The Anti-Joe Lazarus Album

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 16 November 2016.



Although I like the idea of era-specific concerts, I think the fundraiser for the Joe Lazarus album should feature the songs from the Joe Lazarus album. I'm wondering if these songs would, due to their uniqueness of style and their importance to the project, should have been the ones written just before or right after the turbulent reversals, July 4, 1976.

Bad things happened to make it not come out (Concert for Iceland, ECT, etc.). Could the Eagles' Hotel California be the anti-Joe Lazarus album, an album that came out in the psychic void left by the Arthur White/Joe Lazarus collaboration? Interestingly, that was the album when they brought on Joe Walsh. I don't know, that may be a totally unrelated can of worms.

Another concern about the era-specific shows: they run up the bill pretty fast and involve a lot of extra work. I at least feel the need to track down era-specific instruments, costuming, etc. I'm not sure we would make any money whatsoever. What I like about the washed-up "Return of" shows is that they are extremely cheap and easy to do. If we were trying to do a fundraiser to record the unrecorded Joe Lazarus album, I think it makes sense that we would be in 2016, trying to do this in time for the 40th Anniversary of the Turbulent Reversals, that ambiguous event with an even more ambiguous legacy. Instead of Father interviewing us on All Things New, we could have Joe Lazarus, Jr. interviewing us about the album, about his father, about his father's supposed clone, Joseph Lazarus III, who is actually in the current iteration of the band (so awkward!).

Maybe we could have a telethon aspect of the fundraiser, with operators standing by!

I think this could make for some top-rate theater, with Joe Jr. being torn between his passion to record his father's album and being weirded out by his father's clone being in the band!

That would be so awesome with a bank of volunteer operators sitting at a long table off to the side actually answering the phone and talking with donors during songs, plugging their other ears so they can hear. Every now and again, we could pipe in a voice of someone actually calling in, perhaps real people from Arthur's past who couldn't make it to the show. Liza, I love that moment in The Eraserhead Stories, when David Lynch has a long phone conversation with Catherine Coulson in the middle of the interview. I love the idea of Joe Lazarus, Jr. as a vaguely depressed, increasingly bewildered telethon host!

What an amazing dynamic to have him avoid talking to/about his father's clone, who is sitting right there!