I’ve never seen Lou perform this one with the Robert Quine lineup. As usual, Lou fails to disappoint.
Nov 102008
Nov 022008
Get a load of those guns!
Each new release by Lou Reed promises a mix of beauty, truth, horror, and mostly unintended humor. That’s a big part of why I’ve hung in with the guy through so many stilted, hectoring albums, such as the spiritually rock-bottom Rock ‘n Roll Heart, the squirm-inducing Mistrial, and the critically prematurely acclaimed New York, an album that within a few years of its release played like a grainy rebroadcast of an outdated CNN current events show.
Reed never ceases growing up in public, and when we catch him at a relatively fruitful stage in his development he’s still loaded with so many rough edges that even his most ardent fans disagree about the fruitfulness of a given album. Reed’s 1973 rock opera, Berlin, is a good example of this. Following his breakthrough, David Bowie-produced Transformer album, Berlin was panned by many critics as a bloated, forced, doomfest. Rock fans hoping for a catchy hit single to follow “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” were ignored. Slowly the ornately arranged album gained a better reputation, first through its “train wreck” appeal, then perhaps, through a grudging acknowledgment that although the album is a bloated, forced, doomfest, so are hopeless relationships of the variety of the album’s down-and-out protagonists, Caroline and Jim. I never understood the appeal of mopey bands like The Smiths, but I do my share of moping, and in my book Berlin is as good as any album for working through a case of the bad vibrations.
In 2006, Reed announced that he was going to perform Berlin in its entirety at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse with a monster band of loyal Reed contributors, including Fernando Saunders, Rob Wasserman, Antony, and one of the original Berlin guitarists, Steve Hunter, best known as half of the legendary Hunter-Wagner guitar duo from early Alice Cooper and Reed’s live Rock ‘n Roll Animal band! It was a night that no Reed fan within a 90-mile radius should miss, and of course I missed it. Luckily, this release is a document of that show and accompanies the release of a Julian Schnabel-directed DVD of the proceedings, Lou Reed’s Berlin.
This grand, hyped-up live staging of an ancient, already grandiose rock opera easily could have been a disaster as a live CD, but it’s not. The band stays true to the album’s arrangements, but minus the album’s ’70s studio thud, some of the more visceral parts of the arrangements, especially Hunter’s guitar fills, are allowed to breathe. This adds a lot to the brassy numbers, like “Oh, Jim,” which threatens to break into a mid-70s Stones coda, and “How Do You Think It Feels,” one of the original album’s at-best guilty pleasures. The limited, declining quality of Reed’s voice and the need to project cuts both ways. Quiet, introspective songs that benefitted from the lush mush of Bob Ezrin‘s cluttered studio production don’t translate as well. The biggest disappointments for me are “The Kids” and “Men of Good Fortune,” on which the live-audience performing Reed can’t manage to sound as isolated, bitter, and paranoid as he manages to sound on the album’s “head mix.”
The payoff moment for me, however, is the live performance of “Sad Song,” always my key song on the record. Reed struggles with the tender opening lines, but all is forgiven when the bombast of the band backs up the chorus’ succinct couplet, “I’m gonna stop wasting my time/Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.” The care Reed, Ezrin, and the band take in preserving the album’s arrangements make this affair work as a night of finally fulfilled rock opera.
This album is now playing in streaming audio on Phawker Radio. Click the link at the top of this entry to link to Phawker.
Oct 092008
Closet time.
For my money, the third VU album, the self-titled “couch” album, is what cemented the band’s long-term reputation and influence. With one or two questionable exceptions (eg, “The Murder Mystery”, which I’m not saying is all bad and out of place, and “That’s the Story of My Life”, which I think influenced the future of indie rock in more negative ways than any of the out-of-tune jams that seem to bug Hrrundi) it’s a seamless and self-contained album.
Even more than the artfully monochromatic White Light/White Heat, this album has a definite identity, with newcomer Doug Yule smoothing out some of the gaps likely in any recording led by Lou Reed while also providing a taste of what the band lost when John Cale split. The guitar interplay of Reed and Sterling Morrison is as distinctive and rightfully influential as the interplay of any other famous guitar duo in rock, from Richards and Jones to Richards and Taylor to Allman and Betts to Verlaine and Lloyd and so on. I would go as far to say that this album set the course for the four-decade (and counting) journey of Lou Reed…As His Music Was Meant to Sound! All future Lou recordings would be judged against this album.
