by John Lurie
“He is not my manager, there is no contract. We never came to any understanding that he was my manager. We only thought that maybe he could find the band a deal, which he did not, and now I am here. I negotiated the Japan deal myself. He is absolutely not my manager.”
“Well, you understand that I cannot offend this guy. Do you have a problem with him negotiating your deal? I can’t do it otherwise.”
I don’t want to lose the deal, which would be that Island releases the Big Heart: Live in Tokyo record in the rest of the world outside of Japan. I acquiesce.
Blackwell and Webber start to negotiate my deal. I hear a few things back from Webber about the contract. The next thing I hear is they have gone to Toronto together. This seems a little strange. No matter how much negotiating this is going to take, it is odd that Webber would go to Toronto with Chris Blackwell on some junket.
When they come back, Joel Webber has been hired to be the new vice president of A&R at Island Records. Now his new job is to negotiate my deal with me.
He tells me that everything that he has negotiated so far will stand and that I should get a lawyer to finish the deal. This is amazingly dishonest. He also says that I have to have a manager. The band can’t not have a manager.
He recommends this French woman named Valerie Goodman. Valerie works at a company called Time Capsule. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but Time Capsule sets up bands with studio space, handles the rentals, and does other odds and ends to make sure recording goes smoothly. Time Capsule was somehow involved with the Down by Law recording. I met Valerie then and thought she was pretty sharp.
I call Uncle Jerry to try to salvage the rest of the negotiations. But this shit that Joel Webber pulled is unbelievable. Dougie says, “Do you know why snakes don’t bite A&R guys?”
“No, why, Dougie?”
“Professional courtesy.”
The first thing that happens is that we have to do a new album cover. They don’t like the Japanese version. They try to make me use one of their guys, but his work is ridiculous and I refuse. Evan does it with Keith Davis, and James Nares does a little drawing in the corner. Perry Ogden has shot me before and I sublet his loft on Fifth Avenue for a while. I like Perry and think he is talented and get him to shoot the cover.
Then the song “Blow Job” has to be changed to another title. I call it “It Could Have Been Very Very Beautiful” for Liz. Then I get an idea and put on the back of the album: “Dedicated to Miss Liz.”
A message, eventually, she will see. When Liz finally does get privileges at Marathon House and is able to leave the compound, she is in a record store. Sees the dedication on the album but assumes that it must be for someone else named Liz.
28
The Handsomest Man in the World
Sydney Pollack was heading the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Roberto walked around waving a ten dollar bill, announcing, loudly, to the sea of reporters and photographers engulfing us everywhere we went, that he was going to use it to bribe Sydney Pollack.
At the Cannes Film Festival, Down by Law got a standing ovation. This shocked me. Except for Tom, we were all there, sitting in the front row of the biggest theater I have ever seen. When the film ended they went mad. We had to turn awkwardly and face them and take our bow as they roared their approval.
Cannes is very disconcerting. No matter who you are talking to, they are looking over your shoulder for someone a little more important. The photographers can be sitting outside your hotel en masse but not take your photo until one person takes your photo. Suddenly there’ll be a feeding frenzy of photographers, forty of them. Yelling, “John! John! Over here, John!”
I couldn’t stand it.
I was relegated to the third-tier level of interviews. The ones nobody would ever see. The Bulgarian Film Reader. Stephen Torton said, “Jim and Sara are saying, ‘Let’s show John that he isn’t all that important.’ You are being punished.”
I said, “Nah, they wouldn’t do that.”
But it turned out they had done exactly that. I found out, years later, from the publicist that she was instructed not to give any of the more important interviews to me. That Jim wanted to phase me out.
I had been accused of slagging Jim off on Stranger Than Paradise. But honestly, I really didn’t. All I had done was say that the premise for Stranger was my idea. But apparently this is not how it is done in show business.
Thank God that Stephen Torton was there. He talked me into skipping out on the interviews. It never occurred to me that I could just not show up. Getting all the lower-level stuff meant that I was stuck being interviewed by people who didn’t speak English, so they’d ask you, “Jim Jarmusch, how he is?”
“How he is?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yes.”
Great, that’s great.
I am sitting on the folding chair in the interview room when the door flies open with a bang. It’s an Italian writer with loud clothes and even louder red hair. He storms into the room and before he even sits down, he booms out, “John Lurie! The music! Why?!”
I was repeatedly asked how Jim Jarmusch had discovered me, how he had coaxed such amazing performances out of a hopeless dolt like myself. It was kind of like asking a Native American what it was like being discovered by Columbus.
Somehow Torton found a basketball and we went bouncing it down the boardwalk, in search of a court, to the horror of the French. It really was strange how appalled the French were by two guys bouncing a basketball. Mouths were hanging open in terror. We never found a hoop, scared a lot of people, and went back.
I met this fantastically beautiful Egyptian model named Fadwa. She was a very bad girl, you could see it from a mile away.
Fadwa wanted to get some heroin. I hadn’t been high in months and thought, Why not? So I gave her a couple hundred francs and she disappeared. I thought that I probably wouldn’t ever see her again, but later that afternoon, there was a knock on my hotel room door and there she was. She had a package of white powder folded into a quarter page of a magazine.
