Yahoo Finance John Lurie: ‘I wanted to break into Martha Stewart’s house and change the curtains. My lawyer said no’
I was hoping that this show would be educational,” explains John Lurie, while dabbing at a canvas in HBO’s new six-parter Painting With John. “But I really don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I’m just stubborn. I refuse to let these paintings be bad, so I just work on them until they’re good.” It’s one of the more concise life lessons that Lurie offers during the cult figure’s long-awaited return to the small screen.
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Lurie rose to a particular kind of fame in 1980s New York. A rakish, no-wave renaissance man, he was a buddy of Basquiat, knocked about with Warhol and played saxophone in avant jazz group the Lounge Lizards. If that wasn’t cool enough, he also worked with the director Jim Jarmusch, playing perfectly louche roles in classic indie films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law.
Then, in 1991, came one of the most charming, intriguing and downright bizarre shows in television history. Part travelogue, part Don Quixote journey of self-discovery, Fishing With John saw Lurie and a starry selection of friends – Tom Waits, Dennis Hopper, Matt Dillon – search for fish in locations as far flung as Thailand, Costa Rica and Jamaica.
Like Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing by way of Easy Rider, the show’s gentle brand of disruption found itself a committed following. “This series does not go for raucous laughs but for dry wit, good music and satire of macho sportsmen in action,” read a review in the New York Times. Some of its more surreal scenes saw Waits depositing a red snapper in his shorts for safekeeping and Willem Defoe facing delirium and starvation after running out of crackers while ice fishing in Maine.
Thirty years later, and after contracting Lyme disease and cancer – as well as working on a memoir named Fark Fark Indubitably, which is set for publication this August – Lurie returns with a sequel of sorts. His last onscreen appearance was back in 2018 in the Lower East Side episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, but the soothing Painting With John – which aired on HBO in the US earlier this year – now sees Lurie sequestered on the unnamed Caribbean island where he works as an artist. More hermit than hipster, this time around there are no celebrity guests but rather fabulously sprawling stories, the wry Lurie constantly breaking the fourth wall while painting and pottering to discuss how artificial the act of talking into a camera is, concluding that anyone who can do it well must be a sociopath.
When I ask how long the idea for Painting With John had been in the works, Lurie responds with an equally engaging tale. “What I wanted to do for a long time, seriously, was Robbing With John. Where me and Flea [from the Red Hot Chili Peppers] would break into Martha Stewart’s house and change the curtains. Or Iggy Pop and I would break into [US sports presenter] Bob Costas’s house and leave hundreds of baseballs with Mickey Mantle’s forged signature on them,” he deadpans. It’s a great story, but one I suspect to be slightly taller than those featured in the show.
“I was prepared to do it and then move to Kenya or somewhere like that afterward, to avoid prosecution,” he continues. “But the problem was that my crew and guests would have been viewed as accomplices. I tried to figure out a way around this, and kept asking my lawyer. But his answer was: ‘John, I am not even going to talk to you about this.’ So I switched lawyers, and when I asked him about it, he said: ‘John, I am not even going to talk to you about this.’ So I gave up.”
Although our raconteur in paradise is initially reluctant to directly address the camera, he soon gets into the swing of things, recalling encounters with everyone from Gore Vidal and Barry White to “Super Freak” Rick James. The first, he claims, was rude to him at a baggage carousel, the second made his testicles vibrate with the sheer timbre of his voice when they met, and with the third he took cocaine in a cupboard alongside the owner of Studio 54. But, he jokes, “I am saving all the really good stories for season seven.”
Lurie’s own music provides a hypnotic backing for Painting With John’s simply but evocatively shot scenes capturing this alt.master at work. “We made the show for zero dollars. So there was zero dollars for the music,” he says. “I rummaged through my old stuff like a raccoon.” Lifting largely from his more ambient solo film score work, it also features a decent dose of Marvin Pontiac, the fictional African-Jewish outsider bluesman created by Lurie in the late 1990s as a mysterious alias for his own meditative soundscapes. “The music itself has to float along,” he adds of the dreamlike soundtrack.
It makes Painting With John as much a showcase for Lurie’s criminally underrated sonic output as it does his highly detailed watercolours. “I honestly made the show to cheer people up,” he says. “But if there is anything self-serving about making it, it was to get the paintings seen and the music heard.” It’s a job artfully done.
A UK release date for Painting With John is yet to be announced
