Search And Destroy: Lou Reed

Those ARE my "true" reasons. As I stated, I was beyond tired and kept it short and sweet (as opposed to my near rants in previous posts). Anyways, "near flawless" is to mean whatever it means to each and every individual, obviously. What is a "flaw" to me may not be to you (and vice versa), of course.

Anyways, in this particular case (Lou Reed 'Berlin'): "near flawless" would mean (to me, of course) the fact that Lou was able to put on wax (record) the entire second side (other than the final track) in a near (seeing as everything has flaws, regardless of ones individual definition, nothing is perfect - doesn't exist, not in my mind anyways) flawless manner. The expressions sought (or seemingly sought - since you're clearly one for games of silly semantics) after on side two are expressed as well as I (the listener) could have hoped for them to be expressed. Which I (personally, of course) can not say the same for side one (which is riddled with flaws, in my opinion).

Hope that helps. If not, don't expect another reprise.

Now, it's only fair that YOU (sir) further elaborate on your VERY scantily written response to the original question: Search and Destroy-Lou Reed (of course, I chose to focus my response on 'Berlin'...you don't have to, though - in case you were not aware of this).

*By the way, rock (along with anything/everything else in life) isn't MEANT to be "flawed" nor "flawless". It is whatever the individual views it to be (reality is...that there isn't a concrete reality - dig?).

*Also, a part of Lou's appeal IS that he and his music, etc, are "flawed" (opinion depending of course, Mr. Semantic...or...is that Mr. Grainofsalt).

I don't get much out of "Berlin" - it's got my favourite LR song on though ("Sad Song") which seems to crystallise the exhaustion and frustration of the rest of the record nicely, and move beyond the squalid specifics of the rest of the album (which are OK in a short- story way but don't move me) to something more universal. But I'm a sucker for the universal.

Anyways.

However, from what I gather and/or feel: Side two (again, I'll just stick with the half that I, personally, prefer) is just complete and utter despair and helplessness (which you've, I'm sure, already figured out). From the fact that violence can no longer control the situation nor can drugs on "Caroline Says II" to having kids being taken away to his loss of control of his gal in "The Kids" to the suicide in "The Bed" to the final cut "Sad Song" ending (appropriately, though this is my least favorite of the second side, it's still a fine track) with the male lead of the album dealing with his over-all "railroading" (or his dealing with the truth of his gal not measuring up to his wants/needs/wishes/whatever) - which probably means that he, himself, is simply not facing the facts about himself (Lou?).

Just a life (lives, actually) completely and utterly spun (not spinning, but already spun) out of any semblance of control. Which some of us (unfortunately) can relate to, on some level, such depths of darkness or human suffering. Which is what I meant by "near flawless expression". To/for me, side two just hits the deepest-darkness moments in life right on the head (bullseye) - as far as the expression or feeling. Albeit ULTRA dark moments (which, luckily, most of us have to take in a more abstract sense in order to relate to).

But, yea...see I'm just the opposite of you - I very much prefer the short story details (whether in song or literature, etc). Regardless of how downright unbearable they may be (such is the case on side two, in particular).

Well, I know that my galfriend can't freakin stand the album. She just couldn't take the amount of hatred and misery she felt from it. Which I find somewhat liberating in some odd (maybe even perverse) way.

I tht I did Reed already: can't find it here, musta been on another thread.
SO: metal machine music = ok by me; the rest = ok by me, but I wouldn't agitate to impede their destruction by Xtian fundie vinyl- pyre.

Don't stop digging through these ancient threads!! Don't even slow down!! I wuv to see what piffle I wuz dropping back in the day (= May).

Studio - Magic & Loss. Lou doesn't lose his humour on this one. Very, very touching lyrics. For the subject adequate minimal low-key instrumentation.

N.B. I guess this was the first S&D. Rather short I think. Btw I just found out (but you probably all know) that "Search & Destroy" was a song on "Raw Power" by The Stooges.

Destroy: The Bells. Not only is his voice incredibly wavery and flatulent on this one. I dare anyone to truly "get down" to "Disco Mystic". Unless they meant suffer immediate depression.

