by John Lurie
We finish early. I can leave. But I have no idea how to get back.
I’m asked if I would mind waiting for Willem and could I drive back with him. They will return my car to me in a couple of hours, but they don’t have a PA right at that moment.
I don’t see it coming. They bring my car back at nine-thirty that night and it is drained completely of gas. That is just disgusting. I don’t need to be treated like a movie star, but don’t rip me off.
I had two scenes in the movie that were supposed to be shot on concurrent days and then I was going to fly back to New York. Except the next day I got a call that said they were moving my second scene to three weeks later.
I assumed that they were covering my hotel, but after a few days, I inquired about it and was told that they were only paying for the one day that I worked.
“Well, I am in your movie, I don’t live here. What am I supposed to do?”
“Well, you could fly back to New York.”
“Are you paying for the flight?”
“I’ll have to check.”
They refused to pay for the flight. Lynch was not to blame. I later found out that this was all per the producer Monty Montgomery, who had done a movie, The Loveless, that I had scored in 1981.
Man, I don’t understand why they couldn’t just be normal. They didn’t need to treat me like I was treated as a model in Paris, nothing close to that, but they were going out of their way to show me how unimportant I was to them. What kind of sickness makes people behave like that?
So I moved over to the Chateau Marmont, which was much less expensive. I really didn’t want to pay for a place where they had staff meetings to figure out how to stroke the guest’s ego. The juxtaposition of that compared to how they were treating me on the movie would have confused me.
Natalia came over from Germany and we immediately got scabies at the Chateau. Scabies are hell to get rid of. They itch like mad and cause these raised welts all over your skin.
To get rid of them you have to paint yourself with this poison and then wash every fucking thing that you own. I am pretty sure that this was before the Chateau got bought by someone else.
So I have two and a half weeks to wait to do my scene. Natalia is hanging out with Donald Cammell and his beautiful wife, China. I am mostly hanging out at the hotel, watching TV. I guess I have fallen into a depression.
* * *
—
My band has somehow lost its soul, they are treating me like less than a nobody on the movie, and I still cannot get Voice of Chunk released in the United States. Nobody wants it.
I am a giant in Europe and Japan, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything to anybody.
I saw Keith McNally at the airport in Paris. He owns or owned a lot of the hipper bars and restaurants in New York: Balthazar, Pravda, Nell’s, Cafe Luxembourg, Odeon, etc.
The week Balthazar opened, Keith insisted that I stop by. I was sitting there when Donald Trump walked in. He was with a friend of mine’s beautiful ex-wife, and they had only been divorced about a month.
The way Trump was parading her around for everyone to see pissed me off. So I had the waiter bring a glass of their cheapest wine to his table as a sign of my loathing.
Trump refused the wine, but I look back on this as some of my finest work.
As we waited for our planes, Keith McNally asked what was going on, why I was in Paris, and I told him, “My record Voice of Chunk is number two in Germany this week.” I was pretty proud that a record I had paid for myself, and a jazz record no less, was number two.
Keith said, “Oh, really? Mine was number one,” and walked away.
Mostly my mind is not quiet. I had tasted fame and I was addicted to it. For a long time, I wanted fame back. It took a shovel to the head in my life for me to realize that I was much better off without it.
But then, like a junkie. It is so like being a junkie. I need your fix. Oh, it is just sick.
Really what I wanted was respect for the music, as I do now for the paintings.
But I couldn’t even get a deal for the Voice of Chunk record. I really wanted that music heard, and without some big injection of fame, it seemed that that would not happen.
It’s late. I can’t sleep and get up and turn on the TV in the other room, while Natalia sleeps. They are selling some idiotic product, a cat’s collar that says “Meow” when you push a button, which you can only purchase via TV through the mail.
And then it hits me. I know what I am going to do next.
40
Fifteen Minutes Outside of Nairobi, There Are Giraffes
I get back to New York and explain to Val how I am going to become the Boxcar Willie of jazz.
Back then there were only a handful of channels on TV. And late at night there would be ad after ad for Boxcar Willie, a fake hobo who sang country music and made train noises with his voice. I couldn’t imagine that the ads could be that expensive, because who the fuck buys a Boxcar Willie album at four in the morning?
“We’re going to make an ad, maybe two. And then we are going to sell Voice of Chunk ourselves by phone with an eight hundred number. Fuck the music business.”
This is late ’89. There was no internet. This was the only way that I could think of to get people the music without having the gatekeepers involved.
There are always gatekeepers. More and more gatekeepers. And they have invented jobs that are shoved into the music and art and movie businesses. And all they seem to do is keep people who love the artist’s work away from the artist’s work, throw in worthless opinions, and somehow get paid to do that. It is all part of the Conspiracy to Maintain Mediocrity.
We shoot the commercial where Robert Burden had worked, which is a special place for me, but really only because of Robert and that he is no longer with us.
