Come on in, pour yourself a drink!

Let us assume that you’re a guest in my wood-panelled Victorian study, and that I have already helped myself to much refreshment from the crystal decanter. After an initial show of friendship, I’m basically going to talk at you indefinitely in a semi-aggressive fashion whilst you sit there uncomfortably and try to find a non-rude way to make an exit. Is that acceptable? Well afraid it’ll have to be. If you don’t like it you, can start your own weblog.

(I will, by the way, be speaking in the voice of Andre Morell, if that helps you make your mind up either way.)

Ahem.

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I know I’ll be upsetting any solo Lou partisans who happen to be reading right off the bat here, but for me, The Velvet Underground is all.

And even if Lou took all the songwriting money, I definitely prefer to see the band’s achievements as a group effort. As such, I think it's notable that ALL of the VU recordings sound spontaneous and passionate, whereas pretty much all solo Lou Reed stuff sounds like carefully groomed moments of "rock n' roll" spontaneity being performed by actors under laboratory conditions. I could never really get into that. Lots of "oh, well, theoretically I suppose this is quite a good song, but..." moments whenever I've tried, in between the frequent bouts of “by god, I’m turning this off right now”.

That said though, recent adventures in learning to love the collected works of such contrary buggers as Alex Chilton and John Cale have reminded me that, when you’re in it for the long game, there’s more to the appreciation of a record than immediate aural pleasure and basic emotional connection. And surely, no one more so than Lou Reed managed to exemplify that (very ‘70s) idea of using whole decades’ worth of mass-produced vinyl and fan-produced cash to sketch out some kind of grand, conflicted, ever-changing statement about something that nobody ever quite seemed to ‘get’, but that keeps the die-hards fascinated & guessing, and the detractors shrugging and suffering, to this day.

So yes, a proper excavation of the Reed back catalogue has long been on my ‘long-list’ of things to get around to, now that I’ve reached that point in life where I can buy 2nd hand LPs with impunity and sit around laughing at the drum sound and so on, free from concerns of contemporary relevance or financial stability. But I haven’t done it yet. Which is pretty damned inconvenient for the purposes of writing a conventional obituary.

It’s funny actually - when the news filtered through last Sunday night, perhaps my third or fourth thought was “well that's one tough fucking obit that a few hundred journalists are going have to file by the morning”.

For years the whole “Lou Reed is an arsehole” meme has been a running joke in the music world, and it is an idea that I very much abided by through my (ahem) youth, maintaining a strict “Velvets = BRILLIANT / Solo Lou = GHASTLY” policy with a stubbornness that precluded any hope of flexibility. I once even drew a cartoon (subsequently lost) of Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker trapping Lou’s soul in a magic crystal on the night that he left the VU.

But these days, now that I find myself feeling rather more sympathetic toward the intentions of these – how you say? – “grumpy old bastards who waste our time making difficult, unlovable records”, I don’t know if the “Lou’s an asshole” approach holds much water to be honest. Certainly, it’s at the very least an uncharitable simplification of his character: for every anecdote you read about him being a dick to someone or making a really bad decision, there's another story about him being incredibly kind and eloquent, and so on.

And I’m certainly not here to try to whitewash him for all the occasions on which he undoubtedly did act like a prime arsehole, but…I dunno… I guess on reflection I tend to see him more as someone who was always pushing awkwardly towards some kind of... *something* that nobody except him ever quite managed to see, both in terms of his music and his personal conduct. Kind of tragic in a sense, I suppose. Millionaire rock star who never managed to make anyone 'understand' – boo hoo hoo, etc.

(And whilst we’re on the subject, how did he even manage to become a millionaire rock star in the first place? I mean, I suppose the singles off ‘Transformer’ must have done fairly brisk business, and sales of the VU albums must have snowballed since their reissue in the ‘80s, but nonetheless - he’s never really been a big unit shifter, has he? He’s never had a ‘hit’, outside of college radio / indie land. In fact, can you think of ANYONE who’s managed to assume the position of an “I can do whatever the hell I like” major label-backed legacy artist on the basis of such little quantifiable commercial success..? That in itself must count as some kind of an achievement… ‘fake it ‘till you make it’, perhaps?)



I guess he was just a bit of a complicated, mixed up guy really… as were all the members of the Velvet Underground, come to think of it.(1) In fact, read an interview with each of them in turn and it's amazing that they managed to work together for so long without killing each other. But then presumably that clash of personalities is what helped make their output so astonishingly bold and varied.

For, brace yourself for Ultimate Cliché here, but one of the things that makes the Velvet Underground so continuously fascinating is that they were a band built from the start upon a foundation of total, overlapping contradiction:

Often held up as progenitors of punk, in ‘White Light, White Heat’ they recorded the most certifiably PUNK album of all time. Yet they also represent the birth of the strain of self-aware, collegiate art-rock (later indie) music that by-passed the atavistic guts of ‘punk’ altogether when it began to take off via their disciples in the later ‘70s and ‘80s. (In stark contrast to just about every other mid’60s rock group, three quarters of the classic VU line-up had a background in post-grad academic study, a fact that showed through in their aesthetic presentation as well as their lyrical & musical pretentions – “kinda faraway / kinda dignified”, quoth Jonathan Richman).

Frequently pigeonholed by lazy copywriters as a band defined by their cynicism, ‘coldness’ and embrace of decadent, taboo subject matter (an instant cliché aided by the shades, turtlenecks and grim demeanour of their Warhol-era publicity), The Velvet Underground simultaneously produced some of the most off-handedly honest, humane and open-hearted music of their era - not to mention the most conventionally melodically beautiful. And this isn’t the Cale-era / Yule-era dichotomy it’s often assumed to be either: it’s right there from the word go with ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, whilst the departure of Cale and his supposed avant garde tendencies led straight on to the band laying down some of the most extended droning and shrieking of their career (cf: circa ’69 live versions of ‘Run Run Run’ and ‘What Goes On’, not to mention total weirdness like ‘The Murder Mystery’), whilst Cale himself went straight on to make a really boring country-rock album! (Post-Warhol, the Velvets also spent quite a long time wearing flares and floral-patterned shirts, growing unruly hair and grinning at the camera, if anyone bothered to notice.)

Sometimes pegged (justifiably) as marking the point at which rock music shook off the stigma of merely imitating black music and became an identifiably ‘white’ form for the first time (remember the stories about Lou keeping a dollar jar to fine anyone who played a blues lick in rehearsal?), Lou and Sterling Morrison both still somehow managed to talk up their background in dirty, no-good r’n’b clubs, unashamedly playing choppy, urban 12-bar boogie during the height of psychedelia, and pledging eternal allegiance to Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker whilst sneering at Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa.

I mean, how the hell did that work, even on a practical level..?! Who knows, but you certainly can’t argue with the results.

And I guess it was this spirit of beautiful, explanation-defying contradiction – which seemed so effortless and instinctive when the Velvets did it – that Lou tried to cling to through his solo career, with what I think we can safely classify as “mixed results”.

I was joking earlier with the magic crystal / soul extraction thing, but nonetheless, I think some big part of Reed’s world definitely changed forever after that night at Max’s Kansa City in 1970, when he threw in the VU towel. And as ever with Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, there’s mystery hovering around the whole issue, never quite giving us an answer. Sterl recalled that he knew something was up, because Lou suddenly wanted to introduce everyone to his parents - they being strict and straight-laced upstate New York upper-middle-class types from whom he had been long estranged.(2) As I recall, the rumour goes that after that, Reed spent a year or so keeping a low profile back at the family home, as mom and pop tried to medicate him back to ‘normality’, to the extent that he was on the verge of packing it in and getting a job in a lawyer’s office.


I’m unsure of the ins and outs that followed as he decided to return to a music career (and it’s not really our business anyway), but by the time his self-titled ‘Lou Reed’ LP appeared in 1972, I think it should have been clear to most observers that something had gone seriously awry: a tepid collection of re-recorded Velvets tunes, captured in a sterile, “keep the levels low, folks” studio environment by a session band featuring members of Yes (of all the god-damned things!), and topped by this freaking bizarre cover painting of a big, like, dodo or something, surrounded by D&D rulebook-style treasure!(3)

We can laugh about it now maybe, but for any original fans keeping the faith at the time, this plus ‘Squeeze’ must have signalled a rather depressing march into the wilderness. Bowie stepped in with a guiding hand, and the rest is history that we don’t need to plough through here I suppose….

