Save the Country

The sun is shining strongly this morning, the Village looks better and more inviting than ever out my window, and before I go out to get our coffee this morning (no more bagels at breakfast--well, maybe once a week, with poached eggs or lox on top...nope, it's more like cold cereal with fruit again these days, regular diet and exercise after 4 months hiatus for working out means I'm now back to trim, lean and mean, fit and fighting shape as it were--so necessary in a Grand Theft Auto 4 world), hey I actually love working out now with my iPod Nano set on stun (a typical playlist, which I put together recently for Rhapsody.com's "Celebrity Picks", can be found here, with my comments here, now I wish I would have chosen Laura Nyro's "Save the Country" instead of "Stoned Soul Picnic" as more relevant the way things are going these days, but too late now, whatcha gonna (gonna do the best I can)--"Save the Country" never fails to get my adrenaline flowing...

Last Sunday I went over to The Tank at Collective Unconscious on Church Street in Tribeca near the Knitting Factory, a great not-for profit Artist's Space (useta be the Harmony Burlesque Theatre), to see my friend lovely Marie Losier's new film about Tony Conrad, the great minimalist musician who worked once upon a trine with Lamonte Young and John Cale in The Dream Syndicate, I'd met Tony at the late lamented Tonic's John Fahey Tribute some years ago, this sweet good-natured guy who just happened to have helped change the face of music has been teaching upstate for some years (Tony's due to retire next year I believe)...Marie is the coolest young film maker on the planet in my estimation, she curates the programs at the Alliance Francaise here and also travels the world showing her beautiful whimsical and splendiforous films at festivals and art museums, check out http://marielosier.net/-- and her portrait of Tony was one of the most delightful, goofy, disjunctive and ever so relevant portraits of a master strategist at play bouncing around his Buffalo loft (teaches at Suny Buffalo) in an inflatable pumpkin suit, amongst other sartorial delights (polka-dot pajamas particularly fetching) while cracked 20's old timey music and novelty 78's from his collection fill the air, dancin' to the fiddle and saw he ran down along the knoll with Marie in tow and I grinned and chuckled with delight throughout this filmic portrait--imagine a film combining the best of the Brothers Quay (some cool stop motion sequences, dear to my Harryhausen heart), Mike and George Kuchar, Richard Elfman's "Forbidden Zone", Guy Maddin, David Lynch too, and you would have some idea of the formidable arsenal of filmic whatsis Marie Losier flings at the screen like so much flying pigment (if pigments could fly)...they were showing other goodies that afternoon as well, films by Chris Marker, Balthazar Clementi (son of Pierre), Robert Frank and more, plus "Voice of Turtle:, music by Christina Courtin and friends, Christina has a beautiful unclassifiable voice and these were neat, quirky songs you couldn't label, her band was good as well--a definite find, she's singing again at the IFC Cinema on May 7th and 8th before screenings of I dunno, but its worth your while to investigate. the music was that good...

Thursday night Caroline and I were invited by our friend John Nichols, the brainy and witty and charming Washington correspondent for The Nation, to a reading of a great new play, " Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas" up at Symphony Space on Broadway and 95th, as part of a special fund-raising event for the magazine, my favorite weekly must-read along with The New Yorker...the play was a fascinating new comedy/drama by Michelle Willens and Wendy Kout about the infamous 1950 US Senate race in which the young Richard Nixon destroyed the elegant Congresswoman Helen Gahagen Douglas (actress and wife of leftist activist actor Melvyn Douglas), which is how Nixon acquired his "Tricky-Dick" moniker...in light of Karl Rove and his ilk this play has an incredible relevance and resonance today...Christine Lahti and James Naughton were superb as the celebrity couple and Jason O'Connell was a fantastic Nixon, with all proceeds from the event going to The Nation magazine...now Nixon was to me the man you love to hate, a villain of Shakespearean dimensions to rival Iago, I picketed him in 1968, walking out on his stock stump speech at the Syracuse War Memorial during the Presidential campaign with my leftist buddies (members of MISC--the Multi-Issue Student Committee, my high school version of SDS, founded by my friends Allen Sack, Peter Smith, Joe Ycas, Tom Karp, David Horowitz--not that David Horowitz--also David Feld, lovely Louise Feld, and others--red-diaper babies mainly, sons and daughters of various leftwing SU professors, iconoclastic visionaries, rugged individualists all-- these kids were some of the best and the brightest, not to mention the sharpest and coolest..."I wonder what they're doin' with their lives?")...

