| press quotes |
Alternative Press, August 1999
Gary Lucas @Paradiso
by Dave Segal
One of America's foremost guitarists displays his exceptional range and
skill.
Despite working with some of the world's most critically respected
musicians (including Captain Beefheart, Lou Reed, John Zorn and Adrian
Sherwood), phenomenal guitarist Gary Lucas remains unknown outside of
underground-music circles. His solo albums abound with the kind of
playing that inspires worship among guitar-mag writers, but Lucas avoids
the speed-typing-on-the-fret board style for a more satisfying
exploration of the instrument's tonal and textural possibilities.
Lucas recorded @Paradiso's four songs between 1996 and 1997 at the
Amsterdam club Paradiso. With his Fender Stratocaster hooked up to
custom-made electronic devices, he tears through a diverse program: "Rise
Up to Be," a Lucas original that served as the basis for Jeff Buckley's
"Grace"; a space-blues version of Dollar Brand's "Bra Joe from
Kilimanjaro"; a massively arpeggiated cover of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn";
and a rendition of a 1937 Chinese pop song that recalls '60s-era John
Fahey. @Paradiso is Lucas' best work since 1991's Skeleton at the Feast.
The Boston Phoenix, July 1 - 8, 1999
Gary Lucas @ PARADISO (Rating: ****)
(Oxygen Music Works)
Sure, Gary Lucas has a
great résumé: Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, his own inventive
rock outfit Gods & Monsters, songwriting collaborations with Jeff Buckley
and others, soundtracks, and a rapidly expanding universe of solo albums and
concerts. But in the land of guitarslingers, you're only as good as your last
work. So here's a great live recording that stakes out his turf as a parcel
extending from the Mississippi Delta to the textural/ambient domain and way out
into space. It's hard to believe that one guitarist has such absolute command
of mud-deep blues fingerpicking and colorful sonic improvisation. Nonetheless,
Lucas blends roots, jazz, rock, and free improv without sacrificing a scrap of
melody or soul. As you listen to Lucas's emotional tear through "Rise Up To Be"
(the music Buckley used for "Grace") and his masterful step-by-step
construction of spontaneous loops, rhythms, and searing melodies in his own
spin down Kraftwerk's "Autobahn," the sheer creative beauty of his playing
becomes undeniable. (Order from 208 West 30th Street, #1025, New York, New York
10001.)
—Ted Drozdowski
The Riverfront Times (St. Louis), June 1999
Guitars on Mars
by Randall Roberts
Dive in headfirst. What follows is a resume of guitarist Gary
Lucas.
He's played with Leonard Bernstein, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Iggy
Pop, Patti Smith, John Zorn, Future Sound of London, Matthew Sweet,
Sophie B. Hawkins, Graham Parker, Dr. John, Adrian Sherwood, Mary
Margaret O'Hara, the Woodentops, the Mekons, Peter Stampfel, Richard
Barone, Jim Carrol, Bob Neuwirth, Kevin Coyne, Allen Ginsberg, the
Plastic People of the Universe, and Damo Suzuki and Michael Karoli of
Can; compiled collections of ska and reggae for CBS Records (The Real
Jamaican Ska and the three-volume series Rhythm Come Forward); covered
songs on one guitar originally composed for both synthesizers and
symphonies—they'll tear the skin off your back; released a handful of
solo records (one of which is a children's record for Zorn's stellar
Tzadik Records imprint—his is part of the label's Radical Jewish Culture
series), including his recent @Paradiso (Oxygen Music) and a few with his
band Gods and Monsters. Most important for our city this week, Lucas
composed a score for the groundbreaking silent horror film The Golem that
he will be performing live as the film plays during this week's Jewish
Film Festival at the Jewish Community Center.
Or perhaps you know Gary Lucas through his compositions for
ABC News, specifically his music bed for their report a few years ago
called "The Unabomber". Remember the piece? No? Well, that was him. Then
you may remember his "The Exxon Valdez"? No?
