“A Guitar is Like a Mini Orchestra”

From Jeff Buckley to gods and monsters and beyond, Captain Beefheart Alum Gary Lucas celebrates his diverse career on an impressive new compilation.

- By Joshua M. Miller

OVER THE PAST four decades, Gary Lucas has seemingly dabbled in just about every style of music out there. That long list includes psychedelic rock, world music (including Thirties Chinese pop, Hungarian folk and blues raga), film music, classical, electronica, jazz, blues and avant-garde. The common thread to it all is his guitar playing. Thanks to his fearless attitude and agility, Lucas shapeshifts like a chameleon in tune with whatever soundscape he finds himself in.

“A guitar is kind of like a mini-orchestra at your fingertips,” Lucas tells us. “You can really get a full, complex orchestral effect without these pedals — just through open tunings and fingerpicking, for instance. I use a lot of open tunings and a very active finger-picking right hand to get… sometimes… several voices all at once.

“It’s like an extension of my nervous system, the guitar. I try to play what I feel at the moment and transmit it, just through my touch. And there’s something about the bending of strings that definitely emulates the human voice and a wailing kind of ecstatic or painful blues experience. That, to me, is like a foundational element of music, and the guitar is a perfect instrument to do that.”

By using open tunings, Lucas can “re-voice chords,” which frees him from the “prison of the standard tuning and six strings.”