In the mid-1980s, John Lurie had a career choice to make. Three choices, really. Painter? Actor? Musician? In the end, thankfully for music lovers, he chose his saxophone.
As a Grammy-nominated film score composer ( Get Shorty ), bandleader, record label founder, and non-existent bluesman, Lurie found his highest moments of creative collaboration and adulation. His Lounge Lizards, with pianist and brother Evan, required new hyphenates for description; no-wave, punk-jazz. His writing graduated from Monk-inspired, warp-speed atonal bursts complemented by the scattershot guitar of masters like Marc Ribot to tightly composed sections of contrapuntal tension that gave way to improvised release, often with a sly sense of humor implicit in the notes or explicit in song titles and stage banter.
Ironically, it is in his third act, in which he fights a daily battle with Advanced Lyme disease, no longer acts, no longer makes music, and devotes all of his creative energy to his painting, that Lurie is ever more fascinating.
What had become a life restricted, with little activity outside of his home for six years due to his illness, morphed into surreal in 2008. That is when a onetime friend of Lurie’s turned into his stalker; a man with, according to an August 2010 article in the New Yorker, an admitted history of violence, arrest record, and tendency toward predatory behavior began a series of threatening emails and phone calls. Coupled with his tenuous health, Lurie faced the unimaginable- leaving his home and going into hiding. Moving in and out of the country, and concerned for his safety, Lurie tried to remain positive. A few weeks after his 58th birthday, Lurie conducted the following interview via email, still under significant duress.
The Lounge Lizards music of the mid ’90s seemed built around tightly composed sections that led into sections of solos and improvisations. How strict were you with each player adhering to the composition and how much freedom did you offer the band during the improvised moments?
The composed sections were pretty strict. One or two players could possibly stray from what was written depending on the section. I would try to give each of them a chance to stretch out in a solo at some point live. Freedom was there but then it wasn’t. If someone did a solo that was perfect for that piece in Brussels, three weeks before, I would play it for them and try to get them back to it. Also, on recordings, the nature of the CDs should really not have been waiting 12 minutes for the musician to find it. So in some ways the solo had to be structured.
Did you feel the Queen of All Ears record accurately captured the strength of the band at the time or were you better represented in a live setting?
We were far better live than in the recording studio. Just hearing what is going on is difficult with that many players. There are bits on Queen of All Ears – like ‘First and Royal Queen,’ ‘Scary Children,’ the softer, more composed ones that work, but that thing we could get live- that ecstatic roar- just was never there.
Miles Davis and Frank Zappa were two terrific players, but were perhaps equally as renown for their ability to recruit top-flight talent for their bands. You also fit that description, with your bands having included John Medeski, Steven Bernstein, Michael Blake, Marc Ribot, David Tronzo, Billy Martin, Jane Scarpantoni, and the list goes on and on. What are you listening or looking for when you select your musicians?
How they fit together is important. For example, if the drummer is macho, then the bass player has to be a little lenient. There is a big masculine/feminine thing in who I hire. Not male/female but just a sense of who is sensitive and who is strong. It is best to have both in the same person, but if you don’t, then you need to balance it out. I have hired some musicians without even hearing them play; just seeing how they pack up their instrument after talking to them can be enough.
A favorite of jamband audiences is Medeski, Martin, and Wood. At one point in the ’90s, Billy Martin and John Medeski were Lounge Lizards. Can you talk about how Medeski came to be in the band and what he brought to the band’s sound?
Billy Martin (percussion/drums) was in the band for a long time. He kept talking about Medeski. He kind of ending up filling the void that happened when (David) Tronzo and Evan (Lurie, John’s brother) left the band. Medeski can really, really play. And he is real and spontaneous. This is actually rare – you often meet people who can play but they just are a little phony in a way because of how much they studied. So the music is not really coming from them. John was a delight. I really got to use him more on the Get Shorty soundtrack than in the band.
In the chronology of the band, 1998 seems to be one of the higher points; you’re playing sold-out shows here in the U.S. and in Europe and Asia, Queen of All Ears is released, you’re appearing on Conan O’Brien’s show, and yet a year later there seems to be a collision of interests with your Fishing with John television series and the Marvin Pontiac release. Subsequently the Lounge Lizards fades away completely, save for a few anniversary shows. What happened?
No, it wasn’t really a collision of interests. There was a horrible fiasco with the Knitting Factory for our 20th anniversary that really put a damper on things for the band. My health was really getting strange and I had to pull back on stuff. I had started my own label to put out the Lounge Lizards music, but then had to do Hollywood film scores to keep it going financially. It was just becoming too much business and not enough music. But the release of the fishing show was just a coincidence. Marvin [Pontiac, the name of his next studio project] came a year or two later.
That raises two questions. First, you referred to your health, “getting strange.” Meaning what?
