Ted Lucas made a masterpiece. At the start of the ’70s, after jettisoning a string of promising rock bands and sustaining himself as an “exotic instrumentalist” for Motown, the songwriter and guitarist decided to give commercial success another go. He cut a six-song acoustic demo in his Detroit attic at the behest of Warner Bros, submitting it in early 1972. He believed so strongly he’d be signed that he convinced the great psychedelic visualizer Stanley Mouse to give him cover art once intended for the late Jimi Hendrix. But that deal never happened, so Lucas—three years later, in September 1975—self-released his self-titled solo debut, back when putting out your own stuff often meant the music was stillborn.
During the last half-century, though, those nine songs have slowly inspired a second life, prompting OM, as it is typically called, to be reissued multiple times. The definitive edition arrived last year via Third Man, steadfast champions of deserving Detroit obscurities. If you were to ask me for one recommendation in the crowded field of so-called “private-press folk,” where the esoteric and enigmatic is often as good as cash, I would almost always suggest OM, an immediately accessible but deeply uncanny record of stoner hymns, existential lullabies, and white-hot acoustic guitar playing. It feels to me like lighting a fire on a snowy day, balancing strong coffee with sticks-and-stems weed, and letting your mind wander to your most pleasant memories.
But unless you committed to deep Discogs investments or grainy YouTube transfers, OM seemed like the beginning and end for Lucas, a blessed offering devoid of context. He had made this album and vanished, like some bearded angel moving too fast to see. That mystery is over now: Images of Life gathers 32 songs made in the 15-year period around OM, combining those rarities floating around on stray 7”s with a partial excavation of the vast archive Lucas left when he died in 1992. Alongside Mike Dutkewych’s smart and sensitive liner notes, the music portrays Lucas as a preternaturally gifted tunesmith hamstrung by his ability to commit to a single sound or path.
Perhaps too good for his own good, Lucas moves among jangling psychedelia, heartsick pastorals, and radio-ready rock, as if forever searching for a way out of his attic studio or his parents’ spare bedroom. There are songs here that not only rival the best of OM but also rank as lost Nuggets or even missed hits from some Time-Life compilation. If OM captured Lucas as one of the sweetest singers ever trapped in the folk-rock dustbin, Images of Life reveals him as a complicated artist who could make most any hook sound effortless.
Images of Life divides Lucas’ career into three chronological and loose stylistic categories, each nabbing an LP of its own. The first, Strange Mysterious Sounds, finds him pinballing among three bands in a five-year span. Lucas launched his OM label to release the pleasant, fuzzy 1966 single “High Time,” from his psych quintet the Spike-Drivers, before he hijacked a deal with Atlantic in favor of a slot on Reprise. The Spike-Drivers cut tracks at Chess in Chicago and with Tom Dowd in New York—institutions of the era that reinforce how much potential they had. When they split, Lucas launched a duo, the Misty Wizards, with fellow former Driver, Richard Keelan; their troika of acoustic tracks here, all captured during a 1968 soundcheck in Michigan, are a revelation. They sing a little like Simon & Garfunkel or Crosby, Stills, & Nash, their arrangements grounded in blue-collar reality but dosed with acid.
Before the Wizards settled into their lovely acoustic groove, they recorded a searing single, “It’s Love,” at Los Angeles’ Wally Heider Studios, another bastion of that era. Lucas seemed to bemoan that missed opportunity with his next band, a short-lived quartet he called the Horny Toads. Recorded in a small town south of Detroit, their “Head in California” is a sort of we-have-everything-we-need-here anthem, Lucas forcing rhymes like Miami and salami and Mendocino and vino as he offers caution about the damage the rest of the world can do to a working-class Greek kid from Detroit. It is a great rock song, but it also feels like a farewell to the industry, a resignation prompted by a perceived failure.
To wit, Lucas recorded everything on the second slab here, Rainy Days, in various studios, apartments, and venues back in Michigan. These 11 songs stretch from 1970 to 1974, the same timeframe during which he toiled over OM; several of these songs are as breathtaking as those of his finished masterpiece. “Images of Life” is a solemn transmission of domestic restlessness, Lucas reflecting on his circumstances as a married father who almost made it big and larger questions about the arbitrary way in which the world seems to bestow favor upon the few. He revisits an early love song for his wife, Annette, on “Anastasia,” this version haunted and floating, as if he’s trying to imagine himself back to their exuberant early days. Recorded in the same local studio where the Horny Toads cut “Head in California,” the winning and exuberant “Nobody Loves Me Like My Baby Does” doubles as an apology for his moodiness and mercurial nature and a note to himself to commit to the life he’s built in Detroit.