I say into the camera, “Hello, I’m John Lurie. And I am here to tell you that now you can listen to the strange and beautiful music of The Lounge Lizards, here in America, just like people in other lands.”
I stand in front of a large painted scrim and the camera floats by me, with the music starting, and we dissolve to reveal Kazu, sitting all beautiful amid a pile of boxes from Chinatown and exotic ornaments, wearing a hat I had brought back from Bali, looking just as open as a soul can be. Then Veronica Webb in Moroccan garb, Gy Mirano as an Incan princess, and Rebecca Wright, standing bolt upright holding a spear, with the look of an invading Hun, in front of an Astroturf mountain covered with plastic sheep.
It cuts to a card with the information on it and Mercedes, New Orleans accent afloat, saying, “To order call 1-800-44-CHUNK,” and then cuts back to me, looking very bewildered and saying, “Hello?” into a plastic phone. The girls are all gorgeous and it works pretty well.
It might seem odd that these were all ex-girlfriends and everyone got along so well. But it wasn’t really odd at all, so you are odd to think that if that is what you are thinking.
The second spot is me, in an elegant robe that wasn’t mine, lying in a bed surrounded by stuff: a cake with “Voice of Chunk” written on it, some plastic fish, my alto, some toys, and I don’t know what else. The camera comes down slowly from above. I say: “If you’re like me, you like to get things through the mail. Maybe because it makes me feel less lonely. Everything you see here I got through the mail.”
Then the music swells, and I look up and smile. “Listen! That’s the new Lounge Lizards record, Voice of Chunk, and now you can receive that through the mail!” Cut to the card with the info and then to Mercedes holding a phone and yelling like I’m in the other room, “John, another order!”
They were exotic and stupid. I was sure it would work. Val set the whole thing up. We got the 800 number, a place to manufacture the CDs, and a fulfillment company somewhere in Tulsa or Omaha. She also got the ads placed on TV, which was not so easy, because we
were not part of a giant corporation and it was difficult to purchase ad space directly.
Around that time, I was living on my own. Kazu and I had had a fight about raisins in a chicken sandwich and she had moved out.
We shot the ads in early winter and planned to release the thing around January, after all the business was together.
It was a disaster.
The ad, which had looked quite beautiful, when it is broadcast on TV looks and sounds terrible. My ad would play and then a Coke ad would come on and all the colors are bursting and the sound is pristine. I discovered that if you were not a giant corporate sponsor, your ad was duped and duped again and then shuffled in with the corporate ads and duped again. And there was nothing I could do to fix it. All the color was drained out. The sound was gurgly and far away.
People came by my house to watch the first ad on TV. All drinking and not paying attention.
And the ad is on and off in thirty seconds. It is nothing.
I am broken. It looks awful. And no one even seems to notice.
They just say, “Hey, you’re on TV!” and then go back to talking too loud about something else.
So I scream at someone for having their shoes on my bed and throw them all out.
But it was a disaster financially as well.
Not that people didn’t order it. We sold thirty thousand copies in the United States, which for a jazz record was enormous and for an independent label was enormous, but it was not a well-run business.
The fulfillment company would sometimes send out empty packages. They would send five CDs when someone had only ordered one.
Every time someone called the 800 number there was an eighty-cent charge, and ours was really close to other numbers, so we got a slew of wrong numbers that cost us with each call.
Every time the ad would run on MTV, thousands of kids would call asking what kind of music it was. Eighty cents for every kid who called.
They would reach an operator in Tulsa who would read a description that was snippets from some of the best reviews.
I call, myself, to see how they do.
I ask what kind of music it is.
The woman, with that accent from wherever they sound like that, says, “The music from North Africa…with Mr. Cultrane. Mr. John Cultrane, is that right?”
“What?! What are you saying?! No! That is not right!”
“Cultrane?”
“No! It isn’t Cultrane! Jesus fucking Christ!”
“Sir, please—”
Click.
I call again, get another operator with an equally bizarre description.
I yell at her and hang up.
I remind myself that every time I call it costs me eighty cents to yell at the operator.
I call back and try to explain how the description of the music should be read. I think part of the problem was that we sent several descriptions of the music. We had the Lester Bangs quote “Staking out new territory that lies somewhere west of Charles Mingus and east of Bernard Herrmann.” I was always proud of that one, partly because it was Lester and partly because of how much I admire Mingus and Bernard Herrmann.
And we had the DownBeat quote “Music with character played by a bunch of wild characters.” And something I had written, and something by this wonderful woman from the Christian Science Monitor, of all places, who really grasped the music. I think it was her quote, anyway, something about taking the music of Hendrix and Coltrane and melding it together and taking it a step further.
So I am going to call and explain to the operator how it should go.
She answers, “1-800-44-CHUNK.”
She answers, like the others, with complete disinterest, which was not what I’d expected. I’d expected someone with a delightful enthusiasm. Of course, it is two in the morning wherever she is, this is most likely her second job as she raises her two kids, and she is probably the only person awake in whatever place I am calling.
