LOU REED HAS LEFT THIS WORLD

john cale and lou reed

We'll have no more musical inventions by rocker Lou Reed. He has left us so much to listen to, so much that is fresh and new every time, his body of work extensive. To celebrate Lou, I went to cds and picked up a 3-cd set called The Quine Tapes, cassette tapes recorded in three different cities in 1969 by Bob Quine. I think they were released in a box set of three in 2001. On facebook appeared a question to name your favorite Lou Reed song. That one just stopped my mind. I couldn't think of anything. So many titles it makes a log jam to try to think of them all at once. Even reading a list of his songs I couldn't pick one and say this one above all others. I've been listening to Velvet Underground since the album with the banana peel by Andy Warhol. I wasn't ready for them first time I heard the album. It was a period of time when the Rolling Stones were filling football stadiums all over the world, the Allman Brothers with Duane Allman, Eric Clapton with Cream, and the two got together as Derek and the Dominoes. I was into Blind Faith, Cream + Steve Winwood. This was the direction my rock n roll ear was going at the time. Then I hear I'm Waiting For The Man, Heroin, Black Angel Death Song, European Son, a sound my ear wasn't used to listening to. Didn't play it much, but each time I heard it, it became a bit more interesting. Then I discovered Lou Reed and John Cale as musicians and it was on.

 

john cale, lou reed, sterling morrison, mo tucker

velvet underground

 

 

I think of Lou Reed an American poet who gives poetry readings as rock concerts. It's the same for me with Bob Dylan and Steve Earle. It was hopeless to have a chance to see Lou Reed give a concert outside New York. They were a particularly New York band, the art world part of New York that does not translate well to the rest of the country. The Velvet Underground sound seemed to my ear to turn its back to the flower child phenomenon, taking on a rough edge instead of the guitar solo smooth edge. They seemed to reach back into the Fifties sound that the rest of the bands were leaving. The psychedelia bands drew their inspiration from Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, while the Velvets drew their inspiration from Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly. I'm speaking only from my own ear. I've never read any books about the history of rock & roll. I don't even look at Rolling Stone. The few times I've looked at a Rolling Stone it seems like an oxymoron to intellectualize rock. I don't want to read anything intellectualizing the Murderdolls or Mazzy Star. Rock is what it is. That is all it is. It has never seemed right to me to write about rock. I see book after book on the subject, even picked up a history of rock years ago and never opened it. I looked at the pictures. Not much can be said about rock. At this very moment am hearing the Velvets playing an eleven minute version of Ride Into The Sun. Dazzlingly beautiful. Now is starting a 28 minute Sister Ray / Foggy Notion. Thank you, Lou Reed.

 

lou reed

 

 

I can't even think about evaluating Lou Reed critically. I can only write of my own experience with his music over way more than half my life ago. My own Lou Reed experience is that every time I hear anything he made, from Velvets to his last as Lou Reed, I appreciate it more than before. It has been stair-step up the appreciation scale all the years I've listened to his music. Especially now that I've been listening to acoustic music played by masters of their instruments for so many years. Hearing Lou assault his electric guitar strings wringing out Sister Ray. Sterling Morrison is playing rhythm and lead with Lou, Doug Yule is playing bass and Mo Tucker beating the drums. These are people whose musicianship I appreciate more as what my ear can hear expands over years of listening to music. I've never liked boring music. Lou Reed's music is never boring. He doesn't like boring music either. His band was something of a war on boring music. Years of hearing African urban dance hall music from all over the continent, old-time fiddle and banjo music, bluegrass, country, and punk threading through all of it. I need to have my punk moment from time to time, put on Nina Hagen, Jim Carroll Band, The Damned, Hole, L7, Rage Against The Machine. When I want to rock, I want to rock. At this moment I'm asking myself why I don't listen to more. I'm enjoying this madly. I like the sharp assault they hit the strings with. I'm turning the volume up and up as it goes along. I like Lou's verbal assaults. He doesn't scream. He hits with words. He does his screaming through his guitar.

 

velvet underground

 

 

He published a book of his songs without the music, Between Thought And Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. It makes a good book of poetry. When it comes to poetry written by rock stars, it is out there in a league of its own. Lou Reed rates a place among contemporary American poets. He has influenced many an American poet of his generation and younger. Bob Dylan is another one whose lyrics make good reading independent of the music. Both Reed and Dylan tend to talk their songs more than sing them. In the time Lou Reed was making new albums, each one was a work of art. It wasn't just a bunch of songs thrown together to make an album. It was, but he was reaching for art in his writing and in his music. He caught it. I don't hesitate to call Lou Reed an artist in the same meaning I'd use for Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns. When psychedelia faded into Bon Jovi, a wave of punk hit the world's big cities. It seemed like it happened all at once. The Sixties bands that featured virtuoso guitar solos could not be topped by the next generation. Punk happened and you didn't have to know how to play a guitar. Sid Vicious never learned. He was so bad the Sex Pistols only used him on stage for the outrageous audience appeal. They had another bassist for recording. Paul Simenon of the Clash didn't know how to play a bass when they started the band. He was a friend the others wanted in the band. Punk was all-out whatever noise you could make. A revolution. The Velvet Underground was the band from the Sixties whose influence went on into the next generation of rock. Lou Reed lived long enough to see himself become a legend. Though he probably never reached his own ideal, he could certainly look back over his lifetime and see that he made a difference.   

