Gary Lucas
The Spitz
**** (four stars)
Wed 10 Sept 2003
With a leather hat that obscures his eyes and a squared-off grin, wiry guitarist Gary Lucas looks like something straight out of a Robert Crumb comic. In fact some of the audience seem to have wandered in from the same frames, but this is no stoned guitar be-in. Lucas is a one-off - possibly the most authentic and entertaining link yet found between Leonard Bernstein, Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley - and a creative interpreter of guitar music from a diverse range of sources.
There’s plenty of skewed Americana, for a start. And a brief guest appearance from Alabama 3 (famed for their Sopranos theme). Also: dissident rock’n’roll, bluegrass, bottleneck blues, classical transcriptions and reverberative ambient instrumentals, on one occasion deftly sequeing Kraftwerk’s Autobahn into Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries.
Spitalfields’ Spitz is the perfect, intimate venue for an improvising soloist like Lucas, though he makes enough noise to fill a concert hall, enhancing his arsenal of electric, acoustic and National steel guitars with a few effects boxes and pedals and traditional amplifier feedback. His version of Amazing Grace recalls Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner.
Sometimes, as on his version of Abdullah Ibrahim’s Bra Joe from Kilimanjaro, he’ll set up a bass riff, loop it and play over the top. Other composers given the Lucas treatment include Robert Johnson (Hell Hound on my Trail), John Fahey, Smetana (the Moldau) and Dvorak.
For a forthcoming gig to celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, Lucas has adapted the first and third movements from Dvorak’s string quartet in F. Though Lucas reads music (he played the guitar part in Bernstein’s Mass while at Yale) he transcribed the Czech composer’s pieces for National steel guitar solely by ear.
It occasionally feels as if Lucas is working right up to the limits of his (considerable) technique, which makes for risky, exciting performances. Originals such as Fata Morgana and Lalee’s Kin (created for an HBO documentary) fall more easily under his fingers, but he still invests them with barnstorming energy. There’s an air of genial experiment, as he visibly dithers about which guitar to pick up, which piece to play next. Playing solo is a tough gig. But Lucas never loses his audience, who listen, hushed while his bottleneck freewheels across the strings, and then holler or whoop with delight as each number subsides to a gracious halt.
John L. Walters