Maybe you know him from his work with Captain Beefheart's
Magic Band—he was the guitar player on Beefheart's last two recordings,
Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow, the guy whose delicate
fingers graced the exquisite instrumentals "Flavor Bud Living", "Evening
Bell" and "Semi-Multicoloured Caucasian".
Or from his work with Jeff Buckley on Buckley's Grace
album. The song "Mojo Pin" contains a labyrinthine melody that Lucas
created. Or from his work with Joan Osborne on her song "Spider Web".
That's his haunting melody, one that garnered a
Grammy nomination a few years back. Or his visionary melding of Miles
Davis' "Jack Johnson" with Suicide's "Ghost Rider".
It's all a bit stupefying, taken as a whole.
In simple terms, though, it comes down to this: If you
don't know Gary Lucas and are interested in hearing the electric guitar
and the National Steel guitar stretched to their limits, mangled and
manipulated, harnessed and pushed through reverbed conduits, sampledand
scraped, damaged one moment and caressed the next, you must hear him play
the guitar.
He's the only guitarist around with the guts to perform
a solo interpretation of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" and the ability to retain
the piece's sense of combustible momentum. The only guitarist to wrestle
with Albert Ayler's free-jazz classic "Ghosts",
turning it into a rolling rollick of stuctured National steel
pandemonium. Most likely he's the only guitarist who, queried about songs
he's attempted to cover but eventually abandoned, would respond: "I
wanted to do more Hitchcock, and one of the pieces that interested me was
Bernard Herrmann's music for North by Northwest, but it was a little bit
too chromatic to be able to do it in my style and make it sound good." He
did pull off a searing amalgam of music from Psycho and Vertigo, however,
on his debut CD, Skeleton at the Feast (Enemy), but North by Nothwest
proved elusive.
"There were just too many changes," Lucas laments. "Often
when I do these covers I like to use open tunings, and if there are too
many key changes it can sound clunky to try and do it on a guitar. It
inhibits the flow of music. And I want to stay more or less true, to a
certain degree, to the piece. I could have done a fantasia on it, had I
chosen, but the original was so great, with the melody. Another one was
from the Wagner opera Tristan and Isolde. And again, it was really
because there are many modulations leading up to the main classic
love-death sequence of chords in there, and it was just too busy-sounding
on the guitar, whereas something like 'Tannhauser' (also by Wagner, which
Lucas recorded for his album Evangeline) really flows and just fit my
style so well. So that's a factor in what I do.It has to really work, and
I have to feel comfortable with it to be playing it. It has to be fun to
play, or it just becomes kind of academic."
Anyone who tosses off references to Albert Ayler,
Kraftwek, Wagner and Bernard Herrmann shouldn't be blamed for worrying
about sounding academic. Lucas, though—who studied English literature at
Yale—entered music not to become a lofty guitar theoretician but in the
same way any two-bit musician does: He heard some music, was floored by
it and decided to pursue the artist in hopes of performing with him. In
Lucas' case, though, that musician happened to be one of the most
influential musical minds of the century, Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain
Beefheart.
"I first heard his music and was astonished," says
Lucas, with the delivery of someone who's told the story hundreds of
times. "Then I saw him play when I was in
college, in New York at his debut, and I thought, 'If I ever do anything
in music, it's to play with him. I made a vow. So it was like running
away to join the circus, and I got my wish. (At first) I didn't think I
was good enough. I was coming out of the British Invasion
school of guitar, and I was very good at the Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton,
Jimmy Page style, but his music was completely derived out of other
sources such as country-blues and free jazz". It took a few years before
the two would collaborate—Lucas worked in the Far East, played with some
musicians there, learned the Magic Band's skewed style.
But when he returned, they rekindled their friendship, which evolved into
a musical collaboration.
