1. LINGER ON, DARLIN’…

It has come to my attention that it is St. Valentine’s Day, and whilst I have precious little to celebrate, I’m still a romantic sap so that’s not going to stop me taking the opportunity to post this excellent bootlegged live version of one of the most unapologetically romantic songs in the, er, ‘rock n’ roll canon’.

So close your eyes and do your best to forget for a moment that Lou Reed has spent the past 37 years being a villainous, ostentatious, lying jerk. Imagine instead that you’re some (male) kid in Detroit in 1969 and you’ve gone to see this weird New York band The Velvet Underground whom you’ve heard are pretty far-out. Maybe your girlfriend is with you, or maybe you couldn’t convince her to come along. Maybe you don’t have one, and maybe you’re sad about it, or maybe you don’t give a damn. Maybe you came on a motorbike, maybe you took the bus: hey, it’s your head-fiction, go wild, but it’s important to get these details sorted out.

So anyway, the Velvets play about an hour’s worth of this loud, heavily rhythmic music with the occasional ballad, and it’s all pretty repetitious and off-putting and you’re not sure you like their stuck-up New York attitude, but at the same time there’s some fantastic guitar-playing and the stark blare of the sound is actually pretty thrilling. And they close their set with this song.

If I were to send a valentine’s card this year, I might well be tempted to send one to the slippery phrasing of Lou’s singing on this recording, with his slight adlibs and ‘hey I just got the lyrics to this one together, I’m not sure if I like them but here goes’ hesitancy. But the song is great and noble, and it sounds like it has made a deal with Lou that it will speak and define itself through his mouth, but he’s kinda slightly tempted to go back on the deal and keeps trying ever so slightly to squeeze the song out of shape as it emerges, but no, the song holds firm and makes sure he gets to the chorus line in the right place.

The lyrics to this song have been with me a long time, and will be with me for a lot longer, and yet, I’m still not sure if they’re even any good. I can’t really tell whether they meant anything to Lou, or whether he was just trying to sound cool and obtuse, and I’m not sure that bits of them could ever really legitimately mean anything to anybody… but we’re talking pop music, so forget it: the tune steps in and saves the day every time I think that. And I am sure above all that the lyrics succeed in sparking static electricity across that same inscrutable chasm between tossed-off trash and celestial glory that illuminates the more visceral moments of sonic genius in the VU back catalogue.

If I were writing an essay here, I could make myself look smart by cross-referencing the pursuit of bridges across this chasm against the broadly similar aims and achievements of Warhol’s Factory in the art world. But I’m not writing an essay, and especially not one about fucking ‘art’, I’m writing for myself, and I think the influence of Warhol on the Velvets is usually over-stated anyway, so I won’t bother.

Instead I’ll talk about death: I remember back in English Lit class in school, being taught that all worthwhile poems are either about love or death (a statement which I thought was kinda stupid at the time but now find myself broadly agreeing with). So to jump from one biggie to the other, it can be an important business whilst alive to think about what verses you would like to see inscribed upon your tombstone, otherwise you run the risk of having to put up with some platitudinous Christian crap because nobody could think of anything better.

Well hopefully I still have a long and eventful life ahead of me, in the course of which I will gain some more fitting and/or fiery words to suggest before I croak. But if I were to kick the bucket tomorrow, I think I could do a lot worse than;

If I could make the world as pure
And strange as what I see
I’d put you in the mirror
I place in front of me

But enough of that, I’m getting off the point. Back to our role-play: you’re that kid, in Detroit, in 1969, ok? Here’s the song:

Pale Blue Eyes


2. BABY, BABY C’MON…

And as a bonus just for you, here’s another very romantic song from a more current (tho not necessarily more modern) New York band, the rather unromantically named Blood On The Wall.

It’s a great song, even though it doesn’t have half so many words in it. It speaks of chasing the disappearing glimpse of something you hope might have been love but was at least beauty, and of wanting to stay empty and in bed but having to get up and get trapped in places where there is rain and stone and metal and glass and beer only comes in bottles and costs the absolute maximum of what you can afford to spend on it and people are everywhere but never meet each other’s eyes and much fun is promised but never delivered, and there’s nothing left to do but grasp at the remains of your glimpse and hope it might return, and somehow you even manage to convince yourself that this actually feels quite good.

Dean Wareham explored this space pretty thoroughly from a grown-up point of view in his (very ’69 Velvets) band Luna, but Blood On The Wall are strictly for the kids. And if these days “grown-up” = “settled”, then I’d like to think I’m still a kid.

So I will two-time Lou Reed’s phrasing and send another valentine to fuzz guitars. Just, y’know, in general.

I’d Like To Take You Out Tonight.