by John Lurie
“Let’s rap for a while, you go first.”
Let me tell you something, unless you are Elvin Fucking Jones, do not ever go backstage and tell the band that you used to play the fucking drums.
People push in, in little groups, to snort their own drugs away from the rest of the club, in your dressing room, while acting like you’re not there. The dressing room is supposed to be the performer’s safe haven away from the crowd. A place to prepare oneself before the show and relax in peace after.
There was no sanctity. These people barging in were way out of line. There was nowhere to hide.
Someone came in and said, “How did you think you were tonight?”
“It was okay, but—”
“I didn’t like it. I thought it was cheap and derivative.”
I was too tired to punch him. They were coming in, in droves. A Bosch painting in my skin. Draining me.
Liz just sat up in her spot watching me. I went over to her and asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. You want to get high?”
“Yes please yes, do you have any?”
“Yep.”
Liz was sexy. Just writing this now and thinking about her gets a little tingle moving through me. She had red hair and eyes that were green and eight different other colors. She talked out of the side of her mouth.
* * *
—
I had moved back to my place on Third Street, and we went there. I was pretty ruined by the show. The band didn’t make any sense to me anymore. A month before, we had played at Tramps, and they had screwed up the advertising. There were only nine people at the gig.
“Why were you sitting on that table the whole time?”
“I was protecting you.”
That was perfect. I had needed protecting, I was being devoured. I had known her for a couple of years and we had never been close to being together, so I really didn’t know if anything was going to happen or not. But after she said that, I reached over and kissed the back of her neck.
I really did not expect the sensation I got. You can touch or kiss some people in the exact same way, the same spot, and there is nothing, no spark. But that kiss on the back of her neck, sitting on my blue plastic couch, which Klaus Nomi had helped me carry home just a couple of days before, really exploded. I didn’t expect that.
“Wow.”
The next night I was lying in bed with a girl named Joy and the phone rang. It was Liz. She could immediately tell by my voice.
“Is there a girl there?”
“Yeah,” I laughed.
“Tell her to get out, I’m coming over.”
So I had to tell this girl to leave because I wanted to see Liz, and this girl was fairly annoying. Plus, Liz probably had dope.
This sounds harsh and heartless, which I suppose it is, but it was a time of sex and drugs. More than anything it was a time of “take no prisoners.”
Liz was a stripper. This was 1983, and there was pretty much only Billy’s Topless and the Baby Doll Lounge among New York’s downtown strip clubs. Liz worked at both of those places. She would come to my place and we would get high every night. This was the first time that I had thrown caution to the wind and gotten high whenever I felt like it.
Before that I would get high for two or three days and then ride out being sick for a couple of days. On and off. On and off. I was either high or sick but never had gone the full way. In a way my friends were more courageous than me. I always had some level of self-preservation.
Now I was getting high every day and having marathon sex with Liz.
20
Hello, I Am a Dilettante and a Hack
Stephen Torton knew this guy who was being chased by Interpol who had tons of unbelievable heroin. Pure white dope from Thailand. Stephen set it up and got Gabrielle to buy a bunch of it. We ended up holding a good share for ourselves.
This heroin, and I am sorry to say this, but this pure, light heroin from Thailand was magic. If I could find it today, I would take it. Magic. Made you float, but what was really unique was that it made one brilliant.
Gabrielle was nodding so hard her face hovered inches off the floor for hours.
“Look, Gabrielle is reading her carpet.”
It came time to do the music for Stranger Than Paradise. Eszter, who was a pretty decent violin player, and I used to listen to the Bartók string quartets and follow along with the score. Like a little weekly class we did.
Since my character in the movie was Hungarian—actually almost everyone was Hungarian—I wanted to write a string quartet as a kind of nod to Bartók. Jim thought it was a good idea.
At this point I had never really written music on paper before. I had only done it as notes for stuff I was working on for the band.
I snorted this dope from Thailand. My mind went completely clear. Without an instrument, I started to get ideas and write the score: two violins, viola, and cello on a napkin. People can write music without instruments; now I can do it myself. You can hear it in your head and you write it. But at that time, this was inconceivable to me. And a string quartet? Come on. I didn’t know how to write for a string quartet.
This dope made me a genius. I drew lines on the napkins in pen and then started to fluidly write what was popping into my head. I could hear three moving lines at once and facilitate them with ease. It took more time to make the music staffs with a ruler and pen than it took to write the music.
Jim didn’t want to give me a tape of the movie to score to. Suddenly, he was very secretive. If I needed to see the scenes, I should come up to the editing room, but even that seemed like something he really didn’t want to let me do.
He wanted me to just record a bunch of string quartet music and he would plop it into the movie where he saw fit.
“That doesn’t make any sense, I don’t want to write the music without knowing the rhythm of the scene. Why can’t I just get a tape?”
I couldn’t get a straight answer.
Nothing makes me angrier than not getting a straight answer.
I said to Torton, “Shit, it was my idea, I starred in it, I wrote half the dialogue, where does he fucking get off hoarding it? How am I supposed to write the music without seeing it? And why can’t I see it? Suddenly it’s his secret film?”