When Van Vliet decided to abandon music and pursue
visual art full time (it was Lucas who introduced him to artist Julian
Schnabel, who then helped arrange Van Vliet's first New York show),
Lucas started working as a copywriter for CBS Records and eventually
began gigging at the recently opened Knitting Factory club in New York
(which is where his first solo recording, said version Albert Ayler's
'Ghosts', was performed, on Live at the Knitting Factory, Vol. 2), where
he began to develop his visionary approach to solo guitar. That one song
on one compilation propelled Lucas'
solo-guitar career to a new level.
"'Ghosts' came out; suddenly I started to work in
Europe. I put the first solo show together in '88, and I got this big
write-up in the (New York) Times—'Guitarist of 1000 Ideas.' Four months
later I found myself at the Berlin Jazz Fest, and they were also going
nuts. And I thought, 'Man, this is a way to get out of (CBS)—because I
felt, really, I was on a treadmill to oblivion there."
His singular style, which will be on display during his
Golem performance, relies both on galloping, dextrous fingers and the use
of an array of effects pedals—reverbs, delays and samplers—which he
simultaneously plays with his feet. The results are solo-guitar creations
that occasionally sound like symphonies. Lucas plays a melodic line that
gets crammed through a digital delay box, which then recycles and
repeats over and over again while he plays on top of it. At times these
effects provide a live backing track—on his version of "Autobahn",
Kraftwerk's machinelike synthetic rhythm is replicated by Lucas with this
effect. It's confusing to absorb, and you'd swear he's using some sort of
studio trickery to pull it off. Because of this sneaking suspicion, Lucas
often includes in his liner notes the confirmation "absolutely no
overdubs". "I like people to know that I can do the stuff live and get
these orchestral effects live," he says. "Also, I always tell people in
the question-and-answer session that nothing I play is on tape or
sequenced. There's no prerecorded, sequenced parts. Everything is played
in real time at that moment, into these delays. Occassionally they're
sampled and held and manipulated, but if I break a string, or play it
poorly, you're going to hear it over and over again, so I have to be
alert to those possibilities."
At the Jewish Film Festival, Lucas will perform while the
silent film The Golem is shown, a project he dreamed up a decade agao in
New York City.
"The story goes," he says of the film's plot, "that in the
16th century Rabbi Loew created a man out of clay. He brought this
creature to life using cabbalistic magic after sculpting him. This giant
man was empowered to become a servant for the Jewish community and to
protect them against pogroms. So it's kind of a Jewish Frankenstein myth,
and in fact Mary Shelley apparently was influenced by these tales.
"The film is the most famous version", he continues. "There
have been operas, ballets—there's a comic book called The Golem that
Marvel put out—but this film is the one that intrigued me. When I was a
boy there was a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland, and I loved
it. It was my bible when I was growing up, and I saw still photos from
the film first of all in this magazine and I thought, 'Whoa, how cool—a
Jewish Frankenstein.' And I have continued, in my own twisted way in my
music—I'm preoccupied with supernatural themes" (hence the name of his
band Gods and Monsters, which in 1999 features former Modern Lover Ernie
Brooks and former Swan Jonathan Kane).
Lucas was given a grant by the Brooklyn Academy of Music
to develop the project; he composed, with friend Walter Horn, new musical
accompaniment for the film. "I've worked with it hundreds of times, but I
never get bored with it because it's about 50-50 improv over themes, sort
of in the style of an old-time silent-movie accompanist. So I never play
it the same way twice.
"I'm set up on the side of the stage", says Lucas of his
method of performing
alongside The Golem, "with three guitars behind me, all the effects in
front of me—I use a lot of effects—and I just go to town. And it's a
trip, it really is. It's a cathartic experience every time I do it.
There's plenty of room to really sink my teeth into it and wail on the
guitar, which I do. In fact, I've been known to drive older people out of
the room. What can I tell you? It's not for the alter cockers (a Yiddish
term for "old people").
Once I did it in the Toronto Jewish Film Festival and a woman came up to
me during the performance and said, "I am an audiologist, and this is
what I call noise pollution. Will you turn it down?' And I had all these
fans sitting near me in the front, and they were going,'Shhhh, let him
play. It's his music.'"