Q Lazzarus’s “Goodbye Horses” isn’t a song that slips unobtrusively into the background. It fills the room, hovers, lingers. The late director Jonathan Demme understood this when he used it to score crucial scenes in two of his films: Married to the Mob (1988) and, infamously, Silence of the Lambs (1991). It’s clearly a product of the 1980s, but in a creepy, teasing way, it feels unstuck from time: partly because of William Garvey’s shadowy, expressionistic lyrics, but mostly because of Lazzarus’s voice, an androgynous instrument that feels more closely tied to the blues-rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s than the polish of the Reagan decade. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.
Lazzarus herself seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Biographical details were scarce about the singer, born Diane Luckey, until her death in 2022, and she was not an easy person to reach after her retirement from the music industry in 1996. The best way to meet her seemed to be being driven by her; she worked for much of her life as a bus and taxi driver, and that was how she met Demme (she played him the demo of “Goodbye Horses” after picking him up as a fare) and director Eva Aridjis, whose new documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus screens at the 4 Star Theater on Sat/1 (more info here).
Aridjis had entertained the thought of directing a documentary on Lazzarus for some time, but she thought it an impossibility until 2019, when she found herself in a cab driven by a middle-aged African American woman with a flawlessly curated CD collection. “I started kind of putting all these little clues together,” says Aridjis. “She was the right age. She told me she lived in Staten Island. She knew about music, and I knew she’d been a driver in the past, so it wouldn’t have been crazy if she was doing it again.”
When Aridjis name-dropped Q Lazzarus to see how she’d react, the driver changed the subject, but before dropping her off, the driver slipped her her number. Aridjis’s hunch about the driver’s identity turned out to be true, and the two started filming not long after. “We filmed the whole film, everything except the ending, which was gonna be her return to stage in London,” says Aridjis. “But COVID hit and she had surgery, the show kept getting delayed and delayed, and then she unexpectedly and suddenly passed away.”
Aridjis reports that Luckey’s interest in music was reinvigorated in her last days, and it’s heartbreaking to know that the singer never lived to make good on this second wind. We’ll never know whether the stage appearance would’ve led to new music, but two releases are coming out concurrently with the release of Goodbye Horses: a soundtrack to the film, released through indie juggernaut Sacred Bones, and a reissue of the “Goodbye Horses” single through San Francisco label Dark Entries.
The Sacred Bones release runs 23 tracks in its CD and digital editions, spanning Luckey’s career from her work with Garvey in the ‘80s through the heavier, bluesier material during a sojourn in England in the early ‘90s. “It was very important to her that people know more about her beyond ‘Goodbye Horses,’” says Aridjis.
The Dark Entries release, meanwhile, is a shrine to her best-known song, containing three versions of the track and two other songs. Label head Josh Cheon had been working on the release for more than 15 years, long before the inkling for the documentary appeared in Aridjis’s head. “Sacred Bones is doing everything—they’re doing all the later stuff, the ‘90s stuff,” says Cheon. “My curation for this selection of music was based on what I had the stems to, so I have actual multi-track tapes for these songs. They sound incredible.”
Garvey, the “Goodbye Horses” songwriter, was active in New York’s queer nightlife in the ‘80s and met Lazzarus when she was performing at the Boy Bar drag club in the East Village. “One of the songs on my release is called Hellfire, and it’s all about the Hellfire Club in the Meatpacking District, which was a male-only sex club,” says Cheon. “When the AIDS crisis happened, it switched to allowing everyone in. Was this song her experience at the club or was it Bill’s experience? I’m not sure, but it does capture a pivotal time in New York City when you could still go to sex clubs, which don’t really exist anymore.”
It’s ironic, then, that most people (including Cheon) heard “Goodbye Horses” for the first time during a movie moment which appalled queer audiences upon release: the scene in Silence of the Lambs when Ted Levine’s psychopath Buffalo Bill dances to the song, genitals tucked between his legs, as his captive screams horrifically in the background.
“This is in the middle of the AIDS crisis,” says Cheon. “ACT UP is going, there’s all these gay activist groups that are trying to change the way the rest of the world looks at gay people. There was Cruising, now we have another queer serial killer. People were fed up. There were protests.”
Cheon suspects the controversy sank the song’s chance of being a hit despite its prominent placement in the film. “I think there was all of this hope for it to be a big single, but I think it didn’t really take off because of the pushback from the gay and trans community. The song is synonymous with the scene, for better or worse.”
Demme was not aware of Luckey’s history in queer clubland when he used “Goodbye Horses” for the film. It wasn’t even meant to be in Silence of the Lambs; Demme gave Luckey 24 hours to record a new song for the film, and when she couldn’t meet the deadline, Demme decided to use “Horses” instead. (She also contributed a cover of Talking Heads’ “Heaven” for Demme’s Philadelphia, further cementing a queer connection.)
Yet in both Silence of the Lambs and Married to the Mob, “Goodbye Horses” is not simply a needle drop on the soundtrack: It’s diegetic, something playing on the stereo, a song whose words the characters know, part of their culture. It’s as if Demme wanted to create a cinematic universe in which “Goodbye Horses” was a hit—as if Demme “brought it into their world and made it an existing physical object,” Cheon says.
“Goodbye Horses” may not have been a hit by strict definitions, but it’s blossomed into something more in the nearly 40 years since Luckey first recorded it.
“It was part of my teenage years, and when I started DJing, I would always play it,” says Cheon. “It always elicits this response from the crowd. It’s incredibly melodic and also emotional. It definitely became the soundtrack for a generation of moody outcasts.”
GOODBYE HORSES: THE MANY LIVES OF Q LAZZARUS with filmmaker Q&A screens Sat/1, 7:30pm at the 4 Star Theater, SF. More info here.