Stephen played middleman and got Jim to let him tape the scenes I asked for. He brought a video camera to the editing room and shot off the Steenbeck, and I wrote the rest of the music like that.
I had written most of it on napkins at Gabrielle’s the night before. Now I only had a day to write the rest. Jim needed the music immediately to mix it and get the film to Cannes by the deadline. This, you can imagine, is not normal, to give a composer two days to write and record the music for a feature-length film, but somehow I did it. Every step of that movie hung over a precipice that would have doomed it. It was an extraordinary thing that that movie ever got finished.
Liz got home from work and wanted attention. I had to write the music. She stood against the refrigerator, clad in her red G-string from work. Her eyes closed, lips moist and parted, hands cradling her yearning neck, back arched, breasts pointing skyward, and she was moaning a little.
But I wrote on.
I didn’t have a studio or even a four-track tape recorder. I just used two shitty little handheld recorders, layering the tracks on one and then the other. Did all the work on the floor of my apartment on Third Street, bums wailing outside.
I watched the movie with Stephen’s camera hooked up to my little black and white TV, while recording the cello line to one tape recorder on a tiny keyboard, then the viola line on the second keyboard while listening to the cello line, then playing that back and playing the second violin on the first tape recorder because you could still faintly hear the cello line from when I played the viola line.
I layered all four parts going back and forth between the two tape recorders.
Jim snuck us into a recording studio where a friend of his was engineering. Jim slipped the guy some money and I had a string quartet, put together by Jill Jaffe, arrive at midnight.
They came in, set up, the engineer looking over his shoulder the whole time to see if the owner had come in and caught him.
What had I written? I was nervous.
A miracle.
I was amazed. It sounded incredible. I was really worried that it was going to sound plodding, but it was beautiful. The players helped it a lot, they really brought it to life, but I felt like I had invented the string quartet.
* * *
—
I got the call to come out to L.A. to meet with the film company about doing the score for Aaron Lipstadt’s movie City Limits. I didn’t really have the job, though I thought it was mine if I wanted it, but I had to go out there, watch the movie, and then pitch them after. I didn’t really want to do it. I didn’t want to fly to L.A. to sell myself to them as a composer. Somewhere along the way I’d picked up a manager, Frank, who talked me into going.
My flight is early in the morning. I try to go to bed at a normal hour but can’t sleep. Liz is out. When she came back, she was supposed to bring me dope for the trip and leave it on top of the piano. I get up and Liz had come and gone. There’s one little line of dope on the broken mirror on top of the piano. I had expected a package. How is this going to get me through the trip? I snort the line off the piano and head for the airport.
I get out there. I get the job. They hire this guy, Bob, because I have never done a full movie score. I don’t really know what his function is but I can’t stand him. They’ve heard the stuff I did for Stranger, which they were impressed with, and they know the band, but this is a full, big Hollywood film, and they think that I’ll need help.
I don’t have any dope and I don’t know where to get it. During the meeting where I pitch the producers, my eyes are burning out. I tell them I have a cold and go to the hotel to rest. I call Liz and tell her to FedEx me dope immediately.
The package comes after a day and I rush down to the front desk to get it. I have no idea if it is safe to FedEx dope across the country and I am afraid I am going to get caught. The night guy working the front desk gives me a once-over.
“Hey, buddy, you need anything?”
I am a little paranoid, but in the end, I buy a gram of coke from him and rush upstairs with the coke and my FedEx package. I have the weirdest feeling that this is the guy at the SSI office who got down on one knee and pronounced, “I want the money!”
I snort a line of dope and then a line of the night guy’s speedy coke.
Coke hits you first. While I am waiting for the dope to come on, I get so paranoid that I am squatting next to the toilet ready to flush everything when the narcotics agents bust down my door.
Liz wants to come out to L.A. It is not really over with María, but at the same time it’s been over for a while. I snort the last line from the FedEx package and go out to the airport to meet Liz. I am nodding out as I drive, go right up on the median a couple of times.
I expected Liz to come out with heroin, but she doesn’t have any. She is going to kick. She has a bag of heart medication called Catapres that is used, I think, to lower your blood pressure.
The film company has rented this apartment for me in this building for swingers in Burbank. They’re all out by the pool. I feel like a giant bug and can have nothing to do with these swinger people.
I take Catapres with Liz for a couple of days and then stop. It makes me too tired and I hear that it can stop your heart. I find a place to give me a vitamin C drip and then after that I’m cool. In a way, I kind of already have kicked. But I just walk out of that vitamin C thing feeling cool.
Liz’s habit is much worse than mine. Still, I’m a little sick and can’t sleep. I’m flopping around so much in the bed at night that Liz takes the cushions from the couch and puts them in the middle of the floor to sleep on.
