By: Matt Warnock
Images: Courtesy of G. Lucas
At one point in time, which seems like eons ago, music was about creating art. It was about pushing boundaries, defying the mainstream and allowing artists to explore their creativity in an unbridled fashion. Then, sometime around the second half of the 20th century, corporations realized that music could be commoditized, and the world of commercial, Pop-driven music was born. Gone were the days when music was made as an art, now it was designed in corporate board rooms using test groups and marketing schemes.
Although many musicians have moved over to the “dark side” of commercial music, others have remained true to their roots. Writing music that comes from the heart; music that means something to them and to their audiences across the world. Gary Lucas is just such an artist who continues to push boundaries with his music, while reaching out and connecting with his fan base in the process. He has never held his punches with his writing and recordings, and has remained a leading example that artists can remain true to their craft and still make it in today’s overly commercialized scene.
Gary Lucas recently sat down with Guitar International to talk about Jeff Buckley, Gods & Monsters and the current state of the record industry.
Gods & Monsters Photo: Michel Del Sol
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Matt Warnock: Your music is very creative; it moves in all sorts of different directions. Could I get your thoughts on how that level of creativity in your music fits into the modern music scene? How do you see your music fitting in with what’s going on around you?
Gary Lucas: I don’t usually take any of that into consideration. Years ago, when I was starting to do this professionally, I determined that I would really cease actively listening to current music. [Laughs] Because I figured I didn’t want to have stylistic influences that would be time-based with trends that occur in music. I figured I’d already absorbed enough as a consumer up to that point to last me the rest of my life.
There’s definitely a market, I think a large one, but the question is how to get to it and who would that market consist of other than bored people. That’s the ideal market. I couldn’t give you a demographic. People are always asking me, “Who do you think your audience is?” and I think outside of “bored people” I’d be hard-pressed to say. It’s certainly people of all ages. You could say “children of all ages,” ’cause I think there’s a child-like sense of wonder in everything I do, which I try to preserve in me and my soul. And as a card-carrying adult, it’s harder than ever to do it because this is the kind of thing that society likes to beat out of people.
But I think that sense of wonder is really important for creative people to keep intact. Or just for people trying to enjoy their lives, there’s so much misery and agony in the world around us that it’s hard not to sometimes feel dragged down by it and oppressed by it. My music is designed to stimulate people’s senses and give them a sense of astonishment. I want people to come away from it going, “Whoa! What was that? I can’t really categorize it, but I like it.”
I know there are avant-garde elements that occur within all of my songs, but never to the point where it makes it forbidden for the average listener to comprehend and enjoy. They’re just other colors that I like to sprinkle in there. I like to use the full spectrum of colors available as an artist, and I’m old-fashioned in the sense that I like my songwriting to have melodies and things like bridges in songs. I have one foot in the past and one in the future, let’s say. I straddle both epochs. It’s hard to talk about, but I’ll try, I’m doing my best! [Laughs]
I want people to enjoy my music. It’s user-friendly, that’s for sure. They used to lump me in with this so-called “downtown” scene that was based in New York. It was an improvisational bunch of people who were sort of defiantly anti-commercial. But I’m not even ashamed of commerciality. I think I’m trying to expand my audience. I’m not afraid of that, it’s that how to get to them, these days, seems harder than ever just in terms of the sheer volume, thanks to the Internet!
Competitors. You know, every day any kid or adult or whoever can just get a couple of boxes and then make a perfect-sounding record at home. Then press another button and it’s booted up online and it’s for sale, without paying any dues or mastering the craft of songwriting. Those things don’t seem to matter that much to people anymore, but they still matter to me, and I think that’s why there’s such a plethora of boring and soulless music out there.
When it becomes easy and anybody can do it, you have to question the underpinnings of it. I think there’s a soul that accrues for people who have been in the biz a long time, just in terms of their dues-paying. It adds value. I can hear it in the resonance of the writing and the voice of the artist. That’s the kinda stuff you can’t really fake digitally.
Gary Lucas Photo: May Lee
Matt: This is a question that often comes up when talking about creative music and music that pushes boundaries: Can music that is highly creative also be popular?
Gary Lucas: Yeah! I think so. I was inspired, honestly, by late-60’s psychedelia, for instance the Beatles. You know, what they were doing around “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” and “I Am the Walrus.” Here was a band that was the most popular group in the world, and they were making pretty defiantly avant-garde statements but still retained popularity. That, to me, was the trick I was after all along. How to make something that would function as an avant-garde objet d’art and still be popular.
I think I satisfied, at least, the aesthetic criteria, and so the main thing is how to market it or get people to listen to it. That has been the biggest challenge for a variety of reasons. [Laughs] I could give you a long list why I haven’t yet connected with the mainstream. But I’m patient and I know that my fan base has expanded year after year just by my dogged persistence in hanging in there and releasing as much quality work as I could. I also try to appear in as many territories as I possibly could as a performing artist.
