Search And Destroy: Lou Reed

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The Lincoln Center security guards sure looked confused by the Disco Mystic dancers in their see-through but brightly colored outfits

here's some of it---no time to watch yet, although I saw some of "Sister Ray" this weekend (didn't seem that hot, though I came in toward the end). Looks like a decent selection, though some are excerpts (and one's already been removed, or did it just stop functioning):
http://www.uncut.co.uk/news/watch-performances-lou-reed-tribute-concert-87565

Lou's Spotify playlists are kinda cool
https://open.spotify.com/user/loureedofficial/playlist/1Pjh3fIfbzCHtVQ505QwZ3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aNC8tcMBzA

You can get a NYC library card with Lou's Transformer image on it.

When it's scanned, it doesn't beep, it yells "Turn up the guitar!"

Except when R Quine checks something out it says “turn down the guitar”

Lol

Excerpt from Anthony DeCurtis bio, in large part about Berlin and some of Lou's more monstrous qualities in his first marriage

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/oct/01/my-brilliant-troubled-friend-lou-reed-a-life-anthony-decurtis-berlin

I'm about 1

Oops...100 pages into the Victor Bockris book. Of all my favourite bands and singers--and the Velvet Underground are top three--I have less sense of Lou Reed as a person than anyone. He's a complete blank to me.

lol that Bockris book is ... not good

there's a lot of good stories/anecdotes in it and some of the axes Bockris seems compelled to grind are amusing but his writing is pretty sloppy

Bockris book much more fun than the pompous DeCurtis bio or the risible Howard Sounes effort.

sounds plausible

I read Bockris's Warhol book (ages ago) and liked that. I haven't been reading this one as reliable scholarship; I know Bockris's reputation isn't great, but the tone is agreeable--a little junky, but right now I'd rather have that than a serious analysis of Reed's work.

Bio I’d really like to read is the Will Hermes one, assuming he ever finishes it.

yeah, i've been wondering about that one — maybe they pushed it back after the decurtis one came out?
haven't read a perfect lou bio, really. I thought the Decurtis one was OK, especially since he paid more attention to the later days, as opposed to just rehashing the old stuff.

I thumbed through the DeCurtis one and looked up how he handled "Coney Island Baby", which was actually p interesting. He catalogued all the doo-wop references.

interesting lou letter to delmore schwartz, circa 1965

Dear Delmore- it has been a very long summer and winter. I got out of school just in time to have hepatitis. it wasn’t a bad case though and after 2 odd months I was out of bed. then I became involved with a record company and worked at a job as a songwriter a performer and a musician. I helped make one of those cheap $1.98 albums that you see in supermarkets. We wrote 33 songs and sang, played and recorded them in 2 days. I commuted from the city to home from home to the city. worked 6-7 days a week from9 or 10 to anywhere from 11 to 3 in the morning not counting my lousy hour trips on the train to get to the studio. My first record came out. It was hysterically funny if you go for that kind of thing. We recruited a group to accompany me on promotional trips. One guy was from Wales. He got here on a Leonard Berstein scholarship, a starving viola player. the other was a violin player from harvard, who helped do the sound track for an “underground” film called Flaming Creatures by a gentleman named Jack Smith. The last showing drew the police of ny who arrested everyone insight, the projectionist, viewers, etc. -said the film was obscene. The third member of my tribe was an m.a. from u.c.l.a. who just had a showing at an art gallery that was a flop. There was trouble with the promo trips the audience loved us quite a lot, autographs, people knew us in a diner and thought we were ENGLISH. But I wasn’t up to it I’m afraid the way I would have been what seems like years ago. I quit my job (after first determining that I could work as long and as well as anyone there). But this bit wasn’t for me. Then (I was still under contacts of various sorts, they possessed 25% of nothing) my manager brought in this guy with lots of money who wanted to buy us instruments (we were one of the few bands in existence that had no instruments, they rented them for us on occasion) and book us in his nightclubs. I said no and quit the group. Meanwhile I had a folk album going for me. They loved me and my stuff but thought the lyrics were offensive (not dirty, just offensive) and would I change the lyrics and I said no and that was that. Interestingly enough a new record just came out which I had a hand in writing which is quite good and might stand a chance. One song of mine is in hollywood, another is in england where a longhaired group is mulling it over, and my manager has dug up some smaller but more liberal (?) folk record companies. Plus the record company I’m affiliated with now is interested in my making another record even though I don’t work there anymore and am not meant for promotion tours. So now I’m getting this job with the welfare department (because you don’t have to dress and its kind of a usefull job- you try to help people with 6 children and rats in one room apartments if that’s possible). Its a kind of ny peace corp with pay.

