Saturday, November 09, 2013
Lou Velvet (Or, Longtime Companion)(Kind Of)
By Don Allred
The first time I ever heard of the Velvet Underground, back in the '60s, I asked myself, "What kind of an underground rock band would feel the need to actually call itself the Anything Underground?" I was a tuff-minded teenager, new to the very idea of underground rock (also of rock), and the much-vaunted Warhol connection just made them more suspect. He was a P.T. Barnum figure to me, and enjoyably so: having fun with the media, gently demonstrating how to keep a straight face, for reporters sticking a microphone in it, while setting him up with the same old stupid questions (objective journalism). An in-joke anybody could be in on----anybody with a brain, that is. So not nearly everybody, really. But like it said in the Bible, "He that hath ears, let him hear."
So, right on, Andy; rock on in your way----not so differently than in the Beatles and Monkees, when it came to predicting forthcoming books, movies, comics, posters, lunchboxes, your own brand of egg salad sandwiches----but keep your old silver fingers off of actual rock bands. This one seemed designed to shock the straights, titillate the tourists, and, much worse (this was also, ultimately, the one problem with Warhol), play the fools, like cop show caricatures of kooky artso troublemakers, who were really just more overt, inadvertently over-playing (greedy, anxious, clumsy, frequently arrested adolescent) perverts, or, even worse, obliging imitations of same, confirming prejudices----way below Madison Avenue hipsters, a much smoother class of stereotypical con artist. And not far enough from those who would recite gibberish in Washington Square, then dive for the quarters pitched by our parents on family vacations (a painfully indelible scene in my fellow boondocker Barry Hannah's Geronimo Rex.)
Later I met some junkies, and started to understand the song. They might indeed go off on all sorts of tangents----including, "Look at wicked me, wh-e-e-e", "Look at wicked me, boo-hoo"----but always ended up bumping into something----which might well be, "And I guess that I just don't know", before bobbing off in another direction at the balloon farm, which was everywhere. (Getting to various levels under the skin and crossroads, surfacing for that guesswork conclusion every now and then, this song duh turned out to be one of Reed's masterpieces.)
"I'm Sticking With You" (just as sweet, not cloying, def. not nuthin) "Satellite of Love," "Love Makes You Feel Ten Feet Tall," "Ocean," if there's room, for that *late night* stoner '70 FM appeal. I wouldn't miss "Who Loves The Sun," but can see how it's effective opening, incl. shock of This is the VU? and conceivably AM Top 40 sweetening for "Sweet Jane."
I'd recently decided that I was too moody to become a psychiatric social worker, and thus was ready to seize on the charged smog of Loaded's elliptical momentum----somebody had suggested I should become a city planner, whatever that was, so I'd switched my major to Urban Studies, while also stimulated by the model complex on the cover of Cannibals and Christians (Mailer, who had majored in Engineering at Harvard and once planned to be an architect, co-designed this beautiful mega-D lattice, with pieces of Lego or whatever it was---he could do that and write!). Loaded, in combo with my old portable stereo, set up a grid of flats and volumes, squares and other shapes, in all shades, though brightness remained filtered by the haze. So? Just turn the treble all the way up, and let it all hang out.
Still later, I got Paul Nelson's astute edit, Live In Texas '69 (the VU were the Beatles upside down, in a different sense than Big Star: the Beatles retired from phenomenal shows into obsessive, bar-raising studio arts and crafts, long on quality and even more so on quantity; the VU made all their money playing out, from Downtown to the sticks, and left their few, equally satisfying legit studio albums as bootleggy latchkey children, sounding like they were on, down in, under and behind the couch---while actual Velvets bootlegs, studio and live, could go all over the place, incl. not so far from early West Coast jamsters [Lou: "California trash"]). This group-posthumous two-platter set served up more therapy with leader Lou, as sung, vocalized, and also spoken: "We saw your Cowboys yesterday….you should give other people just a little chance---at football, anyway.") And best of all, in "Some Kind of Love", Margarita dropped science on Tom: "La-tee-tah-tah-tah/'Well of course you're a boh-ah/'But at that you're not chahmless'/'For a bore is a straight line/That---finds a wealth in confusion!' " Yes! Hope for us all, for meeee! "Between thought and expression/Let us know kiss the culprit"----or was it "carpet"? Either way; that, and even " 'Oh I don't know, just what it's all about/'Put on your red pajamas mama, and we'll soon find out'(not sure if "mama" 's in there, but could be Margarita, still counseling Tom, as likely as vice versa) were now just (greatly appreciated) gravy (for "jelly on your shoulder" and all): fleet follow-up after the breakthrough. Slinky cowbell and all, in that live.