I love to tour, and I would do it more. I mean I must be doing at least between 100 and 200 shows a year, but I don’t think I would have a problem doing more. Other than my wife would be upset about it. [Laughs] That’s what you gotta do if you really want to make it in music, and I would tell this to anybody trying to do it. I would encourage it, but it’s a big sacrifice in terms of your commitment and time. You have to be willing to do it, just because, despite the liberation of the Internet and it is really liberating, that whole debate there, the paradox has been that people are overwhelmed with the plethora of content.
I don’t even want to get into the looking down on people… I’ll give credit to anybody who wants to put stuff out there and do anything creative. I salute the impulse, but the problem has been with the democratization of the arts and, vis-a-vis, this platform where anybody can be an artist. It’s just crowded the field to the point that really good stuff is harder than ever to find. It’s crowded out by a lot of dregs. But again, that’s all subjective, you know. One man’s need is what I might reject out of hand as not being very creative and enjoyable. My ear closes down 95% of the time when I hear new stuff.
I know it when I hear it, let’s put it that way. Like everybody’s criteria. Something goes off and your spine tingles and you go, “Whoa! That’s really cool,” or “That’s original.” It hits some pleasure center in the nervous system.
The trick, again, is how to get heard, and I’m trying. I always do these releases in hopes that somebody out there will spread the word and the fan base will grow. Maybe go viral [Laughs] but you never know. It’s a complete crapshoot, and then the stuff that seems to be getting out there is like this Rebecca Black girl or whatever. It was a nice effort and she’s very cute, but you still have to wonder.
Matt: You mentioned that when your ear hears it, you know it’s good and creative, but it seems that when kids turn on the TV they hear the same old pop music. They’re cutting music out of schools, and they’re not getting exposed to that creativity at a young age. So while someone from an older generation might hear creativity and think, “Oh I love the psychedelic stuff, that’s something I know,” younger kids hear it and it’s shocking and ugly.
Gary Lucas: That’s true. Everybody’s got their own aesthetic criteria based on whatever influences and history they have. So I can’t really make pronouncements about the current state of music ’cause I don’t listen to it that much.
I’ll tell you what. I was an active consumer of, let’s call it “alternative rock,” stuff that was not really mainstream for many years up to the point when I said, “I’m going to do this for a living now. I’m gonna try it.” I was able to swing it; I’m one of the lucky ones, but it hasn’t been easy. But anyway, at that point I noticed that when I would go to a concert of a group I wanted to check out, as good as they might be I would just fidget. I couldn’t really enjoy it ’cause I’d drive myself crazy going like, “What does this have to do with what I’m trying to do?” Which is probably an unfair comparison I was trying to make, but nevertheless, I was always in this uncomfortable position. And then I’d feel like I should be at home practicing. I shouldn’t be consuming music much. I should take the time to develop my art.
Paradoxically, the move from amateur status, and the word amateur connotes a love of music, that’s where it comes from, into doing it for a living diminished my enjoyment of it. I wish it didn’t, but there’s only so much time. So I’ll keep my ears open, but the older I get, I’m more into, for recreational purposes, listening to more of a world music feel and older artists.
I love Paolo Conte, I don’t know if you’ve heard his stuff. He’s an Italian singer/songwriter. I met him actually, in London. Last year I went to a concert he did at Royal Albert Hall. It was great. I don’t know, you wouldn’t characterize it as rock, really, but I think he rocks. [Laughs] He plays piano and he has a band, and they do jazz-based and blues-based arrangements. That’s what I love to listen to. Or Enrique Morente, who just died a couple months ago, right around the time [Captain] Beefheart passed away, was a fantastic flamenco singer, older guy from Spain. He did a lot to experiment in the form and worked with all sorts of different musicians, still retaining this passion. I like that.
I still listen to some new music. There are artists I might be friends with that will be more commercial, and I’ll listen to their new stuff. But again, I still go back to the eternal verities, people like Van Morrison or Dylan, or the Stones old stuff. I have a pretty big iTunes library, but I haven’t updated it a lot with new music. I don’t know if that’s me or not being exposed to stuff that fires my imagination. I love Joanna Newsom, for instance. She plays the harp.
Matt: I’m curious, do you find that there’s more of an audience, say in Europe, than there is in America?
Gary Lucas: Yeah, I definitely would say that. I think I’m much better-known there. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it’s sort of a function of the fact that it was easier for me in a remunerative way, to do gigs that would pay bills in New York by working overseas from the beginning. I compare it to the plight, well it’s not so bad as a “plight,” of the jazz musicians from the US. Jazz musicians, historically from the ’20s and ’30s, always got a bigger audience and much more acceptance and were treated better in Europe.