My harvard application has been sitting for awhile now because I didn’t know if I was ready to go to school anymore, or if i should anymore, at anytime. I was drafted and naturally ruled exempt, unacceptable for the obvious reasons. Thus I am free of the draft and slowly but surely people who depend on me for music or talent or advice or etc. I’ve had some strange experiences since returning to ny, sick but strange and fascinating and even, sometimes ultimately revealing, healing and helpful. The record industry is viscous as are most businesses, but this one a little more so. ny has so many sad, sick people and I have a knack for meeting them. they try to drag you down with them. If you’re weak ny has many outlets. Ican’t resist peering, probing, sometimes participating, othertimes going right to the edge before sidestepping. Finding viscousness in yourself and that fantastic killer urge and worse yet having the opportunity presented before you is certainly interesting, Interesting is not the word. You have to wait a few days to use it, but often you are truely cold. The easy ways of making money, group bravado, the rich johns on park ave who dig watching fornicating couples enough to pay $250, $500, $&700 prices up for group performances of 3 or more or the more esoteric sexual art forms, f*** f*** f***

I feel better myself. I am better. I needed no school. I have let 6 months go by without looking at anything I had written. I needed to be cool - I needed to be away from the writing so that I could look at it more coldly. I finally did that and I decided that I’m very very good and could be a good writer if i work and work. i know thatswhat ive got to do, no getting around it, but things had to get established. Maybe I will go to school again. maybe i’ll teach, maybe europe, who knows. But mainly it must be writing and I think I’m good enough to give it a run for its money. Hope my latest records a smash because I’ll be needing the money to be sure. I’m lucky though. It doesn’t take much of anything that has to do with money to keep me quiet or happy or mollified. Its the peripheral things round you that need bread. You’ll notice my spelling hasn’t improved.

HOW ARE YOU? I mean that, how are you? I hope very much that you are well. I also hope very much that you are my spiritual godfather, and I mean that quite a bit too.

Lou as modest and self-deprecating as ever.

He never said he was unself-deprecating!

awesome letter

Yeah, that's great

I can recommend the DeCurtis book -- he's a better journalist than critic.

he's especially good covering the Anderson years. Didn't know Lou returned to drinking the occasional glass of red wine or two. I'm sure it didn't help his renal glands.

decurtis is the kinda guy who i think of as showing up as a talking head rock critic in a million rock docs spouting received wisdom. but his lou book covers the right bases, doesn't shy away from unpleasant stuff, but doesn't revel in it either.

NAMED AFTER HIS MOTHER’S late grandfather, Lewis Allan Reed was born on March 2, 1942, at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, New York.
So the Butch Firbanks thing was made up after all?

He was a fan of Ronald Firbank and Butch Wilkins.

Didn’t know about the lattter

The Chelsea Girls all loved Butch.

In Brooklyn:

Late Brooklyn-born musician Lou Reed's memory is being honored with a celebration of his passion for Tai Chi. Ren Guang Yi, Reed's teacher for 12 years, and other teachers from different disciplines will lead a morning meditation in Central Library's Grand Lobby followed by demonstrations and classes that represent many forms of Tai Chi.

No experience is necessary to participate, in keeping with Reed's belief that everyone can benefit from the Chinese martial art.

In the week leading up to the event, patrons can also view Reed's library of Tai Chi books, video clips and some of his weapons.

Saturday, August 3 / 8:30 am
Central Library, Grand Lobby & Plaza

https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/celebrate-inaugural-central-library-lobby-20190803

w/r/t Tai Chi, from Laurie's eulogy:

As meditators, we had prepared for this – how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart and out through the head. I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

Kind of interesting and weird to find out Shelley’s last name and read her description of young Lou.

Only two people lasted until the end of the Velvets’ legendary Summit High School gig, but one went on to co-found Mission of Burma and the other to play bass in The Bongos.

Never listened to this Velvets-backed version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which mostly sounds like “I’m Waiting for the Man.”

This doesn’t seem to have too many views, maybe it’s available somewhere else:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo_7Zqx2_Ek

Reed’s own way of handling such situations was typically more blunt and frontal. At a birthday dinner for the novelist A. M. Homes at the Greenwich Village restaurant Il Cantinori, Reed noticed Anderson, seated across the table from him, enjoying a conversation with writer Lee Smith. Reed leaned across the table, glared at Smith, and challenged Anderson. “Who the fuck is this guy?” he asked. A devoted fan of Reed’s, Smith defused Reed’s anger by asking him about Delmore Schwartz.

Anderson who(?)

Oh Laurie

Anderson Lawrie.

Just barged through the DeCurtis book based on your various recommendations. Very well done, especially with respect to his wives and significant others.

This may be challoups, but I relistened to The Blue Mask as I am wont to do ever decade or so and at this point all I care about is “Heavenly Arms.”

Every

"Our House," "Heavenly Arms," the title track," "Underneath the Bottle," "Gun," "Waves of Fear" -- great.

Wow, yes, "Gun", what a monster of a track.

It's fascinating how Reed's "The Gun" is the quiet, unsettling track while Cale's is the rocker.

I listened to the album y’day... I have to skip “Gun,” I could handle it as a teen/younger guy, but not anymore.

Didn't like The Blue Mask at all at the time, would be surprised if it sounds any better to me today.

Just getting to WL/WH in the Bockris book. I knew the famous Cher quote about the VU--it turned up in Lilian Roxon's write-up on the band--but I don't think I knew about how violently they were rejected on the west coast in 1966.

Here’s an impromptu Blue Mask fact-check:

I remember where I was that day, I was Upstate in a bar
The team from the University was playing football on TV

blue mask is perfect

It isn't, and that's partly why I love it (same deal for New Sensations, which I love even more).