For 50 years, a copy of Ted Lucas’ sole, self-titled album felt like a secret treasure—a coveted charm you might pull out only when the closest friends dropped by, whispering “Have you heard this?” before putting the needle on a record that shouldn’t actually exist. In the early ’70s, Lucas was a frustrated Detroit guitar whiz in his early 30s. Two of his rock bands had already been dropped by Warner Bros., and his once-steady Motown session work with the likes of the Temptations and the Supremes was vanishing as the Motor City institution wheeled away for Los Angeles.
So Lucas multi-tracked six songs alone in his attic and dispatched the demos to Warner, only to be rejected again. He eventually added an instrumental second side, paid to press it twice on his half-real OM imprint, and distributed the thing himself in irritated fits and starts from home. The OM Record, as it came to be known, slowly emerged as a jewel accidentally tossed in the private-press folk dustbin. Even reissues—particularly a 2010 co-release by Willam Tyler’s retired Sebastian Speaks label—could command price tags above $100. Cited as an influence by Clairo and Devendra Banhart and covered by Mountain Man and Julianna Barwick, it is, after all, a magical little thing, as softly stunning as any other bit of idyllic psychedelia committed to tape amid the long afterglow of the lysergic ’60s. You had to keep your copy of The OM Album a secret; the songs are instantly addictive, and there just weren’t enough to go around.
After a half-dozen small editions during the last half-century, Lucas’ only LP is, at last, permanently available thanks to Third Man Records. Motivated in part by their mutual Detroit origins, co-owner Ben Blackwell is leading the first true archival excavation of Lucas, moving beyond these nine mostly perfect songs to explore the full scope of his chameleonic music—and his self-sabotage within the music industry. The project starts, as it should, with a generously expanded reissue of The OM Album. Four digital-only bonus tracks instantly prove this wasn’t some fluke, while the concise but expansive liner notes by Detroit music historian Mike Dutkewych finally explore the backstory of someone so mysterious and magnetic that he has been rumored—at various points, and with no real corroboration—to be the inspiration for “Mr. Tambourine Man.” This is the full treatment these songs have so long deserved.
By the time Lucas climbed into his attic to cut his demo for legendary Warner Bros. boss Mo Ostin, he was a married father of two. The first six songs have the hushed gentleness of someone trying not to wake the babies downstairs. They also radiate the bittersweet sensitivity of a young parent trying to reconcile all the competing needs of his new life.
These are, in many ways, lullabies of self-help. The honeyed waltz of “It’s So Easy (When You Know What You’re Doing)” is an SOS from someone who feels a tad lost, who has never been able to transcend the moments when things “got a little troubled.” The hypnotic sway of “I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)” feels like the last sigh of someone deserted by everyone around them, just before they decide how best to move on. And the narcotic sweetness of “It Is So Nice to Get Stoned” is a plea for soporific oblivion, exhaled by someone who is at least trying to recognize that they have adult responsibilities waiting. “Oh, I wish that I were the breeze/Or a bird with feathers to catch the sun,” Lucas sings in the final verse, voice rising as he reaches for anywhere but here.
Lucas has been chronically compared to Nick Drake, dead for a year before he self-released these songs in 1975, but I forever think of Elliott Smith. Like Lucas long before him, he stacked his own exquisite harmonies on tape, as if building an army of one in order to fend off his own impending doom. And they both could sound so bright that you could, at least momentarily, forget the fact that they were singing from the bottom of their existence, from nadirs of being.
As Dutkewych notes, Lucas was a kid of Greek immigrants, growing up on the styles of the Balkans decades before rock’n’roll pervaded the American adolescent experience. He was interested in the instruments responsible for those sounds, but his catholic tastes didn’t stop there. He studied sitar in the late ’60s in Los Angeles with Ravi Shankar and Harihar Rao, the master and his student. He became Motown’s on-call “exotic instruments” guy in Detroit.
Though he only plays guitar on the second side, its three tracks are all testaments to his curiosity in unknown forms. He flirts with funk above a friend’s conga line on “Robins Ride,” then warps the basic structures of the Delta blues during “Sonny Boy Blues,” a playful articulation of the same escapism heard on the first side. But it’s the finale, “Love & Peace Raga,” that feels most poignant more than 50 years after it was made. He glides over, around, and under a tambura’s undulations, countering rapid-fire acoustic licks and bent notes that speak to his sitar training with more patient passages that suggest he’s looking for some kind of emotional clearing. You can hear the turmoil of his life here, plus the undying hope that something changes.
Dozens of brilliant guitarists, like Glenn Jones and Six Organs of Admittance, have explored this same fertile intersection of solo guitar and South Indian music. Rarely, though, has it felt so confessional without a single word needing to be spoken or sung. It is as much a window into Lucas’ soul as “Baby Where You Are,” the little wonder at the center of the first side. In this bifurcated way, The OM Record recalls Sings, an earlier and often unsung treasure by boundary-breaking jazz vocalist Patty Waters. She followed seven short, tender songs on the first side with an incredibly cacophonous and totally rapturous 14-minute version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Waters demonstrated that very different forms can burrow into the same core, that the avant-garde and the familiar function as brilliant bedfellows. Lucas makes that lesson feel cozy and warm.
Lucas died in 1992 from sepsis following stomach surgery, having long since abandoned his last efforts at a career in music. By many accounts, he remained bitter about his fate in the music industry, how work that he found worthwhile never really found an audience. But the fact that it has steadily spread during the three decades since his death is strangely affirming and reassuring to me. Lucas didn’t come from one of the cool coastal rock scenes—never owned a home in Laurel Canyon, never became a regular in Manhattan haunts.
He was instead an occasional sideman in a city where soul and R&B rightfully reigned, where no one thought to look for one of the most exquisite bits of folk-rock ever made. “In a pop world,” he said almost a decade before he released this record, “publicity becomes real.” At that time, no one seemed to think his story or songs would sell. But they have done something much more important: They have endured, glowing transmissions of sadness, hope, and exploration continuing to drift outward for anyone who needs them.
