All we really knew for sure is that Q Lazzarus made a perfect pop song. All of the rest was bullshit — stories rehashed and reshaped by unreliable witnesses, strangers inserting themselves into the life of a person who held on tight to her anonymity; a person once deemed too unusual, too freaky, too weird for the music industry and ultimately seemed to want no part of it.
The singer and musician known for the haunting ballad “Goodbye Horses” and otherwise total anonymity passed away in July after a brief illness. Fittingly, nobody in the press knew about it for an entire month afterward.
According to an obituary published in her hometown of Neptune, New Jersey, she was 59. Naturally, this is disputed as well: some records suggest she was actually born in 1960, and thus was 61. Even her real name was unknown for many years, at least by the public. The industry, for its own reasons, played along.
Q Lazzarus was the professional name adopted by Diane Luckey, and she was discovered when fronting a band and working odd jobs like thousands of other artists in New York City in the 1980s. Famously, she was driving a cab when she picked up a man who looked like he might be someone famous, or at least influential. She played a demo of music recorded by her band and the passenger — film director Johnathan Demme — took it in.
“Oh my God,” he reportedly said. “What is this and who are you?”
Those words are often repeated, because it’s by and large the same reaction audiences had when they first heard “Goodbye Horses.” Demme had included one of Q’s songs in his 1986 film Something Wild, and used “Goodbye Horses” itself in 1988’s Married To The Mob. But it was Demme’s use of the song in unforgettable circumstances in Silence of the Lambs that first made everyone ask what this was and who made it. There was no YouTube in 1991, but it was the closest thing to an analog viral moment when the song bounces along in the background as serial killer Buffalo Bill dances and asks his reflection if it would fuck him, and answering that he would fuck him. So hard.
The song’s association with the scene assured its infamy, though probably put off proper appreciation for one of the purest, if most unusual pop songs of the ’90s. It was memorable for its time but grew in appeal in the rearview mirror.
As appreciation for the song grew, the singer diminished. Q appeared on screen in Demme’s 1993 film Philadelphia, but playing a cover of Talking Heads’ “Heaven” rather than one of her own songs. It’s not clear when she “disappeared” altogether, because she was never a celebrity in the public eye to begin with. But most accounts suggest that 1996 was the year that Q Lazzarus “vanished.”
People assume that a person who walked away from the music industry must be bitter, broke and/or insane. It’s just one of those cosmic tropes of the world: the artist that gets away from the industry of their own free will must be damaged.
Q Lazzarus had been part of a band, and different members filled in some of the details over the years. The songwriter behind “Goodbye Horses,” William Garvey, died in 2009 and “never had a good thing to say about her,” a friend told Dazed. Gloriana Galicia, a backing singer in the band, remembered her defiance at demeaning evaluations from record industry executives.
“Q wore dreads then and they kept telling her ‘we cannot market you,'” Galicia told Dazed. “She replied, ‘I market myself, I’m a big boned African-American woman who wears dreads, sings American rock and roll – I market myself.’
“Q had an amazing heart, carried herself as a queen.”
After more than two decades of obstinate silence and refusing to be found when others claimed she was lost, Q briefly resurfaced on Twitter (of all places) in 2018. She “wanted people to know I am still alive,” she wrote in a direct message to Dazed’s Kelsey Chapstick, but would soon be leaving Twitter “as I find it odd.” She was a bus driver in Staten Island —”have been for YEARS,” she added — and the hundreds of passengers she toted around town would prove she was “hardly hiding (or dead!)”
This message, we know now, was definitely from Q Lazzarus, though she rebuffed future attempts at personal contact. She seemed to retreat when greeted by overwhelming attention — perhaps remembering why she abandoned the music industry in the first place. “I was even contacted by a promoter in Texas, asking if I could help him book Q to fly down and sing at his venue,” Chapstick wrote, “which helped me understand more deeply why she chose to hightail it out of the vulture-ridden music industry.”
I found this incredibly relatable. More than a decade ago, I wrote a story appraising the music of a Chicago house music producer who had similarly disappeared in the early ’00s. The producer, whose name I’m reluctant to even mention, had lapsed into silence during a struggle with mental illness but either he, or someone pretending to be him, had begun contacting me. A naïve article praising a man’s music instead ignited a feeding frenzy by shifty characters getting involved in the life of a man who was then trying to sue the US Department of Agriculture and dozens of other government agencies for persecuting him. All the way up until a few years ago I would still hear from random promoters who wanted me to hook them up with him for a gig — suggesting, with presumed sincerity, that the healing powers and premium ticket prices of a showcase DJ set would somehow help “cure” a man who hadn’t touched turntables in more than 20 years.
None of the writers searching for Q Lazzarus suggested she was in a similar state as the person I wrote about. But readers — and I can relate to this too — tend to let their imaginations run wild when they come into contact with the archetype of the “lost artist.” Some people assume that a person who walked away from the music industry must be bitter, broke and/or insane. It’s just one of those cosmic tropes of the world: the artist that gets away from the industry of their own free will must be damaged.
This seems to have been far from the truth. From the few accounts that emerged, Q was a person with a family (a husband and two children listed in her obituary, along with a litany of relatives named “Luckey”) and a job that probably earned her more money than her work in the industry ever did.
But when a more detailed obituary was published, it revealed a life even more rich than any mystery writer could have plotted. Q spent a “six-month stint on a fishing boat in Alaska.” She also collaborated with her friend “Danny Z” on house music tracks — an apparent reference to the music from Twisted, a 1996 film adaptation of Oliver Twist “set in a New York City contemporary underground populated by drag queens, drug abuse and prostitution.”
Yet despite a fuller obituary surfacing a few days after we finally heard of her passing, the details are still elliptical, and perhaps, like her age, might be subject to debate. We don’t know if any of this is real.
But the mystery isn’t the full measure of the artist. People were impacted when they heard that Q Lazzarus died, even if they had no clear understanding of how she was living. People like Q and Dave Medusa — they should never die. Their very existence feeds us, comforts us. It means that there’s at least one more freak like us, misfit like us, alive in the world.
But they do, like Dave Medusa of Chicago, and like Diane Luckey of Neptune, New Jersey. What we have left is a song — a perfect song — and an artist that wanted you to know her only through her songs.
The person who was Q Lazzarus could have been anyone. That, outside of sensationalism and voyeurism, was the lure. Q Lazzarus could be someone on a street corner, on a park bench, the florist in your neighborhood, a bus driver or the person under an umbrella on the dunes. She could be anyone you met, which is why you must be kind to them.
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