Grammy Award-nominated guitarist and songwriter Gary Lucas will perform live at two music and film events on Wednesday, March 7, at Rogers State University.
Lucas will perform the music he composed for the historic 1920 silent film “The Golem” during a showing of the film from 12 noon to 2 p.m. in the Will Rogers Auditorium on the RSU campus in Claremore. He also will give a solo concert at 7 p.m. in the auditorium. Both events are free and open to the public. His appearances are part of the RSU Department of Communications and Fine Arts Invited Speaker Series.
Based in New York , Lucas is internationally known as a singer, songwriter and composer, in addition to headlining his long-standing band “Gods and Monsters.” He has been called “the thinking man’s guitar hero” by the New Yorker magazine and has written popular songs for Jeff Buckley and Joan Osborne, among others. Rolling Stone magazine said he is “one of the best and most original guitarists in America .”
His music for the classic silent 1920 German Expressionist film “The Golem,” written in collaboration with his childhood friend, keyboardist and composer Walter Horn, premiered in1989 at the American Museum of Moving Image in Astoria, N.Y., as a commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival.
“A seamless sonic web of themes and improvisations composed for electric and acoustic guitars and synthesizers,” the project was immediately hailed by EAR Magazine as the evening’s “Best Work.”
Since then, he and Gary Walter (who used to have a “combo” together going back to playing elementary school assemblies in 1963 in their hometown of Syracuse, N.Y.) have performed together at sold-out performances at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in 1990, at John Zorn’s Radical Jewish Culture Festival in Munich, Germany, in 1992, and at the Knitting Factory in New York City in 1995, among many other shows.
Lucas prepared the critically acclaimed solo guitar version of the score for the film, which he has subsequently performed in over 15 countries all over the world.
The film, which carries the full title of “The Golem and How He Came Into the World,” tells the story of an actual historical Rabbi, Jehufah Loew, who legend has his fashioned a man from clay in 16 th century Prague to save the Jewish community from annihilation. It has been filmed many times as well as adapted in many other mediums, but this 1920 version is considered the definitive one.
A forerunner of the Frankenstein series, the movie dovetails with his lifelong interest in horror flicks and the macabre. He founded a midnight movie society called “Things That Go Bump in the Night” while at Yale University in the early 1970s.