 

lou reed

 

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IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL BUT I LIKE IT

Hearing the Psychedelic Furs. I've not listened to enough music lately. The Psychedelic Furs is a band that has satisfied my ear for a long time. Having 2 of their cds, often when I want to hear some music and don't know what, the Psychedelic Furs is the answer. I see they have a website and they're still touring. They played in Charlotte 5 nights ago. I'd have gone to that concert if I'd known about it ahead of time. That would have been a good one to drive a hundred miles to. They're grown up now, 2 decades after, but I imagine their musicianship is that much better and their performance of the music is too. I don't usually listen to music when I write, because the music takes me over completely and all I can do is listen. The reason I've not been listening to music much is it takes me over completely. Before I put on a Patti Smith album or Bob Dylan, Bryan Ferry, Jane's Addiction, The Clash, Generation X, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, Angelique Kidjo, SE Rogie, Alternate Roots, Aerosmith, Skeeter & the Skidmarks, Ralph Stanley, Whitetop Mountain Band, to name a few that take me over unmercifully, allowing no wandering of mind, before I put them on I have to have enough time to listen to the album all the way through. SE Rogie coming to mind makes me want to hear him. Beautiful lilting palm wine music with acoustic guitar and singing from Sierra Leone.

s e rogie

The world has so much beautiful music in it, it's hopeless to want to hear it all. I've tried to hear it all, at least a general sampling, but it can't be done. I start listening to North African Rai and can't go on from there for a long time. Or start listening to Islamic sitar music from India. That's it. And then there is what happens when the Rolling Stones come on. I'm all ears. No matter what song by them, it has my full attention. On cd, the only Stones albums I have are the one live at very small clubs, Stripped, where they play almost unplugged greatest hits, blues songs, Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, and their first album that has I'm a King Bee on it. I tend to like everything by the Stones. Their first album continues, after all the great ones like Black & Blue, Exile on Main St, to be the one I return to. Just now found a website that plays the entire album, youtube, so it is playing now as I write. Didn't intend to do that, but am in a Stones bluesy mood. Velvet Underground had a similar groove as early Stones. Stones went to the big auditorium sound, not hardly by choice. There was no auditorium on earth big enough not to sell out immediately for Stones tickets. I never saw a Stones concert. It seemed too much to me like going to Woodstock to go to a place so big the band is the size of vertical ants on the stage, like seeing them from a plane. I like to be able to see that it is human beings on the stage. I don't like to be so close that I see how dirty they are. Too close, they're just people, like us, not big stars, not a fantasy of what a rock star oughta be. It's just dirty, sweaty, stoned American and English young'uns looking to meet some chicks and make some money.

rolling stones

Jagger is singing I'm a King Bee. It takes me back to the Fifties, high school, hearing Slim Harpo singing it on the black stations in Kansas City and Wichita, stations I listened to as much as the white stations. That's where I heard Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Etta James, Jimmy Reed, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. Some of them were played on the white station, but when I listened to both, I heard the best of the new music twice as much. The white station would be where I'd hear Marty Robbins' Singin the Blues. Ray Charles singing Lonely Avenue was incredible. What'd I Say was stellar, like the Stones' Satisfaction a few years later. This Rolling Stones blues and r&b album takes me back to the music like this I heard on the black stations in the Fifties. That's where the music was played that I loved. Didn't have to listen to Paul Anka on that station. They played Mickey and Sylvia. Everything they played was something I wanted to hear. I'm hearing why the great blues guitar pickers, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry were impressed by what they heard when Keith Richards was making music with them. On the Stones concert video Martin Scorsese made, Shine A Light, Richards and Buddy Guy get to going on a guitar duet, whatever they call it when they play in perfect sync. They tore the place up. In an interview clip shown in the film, somebody was interviewing Richards and Ron Wood together. Asked which of them was the best guitar player, Richards said (I paraphrase), We're both just ordinary guitar players, but together, nobody can beat us.

dionysius and the satyr

 

 

