The History of Bones

by John Lurie

  Ornette had been supportive of me right from the very beginning. He had come to see the band play our fourth gig back in 1979, when we were really finding our way. His only comment was that we “needed to play in different unisons.”

  But that he had enough respect for me now to take the time to talk—that was special to me. I had a ton of admiration for Ornette, and it was a gift to be able to pick up the phone and talk to him about music and running a band.

  Later, I had a similar relationship with Elmore Leonard. When I was doing the music for Get Shorty, which Elmore had written the book for, my office got a call that Elmore Leonard wanted to talk to me.

  So I called him and he just wanted to know the general direction of the music. But then after that, we talked on the phone regularly. Often about nothing. And it was so wild, how he was a creature from a whole different time. You called Elmore Leonard on the phone and he would just answer. There was no assistant screening the call. I don’t think he even had an answering machine. Only one time did I call and a woman, I guess his wife, answered, and she said Dutch was at the baseball game.

  I would call Elmore and it felt like he was always just sitting on the porch watching the sun go down. There was a relaxed warmth about him. And this book, if it is any good, owes something to Elmore for the two or three things that he suggested to me.

  When I think of Ornette and Elmore, it makes me sad. It feels like they were almost too decent to live in a time like we have now. They didn’t have the armor for it.

  But why the fuck do you need armor?

  * * *

  —

  When we got back to Europe, after the break, Christina, the sweet tour manager, was standing outside the hotel with everybody after we had checked in. She looked at Brandon and said, “Your skin looks lighter than before.” I noticed Calvin was looking at me out of the corner of his eye to see if I caught it. Then we both grinned. Later that night, Calvin poured a glass of red wine on a girl’s head at a restaurant, because Al had told him to do it.

  Calvin was devilment incarnate. And it was not usually fun or remotely acceptable. It wasn’t really Calvin so much, as it was Al pushing Calvin to do these things, and then Calvin did them. Oddly enough, over not so much time, as Calvin changed, he and I became deeply connected. I grew to love Calvin.

  Toward the end of the second leg of that tour, I was getting further and further away from the band. Often I was flying to the next gig, while the band drove. I was doing it partially to get there earlier to do the mountain of scheduled interviews, but partly it was because I felt shitty all the time and needed to get whatever rest I could. And I didn’t admit it to myself, but I think I wanted to get far away from the toxic band dynamic.

  When the Lizards were on tour it was difficult to get clothes cleaned. We were rarely in one place for more than a day and the hotel would never be able to do dry cleaning in time. Getting your laundry back can be like gold. Clean socks! Hurray! But dry cleaning usually takes more than a day.

  There is something very creepy about getting up in front of two thousand people wearing dirty socks. Or even if the suit I was wearing looked okay from the audience, somehow it felt phony as hell to get onstage wearing a smelly suit. It just seemed wrong, like I was lying to them.

  More than once when I’d completely run out of clothes on a tour, I tried washing socks and underwear in the sink, but the stuff would never dry in time. So I’d be driving in a cab to the airport holding my boxers out the window trying to dry them before putting them in my suitcase.

  I was nervous when I looked at the schedule for the second leg of this tour and saw the only place we could get cleaning done was in Ljubljana. I had just bought these three very elegant Armani suits for a lot of money. They were perfect. I have trouble finding clothes I like and these just hung perfectly. It was a lot of money to spend on clothes, but I’d decided, fuck it, they were going to be my Lounge Lizards uniforms for years to come.

  I am not sure how the fashion thing happened. It was something I never gave much thought, something, in a lot of ways, I am opposed to because of the financial hierarchy.

  When the band first started I would buy $5 suits at the used clothing stores in the East Village. I had one pair of shoes that were held together with gaffer tape. Which I liked just fine. But now it was expected that I was going to be some kind of fashion plate.

  In 2000, British Vogue voted me one of the best dressed men of the last century. They would be pissed as hell if they saw what I have been wearing every day for the last ten years or so: sneakers; cargo pants or basketball shorts; T-shirts; and a Carhartt sweatshirt in colder weather. Every day. Basically, I dress exactly as I did when I was nine years old.

  But I really wanted to protect my three new suits. They were something to me like no clothes had ever been before.

  I didn’t want them ruined, which had happened more than once before on tour, and I was particularly nervous about this kind of thing in Eastern Europe, so I had Val fax the promoters in advance, saying that it was important that I get my dry cleaning done in a decent place.

  I fly to Ljubljana by myself. I’m trying to get through customs when a man with a machine gun comes up to me and starts screaming at me in Serbo-Croatian. I don’t know what he’s saying but interpret his gestures with the end of his gun barrel to mean that he wants me to stand in a certain spot, and I do. He goes off, leaving me there.

  Moments later another guy with a machine gun comes and starts to scream and moves me to another spot.

  I’m standing there waiting to understand how I am supposed to get out, when the first guy returns, his eyes bulging with surprise and rage to see that I have moved from the place where he left me. He screams and I try to point out the other guard, who has now disappeared, and I go back to the first spot.

