If I had to pick the absolute perfect song, tied up with a gun to my head, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with one better than Q Lazzarus’s “Goodbye Horses.” That sparse, sultry beat that slowly emerges as if from the clouds, combined with a strange, sci-fi keyboard do-dooing that somehow comes off as ethereal, melancholy, and wistful rather than cheap, lame, and dated. The floaty outerspace spin of the music is momentarily grounded by the otherworldly androgynous depth of Q’s voice and the narrative she tells of cynicism (“He told me, ‘I’ve seen it all before’”) and her dismissal of it (“Oh no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. I must disagree”). Then, a pause before the sparkling chorus takes flight as the music ascends, spiraling into orbit: “Goodbye horses. I’m flying over you!”
Whew. It just makes me want to twirl and vamp in the mirror in a silky robe and pinch my nipples, ignoring the human material for my future skin suit screaming for help when she should be lotioning up in the stone-lined basement in the next room. Of course, I wouldn’t be alone. Jame Gumb aka Buffalo Bill did it first. Like most, Ted Levine’s psycho Narcissus preen in The Silence of the Lambs is responsible for my obsession with “Goodbye Horses” and its enigmatic songstress. Although The Silence of the Lambs contains many memorable images—Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lector peering over his mouth guard with wild eyes or making slurpy noises at Jodie Foster’s Clarice after reminiscing about the ideal wine pairing with human meat, no other scene stuck with me as much as Buffalo Bill’s boogie. And it’s entirely due to the selection of “Goodbye Horses,” which, in director Jonathan Demme’s hands, transforms from a nostalgic song into a spooky, menacing melody. Buffalo Bill may have been criminally insane, but his music taste was unrivaled!
While The Silence of the Lambs was my first encounter with “Goodbye Horses,” it was not the song’s cinematic debut. “Goodbye Horses” also featured less prominently in Demme’s earlier Married to the Mob, which I’ve never seen. Demme’s Philadelphia is also responsible for Q Lazzarus’s only cinematic appearance and the one time I recall catching a quick glimpse of her—a Black woman with locs and smoky makeup, wearing an oversized fuzzy hat, her eyes slammed shut as she covered the Talking Heads’ “Heaven” while Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas slow-danced. Q’s “Heaven,” even with its paltry minute or so on screen, is sublime. Q turns David Byrne’s hyper, nasal whine into a full-throated tearjerker belt. However, anyone who wanted to hear the full song—or have it at the ready to play at a funeral (as I demand it be played at mine)—would come up short. The Philadelphia soundtrack criminally does not include Q’s “Heaven.” Instead, listeners can enjoy Pauletta Washington playing the piano and the Spin Doctors…ugh. Who do we punish for this?!! GET THEM!
Thankfully, this egregious oversight has finally been rectified through an expansive album of Q’s music, released by Sacred Bones Records, and a revelatory documentary, both titled Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus. Sadly, this much-needed revisitation–or resurrection–is posthumous as Q died suddenly in 2022. It was Q’s death and the resulting obituaries that allowed me to learn exactly who this mysterious “Goodbye Horses” singer was and what happened to her after dropping off the musical and cinematic radar post-Philadelphia. Q, otherwise known as Diane Luckey, had been right here in New York City, driving cabs and buses while living on Staten Island with her husband and son. Reading about her modest life, her working-class job, in particular, made me fawn over her even more and fantasize that maybe I once unknowingly rode in her cab. Imagine…Still, the obits also raised more questions than answers: What happened between Philadelphia and her death? Did she really, as it appeared, abandon music—or at least public performance? Where the hell did she go?
