Lou Reed RIP

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

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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?

Naw, I don't mean to say Big Star's as well-known as Velvet Underground. I do mean that they're a band most people have heard of, rather than have actually heard.

http://img1.etsystatic.com/030/0/6276524/il_570xN.518555379_exud.jpg
Poor Ernie HudsonIggy Pop.

I don't think that's true pp

like if you're the type of person who's heard of big star you're probably the type of person who's listened to big star

VU crept in at the edges of my awareness circa 1973 via thumbing through other people's record collections in college and hearing Heroin played on FM, back when AM ruled the airwaves and FM was an obscure backwater that drew 1/20th the audience of AM.

By the eighties people who liked music assumed you would have heard and liked the VU

By the nineties the VU were canonized. That's when I started seeing people actually owning their albums or their stuff on sale at Best Buy or Camelot.

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.

oh fine if you wanna bring facts into it

I guess I retconned in the flirting based on lou's final remark but the qs are total "plz talk for ten minutes about how you are a neglected genius, starting... NOW" fluffing (which is SOP for UK chat shows granted but for that to get a "now THIS english journalist is one of the good eggs" response is still pretty lolsome)

Not sure what the original point about Big Star was, but at least since the late 80s Lou was playing places like Radio City Music Hall, whilst Alex Chilton could be found at Tramps and Coney Island High.

I do like his marked preference for female music journalists, though. xp

Also bristled at questions about his personal life. Presumably because he was smart enough to know that shit didnt matter.

Who topped, him or Bowie?

> ME: I dunno, a dozen? 20?

i was browsing amazon the other week and noticed he had *4* of those cheap 5-album cd boxes available, the ones with the facsimile cardboard covers. all going for about £13

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Original-Album-Classics-Lou-Reed/dp/B0018BF1J0/ref=sr_1_1

Big Star has not been parodied in a Scooby Doo episode. game-set-match for Velvets imho

omg, just read description of that and other episodes. Awesome.

LL's dad story is hilarious

Scooby Doo episode is linked to one of the Velvets threads somewhere

http://i.imgur.com/wAVzbnG.jpg

All valid points.

Again, not trying to say Big Star is as well-known as VU. Hell, even though the guy had a No. 1 song, I'd maybe wager that more people know who Lou Reed is than Alex Chilton.

My point may have made more sense before the internet. I used to buy these picture books ranking the Top 100 albums of all time, where Sgt. Pepper would always be No. 1. Blonde on Blonde would always be No. 2. And in the Top 10, you'd eventually see that Warhol banana with a summary of how no one heard this record, but they all become nuclear physicists or whatever. How Nico's voice and John Cale's viola and Lou Reed's guitar and songwriting was this mysterious force that shaped rock and roll in more ways than anyone could imagine or even be aware of. Of course though, I had never heard any of this music. My parents didn't have any VU albums. Magic 105 didn't play the Velvet Underground. MTV didn't have it. It wasn't until I was 17 or so that I finally found a friend who had one of the records.

And the same goes for Big Star. Somewhere in the higher numbers of the list, there'd be the Eggleston photo of the ceiling fan. And the summary would say something like "Without this band, there'd be no R.E.M." And I wonder how in the world the deep-throated "Letter" guy inspired Michael Stipe.

Obviously, if I was reading one of those lists today, I'd hit up YouTube, or if they were really obscure, dailymotion, and find a damn tune to hear. But there are still many, many rock fans aware of the canon who still haven't done so. The people who know Walk on the Wild Side and nothing else. The people who snap their fingers to That 70s Show theme, not knowing it was written by a guy who also sang something called "Holocaust". They've heard of these bands, but asking them to name a song might be a little much.

I know, from the comfy confines of ILX, it sounds impossible. But man, 3.5 million people bought the last Eagles record released five years ago. Sincere rock music fans used to call my station and ask for crazy shit like "For All That It's Worth" by Buffalo Springsteen. Even if it's just because there's still a grocery store chain down here called Big Star and people know some band took their name from it, I'd say there are plenty of people aware of what Big Star was without having heard a song.