The sense of musical community was also trans-subgenre, transgenre, also transgendering by and as association, whatever that might mean. In the American Studies tradition, these traveling songsters were kissin' cousins to the equally resourceful Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, and other circuit riders/breakers along the Northwest Passage. This of course was several years before Gun Club, the Cramps, or that line-up of the Flesheaters which included members of X, the Blasters, and I think Los Lobos, honking skronking in the b-movie boogie swamp (in the club, at some length, and as such, still on YouTube, last time I checked). Which, come to think of it, was also true of electric Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, Blood Ulmer, Sonny Sharrock, Henry Threadgill (when he suddenly got to Jelly Roll Morton, especially). Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Steinski, DJ Shadow, any number of other DJs, at least for a moment, Parliafunkadelictment, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, various artists from all over the world and the past 114 years or so of recording, discovered and rediscovered; also Bob Dylan---- all gratifying, at least for while, sweet spots no other kinds of musical artists can can quite reach, as far as I'm concerned..
But yall knew that, and of course the great anticlimax continued, with more spills, chills, and peaks in his case, for the rest of his life after VU, and mine too: some sure things blown, some improbabilities in full bloom----luck almost as good as luck gets, everything (and I mean everything) else aside. Both of us struggling with the aspirations, compulsions, and what I'd like to think is the basic and/or well-groomed perversity, the wild-on-a-leash side of creativity, the paths of generation and regeneration, of this way to the egress and beyond----erm, anyway, he was out there, showing up periodically, seldom or often, for a while---I never know him (Lou Reed), music aside, but he became as close and distant as any friend. In different ways, of course----I'd never think of expecting anything from or for him, except music's power of association. But the fact that he kept going----"Growing Up In Public" and not---- for so very long, and with an improbable degree of recurring quality product, was never to be taken for granted, was always some kind of reassurance, some kinda (okay, I don't know how else to end it) love.
"Our house is very beautiful tonight…"
(updates: you prob saw this, but just in case: Laurie A. on life w Lou R.
his prose poem to Delmore Schwartz[check the comments too]http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244148#article
a great pic, intriguing comments, links:
http://praymont.blogspot.com/2013/11/delmore-and-lou.html
Curtis and Morrissey were added to the roll of social workers,
per Richard Riegel's response:
Technically I wasn't a social worker
[someone who coordinates services for a client], but rather an "income maintenance" worker, i.e., the one responsible for the client receiving the correct financial assistance. "Six years a county welfare caseworker, twenty-four years a state quality control reviewer" [as Moll Flanders might have recited her resume], and I made regular home visits to clients on both jobs, so sometimes ended up doing a certain amount of social work anyway.
Since we're on this topic, my parallel-universe connection to The Factory (besides looking like Warhol after my hair turned white) is that Paul Morrissey was a welfare caseworker for NYC when he was first frequenting the place, would stop by in the evenings after work and regale Andy with stories about weird clients he'd visited that day. An auteur in the making, in Morrissey's case.
Also, I noted in the Control movie about Joy Division that Ian Curtis had a day job
as an employment counselor for people with disabilities in some Brit social services agency. I always identify with Curtis in the scenes when he's wearing a tie and sitting behind a desk, r'n'r can wait until tonight, my scene exactly that same 1979. RR's own thoughts on LR:
http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2013/11/all-tomorrows-parities/
Many more worthy links are in rockcritics.com's reed obits section.)
Point made, re "Heroin" (presume he's thinking of "dead bodies piled up all around/All the politicians makin' crazy sounds"), maybe missed here, although what he says about those who got it "subliminally" might be why the PKD association, which I was thinking "Whah?" about and thinking about taking out"). Scroll down (good site to keep up with, "after" a war or two or
note:
The first time I ever heard of the Velvet Underground, back in the '60s, I asked myself, "What kind of an underground rock band would feel the need to actually call itself the Anything Underground?" I was a tuff-minded teenager, new to the very idea of underground rock (also of rock), and the much-vaunted Warhol connection just made them more suspect. He was a P.T. Barnum figure to me, and enjoyably so: having fun with the media, gently demonstrating how to keep a straight face, for reporters sticking a microphone in it, while setting him up with the same old stupid questions (objective journalism). An in-joke anybody could be in on----anybody with a brain, that is. So not nearly everybody, really. But like it said in the Bible, "He that hath ears, let him hear."