Q Lazzarus in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia
Directed by Eva Aridjis Fuentes, the film Goodbye Horses provides answers, mostly from Q herself. Q takes the audience through her New Jersey childhood, including visiting the Baptist church where she sang growing up, greeting a group of elaborately hatted friendly church ladies in the parking lot who knew her instantly; her move to NYC to pursue her musical dreams while driving a cab; and her jet-off to London, hoping to find a more open, welcoming environment for a Black frontwoman. Her rejection by the music industry is frustrating but also not surprising. As heard on the corresponding album in songs like “A Fools Life.” “Don’t Let Go,” or “I Don’t Want to Love You Anymore,” Q primarily sang glam metal. Like her childhood dream, as her sister shares in the film, of becoming Rod Stewart, her wailing power vocals that soar over shredding guitar solos and heavy rhythms have more in common with KISS’s Paul Stanley and Ratt’s Stephen Pearcy than the esteemed Black female singers in genres like soul, gospel, or R&B. This boggled the minds of 1980s and 1990s record company executives who didn’t know what to do with a Black woman vocalist fronting an otherwise all-white band, leaving her music on the reject pile just because they didn’t know where to slot her. Assholes. After finding the same kind of small-minded bafflement in London, she vanished from her band, returned to the States, and eventually, dropped out of music.
While it’s better to hear the story straight from Q, what came next was a doomed romance, crushing depression, crack addiction, poverty, homelessness, and sex work to keep up the drug habit, some of which she experienced under the name Pam, yet another one of her lives (hence the film’s subtitle). Predictably, like many Black people suffering from addiction in the 1990s thanks to the 1994 Crime Bill, she was incarcerated for a relatively small amount of crack cocaine. Eerily, some of her unreleased songs on the Sacred Bones collection foreshadow her future struggles like the howling “Flesh For Sale” and the more somber, “Fathers, Mothers, and Children Dying in the Street” (“I see a lot of bodies laying around me and they spend their time begging for money”), a heartfelt dirge about homelessness. Even freakier was that the Goodbye Horses screening I saw was held at the Angelika Village East on 2nd Avenue and 12th Street, the exact block where she lived while struggling with addiction, and just two blocks uptown from where she slept while homeless, on the benches outside St. Marks Church. She was right here all along. Mercifully, she eventually got clean to raise her son with her husband on Staten Island.
These memories are narrated almost entirely through Q’s often devastating but always humorous voice with input from family, including her husband who seems to share her sense of humor (“It was the Lower East Side, everyone was on drugs”). There is limited footage of Q Lazzarus performing, only glimpses of Q doing interviews, hosting rock nights in London clubs, and the gorgeous black-and-white “Goodbye Horses” video, which Aridjis Fuentes uses liberally. This lack of visual archives (other than Q flipping through some preserved flyers) could have posed a serious challenge for the film. Is there anything more monotonous than talking heads in a documentary? Yet, it’s not a docu-bore due to Q’s skill as a particularly charismatic storyteller, not to mention just compelling to look at. Her enormous expressive eyes and impressive range of wigs alone, often secured with a bandana (the perpetual rock and roller), captivate. She comes off as warm and unbelievably vulnerable, a shock for a musician who seemed to want to remain anonymous for decades.
Her openness in the documentary is a testament to the close relationship she forged with director Aridjis Fuentes who, in a surreal bit of kismet, met Q while riding in her car just like her most enthusiastic supporter, Jonathan Demme, did decades earlier. Impressed that her driver was listening to Neil Young’s Harvest on CD rather than passively tuning into the radio, Aridjis Fuentes had an inkling that her driver was, in fact, Q Lazzarus. After talking around it, at the end of the ride, Q extended her hand and introduced herself: “Nice to meet you, Eva. I’m Q.” CHILLS. They exchanged numbers and though Aridjis Fuentes assumed she’d never hear from Q again, she did. As the filmmaker recalls in Interview Magazine:
“The next morning, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize, and she said, ‘Eva, it’s Q. I had a dream about you last night.’ I said, ‘Was it a good dream or a bad dream?’ She said, ‘Girl, if it was a bad dream, I wouldn’t be calling you. I was performing and you were there, and it was the first time I dreamt that I was performing in 15 years.'”