Afterwards there was a terrific party in the Symphony Space lounge/restaurant with the best catering by far in many a moon though I was trying to stick to the program and we got to meet the actors and some of The Nation crew, including the charming New York based journalist and associate publisher Peter Rothberg, and also the Nation's star contributor, the lovely and brainy writer/feminist/poet Katha Pollitt, whose work I have admired for ages (I loved her book "Learning to Drive"--check out her blogspot...she is an old old friend of Gods and Monsters' bassist Ernie Brooks, as well!)-- and also enjoyed chatting with Katha's English academic husband Steve Lukes, who instantly bonded with my London-born wife as he, it turned out, was best mates and co-authored a book with Caroline's former philosophy professor at the University of East Anglia, Martin Hollis, the famed British pragmatist philosopher...

Later on the lovely and fiercely intelligent publisher and editor of the Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel swept in to the party coming straight from a big New York Magazine Awards ceremony being held earlier that night, where The Nation had racked up several awards, and instantly gathered a large coterie around her, I'd seen her give a talk last year at the Barnes and Noble on Union Square (which they are closing, for shame) and found her to be one of the most forceful and engaging speakers I've ever encountered, we chatted a bit, she was exceedingly charming and friendly and really hip (a Steely Dan fan!), her latest book is "Taking Back America: And Taking Down the Radical Right"...

Afterwards John Nichols, Caroline and myself raced downtown to the White Horse for a late night snack and good and hilarious conversation (John is such a fun guy, and one of the most cogent public speakers and writers in America--check out his regular Nation column "The Beat")--I am really glad that The Nation is around to fight the good fight and roll back the darkness threatening to engulf this fair land, please do yourself a favor and subscribe, details at http://www.thenation.com/...

My live debut show with Najma Akhtar was like a dream, quite a beautiful night last Saturday at Joe's Pub, we had done several well received radio appearances during the week on John Schaefer's "New Sounds" program and Rob Weisberg's show on WFMU (both archived on my website homepage) in the run up to the show, and we had a really good large crowd, Dibyarka Chatterjee added his customary energy and good vibes on tabla, and Najma was in fine form throughout, and we received an ovation and several encores for our hour plus set...special thanks to Shante and Jennifer at Joe's Pub and Bill Bragin who first set up the gig before departing for Jazz at Lincoln Center, plus all the friends who showed, including some new ones such as legendary producer/mixer Ron St. Germain who was there with his wife, also my friend the Emmy Award-winning documentary producer Peter Bull who I'm working on a new score for, Kurt and his wife from The Gripweeds, a large Indian contingent (including Dibyarka's mother, who is an excellent classical Indian singer in her own right). Pakistani pistol Shaista Husain and her guy Gus, my old Dutch friends Karin Van Heek and her beau Martine, film editor Michael Taylor, cinefantastique Marie Losier, health guru Richard Swanson, WKCR's Charlie Blass, filmmaker Eli Kabbillio and his wife, former Zoo World editor/CBS publicist and all around knowledge brother & good guy Arthur Levy and his actor son Jake, Bill Bragin himself who was loving it, Gary Nesbitt and his wife Terry plus Freddie Fry and their whole Jersey posse, we are nearly done recording our debut album and will put the finishing touches on it very soon, it sounds incredible--stay tuned...

