review of The Quine Tapes click here
review of Lou Reed's Ecstasy click here
The Velvet Underground
important work in black
1967: The Velvet Underground and Nico. 1968: White Light/White Heat. 1969: The Velvet Underground. 1970: Loaded. 1972: Live at Max’s Kansas City. 1974: 1969/Live. 1984: V.U. 1986: Another View. 1993: The Velvet Underground MCMXCII. 1996: Peel Slowly and See (Box Set). 2002: The Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes
Lou Reed: 1972: Lou Reed * Transformer. 1973: Berlin. 1974: Rock & Roll Animal (live) * Sally Can’t Dance. 1975: Metal Machine Music * Lou Reed Live. 1976: Coney Island Baby * Rock and Roll Heart. 1977: Walk on the Wild Side – The Best of Lou Reed. 1978: Street Hassle * Take No Prisoners (live). 1979: The Bells. 1980: Growing Up in Public * Rock and Roll Diary: 1967 – 1980 (retrospective). 1982: The Blue Mask. 1983: Legendary Hearts. 1984: New Sensations. 1986: Mistrial. 1989: New York. 1990: Songs for Drella (with John Cale). 1992: Magic and Loss. 1992: Between Thought and Expression: The Lou Reed Anthology. 1996: Set the Twilight Reeling. 2000: Ecstasy. 2003: The Raven.
There is a meshed compatibility that makes some bands seem like naturally superior biological organisms rather than a hybrid of thrown together parts. The Velvet Underground was one such organism created out unified, often bizarre. Maureen Tucker relentlessly pounded/tapped her way through long barrages like "Heroin," "Sister Ray," "European Son," and "All Tomorrow’s Parties." She controlled the Velvet’s ebb and flow of tempo with her slow-moving tom-tom beats or her contrasting eighth-note snare attack. What once was called primitive now seems a drummer’s triumph of stamina and individuality, as persevering in its own was as Charlie Watts or Mick Fleetwood. Sterling Morrison’s and John Cale's bass playing was a dark oozeing wave; the tone was fat and ominous whether he was holding hypnotic grooves, creating quirky walking lines, or lifting incongruent bass riffs from old r&b tunes. Reed and Morrison were busy and angular and inventive and contributed to the band’s wall-of-sound glory by playing away from the lead guitar theatrics in favor of rhythmic chordal variations that added dissonance, drone and punch. John Cales’ piano, organ and electric viola stuck to the rhythmical base, but colored the music, gave it depth and hugeness and most of its exotic flavor. The Velvet’s musical empire was built on pure rhythm density. It was a groove that had nothing to do with r&b funk, and little to do with boogie rock and roll. There’s a bit of the Yardbirds’ rave-up rock in the mix, and, oddly enough, though they might never admit it, a bit of the Grateful Dead’s cyclone of rhythm noise and arcane musical weirdness ("Viola Lee Blues" from the Dead’s debut album and "Sister Ray" from the Velvet’s debut create similar musical vortexes, and a "Heroin"-like statement is made on the Dead’s "The Victim or the Crime"). When John Cale left after the second Velvet Underground album, the music changed dramatically though the Velvets remained a spunky rock and roll band. When Lou Reed set out on his own after Loaded (1970), was a mast without a ship.
Reed soon joined a rarefied league of curmudgeons that included Robbie Robetson and Eric Clapton. Although musicians are generally fairly ignorant of their art and the art of their colleagues, Reed’s ungraciousness was mystifying. In an interview in Rolling Stone in 1976, he spouted that Bob Dylan’s musical worth was "two, maybe three songs." He said, "It’s unfortunate for Dylan that studio techniques have improved to the point that it’s very hard for him to conceal any longer how musically bad he is." About Van Morrison, Reed opined, he "did it only once, on one song - "Madame George." Reed was suggesting himself as a great technician and a great songwriter, even though the recklessness of his song meter, his stripped down musical dynamics and his preference for rock and roll rhythm put him squarely in Dylan’s camp – though his lyrics are seldom as resonant as Dylan’s and his music never as effortlessly passionate (nor is he as good a singer). Reed’s arrangements hem in his players about as much as Dylan’s, but without as much recompense. And as a musician/conceptualist, Reed has never been in the same league as Van Morrison. In the same interview, Reed praised Neil Young’s guitar playing, but called Young’s lyrics "so stupid … so West Coast dumb." Reed was participating in the type of patriotic city against city warfare that blinded him to how "New York dumb" so much of his own writing was becoming. Reed’s dubious pronouncements came back to haunt him when, incredibly, he was invited to induct Frank Zappa into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Zappa’s family protested vehemently since it was already on record how much disrespect Reed had show Zappa in the past (of course this complicates the curmudgeon angle since Zappa wasn’t exactly an uncritical gentleman himself).
Known for his downbeat subject matter, Reed’s terrain alone has often been mistaken as art: violence & brutality & drugs & humiliation equals truth and realism, everything else is irrelevant bourgeoisie daydreaming. Reed treated his half-world as if it was the whole world and half his audience was mesmerized. "Crazy Feeling," from Coney Island Baby, isn’t played strikingly well and would be just another pickup-in-a-bar tune without the lines "you really are a queen, and I know because I’ve made that same scene." In fact, even with those lines, the song is just another pickup-in-a-bar tune. The sensationalized seventies’ material sometimes seemed to be controlling Reed, rather than the other way around. Divorced from his can-of-worm realism, Reed’s love songs on the debut album – "Walk It and Talk It," "I Love You," "Love Makes You Feel," "Berlin" – are transparently shallow. He seems both above his concepts and beneath them. On "I Love You’ he sings, "when I think of all the things I’ve done, and I know I’ve only just begun, good times, oh, you know I can’t forget em, but for now I love you." The "but for now" subverts the genre too easily; Reed’s cunning makes the idea a cold, singular idea, rather than an emotional experience. He’s just being snide.