I had, what they called at the time, ‘chronic fatigue syndrome.’ I later discovered it was Lyme. I had had Lyme in 1994. I could do what I needed to do but would just collapse for a month or so after a tour. I was dizzy and aching all the time. I knew something was wrong but thought maybe it was just exhaustion. So, in 2000, I decided to stop everything.
On the Marvin Pontiac record, you moved away from being the sax player you were in the Lounge Lizards, to being a singer, guitar player, and harmonica blower. Did the growing effects of your illness have any influence over the choice to do this record, under a pseudonym no less, and kind of remove yourself from the pressures of being the bandleader of the Lounge Lizards?
No, the pseudonym was because I can’t sing and didn’t really want to put out a John Lurie Sings! album. No, I wasn’t so sick yet. (It) was just a project.
So without having any sense of what debilitating effect the illness would eventually have, how comfortable, in hindsight, are you with Marvin Pontiac being your last major recording? I would imagine you have a lot left to say musically?
Well, I am more uncomfortable that we were never able to really capture what was great about the Lizards, except in moments, on record. I am proud of the Marvin Pontiac CD – maybe this project was just better suited to recording than the band, but I don’t mind that it was my last CD.
Can you describe what your daily life is like battling the disease, and why it has forced you to stop playing music?
The disease is odd. Migrating neurological problems. One day my vision is nuts, migraine aura. There is another one that is really crazy where everything looks like it is made of static electricity. The next day, my left leg won’t work. Music became more like the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. The sound of two plates clinking together would just kill me. Music with a beat, particularly an insistent, irritating beat, would just send my sympathetic nervous system into hell. I am a good deal better now. My daily life, since the stalker- that is almost impossible to explain. It is so strange to have had a disease that no one really believed or understood and then this threat of a psycho freak that no one really believed or understood.
Interviewer’s note: In August of 2010, the New Yorker magazine published a lengthy article making public a situation in Lurie’s personal life. Subsequent to the article’s release, several blogs and their attached reader comments have disputed writer Tad Friend’s account, including omission of facts and quotes out of context.
The New Yorker detailed a situation in your personal life in which a onetime friend had become a stalker of yours, threatening physical harm through emails and phone calls beginning sometime in 2008. What did you think of the article?
The article was so undignified, so wildly inaccurate, that I don’t know what to say about it. And this was in the New Yorker, a magazine that I used to trust.
Can you point to one or two things about the article that you find most egregious?
It was supposed to be an article about my life and work. I think interviewing someone’s stalker and writing what they tell you as fact, with confirmation from nowhere, is fairly egregious. If my stalker told them that he took care of me when I was ill- something that is absurdly untrue- it is in the article as though it happened. Evidence and witnesses were ignored to tell the stalker’s account of the hideous things he did and is still doing. All the seething obsession of this guy has been cleaned away, making him appear to be a rational starving artist. The inception of the problem is so muddled that the reader might think the stalker had a legitimate reason for doing what he was doing. I have documented Advanced Lyme disease and it is passed off as a mysterious ailment. The writer seems to be obsessed with fame. If I spoke to a stranger in Starbucks, the writer’s take on it was that I was hoping to be recognized, which I think is pretty sick. If someone was to recognize me at a Starbucks in Joshua Tree, I believe I would have fainted. And, of course, the mis-quotes were a charming addition.
At one point, early on in the harassment, you had the opportunity to file charges with the police and you declined. Do you regret that decision?
I felt that practically and spiritually this was the wrong way to go.
How about you, practically and spiritually? Did all of these recent trials ever find you depressed? Or was it more anger and confusion as to why it was happening?
Anger. Depression. Baffled. All three. All I am guilty of is doing an unstable person a favor and agreeing to do an article with a magazine that was once reputable. Look at what has happened to my life.
I understand from a recent, very bizarre email several weeks ago from the man that this situation is not over?
Well, the eeriest thing about that email is that I had only been home for three days after being gone for two years. And the freak sends me the strangest email that ends in “WELCOME BACK.” No one knew I was back. Two days later I began getting a series of calls from pay phones in my neighborhood and then someone came and leaned on my doorbell buzzer for two minutes. I thought the buzzer had broken but then the pay phone calls started again a couple of minutes later. A writer contacted me because he found the New Yorker article somewhat off and wanted to do a piece on it. He also called the stalker. Then I guess he thought he would try to do the human thing and asked if they could mediate the situation. The stalker said he would only sit down with me if I took out a full-page ad in the New Yorker admitting my lies. But the gist of the conversation was that he was on a mission to teach me a lesson because of who I am. And he admitted that it was him calling. So, no I don’t think so.
