Back in 1966, a 14-year-old Gary Lucas was jamming along to the Yardbirds' "Roger The Engineer", Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's "Freak Out!", Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends" and the Rolling Stones' "Aftermath". Thirty-three years later, pressed for an answer to the question "What was the last group or album that made a significant impact on you?" he says "The Smiths" without hesitation. He is "disappointed by current music," as many people of his generation are, but he's gone one step further than the usual passive-aggressive nostalgic complaining. He's created his own brand of current music, one that borrows from Wagner, British progressive rock, Bernard Hermann's Hitchcock scores, science fiction, and a kind of blues so authentic it can only be heard these days on some Jewish bookworm's late-night college radio show.

My boyfriend the noise geek mocks me. "You're not into these guitar people. I play you Frank Zappa; you leave the room. I put on King Crimson; all you're capable of doing is saying "Frippertronics" with a snide grin on your face. Adrian Belew doesn't even register with you. Why on earth do you like Gary Lucas?"

The answer? Zappa was a talented fellow. I always liked his ability to thoroughly disgust me; it meant he was doing his job, rebelling against the schmaltzy repetitiveness of his colleagues. But I don't look to music to be alienated. The "30% More Notes In Every Bar!" philosophy often means a sacrifice of feeling, of beauty. Why on earth do I like Gary Lucas? He's an artist. He's to be classified separately. The next record store clerk who sticks him in the same section as Yngwie J. Malmsteen will be shot on sight.

We always said we were going to catch Lucas in concert. Many a time, I was away at college, looking at the tattered copies of the Village Voice they kept on the counter of the University Union newsstand, and I'd see listings for Gary Lucas' Gods and Monsters at the Knitting Factory . . . on a Tuesday night! I would have had to take a 3 1/2 hour trip downstate on the Short Line bus, a subway ride downtown from the Port Authority, and another voyage back upstate. Perhaps I was home in Brooklyn, out of school entirely, and Lucas was doing a Du-Tels show with Peter Stampfel down at Tonic, but it was a Sunday night (read: "Simpsons") and I (or my boyfriend) had the flu. We finally caught Gods and Monsters (at the Knitting Factory, as it turns out) a few weeks back, and were wowed. The Tiger Lilies, an English novelty band, opened up, and were rendered awful and irrelevant by the time Lucas plunged into his first song.

During the two interviews I had with Lucas, he struck me as a real individual, a mainstay of New York City's premier eclectic-music haunts who hasn't a shred of "downtown" attitude. He doesn't try, is what it is; hipness gravitates toward him. He seldom rides the subways ("They can be very jarring. I'm still a neurotic Jewish person."), sees movies, or lives the "bohemian" lifestyle, despite having moved to New York in 1977. However, he is recording an album with the electronica outfit Future Sound of London (he says their "sensibilities match up" to his) and sells out venues in Amsterdam. His new EP, "Gary Lucas At Paradiso", features live material from his favorite Amsterdam concert hall, a church that has hosted rock shows since the late 1960's (Lucas believes Paradiso has excellent acoustics and "very benign spirits.")

There are four songs on the EP. There's a cover of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" ("frenetic, driving") and a number called "Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro" ("electronic, aggressive.") There's a reworking of a Chinese pop hit from 1937 named "The Songstress On The Edge of Heaven" (which can also be heard on Lucas' 1997 album "Evangeline".) There's also "Rise Up To Be", a song Lucas gave to Jeff Buckley in the summer of 1991. Buckley wrote lyrics for the instrumental piece, and it became "Grace", the title track of Buckley's 1994 album. "Gary Lucas At Paradiso" re-introduces "Rise Up To Be" in its original form. The EP, although not yet released, has been circulating around London and has been mixed into performances by DJ Riz Maslen (Lucas has recorded with Maslen as Jet Stream Tokyo.)

What does all this sound like? Without getting into sloppy adjective-throwing or reference-bandying-about, I'll tell you. Fog. Monsters. Europe. Chimes. Echoes. Years of practice. Upstate New York winters (Syracuse, to be exact, and he hated it there). Visions of New York City, records from the South. Sometimes, rain falling so fast it's all a wet, plinky collage. English trolls with funny accents. Fireflies. Scenes in movies wherein a handsome gentleman and his comely female companion drive along sharp-bending mountain roads to meet their bloody fate.

In 1989, Lucas and keyboardist Walter Horn debuted their score for Paul Wegener's 1920 silent film Der Golem (though Wegener filmed two previous versions of Der Golem, the 1920 film is his most highly regarded.) Lucas still shows screenings of Der Golem, playing guitar in the background. Horn no longer accompanies Lucas ("Basically, I'm in the Golem business and he's not", Lucas said.) I went to see it for the first time on January 27th, at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden. At the show, he repeated his "Golem business" comment to the audience, adding, "Have Golem, Will Travel."

Amid the Winter Garden's palm trees and panoramic skylight, Lucas backed the spooky, German expressionist film with airy, fantastic shards of sound, conjuring musical spirits the way Rabbi Loew conjures up the clay beast of the movie's title, the "monster without a soul" who "terrifies the multitudes" (as it states in the program handed out at the screening.) The movie genuinely belongs in the "horror" genre. Coupled with the music and augmented by tinting all the print's scenes in different colors, it's a beautiful, "phantasmagoric" (Lucas' word), frightening thriller, an experience most Wes Craven-weaned kids will never know. Just when the audience was fully engrossed in the film (I could tell because the person behind me had stopped discussing mutual funds with his friend), Lucas threw in a lick from Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries."