I say, “Hello, where am I calling?”
“This is 1-800-44-CHUNK.”
“Yes, I know that, but where are you?”
“I am in Wichita.”
“Oh, I thought you were in Tulsa.”
I am thinking that they have the same accent in Tulsa as they do in Wichita.
She explains that they have several operator stations scattered across the country but she doesn’t really know.
And she also, clearly, doesn’t care.
And I don’t blame her.
I just started to feel sad for her.
I tried to explain what it was supposed to say, but she didn’t believe it was my product. I was just some nut calling in. Which is exactly what I was. I was some nut calling in.
There was other stuff too. But once I had the idea and got it up and running, I wasn’t interested in running the company, and oh fuck, what a disaster it was.
I was just so bummed by the whole thing. I put all my money and soul into making that record. And it ended the band. I really felt that they had abandoned me, more than I had done something to make things go like they did. And then no record company would touch it, even though every time we played we drew enormous crowds. And it moved people. It clearly made a difference. And now I was doing this and had lost all the rest of my money and couldn’t make it work.
Maybe it was too beautiful. Maybe the Devil was trying to stop it.
I just wanted to put something into the world that touched people like Coltrane and many others had touched me. Like Martin Luther King’s voice had touched me. And please, I am not comparing myself to any of this, but that was what I was hoping to do.
I have always been so jealous of Gaudí. I don’t even know his story. I would just see his buildings in Barcelona and think, How the fuck did this happen? They paid to let him make these weird, beautiful, unusual structures? No one tried to stop him? They gave him the money to make this stuff? What lucky fucking true artist ever gets in that position?
Most “artists” who get themselves into that kind of position are usually good at one thing only: getting themselves into that kind of position.
I have been slow to learn this lesson. For a while, I was friends with Danny Elfman. He is certainly talented and has done some great music for film. But after talking with him several times when I was having trouble dealing with a movie producer or the agents that we shared, I realized his true genius was dealing with these people.
He knew how to do it. And I just fucking do not.
* * *
—
At the end of the eighties, for New Year’s Eve 1989, I played a saxophone solo concert in Stuttgart.
Some of my solo concerts had been perfect. About a third of them were perfect.
If I had a half-decent sound system and the kind of venue that led to the audience being respectful to the music, like a theater rather than a nightclub, and if I allowed the space and silence to work for me instead of rushing to pour sound into every moment, it really could be like a perfect thing. A poem.
But the venue was so important. A year before, I had done a concert in a giant disco in Milan. Right before I went out onstage to play solo saxophone to three thousand standing people, they were blaring Donna Summer. It just didn’t work. Of course it didn’t work. It had to be in a theater, where people were seated and there to listen to music. It was a concert, and if some promoter was just trying to make money using my name, it could be a disaster.
That concert in Milan, they kept yelling out intelligent things like, “Are you Jack or Zack?,” a line from Down by Law. It was awful.
But then the next night, in Torino, it was magic. Maybe the Shroud guided me through it.
So, to play New Year’s Eve is a risk. People are out to have fun on New Year’s Eve and I thought it was a bad idea, but the promoter and Val talked me into it. Val because o
f the money, and the promoter promised it would be a serious music venue.
There was a kid named Larry Wright who used to play drums on a compound bucket in Times Square. This sixteen-year-old kid could play stuff that would make you positive that there must be reincarnation, because it was shit that he just could not know about. African stuff and jazz stuff that he clearly had never heard, as he only listened to hip-hop.
What was particularly interesting and inexplicably complicated were his segues from one beat to the other. Where he was finding his next beat, that was where this stuff would come out that would just make me do a double take. “How does this kid know that?”
Ari Marcopoulos had made a short sixteen-millimeter movie about him and suggested that I take him to Stuttgart to open for me on New Year’s Eve. I thought it was a great idea and said yes, but then Ari ran into some obstacles. Larry’s parents were estranged, and my understanding was that his mother was a crackhead and his father was a junkie. Even though I was going to pay him a thousand dollars to play one night, and even though they claimed that they wanted him to go, they really didn’t want him to go, because if he went to Germany for three or four days, they would not be collecting the sixty or eighty bucks a night that he was bringing home in quarters and crumpled dollar bills, which he collected playing on his bucket, in Times Square. And they needed their money regularly.
They said that they wanted Larry to go, but every time that Ari went up to Harlem to bring them to the passport office, because they had to sign for him, as he was a minor, they came up with an excuse as to why today was no good. And these two were not really doing anything with their days, except for waiting for Larry to come home with $60.
So finally Ari went up to their place with this large martial arts, community-minded guy who basically threatened them into letting Larry get his passport right away.
I should have known that a saxophone solo show on New Year’s Eve was a mistake. The thing with the solos is that if I have the audience, I can relax and stretch it. I can play with them, hold back, not give them just what they want when they expect it, leave big silent pauses, play one note with a perfect tone and let it sit for a moment, and then take a sudden left turn.