She takes a ton of Catapres. This surely can’t be safe, but Liz just lies on those cushions for days, hardly moving. She is not bathing and it is like having a big, sick, stinky dog with red hair in the middle of the apartment. I come in to sleep. Now that I am feeling better I want to have sex, but if I try to touch Liz, I am attacked by the snapping alligator that has taken over her body. Otherwise I am gone all day at the studio they have set up for me on Sunset Boulevard right above their offices.
I cannot stand Bob. Poor Bob. He’s from New York, so we are supposed to get along, but he says things like, “What’s the prob?” instead of “problem.” If you want to be my friend, one thing you can do is, while you’re talking, use your fingers to make air quotes around interesting words in your sentence. That will go a long way toward making me warm to you.
I just can’t stand him. I get ornery and drive him to quit.
Liz is coming around. Actually just like that, she is up and about and not so scarily cranky. We drive into L.A. and on the way back, the rent-a-wreck they got me, because it was supposed to be cool, blows up. I just leave it on the highway, smoke billowing out from under the hood. Liz and I walk back to our swingers’ apartment.
I get them to get me a normal new car and move me to an apartment in Westwood. Not great, but it’s not Burbank.
I do the score. It’s so much work, and what doesn’t help a bit is that the film is just awful. The people who did it are the nicest people, but the film sucks. It is right after The Road Warrior was such a hit, and so they’ve done a futuristic biker movie with gangs of kids. The movie has Robby Benson as some kind of evil higher-echelon character; Rae Dawn Chong, who at one point, on the back of a motorcycle, actually yells out, “Knees to the breeze, cowboy!”; John Stockwell; Tony Plana; Kim Cattrall; and a whole slew of people who end up being somewhere years later. The movie is The Road Warrior with some of the less delightful elements of Welcome Back, Kotter.
I need an orchestrator and a copyist. I read a book about writing for film music. It says that a film composer who does not orchestrate his own score is a dilettante and a hack.
“Hello, I am a dilettante and a hack.”
A guy auditions for the job and I am told that he wrote the music for Hawaii Five-0. Well, perfect, let’s use him. I think it’s funny and want to hire him but the production thinks it’s a bad idea.
They bring in this guy, Jim Price, to orchestrate and conduct. Jim Price is kind of a Hollywood session guy by this time. He also is a bit of a cowboy. We are from different worlds and clash a bit, but in the end I grow to like him.
Jim Price used to play trumpet with the Rolling Stones for years, and Joe Cocker. I can tell he used to be wild but is trying to make the transition. We have to work like mad to get the thing done in time. I thought that the score came out great. They loved it at first, and then when the film tested badly, they took the score off. That was fine with me. I had learned to write for an orchestra and gotten paid for it. Earn while you learn. The movie was bad, but they had treated me nicely.
* * *
—
Rudy shows up! Rudy Graham! After writing religious slogans all over his walls and disappearing all these years, Rudy Graham shows up.
I think I found out from my sister, Liz, that he was living in L.A. and working at a publishing house. I get his work number and call him up. He has disappeared for ten years and it is like no time has gone by at all. A lot of people who are friends, if you lose touch for a while and then see them years later, it is different. Who are they? But with Rudy that is not the case. Not at all. It’s like I dropped him off at his place on Friday and now it’s Monday.
He looks great. That big Buddha laugh. He’s wearing really straight clothes for his job, a bad white shirt and tie.
I get the movie to fly Evan out to play t
he piano parts. Jim Price doesn’t want to do it, but I need someone in the studio who I can stand and Ev needs the money. I insist that there are parts only Evan can play.
Evan is in the room recording, and the engineer and Jim Price are making nasty comments to each other about his playing. Not so I can hear, but they’re leaning in to each other whispering and then laughing. I’m livid, but it isn’t blatant enough for me to call them on it. It’s just stupid anyway. “He’s not part of our L.A. session musician club. He can’t be any good.”
They can have their little club. I want to go home.
Frank, my manager, and his partner negotiated the deal. I got $15,000. This to me then is unfathomable wealth. Fifteen thousand fucking dollars. This is going to last a lifetime.
Frank gets me to wire his commission out immediately. He knows about Liz’s and my proclivities and wants to make sure to get his money. I think he’s acting like an asshole. How could Liz and I go through $15,000 before we get back to New York? I’m on the street talking to Frank on a pay phone on Sunset Boulevard. I’m pretty pleased with the money. In that same conversation he tells me that I have to sign the contract for Stranger Than Paradise.
I already know the deal. Jim and I talked about it. I’m certain that Jim isn’t going to try to do anything dishonest or creepy. He seems like a really decent guy.
I am getting a thousand for acting and a thousand for the score. If the movie makes money, Jim has offered me three points of gross. Also, we’ll take turns taking it around to festivals. I don’t think much about the many-page contract when it arrives.
I told Frank the manager and his lawyer partner Wayne what the deal was supposed to be with Jim, and they’ve promised that the contract is fine. I can just sign it. I think they don’t expect much from Stranger Than Paradise.
I’m in the middle of writing this score, working eighteen hours a day, and it just doesn’t occur to me that Jim wouldn’t make sure I got what he promised. A naïve mistake that I would never make again.