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Rating:
I had left him in front of the Big Club, humid evening, little traffic, a staggering figure disappearing down the sidewalk with the extremely chic suit hanging on the hanger bouncing on his back.
It had been a strange concert, him and his saxophones, solitary and charming: that old sword polished to a shine initially puzzled me, but after a couple of pieces, I accepted the mood, and it worked. I don't remember the details, except for that slightly crooked half-smile and the farewell after a few chats in my hopeless English outside the venue. A nice guy, John Lurie.
Then eons passed, I happened to read about his illness, Lyme disease, about a halt in his activities, then I saw the paintings he started to create (thanks to a link in a review on DeBaser, I think), not exactly memorable. I hadn't thought about him anymore in recent years. Today, though, I revisited the site of a gentleman, a true gentleman, Borguez, and discovered the very recent creation of the old Lurie, this "The Asylum Tapes". But not only that: I discovered that already in 1999 he had recorded an album, under the assumed guise of the specially generated figure of Marvin Pontiac, and as soon as I started listening to that record, the crooked crescent of the smile and that sneaky, mocking gaze came back to me. Great record that one, surprising. Someone had tried to point it out, here, on DeB, but that page had eluded me, https://www.debaser.it/marvin-pontiac/the-legendary-marvin-pontiac-greatest-hits/recensione, as had Lurie's new life. Yes, "The Legendary Marvin Pontiac Greatest Hits" is a great album, and Paolos' brief page captures it well enough.
Now I'm listening to these pieces, which I struggle to describe. Since Borguez does it well, I'll paste his words. As for me, a couple of links in the comments and the transcript of a pleasant surprise (so rare) that I felt right to share (especially with those seasoned enough to associate Lurie’s name with the memorable Longue Lizards creature)
From Borguez:
"...24 tracks scraped from reclusive time, 24 scraps of nonsense and insanity: mostly very brief obsessions, illogical torments, art brut from a junk dealer. hollerin', prison songs, invocations, unhealthy pastoral echoes. Marvin Pontiac's cloistered universe is inhabited by garden gnomes, Godzilla, bears, runaway piglets, frogs, and a Santa Claus who shows up in April without pants. But also invocations of (supposed) sanity and identity, organic impulses, insults and obscenities, non sense and the plea I Want to Get out of Here which closely resembles that I Scream You Scream We All Scream For Ice Cream made famous by the film Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986) for which John Lurie curated the soundtrack and which, in the sound settings, greatly resembles the sound of this record.
those African influences present in the previous record have been lost, but echoes of Native Americans have come from the underground (I’Am A Man is a mantra for the Great Spirit): and after all, there was a Pontiac well before Marvin!"
http://www.borguez.com/marvin-pontiac-the-asylum-tapes/
From Dagospia (yes, I found it there) interview with Lurie from 2014:
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