Search And Destroy: Lou Reed

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.

wow

What Would An Elvis Costello/Lou Reed Collabo Sound Like?

The sound of that collabo just made a child wake up and cry.

hmm. i have a sleeping child handy, let's see if i can duplicate the result...

nope. sleeping soundly. further study required.

(i actually like that clip, but it makes me want to hear just an elvis version of it.)

I've got one light sleeper that woke up and one sound sleeper that didn't so maybe I skewed the results a little bit.

Yeah, EC makes a lot of annoying pretentious career moves, but one has to admit the guy can sing.

But that EC / Lou performance seems a mess cos Lou's chorus talking is totally out of any rhythm - even with an old pro like EC I kept wondering how he could stay in time with that noise going on.

I think I'd rather hear them both play a full rock version of 'Wild Child'. Come on! I was talking to Chuck in his Ghengiz Khan suit and his wizard's hat ...

Still trying to get the measure of the first Lou Reed solo LP, but I like it; good stereo seems to help with this 1970s material.

Kind of worth it just for the very start of the solo career: the four bashes on the drum that start 'I Can't Stand It'

Listening to New York again for first time in years. It sounds terrific! The sound clear, clean, dynamic; the voice up-front and authoritative; all the material so good before they even started. I think it's often been said - even back in 1989 - that this LP's topical lyrical references would come to seem very dated - but that doesn't feel like a problem: a lot of it just isn't dated, and what is seems historically interesting. Maybe this really is the best solo LP.

I've just heard Transformer in full for the first time, and boy yes it IS strong!!

coney island baby still best lou reed solo album.

Yeah, that's the one I get the most pleasure out of ... Speaking of which, check this out: http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=90 for a rad version of "Kicks" with Don Cherry! Eeeyagh!

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