And she was going to. Q’s appropriately Lazarus-like return was the intended conclusion of Aridjis Fuentes’s documentary. We see Q as she reconnects with her old bandmates over video chat and gets visibly excited about performing again, most movingly belting “Goodbye Horses” while standing in her kitchen. It’s wonderful—and completely crushing as this dream would never be realized, first because of COVID and then Q’s unexpected death from sepsis. Instead of watching her perform, the audience witnesses her burial set to “Goodbye Horses” and tries not to wail in the theater. I mean, fuck. If that weren’t enough, the music industry had one final knife twist to give Q. In the post-screening conversation with Little Richard: I Am Everything‘s director Lisa Cortés, Aridjis Fuentes shared that the funding dried up after Q’s death, with John Legend’s production company pulling out, requiring a turn to crowdfunding on Kickstarter to finish the film. Again, assholes. For whatever reason, they couldn’t see that Goodbye Horses is even more valuable and necessary now since the documentary became the definitive record of Q’s account of her own story.
It also makes Q Lazzarus’s new—and only—album that much more essential for fans who only had the shadowy release of “Goodbye Horses” (Q wasn’t getting paid, so who was?) to rely on for their devotion. An hour and forty-some minutes that spans a decade, the album derives from a batch of cassettes Q handed Aridjis Fuentes, who also gives the music a central role in the documentary. Granted, none of the songs on Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus (the album) come close to touching the transcendent genius of the original “Goodbye Horses,” even the New Wave version that opens the album, which is so tragically 1980s Yamaha keyboard that it belongs in the opening or closing credits of a John Hughes movie. That’s ok. What does?!
Rather than a single masterpiece, what shines through the album is the astonishing sonic diversity of Q’s music, all of which she nails. There is the aforementioned heavy metal, of which, Aridjis Fuentes noted in the post-screening conversation, Q was most proud. It’s not hard to see why; her chest-thumping, core-rumbling vocals are at their most commanding in songs like the bluesier “Mama Never Said” or “Flesh For Sale,” which demands its rightful place as an ill-advised karaoke classic. Several songs like the bouncy “Bang Bang” and “I See Your Eyes” dial back the hair metal for a sound that is less Headbangers Ball and more the itsy stage at the Pyramid Club. My favorite version of Q just might be her foray into house music: the decadent disco flourishes on “My Mistake,” the chanting “Love is love and lust is lust” on “Love Lust,” and the near-gospel “Only You Can Light The Candle,” a manic, praise-hands-waving song that could have been recorded by Sylvester. She even rivals the strutting confidence of Grace Jones’s covers of “Warm Leatherette” and “Nightclubbing” with a unique take on Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Frankly, I’m baffled that these dancier tunes didn’t become club standards. How the hell was “My Mistake” not on constant rotation at the Tunnel alongside Crystal Waters and Robin S?! Granted, not all these aural experiments work and the ones that don’t are often my most cherished. Take the fire and brimstone damnation of “Hellfire,” which has way too much going on for one five-minute song, from Q’s bellowing hollers of “HELLFIRE,” to a choir reminiscent of Dr. John’s backup singers to a croaky muttered bridge that’s so hard to make out it’s almost ASMR.
Though the range of genres could make for a head-spinning, nearly two-hour trip, the album is tied together by the sheer force of Q’s voice alone. Just try to listen to “Love Lust” without waving that finger in the air and belting, “Baby, you ain’t gonna ask me for more!!” Or yowling “LOOOOOOOOVE DAAAAAANCE, LOOOOOOOVE DANNNCE” alongside the track of the same name. Or screaming at the top of your lungs, “It don’t mean NOTHING!!” and pumping your fist while bopping around to the album’s cathartic finale. Impossible. Her sense of humor, on view in the documentary, is also perceivable here with occasional eyebrow-popping lyrics such as the demand to “Sit on my face” in “Bang Bang” or the bizarro erotic lingo “sexual inflation” in “The Time is Right (Dare).” Her unique voice and perspective are so strong here that it’s hard to rectify that Q is gone after introducing listeners to the full breadth of her performance ability. In the documentary, one of her London bandmates explains how Q’s mysterious arrival in London and even more mysterious departure felt like she mystically breezed in and out of his life. Aridjis Fuentes echoed his sentiment in her post-screening conversation. On a smaller and more remote scale, I feel the same thing. I fell in love with her in the film and on the album, only for her to have already disappeared (yet again). Luckily, though, she left more traces this time, which feels like a gift.