by John Lurie
I stick with him. We fly to London to tour supporting the first album. We’ve checked into our rooms. This is all very exciting. There are lots of interviews. Lots of girls.
I get a call from Piccolo, who says I’ve got to come to his room, right away. There’s a problem.
Great, what now? I go to his room and he shows me his arm. It’s blown up and looks like it’s been pumped full of Jell-O. It is, literally, four times its normal size. His arm is so big, he’s carrying it around the room with his other hand.
What’s happened is that he shot up with the water in the airplane’s bathroom—the water that the big sign says “DO NOT DRINK”—and he’s had some horrible reaction. So the water is not safe to drink but he has injected it directly into his bloodstream. Holy Human Fuck.
I find him a doctor and his arm is back to normal the next morning.
I can tell on the phone, immediately, if somebody is high. The person is on the other end, denying it, but their voice is raspier and has a different rhythm and pattern. It’s a funny thing, because even if they are trying to hide that they are high, it’s one of those things that you feel is being enjoyed, which makes it infinitely more annoying.
Long after I stopped using, I would still have all the usual reactions to heroin. After sound check, which is always somehow rushed and irritating, I’d think, What do I have to do now? I have to cop and then go home and change. When I hadn’t been high in six months.
I’d kick before going on tour, maybe go out with just a chippy and get straight on the road. By the end of tour I’d be completely fine. My suitcase would come off the conveyor belt back in New York and there would be a shooting pain in my knees. Then my stomach. My eyes burned. I was dope sick! After three weeks of being straight! It doesn’t make any sense. I am Pavlov’s dog.
* * *
—
The European tour is fishy. It’s been set up by the record company EG records, run by Mark and Sam. We were told in New York that we’d be getting twenty-five pounds a day, each. That wasn’t much but it was fine. We were opening for their darling, Robert Fripp, and we were blowing him off the stage night after night. We were getting all the press and all the energy from the crowds. Mark and Sam didn’t like these upstarts from the colonies not understanding their place.
They decide that we’ve misunderstood what we were told in New York and that, in fact, it’s $25 a day, about two and a half times less money at that time, and oh, by the way, we have to pay for the transportation of the equipment, so we actually lost money to go on tour. This was the first time I’d encountered shit like this.
We had Sam’s address and I tried to talk the rest of the band into breaking into his house, but only Piccolo thought that it was a good idea. Piccolo started sending them postcards from all over Europe:
Dear Mark and Sam:
Tour is going splendidly. Audiences in Italy love the band and I’m sure they are buying tons of records.
Yours truly,
Steve Piccolo of The Lounge Lizards
It reminds me of that story that may well be an urban myth. The story where a band steals a lawn jockey from somebody’s front lawn in Michigan and takes it on tour.
The band takes photos of the lawn jockey in front of the Eiffel Tower, in front of the Berlin Wall, at the Acropolis, and sends the photos, like postcards, back to the address where they stole him. The postcards say, “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”
When they get back to the States they put the lawn jockey back in the yard where they found it.
I don’t want to hear that that story is not true. It may be absolutely untrue, and you may know for sure it is not. I don’t want to know. And fuck you for being the kind of person who would need to point that out.
* * *
—
We’re playing at Danceteria and Piccolo wants me to pick him up in a cab on the way. I don’t want to. I have all these rituals I do before a gig and this is not one of them. He’s also out of my way and I don’t want to get him, but this is a way that at least I can make sure that he makes the gig, and so I go and get him.
He gets in the cab and doesn’t make me wait for him before coming downstairs. He seems fine.
“I have to make a stop.”
“Oh, no.”
I want to get to the club and find a reed, warm up before the show.
I give in and he directs the cab where to go. He knows that if he says Fifth Street and Avenue C, I’m going to say no. So, he leans forward, and in this sneaky little voice he says to the driver, “Take a left here, okay, now straight, okay, left here.”
We do go to Fifth and C. He says he’ll be right back. I’m nervous and hyped about the show, and the driver is nervous because we are in what looks like a war zone. The streetlights don’t work, the buildings look like they’ve been bombed. Anybody who is actually out on this street has to be a murderer.
He’s gone a long time. The driver is really nervous and wants to leave. I can’t leave Piccolo here and I don’t want to go down that alley where he’s just disappeared. We wait. The driver starts to drive away and I scream at him to stay put.
Finally, Piccolo arrives. I’m so angry that I don’t say anything.
We’re playing, it’s going okay, and then the rhythm goes sideways. Really sideways and I’m not sure what’s happening. Usually when we play and the music takes that amorphous drop, it means that there’s a broken string or drum or something’s wrong. I can’t turn around when I’m playing, I’m always in front of the rhythm section. There’s a part in the music where I’m playing in phrases that make it possible to turn around, and I see Piccolo. He’s leaning way over and standing on one leg. His torso is parallel to the floor. He’s balancing in a way that challenges the laws of gravity and physics. His mouth is wide open and he looks like he’s asleep. He’s gone into a complete junkie nod. If you live in a big city, you’ve probably seen this: A guy on the street so bent over that he’s about to kiss the pavement. He’s not unconscious but he’s certainly not conscious either. It’s not possible to balance like that. But they never fall. Never. Just like you never see a bird fall out of the sky when they die, you won’t ever see a junkie on a nod fall down.