Oh, and if you really wanna Search, just get the box set. A listenable survey of a chap I'm too young and too unworshipping of NYC to appreciate beyond those sweet, sweet Velvets.

Tripple destroy: Metal Machine Music.

$25 at the Django's in Portland, Oregon a few weeks ago.

You, of course, need the 4 VU studio albums and Live: 1969.

All of his live albums that I've heard are pretty desolate.

horrible album art i'm afraid

Basically any albums with fretless bassist Fernando Saunders are great. His '80s and '90s work is overlooked.

I discovered Lou through "New York," so that will probably always be my favorite solo album. After that, probably Berlin, Transformer, and this "Master Class" bootleg (with Little Jimmy Scott) that I really need to Torrent one of these days.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/06/lou_reed_talks_his_new_radio_s.html

what a dumbass

dude are you nuts, "What are you, a fucking asshole?" is one of the all-time great interview answers

classic

classic asshole

lou reed, a real classhole

but seriously, J0hn D, you should def. try to work "What are you, a fucking asshole?" into any future interviews you do.

I think I'm gonna go with "what are you fucking, an asshole?" just to put my own special spin on it

I'm not really sure why the song "Coney Island Baby" had never made an impression on me until now, but I sure dig it.

still creepy after all these years

Holy shit, this is amazing, Paris 1974. He's got the whole new wave thing down and punk hasn't even happened yet.
&

Fopp are selling a box of 5 Lou Reed CDs for £15. I am playing the first record now. It sounds good, my hi-fi seems wired for rock! Transformer, Berlin, Sally Can't Dance, Coney Island Baby to come.

Bizarre: Mark S in summer 2001 was talking about digging through ancient threads

Those threads Egyptians to Mark S's Romans.

Does that make current ILX the Dark Ages or the Renaissance?

i think 'transformer' is a really wonderful, consistent record.

'berlin' i like, except for those plodding slow numbers at the end. lou's concept just isn't developed enough for me to buy into the tragedy of those tracks

I downloaded Hudson River Wind Meditations from emusic last month. Listening to it is like doing tai-chi without moving.

Berlin was a bit of a dissapointed i thought (when i heard it in 2005) I am still rooting for New York. Dirty Blvd is awesome :)

Rooting? Have you heard it? Don't believe the doubters, it's terrific!

Ever noticed how awesome Jack Bruce's bass parts are on Berlin?

'berlin' i like, except for those plodding slow numbers at the end.

!!! the last third with the slow numbers is the good part. I like the album in general but chunks of it are really dire - production/arrangements seem a bit wrong in places.

but if we paid attention to bad arrangements and dire production we'd never listen to Lou!

don't forget the occasionally god-awful singing!

speaking of which:
yeesh.

unsure re VU, someone else would be more qualified to answer that

and xpost to alfred yes the stuff on the 73 tour is great

honestly and maybe this is a small thing or not even a thing but i really appreciate that hermes has enough nuance to always try to parse who Lou is presenting himself as onstage or to the press, vs Lou the human.
you really start to feel the intense weight of VU on him

oh also, there’s a great quote from cale early on about how Reed deliberately pushed people’s buttons & brought out their worst as a way of confirming his paranoia / expecting the worst, so that he could just deal with it out in the open. it was so astute & fascinating. i’ll try to dig it up & post it

I’m finally dipping into lou a bit. I think I was always too intimidated before. The big songs everyone seems to know, I don’t really know so well. So maybe it’s a little trite to say this but “Perfect Day” is a masterpiece and I love it. Do I hear lou channeling Roy Orbison in some of his little crying hiccups?
I’m giving “The Blue Mask” a try as well and beyond immediately loving the Robert Quine guitar it’s growing on me. I guess I always found solo lou’s vocal delivery off-putting but maybe it’s starting to open up for me.

Perfect Day is gorgeous. It's so pretty and sad, and the "reap what you sow" part is just... chilling.