I've let the Stones album play again, and again. It takes me to my very own foundation in music. The beginnings of rock n roll occurred with the Penguins' Earth Angel, the Coasters' Searchin, Bill Haley & the Comets' Shake Rattle and Roll, Little Richard's Tutti Frutti, Chuck Berry's Maybelline, Bo Diddley's Bo Diddley, Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel, Jerry Lee's Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On, then the whole body of work by Chuck Berry and Little Richard throughout my Jr Hi and High School, the years when a kid really needs his own music. I had the super good fortune to see both Alan Freed Rock N Roll Shows. I think the years were 58 and 59. They were fabulous for a high school kid who by then had a head totally involved in rock n roll. Rock n roll was my escape fantasy. At one of the shows, Fats Domino played his set and filled out the time of two players who'd missed the show, Jerry Lee one of them, Screamin Jay Hawkins the other, from probably being too drunk and whatever else. Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and the girl group I loved the very most, the Chantels, were there. I heard the Chantels sing their two hits, Maybe and Every Night, from twenty or so feet away in adoration. I was like a Catholic boy kneeling before statues of saints aching his heart out to be a real boy. Chuck Berry played at both the shows. After work, walking to the bus stop to go home from work the day of the second Rock N Roll Show, a gold 57 Cadillac with venetian blinds in the back window, mudflaps and a license tag that said, C BERRY, passed by so close I could have reached out and touched it if I'd seen it in time. Flipped me out. I had all his 45s to that date. The show was that night. Larry Williams fell off his upright piano attempting to dance on top of it drunk. I loved seeing Mickey and Sylvia sing Love Is Strange.

 

 

chuck berry

 

This music from the Rolling Stones' first album brought that period of music back to life for me. I was a hung-up Fifties lonely teenager listening to Dion and the Belmonts sing about it. Oh Susie Q, baby I love you. Ronnie Hawkins' Mary Lou I loved as much as any Little Richard song. Little Richard stood out for me way beyond everybody else. Bob Dylan took care of that zone for me next. I'm goin to tell you a story 'bout Mary Lou, she's the kind of a woman make a fool of you...She took the keys to my Cadillac car, she jumped in my kitty and she drove a-far. Learned many years later, his band, The Hawks, evolved into Dylan's band, The Band. I guess it's all right to call Elvis the king of rock and roll, but for that title, I'd have to go with Bo Diddley. I'd give it to Little Richard if he hadn't had so many facelifts. He's the undisputed queen of rock and roll. I say Bo Diddley because the Sixties bands leaned more toward the Little Richard and Chuck Berry sound, except the Velvet Underground that came after the Bo Diddley and the Buddy Holly sound. Punk that started in 75 went with the Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly sound funneled through the Velvet Underground. A very large portion of the rock ever since has been of the Bo Diddley sound, a tight, quick beat. His influence in rock is every bit as direct as Chuck Berrry's and Little Richard's. I had the good fortune to see Bo Diddley at Ziggy's ten or more years ago, when he was 74. He gave an all-out concert, and it was, indeed, Bo Diddley his very self. It was thrilling for me, loving his music my entire music-listening life, Bo Diddley playing all those songs that are standards in the jukebox of my mind. The Bo Diddley beat is in me as much as Carlos Santana's guitar. Ron Wood made a live album with Bo Diddley in concert at a small New York venue in 1988, Live At The Ritz, dynamite rock and roll.   

 

 

ron wood and bo diddley

 

 

 

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VELVET UNDERGROUND AND HEROIN

Earlier, I put on a Velvet Underground album. Their tune Heroin continues in my head, Lou Reed's and John Cale's guitars pumping a rhythm with Sterling Morrioson's bass and Moe Tucker's drums keeping the rhythm going. The shriek of guitar strings like subway wheels screeching on the tracks in curves through the tunnels under Manhattan streets. Heroin was their obligatory anthemic drug song required of every band in the Sixties. The drug anthems tended to be around lsd trips, floating over strawberry fields forever. Not the Velvets. Hard core spike in the vein, makes me feel just like Jesus' son. Hippies didn't take to the Velvets' New York scene where everybody hip wore black. California was the flowers in your hair hip style. The Velvet Underground only played outside New York a few times. They made a bus trip to Texas and then to San Francisco in hippie times playing New York sounds and lyrics. Audiences didn't take to them at all. They hated the song Heroin. Too hard core. The Velvet Underground also cranked up the metronome a bit making their rhythms a little closer to original Fifties rhythms of Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley.