Najma Akhtar and Gary Lucas wirh Premi Ankolekar backstage at Joe's Pub, Gary and Najma's live debut show, 5/3/08 | photo by Satej Ankolekar

Najma and Gary backstage at Joe's Pub, 5/3/08 | photo by Satej Ankolekar

Gary and his old friend and former editor ("Zoo World" magazine) Arthur Levy backstage at Joe's Pub, 5/3/08 | photo by Jake Levy

Click to enlarge

xxLove

Gary

I'm a Stranger Here Myself...

...doin' time on planet earth. A wandering minstrel, aye, who likes to commingle with other like-minded folk, strange kin peoples of the outer and inner circle (Whitman-sampler like, I contain multi-kulti 'tudes)... traveling the globe to bring you the thrill of victory...and the agony of de feet (o my achin' pieds)...

And 'twas a glorious evening well spent last Sunday at the KGB Bar over on East 4th Street wherein yours truly improvised an accompaniment on National steel for my pal Steve Beeber (renowned expert on all things Jewpunk--author of must-read "The Heebie Jeebies at CBGB's", editor of the recent Soft Skull Press anthology "AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless") who was a'reading my story "Me and the Golem" from same said book to a largish crowd...Steve's an excellent reader, story went down well, but the real fun part for me was digging the other turns by some fantastic writers, including the hilarious and foxy Catie Lazarus, Catie's a sharp dresser (wore a little red-riding hoody ensemble with a half a bear visage over her hard skull--Caroline would have loved this) who also is a stand-up practitioner of commedia del pahty, she's written for Heeb, The Forward, Time Out NY, lots of tony publishing houses too, she read from Steve's anthology a thing called "Insomnia" (a trademark symbol should go next to the a, don't have this key on my G4, sorry Catie) and had us all smiling and giggling, sometimes howling, she is quite a kosher cut-up for sure (are there any female mohel's allowed out there?)...

Bud Parr, who writes a regular blog with the provocative title "Chekhov's Mistress", delivered a strong reading of a piece entitled "I Wish I Were an Insomniac" (careful what you wish for, bud, I've been there, and a long night of the soul is oft not a pretty story)...and the lovely Priscilla Becker read a very very funny piece entitled "Taking Out the Trash", Priscilla won the Paris Review's book prize with her first book of poems "Internal West" a couple years ago, she is also a freelance music critic, I thought she looked kinda glamorously familiar when she got up to read--turns out she used to work at my pal Johnny Rocket's Rockit Scientist store down on Carmine Street, one of the best music emporiums in the city, now located on St. Mark's Place, a real good place to haunt for all sorts of genre rarities like my good friend and collaborator the writer par excellence David Dalton's ancient psychedelique arcana/waxing, "How to Blow Your Mind and Have a Freak-Out Party", possibly his only foray into recorded music which he'd probably rather forget about but which I'm told is a good 'un (wonder if my pal Julian Cope is hep to this album? Memo for further investigation!) (it's not Rockit Scientist's link, but will have to do for the nonce, they got it there, believe me!)...sure is a funny old world--hope David is getting sent his royalties from this reissue in a timely way!

Thursday Gods and Monsters had a wonderful gig at Oberlin College outside of Cleveland, never been to that school before until Michelle Cable of Panache Agency booked us (Oberlin was considered one of my "safe schools" along with Antioch back in the day, oy vey), and I brought the full industrial strength Gods and Monsters supergroup lineup with me (Jerry Harrison, Ernie Brooks, Billy Ficca, and Jason Candler--Joe Hendel was occupado with his Downtown.tv show thingy)...Oberlin treated us royally, special thanks to Brandon Adler and his crew who made the whole thing effortless, worthwhile, and big Fun--the guys played their asses off (considering Jerry was out pahtying with David Byrne at Del Posto the night before till the wee small hours of sixpence, he played like an angel), the attending student body at the 'Sco proved outstandingly receptive to the collective cut of our jib, and we're doing it to death all over again here at the Bowery Poetry Club NYC on my birthday, June 20th, with Joe Hendel hoisting his mizzenmast (well, trombone) at this one...

