By the time Lucas climbed into his attic to cut his demo for legendary Warner Bros. boss Mo Ostin, he was a married father of two. The first six songs have the hushed gentleness of someone trying not to wake the babies downstairs. They also radiate the bittersweet sensitivity of a young parent trying to reconcile all the competing needs of his new life.
These are, in many ways, lullabies of self-help. The honeyed waltz of “It’s So Easy (When You Know What You’re Doing)” is an SOS from someone who feels a tad lost, who has never been able to transcend the moments when things “got a little troubled.” The hypnotic sway of “I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)” feels like the last sigh of someone deserted by everyone around them, just before they decide how best to move on. And the narcotic sweetness of “It Is So Nice to Get Stoned” is a plea for soporific oblivion, exhaled by someone who is at least trying to recognize that they have adult responsibilities waiting. “Oh, I wish that I were the breeze/Or a bird with feathers to catch the sun,” Lucas sings in the final verse, voice rising as he reaches for anywhere but here.
Lucas has been chronically compared to Nick Drake, dead for a year before he self-released these songs in 1975, but I forever think of Elliott Smith. Like Lucas long before him, he stacked his own exquisite harmonies on tape, as if building an army of one in order to fend off his own impending doom. And they both could sound so bright that you could, at least momentarily, forget the fact that they were singing from the bottom of their existence, from nadirs of being.
As Dutkewych notes, Lucas was a kid of Greek immigrants, growing up on the styles of the Balkans decades before rock’n’roll pervaded the American adolescent experience. He was interested in the instruments responsible for those sounds, but his catholic tastes didn’t stop there. He studied sitar in the late ’60s in Los Angeles with Ravi Shankar and Harihar Rao, the master and his student. He became Motown’s on-call “exotic instruments” guy in Detroit.
Though he only plays guitar on the second side, its three tracks are all testaments to his curiosity in unknown forms. He flirts with funk above a friend’s conga line on “Robins Ride,” then warps the basic structures of the Delta blues during “Sonny Boy Blues,” a playful articulation of the same escapism heard on the first side. But it’s the finale, “Love & Peace Raga,” that feels most poignant more than 50 years after it was made. He glides over, around, and under a tambura’s undulations, countering rapid-fire acoustic licks and bent notes that speak to his sitar training with more patient passages that suggest he’s looking for some kind of emotional clearing. You can hear the turmoil of his life here, plus the undying hope that something changes.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings