A dead-on name, a made-for-myth biography, and a knockout dose of obscurity.

What do you get?

Well, Marvin Pontiac, of course.

Now, say it.

Yes, I do mean out loud. Go on now, just try it out.

Marvin Pontiac. Okay. Once more, slowly this time.

Marrr-vin Ponnnti-ac.

Nice, huh?

It's been noted elsewhere how effortlessly that name rolls off the tongue. Beyond its buttery smooth feel, though, this name is so fantastically loaded it's silly. Play some extended free association with each of those words and you're bound to, sooner or later, touch upon just about anything of cultural relevance to happen in the last hundred years. (Well, use your imagination.) But as suggestive a name as it is, it absolutely pales in comparison to the life story behind it:

In 1932, Marvin Pontiac is born to an African father and a white Jewish woman from upstate New York. The toddler is taken to the west African country of Mali by his father after his mother descends into permanent mental illness. (This is what they call "foreshadowing"). Young Marvin moves to Chicago at age 15, taking with him a love for African music that will stay with him for his entire life. In Chicago, he quickly wins praise and notoriety as a blues harmonica prodigy, only to leave it all behind once again after a humiliating defeat in a bar fight.

Pontiac starts over in Lubbock, Texas. Here we come up against the requisite gap in chronology: three unaccounted-for years during which, among other things, he is alleged to have participated in a bank heist. He relocates yet again to Slidell, Louisiana. While in Slidell, Marvin records a handful of songs, scoring a minor domestic hit, as well as (irony of ironies) a hugely popular bootleg hit in Nigeria, of which he remains unaware.

The first hints of Marvin's imminent madness begin to manifest themselves in his growing eccentricities-- he will only do business with record companies, the owners of which agree to visit him in Slidell and mow his lawn. Marvin convinces himself that he has been abducted by extra terrestrials. The end is near. It isn't long before Pontiac gives up music for good and, following an arrest for nude bicycle riding, moves back to Detroit where he will live out the remainder of his disturbed life. In 1977, Marvin Pontiac is hit and killed by a bus.

Once in a while, truth has the power to out-weird even the most far-out fiction. In which case, you have the stuff myths are made of. But a good heaping bunch of bullshit trumps them all, and Marvin Pontiac's life story, captivating though it may be, is just that. Bullshit. Every last word of it.

Credit for this elaborate joke goes to downtown NYC music fixture, John Lurie. Better known for fronting the Lounge Lizards, for his countless collaborations, for his quirky fishing show, and as the composer of the theme song to "Late Nite with Conan O'Brien," you'd think Lurie would have a full enough plate as it is. Luckily, he's had enough time along the way to toss off the 14 gems that make up bluesman Marvin Pontiac's oeuvre.

Greatest Hits is a chaotic sampler platter that groups blues, dirty-ass rock-tinged funk, and glossed over Afro-pop approximations into a perfect counterpart to the tall tale of Pontiac's life. Not that the genre delineations are especially clear. Very often, in fact, the songs sound improbably hybridized. But they're consistently powerful-- sometimes drawn out and intoxicating ("Small Car"), sometimes just luridly funky ("Now I'm Happy").

Marvin is supposed to have recorded the bulk of his "hits" while interned at a mental asylum. Naturally, Lurie extends the joke to the lyrics. Lurie mumbles, croons, and growls droll non-sequiturs ("my penis has a face and it likes to bark at Germans") in a voice that can't seem to choose between Tom Waits, Barry White, or Leonard Cohen. The songs do an admirable job of justifying the hoax, or, for those too thick-headed to catch on, reinforcing it.

And more than one record reviewer covering this album never caught on to the joke at all. But it was not for lack of clues. The production quality alone ought to immediately alert listeners to the fact that these very polished songs could not possibly have been recorded in the time or place claimed. That is, unless the late '60s and '70s were some sort of mental hospital music production golden age. The veritable arsenal of instruments deployed, as well as the army of voices that back up Pontiac on several songs, are likewise glaring neon signs that flash JOKE! JOKE!

Not enough? The most cursory glance at the additional musicians list (huh? Additional musicians? In a nuthouse?) reveal yet more anachronisms. Named among the many luminaries are John Medeski (of Medeski, Martin, and Wood fame), Lurie himself, and singer Angelique Kidjo. Who all would have been children at the time of Pontiac's creative outpouring.

Strange and Beautiful Music's website dutifully rounds out the production with a string of quotes from modern music notables. Michael Stipe, Flea, Beck, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie all testify to the enduring effect of Pontiac's music on their careers. David Bowie's inclusion is an especially funny gesture, considering Bowie perpetrated a similar hoax when his publishing company put out Biography of Nat Tate by William Boyd, a detailed dissection of the life and works of a made-up artist, heavy on theory-speak and bombast. Several book reviewers for prominent publications took the bait and blathered foolishly on the merits of Tate's work. A very successful joke. Bowie's quote regarding Pontiac raises Lurie's joke to an almost insolent pitch: "A dazzling collection! It strikes me that Pontiac was so uncontainably prescient that one might think that these tracks had been assembled today."

The obvious and necessary question is why? Why do something like this? Is Marvin Pontiac just the repository for songs that didn't make it onto any other Lurie projects? Or is it, as one writer said, a musical blackface act? It's inevitable when you've got a white musician drawing from the well of African and black American music that the question of exploitation and cultural plunder will be raised. For me, the question is moot. Paul Simon's widely reviled Graceland album is held up as a classic example of this sort of thing, but in bringing worldwide exposure to South African township music, it served a noble purpose. If a few people that listen to Marvin Pontiac as a side project of John Lurie's wind up buying some Fela Kuti records and looking deeper into the blues, it has likewise served a laudable end, underlying politics notwithstanding.

Another writer questioned the logic of concocting this great pseudonym and life history only to spoil the joke by leaving the all the names on the musicians list undisguised. Taking everything into consideration, there is only one answer that makes sense. The outright mention of famous musicians in the liner notes tells us that there is no real effort here to prolong the ruse indefinitely. In fact, Lurie's grand design is that you read the biography, listen to some of the songs, and quickly thereafter become aware that you've been had. It's how Lurie makes his point. The fact that some listeners fail to ever catch on is instructive insofar as it reveals a certain desire we have as listeners. If you don't eventually see the joke for what it is, it's because your desire that the story be true has out-powered your common sense. And this is precisely what Lurie is getting at.

So, why is Marvin Pontiac's ludicrous biography compelling? Because the connection between artistic production and insanity is an idea that still carries a lot of weight. The idea of the artist as a doomed, crazed, or specially endowed medium for some greater force (inspiration, whatever, call it what you want) is the cloth that the Marvin Pontiac story is cut from. And it's the bait Lurie uses to entice us. You get the record, you read the bio, and you think you've found some little known gem along the lines of the Shaggs or Arthur Brown.

And like it or not, the story colors your perception of the music. When you notice you've been taken, the joke's on you. You feel like a jerk. You question the validity of your initial appraisal of the music. And that's great! Anybody who says "too bad the story isn't true" is utterly missing the point. It's like saying too bad the Trojan horse wasn't a real horse. The fact that Lurie could put together this solid batch of songs, strong enough to stand on their own, and also make us examine our corny and outdated ideas about what makes an "artist," as well as force us to think about how we like what we like, and what those pleasures are contingent on-- well, he's accomplished something worthwhile, in my book.

-Camilo Arturo Leslie