Reed’s approach has always been willfully stylized, mannered and distancing. He is aware of the discomfort that comes with his songwriting and singing. Moral suspension, moral confusion are good themes, but sometimes Reed never quite balances the scorn he shows his subject matter with the pride he seems to have in revealing it to us. "Animal Language," set to a dance beat, is the tale of a noisy dog that is finally silenced with a shotgun. It’s a guilty-feeling dance tune. The same thing happens with Mulberry Jane ("She’s My Best Friend"): "she made jam when she came, somebody cut off her feet, now jelly rolls in the street." On this song the story concerns a man who does real bad thing, and is lucky to have a girl that understands him when he’s feeling down. Reed has fun playing with the listener’s expectations, but there is a difference between the tonality of "Baby Face" with it’s stark musical moodiness that reinforces the story, and "Animal Language" and "Sally Can’t Dance" where music and message are consciously at odds with the listener (though they may do a good job of describing the feeling of the character in the song). Reed often is depicting someone else’s experience rather than his own, but the points-of-view are seldom strong enough to take you along with them, stuck as they are in the literary world. Sometimes they are meant to push the listener back a little. On "Kicks" you almost have to be a blood-loving freak to participate in the musical experience as strongly as the protagonist is participating in the "actual" experience, but the music is strong enough to give you some sense of metaphorical blood lust, I guess. On "Sally Can’t Dance," Reed writes: "She was the first girl in her neighborhood to wear tie-die pants like-a she should; she was the first girl on the scene to have flowers painted on her jeans; she was the first girl in her neighborhood who got raped in Tompkin’s Square, real good; now she carries a sword like Napoleon and kills the boys and acts like a son." There’s a detail in this song about Sally being "in the trunk of a Ford." There’s no overriding reason to assign Reed culpability in his character’s thoughts and actions, even if Reed’s disdain of hippie culture is on record, but, in so many of his seventies’ songs, what resulted when Reed set up a story is a garish sort of anti-music that tries to raise Reed’s biologically entrenched obnoxiousness to the level of art. Reed captured the effect successfully on the Velvet’s "New Age, " which has a perfectly detailed lyric, good hooks, and a good melody (which many of Reed’s songs do not have). On "New Age" you get a bittersweet, horrified, participatory awareness of both characters’ situations, but, as usual, empathy is not encouraged.
Subtracting from everything are Reed’s vocals, which are said to give him street credibility, but are colorless and seldom do even his best melodies justice (if anybody ever needed a tribute album, it is Lou Reed). He often sings behind the beat or ahead of the beat, smashing together a string of words suddenly, or dragging them along in unmetered staccato. His enunciation verges on the phonetic. The result isn’t conversational, colloquial, musical or even very expressive, but it’s definitely idiosyncratic.
Willful inarticulateness, bad vocals, sarcastic points of view, unsympathetic subjects, a chastening tone of voice (sometimes his own; sometimes his characters’), questionable success as a band-leader, arrogant posturing ("New York Stars" is an unforgivably stupid song), make up an aesthetic that usesReed as a crutch. He has always been excellent at explaining away failure while whining about how nobody understands his brilliance. All of this hurts Reed’s standing as a songwriter, but when he is good, it’s pretty much because of the same attributes. With his simple, cloying chords and unrefined sentiment, there are times when Reed is just another singer-songwriter despite the harshness of his delivery and the loudness of his backing band. The marginal attributes that give him distinction – his occasional attraction to avant garde style, his boisterous rock and roll sensibility, his hatred of singer-songwriter sentimentality and easy introspection, and his street-level grit – make him unpredictable and compelling despite the outright failure of so much of his music.
Growing up in Public (1980) was a turning point for Reed: he delivered autobiographical songwiting without the experimental clutter. On New York (1989), he woke up one morning and found New York City an intolerable place to live; on some songs he sounds as wistful as an old hippie, on others he’s as sanctimonious as a born again preacher. But it’s toughly played, and there’s some good rock and roll included.
Magic and Loss seems overrated. Reed avoids sentimentality on a subject that could use some and his poetic mysticism, like so much of his poetic conceit, is pretty shallow. Just like the oddly dilettantish, newly acquired repugnance on New York, Reed’s approach to death on Magic and Loss seems like a slow train coming that hasn’t quite hit him yet (much more poignant is "Finish Line" from Set the Twilight Reeling, and the entirety of Songs for Drella - the latter is absolutely fascinating if you can find it on video). Magic and Loss is nowhere near the status of, say, Neil Young’s death-riddled Tonight’s the Night.
In the late eighties Reed actually started being seen in public, showing up for charity benefits and hobnobbing with his peers. He’s late coming to the game and maybe he’ll never get the knack, but at least there’s a clarity to his recent work that makes more of it endearingly Reedish rather than repulsively Reedish. The up close and personal Reed remains an oddity. The most beautiful sensibility he’s expressed in his solo career was when he left his own sensibility behind in order to evoke Andy Warhol on the stunning Songs for Drella (with John Cale providing counterbalancing melody, harmony, musical and thematic relief). It’s a much more interesting world than the one we usually see through Reed’s conceited, shit-colored glasses.