That same year, though, he recorded “Rainy Days,” which slips easily into a lacuna of devastating and beautiful songs by soft-voiced guys with guitars framed by, say, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, and Justin Vernon. Playing for a tiny crowd in a Detroit gallery launched a decade earlier by a married pair of arts enthusiasts, Lucas perfectly captures the push and pull between contentment and independence, between letting himself be loved and letting himself roam. “Sitting here with my guitar/I watch my time slowly fade away,” he sings in the final verse, his voice warm but fragile, like a threadbare blanket. “And like a burned-out shooting star/I know I’ll never see the light of day.” It seems a miracle he ever finished OM; recorded three years before he released that album, this sounds like an end.
In true restless Lucas fashion, of course, he wasn’t done. By the time he finally issued OM in 1975, he had already started a new rock band, the impeccably named Boogie Disease. He recruited a 23-year-old Detroit bassist who would soon rechristen himself Don Was to join his Ted Lucas Band; they opened for Black Sabbath in Toledo, playing electric covers six weeks before the gentle OM was released. An enterprising recording student, Was had access to a studio in an industrial building in Detroit. He brought most of Boogie Disease to that space in 1976 to cut five assured rock songs about Lucas’ misgivings and misfires with love—and, hilariously, a border patrol agent staring up his ass in a quest for contraband.
Especially given their amateur provenance, these are great rock songs that could have slotted between Cheap Trick and Steely Dan on late ’70s radio. “Impossible Love” hinges on an inescapable hook, while “Slow Motion Ocean (of Love)” grooves around an incendiary guitar solo that fuses Lucas’ interests in Carnatic and psychedelic improvisation with radical aplomb. But Lucas struggled to finish these tunes, overdubbing with Was for months before decamping to Canada to work on them even more in 1977. An accomplished self-saboteur, he barely managed to release any of this music.
By decade’s end, Lucas’ misgivings about his life had started to curdle into bitterness. He got divorced in 1980, and you can hear him nearing the bitter end on “If I Can’t Be Your Lover (I Won’t Be Your Friend).” The pizzicato strings, brief Elvis pastiche, and buoyant beat sound fun, but the song itself is a rusty knife forced through an old bond, a goodbye that’s meant to hurt. Lucas was months away from 40 when he cut the track; this is the end of suspended adolescence and any youthful whiff of idealism, the beginning of acceptance that stardom would never happen.
Most of the material on Images of Life sounds incredible, a testament to the studios and situations that Lucas’ perennial next-big-thing status got him into and to the careful mastering work of Warren Defever (of the great His Name Is Alive) at Third Man. Given that general fidelity, then, the temptation to skip past “I Wish I Knew,” at the end of Rainy Days, will be understandable. Found on a tape reel labeled “sounds good,” Defever says it instead sounded like someone copying a tape with two boomboxes several feet apart inside an echoey room. Muffled and overdriven, it still sounds vaguely like that now. Listen anyway. Across five minutes, this devastating song about trying to restore lost love becomes strangely hypnotic; Lucas’ simple strums and sweet falsetto feel like watching a candle flame flicker as you try not to fall asleep. By track’s end, it is beautiful, the bell-clear emotional resonance overriding any fidelity issues. I feel like I am right there with Lucas, pulling for him to figure out his life and work once and for all.
This recording of “I Wish I Knew” and the experience of listening to it feel like an apt summary of Lucas’ arc during these last 50 years. For so long, he was lost as all but a memory, championed only by Detroit locals like Was and family members. Reissues of OM made him feel as mysterious as a ghost, like a spirit who had offered up a gift and then gone. Images of Life puts flesh and bone to the singer and his songs, building a real picture of Lucas as a person of ambitions and insecurities, of so many songs and not enough belief. “Since nothing sells like a dead artist, my words and music will increase in value after my no doubt untimely demise,” Lucas wrote in his will in 1979, the very year the last of these songs was cut, a year before he became a divorced dad. It’s a tragedy that he was right; it’s a gift that he left more than enough music to make sure we get the message.
