brief encounters #3: knitting with john

John Lurie’s Painting with John just concluded its third season (photo courtesy HBO)

It was a fabulous night in the late 1980s. My friend Joe and I were going to see John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards at the old Knitting Factory on Houston St.

I had read a lot about Lurie, a saxophonist and actor who had started the avant-jazz band in 1978 with his brother, pianist Ethan Lurie. Born in Minneapolis on December 14, 1952, and raised in New Orleans and Worcester, Massachusetts, John had also appeared in such indie films as Eric Mitchell’s Underground U.S.A., Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas.

Downstairs at the Knitting Factory, the Lounge Lizards were moving to their unique groove. They had released a few albums, including their eponymous debut in 1981 that featured such tracks as “Incident on South Street,” “Do the Wrong Thing,” “Demented,” and “I Remember Coney Island,” followed by No Pain for Cakes in 1987 and Voice of Chunk in 1988.

Joe and I had had a few drinks, but suddenly I was overcome by fatigue; I couldn’t keep my eyes open, could barely stand up. So I went upstairs, where the entrance room was virtually empty. I sat down at a table and passed out.

In 1991, Lurie hosted the cable program Fishing with John, in which he took out a boat and some rods and reels and went fishing with Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, and Dennis Hopper. In each episode they talk about life and art, having conversations that are as ludicrous and absurd as they are mundane and hilarious.

In his Criterion essay for the DVD, Michael Azzerrad writes, “Plunked down everywhere from Maine to Thailand, these sophisticates are escaping the hum and velocity of their lives and loving it. But they’re also kind of hating it — every guest expresses his misery and discomfort at some point, some more forthrightly than others. They are, so to speak, fish out of water. What makes Fishing with John special is the collision between the urban, urbane Lurie and his guests and the reality of their surroundings. . . . The leisurely pace, unfurled with a musician’s sense of timing, owes a lot to Jarmusch’s bleak, deadpan directorial style. It’s why Fishing with John is still great even when the repartee is, shall we say, less than scintillating. Turns out there’s just something very funny about very interesting people having very dull conversations.”

In 2021, Lurie kicked off a kind of sequel, Painting with John, an HBO series filmed in and around his home on an unidentified Caribbean island. The show came about accidentally, after his friend Erik Mockus filmed Lurie painting — John makes lovely, minutely detailed watercolors that unfold during each show — and the video ultimately made its way to writer, director, and producer Adam McKay (Anchorman, The Big Short), who brought it to HBO. Lurie is the writer and director of the series, Mockus the editor and cinematographer.

In each episode, John, speaking in a gruff voice, his long face dominated by a black and gray goatee, thick eyebrows, and penetrating dark eyes, tells stories from his past, pontificates on the future, and interacts with two women who work for him, his longtime assistant, Nesrin Wolf, credited as Scooch the Oocher, and Ann Mary Gludd James. He shares great memories about John Coltrane, Barry White, Anthony Bourdain and Joey Ramone, puts on half-animated, half-live DIY mini-Westerns, all the while making paintings. It’s fascinating watching him lightly touch brush to paper, the watercolor slowly spreading over a tiny space as defined images start to reveal themselves, from flowers and trees to animals and mythical creatures.

Secrecy surrounds much of what Lurie does, ever since he was diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease in 2004, followed by the 2010 publication of a New Yorker article titled “Sleeping with Weapons,” which asked the question “Why did John Lurie disappear,” exploring Lurie’s fear that his closest friend was stalking him and wanted to kill him. In a 2014 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lurie noted, “I would very much like to address the horrors of that New Yorker article and the incredible damage that it needlessly did to my life but can’t imagine you have room for that here. What one would hope is that the beauty in the music and in the paintings can somehow transcend and invalidate the kind of sickness that led to the article being written as it was and the kind of irresponsibility that allowed it to be published.”

Installation view, “John Lurie: Works on Paper,” 2006 (photo courtesy of MoMA PS1)

There is beauty in his music and his paintings. In 2006, MoMA PS1 staged a wonderful exhibition of Lurie’s works on paper, consisting of eighty intricate watercolors and ink drawings with often humorous titles, such as When Alice Got off of Her Cell Phone and Came in from the Pool the Bunny Was Going to Give Her a Spanking.

Every episode of Painting with John features new and previously recorded music from Lurie, solo, with the Lounge Lizards, and by his alter ego, Marvin Pontiac. “It’s important to have fun every day,” Lurie says in the first season. “I was hoping this show would be educational, but I really don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” Words to live by.

Back in the late 1980s, there I am, my head down on an empty table in an empty room at the Knitting Factory, a place that, Lurie told the Jazz Times in May 2020, “smelled like an old carpet. They had no air conditioner. We played there for a week one August when it was like 110 degrees in there, so we brought a canary onstage to see if it died, like coal miners do. The canary didn’t die. That’s about as positive a thing as I have to say about the Knitting Factory — the canary didn’t die.”

I am suddenly awakened by an extraordinarily loud blast in my ears.

Looking up, all I can see is a saxophone; John Lurie is playing right in my face.

The Lounge Lizards turn into the Pied Piper as they make their way upstairs and onto Houston St., the jovial crowd trailing behind them. Joe grabs me, and now we’re marching outside, gorgeous experimental sounds filling the air.

“Once upon a time, there was something really — it was quite beautiful,” Lurie says in season three, which recently ended. “It was delightful. Yeah, just imagine something delightful. Once upon a time, there was something delightful. Okay, I’m okay with this.”

So am I.

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