I put a tiny bit of the powder on my tongue with my little finger. It didn’t taste much like heroin. Didn’t taste much like anything. I was sure she had been ripped off. I snorted a small line and didn’t feel anything at all.
I had been invited to a dinner at the president of the festival’s mansion. I didn’t want to go but I was told that this was a big honor and I absolutely had to go.
There were these long, fancy tables with very famous and very rich people, dressed formally, getting ready to eat. I have never played so well with the rich in the first place, but now I was beginning to feel a little odd. I suspected that the thing I had snorted was ground-up sleeping pills.
When Stranger Than Paradise came out, Roger Ebert played a clip of it on his show and exclaimed, “That’s John Lurie! I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of him in the future! He’s very talented!”
I was seated next to Roger Ebert at the dinner.
Then I fell asleep on Roger Ebert’s shoulder.
I had a wild time with Fadwa that went on round the clock and didn’t leave my room very often. I got a call that I was supposed to go to the awards presentation and I was a mess. Stephen had gotten me to buy this beautiful silk tuxedo that I had worn once, to the dinner. I found it crumpled up in a corner of my room. My room that looked like it had been vandalized by monkeys.
Spike Lee stopped by because he wanted to meet me, took a look around my room, and left immediately.
I picked the tuxedo up off the floor. It uncrumpled itself and looked gorgeous. Like some miracle fabric of elegance. Ten years later, Stephen wore that same tuxedo at his wedding.
My hair was going in several directions and my face was all swollen and puffy. We had to walk up this big, open stairway to get to t
he theater. It was kind of like the red carpet, and there were TV cameras everywhere. I must have looked like an ashtray with a bloated face, in a tuxedo, and I wonder how famous people do it, always in front of the camera looking fresh and clean and presentable. They probably don’t take that much heroin and have never spent the night with Fadwa.
I wasn’t doing this movie star thing very well at all.
I remember being home, dope sick or hungover, and watching my little black and white TV from my mattress on the floor, getting up only to use the bathroom, and I’d see someone sprightly talking into the camera, looking all clean and together. I’d think: How does she do it? Of course, there were times that I’d look out the window at people on the street and think: How do those people have the energy to walk down the street? When do they have the strength to buy clothes?
* * *
—
Sue Jacobs is Chris Blackwell’s top assistant. The negotiations with Island are not going well. I do not want to accept any of the stuff that Joel Webber has negotiated for me, and I do not want to have to deal with this sleazeball Webber further, but he will now be my A&R guy. I meet with Sue for lunch and she tells me that if I do not accept the deal as it stands, it is not going to happen. But she does seem to be legitimately on my side on this.
Back in New York, I hire Valerie Goodman to run my business. She is always pleasant and very energetic. I give her a weekly salary.
I get a call from Joel Webber. He tells me the Big Heart record has sold seventeen thousand copies in the first week.
“Is that a lot?”
“Yes, that’s a lot!”
We’re about to go on tour for a month in Europe. Webber gets in the middle of it and somehow Island books us at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London—ICA.
Philippe de Visscher, who is booking our tours at the time, is furious. He has booked one big gig in London at the Hammersmith. We’re supposed to fly in, do the gig, and then leave the next day. Because the ICA is a small venue, we will play there five days. This means five days of hotels to pay for, the musicians get paid by the week, and everything else. It means there will be a lot of money lost. Philippe isn’t going to take the loss himself, so now he is paying me five thousand less for the tour. I can’t go back on what I promised the band, so the money is going to come out of my pocket.
I very much prefer to play one place for five nights. There is no travel, no packing, no sound checks. You can sleep late and maybe even meet some people from that town. But I can’t afford to lose the $5,000.
I go back to Joel Webber and say we can’t do the gig, that I’m going to lose too much money. He insists. Says that Island in London had to pull a lot of strings to get us a week at the ICA. This is a prestigious gig. It will be very bad for my relationship with them. I know the ICA from when I lived in London; it is kind of a cool place, on par with the Kitchen in New York, but it is not what I would call a “prestigious gig.”
Joel makes a deal with me. He will get Island to put up money toward making a music video for the band. I like the idea and say okay to the gig.
A couple of weeks later, when I go back to Island about the budget for the video, they say they will put up $500. Five hundred dollars is absolutely, ridiculously, ridiculously nothing to make a video, but I think I can shoot it in Super 8. Get Stephen to help me and Robert Burden to edit it, and maybe we can pull it off. It might be fun, and even though I’m losing about $4,000 because of his interference in the tour and now they’re offering $500 to make up for it, I think that if they pay for the video, then they might feel involved and will try to get it played.
* * *
—
I liked touring the most. I loved it. Even though I was always stressed out about getting paid, or the travel, which was always worse than necessary because the people planning it had never really looked at how to make it easier, or because the hotel always seemed to be under construction, or because the monitors sucked 70 percent of the time and we couldn’t hear ourselves, or any of a list of horrors one can imagine if they have ever traveled anywhere.