Lucas' Busy Being Born

During interludes such as this one, he feels he is "laughing through his guitar." He admits comedy plays a role in his music (in fact, his Jewish-themed 1998 album "Busy Being Born" pays homage to the Marx Brothers) and confesses to being a "Seinfeld" enthusiast. It's one of the only shows he'll watch.

Lucas was never much of a TV viewer as a kid in Syracuse, NY. He spent his time reading, playing guitar, talking to his older friends, but the self-styled "loner" never felt comfortable in his surroundings. During our interview, we talked about the off-balance, dismal atmosphere of upstate New York (I attended college in nearby Binghamton, the birthplace of "The Twilight Zone"'s Rod Serling--one of Lucas' heroes.) In high school, he was already scoring films; his first assignment was the Serling-narrated Aquatic Ecology for the Upstate Medical Center's documentary film unit. Despite his otherness, Lucas' application essay to Yale (which would be his alma mater) was a treatise on his life as a "child of the media."

He says he always figured he would "wind up in New York City," and he feels "the most grounded" there, but his intense "wanderlust" and his touring schedule have taken him around the world. He loves Europe, particularly Amsterdam (he's played at Paradiso eight times since 1980, when he was a member of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band) and has considered making Europe his home.

Gary's with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band at the video shoot for "Ice Cream for Crow."

Since Lucas' days as the music director at Yale's radio station, WYBC-FM, his dream was to play guitar in Captain Beefheart's band, and it was shortly after Beefheart's East Coast debut that the two met and became friends. Before Lucas became a guitarist with the Magic Band (appearing as a soloist on the albums "Doc at the Radar Station" and "Ice Cream for Crow", he had another impressive gig. In 1973, he, along with the Yale Symphony Orchestra, ventured to Vienna to take part in Leonard Bernstein's "Mass". It was the piece's European premiere.

After graduation, he lived in Taipei for two years, and formed the O-Bay-Gone Band with a group of natives and fellow travelers (the name is Taiwanese for "The Bullshit Band.") The band was doing well, but a bar brawl in 1976 led Lucas to return to New York. He worked as a copywriter for CBS Records, and eventually made the Magic Band his full time job. Well, Captain Beefheart quit the business in 1984, changed his professional name back to Don Van Vliet, and decided to make his living as a painter. Music's a fickle business, as Lucas can tell you. He's managed to survive.

He tries to concentrate on his spiritual life ("I'm not a careerist," he says). Recording "Busy Being Born" for John Zorn's Tzadik label is just one way he's chosen to do this. In addition, he volunteers at a Jewish home, to "give back to the older generation." He has been invited to do Der Golem in Tel Aviv. Before I saw him at the Winter Garden, he had flown down to Miami with Der Golem. The audience, which comprised mainly of elderly Jewish people, didn't know what to make of Lucas' guitar, and "politely applauded." Zorn approached Lucas about recording another album of Jewish songs for Tzadik, but Lucas thinks he'll wait a while. He doesn't want to be pigeonholed.

Lucas was not raised in a strictly observant household, but he did go to Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah. He says, "I will not deny my identity. I embrace it. I relate to the plight of Jews in history." When asked whether he thought Jewish musical forms like klezmer, which is very popular in New York right now, would ever reach the level of cultural saturation that big band and swing have, he responded by saying, "I hope so. I hope it will humanize Jewish people." He believes there is a "frightening disparity between the cosmopolitan element of New York Jews and the rest of America." What are Lucas' thoughts on swing? "I did a Gods and Monsters show with Royal Crown Revue, and was thrown off by the slavish recreation of it." (Gods and Monsters is one of Lucas' numerous side projects, a loud, rocking band with a rotating lineup that has included Jeff Buckley and Matthew Sweet.)

Looking back on the '90s, he feels it's "all a blur." "The last couple of decades had more of a recognizable feel." He is scared of how "everything is accelerated" and "civility has been stripped away." A "Jimmy Stewart, or even George Bush" America "has fallen by the wayside."

It's hard to eke out a living in the '90s music world, where thousands of bands compete for the same spotlight. Luckily, Lucas' albums have near-universal critical acclaim (he's been dubbed "Guitarist of 1,000 Ideas" and "a true axe God." "The things he manages to conjure up are astonishing", one Dutch reviewer said.)

I alerted him to a recent New York Press article celebrating the Extinction of the Record Reviewer, and he disagreed with the writer, saying music critics have a "good function--to notify people as to excellence." He looks down upon the negativity used by certain writers, but believes the "glut of crap" calls for a "road map." "The '60s were different. It was easier to take a gamble on music." There were fewer albums from which to choose, and Lucas often picked things up solely for the psychedelic cover art.

Now, his musical career has forced him to look at recreational listening as a busman's holiday. He doesn't hear much radio (although he says he has enjoyed being a guest on Vin Scelsa's freeform show, "Idiot's Delight") and shies away from current trends. He speaks highly of Scelsa, praising his "'60s sensibility."

Lucas still loves music, and is extremely humble about his accomplishments and his place in the pantheon of guitar wizards. In other words, he's too nice to be a working musician. "I'm in awe of music," he says. "I don't think anyone has a monopoly on it." He practices for at least an hour a day in his West Village apartment. His songwriting style depends upon his constant dialogue with the guitar. "I have to write by playing, stumbling upon motifs, improvising, recording my ideas . . . I try to turn my mind off."

That's a hard job for a guitarist of 1,000 ideas.

Gary Lucas' new EP, "Gary Lucas At Paradiso", will be released February 15 on Oxygen Music Works. His web site is www.garylucas.com.