But in its own way, that weird, thoroughly forgotten first album already highlights everything that Lou had lost and (according to my current opinion at least) never really regained.

I know I was going on about it earlier, but what was really lacking was the sense of spontaneity. Lou Reed was, intermittently, one of the most sublime rock/pop lyricists who ever lived. But his gift always worked best when encountered in an elusive, unpredictable context. And whilst sadly it took no time at all for Solo Lou to become the kind of guy who liked to see his words dried in ink, preserved forever as nuggets of rather underwhelming ‘genius’ for the faithful to pore over, VU Lou was a very different dude. Wonderful things seem to pour from his croaking gob throughout the duration of the Velvets recording career, floating off into the ether never to be heard again, and if there are bits on the studio albums where he sounds like he’s making this shit up as he goes along, that’s because he probably WAS.

One of the great joys of excavating the VU’s demos and live recordings is in hearing the way that the content and delivery of his songs developed and changed and changed again, never really reaching any ‘complete’ version as he went from irreverence to piety and back again at the flip of a coin, his capacity for lyrical improvisation often bordering on the extraordinary.(4)

As a more earnest young fellow, I used to get a bit pissed off with various 'placeholder' lyrics that seem to survive on many of the VU’s not-released-at-the-time recordings – my assumption always being that these were just some nonsense and bad taste joke stuff that Lou knocked out as a guide track, meaning to replace them with something more refined at a later date. But now I think I understand that such improvisation was the basis of his whole approach to song-writing (or at least, the best, least preppy parts of his songwriting) – an approach in which the actual content of the verses very much came last, in which the song’s title and emotional ‘feel’ were instead very much the key component, slowly subliminating the accompanying verbiage over a matter of months or even years.

True, the undercurrent of cheery sexual violence that mars the otherwise incomparably brilliant ‘Foggy Notion’ still grates (presumably the work of the same heeeelarious Lou Reed who deadpanned through ‘I Wanna Be Black’ many years later), but whatever, I can live with it. And I certainly don’t have to force a grin for the nonsense verses on ‘She’s My Best Friend’, which provide a black horse pick for one of my favourite Reed lyrics ever:

“Here’s to Newspaper Joe / knocked his teeth on the floor / caught his hand in the door / I guess that’s the way the news goes”.

 Edward Lear eat your heart out. Cracks me up every time.

The thing about stuff like this though is that it only works once – do it today, and then throw it away. I was quite depressed when I once listened to an (extremely bad) version of ‘..Best Friend’ that Reed re-recorded in 1976-ish, to hear all that silly old rubbish still there, in exactly the same place, as if Lou had listened back to the old recording, scratched his chin and thought “hmm, yes, that is rather amusing”, grimly carving it for all time into the Official Lou Reed Book of Beautiful Poetry (I bet they keep a copy in a glass case at the ‘Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame’), the rancid icing on the lumbering, digital funk hash that his band of the day were busy making of the breezy, strummin’ bubblegum of the Velvets original.

I want to stay positive though, so let’s back straight back to the ‘60s and slam the door.

I was meaning to continue with an emotional trawl through the various extant versions of one of my favourite Reed numbers, ‘Sweet Jane’, but it is now the weekend. And I promised myself I’d post this at the weekend, so… you’ll have to excuse me gentlemen, I’m not quite feeling myself this evening, and, I….

…..

..

Nurse! Nurse! Come quickly!





(1) Well except Doug Yule I suppose. He just seems like a nice bloke who wanted to play some tunes.

(2) And enough with that “bard of Manhattan” jive by the way – like just about all the most successful New York art/glam/punk types, Lou moved in from elsewhere, moneyed and educated in advance.

(3) I think it’s kind of a great cover actually, but total WTF in the context of a Lou Reed album.

(4) Although we’re obviously just talking Reed here, you can of course check out ‘Temptation Inside Your Heart’ for a demonstration of how brilliantly the VU’s collective spontaneity and irreverence toward their own work functioned – hopefully it speaks for itself.

Labels: deathblog, Lou Reed, rambling, The Velvet Underground