting his talents!” It was just stupid, and Brandon was just arguing to argue. But really, the clear, unsaid implication behind this was that I was white and Al was black, and thus I did not have the right to tell Al what to play. Brandon never had a problem when I explained to the white guys how I wanted something played. Never even noticed.
The first gig we did with that band was a warm-up at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. Took the band out of New York to a gig that didn’t matter that much. We had been the first band to play the 9:30 Club, twelve years earlier, when it opened.
The 9:30 Club is a small rock venue, holds maybe four hundred standing people. I had remembered it being nice back when we had first played there. Now that smell of stale beer and leftover cigarettes that hit you when you came in was a sign. That stale beer smell is pretty much a guarantee that the sound system in that club will suck and that the local sound guy is the owner of a fried and ugly brain, has bad hair and bad skin, and will hate you if you are pretentious enough to want the sound to actually be good.
It is a nice day, and I usually don’t have to get to the sound check until a couple hours after load-in. Everything has to be set up, power lines have to be run. In the really good places, everything is done when you arrive as per the specs of the contract, but in a place like this, it is a war for our own soundman to get anything set up in time for us to have any sound check at all. Frankly, it was playing a number of these kinds of venues that led me away from touring in the United States. It just seemed disrespectful to the music. Unless we could get booked at actual concert halls, we wouldn’t do it. And in the United States that just never happened. We were never seen as anything other than a punk band.
I step outside. It’s beautiful out. But this neighborhood has gone to hell. Crack has moved in like a raging weed and completely taken over. The people walking around look nuts and dangerous. They look like they are either covered in bugs or have been transformed, Gregor-like, by cocaine, into actual giant bugs.
I don’t think that it’s safe to go any farther than the doorway of the club. Calvin comes out and sta
nds next to me.
I said, “Sure is buggy out here.”
Calvin just went, “Woooo,” and went back inside. Which was interesting because Calvin’s neighborhood in Philadelphia was intense, just with far fewer giant bugs.
Calvin has a nice brownstone on a beautiful tree-lined street. There are sweet older women sitting out on their porches. But one of the times I visited him, it turned out that the kid who lived three doors down from him had been shot to death by the kid ten doors down.
These kids were both about fourteen. But how the older women addressed it was that it was a shame but by no means not a regular occurrence.
We had played the 9:30 Club another time about five years earlier and the dressing room had gotten robbed. But there was something so caring and elegant in how it was done.
Every item of clothing that had been gone through was folded and put back. Forget folded; whoever had robbed us had folded the clothes in the dressing room more neatly than we had left them. All personal items were placed back, carefully, where they had been found. Only the cash was taken, not even the credit cards.
I can’t imagine this. You have to think about what it is like to rob a dressing room in a crowded club. You have to be in a mad scramble to find money and get out. Your nerves must be jangling at you. But this guy had taken the time to leave the room neater than he had found it and to do no actual harm to the people he was robbing, other than taking a few dollars. I loved this guy.
Kind of an odd thing to have more affection for someone who has robbed you than for the people who haven’t.
It reminds me of another thing that had happened on Third Street years before, when it was still the worst neighborhood in the world.
I saw it coming. Two Hispanic guys approached me, and I could tell immediately by how they looked at me so intensely and then looked off, as though trying to be nonchalant, that they were coming.
One went out into the street between the parked cars and the other kept coming down the sidewalk in my direction. It was done in a rhythm that felt like they had done it a hundred times before. Then I was even more sure it was coming. The one in the street, when he got to the sidewalk, circled back behind me. The one in front of me pulled out a knife the size of a small machete, as did the one behind me.
I was trapped. And honestly, though I saw it coming almost a full forty-five seconds before it happened, I am not sure what I could have done to avoid it.
I was completely calm.
They went through my pockets and found $10. The one who came from behind started motioning for me to take off my shoes, but the one who had come from the front was clearly the leader of the two. He looked into my eyes. And bizarrely, we had a moment. We somehow connected. Soul to soul.
He said something in Spanish to the other one, who stopped yelling at me and reluctantly gave me back my $10. I will never forget that front guy’s eyes. Brown with a little speck of green. Brown with a little speck of green.
* * *
—
After the 9:30 gig, I had to fly to Chicago, and the rest of the band drove back to NYC, at night, after the gig. When I got back to New York, Evan called me and said the vibe was not good in the band.
I couldn’t get him to be more specific. But Evan never complains about this stuff, so I knew it had to be something. I guess the ride back was horrific for some reason.
After the warm-up gig, we went on the first leg of the European tour.
Musically and spiritually, it was a bad period. The first gig in Paris, we blew the fucking roof off the place. Al and Calvin could play with such ferocious energy and power that it created an unconquerable roar.
But there was no nuance, no subtlety. There was nothing precious about it. There was no love in it. It just plowed through and was not about the reason that I wanted to make music.
I said somewhere that the band was macho, but macho like your baby’s first steps. That was what I wanted.
