Lou Reed: The Blue Mask

i finally found this at my record store yesterday! total classic imo, if only for the quines guitar playing (esp. at the end of Women), waves of fear, and heavenly arms

xxp el perro del mar does a really great cover of heavenly arms

First forty seconds of "My House" = glorious.

oooo and the drum fills towards the end of 'my house' !! really fits with quine's offtime-ish riffing and packs a punch

esp. at the end of Women
i might be wrong, but i think this is actually lou on lead.

ahh yeah, youre right. quine in the left channel, lou in the right

yeah, i think the only reason i know that is cuz lou takes the solo on the "night w/ lou reed" video (which is essnetial if you dig this album btw).
it is a great solo, though, kinda redeems the song imo.

Thirty years old today!

I remember where I was that day, I was upstate in a bar

you and your friend got out a ouija board

I think I was watching the team from the university play football on tv.

im listening to this for the first time. so so good. quine's guitar on "waves of fear" is amazing.

The "tuning up" intro on "My House" is worth the price of the album.

I love "Women" and "Gun" and "Underneath the Bottle"

a special album for me because it was the first one to be released by Lou Reed after I became a fan. I had gone completely ape, buying or begging anything I could get my hands on for over a year - bootlegs, used anything, some forgotten English magazine that came with a cassette featuring an interview with him (he got mad at the interviewer and told him "I am not here to loon around," which lodged itself in my brain forever). I wasn't 100% sure what to make of it at first but "Waves of Fear" just knocked me over and when I was 15 I got drunk and listened to "My House" and that outro just washed over me and I then had a night-long argument with friends who didn't think "My House" was great.

still the best of the post-70s albums imo.

holy shit @ all of this

http://www.hideoutchicago.com/event/633787-robbie-fulks-chicago/

Mondays With Robbie
Robbie Fulks
R.I.P. Lou Reed - Blue Mask LP performed with loud band, featuring Michael Shannon as Lou Reed*
Mon, July 21, 2014
Doors: 6:00 pm / Show: 7:00 pm
The Hideout
Chicago, IL
$10.00

Wow

so weird, but sounds like it could be totally fun. is shannon going to be "playing" lou reed?

One would hope so

yeah he's gonna be the singer, fulks is only playing guitar

i guess Shannon has a band!

http://corporalband.com/

man I would totally go to this

yeah he's gonna be the singer, fulks is only playing guitar

A+, according to Harry Pussy
https://harrypussy.bandcamp.com/track/robert-ranks-reed-alphabetically

Think there are several videos of that Michael Shannon gig out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjYS585jwm4

Ha, my guitar teacher (along with Narducy et al.) backed him doing something similar with the Smiths a couple of years back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oFEkHYNe_k

Here's Shannon giving his tribute all to Bowie and Iggy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ88oSMRo_4

I think he skipped some awards show to do this instead.

Sylvia! Sylvia!

You guys know that story about Sylvia, Ivan Julian and Bo Diddley?

At Max’s Kansas City.

Can’t find the original story though, only me posting about it here/pvmic

You guys know that story about Sylvia, Ivan Julian and Bo Diddley?

― No Particular Place to POLL (James Redd and the Blecchs)

who topped?

Heh, close. Ivan and Sylvia went to see Bo and when they met him Bo thought Sylvia was Ivan’s girlfriend and tried to make some sort of deal with him.

Sylvia is supposed to be writing a memoir of some kind, which should be interesting ...

That'll make two ex-wives with books! Sylvia was interviewed extensively in the DeCurtis biography, there was a lot of interesting stuff about how he basically installed her as his manager and then wondered why the record company wasn't giving him the support he felt he deserved.

As for The Blue Mask, it started the Professor Lou phase of his career where he would put one good song on albums whose interest was maybe more conceptual than musical:

The Blue Mask: "The Gun"
Legendary Hearts: I actually like most of this
New Sensations: title track
Mistrial: "Tell It To Your Heart"
New York: "Dirty Blvd"
Songs for Drella: don't even like the Cale songs on this
Magic and Loss: title track
Set the Twilight Reeling: "Adventurer"
Ecstasy: wow, maybe four good songs!
The Raven: "Call On Me" is the only good song, but some of the recitations are funny
Lulu: about half of this is good

He wanted to make records that were taken as seriously as novels, but I want albums that I can play dozens of more times than I would ever want to reread a book.

Strongly disagree about New Sensations and STTR.

Strongly disagree overall

xp Not liking blue mask, New York, and Drella is quite a Lou Reed challop!

Strongly disagree overall

Same here.

Also I didn't really like Drella all that much until I got a hold of the Ed Lachman film of their performance. For whatever reason, I found that to be more moving even though the audio itself wasn't really different.

I know these albums well, I could probably recite you lyrics from most of the songs on them. But for an enjoyable listening experience, I'd even prefer Sally Can't Dance or Rock 'n' Roll Heart.

Strongly disagree overall

OTM ... and not for the first time, some people just have very different tastes!

The Blue Mask: "The Gun"

This whole album is consistently great.

Legendary Hearts: I actually like most of this

Ditto, but it needs more Quine.

New Sensations: title track

It's hit-or-miss, but there's at least three other songs on it as good as the title track.

Mistrial: "Tell It To Your Heart"

This album is so awful that I forgot a not-awful song was on it. But I'm not hearing an overriding "concept" on it (unless the concept is "GET ME OUT OF MY RCA CONTRACT NOW").

New York: "Dirty Blvd"

There's a few songs as good as (or better than) "Dirty Blvd", but when I listened to it a few months ago (for the first time in maybe 30+ years), I'd forgotten how infuriatingly both-sidesy "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim" was. Fuck that song.

yeah, "Waldheim" is the only really bad song on New York imo.

title track and “waves of fear” are incredible and inspiring. Fuck every other singer songwriter who ever lived, this is the real shit

wish I liked 80s lou more tbh, only thing I dig on NS is “high in the city”. “turn out the light” on LH is really cool, it captures that totally lou extremely laid back low pulse rate cool feeling I first got a hit of with “some kind love” back in high school

i like legendary hearts, which i only heard fairly recently, part of it is i think the low expectations based on the album cover

lou is one of those where i can tolerate the really bad stuff because i feel like he worked in such a way where if he wasn't prone to making such cringey stuff he would never be open to receiving the genius ones

This last is a fair point, although I feel like I have less tolerance for it than some. But I also think it is kind of an integral part of being a fan of his.

yeah the fact that lou generally delivers his great stuff with the same gusto that he does with his less great stuff has something to do with it.

I remember this Mojo interview with Lou where he was in quite a mood and the interviewer asked something about how he knows songs are good, a jazz record (monk maybe, something real classic) was playing and he walked over and held out his forearm, which had goosebumps and said "look at that, when i feel like that no one can tell me that's wrong"