Search And Destroy: Lou Reed

before the guy from Warm Soda was run out of the business for being a racist I was a huge fan of their version of "Waiting for the Man" on the castleface 'VU & Nico' tribute record

Motorcycle Boy - Run, Run, Run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCr4ZyI2r8I

The string duo's version of "Sunday Morning" as the processional at my wedding this past May was outstanding.

'Ennui' on the SALLY CAN'T DANCE LP. Strikingly good: mellow, subtle, expansive - with that kind of gentleness that he occasionally offered, as on 'Coney Island Baby'.

in case anyone's interested in listening to old Lou bootlegs with me: https://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/tagged/summer-of-lou

Always.

is this the first S&D thread on ILX/ILM?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW4YW3YiSWE
Lou Reed & John Mellencamp - 1987 Bloomington Indiana

lou @ 16:07

some of my friends were there! that's been making the rounds on my FB feed paired with people's memories - Lou came out into the alley to say hi to the underage kids

Wow, that's terrific. Lou looks touched by the response. I can imagine Mellencamp covering "New Sensations."

Rolling Stone wrote about this upload and it got picked up by some papers. Amazingly, John Prine came out and joined them at the very end, but no footage of his appearance has surfaced.

Even more surprising was this:

Indiana University rock history professor Glenn Gass was in the crowd that night. He followed Reed into an alley after the musician’s set and told him he was teaching his students about the Velvet Underground; Gass wrote his phone number on a matchbox and invited Reed to speak to the students, never thinking it would happen.

Reed called Gass the next day and said he wanted to do it. “He was very paranoid about it,” Gass told the Indiana Daily Student in 2017. “He said he had never done anything like this before. Just was nervous, visibly shaking all the way to the classroom. He was afraid he was going to walk in and people were just going to stare at him.”

But Reed wound up enjoying the experience and stuck around for 90 minutes. “It was kind of like a dream come true when you’re a rock-history teacher,” Gass said, “to have Lou Reed come in and spend an hour and a half.”

Lou obviously forgot this:

Lou Reed is spokesman for the Velvet Underground at a literature and electronic media class run by Dr Joseph Kruppa at Texas University, 23 October 1969. 'Because of media censorship, nobody has heard any real music, nothing to make your hair stand on end.' Daily Texan 24 Oct 69 pic.twitter.com/vcs9Jr1Wnx

— Arthur (@ratherarthur) August 3, 2020

and this!
http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/2013/10/lou-reeds-rock-n-roll-high-school.html

lloyd grove:

Speaking of Lou Reed, I remember that 31 years ago he played a high school assembly at Beverly Hills High School, where I was a 9th grader, and he and his Velvet Underground justed blasted out the place. When the school psychiatrist--yes, they had one of those in Beverly Hills, natch--warned that studies had shown that rock music had caused hearing deficits in hamsters, Reed replied "When we play for hamsters, we will turn the volume down."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/00/source/source0616.htm

https://i.imgur.com/RrnIKMV.png

xps yes some of my friends were also taking that class at the time! it was a big fuckin' deal.

I think this was just before I turned 21

Was the Live at the Gymnasium tape made at one these schools? It's great, hope it's come out on some legit comp.

gymnasium gig came out on the wl / wh deluxe box a few years ago — wasn't a high school venue, though. it had previously been a health club before becoming a night club.

what a great set that is

sleeve, the drinking age in indiana couldn't have been over 16 or 17 back in '87 ?

lol I wish, it was bumped up to 21 the year I turned 19 (1985) cuz the feds threatened to withhold matching highway funds from states that didn't comply

(before that it was 19)

been really enjoying Street Hassle lately.

Great Lou Reed cameo in this Atlantic article about a woman lamenting the slow death of her father's high-end audio repair shop:

Occasionally, a doctor bought an entire custom home-theater system after perusing for an hour. Other days, a lawyer would ask dozens of questions before declaring that he was heading to Best Buy. Or Lou Reed might walk in, insult the Tchaikovsky playing over the speakers, buy $700 Grado headphones for a recording session at Skywalker Ranch, and then have an assistant return them once it was done.

🤩

Checks out

american poet is awesome, maybe one of my fave lou reed recordings ever. wayyyyyy different sound than the r&r animal stuff that followed.

RSD Black Friday

I went to high school with Doug Yule, you can't say that!

Haha yeah the interview segment is adorable. LOVE American Poet, didnt know about the RSD release, excited to check that out

i've had the bootleg of that alice tully hall show for ages, but glad to see it's being cleaned up and made a part of the official canon. not as good as the American Poet show but pretty damn good.

I like AP so far, wondering how I should compare it versus Live at Max's.

Lou's singing is still pretty good, the band are a bit over-enthusiastic.

It's like an entire band of Billy Yules.

Ha!

I never heard this backing band (called The Tots) until American Poet came out. The Lou Reed biography by Diana Clapton was extremely negative about them, but based on that record, at least, their playing was a lot more pertinent than the Hunter/Wagner band.

I think they were just a bar band from Yonkers, not sure how they ended up backing Lou Reed!

I always thought their sound suited those tunes way better than the R&R Animal-era stuff that I've heard, which I've never dug at all

Yes, that's how I feel.

This is totally random/trivial (and more about RCA than Reed), but I'm curious:

As a preteen, I owned (and often listened to) a tape of this Best-Of comp; but looking at that Wikipedia page now, I'm struck by the fact that my copy didn't have all those songs.

Referencing the Discogs page for the album, and clicking through the many versions (including cassette versions), they all seem to have the complete, 11-song program... until I finally land on the specific tape I had, identifiable both by the tweaked cover art and the pared-down track list. (Clicking around further, the only other edition I find with only those 8 tracks is this bootleg/unofficial cassette.)

Why would they have issued one edition of the tape without three of the songs ("I Love You," "How Do You Think It Feels," and "Nowhere at All")?

It might have been some budget release for truck stops or duty-free or something.

RCA did a lot of chintzy budget comps/reissues like that on tape and CD. Iirc, the original CD of Transformer was sort of like that: just the album in a jewelcase with a card with a bad scan of the LP covers.

Interesting that the 1988 LP reissue was also cut down to 8 tracks. Maybe they wanted to push people to the CD version, which got all 11 tracks?

Oh, I missed that one… so it wasn’t just the tape. It was a pared-down reissue, for whatever reason…

RCA reminding you they learned everything from recycling the Elvis catalogue over and over.

Hehe. A Date With Lewis.

The record industry's contempt for its customers was evident in the way they treated pre-recorded cassettes. A friend of mine bought a cassette of Pink Floyd's Ummagumma, which omitted three songs totalling 31 minutes. No warning on the package, just slap "Pink Floyd" on it and wait for money to flow in.
I also remember an Eric Clapton compilation where the cassette left off one of the tracks on the LP, just to save $0.02 in blank tape.

Sequencing was frequently fucked with on cassettes. I dubbed my brother's cassette of The Velvet Underground and Nico which has "The Black Angel's Death Song" as the second song, and "I'm Waiting For The Main" as the second-to-last song. That was the only way I heard it for maybe 10 years or so, and I still prefer it over the correct running order.

My first tape was the first Skynyrd album, which moved "Freebird" to the middle, where it was split over two sides (song on Side A, jam on Side B).

Its weird that record companies would do that kind of shit with the cassette issue. It seems like the constraints on running time would be more relevant in the case of vinyl. I guess they were worried about having a lot of blank tape at the end of one side, which would force people to fast forward to the end before turning it over?