Laurie Anderson "United States Live": C/D?

I saw it at a record store a few months ago and put it down. Scary :(

I've owned it for years and never actually put on the whole thing end-to-end, but I can't remember whether that's because it's not good or because I never had the time. Tell you what, I'm gonna give it a shot today and get back to you.

I, too, have owned it for years. I've listened to the whole thing a handful of times. I should rip it, I bet having quick and easy access will make me pull out random bits more often. Lots of cool spoken word bits, ALL of _Big Science_ and then some. Get it cheap.

Classic. Sometimes it's my favorite of hers. Also huge and long, which I think works in her favor.

I was a youngster when my local radio station played the whole thing. I remember staying up til 4am flipping over tapes so I could get it all.

Tremendous piece of work, really imaginative. And catchy.

My verdict: Enjoyable, Not Essential. A lot of the best bits will already be familiar from Big Science, Mister Heartbreak, and Home of the Brave. The stuff in between is never bad and there are some fantastic little things that I don't think have been cherry-picked for other records. But it's quite a commitment as a listening experience so, I say, if you love Anderson, get it and enjoy it, I did. If you haven't already digested the studio albums from this period, I would say do them first.

i have the vinyl and as a result haven't listened to it in ages; but I certainly used to. there is a lot of stuff on there that never made other records, and a lot that did, but is here in a rawer and usually better form. classic, certainly

I used to have the cassette boxset. there were a couple sides that had it going on, but it's been years since I've heard it.

buy it!

Yeah, I think the vinyl effect is a big factor in my comments above - much as I love flipping records, ten sides is an awful lot of flipping!

I have sentimental feelings about this thing, despite never owning it. It's one of the first things I remember hearing when I discovered college radio in 1985. More recently (within the last year) I started actually listening to bits of it for the first time since then. It's good fun. But I can understand if folks say listening to the whole thing would be a bit much. Also I didn't know that Big Science was just pieces of it. It was weird to hear "Sweaters" again. I had really forgotten that one entirely and it's fantastic.

http://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/sammlungav/bilder/a/anderson_1985_25.jpg

Oh yeah, and she's hot on the cover.

otm

I discovered college radio in 1985

Ok, that explains the similarities in taste. I did the same in the fall of 1984. And Laurie Anderson was also one of the first things I heard.

I'm definitely going to make the effort to listen to this set this week.

I did the same in the fall of 1984

Heheh, well not trying to play one-upmanship but actually it was fall of '84 for me as well, but for some reason I haven't been able to remember much from before Christmas of that year.

I listened to US Live constantly during the fall of 1984. I had recorded it onto a series of 4 90-minute tapes (wich i still have) and I would put them in my Aiwa boombox on repeat during the night. There are a lot of really funny/spooky spoken parts that are unique to this record. The bit about being Jimmy Carter's lover, the Finnish farmers... Stumphenge...

Seriously, baaderonix, you should get it.

how big was she on college radio at the time?

laurie anderson was fairly well known at that time - not huge, but people knew who she was - appearences on snl, etc. I remember seeing united states up front with the new releases in a sam goody's when it came out. I don't remember hearing her on college radio at the time, but it makes sense.

there are some lotsa good bits that aren't on the albums, "hey ah" and "difficult listening hour". iirc the version of "born never asked" is v v good.

in fact it's a perfect record for the digital age, it'd be easy to pull together your own united states mix cd. hmmmm....

also, she was on warner bros, and 5 album releases were rare which got her some press. according to wikipedia, it reached 192 on the billboard 200. pretty good for a massive boxset. but it wasn't the kind of thing that was played on mainstream stations.

Finally hearing this thx to magic of the internet and it's absolutely beautiful and brilliant.

i kinda wish she'd restage this

this thread made me pull this out last year and give it another listen. everybody should try to make it through this at least once. the ratio of good stuff to filler is surprising.

what I had forgotten is how effectively she shifts gears from the wacky ironic humor into straight up dread & longing. "song for two jims" is devastating.

and then there's "mach 20"...

Ladies and gentlemen, what you are observing here are magnified examples or facsimiles of human sperm. Generation after generation of these tiny creatures have sacrificed themselves in their persistent, often futile, attempt to transport the basic male genetic code. But where is this information coming from? They have no eyes. No ears. Yet some of them already know that they will be bald. Over half of them will end up as women. Four hundred million living creatures, all knowing precisely the same thing--carbon copies of each other in a Kamikaze race against the clock.

Some of you may be surprised to learn that if a sperm were the size of a salmon it would be swimming its seven-inch journey at 500 miles per hour. If a sperm were the size of a whale, however, it would be traveling at 15,000 miles per hour, or Mach 20. Now imagine, if you will, four hundred million blind and desperate sperm whales departing from the Pacific coast of North America swimming at 15,000 mph and arriving in Japanese coastal waters in just under 45 minutes.

When I was in high school our hipster creative writing teacher took us on a field trip to go to a Laurie Anderson concert. At the beginning of the show she informed the audience that flash photography wasn't allowed, then had the ushers pass out sketchpads and chalk for anyone who wanted to record images of the performance.

bought it on cd a long time ago. never listened to the whole thing. not sure if i will ever make it in one sitting.

