Tad Friend's article "Sleeping With Weapons" in the August 16/23 issue of The New Yorker tells the strange, sad story of artist and musician John Lurie, best known as leader of the Lounge Lizards, who has been living in hiding since 2008.
The story doesn't lend itself to quick summary, but basically it appears that Lurie fled into self-imposed exile after falling out with a close friend, artist John Perry. The pair had a complex, combustible relationship, and what began with a seemingly minor incident escalated rapidly into a sustained feud of bizarre proportions -- exacerbated, perhaps, by a degree of instability on both sides. Lurie, who has suffered for years from a debilitating but indeterminate illness, comes across as more than a little paranoid and obsessive. But Perry's reported actions resemble nothing so much as a campaign of deliberate harassment: creepy, insinuating and borderline stalkerish. While it's impossible to know where the truth lies, exactly, one gets the impression that the two men reinforce each other's worst tendencies.
It's saddening to note that Lurie stopped playing his saxophone nearly a decade ago, and to think that the odd spectacle of his life now will probably overshadow what was, in its time, an estimable musical career.
Early in their career as fixtures on New York's downtown scene, Lurie glibly characterized the Lounge Lizards as a "fake jazz" band. Their actual music -- influenced in roughly equal parts by Monk and Coleman, noir atmospherics, Henry Mancini and No Wave avant-clatter -- belied the label, but it stuck all the same, as these things tend to do. A lot of serious jazz fans, I'm guessing, have given the band a pass over the years, mistakenly assuming that what they'll be getting is some sort of smartass hipster parody of bebop, irony on its sleeve and head up its ass. They'd be wrong.
For those inclined to hear for themselves, I can vouch for Big Heart: Live in Tokyo, which documents the band and its most impassioned and urgent (thought the epic "Punch and Judy Tango" does meander a bit), and the self-released Voice of Chunk, which captures both their sense of humour and their lyricism. (I'll leave it for others to speculate how much John's brother Evan -- better known these days as the guy who writes music for kiddie show The Backyardigans -- had to do with the latter. But if you're curious, his unheralded, tango-influenced 1990 solo album, Selling Water By the Side of the River, is well worth searching out.)
As for the Lizards' self-titled 1981 debut ... well, with Arto Lindsay's guitar skronking all over the place, it's perhaps a tad astringent for some tastes, but still one of the few recordings from that time and place that even halfway lives up to its legend. Listeners who appreciate Lurie's esoteric side will also want to track down the minimalist string quartet music he composed for Stranger Than Paradise, which sometimes almost kinda sorta makes me think I should get over my Jim Jarmusch issues and rent the movie. But never quite.
Not that it matters one way or the other, but Lurie was also, in his heyday, an uncommonly beautiful individual. Check out the slideshow here. Let's hope he returns from the wilderness one of these days -- and, if we're lucky, finds a reason to start making music again. He is missed.
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