Saturday night Caroline and I went up to Zankel Hall to hear the Yale Symphony Orchestra perform at the Musical Olympus Festival Concert, which featured First Prize winning young international prodigies joining the orchestra, including Romania's Mihai Marica on cello, the Russian Nikita Lyutikov on clarinet, and the Hungarian French horn whiz Szabolcs Zempleni playing Strauss' Horn Concerto No. 1...our favorite though was Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili who played Chopin's Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra--an incredibly difficult finger-buster--in a blissed-out, rapturous trance that had the audience weeping for joy, she brought out nuanced lines and passages with such passion and fire there was nothing more to say at the end but Bravo, which the audience, did, loudly...I am an alumnus of this very same orchestra, having played electric guitar with them under the baton of John Mauceri in 1973 in the European premiere of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" at the Vienna Konzerthaus...and I must say, the 2008 YSO is a marvel of sophistication under the baton of Singapore's Darrell Ang--and a beautiful thing to hear, indeed...you really should try and catch them...

C and I then went downtown to meet our friend Richard and enjoy a fine Middle Eastern meal at Mamlouk on East 4th Street between A and B, where we beheld the miracle of my friend the very gifted vocalist Anath bellydancing up a storm, she got the crowd up and swaying with her immediately, including Caroline, who cut a mean boogie (while Richard averted his eyes-- for shame!), Anath's going to be at Drom in the East Village on May 8th, and I should be there that night also sitting in with her and her partner, ace Chilean keyboardist/sampler extraordinaire Pablo--you really should check their music out-- together they weave an exotique tapestry of sounds Middle Eastern and otherwise (I love their version of Blondie's "Rapture", it's on Youtube), they make shimmering trancelike musique nonstop, extremely hypnotic and danceable...Anath's a good friend of Yael Naim's, who may well be there too (btw, I'm sitting in with Yael and David Donatien at Central Park Summerstage the night of June 22nd--please come and check Yael out live-- she is simply Incroyable!)

(Wipe that smile off your face, Lucas!)

No way...

xxLove


Gary

Fun House

Just back from supping with Caroline at the fabulous Al Fama restaurant, corner of Hudson and Perry Street here in the w-w-wild West Village--nostalgic for Portuguese cooking (they have some of the best I've ever tasted...and I am missing Portugal a lot again after my super gigs there last month with Dead Combo in Coimbra, which made the front page of the Portuguese national paper Publico here, I returned there tonight and ordered the excellent fillet steak you carve up yourself and cook to taste (rare, very rare in my case) on a sizzling stone and eat in tiny bites dipped in chili sauce and garlic sauce...plus hot cinnamon and egg custard pastelas for dessert... mmmmmmmm...

this was the first eatery to stick on the corner there (going strong for 6 years now) since I moved here in '77, replacing many a non-starter pectopah (I recall a procession of dreary Japanese and Spanish joints--and I love good Japanese and Spanish food)..so long may Al Fama reign..in fact, the enterprise was kicked off in style befitting the elegant and immaculately decorated cool clean interior with an appearance by the exquisite young Portuguese fado superstar Mariza, with whom I shared a bill on world music maven dj Charlie Gillett's 30th anniversary show on BBC London some years back (along with Nick Hornsby and Nick Lowe, check it out here), Mariza was holding her American record release party at Al Fama right after they opened...and I have since enjoyed many a lovely mid-summer's night dream there kicking back with friends at tables the restaurant sets out along leafy Perry Street...go there and say hello to their charming hostess Denise Costa, and indulge yourself in sybaritic decadence...it ain't THAT pricey--and it's definitely worth the $$...