I always ( there's a good chance that means once) heard the debut album in a roomful of chattering friends, so it was their fault that I was left with the lasting impression that Lou Reed ("Lurid", get it?) and his partners were indeed out to confirm my suspicions, especially with the jab of "Heroin": when they got to "feel just like Jesus' son"----that was it, here's your quarter, now turn off the strobe lights so I can read this here National Enquirer.
Then I discovered Creem, where any discussion might lead to the Velvet Underground, and I found myself buying or trading for Loaded. When Reed mentioned, as Jack and "Sweet Jane" 's mood (and, hopefully, make-out) music, " 'The March of The Wooden Soldiers'----your protest guests?"----that genial last was an aside, a stage throw-away (not quite hiding his sociable interest), between the beats, right before going back to the sweet street kitty stalk 'n' pounce----the '70s were settling into wartime, despite all the amputations and the protestations----so Pop Art was a reality after all, (here in another counterworld, more fun than Self-Portrait)(though sometimes just as in-your-face: "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" an animated line drawing, straight from the pen, " I Found A Reason" a better-than-Zappa zing ov doo-wop and other romanticism, "New Age" starting like a Tennessee Williams x Warhol soap opera, gradually morphing into an inspirational Rock Anthem, although almost uniquely stately with it: prime example of how VU turning seemingly familiar components to new-sounding results, like Big Star and a few others did in compelling ways, among the popologists of that era)(Reed maybe sometimes writing for Doug Yule's castaway Beach Boy-for-a-day pipes as he maybe sometimes had w Nico profundo in mynd) and I was hooked. And didn't Woody Guthrie say something to the effect that a songwriter should be able to get up in the morning, open a newspaper, point his guitar at some story, and write a song about it? If that paper was the Times, the Daily Worker, Women's Wear Daily or The Enquirer, so be it.
Hard-eyed 2021 update break-in: Since I finally got around to looking at the track lists for Fully Loaded and Re:Loaded today, I now think that Reed, as *the^ writer and/or copyright taker, also left his mark as sab-auteur, by not incl. some superior material.
If he, and/or whoever else had a lot of say, were really serious about some kind of commercial appeal, some conceivably significant amount of AM Top 40 play---and/or (more plausibly "or") 1970 FM (in most states, mostly Collegetown) stoner art-pop appeal, like the Grateful Dead's American Beauty, and CSN's s/t debut, more than Beach Boys' often worthy but not big-selling recent ventures in this vein---he/they would have left out "Lonesome Cowboy Bill," "I Found A Reason" (funny but once you've heard the joek it starts to lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight, at least to listen to), and even "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'," at least at this length--nah, take it out altogether--and work up finished product of some of them demos (ones he may have already been thinking of as solo material):"I'm Sticking With You" (just as sweet, not cloying, def. not nuthin) "Satellite of Love," "Love Makes You Feel Ten Feet Tall," "Ocean," if there's room, for that *late night* stoner '70 FM appeal. I wouldn't miss "Who Loves The Sun," but can see how it's effective opening, incl. shock of This is the VU? and conceivably AM Top 40 sweetening for "Sweet Jane."
At some point I'll buy a bunch of these as downloads and make my own Loaded Baked Potato playlist, unless, hopefully, the Wizard of Albums That Never Were beats me to it (maybe has).
I'd recently decided that I was too moody to become a psychiatric social worker, and thus was ready to seize on the charged smog of Loaded's elliptical momentum----somebody had suggested I should become a city planner, whatever that was, so I'd switched my major to Urban Studies, while also stimulated by the model complex on the cover of Cannibals and Christians (Mailer, who had majored in Engineering at Harvard and once planned to be an architect, co-designed this beautiful mega-D lattice, with pieces of Lego or whatever it was---he could do that and write!). Loaded, in combo with my old portable stereo, set up a grid of flats and volumes, squares and other shapes, in all shades, though brightness remained filtered by the haze. So? Just turn the treble all the way up, and let it all hang out.