But I loved it. A floating circus, and often—usually—the music was great. Frequently we would arrive and it was a disaster, usually with equipment. Dougie one night ended up playing on a child’s drum set, which he destroyed by playing it with a hammer. Another time he played on a set called Jolly Drums. I knew they were called Jolly Drums because in big, animated, colorful letters on the bass drum was printed “Jolly Drums.” How can someone bring you to their town to play music when they have signed a contract saying that they will have specified equipment, and then when you arrive it is nothing like what it is supposed to be? It is insulting to us and insulting to the music. Our only recourse would be to cancel, but the only reason we were doing the whole horrific thing was to play music.
But the duress often made us play better. It created an us against them situation: The worse the situation, the stronger we grouped together. We played with absolute rage. We would unify and fight, like men at war, until we had conquered the sound of the room. No gig was ever allowed to end before we had found that thing, before we had somehow conquered the sound of the room.
The first gig is at a jazz festival and there are a lot of famous older jazz musicians on the plane from the United States. Roy is completely thrilled. Most of the flight he sits and talks with Reggie Workman, who used to play bass with Coltrane. I will admit that for almost any horn player, getting a chance to talk with someone who actually knew and played with Coltrane is an enormous and exciting opportunity.
But there is something about the way Roy, who is one of the most truly obsessive people I’ve met in my life, is hunched and twitching in the seat next to Reggie Workman and just prying into him for information that makes me uneasy. Roy can be beautiful, soulful, and completely genuine, but right now he’s giving me the creeps.
Well, Reggie has really done it. He told Roy that Coltrane used to play eighteen hours a day. That, while reading a book, he would also practice at the same time. He went offstage and practiced while other people were soloing. This is fairly common knowledge, but I guess that hearing it firsthand really set Roy off.
Not only is Roy one of the most obsessive people on the planet, he is in many ways one of the most unconscious. When he is practicing, he seems to pay no notice at all to what he is playing—the same line played over and over again, out of tune. It is not pleasant. But now he’s trying to follow in Coltrane’s footsteps and play eighteen hours a day. As soon as we check into a hotel, after traveling ten hours by bus, after sleeping two hours the night before, and with sound check in an hour, Roy begins his ritual squelching.
Dougie, who sleeps all the time, calls down to the front desk, in a fake foreign accent, and says, “Horrible noise coming from room two oh two. It must stop.”
* * *
—
On tour it’s difficult to eat. I’ve been on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers after they became gigantic, and it is not difficult for them to eat. But for a band on the level of The Lounge Lizards, it can be impossible. You have the hotel buffet breakfast, which in Germany is ham, cheese, and bread. On the train you can have a ham or cheese sandwich. When you get to the dressing room there is a display of ham, cheese, and bread.
Ribot said, “Which ham sandwich killed him?”
In Germany, a paper ran a huge photo of me on the back page with an article about the band and me as an actor. The title of the article was “The Handsomest Man in the World.”
After that I was unbearable. I’d get into the elevator with the band and say, “Now the handsomest man in the world is getting into the elevator.”
“Now the handsomest man in the world is getting out of the elevator.”
“Now the handsomest man in the world is in the lobby and about to argue with the front desk about his long-distance phone bill.”
I was absolutely making fun of the idea that they had proclaimed this of me, but the band couldn’t stand it, especially Evan. And I don’t blame them. So I cut it out after a day. But it’s nice to be called the handsomest man in the world, particularly when you have a pimple on your forehead and your legs are hideously skinny.
Marc is sleeping with Pascal, the tour manager. This is a very bad idea. The tour manager’s job is to book you into hotels, make travel arrangements, make sure you get paid by the venue, etc., etc.
But why it’s a bad idea is that the tour manager is not on your side. The way it was set up, she was the employee of the promoter. She is his emissary. So she is the one who whispers to you at midnight, after the show, that at four a.m. you have to check out because the bus driver quit and you have to take the train to Nice. She is also the one to pay us and we have not gotten a penny yet.
* * *
—
Philippe de Visscher, the promoter, shows up somewhere in France and comes out to dinner with us after. It is a tiny stone restaurant and it is only the band eating there this late. I am getting very nervous about the money. We were supposed to get a deposit before we left, which we didn’t get, then paid weekly at the end of each week. So far we’ve gotten nothing and it’s two and a half weeks into the tour. When the guys need spending money, I have been fronting it to them out of my own pocket. Marc is sitting at the table strumming a guitar; the food is taking forever. I ask Philippe a second time about when we are getting paid and he makes an offhand joke about my learning to relax. I lose it. I smash my wineglass down on the table. It shatters, flies everywhere, and severs three of the guitar strings. I jump over the table and pull Philippe out of his chair. But then I stop because I am afraid maybe I have actually hurt somebody with the shattering glass.
I think on this same tour, we’re somewhere in the south of France, very excited to be near the ocean. We’re on the highway and there is this structure up ahead that looks like a bomb shelter, an unpleasant, heavy block of a building, made of concrete with no windows.