It could be that they have more of a cafe culture there, where people prize themselves on discovering artists that weren’t mainstream or being rammed down their throats by mainstream media and cherishing them. Also, in this culture, they spend a lot of time discussing and analyzing music in a leisurely way. It was just more of a curiosity here in this country, as a result. Market forces, global capitalism and overwhelming media presence, and also not a lot of subsidies of the arts from the state or federal government, it’s been a more Malthusian situation, dog-eat-dog, whereby the most popular artists are the ones that got recorded and recognized by the media. Naturally, because it would help sell commercials on these commercial stations and also newspapers and magazines. They’ll sell more copies by concentrating on stuff that was already popular. There wasn’t a lot of effort to build up and expose new artists outside of NPR or college radio.
It’s getting more like that in the world, I tell ya, because a lot of the European states subsidize their artists. That’s the other factor why I work there more, that we’re lucky enough to have stipends given to clubs to book specifically foreign artists. So you can tour in Germany and actually make enough money to go back. You might do the same amount of gigs in the US and lose money because they wouldn’t give you hotels and stuff.
So they just treated artists better that way, and a lot of it was state monies, but as the worldwide recession hits, they’re doing a lot to slash these budgets. It’s harder than ever, but saying that, I don’t know, there are waves where it comes back and people say, “We’d really like to spend more on art,” but that’s just the way it is.
Matt: You recently played a sold-out tribute show to Jeff Buckley, who you had worked with. Jeff is a guy who wrote very creative music, but was able to achieve at least medium level pop success. People knew him from the radio and television and yet he was pushing boundaries with his music. I was wondering if you could comment on why you think that was. Why was he able to bridge that gap between creative and popular music, and what was it about his music that you really loved?
Gary Lucas: I think he was able to do it for a variety of reasons. One was he was such an extraordinary talent and extraordinary-looking person, and a younger person who was affiliated with the largest record company, aka machine, in the world. He had a platform that was certainly, I wouldn’t say unstoppable, but hard to ignore. So that door was open.
I don’t begrudge it at all. I understand. I’m happy for Jeff, and I’m sorry he’s no longer here. He was the best collaborator, I’d say, that I ever had up to that point. But saying that, as well-known as he was in the states the mainstream success still eluded him. I know that the record Grace has sold, they tell me, at least 2 million copies, maybe more. But when he was alive it had not sold a million yet. It was getting there, but that was after three or four years of really slogging away and touring extensively everywhere. And also, on Billboard charts, if this measures anything, I think the record only got to about as high as one hundred forty-something. You really need to get into the top 50 to start really selling. That’s what I’m told.
So he had a level of success, certainly in the live arena. He was very successful and played many places all over the world for large audiences at festivals and whatnot, but as far as selling records, it was a disappointment. This is pretty well-known. He didn’t really bust out. I don’t really know what to say other than it had nothing to do with how he was marketed or anything. I don’t really want to comment on it, but it was the kind of situation where, I think, on one hand he had somebody who wanted to develop it slowly as an underground artist, but he hooked up with a huge, monolithic machine that expected immediate returns in terms of record sales. And that caused some problems for him and with the company. It didn’t really go according to plan, at least in the US. Now he was very popular in France and in Australia, where commensurately, he did sell a lot of records in these markets.
Perhaps the follow-up to Grace, which unfortunately he never lived to record, would have broken him out to the mass audience. I miss the guy. That’s mainly what I’m left with; thinking about what a tragedy it is that he’s no longer here.
Matt: How did you approach the tribute as far as the songs? Did you perform them as they were from his versions, or did you try to re-do them?
Gary Lucas: No, I worked with three singers, and they were very comfortable with my accompaniment. It doesn’t really deviate much from what Jeff did on the record. I can tell you on “Mojo Pin” he snipped this kind-of hardcore coda frenzy when he came to record it. But in really every case other than in “Grace” he added a chorale, a wordless section over the chords in the middle, everything else was left intact. Just kind of rearranged in a more grandiose style.
He worked out some more vocal parts. Essentially, that was why I loved working with him; he left my parts alone. In fact, the way all of the songs that I wrote with him began, was my guitar instrumentals. I’d write them with his voice and mine and then hand in the cassette of the finished instrumental. Generally speaking, I like to work this way, and I think that my best songs are derived this way because there’s an integrity about writing an instrumental. You know when you think you’ve got it down and complete, and it sticks in your head after you’re finished working on it. Then if it is in your head the next morning, it’s probably a good candidate.