  When I finally clear customs, there are two people waiting for me: a very tall, very thin man with a black beard and a very pained and tortured face, and a plump woman who I believe is his wife. Probably to be a jazz promoter in Yugoslavia is not the easiest thing.

  After nodding at me in recognition, the first words out of his mouth are, “Where are the suits?”

  Maybe Val has gone a little overboard in expressing the importance of the suits, but this should ensure that they get cleaned without incident.

  I explain that first I have to unpack. I don’t know if they think they’re in a special carrying case or what.

  They drive me to the hotel in their tiny little car, my knees up around my ears, and follow me to my room. Which is weird. The whole hotel is weird.

  There are five clothes dryers against the wall in the lobby.

  My room, which is supposed to be a suite, is actually four adjoining office rooms with a bed and makeshift bathroom. There is industrial carpeting, and one room is filled with desks and office chairs stacked on top of one another. It is an office space that was quickly transformed into what is supposed to be a suite.

  I give them my suits. I’m a little embarrassed by all the concern, but at least I am sure that with this much attention, they will be safe.

  The next day Evan goes for a walk. He usually goes for walks when we arrive somewhere new or different. I like that about him but I never do it myself. Evan, all his life, has been curious about things. That is a great quality, especially when one gets older. Stay curious.

  Lack of curiosity kills the human.

  When he comes back, he notices that whatever is spinning around in the dryers in the lobby looks an awful lot like my suits. He looks away quickly and shakes his head. Nope, that’s not what’s happening. Can’t be.

  When I run into him he says, “I hate to tell you this, but I think that I just saw your new suits in the dryer in the lobby.”

  There is a pause as this information starts to settle in my brain.

  Then, fearing how I am going to react and not k
nowing what else to say, Evan says, “Why are there dryers in the lobby?”

  I don’t find any humor in this at all, and Evan, being my younger brother, is rightfully worried that this is going to have bad consequences for him, because if my suits are ruined, my mood will go pretty dark.

  I get my suits back in a folded stack. I see that the fabric is all bunched up. I unfold the top jacket in terror. Just from looking at them I can see they are now best suited for a boy just under the age of ten. There is no sane reason to try it on, but that is what one does in this situation. I have to arch my back in a sort of yoga pose to get it onto my shoulders. The sleeves come to my elbows.

  Apparently what has happened is that the promoter has taken the suits and given them to the hotel, saying they must be very careful with them. The hotel has given them to the cleaning woman, who has thrown them in the washing machine in the basement and then dried them in the lobby. I have seen this cleaning woman and her angry face around the hotel. I imagine when she threw my three thousand dollar suits into a washing machine, it was the first time she had smiled in years.

  The hotel is government owned, and four Yugoslavian officials come to the hotel to inspect the suits. This is now an international incident. They hold the suits in their hands and stare. They ask if I can put one on. I am in my underwear trying to get the suit on and they finally realize that with all but one of them, this is impossible.

  They confer as government officials do.

  It is decided that I will be driven to Italy, where I can purchase three suits. I have a concert that night, so I must leave immediately. They send a driver who takes me to Trieste. The driver is very smart and well educated. He quotes Pablo Neruda to me on the drive. He is an engineer but lost his job because some government enemy pushed him out. I don’t fully understand the story. It is scary sometimes when you go to a place like this and you meet some really solid, bright person and their job is driving the American saxophone player to and from Italy to buy a fancy suit. One tends to remember that even though they have just shrunk all your clothes, you have been pretty much protected throughout this life.

  The Italian men in Trieste must all be quite small, because nothing is close to fitting, and I come back empty-handed.

  When I return, it is decided that the government will pay for my suits, but there is a lot of paperwork and they will have to give me a voucher and then mail me the money in the States.

  The check didn’t come, and soon after that, the war broke out. I didn’t think some piddling thing like a war should cancel their debt, but I no longer knew who to write to.

  We play in Ljubljana. I wear the one suit that I can still get on, my pant legs three inches above the tops of my shoes. No one seems to notice.

  After that I have to drive to Vienna to do a press conference that is insisted on by Thomas Stöwsand, who is promoting the tour. Stöwsand at this time is pretty much the biggest independent jazz promoter in Europe. He always gets the highest-paying gigs. He is famous for sending bands willy-nilly across the continent: Berlin on Tuesday, Prague on Wednesday, London on Thursday. He goes for the highest price with no thought about the fact that these are actually human beings, and he is having them travel for sixteen hours by bus or train between all the gigs. The thing that is amazing about the people who promote tours for a living is that if they were shipping tomatoes or fish, they would have to be more careful about their travel arrangements, because the product would spoil.

  I particularly don’t like Stöwsand because years before, we traveled to Vienna from God knows where and then did a show, and were scheduled to take the train that night to arrive at the North Sea Jazz Festival the following afternoon and play. I saw Stöwsand after the show, and he came up to me and said, in a way that was begging for sympathy, that he was exhausted because he’d arrived from New York that morning.

