RIP David Lynch

Not primarily a musician, but I figured there's a lot of crossover.

Details.

A real gut punch. Not a surprise given his age and his earlier announcement of how serious his emphysema had become, but he clearly had it in him to produce more work and had no shortage of ideas, but unfortunately it's always been difficult financing his films and it certainly hasn't gotten easier.

Nevertheless, he still had incredible success for someone so idiosyncratic and uncompromising, and without hesitation I'd say he's easily one of the greatest filmmakers of the last 50 years. Once in a while a great surrealist manages to break through to the masses, as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali did before Lynch, but I'm not sure if there's another filmmaker currently out there who can scale the same heights and accomplish that same feat as them, and it makes Lynch's passing even harder.

In heaven, everything is fine...

It’s impressive how many in the music world collaborated with him given the tributes popping up: expected names like Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie and Billy Corgan, all of whom appeared on his soundtracks, but also Anthrax, close friendships with Questlove and Karen O…even Chris Mars of the Replacements considered him a friend (and surely they bonded over their paintings, both inspired by Francis Bacon). Dave Alvin of the Blasters has a wonderful Facebook post about the music he made for a movie that never came to be:

Very sad to hear that David Lynch passed away.

I can't say that we ever hung out together at his favorite hang, Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake, but for a couple of years, around 1989/90, I did guitar work for him on a few of his projects. I played some background guitar for his Twin Peaks TV show as well as on a song he produced for the late vocalist, Julee Cruise. The most interesting stuff I did with him, though, was for the soundtrack of a film that wound up never getting made.

His storyline involved (and I ain't joking) a dwarf blues guitar player in early 1950s Chicago who is also an extraterrestrial from outer space. Mr Lynch and I did three sessions where he would describe a series of abstract images to me then ask me to create some sonic landscapes to enhance the images.

One of my favorites of Mr Lynch's scene descriptions was: "Now, Dave, imagine an old conveyor belt full of liquid metal. The conveyor belt with the liquid metal then travels into these gigantic, antiquated, rusty machines where this liquid metal experiences some sort of loud, transmogrifying process inside the machines that turns the liquid metal into beautiful sparks of wild electricity. And please make it sound like Muddy Waters but also don't make it sound like Muddy Waters."

Along with drummer Stephen Hodges and bassist Don Falzone, I came up with something that sounded like a cross between Muddy Waters, Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis and The Cramps.

Mr Lynch loved it. Needless to say, I wish I had tapes of those sessions and, damn, I wish that movie had been made.

> I came up with something that sounded like a cross between
> Muddy Waters, Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis and The Cramps.

Ohhh man, I'd love to hear that! Holy moley ...

I'm guessing the film in question was Ronnie Rocket, which has its own Wikipedia page. If Lynch got the tapes, I'm certain he saved them, so we may get to hear them yet.

[en.wikipedia.org]

A marvelous artist who will be much missed. The first Lynch film I saw was The Elephant Man, which I caught at a shopping mall cinema in 1980. When I came out of the theatre, my mother (who had been shopping) asked me how the movie was. I was so profoundly moved by the picture that I couldn't speak for at least ten minutes--I was fifteen at the time--for fear of bursting into tears. I remember that she hugged me and said, "You may be your father's son, but you have your mother's emotions." I also recall going into Camelot Music at the opposite end of the mall to try and pull myself together, and buying Split Enz's True Colours. These two great works of art are inextricably linked in my mind.