It’s hard to recognize John Lurie in this 68-year-old man with a goatee, shorts and flip flops who stars in Painting With John, available this week on HBO. There are six 20-minute episodes shot at the home of the musician who founded The Lounge Lizards and the star of Jim Jarmusch’s early films on the Caribbean island of Grenada, where he has lived for seven years. The series, produced by him, hides behind the pretext that Lurie now paints watercolors, his main dedication at the moment, but above all he speaks.
Sometimes he goes out into his garden, which looks like a rainforest, and throws tires down a hill or picks up a branch that looks like an elephant’s trunk. On one occasion, he gets in a car and visits a friend. But the series is about him and his anecdotes. It could be something that happened in his childhood or a story about his testicles and Barry White (I don’t want to know more, you have to see it to understand). They would look like recited stories if it weren’t for this sense of improvisation. Although it can be forced. He himself confesses in one of the rare pearls of sincerity that seems to escape him by painstakingly painting that the actors are sociopaths. “The better I acted, the worse I became. I’m not kidding, ”he says without worrying about developing ideas. With a few exceptions, such as the chapter he devotes to talking about celebrity. “Fame is important to you. You can’t stop being famous. It took me a long time. But then why am I doing this series? », He thinks.
Who is John Lurie? He appeared in the late 1970s as the frontman of The Lounge Lizards. Him with his sax, his little brother Evan at the piano and guitarist Arto Lindsay were the core of this combo jazzy in form and punk in attitude. It was time for the brief but very influential New York wave. When punk gave way to the new commercial wave in England, the young musicians of Manhattan were betting on the opposite: noise, experimentation, risk and nihilism.
His style, which he himself jokingly called faux jazz, and his way of dressing (those very American classic costumes in light fabric that crumple and that rat pack attitude between formal and disheveled), brought him together. with other aesthetes of the time with one foot in the future and the other in the past. Although he was born in Minneapolis, he was the epitome of Downtown Manhattan cool and in addition to acting, he was acting. During the shooting of the feature film Underground USA, he met Jim Jarmusch, then a sound technician, who as soon as he started directing, made Lurie his favorite actor. During the eighties he combined lizards with theater. He played in Permanent Vacation, Down By Law, Strangers Than Paradise or Mistery Train, by Jarmusch, and was secondary in Paris, Texas, by Wim Wenders, The Last Temptation of Christ, by Scorsese or Wild Heart, by David Lynch.
He has become a familiar face and a respected musician. As in addition to starring in Jarmusch’s successful independent films, he also signed their soundtracks, during the 1990s he received more and more musical commissions for films. Between tours, he undertakes personal projects. With sardonic humor, he created, directed and presented in 1991 a television series, Fishing with John: a complete delirium. In each of the six episodes, Lurie dragged a guest – Matt Dillon, Tom Waits, Jarmusch, or Willem Dafoe – to fish with him. They talked about mundane things as, completely out of place, they tried to catch a shark or poke holes in Maine’s frozen lakes at minus 18 degrees centigrade. Over time, this eccentricity has become a cult series: the distant reference of this new television adventure.
Then came the dark period. It practically disappeared in the first decade of the 2000s, until 2009, when he published his book A Beautiful Example of Art. There he reckoned that with the turn of the millennium he had started to feel sick. Terrible migraines, fatigue and above all, a nervous disorder that made it impossible to touch him. “Now I’m better, but I can barely listen to music, it directly attacks my nervous system, I only hear an unbearable noise,” he said in an interview in 2010. It took years to diagnose Lyme disease, a disorder caused by a tick bite. .
Illness is the reason he started painting. But even while painting, everything was calm. He claimed to have been harassed and threatened with death by a painter friend. He left New York to hide in California, on a ranch owned by his friend Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Later in Granada, where he eventually settled.
Nothing of this exciting life appears in the endearing Painting with John. We will have to wait for the publication of this autobiography that he claims to have completed. Important moments only serve as details to frame the stories. For example, your recent cancer treatment is the distant source of a gas oven explosion in your kitchen. Which in turn is why he came out naked with a machete. And everything like that. At the end of the series, it feels like you’ve spent a few days with an eccentric retired Yankee painter. John Lurie did whatever he wanted for HBO. This is in fact what he seems to have done his whole life.
–