What’s this all mean to our friend HVB, who’s never been the least bit interested in the artistic journey of Lou? Nothing positive, I would think.
Hrrundi, here’s a quartet of VU songs that will enable you to get back in touch with your inner VU torment. Enjoy – or dislike – or whatever you feel is the appropriate emotional response. You’re among a loving, trusting community.
Oct 062008
Velvet Intervention: Day 1
Over the years Rock Town Hall’s preeminent hippie hater, Townsman Hrrundivbakshi, has made numerous threats to explain what it is that makes him incapable of appreciating the artistry of a couple of more Beat-indebted rock legends, Bob Dylan and The Velvet Underground. We’ve granted Hrrundi his hatred of The Jefferson Airplane, and we’ve given up on him ever fully explaining his overall dislike of hippies. After years of grilling, he’s been man enough to occasionally come to terms with Dylan. However, to date we can recall no time when he has attempted to ellucidate his feelings on The Velvet Underground.
This week a gentleman and a scholar has agreed to air out his thoughts. He has requested we select 7 songs representing the scope of The Velvet Underground for his consideration and assessment. We will respect his request, in concept, but demand that he responds to a few more songs to accomodate for the band’s scope. Considering that it’s taken HVB a good half dozen years, dating back to Rock Town Hall’s roots as a listserv, to come clean, we will allow him a few days to assess our selections. I think this is only fair to the man.
Today we will focus on the band’s debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. I would suspect that most VU fans of my generation probably learned about the band in reverse order, from hearing Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n Roll Animal version of “Sweet Jane” to hearing the VU album version (without, I must add, the momentum-draining middle eighth that was cut back in on later digital reissues) and that song’s radio-friendly mate, “Rock ‘n Roll”, before digging back to this mystical “banana” album. I’ll leave it to our VU-digging Townspeople to share with Hrrundi what this album meant to each of you.
For me, a college freshman far from home and entering some new psychological territories, it meant that a lot of pent-up fear, anger, and desire was all right to be expressed. More than any of John Lennon’s primal scream stuff, which may have been better on paper than on record, songs like “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin” allowed me to work out some serious self-doubt. I was already well aware that all I needed was love and told myself things were getting better all the time, but I had to touch ground first. I had no idea how I’d go about getting all the love that was promised or where it even was. The Velvet Underground provided a foundation consistent with the state I was in.
Musically, it meant there were new possibilities for expression that were only hinted at by all the ’60s psychedelic and garage bands I’d been into since boyhood. The way the band played gave me hope that pounding out my own repetitive, innervisions was a valid way to make music. I never had time for “jazz chords” and reading music. Harmony groups like The Byrds did little for me. I wanted my ass kicked by the records and movies I was digging into at that time.
What was especially cool about the VU compared with the ass-kicking garage bands they often sounded like on the surface is that they were not retarded. As much as I love a song or two at a time of third-rate Rolling Stones, like The Chocolate Watchband or countless other Nuggets bands, I get tired of cars and chicks. I was a realist: the cars and chicks were never coming my way when I was 18. I had to look ahead and plot some more sophisticated, sensitive, and cynical course toward attaining cars and chicks, maybe by the time I reached my mid-20s. The lyrics of The Velvet Underground helped me prepare that course, and lord knows it worked wonders as I drive the love of my life and our two kids around in my 2003 Toyota Camry!
Without further ado, Hrrundi, your first mission is to listen to and comment on three representative selections from The Velvet Underground & Nico.
We look forward to your thoughts.
Sep 262008
Wow! This clip gets to the heart of the matter concerning our ongoing series on the sincere human beauty found in even the worst moments of Lou Reed’s long and suprisingly documented career. Talk about growing up in public!
Aug 092008
What becomes a sax solo most?
Jul 262008
Supposedly Australia’s Jeans West company threw enough bread Lou’s way to get this ad made. Is there anything else known about this story?