Had to give a presentation in class today about postmodern theory and one of the assigned readings made reference to United States Live so I figured, what the hell, I'll break this thing out to get myself in the right frame of mind. Definitely my first listen since those 2007 posts above. Still sounds fucking great, and genuinely, strikingly weird in certain patches. Pretty low on bullshit. Moments of straight up brilliance. Note, I am only most of the way through disc two out of five so this may change. But I can strongly endorse it.

My roommate: "In the battle of which of us has the stranger music, I think you have prevailed."

haha oh man "Talk Show" is fuckin cool

I had this dream and in it my mother was just sitting there
Cutting out pictures of hampsters from magazines
And some of the pictures of hamsters and pests
Some of the scenes were hamsters and some were in the background
She's got a whole pile of these, these cedar chips, you know the kind
The kind from the bottoms of hamsters from hamster cages
She's gluing them onto the frames for the pictures
She glues them together and frames the pictures and then hangs them over the fireplace
That's more or less her method
Then suddenly I realise that this just her way of suggesting to me
That I should become a Structuralist Filmmaker
Which I had you know planned to do anyway

It's also cool because, I mean, I love Big Science but it's weird to take this sprawling body of material and boil it down to a collection of (largely) discrete tracks. The tracks here are also generally pretty discrete but things come in and out of focus; there are less demanding passages that waft along and then something more coherent comes into focus. I guess this happens in a smaller way on the studio albums but clearly the scale is just so different.

Also, I've probably rambled about this before in reference to "O Superman" or maybe T-Pain, but the vocal effects here have this incredible quality of conveying the warmth and humor and fears and desperations of a human being pressing their face up against and through the machine. It has as much to do the full, rich sounds of the synths as it does with the vocal performance, I think. Digging it on "Let X=X" right now for example - - - there's nothing at all sterile or mechanical about that sound no matter what else is going on in the content.

WhO TORe UP ALL MY wALLpaPER SAmPleS??!

god, this is great

whenever I am at a loss, "it was up in the mountains" never fails to reassure me and make me feel better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwZ9mpzaSQU

starts at the 4:00 mark

who ate all... the grapes?!

transcript of "mach 20" upthread cuts out just before my favorite favorite favorite line in almost anything ever:

How would they be received?

current runs through bodies, and then... it doesn't.

hooray i have a listening plan for this evening now

:( I feel like I will never see a live concert of hers

who ate all... the grapes?!

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 24 October 2012 04:35 (9 hours ago)

almost typed this last night!

yeah I need to listen to this again

figured it was my responsibility

wallpaper through grapes has to be the highlight of this whole thing, I was in stitches. Just now starting side eight though.

seeing her on friday :D

I saw her once in the 80's (for Strange Angels), once in the 90's around the time of The Ugly One With The Jewels (that show was amazing), and once around 2004 or so with a more stripped down solo show. I need to see her sometime this decade to keep my streak going.

have you ever really considered

how much

your buildings

actually

weigh?

http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/1325096181-buckminster-fuller-copy.jpg

Never listened to this -- but it's on Spotify.

then sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair

Hard to do packed like sardines on the Green Line to Boston. But I am trying.

Hahaha I am trying to listen to this straight through on spotify but having it interrupted by a dude yelling at me about "advanced auto parts!" every 3 songs is kind of ruining the flow.

That's part of the album iirc

Yeah, does he found like he's yelling thru an Eventide H3000 harmonizer?

The whole thing on Amazon for £9 on MP3. One click...

I met this guy the other day. He looked like he might be a... part-ordering clerk at an automotive supercenter. Which...he turned out...to be. And I said... ''Oh boy... the right part, again.''

cross-posting from Prolific bands/arists with one super special album that will always mean the world to you but you don't really care for the rest of their relatively sizable discography since this seems like the thread where folks would appreciate it

I went pretty deep on the performance history of Laurie Anderson's United States for a research project in undergrad. I came away feeling sad there isn't more surviving documentation of the full two-night, 8-hour piece (though there was a lovely book full of photographs and texts, produced as a sort of exhibition catalog to accompany the premier of the full 4-part United States in 1983) -- or if there is and it's out there, I couldn't find it.

― handsome boy modelling software (bernard snowy), Friday, November 27, 2020 1:12 PM (twenty-two minutes ago)

What the heck, I dug out the final presentation I put together for that class and uploaded it to Google Drives; if anyone's interested you can get it here. I would recommend downloading the file, as the embedded video links don't seem to display right in Google Slides. Don't wanna toot my own horn but I think I did good work in assembling the bibliography and crafting a narrative (check the slide notes)

Working on Anderson was such a labor of love. I miss being in school!

― handsome boy modelling software (bernard snowy), Friday, November 27, 2020 1:17 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

ooh wow thanks!

A month ago I asked her if she had video of these performances, and she said she did not. They apparently have multi-track recordings in "deep storage" but didn't get video

it's very sad to me that there isn't a full filmed documentation

even the album is only 4 hours long ish?