  Like, Poor me. I am jet-lagged. This guy was having musicians hop in a van after a concert, travel for thirteen hours across Europe, and then arrive somewhere, do sound check, play a great concert, and then do that again day after day, and he was going to complain about being jet-lagged from flying across the Atlantic?

  So I don’t like Stöwsand much in the first place. My suits are shrunk. The band has no love in it and I don’t want to go to Vienna to do a press conference. And I don’t feel well. I just feel like shit all the time.

  I like press conferences better than doing ten interviews in a city. Obviously, it is faster, but it also seems like the other press there are your witnesses in a way. So when they write something you didn’t say, at least the rest of the press in that town knows that you didn’t say it, and maybe they will back you up. Also, if someone asks a really stupid question, you can make fun of the question, which you can’t do one on one.

  But this press conference is not a press conference. I expected to be at a podium or a desk, maybe on a stage. But this is a lunch, where everyone is just milling around. There are no questions. I am just being observed by the Austrian press as I am eating. It feels hideously uncomfortable. I am a panda that will hopefully mate.

  I am depressed. The band is meeting me in Graz, where we play tomorrow, while I’m staying in Vienna that night in a fancy hotel. I feel ravaged by the “press conference.” Felt like going to a dinner party with people you don’t know and don’t like, but they all know you. And you are being observed like you are some kind of beatnik experiment. The band is not soulful, there is no solace in the music right now. So it really isn’t worth putting up with all this. I think, very seriously, about taking the tour money in my pocket, twenty thousand in U.S. cash, and walking out of the hotel without my stuff. I could go to the airport and catch a flight to Africa. And be gone.

  But I can’t do that to Evan. Still, I have the money in my pocket and I am pacing around the hotel room thinking, Go, just fucking go, do yourself a favor, it’s your life, go to Africa, when the phone rings.

  It’s Evan. There is stress in his voice.

  “There’s a problem here. I think you have to come to Graz immediately. Things aren’t good with the band.”

  There is a desperation in his voice, and Evan really never asks me for anything.

  “What happened?”

  I imagine that the trip from Yugoslavia to Graz was probably hideous, with Al putting Calvin up to all kinds of antics. There was just that ugly vibe. I had never heard Evan sound so shaken, and I wonder what happened that he isn’t telling me about between him and Al.

  I am sure that was most of it, just this uncomfortable vibe. But there has been an incident.

  What happened is this: Calvin just had his first baby, the first of many. He called home to see how the baby was and his brother, who was his nemesis, answered the phone.

  Calvin asked how the baby was doing and his brother said something mean and hung up the phone. So Calvin dialed his mother’s number. His brother must have dashed out of the house and run down the street to his mother’s, because he answered the phone there as well and hung up in Calvin’s ear.

  Well, Calvin went nuts. Really nuts. This explosive rage that he had made his playing something to behold with awe, but in daily life it was insurgent and dangerous. He destroyed his room. Everything in it. The police came and arrested him. If he paid for the damage, they would let him out of jail. Evan and Al, an unlikely duo, went to Calvin’s destroyed room to look for his tour money. Calvin had told Al not to pay, that he would stay in jail. Evan had a pretty good idea that Al knew where Calvin had hidden his money but Al was making like he had no idea. I guess Evan got really mad and demanded that Al tell him where the money was and Al suddenly went, “Ooh, look, I found it.” I would have liked to see Evan yelling at Al so hard that he confessed. They paid the hotel with Calvin’s tour money and he was let out of jail.

  I had fucked up. I had always prided myself on my intuition in putting a band together. Who would go with who
. What number of alpha males versus whatever different kinds of energies and sounds might be fitting into the band. I was so good at this, and I had blown it.

  For example, I had met these twins in Elba one summer. They were playing in a bar every night and I sat in with them sometimes. These twins had something really nice in their playing. They had great rhythm and they had this quiet sweetness about them.

  I had an epiphany, and when I got back to New York, I told Kazu, who was desperate to get her music thing off the ground but couldn’t find musicians to play with, that there were these twins, and that if it were ever possible, she should start a band with them. Soon after, the twins moved to New York and they started Blonde Redhead.

  But I have that thing. I have it deeply. I can figure out who is best to play with who and how to find their deeper talents. But now the vibe was terrible and I knew that Evan was really unhappy. This was horrible for me; I didn’t know exactly what had happened, and I still sensed that it had something to do with his being gay and Al’s somehow fucking with him when I wasn’t around, but I didn’t know what to do.

  Because of Calvin and Al’s energy, that band was never bad. There was never a bad gig, but there was never a great one either. I never once got that thing. I never once got chills when the music just seemed to hover beautifully above the ground.

  39

  Giant Diving Bugs Bombing Our Faces

  After the tour I went and stayed with Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta for a couple of weeks in Rome.

  I bought them the ugliest ashtray that I have ever seen. It had an ugly stand to go with it.

  It was magnificent in its ugliness.

  I insisted that they never throw it away. That it was important to me.

  There was a lot of pained laughter, but the next two times I went to see them, my ashtray was still there, in a place of honor on the veranda. I bet they talked about my ugly ashtray every time they had guests.