Days Between Stations. - Review - sound recording review

Interview, July, 2000 by Greil Marcus

MUSICIAN JOHN LURIE CHANNELS THE GREAT MARVIN PONTIAC

It's an open secret that Marvin Pontiac and downtown Manhattan composer John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards are one and the same. But nothing is lost and much is gained by taking The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits (Strange and Beautiful) as it presents itself.

The gravelly, late-night voice is confident, pleased with itself--and also questioning. It's a hipster frontiersman's voice, even if it gives you the idea that its owner never leaves his apartment, hasn't left it for years. The biographical notes contrived for Pontiac seal the impression: He first recorded in the early 1950s, in the time of McCarthyism, lobotomies, and the Beats; he went insane in the 1970s and was struck and killed by a bus in 1977.

Pontiac had a "minor hit for Acorn Records" in 1952 with the "then controversial song 'I'm a Doggy,'" the bio says, and an "enormous bootleg success in Nigeria with the beautiful song 'Pancakes.'" The music backs up the story: Talking over floating, light, TV-jazz backgrounds, sometimes over harsh blues and odd little voices buried in the music, or talking back and forth to a female chorus as if the women in it are figments of his own imagination, the man is having a very ironic kind of fun. Even when he pushes, huffing and puffing as if he's climbing a hill, or hammering "wanna wanna wanna wanna" like someone trying to prove he'll knock on your door all night if that's what it takes, you sense his restraint, his amusement. Though you can hear the man as a voice behind Bob Dylan's odd 1970 jazz-poetry excursion, "If Dogs Run Free," the drifter in this music is never smug. Not only has he been and gone from places you will never get to, he'll never get back to them.

When he comes close to singing, it's as someone who doesn't sing, who just muses over a melody he can't really ride, just extending vowels, dragging out a sound. Mostly he talks--but his talking is at once flat and absolutely unpredictable, in languid rhythm. He takes a few steps back from orchestrations--of vibes, guitar, drums, harmonica, piano, horns--to cast a doubting glance on his own tales, aphorisms, non sequiturs, puns, his whole persona.

No wonder, you think as you continue with the Pontiac bio: born in 1932, son of a man from Mali and a Jewish woman from New Rochelle. The father, Toure, changes his name when he moves the family to Detroit, thinking "Pontiac" was like Smith and would make him seem more American. When Marvin is four his mother goes insane; he lives with his father in Mali until he's fifteen. Then he goes to Chicago to learn blues harmonica: "At the age of seventeen, Marvin was accused by the great Little Walter of copying his harmonica style. This accusation led to a small fistfight outside a small club on Maxwell Street. Losing a fight to the much smaller Little Walter was so humiliating to the young Marvin that he left Chicago and moved to Lubbock, Texas, where he became a plumber's assistant."

A red flag waved lightly in the wind at this point--little or not, Walter Jacobs, with a crescent scar on his forehead that looked like it was made with a church key, was one of the last men in Chicago anyone, let alone a teenager, would get into a fight with--but I was too entranced by the music to notice. I was caught up in the second track on the album, playing it over and over: "Small Car."

In most of the songs the performer walks through unresolved situations like Philip Marlowe after he's been drugged by a Santa Monica doctor. Here, the chiming, repeating little guitar notes that run through "Small Car" like rain make a continuing fanfare, just as the insistent repetition of the title by the female chorus is like the turning of a page. This is going to be a story, a fable. The voice is that of a storyteller convinced that there is something very important to relate, even if he hasn't figured out what it is yet.

The music around the man lets you know his story will be hard to follow, if only because the theme established by the little guitar notes, soon picked up and extended by horns, then tossed back in counterpoint by the chorus, is so hypnotic. You're lost in the swirl; it's hard to follow the story even if you're trying not to hear the music.

The man tells the tale of a small colony of farmers, and the day, the one day, they left their farm to investigate the world around them. "Hello, farmer," says a voice outside the speaker's bedtime-story narration, and you wonder where the person behind this voice came from, and where, just as quickly, he went. Are those children talking now? Where did they go? Every new detail is like a door opening--but you're never allowed to pass through even one of them, so when the story ends you're overwhelmed not by what you've heard but by how much you've missed. Curious, curious, curious--that's what this man is, you decide. But his reticence is at war with his curiosity: He's the ultimate example of the man who knows where he wants to go, gets lost, and won't ask directions. If he asked directions he'd no longer be an artist. If he couldn't see himself as an artist, he wouldn't exist.