Piccolo is in complete nod. One leg, mouth open, but he’s still playing. I could fucking kill him.
Steve Piccolo has since moved to Italy and is straight, married, and now, at least according to him, the highest-paid translator in Italy. He also really is a genius. His Domestic Exile records, which he did in the early eighties, were truly some of the best pop things I’ve ever heard.
When we went on another tour, we were in a small white van. Five boys from New York City looking out on the French countryside. When you are with the same people twenty-four hours a day in close quarters, the smallest thing begins to irritate you beyond belief. “I hate his ears! I hate his ears!” I heard a story from Tony Levin where the guitar player couldn’t stand the way the drummer chewed, and so one day in the middle of a roadside meal, with no warning, took his fork and stabbed the guitar player in the knee.
We got into a big debate about whether or not cows had horns. It became very heated and almost led to fist fights. Two of us emphatically believed that cows had horns and the other three didn’t. We did agree that only cows had udders.
We’d drive past a herd of cows and the two of us who believed that cows had horns would point madly and scream, “Udder and horns! Udder and horns!”
“No! No horns!”
“Yes! Yes! Look! Udder and horns! Udder and horns!”
* * *
—
We had a manager for a little while. Nice enough guy, Paul Trautman, who looked like a mild-mannered Jimmy Connors. He had kind of a weird speech thing, not exactly a stutter but something like that. How he got it in his head to try to manage us, God only knows.
/> Trautman contacted me and I said sure, we’ll give it a try.
Pretty quickly, Piccolo wanted to start a magazine called the Trautman Intelligencer.
Later Trautman set up our first Japanese tour, which was great, but his first tour was in the States. He had gotten some kind of cheap ticket for us to travel all over the United States, but only if every other flight came out of Atlanta. So when we did the West Coast, we went from L.A. to San Francisco, and then the following day was in Portland, but we had to go via Atlanta. Then to Seattle and then to Vancouver, via Atlanta. Every other day we were flying all the way across the country and back. Danny Rosen, who was playing guitar then, took a locker at the Atlanta airport and kept his bag there. He’d dress for the gig in the bathroom of the Atlanta airport. He told me that he didn’t need a hotel room if he could just keep the locker.
Trautman had come to our rehearsal to present the tour to us. He was nervous in general, and the guys in the band, a bunch of wise guys who would torture him, didn’t make it any easier. The venue in Seattle wasn’t going to cover the hotel expense and we couldn’t afford to pay for hotels, but Trautman didn’t present it like that. He somehow did this brilliant Tom Sawyer maneuver where we were all actually looking forward to the adventure and not angry at all. Instead of having a hotel, we were going to all sleep in sleeping bags on somebody’s roof. “Oh, boy!” It did actually sound like fun at that moment and we never gave it another thought. I remember us all trying to sleep on this freezing roof, cursing him. When the sun came up at six a.m., we cursed him some more.
During this meeting at the rehearsal, there was some confusion about the dates and whether we had a day off or not. He didn’t have an itinerary and was giving us the dates verbally, from memory. He was getting flustered, and Piccolo kept asking what day we were playing in Vancouver.
“The sixth.”
“You just said we were playing in Portland on the sixth.”
“That’s right.”
“So what day are we playing Vancouver?”
“On Tuesday.”
“What day is Tuesday?”
“The fifth.”
“We’re playing Vancouver before Portland?”
“No, Portland, then Vancouver.”
“Well, then we can’t be playing in Vancouver on the fifth and then Portland on the sixth.”
“Oh, I see.”
“What do you mean, ‘I see’?”
Trautman was sputtering, “Oh, that’s right, that’s right, the Tuesday is a Wednesday.”
“Oh, I see. It’s confusing because that week the Tuesday is a Wednesday.”
“Yes. No!”
13
Mutiny on the Bowery
Martin Meissonnier lost most of his money because Fela Kuti and his eighteen wives and enormous band roasted an entire goat in their hotel room.
They did that and a lot of other things.
Martin was a French promoter we worked with for a while. He also booked Fela’s tours at that time.
Fela traveled with his whole village, seventy people, who were running perpetually amok. Fela had a witch doctor who would tell him not to play if there were evil spirits onstage. Unless the tour manager paid the witch doctor a substantial bribe, evil spirits were declared and the show would be canceled. Cancellation by a witch doctor not legally being an act of God, this also cost Meissonnier a great deal of money.
The band—with Piccolo; Danny Rosen, who replaced Arto; Anton Fier; and Evan—did another tour of Europe, which was set up by Martin. I liked him a lot. What was great for us was that on the tour bus, we had all these videotapes of Fela playing live. Unbelievable music.