I sent him these two instrumentals that became “Grace” and “Mojo Pin.” “Mojo Pin” was called “And You Will,” and “Grace” was called “Rise Up to Be.” Both of the titles were meant to encourage Jeff to come to New York and join my band. I think the only modification he made was on “Grace.” He said, “You know this thing called ‘Rise Up to Be’? Now it’s called ‘Grace’” and he sat down, this must have been late July or early August of ’91, right over on the couch. At one point, he said “I want you to repeat this section ’cause I have more lyrics there.” That was the only change he made.
So when I played with these singers, they didn’t have any problem. Because they were orchestrated further in the studio with strings and with mixing, it just has a different character and sound feel. But the bare bones are there. I played them with him, more or less doubled his parts on both songs on the studio record. “Mojo Pin” opens with my guitar, that drone. If I listened closely I could identify each part that I played and all the different sounds people have mistaken for different things over the years.
Matt: Besides the tribute to Jeff and your own stuff going on, there’s also the new album from Gods & Monsters coming out. I was wondering if you could talk about how you are going be promoting this album, would you do a tour?
Gary Lucas: Yeah, I hope so. I’m waiting for dates to materialize, and I think it might be early days, ’cause the way things are these days is that it’s hard to get any gigs that pay without there being some activity on the record. Promoters don’t want to lose money, which I understand, and the thing with labels is that they don’t really want to shell out tour support unless they really see a pattern developing. But hopefully there’ll be shows here and in Europe. I have a couple of European shows penciled in and a couple of New York dates right now. But again, it’s down to booking agents, and we’ll see. We hope to get some good news in the next couple of weeks, but the reviews have been awesome. We just got 4 stars in Mojo, which just went on the stands in England. If you go to my website, go to the homepage, you can see more.
I’m pretty excited, and I really hope this would bust out the band this time around. I’d love to see that happen, nothing more than that. It’s a great band; I’d love to work it, but I can’t run on a deficit, which I’ve done over the years. That’s no fun. All of them have families, and you want to pay them decently. It’s different when you’re twenty years old and you can go out in a van and sleep on floors, but no one is willing to do that. [Laughs] I don’t look down on it, but at this stage in the game I won’t put myself through that, as fun as it is with adventures on the road. I like to go on the road, don’t get me wrong. I tour a lot, as you know, but it’s usually in the variety of contexts where I know I’m gonna get paid, ’cause it’s what I do for a living.
Matt: I noticed you released one of the tracks as a pre-release for the fans online for free, and I was wondering, with a lot of people doing this recently, were you ever considering just putting all the album up for free for your fans and then trying to make your money back with the touring that would come from that?
Gary Lucas: Maybe you’re right, maybe I should, I just don’t know whether or not it would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s hard to say. Some bands have done it. I’ve noticed that Radiohead did not do that this time around, [Laughs] and in fact they’re spending an inordinate amount of money flagging this record in TV ads and media events and the Internet. They have multiple editions with extra artwork and $100 versions of it, so I think they certainly generate profit from them.
I’m as bewildered as anybody out there. I don’t think there is a hard formula, but I do know somebody got paid in the past. And the copyrights to the songs, at least songs I’ve written for other artists, there’s one old-fashioned part of me that still wants to believe that there are people out there that would be willing to pay whatever iTunes or Amazon charges to buy either digital versions of my records or hard goods versions of the record that would generate an income for me. Because I think artists deserve to get paid.
You can read Bob Lefsetz or any of these other media pundits who think that’s a realizable paradigm. I don’t know. I know it’s always a struggle right and left always to get paid. I’m fighting with people, agents, promoters, all the time over nickels and dimes. [Laughs] Nothing changes. There’s less of a pie to go around thanks to file sharing, so people are trying to figure out how to monetize it. And will merchandising, selling merch to the fans on the road make up the difference? Maybe it will, but it depends on how big the fan base is, so we’ll have to wait and see.
I haven’t really road-tested a tour, a lengthy tour with a band, in a long time just because it’s daunting, and again, I want to ensure payment when I can. I want to pay everybody, but I’m willing to take some risks here. But I notice a lot of older artists are less and less willing to do that unless they’re super-established, and then they charge an arm and a leg, and I don’t want to overcharge. That’s just insane. I don’t want to pay $100 plus for a ticket to see an older artist, really. And that’s how the live concert industry goes. These dinosaur acts are staggering around, not even filling arenas. They want to get paid. I mean we all want to get paid. But there’s getting paid and then there’s getting paid. To me a good payday would be inadequate for most of these artists, so you do what you do.
The fact is I’m never sitting still, so I’m preparing several other projects that I have in the works, and records due to come out, only because I learned a long time ago that I couldn’t really afford to put all my eggs in one basket. The problem with many artists is if they don’t have a B plan or another project, unless the thing they do conquers the universe, the dilemma is perhaps going out of business or just doing something else to make a living in the interim. I’ve made a living by hook or by crook in music for over twenty years now, full time, without going back to a day job. It hasn’t been easy; I work my ass off to do it.