There was also an association with the board game played by miners in the frozen bowels of Mars, and in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It was like sort of like Monopoly,especially if Monopoly included a drug called Cand-D, and a Barbie-type doll called Perky Pat, whom you could go riding with in a sports car, under the trees and over the squares. Loaded's layout experienced its own kind of Urban Renewal program, its own aforementioned "New Age", its own "Sweet Nuthin' " too, with no contradiction. Its characters were real enough, and surrounded, though never crowded, by Lou's crew and their regard, eye to eye or sidewise----oh, sweet group therapy; sweet, long gone Psychiatric Social Work syllabi----and what about distinctively rocking social workers Kevin Coyne, Ian Curtis, Paul Morrissey, Richard Riegel, Sonny Sharrock? Maybe I was wrong to change my major?! Nah.
"And as I walk down life's highway/Hand in hand with myself/I realize/How many paths/Have come between."
So, there was that sense of community----and more, as the band with the counter-countercultural "No Blues" policy now let more of its actual (no getting round the term) roots out----not slumming below the Mason-Dixon, just confirming the Times Square Tex-Mex and other migratory suggestions brushing by in "Sister Ray", or the Johnny Winter-hoarse coursing of "Head Held High", the wistful yodel and deft lasso of "Lonesome Cowboy Bill", the jiggling balance and level aim of "Train Comin' Round The Bend"----all three on Loaded----but this live thing was something else again, not least in the riskily extended "What Goes On", which left that self-titled album's ether in the dust, for a slightly clumsy pursuit of Bo Diddley, getting close enough, as they always did, sooner or later (what the heck, the debut even went gold, something like thirty years after its release). And teen bar band/song-plotter Lou had absorbed his Chuck Berry, among other denizens: "Take me back down South where I belong/You know eveah-thing I doo! is wrong/You know it's too, too much baby", flirting with the truth again.
But yall knew that, and of course the great anticlimax continued, with more spills, chills, and peaks in his case, for the rest of his life after VU, and mine too: some sure things blown, some improbabilities in full bloom----luck almost as good as luck gets, everything (and I mean everything) else aside. Both of us struggling with the aspirations, compulsions, and what I'd like to think is the basic and/or well-groomed perversity, the wild-on-a-leash side of creativity, the paths of generation and regeneration, of this way to the egress and beyond----erm, anyway, he was out there, showing up periodically, seldom or often, for a while---I never know him (Lou Reed), music aside, but he became as close and distant as any friend. In different ways, of course----I'd never think of expecting anything from or for him, except music's power of association. But the fact that he kept going----"Growing Up In Public" and not---- for so very long, and with an improbable degree of recurring quality product, was never to be taken for granted, was always some kind of reassurance, some kinda (okay, I don't know how else to end it) love.
"Our house is very beautiful tonight…"
(updates: you prob saw this, but just in case: Laurie A. on life w Lou R.
his prose poem to Delmore Schwartz[check the comments too]http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244148#article
a great pic, intriguing comments, links:
http://praymont.blogspot.com/2013/11/delmore-and-lou.html
Curtis and Morrissey were added to the roll of social workers,
per Richard Riegel's response:
Technically I wasn't a social worker
[someone who coordinates services for a client], but rather an "income maintenance" worker, i.e., the one responsible for the client receiving the correct financial assistance. "Six years a county welfare caseworker, twenty-four years a state quality control reviewer" [as Moll Flanders might have recited her resume], and I made regular home visits to clients on both jobs, so sometimes ended up doing a certain amount of social work anyway.
Since we're on this topic, my parallel-universe connection to The Factory (besides looking like Warhol after my hair turned white) is that Paul Morrissey was a welfare caseworker for NYC when he was first frequenting the place, would stop by in the evenings after work and regale Andy with stories about weird clients he'd visited that day. An auteur in the making, in Morrissey's case.
Also, I noted in the Control movie about Joy Division that Ian Curtis had a day job
as an employment counselor for people with disabilities in some Brit social services agency. I always identify with Curtis in the scenes when he's wearing a tie and sitting behind a desk, r'n'r can wait until tonight, my scene exactly that same 1979. RR's own thoughts on LR:
http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2013/11/all-tomorrows-parities/
Many more worthy links are in rockcritics.com's reed obits section.)
