Word: bela
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Deficient? The word does no justice to Wood's work -- to Bela Lugosi's mad monologues in Glen or Glenda ("Bevare of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep!" he intones between stock shots of atom-bomb blasts and buffalo herds. "He eats little boys! Puppy-dog tails! Big fat snails!"); to Bride of the Monster's rubber octopus with a broken tentacle, which Wood stole from Republic Studios; to Lugosi's double in Plan 9, who is a head taller than the star (who died during the filming) and must cover his face with a cape...
Growing up, Bela fell in love with the Beatles, fooled around with guitar and took up the banjo at 14, after seeing the movie Deliverance, with its Dueling Banjos bluegrass theme. "The sound of the banjo just killed me," he says. "It's like hearing mercury...
...jazz. "I bought a Charlie Parker record, and I thought, "Wow! This is incredible." I tried to learn Parker's licks on the banjo, but I couldn't find the notes." One day, in a high school jazz-appreciation class, the teacher played pianist Chick Corea's Spain -- for Bela, another revelation. "It was just so immediate. It was a light going on and a door opening...
...sounded so great because I lacked tone and I didn't have a great sense of rhythm. They were right." In 1981 Fleck moved to Nashville and joined the group that would be his musical home for the next eight years: the New Grass Revival, which played what Bela calls "high-tech bluegrass with a lot of heart and intensity; the singing was like R.-and-B. soul, like Motown...
Television provided Fleck with the chance to escape what he eventually felt were the Revival's constraints. Two years ago, producers of the Lonesome Pine Specials asked him to do a solo show. Bela Fleck and Guests began with the tux-clad banjoist joining the Blair String Quartet in a four-movement classical work by Fleck and composer Edgar Meyer. It ended with a jazz section riffed by Bela and the trio that became the Flecktones: Howard Levy on keyboards and harmonica, the brothers Victor and Roy ("Future Man") Wooten on bass guitar and Drumitar (a guitar wired to electric...