Yeah... I think the fullest possible reconstruction at this time would be to sit down with a copy of the album and the 1984 Harper and Row coffeetable book, which is sequenced like the performance and titles each segment in a way that is generally consistent with the titles used on the tracklist.

From reading reviews around the time that United States Live was released, I got the sense that most of the 3 or 4 hours of performed material that didn't make the LP set was wordless music accompanied by visuals (slides, dance) used to bridge the spoken word material – I don't think there were any "stories" left on the cutting room floor.

*I should say, the fullest possible reconstruction available to the general listening public. Those audiotapes fgti mentioned are tantalizing! Even without the visual accompaniment, I would be very interested to hear how the (s)pacing of the bits that we have differs between the soundboard recordings and the released LPs.

Wonderful thank you! Still, it kills me that USA Live was never properly documented on film.

Ha! Just last weekend I played the live version of Big Science from this on my radio show:

https://www.mixcloud.com/arefriendselectric/are-friends-electric-nov-22-2020/

- a friend gave me the LP set as a ridiculously generous birthday present in HS. I haven’t listened to it much in a few years - but at one point I was playing the whole thing a lot. And probably taping it for friends...

I’m going to enjoy digging into those slides - thanks!

I don't think the show was actually 8 hou

...rs long. My memory of the show was that it ran for about 3 1/2 hours each night over 2 nights, and that includes the break between acts. It was really probably more like 6 hours. The United States book showed that very little text was deleted from the albums, and I think that most of what got omitted was repetition and trimming the fat between tracks.

excellent revive, thanks all

I loved this record SO MUCH when I was like 19, I would just listen to my tapes on an auto-reverse boombox at night

Looooove this thread, thanks so much, def. incl. links which I must check, esp to xpost presentation. I've never heard the whole thing as such---mainly the single albums w same material, but also some of it (video x audio) was excerpted on 80s cable TV, some concert series(s): believe it or not, but the USA Network used to be esp. good for this kind of thing, also she had some videos on MTV, don't think they quite knew what to do with her, but the videos were state of the art and distinctive and the Warners backing sure seemed to help (yall know all the vids back then were pay-for-play, right? Commercials, not payola, all good with the FCC; IRS Records even had its own show, The Cutting Edge). Also some of that on PBS, and she hosted their Live From Off Center, all manner of compatible Downtown etc. hipness.
A couple of things I read somewhere: back when she was still mainly or exclusively a visual artist, she meant to counter the massive male-seeming works of Richard Serra etc., with things she considered more feminine: witty, cheeky, sly, fluid, disconcerting, yet beguiling too, like, come along if you can, in-joeks for however many get 'em (reminding me of one of Warhol's very early colleagues saying that they meant Pop Art to counter the male dominance (incl. by righteous Cold War closet cases) of Abstract Expressionism).
The other thing she said that I remember: she was teaching one of those monster Art courses that everybody took because they had to choose an elective and thought it would be some easy credit hours, and her microphone commentary for the slides started sliding more and more through her own associations (reminded of this by the xpost sperm commentary upthread), and while there were no complaints to the Dean etc., she knew it was time to go.
I knew some people who saw the shows and said the box worked much better as stand-alone than, say, Einstein On The Beach

Excellent revive, thank you!

i still prefer the way Big Science uses those particlar tracks, especially "Let X=X" and "Example" and "It Tango" but this show is its own very special thing, the difference between Albums by Artists and what you can do outside of those confines

xpost to dow: Your memory is correct. In an interview she did with William Duckworth for his book Talking Music, Anderson talks about her Columbia MFA sculpture days, when that massive welded steel aesthetic (believe she used the term "machismo") was very much in vogue. If you want to see the kind of work Anderson was exhibiting before her turn to performance art, RoseLee Goldberg's 2000 book (which someone has helpfully/illegally scanned in its entirety) is the place to start.

The art history lecture story recurs frequently. The first place I recall finding it was in a Christian Science Monitor interview from 1983, where Anderson told the interviewer: "I was a horrible teacher, because I didn't keep up with the field and I couldn't remember anything. So I improvised. And I found I really enjoyed being in the dark with people, talking to them and showing them pictures."

... one last thing while I'm nerding out: I know plenty has been written about the NYC loft scene of the 1970s, but I want to put in a plug for Toni Sant's book, Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde. Almost 1/3rd of the book is taken up by a long interview with Martha Wilson, which I found invaluable for understanding how performance art fit into the cultural landscape during that moment in time when Anderson was crossing over to mainstream success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR6zVM1MFo8

Haven't spun this in 20+ years, really enjoying it but it's a commitment - 4.5 hours! I love what sounds like non-performers reading their lines. "You're walking, and you're falling"

Anyone here see the original production? I was under the impression it had been filmed, but possibly more for preservation than anything else and that the film has never been made available to the public.

it was! Home of the Brave, on VHS, is from the United States tour

(or maybe it isn't?)

I think that was a later tour, yeah

There's discussion upthread including a confirmation from Anderson herself that USA Live was not filmed.

Aw man