I'm a die-hard VU fan and I love Lou up to Street Hassle, which might be my fave solo album of his. After that I can't deal with his stilted singing. Could not get into the Blue Mask. There are a few songs here and there that I like on his later stuff, but it's pretty sparse. If the only thing he ever recorded was "Street Hassle" it would be enough to win me over. If it was instrumental it would STILL be an amazing song.

The Street Hassle live album, Take No Prisoners is pretty great too. It might be the Louest Lou Reed album of them all.

“Blue mask” title track is the fucking TRUTH

The Blue Mask is what I believe young people call a no-skipper

other great albums include New York, Songs for Drella, Magic and Loss, Set the Twilight Reeling and Ecstasy

and obv Lulu is great fun and has very high highs (it has been awhile since I listened to it in its entirety)

that book sounds really intriguing

I forgot about Songs for Drella. I like that one a lot.

I skip "Average Guy" and "The Day John Kennedy Died."

also *cough* Coney Island Baby, Legendary Hearts, New Sensations -- all good to great.

I co-sign the love for those '90s albums.

(xp) Both are funny but only the first is intentionally so.

Mind you, in retrospect, the line about him worrying that his liver's too big and it hurts to the touch is a bit :-O

Will Hermes is on the latest Jokermen pod, should be good. I've been enjoying their trawl through '90s Reed & Cale (and even listened to all 3 hours on Bisch Bosch).

xxp I skip “The Gun” b/c it’s too disturbing to handle. Love the others…

the bells is great too, imo

The Blue Mask is a no-skipper for me, and I also love the live video (still on DVD) that he recorded at the Bottom Line for a "homecoming" show around this time - everyone plays great and is in great spirits, clearly still on good terms.

There's a "more disturbing" version of "The Gun" that's been talked about over many years - I imagine the NYPL has it now, but I would definitely listen to it. By this point, I doubt it's as harrowing as people's imaginations have speculated it to be.

i'm reading ian penman's new yorker piece on the book. i might wind up reading the book at some point. i don't know. right now, tertiary sources will do. penman says:

Reed later claimed that the aim of the ECT was to “cure” him of being gay, but his sister, who seems like one of the more reliable witnesses here, denies this, and there’s no evidence to support it. Whatever the reasoning, the treatment became a defining moment in his life. Hermes describes it as “part of Reed’s mythology.”

it just frustrates me so much, this argument. was lou reed given electroshock because he was gay, like he says, or because he was mentally ill, like the people who knew him during this period say? like there's a differential diagnosis to be made there.

maybe people are confused by the fact that homosexuality was widely considered a mental illness at the time. by the fact that he _could_, in fact, have been given electroshock because he was homosexual, and for no other reason. penman, above, claims that there's "no evidence" to support this, which is an interesting way of framing it. that reed said, personally, that he was given electroshock because he was gay isn't considered "evidence"; he doesn't have the right to speak about his own life, his own experiences. this is, i've found, a pretty common experience queer people have.

-

lou reed and i are very different people, but i do think we have something in common. i think that in our own separate ways, lou reed and i are sort of mythological creatures.

it was one of the most curious parts of transition, for me - realizing that i had unwittingly become a mythological creature. a fantastic beast, if you will. all of a sudden everybody looked at me and judged me and had all of these _ideas_ about me. it's not that i love that or hate that, i just find that... very interesting. other people saw me in all of these different weird, mythological ways, and it changed the way i thought of myself. i started looking at myself in all sorts of different mythological ways, understood that i didn't have to be one thing, didn't have to have one consistent self that everybody agreed on.

-

which is to say that there are multiple perspectives to look at reed's electroshock from, and that, to me, is what i see in reed's narrative and weiner's narrative.

In later years, Lou spoke of being beaten up routinely after school at Freeport Junior High School, which boasted a number of gangs at the time. However, our next door neighbor told me, years later, that Lou was challenging, unfriendly, provocative even, daring him to “cross that line onto my property and you’ll see what happens.”

so what's the narrative in there? lou reed was 'provocative', and so other people beat him up. i understand this narrative. i was bullied as a child. i was _asking for it_ because of my behavior.

how often, do you think, other kids at that junior high called lou reed a "faggot"?

