“I’m a big believer in collaborations,” says journeyman guitarist and composer Gary Lucas. “I think a good collaboration definitely is sometimes mostly greater than the sum of the individual parts going into it.”
Lucas is certainly in a position to know. In a career spanning more than five decades, he’s collaborated, worked, or played guitar with some of rock’s most distinctive artists, including Jeff Buckley, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, John Cale, Captain Beefheart, Chris Cornell, and Bryan Ferry, as well as composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Like Forrest Gump, he seems to always be where the real action is happening.
Buckley is a case in point. The two met at a tribute concert to the singer’s late father, Tim Buckley. Soon after, Buckley was performing with Lucas’s psychedelic rock band Gods and Monsters. Once Buckley got his own record deal, Lucas contributed a pair of tracks to his celebrated studio album Grace: the title track and “Mojo Pin.”
“I had given the music of ‘Grace’ a crack before I met Jeff,” he recalls. “I had some of it already written, but it just sucked in what I had done. But then once Jeff heard it, he took it to a whole different place.”
The New Yorker once called Lucas “the Thinking Man’s Guitar Hero.” We asked him to tell us about five artists with whom he’s inarguably served in that role.
Jeff Buckley
“Jeff was the most incredible young musician all around — not just an amazing vocalist, but an accomplished guitar player, too. Pretty much any instrument he picked up, he could get music out of it, which is what they used to say about Brian Jones of the Stones. And when I worked with him, he was 24, so he was very fresh, unspoiled, with a great attitude, and super nice. It was only after the business crept into our relationship that tension set in. But initially it was like a dream.
“I had first met him at Greetings From Tim Buckley, a tribute to his father, who I adored. I remember feeling overwhelmed when I first heard him sing. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I was in a deal with Columbia Records and the singer I had wasn’t working out very well. I told Jeff, ‘I might be able to get you on this record — I think you’re so great,’ and he said, ‘I’d love to.’
So I took him to lunch and he told me that he adored the Smiths, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin. And so do I! My dream with this band was to take a bit of this template of a shamanistic singer-rock star and drag it into the ’90s, taking a bit of that formula but doing something fresh with it, incorporating different elements. And that really appealed to Jeff, as he fancied himself doing that. He was so into this idea.
“The beauty of working with him was that I could come up with instrumental pieces and send them to him, and he never failed to come back with perfect lyrics and a melody. That’s why I loved that writing relationship. He always rose to the occasion.”
Chris Cornell
“I first met Chris at a wake for Jeff Buckley. There was sort of a concert after Jeff had died at this church in Brooklyn. And Chris was a friend of Jeff’s, as Chris was one of the few artists out of the Seattle scene that Jeff bonded with and admired. Chris was a big Led Zeppelin fan, too.
“Several years later, Steve Lillywhite, who was producing Chris’s album Carry On, called me in and said, ‘Chris would like you to play on this new album I am producing.’ I went to Hollywood, where they were recording, and Chris heard me play really up close and watched me. He threw about six songs at me throughout the day, and at the end he said, ‘Can you stay here all week? I really love the way you play.’ So I stayed and ended up being on about eight songs on Carry On.
“Chris had already done the demos and the writing. At the time, he’d been in a disagreement over writing credits with the members of Audioslave. I did show him a few instrumental ideas that I had for him, but I never demanded any credit. He was under a lot of pressure both personally and with his management to keep the lion’s share of the writing as much as possible, as is the case with artists who have heavy management.
“I could have said, ‘Well, Chris, these are my parts,’ but I was just happy to do it. Sometimes you can stand up for yourself, but other times I think it’s wise not to if you want to keep a good working relationship. I was grateful to have that gig and super happy about everything.
“I really miss the guy. I thought he was so talented. I couldn’t believe the way he passed. I didn’t see it coming at all, but he had his demons. It was a big shock. I would’ve loved to have continued to do more work with him.”
Lou Reed
“Musician magazine asked 20 guitarists, including me, to pick their favorite guitar solos. I submitted Lou Reed’s solo on ‘I Heard Her Call My Name,’ a Velvet Underground track that opens side two of their second album White Light/White Heat. Lou does this totally crazy feedback-drenched, somewhat atonal, free jazz–type solo with explosions of feedback.
The band was not happy about it. But Lou knew how powerful it was and wanted it to be more prominent.”