Point made, re "Heroin" (presume he's thinking of "dead bodies piled up all around/All the politicians makin' crazy sounds"), maybe missed here, although what he says about those who got it "subliminally" might be why the PKD association, which I was thinking "Whah?" about and thinking about taking out"). Scroll down (good site to keep up with, "after" a war or two or
Sally's Week Beats Blue's Year:
http://koganbot.livejournal.com/339861.html
Give the drummer sum:
Give the drummer sum:
Mo Tucker on life w the Velvets, from Legs McNeil's interview
tapes for Please Kill Me. Here's still hoping she does her own book:
http://www.vice.com/read/moe-tuckers-snapshots-of-the-velvet-underground
http://www.vice.com/read/moe-tuckers-snapshots-of-the-velvet-underground
from https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2016/01/dont-curb-your-ork-pazz-jop-2015-ballot_21.html :
VU's complete Matrix Tapes: although I'd heard some of it before on the live mid-70s twofer (and yet more had been on The Quine Tapes and wildly deluxe editions of studio etc., so it's not on this year's P&J ballot) was immediately astounded by entering the bluestopia of an epic, post(?)-doowop slow groove "Waiting For My Man. Plus, the most beautifullest "I'm Set Free" imaginable, so far ("What in the wor-rld/Is/Happening to me-e," and I'm rising, swooning). Margarita is waiting so patiently, stoically---"Between though and expression/Lies a lifetime"---'til she sees in Tom a suitable case, a suitable candidate----maybe "just" Mr. Right Enough, but her standards are...high. It's as uneven/predictable at times as a three-night club sojourn far from home is likely to be, with moody Lou as punk priest/tour guide. sometimes taking us from ritual invocation and philosophical testes cases to routine--- but the brittleness of some performances (the strongest of these "Pale Blue Eyes," especially) blends with the wariness of themes, implicit and explicit conundrums: how and why and when and etc. should you could he stick strictly with the pleasure principle, and guard it hard (leisure becomes a full-time job, depending on patterns of floatation; then again these can find "a wealth in confusion!")----keeping it all to and for yourself/trust another person, considering that they that anybody could be just as weird as you, given what you know about personhood. (While bouncing off Dylan's contemporaneous "Someone thinks that they have found you!") Also, no matter how incredible thee ongoing seemed last night about this same time or tyme (onstage, for instance) tonight and tomorrow are just some other times, exciting or not---and "Lisa Says" has nothing beyond cuteness to add to this inquiry, and "Ocean" once again seems too conceptual---"I never get things done," okay, but beating your head against the waves doesn't have too much impact here, and time and tide and wet sand all seem too vaguely implied, if even that, at such length, for instance--maybe it's a test: can we strike wet matches, abstaining from all the usual signifiers? But even such frustrations pull me into the club, the extended stay vacay, and oooweee (and finally all in stereo, so even on so-so headphones, even familiar tracks can be revelatory).
Delmore's Delicatessen of Dreams Responsibilities World Weddings Movies open all night
VU are Bizarro World Beatles. Beatles impact: Hot! Fast! Massive! VU: Cool, slow-growing, infiltrating---as Beatley sounds become more niche, going to power pop etc., VU becomes less so, more of a given in punk, new wave, "post-punk"(which as mark says, could also be pre- and para-punk)(I'm paraphrasing).
Beatles stopped touring because things(girls) getting too massive and wild, discovered Epstein had sold off ancillary rights etc, had to keep cranking out records for income, but also overhead of studio expense was no excuse not to keep slaving away to meet expected standards. also flooding the market no excuse because it didn't happen because they were the Beatles, prisoners of success.
VU made all their money playing out, records mostly sounded like bootleg. VU not prisoners of success.
Beatles media, incl. making movies and having press conference. VU multi- media when working w light show, only "movies" silent footage and Lou's Warhol "Screen Test," no press conferences per se that I know of, or that they were known for (I'm old, had contacts, would have heard about it).
More?
¶ 11/09/2013 Beatles stopped touring because things(girls) getting too massive and wild, discovered Epstein had sold off ancillary rights etc, had to keep cranking out records for income, but also overhead of studio expense was no excuse not to keep slaving away to meet expected standards. also flooding the market no excuse because it didn't happen because they were the Beatles, prisoners of success.
VU made all their money playing out, records mostly sounded like bootleg. VU not prisoners of success.
Beatles media, incl. making movies and having press conference. VU multi- media when working w light show, only "movies" silent footage and Lou's Warhol "Screen Test," no press conferences per se that I know of, or that they were known for (I'm old, had contacts, would have heard about it).
More?
