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

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