Reed's and Cale's guitar solos were never Stairway To Heaven psychedelia. They wrenched the strings making unmelodic squawling sounds that turned up later in new ways by Rage Against The Machine, Papa Roach, The Clash, Garbage, Patti Smith Group. To make it brief, punk. Punk followed Velvet Underground's influence as Velvet Underground had followed Bo Diddley's and Buddy Holly's musical influence. In New York, punk pretty much came out of CBGB's where a new sound was emerging, like all at once after the New York Dolls when Patti Smith recorded Horses. Simultaneously in London punk was an art student trend. Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees was one of the first run of London punk bands in the time of the Damned, the Sex Pistols, Generation X, naming just a few, and Nina Hagen Band in Berlin. Siouxsie said punk is not a particular style of music. Punk is the freedom to do what you want to do, make the music you want to hear. In London, the press made punk into an anger expression, when it was an art student trend. There, kids wanting to get with a band went to art school. That was where you met other's looking to get a band going. Every one of the Clash met in art school. Paul Simenon, the bass player, didn't even know how to play bass. When Jones and Strummer started talking about it, Simenon was there and a friend, so come on, you can learn it, let's party. Punk was not an anger expression in New York either.


Herion ran through the New York punk scene like a plague and crossed the Atlantic to the London punk scene where junk critically wounded the punk spirit in just a few months. Richard Hell, interesting New York guitar player in the band Television with Tom Verlaine for awhile, then his own band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. He didn't last long. The black dragon got him. The one song he might be remembered for is Love Comes In Spurts. He was a guitar player and singer with promise at his very beginning, but he took a liking to the extended orgasmic feeling that's better than sex and goes on for quite awhile. Then it goes away and everything is boring, gotta get some more right away. Breaking and entering, becoming habitual at stealing cars, computers, anything, and it becomes a career. Steve Tyler of Aerosmith kissed the lips of death and wound up in the literal gutter before he could turn around. Lost his band, home, jewelry, self-esteem, the works, down the drain to the sewer. He survived and came back, as did Bob Dylan, Steve Earle and several I don't know about and never heard of.


The obvious finally popped me with a knuckle on the forehead that heroin addiction is the beginning of the spiritual path for the ones able to get with some kind of help to get over the addiction. It looks like the only path out of any kind of addiction is the spiritual path. And when one comes back on the spiritual path, they have experience of both the dark side and the light side, the whole. I think of them as brave people. They may not think they're brave when they start shooting up, but it's not long before breaking into somebody's apartment in an apartment building and carrying out the loot is what you do. That's brave. I do not have the bravery to break into anybody's apartment or house, even if the house is remote and the owners in Europe on vacation. My heart would beat so fast, my knees would be so weak a cat could scare me out of my wits. It wouldn't do for me to put myself in a situation where I have to be brave enough to face somebody being home when I wasn't expecting them. I don't have what it takes to be a junkie. I'm not brave enough to do something to get myself handcuffed behind my back and stuffed into the back seat of a police car. I have a problem being handcuffed by an authority I have no recourse against. I don't want to go there. So I obey the laws, at least within reason.


I've read different writings by junkies, known friends who have friends who are junkies. We have our share here in Alleghany on every kind of thing from crystal meth to opium, cocaine, heroin, anything of prescription drugs. I've seen it take young'uns just out of high school, set free from the leash the first time in their lives, dive head first into everything they can find. Then you need the money. A labor job just out of high school doesn't pay enough. Besides, that's work. Breaking and entering is easy and fun and you find all kindsa shit. Crossing the line into needing to steal a woman's precious jewelry, some of it her mother's, tainting her private space with the presence of a thief without compassion is something I cannot do to both myself and the person I'm stealing from. It's a feeling of having been raped when you discover somebody has been in your house and you start seeing what's missing. I don't like that feeling and I can't give the experience to somebody else. It's just not in me. It doesn't leave the world a better place. Sometimes we hurt other people without intending to and without knowing it, like when I have kicked Caterpillar walking through the house in the dark. I would never kick Caterpillar with intent to hurt her.


The people brave enough to stick a needle between their toes have something I aint got. But then it's not long before standing in the street in downtown New York traffic, holding up a lane of traffic, standing in the street talking to somebody who isn't there. That's not how I want to live my life. Whatever a heroin rush feels like I'll never know and don't want to know. It's the nature trail to hell. For the last half century the American people have made the drug trade the most lucrative in the world. It's got millions of people in prison over the last half century. The drug war is just another war used by our government to keep war going. After the 2nd WW, the Cold War. After the Cold War, the War on Drugs. Or, as Gore Vidal calls it, the War on the American People. I wouldn't think of hoping our government might do something sensible, but it seems to me free treatment programs in every city and rural county would keep prison populations down, clean up the drug problem in a short number of years. I'd be for taking somebody in no matter how many times they lapse and return. Not one minute in the labor of helping junkies is wasted, no matter what the results. Compassion the guiding light instead of punishment makes living easier all the way around. Junkies want help, need help, can't afford help in a society indifferent to them. Not indifferent. Hostile. It is a hostile attitude Americans have for junkies. Making it harder for them just makes it harder for the rest of us. Compassion costs nothing, is easy, and every expression of compassion makes the world a better place.

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