Lou Reed RIP

which has contributed more to the world: lou reed or finland?

xpost thread's in ILE so we should only talk about Reed's acting and political views here

Feel like this example has finally enabled me to understand in detail what is so annoying about this shtick of Tuomas's but I can't type it into my phone right now.

/fermats_last_theorem

best film appearances:

1) dick producer in One-Trick Pony
2) those monologues in Blue in the Face
3) keeping me briefly awake in Faraway So Close!

Fred Maher, who was in Scritti Politti, makers of "synth pop crap."

tuomas otm except, admittedly, for the 'knowledgeable pop fan' thing

I mean maybe if it was still the early eighties and you still had to go to Bleecker Bob's to get your VU or you were an Onion Area man stuck in the 80s, but all the intervening decades of Tower and Virgin megastores, deluxe box sets reissues, MTV, cable television, streaming services, PBS documentaries, Trainspotting, Doors Movie cameo, Wes Anderson movies, entire generations of bands citing them as an influence, generation that would know who he was all grown up and running things, the Czech's naming a revolution after them, the Israeli's naming a spider after him. My dad, like PPs, wouldn't know who he was, but he wouldn't be able to name a Beatles tune either. Not a good sample set.

Forgot to mention shelf full of books like Please Kill Me, From Velvets to Voidoids, Uptight, recent coffee table books devoted specifically to the VU.

I never know how to gauge these things, who's gonna who what about whom. But I was completely stunned and shocked to hear, along with the usual "Walk On The Wild Side," clips of "Heroin" and Metal Machine Music on the NBC News piece on Reed the other night. I don't know if there's someone at NBC News who's a huge Reed/Velvets fan, or if it was an accurate reflection of what most people know about Reed.

I mean, jeez, even our local newscasts (upstate NY) did stories about Reed's passing that highlighted the Velvets.

On the other hand, I'm a total moron and I know lots of stuff about VU/Lou Reed.

and here's some less important stuff about Lou

More email to Bob Lefsetz:

tour manager Bert Holman says in part:

Lou and I bonded on tour late night playing pinball in hotel children's game rooms to the point that I carried $50 in quarters where ever we went. I was mandated to book hotels that had pinball machines. He was a master of the slanted table and each players turn could take 10 or 15 minutes while the other remained a spectator and we chatted about life.

Czech's naming a revolution after them, the Israeli's
I knew in my phone-posting fury I would be drawn into making some egregious typographical error.

"Egregious," for those without the benefit of a Long Island education, means...

Most people in my work only know "Walk on the Wild Side" and possibly "Perfect Day". One girl had never heard of Lou Reed (she is 22 and from Bulgaria though).

I'm pretty sure the Czech revolution was actually named after the house music producer Green Velvet. It was time for the perculator!

this is beyond stupid. if anything, particularly in America under-30s might recognize Lou/Velvets from the copious use in films (which was def the case with my top-40 loving teenage niece, who knew the Velvets' songs from the fucking Juno soundtrack)

"Heroin" was in that terrible Denzel drunk pilot movie

Andy's Czech

do not feed the Tuomas

lol @ pplains

Praguey Notion

"we're gonna Havel a real good time together..."

this thread is about a great man not some tuomas faux-naif passive aggressive trolling bullshit

shut the fuck up tuomas to to threads about shit you do care about and talk about that

heh in the UK we used to have this carcrash called "the culture show" and I remember the host flirting w reed and basically asking tough questions like "why are you so great" and "why do your toes taste so nice" and at the end of the interview lou said "just so you know, there is now one english journalist I like". The scoundrel!

― Jesus (wins), Wednesday, 30 October 2013 02:11 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2d8t6_lou-reed-berlin-interview-2007_music

Laverne's questions are fairly innocuous but she does the right thing in asking him about the music which always seems to be the one thing he's happy to engage in.

Interesting!
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/10/29/how-many-albums-did-lou-reed-and-the-velvet-underground-really-sell/

more like poo peed

http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/stop-the-presses/lou-reed-most-cited-influence-rock-n-roll-234749432.html

is there anyone Bono hasn't been influenced by?

Tuomas.

loool

from that Wall Street Journal blog

Since then, “The Velvet Underground & Nico” has sold 558,000 copies, more than any of the band’s other releases.

that's not really a surprise, "Heroin" is far and away their most notorious (and probably well-known, again thanks to film) song

man Oh! Sweet Nuthin's been used a lot too:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0892754/filmoyear

Banana album had sold 400,000 by the time of Rolling Stone's 20th anniv. issue in '87, I remember. ("Trout Mask Replica" 50,000; "Modern Lovers" all of 5000.)

I think VU & Nico had even outsold Music From Big Pink by that point, if I remember my RS 20th anniv. numbers correctly...also, Astral Weeks was in the high four-digits.

ME: So, what do you think about Lou Reed?

DAD: You know, I liked that song when it came out even though it was "different." It was his big hit, but you probably know this, he was the "cult" guy. Had a whole other career.

ME: Did you ever listen... to the band he was in?

DAD: The, what, the Hot Pepper?

ME: Velvet Underground.

DAD: "Hot Pepper?" Yeah, the Velvet Underground. No, I never listened to them. Were they played on Dr. Demento or something?

ME: Well, maybe an FM station at 3 in the morning.

DAD: I never heard anything else of his besides that one song, but everybody says he influenced a lot of people. How many records did he make?

ME: I dunno, a dozen? 20?

DAD: Really? That many? I know all his stuff was about the shady side of New York. Kind of his thing, right?

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/metrics-emily-haines-pays-tribute-to-lou-reeds-integrity-and-humor-20131028

this is just... i cant...

ME: Well, yeah.

haha

My girlfriend, who's younger than me, was surprised to learn that there was ever a time when VU wasn't super-famous. The way she learned the '60s as a budding 1990s hipster, England had the Beatles and Stones, and America had the Velvet Underground.

does she think the Beach Boys were french or something

Yeah, I don't know. Those are the three bands she mentioned as being on the same level, in her sense of the era. (I'd put the Beach Boys down on the next rung too, tbh.)

Michel L'amour

But anyway my point is that it's not surprising even the mainstream obits talk about the Velvets -- they've been successfully retroactively inserted into the timeline as a major force, even if most people still haven't heard them.

Also see: the band the Box Tops guy formed in the 70s.

eh I dunno if Big Star is *quite* on that level. I mean CNN didn't cover Chilton's death

Don't think Big Star nearly as famous. No Andy Warhol connection for one. Bet a lot of people who watch That 70s Show don't even know where the song came from.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/metrics-emily-haines-pays-tribute-to-lou-reeds-integrity-and-humor-20131028

RIP heaven needed

http://img1.etsystatic.com/030/0/6276524/il_570xN.518555379_exud.jpg

re dads
My parents did not have a Velvet Underground album but my dad went to see them in Cleveland and said it was the "worst concert [he] he ever seen" and he walked out and then complained about it for the next 45 years. He hasn't mentioned it recently, but I'm sure I could get him going on how terrible it was just by mentioning Lou Reed.

― La Lechera, Monday, January 30, 2012 10:01 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Did your parents have a Velvet Underground album?