*One thing I found so glaring and odd was how the New Yorker article put so little emphasis on this guy threatening two policemen with a baseball bat or that he filed a false police report against you so he could attack you and not be charged. Even his admission that he claimed your identity to find out from the cable company if you had ordered a pay-per-view boxing match, and planned to do so again to ascertain exactly how many minutes you watched the fight. This didn’t get the attention in the article that one might assume. *
Yeah, they really passed over it like it was nothing. Like it was something any sane person might do if they got up on the wrong side of the bed. And the thing I thought was sickest was when I wrote the man asking why he was doing this, the next thing was that somehow he found out where my doctor was and said he would wait there. So, after being really ill for seven years and finally finding some treatment that was helping, he is going to wait at my doctor’s office?
In the past two years you have lived in Granada, Turkey, and Big Sur, among other places. But these were no vacations. Has it been difficult for people, including the New Yorker, to grasp the severity of the effects all this has had on your life?
No one comes close to understanding this. Most would prefer to think I have lost my mind rather than believe what is happening. It is pretty unbelievable, so I understand why people say, ‘Nah, that isn’t really happening.’ But, this is two years of this, and I see no end. But what is really depraved is that the New Yorker had a ton of evidence and knew that someone who had been ill for years was hiding from a very disturbed person. And then wrote a piece of fiction about two artists bickering. I just met with a private detective who had read the same emails that the New Yorker had. He said, “I read the article and thought you were hysterical, but this guy is level 3, shoot-people-from-a-tower crazy.” Three different psychiatrists have had similar impressions. All you have to do is read his post on the Dangerous Minds blog and wonder how on earth the New Yorker made this guy sound rational. If he is the guy in Tucson and I can see it a mile in advance, how on earth does that put my sanity in question?
Did the article, which essentially made this public for the first time, resolve anything or did it make matters worse?
Not sure if it made things worse or not. The situation continues. Whether it made it worse or not is all in the mind of the stalker, a place I really do not want to visit. But, I have to live like the threat is 100% real all the time. Certainly wasn’t like the stalker went, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ The _New Yorker _sort of made light of it. It is just so strange. How did it serve them to do this? The truth was such a better story.
You’ve painted throughout your career, your work appearing as cover art for some of the Lounge Lizards releases. In 2007, A Fine Example of Art, was published containing many of your paintings. They also can be seen, and prints purchased, at johnlurieart.com. Additionally, you’ve done successful showings in galleries both in the U.S. and abroad. How have these personal battles informed or affected your work?
Well, now things have pretty much ground to a halt.
When things grind to a halt, either by choice or by circumstance, how, as an artist, do you get out of it? How can you get back to painting?
When you are spending all your time trying to figure out how to be safe, it makes it difficult to do much else. I was able to for a while, but now I am just exhausted.
You have been directed by such notables as Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, and Martin Scorsese. You could’ve been a Hollywood movie star, possibly, if you had chosen that field. Why didn’t you? And do you miss it?
The music was more important to me. I thought also to the world, but maybe I was wrong there. Miss it? Nah.
Your music, acting career, television show, paintings, interviews, and stage banter, typically contain moments of playful, often cynical humor. I think this says a lot about how you handle life. How’s your sense of humor these days?
Still there. You want me to say something funny?
Once during a Lounge Lizards concert in Central Park, there was a moment when somebody tossed a microcassette up on stage, presumably from an audience member recording the show. You smiled, and without comment, slid it into your shirt pocket. What was your feeling on people taping your shows?
It is fine with me. I just hope it sounds good. I am so into capturing the thing sonically and always had trouble with it. I hear these things on YouTube and cringe.
YouTube has certainly become the new medium of bootlegging. The Lounge Lizards have a number of videos on there, including an entire 1998 concert taped for Polish television. It’s visually and sonically pretty good. Is the Live in Berlin concert video from 1991 something that you can see surfacing anytime soon, on YouTube or DVD?
I just saw that Polish one. I think the horns sound very shrill. It is a board tape. Live in Berlin? Yeah, maybe someone should put that on YouTube. I know it sounds good.
A quick check of iTunes finds nearly all of the Lounge Lizards releases as well as your solo and soundtrack work available. What do you think of the digital medium, and how much of your material is under the control of your Strange and Beautiful label?
I control all of the Strange and Beautiful catalogue. I like albums. I like analog recording. I find a little of the soul of the sound is lost in digital.
Can you tell me three of your favorite albums?
I can’t listen to music any more because of the neurological effects and because the loss is too great. So, I no longer have favorite albums, but Zero Hour by Piazzola, something by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and something by Fela. But, I am leaving out Ellington and Monk and Mingus and Hendrix and… I guess I never had three favorite albums. It is kind of like answering, ‘what is your favorite color?’
Rumor is you are working on an autobiography. When might we see something in print or online?
I don’t think any time soon. If I write something now it would have to be this story now. I have the title- There Has to Be a God or It Couldn’t Get This Weird.
