Tributes for The Legendary Marvin Pontiac’s Greatest Hits:
“In my formative years, as an aspiring bass player, there was nothing I would listen to more than Marvin Pontiac” – Flea (of The Red Hot Chili Peppers)
“A dazzling collection! It strikes me that Pontiac was so uncontainably prescient that one might think that these tracks had been assembled today.” – David Bowie
“This record has changed my life.” – John Lurie
One sunny afternoon, back in 2001, I was driving between New Orleans and Washington, DC after having had one of my worst vacations ever. I had gone to New Orleans to try to not think about something and you can imagine how well that worked. Not the sort of escape that usually makes for a great vacation. Anyway, I was driving somewhere through southern swamps and my car radio was going in and out of tune. I was listening to some NPR station and there was a show on people who do things in masks. I could have sworn the show was This American Life, but in looking through their archives I could not find the story…
One of the guests on the show was John Lurie. He was talking about an album he had released on his record label Strange and Beautiful Music called The Legendary Marvin Pontiac’s Greatest Hits. Here is the Pontiac story from the label’s website:
MARVIN PONTIAC was hit and killed by a bus in June 1977 ending the life of one of the most enigmatic geniuses of modern music. He was born in 1932, the son of an African father from Mali and a white Jewish mother from New Rochelle, New York. The father’s original last name was Toure but he changed it to Pontiac when the family moved to Detroit, believing it to be a conventional American name.
Marvin’s father left the family when Marvin was two years old. When his mother was institutionalized in 1936, the father returned and brought the young boy to Bamako, Mali where Marvin was raised until he was fifteen. The music that he heard there would influence him forever.
At fifteen Marvin moved by himself to Chicago where he became versed in playing 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 fistfight outside of 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.
Not much is known about him for the next three years. There are unsubstantiated rumors that Marvin may have been involved in a bank robbery in 1950. In 1952, he had a minor hit for Acorn Records with the then controversial song “I’m a Doggy.” Oddly enough, unbeknownst to Marvin and his label, he simultaneously had an enormous bootleg success in Nigeria with the beautiful song “Pancakes.”
His disdain and mistrust of the music business is well documented and he soon fell out with Acorn’s owner, Norman Hector. Although, approached by other labels, Marvin refused to record for anyone unless the owner of the label came to his home in Slidell, La and mowed his lawn.
Reportedly Marvin’s music was the only music that Jackson Pollack would ever listen to while he painted, this respect was not reciprocated. In 1970 Marvin believed that he was abducted by aliens. He felt his mother had had a similar unsettling experience, which had led to her breakdown. He stopped playing music and dedicated all of his time and energy to amicably contacting these creatures who had previously probed his body so brutally.
In 1971 he moved back to Detroit where he drifted forever and permanently into insanity.
And it’s all a fiction.
The music is real but the biography behind the supposed artist Marvin Pontiac comes from the same place as the music – the mind of John Lurie. When Lurie decided to release a vocal album he decided to release it under the moniker of Marvin Pontiac. Pontiac, as designed by Lurie, was an “outsider” musician who spent much of his life in an insane asylum. Reporters fell over themselves to write up this discovered artist with this haunted and beautiful music. The praise turned to anger when it was revealed that Lurie was the artist behind Pontiac (which should have been no surprise as it was released on his label).
Lurie had long been threatening his friends that he was going to release a vocal record (much like he threatened to do a fishing show). Here is Lurie in an interview with Allan Macinnis on releasing the album: “I was going to put it out without the musician’s names and really do it like it was this insane guy that people should know, and they don’t. And so they think that they want to be cool by saying ‘I knew about him all along’… then it was getting a lot of attention…I hired a publicist who, right in the middle, without even warning me, panicked and called everybody and said ‘It’s John Lurie – it’s not really a dead African guy.’ There was a guy from the Village Voice who was writing this five-page thing about this undiscovered genius and when they found out they had been duped they were furious… they liked it better when they thought he was black, they’re pissed at me!”
And on the NPR appearance I heard that sunny afternoon, “I get invited to be on NPR about people who do things in masks. I thought, perfect – that’s exactly what it was: I put on a mask, I created a character, and that was how I did this project. But I didn’t realize it was some kind of negative thing… So I went on NPR expecting to have to defend myself for doing this thing, basically, in blackface… but what she mad about was she’d bought the record because it was an insane person… So she was mad that I was pretending to be insane…”
This is a perfect example of the emphasis on biography as a means of evaluating creativity. The same critics who were heaping praise on Marvin Pontiac when it was the work on an insane, dead musician were angry when the music was by John Lurie, downtown NYC musician. Why was the music “better” when it was done by this other musician, this outsider? The music is not fake; the music is real. And it’s really good too. But, as I wrote in my recent piece on Henry Darger, an audience loves the doomed, mad artist as a romantic stereotype. The lens in which audiences listened to the music changed once the veil was lifted and their opinions then changed as well. Too bad.
Lurie no longer makes music. In 2002 Lurie came down with a neurological disease that doctors have not been able to diagnose. For years he was not able to leave his house because he was too sick. He misses music: “The sense of loss is unbelievable… my soul came through with music. Music was everything for me.” Now his outlet is painting.. Some people have said his painting is reminiscent of outsider art. As one neurologist told Lurie, “I think you’re just wired different than everybody else.”
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