Uploaded December 2022 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
Greatest Hits, Strange & Beautiful Music 1999
"In 1999, the artist, actor, and composer John Lurie invented a personality: Marvin Pontiac, the musically gifted son of a man from West Africa and a Jewish woman from New Rochelle, New York. Pontiac’s biography, as Lurie imagined it, was a wry and purposeful sendup of the ways in which critics canonize and worship the disenfranchised and the bedevilled. In Lurie’s mythologizing, Pontiac, who was born in Mali in 1932, was abandoned by his father. His mother was institutionalized in 1936. He eventually ended up in Chicago, where he studied 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.
Later, Pontiac went nuts; he believed that he had been abducted and probed by aliens. He was hit and killed by a bus, in Detroit, in 1977. Because Pontiac “held the tribal belief” that cameras suck the soul from the body, there are only two extant pictures of him—both candid, both impossibly blurry. His recordings were discovered and released posthumously, though it was also true that Pontiac’s music was “the only music that Jackson Pollock would ever listen to while he painted.”
In corralling all of our preposterous critical fetishes into a single, nonsensical narrative, Lurie is, of course, writing a kind of meta-commentary on the ways in which we assess and value so-called outsider art—that Pontiac’s characteristics (all of which point, in one way or another, to misshapen yet pervasive ideas of authenticity) are so precise and absurd is also what makes them funny. Working-class, mixed-race, mentally ill, dead and heretofore undiscovered: eat it up, suckers!
Lurie is preceded in this experiment by John Fahey, the finger-style guitarist and collector of 78-r.p.m. records, who, in 1959, invented a figure named Blind Joe Death. The name was a nod to the real-life bluesmen (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller) whose records Fahey hunted down and cherished. But Blind Joe Death’s backstory (he played a guitar fashioned from a baby’s coffin) was a gag at the expense of revivalists, who were so pie-eyed at the idea of discovering some gloomy and tenebrous new artist from some previously unreachable rural pocket that they bought in without asking questions.
“The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits,” which Lurie wrote and recorded with Marc Ribot, John Medeski, Billy Martin, G. Calvin Weston, and Tony Scherr, was released in 2000, by Strange and Beautiful Music. Even its cover—which features one of the two obscured photographs—feels like a lampooning of the many reissue labels dedicated to hunting down lost talent, and then repackaging and recontextualizing the work, trading on the idea that, in our era of abundance, obscurity is its own currency.
Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker. 11-28-2017
Greatest Hits, Strange & Beautiful Music 1999
"In 1999, the artist, actor, and composer John Lurie invented a personality: Marvin Pontiac, the musically gifted son of a man from West Africa and a Jewish woman from New Rochelle, New York. Pontiac’s biography, as Lurie imagined it, was a wry and purposeful sendup of the ways in which critics canonize and worship the disenfranchised and the bedevilled. In Lurie’s mythologizing, Pontiac, who was born in Mali in 1932, was abandoned by his father. His mother was institutionalized in 1936. He eventually ended up in Chicago, where he studied 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.
Later, Pontiac went nuts; he believed that he had been abducted and probed by aliens. He was hit and killed by a bus, in Detroit, in 1977. Because Pontiac “held the tribal belief” that cameras suck the soul from the body, there are only two extant pictures of him—both candid, both impossibly blurry. His recordings were discovered and released posthumously, though it was also true that Pontiac’s music was “the only music that Jackson Pollock would ever listen to while he painted.”
In corralling all of our preposterous critical fetishes into a single, nonsensical narrative, Lurie is, of course, writing a kind of meta-commentary on the ways in which we assess and value so-called outsider art—that Pontiac’s characteristics (all of which point, in one way or another, to misshapen yet pervasive ideas of authenticity) are so precise and absurd is also what makes them funny. Working-class, mixed-race, mentally ill, dead and heretofore undiscovered: eat it up, suckers!
Lurie is preceded in this experiment by John Fahey, the finger-style guitarist and collector of 78-r.p.m. records, who, in 1959, invented a figure named Blind Joe Death. The name was a nod to the real-life bluesmen (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller) whose records Fahey hunted down and cherished. But Blind Joe Death’s backstory (he played a guitar fashioned from a baby’s coffin) was a gag at the expense of revivalists, who were so pie-eyed at the idea of discovering some gloomy and tenebrous new artist from some previously unreachable rural pocket that they bought in without asking questions.
“The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits,” which Lurie wrote and recorded with Marc Ribot, John Medeski, Billy Martin, G. Calvin Weston, and Tony Scherr, was released in 2000, by Strange and Beautiful Music. Even its cover—which features one of the two obscured photographs—feels like a lampooning of the many reissue labels dedicated to hunting down lost talent, and then repackaging and recontextualizing the work, trading on the idea that, in our era of abundance, obscurity is its own currency.
Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker. 11-28-2017