-

reed himself is a mystery to me. i didn't ever know him. he's dead now. anything i say about him says a lot about me, and very little, if anything, about him. this is the nature of mythological figures. we want to know their reality, who they really are. not only can't we, confronting them is to confront the impossibility of knowing anyone, really, who's different from us. lou reed was different from pretty much everyone. That's still what being queer is, to me, today. for reed, in his day, how much more might he have felt that?

so penman asks:

What happens when mythmaking becomes part of your daily life? The difficulty for any Lou Reed biographer—including the latest, the rock critic Will Hermes, the author of a bulky new chronicle called “Lou Reed: The King of New York”—is that sometimes Reed embraced his persona, and took it as far as it would go, and sometimes he talked as though he were merely its pained victim. In the seventies, coverage of Reed swung between binaries, sometimes in the same article: serious artist vs. sleazy hustler, brave truthteller vs. sly put-on merchant.

i myself have a tendency to "swing wildly between binaries". there are many ways people describe this tendency, many lenses through which people see us, many myths. fearful-avoidant attachment time. complex post-traumatic stress disorder. borderline personality disorder. these are all newer myths. in reed's day, people didn't see him through those lenses. today, i can look at penman write:

He was one of those people who carry the air of a child hurt so bad he never quite recovered. Always testing the bona fides of friends, like the hipster equivalent of a polygraph. The eggshells they once walked on they now make other people tread.

and say oh yeah, i got that too, that's my BPD, i'm working on that, working hard to not perpetuate that cycle of abuse. that's not him, though. those were different times, as distant from me as a stutz bearcat was from reed himself. that's one of the reasons i don't feel like i can truly understand him - people back in his day just _thought_ differently. the frameworks around reality were different.

to an extent. to an extent. the things lou reed wanted... nearly everybody, including people who wanted those same things, thought it was sick and wrong to want those things. put in those terms, framed that way... that's my lived experience. that's how i grew up. i learned to hate myself. i internalized a bunch of fucked up ideas. i've tried to deal with them as best i can, but not all of those ways were healthy. i didn't... i didn't really have a stable sense of self. Penman says Lester Bangs says of Reed: "three different justifications for one course of action may be proffered in a single night, each believed in the moment it’s delivered". This is attributed to Reed being a "speed-freak". Maybe that's the reason. I've done that exact same thing, many times, and I've never done speed. I take Adderall a lot, but _right now_ most people don't consider that speed. That framing might change later.

The world keeps shifting around me. The world keeps changing. If I change, it's me just trying to keep up with this crazy shit. Five years is a lifetime to me. Ten years is two lifetimes.

-

Hermes doesn’t dig too deep when it comes to Reed’s sexuality, which is perhaps understandable; speculation about the intimate lives of others is difficult to pull off without undue prurience. But the book’s reliance on more au-courant terms, such as “gender fluid” and “nonbinary,” can feel like decals applied to an opaque surface, with none of the silt or soil of real life.

which i guess answers a question i had just last week, when i read an excerpt from Hermes' last book, published ten years ago, describing "old-school trannies washing down demerol capsules with swigs of whiskey". What, I wondered idly, would Hermes say about that scene today? i guess he avoids "undue prurience". personally, i prefer the prurience. i prefer it to the discreet assumptions, the quiet myths. that's just me, though.

me, i'm not going to judge the way penman does. i don't... i don't need someone else to provide the silt and soil. i know enough about the reality of things. penman says "Reed claimed, at one point, that he was 'one hundred per cent gay'." i don't really know why Reed said that. those were different times. i know how fucking hard i've worked to be queer. how much i've given up. i know how hard all of us work. i didn't do all that so i could be fucking _straight_. lou reed said he got electroshock therapy to _cure_ him of being gay. what does it mean, what does it say about _him_, if he loves women, if he marries women?

to me? nothing. precisely nothing. marrying a woman doesn't have to make you straight. you can love whoever, be whoever, and be queer. it wasn't like that then. he had to _prove_ it. over and over again.