But no, I agree. There are far more people who know about Velvet Underground.

Gosh, you can hardly see John Kale back there behind his keyboards.

My dad remains incensed that he was subjected to such "pointless noise". From the day he told me that, I've realized that this is a fundamental difference between us -- I like chaotic noisy things, he does not. He will never see my side, and I will never change my mind.

But that brings me to my other point about the aftermath of LR's death -- it feels like a big family reunion prompted by a funeral where the thing we all have in common is the considerable legacy of the VU. I'm enjoying asking my friends about what effect his death has had on them.

For me, I've somehow tapped into long-buried teenage feelings and energy that I haven't felt in ages. That and being made extremely aware that I am one of those people whose entire life was changed by this band. It's not unpleasant!

it feels weird to me to say a band "changed my life", I mean my life changes all the time... otoh the very first multi-part harmony I ever figured out how to sing (and record) was Femme Fatale, so

But they really did change the course of my young life. In 1988-89 I hated everything and was super bored, and then my bff and I went to the library and got the best of VU (that's what they had, we were REM fans and wanted to hear the originals). We dressed up like beatniks and sang. Even though I had been reading about this band, once I heard them I realized that they weren't as far out or experimental as I thought they were. We were 13/14.

They came along at a pivotal time when I was ripe for liberating sounds and opened my world. That's life-changing.

I mean who cares, that's just my personal experience, but it's not unlike a lot of other people's experiences and those people are my people! I never had people before that.

sorry to get mushy-- that's just what listening to all the VU has done to my brain

no worries, I get it, I was just speaking for me personally

I didn't really have anyone to share VU with (apart from my brother, I guess), it was like a foreign world to me. albeit one I found v engaging

I feel like I have a good handle on how obscure VU and Reed are to the general public, but I'm still shocked that the best selling VU album only sold 500k!

like if you look at their lastfm stats, VU has 1.6 million listeners, but the first album only has 482k listeners. Who are these million VU fans who don't listen to the first album!?

Words and Music of Lou Reed listeners

nope, only 11,000 of them

my friends and i listened to them a lot. and my brother too, of course. we were all fans. and we all did a lot of drugs. but i don't know if it was the drug part we liked. it was just cool music. man, when that album came out with foggy notion on it? how cool was that!? more VU! they played that stuff soooooo much on the local college station. i always think of summer when i think of the velvet underground.

often "Foggy Notion" is my fave VU jam -- and makes me think they were a better band with Yule.

That (VU) was the first one I heard. To say it blew my 12-year-old mind is something of an understatement, but middle school was a pretty lonely place for a Velvets fan. Trying to pry my friends away from Huey Lewis records was a losing battle.

(I also heard the MC5 for the first time that same week. That was a good week.)

xp

middle school is a lonely place for everyone
i was never into drugs, i just liked the sound/groove and lyrics that weren't extra super stupid

Is it wrong that I kind of want that Iggy Pop shirt?

I've always wondered about the album sales of acts like the VU, Big Star, Eno, Ramones and the like, massively influential cult acts who likely sold a pittance, assuming anyone was even keeping count. You'd think the sheer number of words written about each would pump up the bottom line a bit, but who knows. I was shocked when I learned it took the Sex Pistols album 25 years to go platinum in the US, given it's just, like, one record from one notorious band that sparked an honest to goodness before-and-after revolution. You'd think over the decades more than a million curious people might have picked it up.

I want the Iggy Pop shirt that just says "Rational" on it.

I'm sure I bought the OOP banana album during college from St Marks Sounds' used bin, probably for the princely sum of $10-12.

I got mine in the early days of ebay.

Think it was £50 or thereabouts. Reasonably intact banana.

I can't remember where I bought it, didn't seem as hard to find or expensive as the second and third albums. Banana not peelable though, just a picture, not a stick on.

cassette - Hannukah gift from my brother when I was 13. he gave me the third album too.

When I got into them, I think the studio albums were all out of print, and all I could find on CD were those VU and Another VU comps which were expensive iirc, and the 2 separate discs of 1969 which were cheap, so 1969 Vol 1 was my first VU.

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