Still recovering (the steak helped!) from a Gods and Monsters live blow-out Saturday night, the guys and I played a legendary underground party (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) which goes down in an un-safe house every 3 weeks or so in darkest Brooklyn, on the fringe of South Williamsburg/Bed-Stuy/the Brooklyn Navy Yard--a not very fashionable industrial no-man's land that is growing dismayingly trendier slowly but surely every day...party held at the most peculiar building, a two story loft decorated Pee-Wee's Playhouse style with day-glo tsotchkes and handmade boho objet d'arts dangling from the ceiling and encrusting every wall and available surface space...a real Laff-in-the-Dark Fun House cum Factory with a great stage area when you climbed the steps up to the first floor to enter where we mesmerized the crowd filing in with an intense and loose free-form psychedelic jammy of a set (Ernie Brooks and Billy Ficca from Modern Lovers and Television comprising one badass rhythm section and throwing thunderbolts as one with their rhythmic cut and thrust, Jason Candler like a fresh cool breeze on alto sax and fx, young Joe Hendel was on the f'ing case on keyboards and trombone, hot from walking the walk on his downtowntv.com programmy "The Latest Show on Earth"--boy knows how to improvise)...multiple dj's were spinning gold in the basement dance hall areas--2 of 'em, real good they were too, I climbed down there after our set to walk in on one blasting an old crackling London 45 of "She Said Yeah" by the Stones (the old Larry Williams tune done rave-up stylee and sporting Keith's proto-metal riffing fuzz-toned guitar--one of my favorite all time tracks, with a guitar solo that sends me every time I hear it and sits firmly at #1 in my Top 5, along with Lou Reed's "I Heard Her Call Name" and Hendrix's "The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice") (a/k/a "STP LSD"), the other spinner was playing a nasty 70's r&b track by unknown black female with rude 'n lewd lyrics, entire place was crawling with attractive young sharp-dressed hipsters of both sexes, young old and in betweenies all young at heart (including the beatnik who was projecting movies in a Harum Scarum-style tent set up on the roof overlooking the industrial wasteland, I climbed the rickety fire escape up top, waded through the gimlet-eyed stoners (thought I wuz a donut, you tried to glaze me--didn't need to, I was High on Life at this do just people peeping--everybody seemed tranced out on something or other in this rollicking rip-roaring timezone of a son of flubbery/flim-flam flummery/rubber-room of a crib--PAHTY HAHTY!)--and walked in on him in the midst of projecting an 8mm, sepia-tinted print of (!) (never seen this before) Max Fleischer/Betty Boop/Cab Calloway's classic 1933 'toon "The Old Man of the Mountain", which I've sung snatches of onstage with Fast 'n Bulbous, like the other night at the Knitting Factory Beefheart Tribute, in homage to our hirsute baritone sax player Dave Sewelson, who kinda resembles the toon's protagonist...

Okey dokey, 2-count them-2 of my favorite cultural artifacts--"She Said Yeah" and "The Old Man of the Mountain"--cosmically hurled flung dummy-like/Aaron Kaye-style in my face (pie in the fucking sky) upon entering the twin sanctum sanctorums of (what was this party head-quarter's name again?)--I mean, what more could one ask for? Hey hey hey, boyz and grrrrrls--I was in 7th Heaven! The Ultimate Pu-Pu Platter a'set before me! Wandering through this glowing bifurcated house 'o smiles, grinning from ear to eternity, like a newborn child, God was smiling his beatific Buddah smile down upon me tonight at noon like the Teletubby Sun-Baby (Sun Tzu Spark?) (Pulitzer prize winning Chronicleer/Chanticleer's Sun Pie hisself?)...

Jackpot! Banco! Kismet! Polovetsian Dances! (Prince) Igor on chains, backed by his baying hounds! ("Take my hand, I'm a stranger in (roll the) Pair 'o Dice")!

A Quincunx Quiddity! Serendipity!!

(Double Jeopardy??)...

Maybe so...maybe some sick sense was telling me it was possible to have too much fun--too much, too soon--in one night (all summer in a day...)

