'And curtains laced with diamonds dear for you...'

Passing thoughts and notes on a recent passing
of note. Scratched out some 10-11 days ago; partial,
piecemeal, unpolished, unfinished.


Numerous friends & peers expressing shock or surprise at the news of Lou Reed's death. I shrug. Maybe I've become inured to such news in recent years, know to expect it at regular intervals.Maybe it barely rated as news. Maybe I had given the guy so little thought in recent years that...

Anyway. I did do the sort of thing of thing that I normally don't do on such occasions. Y'know -- that vulture thing of pulling out a bunch of records and basking in the achievements of the recently departed. Because hearing "Sweet Jane" turn up in the breaking news on Sunday made me realize that Loaded was an album I hadn't bothered to spin since roughly 1990. And even then, lifting the needle over about half the tunes. So I played it in full. Two things come to attention right away. One being that the politics of the label shoving Reed out of the band for the sake of front-staging (the hopefully more marketable and listener/audience-friendly) Doug Yule are deeply etched into the thing, since it sounds very much like some A&R-pressured departure from their abrasive, fringe-dwelling East Coast origins and far more like some West Coast country-rock outfit of the Moby Grape order, which I gather was really big at the time. Second thing I noticed that on those tunes wher Reed was allowed to lead ("Sweet Jane," "Rock & Roll," et al), his vocal delivery was uncharacteristically heated, exuberantly engaged -- possessing an energy and coiled intensity that otherwise was atypical in his long and often plodding career.


***




Related anecdote one: Seeing New Order play live in 1986. They were on supporting the Brotherhood album. I suppose they didn't feel too confident about said LP, because they defaulted on playing the bulk of Low-Life instead. And then for an encore came back onstage to play a long monotonously trudgey thing that went on for what seemed like 15 minutes, gradually building in density as it trudged along. Eventually some lyrics entered into the thing, something about doing the ostrich. Realized that I was hearing a tip of the topper to VU, tho' by way of an obscure route that involved a tune that had (at that point) existed mostly as an unheard footnote to the VU story. Or maybe it was meant as an echo of the "Sister Ray" cover that lurked in their earlier history via the Joy Division days. I didn't/wouldn't hear the original until I acquired of 45 of the tune some years later, and it still amuses me each time I hear it.


***




Related anecdote two: At some point in history, many of Reed's '70s solo LPS were actually considered essential, cultish listening. Item one on the "underground" cultural-credential credenza. Once a good friend friend of mine and a buncha friends of his from the school's radio station were hanging out drinking together at my friend's apartment, and the thing devolved into a music-geek pissing contest about "Name/Play The Most Depressing Song You've Ever Heard," illustrating their case inasmuch as one friend's record collection allowed. I'm can't recall what all got nominated, but apparently The Pogues'"And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda"crossed the turntable at one point. But then my friend cheated, and made everyone listen to the entire second side of Lou Reed's Berlin, which shouldn't been tantamount to a violation of the Geneva Convention or something of that magnitude, as far as the rules of the contest were concerned. At any rate, by the time the stylus eases into the lead-out groove, everyone sat around in silence for a moment. Then one participant (the station's format chief, and a moody guy by nature) stands up, flatly declares, "Yeah, I think that's got to be the most depressing thing I've ever heard", and without saying another word to anyone, leaves.


***
I'd heard many years ago that there was some kind of rivalry between Reed and Frank Zappa -- like some sorta East Coast/West Coast gangsta beef in which the Velvets and the Mothers of Invention had been pitted against each other in competition for who would be roundly embraced as Lords of the Freak Scene. And that the two had harbored nothing but loathing for one another for all the years thereafter. If true, it always struck me as daft. The two acts were in no way comparable. No chance of the Velvets ever being a contender for that title, anyway. Far too dark, too severe, too art-damaged, and far too NYC and attitudinally out-of-step with the zeitgeist. Proper recognition would have to wait for later, much more different times.

The Wrong Side of History, I

A throwback jawn, yeah. One that's been nagging me, lately.

Returning to the previously-mentioned matter of affixing a record’s feet to "the floor of a certain era." At one point in the 1990s, talk of the future had to be consigned to the past. So often was it invoked or attached to this e-music thing or another that it quickly became a snigger-inducing cliché – as if the most trite thing you could do was to describe something as "future music" or, worse still, the “future sound of.” A hackneyed marketing slogan, that’s all it was. And yes, it seemed kind of silly because the music in question had been around for almost a decade, had been developing on the margins, already had a history behind it. Meaning that, for anyone who had had their ears turned in that direction during those years, it was really more the music of the Present -- the Now Sound or whatever.*

Some Lateral Thoughts, II (in Which a Rose is Not a Rose)

Reading Peter Schjeldahl's recent New Yorker write-up of the Jay DeFeo retrospective at the Whitney, being reminded of how DeFeo has long been one of those one-hit wonders of the artworld. Mainly because of her painting "The Rose," which -- being over ten feet tall, close to a foot thick, and allegedly weighing upwards to a ton -- is not so much a painting as a laboriously crafted sculptural bas-relief that happened to be made out of paint. A "single, preposterous object," Schjeldahl calls it. It was reputedly the sole piece that she worked on during the years of 1958 to 1966, the effort being mostly forced to an end when the artist was evicted from her San Francisco apartment; an event that required removal of a portion of wall so that the painting could be lowered out of a window into the street below (with Bay Area artist and experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner documenting the whole thing).

Over the years I was used to seeing the work routinely cited or reproduced in artists that dealt with the West Coast art scene of the postwar decades. With the artist being given a passing mention, nothing much said aside from the fact that she was the person who made the work in question. Thing is, for a number of years early on I didn't realize that it was a single painting -- rather I thought it was a series of works dealing with the came motif and compositional schema. Reason for that being that the painting tends to look different from one photograph to the next, depending on how it was photographed. The quality and angle of the lighting being the key to these differences. In some shots it looks darker, with the earth tones dominating. In others, it looks quite pale and bright, with the red and pink-ish hues being more pronounced. It's dense material facture also being another quality that captures differently from photo to photo, as well. Years ago, I had initially assumed there were several versions of the thing -- all being variations on a theme.