That infectious neverending beat that just pulled you in. They did concerts that went on for hours.
The videos showed his eighteen wives gyrating on the floor as they sang backup. They would be on their hands and knees, wailing, and would do this little bump-up thing with their asses going into the air that is the most arousing thing I have ever seen.
What The Lounge Lizards were doing musically had never been done before. In our way, for sheer ferocious energy and concept alone, we were great. We were tumultuous, irreverent, and exciting. But Fela’s music, with that incredible rolling rhythm, was so noble and organic, it made me think that what we were doing was maybe phony and I started to rethink it.
We played Paris and it was wonderful. We started our opener, “Incident on South Street,” and after the first two notes came climbing out of Evan’s Farfisa organ, the crowd roared in recognition and approval. Beautiful young women all up in the front, giving knowing, smiling nods.
* * *
—
There was a show canceled in France, in Clermont-Ferrand. We had a day off in this little village. The tour manager and driver, who had been jerks the entire time, left us with the van and went to their hometowns.
So when they were three hours late getting back, we stole the van and drove through the Alps to our next gig, in Lyon. It seemed insanely dangerous to have Piccolo driving at high speed through the winding mountain roads. On each curve, the centrifugal force would press my face against the window. As the van leaned out over the precipice, I would look down at the jagged landscape a mile or two below.
Later on that tour, we had been booked to play at this beautiful casino in Deauville. It was the kind of elegant room we’d envisioned playing one day.
But something seemed very odd.
We looked out from backstage and saw a rectangle of tables, with crisp, white tablecloths, around the stage. A lot of older people in formal attire, politely eating.
“What the fuck?”
“How are we going to play for these people?”
“I don’t know.”
We attempted to modify what we normally do and play music that would not ruin these people’s evening. We did a slow blues. Then we cut out the dissonant parts on a couple other things to be tamer, so as not to scare them. We tried, we really did try.
But about ten minutes into the music, almost in unison, everyone quietly folded their napkins in front of them, stood up, and left the room.
After they left, we played our normal set for ourselves in this beautifully ornate, empty room.
Turns out that this was a reunion dinner for a group of older veterinarians and their wives. It was sponsored by Meissonnier’s older brother, who was in charge of the event. I don’t know what their relationship was—I imagine it was not much of a relationship—but Martin’s brother, knowing he was in the music business, must have asked him for a band for this veterinarian event. Martin, having a sense of humor and I suspect not liking his brother so much, had booked us, the wildest, weirdest thing he could get his hands on.
The last gig of that tour, we were scheduled to play the Philharmonie in Berlin. This was a modern, fancy concert hall that we were playing as part of the Berlin Jazz Festival. Outside, as we were rushing in to do the concert, I met Stephen Torton, who became an integral part of my life later.
I was completely groggy. We had to soundcheck at nine in the morning and we were playing at eleven that night. So I had been sleeping.
Torton was waiting outside the hall trying to get in. I guess we had met before in the East Village, and he said, “Hey, John, can you get me in?” So I did.
* * *
—
The Berlin papers had said we were supposed to be funny, so any time there was a change or segue in the music, the audience would laugh. The “I get it” laugh of the pretentious modern art aficionado.
But they were laughing in a lot of places that weren’t funny. So I started stopping songs in the middle and then having the band point and laugh at them.
Crowds in Europe’s bigger cities seem to grasp the music in a more real way, but this was not that kind of crowd. These were people who buy their culture for the se
ason and go to every event because that is their social life. They don’t understand a thing, they don’t care to, but their clothes are very expensive.
So we laughed at them and pointed.
Perhaps I have not managed my career so well.
We have done shows at cultural centers in Europe, especially smaller towns in France, Italy, and Spain, where we were part of a cultural series at the fancy theater in town. It is an event, but the freaky thing is that the first two or three rows are filled with the bigwigs of the town, the mayor and his wife, and the idiotic chief of culture, and whoever else is the most bourgeois in that town. They couldn’t care less about the music, but these people in the front rows have the honor of getting these seats, so they are there with these sour faces, looking down at their bellies, fingering their ties, and fondling their jewelry.
The one thing that I really remember about that night in Berlin was that it was live on TV, but in Berlin that station at that time went off the air at midnight. We are playing past midnight to a crowd of some five thousand people and the television crew is packing up all around us. Evan is playing this quiet, beautiful solo and this guy is dragging a cable across the stage.
“What are you doing?”
“TV finished. Go home.”
“Great, but we’re still playing!”
He shrugs.
Hard to hold the violence down sometimes. I protect Evan and music with the ferocity of a mother bear.
* * *
—
After the tour, Danny and I got an apartment in Paris, near the Bastille, for a couple of months with Vincent Gallo. We knew Vince from New York. Danny and I were getting high pretty often. We’d go to the fancy clubs and meet sexy girls and get high. We’d come home late at night to find Vince sitting in front of a mirror wearing a three-foot-long fake beard in a rabbi outfit or some other equally bizarre thing.