Touted by Rolling Stone as "one of the best and most original guitarists in America," Gary Lucas is the type of under-the-radar artist who, amidst all the Pop Montreal ballyhoo, stands as one of the best kept secrets of this year's festival. Also praised by the culturati at The New Yorker as "the thinking man's guitar hero," he has amassed an extraordinary musical catalogue. Lucas's umpteen solo albums, soundtrack recordings for film and TV, collaborations with the likes of Jeff Buckley, John Cale and Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison and Grammy nomination are all impressive feats, especially for an artist who spent the bulk of his career whiling away in willful obscurity.
Though he has played guitar since age nine, Lucas's "big break," didn't come until his late-twenties, when he was enlisted by the tin god of experimental blues-rock, Captain Beefheart. Lucas first saw Beefheart perform in 1971, when he and a group of college buddies made a pilgrimage from Syracuse to a concert in New Haven. "It was a life-transforming experience," Lucas said. "I knew that if I were to ever do anything professional, I wanted to play with this guy."
It was in 1980, when he appeared on Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station record, that Lucas's long-laboured ambition would be realized. His nimble axe-grinding on the track "Flavour Bud Living" impressed both critics and, perhaps the much harsher tribunal, Beefheart himself. "That was the first recoding of me on a big-time record," Lucas said. "It kind of put me on the map." Beefheart subsequently embraced Lucas as a full member of his Magic Band on his last album, 1982's Ice Cream for Crow. Lucas is frank in stating that playing Beefheart's nefariously intricate compositions "takes an incredible amount of work."
Unsurprisingly, the experience proved formative. "It laid the groundwork for my later career," Lucas explained. "I went to Beefheart University. I earned my stripes." And though Beefheart became a reclusive oil painter in the years following Crow's release, Lucas, whose undaunted original approach to his instrument and lofty musical proficiency showed he had chops to spare, countinued undaunted.
From there, he went on to record with his own experimental, pscyh-rock band, Gods and Monsters, as well as to work on albums with a throng of musicians whose sensibilities lay somewhat left of the dial, from Bryan Ferry and Iggy Pop to Lou Reed and DJ Spooky. He also co-wrote two of Jeff Buckley's most famous songs, "Mojo Pin" and "Grace."
"Those songs went on to shake the world, right? I mean they're anthems!" Lucas said of his work on Buckley's much-celebrated Grace album. "To me they exemplify, you know, the strength of my own writing."
But the focus of Lucas's Pop Montreal performance won't be his uncompromising work with Gods and Monsters, nor his incendiary guitar playing. Instead, Lucas will be providing a live score to a handful of early experimental films. The project is called "Sounds of the Surreal" and it may sound familiar to those who caught Lucas at last year's Pop Montreal festival, where he accompanied a screening of the 1921 German horror film The Golem.
"I was definitely affected by the reception I got up there," Lucas said of his stint at Pop Montreal 2006. In "Sounds of the Surreal," Lucas lays down improvisational guitar solos over three classics of silent cinema: Rene Clair's Entr'acte, Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique and Ladislaw Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge.
"It's kind like a psychedelic approach, but without drugs," said Lucas of the project. "People coming get their minds blown by the fantastic visuals and the music, which is always composed in service of the work."
As he does with the music of his hero Beefheart, Lucas takes initiative to expose these little-known films to new audiences and he does so with puritanical vigor. "To me it's a whole mission: let's bring this stuff into the light," he said.
With unique, yet certainly profitably-perilous endeavours such as "Sounds of the Surreal," Lucas maintains his general indifference towards the music industry's insistence on an artist's financial viability. Instead, the so-called "Guitarist of 1,000 Ideas" prefers to keep blazing his own trails, however divergent. "I never had a direct path to anything," he said, "And that's one of the reasons I'm still around."
Sunday, Oct. 7 at 10:00 p.m.; Portuguese Association (4170 St- Urbain).
Spring Break
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