— Gary Lucas
“I later found out it was controversial among the group because Lou and an engineer went back into the studio the next day, at the crack of dawn, to turn his guitar up in the mix. The band was not happy about it. But Lou knew how powerful it was and wanted it to be more prominent.
“Six months later, I was out at JFK Airport to take a trip to the Berlin Jazz Festival. Lou was at the airport too and walked up to me. He stuck his hand out and said, ‘I want to thank you, Gary, for that nice thing that you said about me in Musician magazine.’ I said, ‘Oh Lou, come on, I think you’re spectacularly talented and I admire your work so much and what you’re doing today.’ So we bonded over that and then he made a point of seeing me in a rehearsal doing what I was doing.
“Afterward he said, ‘We should get together when I get back to New York.’ He invited me up to jam with him one day. We went out to lunch, and it was then that I found out he was a gearhead. All afternoon people were bringing custom-made guitars and new amplifiers for him to test. I didn’t realize he had this gear-mania side to him.
“He wanted me to teach him the Jewish song ‘I Have a Little Dreidel,’ as he was rediscovering his roots, so I showed him the song. He said, ‘I could listen to you play for hours, Gary.’ He was super complimentary.
“The funny thing is, I did a show with him and I was just pumped about the whole thing. He told me, ‘Don’t bring any pedals — just plug right into the amp.’ So I came with just my electric guitar — and then he showed up with a roadie and about 15 pedals set up all in front of him! But that was Lou.”
Captain Beefheart
“He was the most gifted artist. I never met anybody like him. He was completely light years ahead of most. On a good day, he was utterly charming, especially if it was a one-on-one situation. He’d draw you in and you’d have these deep philosophical conversations that could touch on everything and nothing. He could pluck images out of the air and just crack you up.
“For example, one day we were over visiting a friend and the television was going on in the background with some news show. It turned out to be about race relations and riots in the ’60s in America. And the announcer said just randomly, ‘a mood of black rage swept over America in the 1960s,’ and he caught that word and went, ‘Black rage! What a hip name for a perfume, man. Let’s do that!’ So he was taking it all in and living in this largely whimsical, lovely world of Beefheart.
“But on a bad day, he could be extremely paranoid and angry, especially if somebody in the band was failing or not playing something exactly right. He would make the band work really hard to codify his instructions for a song. He didn’t write things out, and a lot of the sounds that he got were captured in the moment.
Sometimes he would get on your instrument and move your fingers — ‘No, no, it’s here’ — just to mess up the chord you’re playing.”
— Gary Lucas
“Once, when we were recording in a London hotel, he threw an ashtray against the wall in the room. It spun around the floor for 30 seconds, and the tape captured the sound. He said, ‘That’s the drum solo, man.’ I had to give that to [Robert] Williams [drummer] to learn.
“Sometimes he would get on your instrument and move your fingers — ‘No, no, it’s here’ — just to mess up the chord you’re playing. He could achieve really good keyboard effects and saxophone, too. He’d get on a keyboard and improvise, but he couldn’t repeat it once he had the thing down. You’d ask him to play it again to clarify the part, but he couldn’t do it. He was a total primitive. He just had an instinctual feeling for the instrument and would get in grooves and ride them. And then you had to learn what he’d done.”
Bruce Springsteen
“I heard that first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., while I was on the way to go to work in the Far East to visit a friend. I found ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Spirit in the Night’ enchanting and inspirational songs. I thought he’s truly a poet with so much soul.
“In 2003 there was a charity album being made, Light of Day: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen, and I was asked to be involved. They wanted me to take one of Bruce’s songs and do my own version with Gods & Monsters, so I took ‘Ain’t Got You’ from Tunnel of Love, and we did a ripping version.
“We were invited to do it in a public performance at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, which is where Bruce got his start. We just got off the stage when I got tapped on the shoulder. It was Bruce. I was startled because I did not expect that he would be there. He said, ‘Man, you’re a phenomenal guitarist. And that was a phenomenal version of my song.’ He used that word twice! He began quizzing me, like, ‘Where are you from? What are you doing?’ I walked out of there feeling like a million bucks.
“A few years after, they were putting together a big multiple-artist tribute in New York called the Nebraska Project, where artists performed arrangements from his album Nebraska. I performed ‘State Trooper’ and played it solo.
“When I finished, Bruce bounded onto the stage and gave me a bear hug. At the party afterward, he and Patti Scialfa were super nice. My wife said, ‘Bruce, I love The Rising. I listen to it every day.’ And he’s like, ‘Come here, darling…’”
