Former Captain Beefhart guitarist Gary Lucas created a soundtrack for a silent film at the James River Film Festival. (Photo by Bram Belloni)
Gary Lucas has been the guitar sideman of choice for some of popular music's larger-than-life singers — Jeff Buckley, Captain Beefheart, Lou Reed, Nick Cave — so maybe backing up a golem and Popeye the Sailor Man isn't such a stretch.
The Syracuse, New York, native comes to the 25th annual James River Film Festival this weekend to serve as a live soundtrack provider — on Friday night, his guitar will accompany the 1920 German silent film, "Der Golem" (cited as the first superhero movie), and provide the tunes for a Sunday-afternoon program at The Byrd Theatre of vintage cartoons from the legendary Fleischer Studios (Popeye, Betty Boop, etc.).
Lucas memorably performed with "Der Golem" at the 2003 James River festival for a special screening at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. "I have it mapped out, but I leave myself plenty of room for improvisation," he says of his live soundtracks. "In the old-time silent movie days, they'd have a piano player and he'd get to know the film pretty well before he put music to it, but he left room for him to throw in stuff as it occurred. That's what keeps it fresh. If it was note-for-note every time, I'd get pretty sick of it. But I never play it the same way twice."
Richmond magazine recently talked to Lucas — the man whom the New York Times called "The guitarist with 1,000 ideas" — about the art of film music, collaborating with legends and his love for vintage Chinese pop.
Richmond magazine: It seems like you are a regular at the James River Film Festival.
Gary Lucas: Yeah, I've been there, what, four times? I've played 'Der Golem' there twice before. It was the first film I did a score for. I have about 12 now, so I've diversified over the years. I have a page on my website that lists a dozen of my film projects ... and what would tie them all together, more or less, is that they're in the fantastic film genre. That's my personal preference. ['Der Golem'] was something I'd seen mentioned in a horror film magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, when I was a boy. I was intrigued. But they never showed it anywhere, and it was way before the age of digital or VHS. I had to wait, but eventually I got a commission in 1989 to come up with a soundtrack to a film, and so I came up with 'The Golem,' and I'm glad I did.
RM: When you perform a live soundtrack, do you ever quote yourself, throw in a snippet of a Captain Beefheart or Jeff Buckley song or something from one of your albums?
GL: All the time, all the time. But I don't want to give it away. And that just goes back to the old days: If a guy on screen slipped on a banana peel, the accompanist might play 'Yes, We Have No Bananas.' It's a little snatch of something referring to something else in the world of pop culture.
RM: Your solo albums have been expansive affairs. My favorite is 'The Edge of Heaven,' your set of Chinese popular music from the '30s and '40s.
GL: Sometimes these things come about because some other person says, 'You know what, Gary would be good for this music or that project.' For that one, I lived in Taiwan for awhile, and I met this Chinese woman that I fell in love with and later married. And she had this cassette of this beautiful Chinese pop from Shanghai in the '30s, and she turned me on to this amazing genre that most westerners don't know and have never heard, but would probably like if they had the chance to be exposed to it. These beautiful songs came out of film musicals but were also sung in nightclubs and are a weird hybrid of western swing and tin pan alley and jazz and Chinese influences, sung in Mandarin. If you say Chinese music to most Caucasian people, they'll make a face because Chinese opera is what they think of, and that strikes their ears as discordant. Kind of making a racket.
I turned Don Van Vliet [Captain Beefheart] on to this music, and he dug it and played this cassette before some of our concerts on the PA. He loved Chinese culture. We got him a Chinese opera gong, and I taught him some Mandarin, which he kinda sang on 'Sheriff of Hong Kong.' [Laughs]
RM: What's the one thing about Captain Beefheart, or working with him, that would surprise people?
GL: For a guy who claimed to be as autocratic as he did, and he was autocratic as far as being a bandleader; I mean, we had to play it exactly the same way he wanted it. You couldn't improvise, or you'd be out. But for a guy like that, he would defer to his wife, Jan, constantly. She was the final arbiter of what went on the record and in what arrangement. That might be a shock to some people that she would carry such weight. But he was in consultation with her. I mean, she also came from an art background, and he would always maintain that she was a better painter than he was.
I don't want to bore you with a long story, but when we were recording his last record, "Ice Cream for Crow," she didn't think what he had done was ... she thought he had ruined one of her favorite pieces of his that had been recorded earlier and not released. She made him change it back [to the original arrangement]. He said, during one of our final sessions, 'Play it the original way, Jan couldn't stand that version.' She had input certainly — he deferred to her judgement on clothing, packaging, photos — he ran stuff by her. So she was the woman behind the man. Or, maybe, [laughs] in the current climate I shouldn't say that.
RM: When Beefheart quit music — to become a full-time visual artist — he really quit. There was no more.
GL: Right. And he had the opportunity to continue because Virgin was ready to do another Beefheart album after 'Ice Cream for Crow,' but I think he felt that he had tried everything he wanted to say, and that given the way that the [music] business was going, there wasn't a huge upside to doing it anymore.
RM: What about working with the late Jeff Buckley. He's such a mystery figure, cut down at an early age. What was he really like?
GL: He was very sweet and warm, an incredibly talented person. I have a book I wrote about working with Jeff called 'Touched by Grace.' When you were one-on-one with him, you'd feel like you were in a magical space, like with Don. But he also had a darker side ... he would brood a lot, and I think the death of his dad [singer Tim Buckley] weighed on him. He would always try to understand what happened, and it really bothered him.
RM: What kind of artist do you think he would have grown into?
GL: I don't know. Pop music ... it's so ephemeral. I hope he would have flourished.
"Der Golem: How He Came Into the World," with accompaniment by Gary Lucas, will screen at the VCU Grace Street Theatre on March 16 at 7 p.m. $10 to $15. Lucas and local group Zgomot will perform following the film. A Guitar Workshop with Gary Lucas will be held at Strange Matter on March 17 at 10:30 a.m. $10 to $35. Gary Lucas plays the Fleischer Brothers, with vocal accompaniment by Caroline Scruggs, at The Byrd Theatre March 18 at 1:30 p.m. $10 to $15. For more information on these and other James River Film Festival events, visit the festival website.