("A lifetime in a night."--James Joyce, "Ulysses")

Soooooo--

me and roady Davy scaramooched outta there to our waiting livery/car service around quarter to 2 am, special thanks to Kris Anton and Chris the cool party promoter and lovely Sari and the lovely girl with ostrich feathers on her head (step on yr head and do the ostrich) who shimmied before us while we played and the guy who told me he'd learned "Flavor Bud Living" in an open tuning (wrong, but what the hey) and the lovely Russian girl who said she had come there specifically to see me play, and, and, uh....

Well--apparently the cops raided this here floating world crap game tethered to the mast 'o (what was that name again? Rhymes with Cool de la) at 3am and busted some folks there for selling liquor...and alice be toke-less brownies... and bic pen barrels filled with the unnameable (giving new meaning to the apothegm 'flick yr bic')...

but the party will regroup and reconstitute itself like wild mercury quivering on the plate of life...

and we'll be playing there next time at the witching hour itself we were so well received there (contributing mightily to getting this party started) saith the party promoters, who truth to tell have survived numerous busts and shakedowns over the last 15 years since they started up (where's that confounded name?) (seems like this goes on a lot in Brooklyn--certainly the last few times we played there...

next stop for G&M--Oberlin College in (I know a rhyme that comes with a riddle) Ohio this Thursday, dear people (what's round on the end and high in the middle? oHio)-- with the full supergroup lineup (Jerry Harrison is joining us for this one--thanks to Michelle Cable and Panache Booking for hooking it up, at, appropriately enough, the Dionysus Disco...)

Be there now...

xxLove


Gary


ps two excellent gigs earlier in the week: beginning with "Beefheart Night at the Knit", a Pick of the Week in both the New Yorker magazine and the Village Voice, a special gala event featuring the return of Fast 'n Bulbous, who were all in town (my co-leader Phillip Johnston flying in from Sydney Australia for this) to record our second album for Cuneiform--plus a cast of 1000's (including many many beautiful Van Vliet paintings and drawings courtesy of Beefheart.com, which were projected in all their grandiloquence on a large screen throughout the poetry readings and side-splitting and poignant reminiscences by Danny Fields, Alan Vega, Hal Willner, Kurt Loder, Lee Ranaldo, Giorgio Gomelsky, Brainpang a/k/a Peter Warner, Mike Edison, Glenn Kenny, David Lynch remotely, Darryl Read by way of London, Felice Rosser from Faith, Billy Altman, Jamie Cohen, Dusty Wright who also filmed much of the event--a podcast should air on his culturecatch.com webzine in a couple weeks)...I curated the night as a conscious-raising exercise to call attention once again to this sadly still very much overlooked American visionary genius, my former employer and mentor Don Van Vliet...

Gary, Dave Sewelson and Joe Fiedler let 'er rip at "Beefheart Night at the Knit", NYC, 4/9/08

Gary and surprise guest Robyn Hitchcock got the time to teach ya at "Beefheart Night at the Knit", NYC, 4/9/08


The band played two white-hot sets, debuting new renditions of Beefheart classics such as "Woe is a Me Bop" and old favorites (an incandescent "Kandy Korn")...and at 12:30am the overflow crowd was treated to a surprise appearance by Robyn Hitchcock, who sat in as a duo with me playing National steel on "Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do", "China Pig", and "Click Clack" (Robyn hightailed it downtown to join our party after his gig with the aforementioned Nick Lowe uptown, which is why he was a surprise guest, we couldn't advertise his appearance! He was bloody magnificent too...)

Second great gig was me sitting in with Gallo and the Roosters, my good-hearted Italian pals with whom i cut an album in Milano last February after my Spanish solo tour...C showed up on Friday to catch us at John Zorn's joint The Stone on 2nd Street and Ave. C--and was dazzled by Danilo Gallo's cinematic charts and the propulsive interplay of drummer extraordinaire Zeno di Rossi, saxophonist Francesco Bigoni, local trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, and yours truly...can't wait till you hear our album...