-

so when it comes to rachel humphreys... i can see why he might have done what he did. why he might have called her a man, over and over and over again, referred to her with he/him pronouns, over and over again. why he might have needed to believe that, even as he defended her against everyone else, the ones who said cruel, vicious things about her. i feel so _strongly_ about what he did, though. so strongly. to do that to someone you love, someone who supports you, someone who _trusts_ you, over and over and over again... reed did many cruel things in his life. to me, it is the most shocking. it makes me angry, and it makes me sad, and i allow myself to admit that, i allow myself to feel those things about him. i have the right to feel how i feel. it's not a question of right or wrong.

lou reed was probably the best hope humphreys had. lou reed was at his worst, a cruel, fucked-up man, but it was more than most women like her had. we can call her, today, a "trans woman", but then, she was a tranny, a man, a monster, a fraud, a threat. that was how people saw women like her. i can look at pictures of her now and see a woman whose beauty i envy. what difference does it make? she died many years ago. died and was buried in a mass grave.

that's not lou's _fault_. she loved him and he hurt her, he called her a man and wouldn't let her get the surgery she so desperately wanted. he needed to be 100% gay. he needed her to be a man. he loved women, married women, but he needed her to be a man. it's not his fault what happened to her.

reed was the best chance she had, he offered her more than any other man could in those days, and it wasn't enough for her. they broke up and she consoled herself, perhaps, by washing down demerol capsules with swigs of whiskey, and she got sick and she died. well. we remember her now. we know her name. because of the man who loved her deeply and hurt her deeply.

there's no right or wrong in that. reed isn't a good or evil man because of it. it's just something that happened, things that were done by a man i didn't know, a man i admire deeply, i man i despise deeply. this man, this monster, this myth.

would people be interested in a chronological Lou Reed solo listening thread

Yes!

Seconded.

yes!

yessss especially now

I’m in.

please

Yep.

what does it say about _him_, if he loves women, if he marries women?

to me? nothing. precisely nothing. marrying a woman doesn't have to make you straight. you can love whoever, be whoever, and be queer. it wasn't like that then. he had to _prove_ it. over and over again.

The conclusion Hermes reaches too.

im skittish but maybe

I will get sad at the mean things people will say about “high in the city” but yes go ahead

I will laugh at the mean things people will say about "Animal Language" because Lou would have wanted it that way.

Ooohhh-wow, bow-wow
Ooohhh-wow, bow-wow

xposts to kate

hermes’ critical distance is a bit disconcerting at times, esp wrt Rachel and the way she is tuned in and out of the story like a low-frequency radio station… but i think, me personally, that his choice to avoid speculation is maybe more uh, respectful somehow.
like i do want the color added but not by hermes, someone better equipped to read between those lines idk someone queer etc etc

though it def does feel cold, when she drops from the story because lou stops talking abt her. it is very much that thing of her only existing when lou chooses to See her which sucks when you stare down the weight of that (and obv a crappy under-acknowledged reality for a lot of queer/trans ppl)

(but also i think the book is better than that new yorker review allows but that is just me lol)

There's a "more disturbing" version of "The Gun" that's been talked about over many years

have never heard about this -- have you got a link to something about it?

From the liner notes for the Between Thought and Expression box set:

On "The Gun" Lou once again takes on the persona of the criminally insane. The effect is chilling. "We had a version of 'The Gun' that was even worse than the one on the album but we all agreed that it went way too far, that none of us would ever listen to it. It just went too far, it went over the line. There was no reason to do that."
The band's performance on the version Lou is referring to is not all that different from what eventually appeared on record. What did go "too far" was Lou's character playing as a couple of improvised lyric lines are so violent as to make the stomach recoil.

in other news the Jokermen podcast 2-parter on Songs For Drella is so gooood, exactly the nerdy indepth exegesis i needed

Ooooh they're takin' her kids away!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVcHLZ4B1mY