That band did have a lot of power, though.
Veronica Webb came up to me after the show in New York and said, “It’s like having your brains fucked out, over and over again,” like that is somehow a good thing.
But then off somewhere was Brandon, playing with so many effects that it sounded like a fluffy whoosh. It was nice on its own, or in a quiet setting, but in this crashing onslaught we were making, it just sounded like someone was playing a hundred yards away, the day before. Nothing he played cut through the roar that we created, so the guitar melodies were lost. And the guitar melodies were written with the idea that it was the one instrument that was guaranteed to be heard on top. The one thing that would cut through.
I tried to get him to change his sound or anything he was playing was just going to disappear and be added to a sort of lost, mushy sound. But Brandon said that his sound was his domain and that I had no business asking him to change it.
Fair enough, but in the places where the written guitar parts were intrinsic to the essence of what I had written, the guitar couldn’t be this little elf waving from a faraway hilltop.
There was something beautiful about Brandon. But it was really weird, because when I would try to get Al and Calvin to lighten up—partly to get them to take it down a peg to make some room for Brandon—then Brandon would be in my face about how I shouldn’t be telling the great Al MacDowell how to play.
I could sense that there was an underlying feeling in the remaining musicians from the old band that this mess was all my fault. There was a lot of sadness and anger because of the firing of Marc, and Erik and Dougie’s being gone.
I suppose as a leader, it was really my fault. Maybe there was a better way to deal with Marc and Erik. Marc was an unbelievable musician, and Erik was someone who I loved and who was all-around artistically brilliant. Maybe there was a way I could have kept that band together. Downbeat had said, “A band of characters playing music with character.” And it was true.
I so wanted the music to work in a soulful way, but all the attention was going to the movies or how I looked or who I was sleeping with.
Maybe I had become an egomaniac. Privilege is hard to see when it is you being handed everything.
But fame is a very hard thing. It is almost worse than drugs. It gives one a false sense of buoyancy and you don’t want to let it go. You want more of it. And everyone you encounter assumes that it is better for you to become more famous. Not just your agent or manager or whoever, but everyone.
It is moving counterclockwise to your soul.
If you know anyone who has suddenly gotten famous, have a little patience with them. Maybe treat them like they have just had a serious operation and will need some time to recuperate before becoming themselves again.
The tour was broken into two parts. A month in Europe, back to New York for a week, and then back out for another month.
Calvin and Al would stake out the back of the bus by themselves and smoke tons of pot. The smell would usually pull E.J. to the back for a hit, but he wouldn’t hang with them. E.J. felt that Calvin was overplaying and not leaving any room for him on percussion, which was largely true. Curtis and Roy would huddle, whispering together, and Evan and Brandon did the same separately, off by themselves. The band was horribly ununited. From the back of the bus, you could hear loud, sophomoric snickering, followed by hyena laughs. I could tell from Evan’s face that he felt it was directed not so much at him, but at gay men in general. You could hear bits of phrases like, “And then I ate all the way up to her kidneys,” or over and over, “Hey, bitch, what’s for dinner? I’d like to have a steak, but I’d rather slide it in ya.” And then roars of ugly laughter.
Evan, repeatedly, was letting me know that there was a problem. I could see it was causing him pain. But he wouldn’t be specific about what was happening. I have no idea what kind of shit went on when I wasn’t around.
And th
ere was no way to really deal with it.
When I got back, I called Ornette Coleman about Al and Calvin because he had worked with them. I just needed advice on how to deal with a band that had somehow gone off the rails.
Ornette was an angel. Literally an angel. I asked him about Calvin and Al: How did he get them to play what he wanted and were they out of control on the road?
“Are they smoking a lot of that stuff?”
“Yeah, all the time.”
I didn’t ever have a problem with musicians’ smoking weed, as long as they didn’t bring anything across borders or forget their instrument in the hotel room. But Ornette had a long theory about why marijuana was bad for the music.
I told him about their being out of control, how hard it was to lead a rehearsal, and that the general vibe was really insidious.
Ornette said, in that soft, lispy voice, “I don’t know, man, they even make fun of me!”
And I could see it, too, Ornette up there like a mad scientist schoolteacher, with the odd way he talked, and Calvin and Al at the back of the class giggling and setting some girl’s hair on fire.
I talked to Ornette for a long time about music and knowing exactly how it is supposed to sound and then trying to get the musicians to do it. And that thing of where the musician might know exactly how it was supposed to be played and that they were capable of doing it, and even if that musician, too, knew that to play it that way would be better for the music, they would still not want to do it because they didn’t want to be told what to do.
And the more exceptional the musician, the more difficult it was to get them to do what was needed.
And I was thinking, Shit, this happens to Ornette? When do you arrive? When do you not have problems like this? It reminded me of Scorsese complaining about how hard it was to get the money to do Last Temptation and how he wished he could have done it this way or that way. And I was thinking, What? Martin fucking Scorsese can’t get the money he needs to do it properly? How is that possible?
