Search And Destroy: Lou Reed

https://jeanhugueskabuiku.substack.com/p/about-vatican-shadow-link-with-the

(that link was re: yr 1st question, answer to the second is "not any more than in metal, maybe less"

I am playing the first Lou Reed LP, LOU REED.

It's good.

Thanks sleeve. Disturbing stuff, hopefully more journalists will call it out.

I didn't know about those connections and I wrote a lengthy profile on Fernow for The Wire in 2011. Pissed me off quite a bit to find out.

Yeah I was bummed because while my exposure to that musical world is very dilettantish, I actually like Vatican Shadow and saw him perform once.

I mean it goes back to Boyd Rice/Non, Whitehouse etc

New NYT piece up that's taken from Will Hermes's in-the-works biography, covering the time between the Velvets and Transformer, more or less.

Oh wow, I was starting to think he had given up on that project.

Ha I'd been half thinking that myself at points but I saw various posts from him that it was still happening. Just was putting in the work!

It’s here!

Hermes bio is stellar — definitely the best Lou bio ...

Also! This thing I put together ...

https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2023/10/03/sad-song-lou-reeds-berlin-at-50/

I met him in 2015 at Pop Con and he was already working on it.

(xp) Funny you should mention Fassbinder, and I might have mentioned this before, but this scene from "Beware of a Holy Whore" always reminds me of the cover of "Berlin".

https://peterburnett.info/images/film_stills/beware_of_a_holy_whore/beware_of_a_holy_whore_041.JPG

Wasn’t Berlin supposed to be a double album and the label said “hell no”? Is there any idea what that tracklisting would have looked like?

That's the story but I have never actually heard of what else was recorded for it and not used and I suspect it might be one of Lou's fairy stories (no pun intended).

the beginning and end of that mix I made has the only real Berlin outtake I've heard — which is just a quick instrumental of "Berlin". I think the acetate that floats around has slightly longer edits of some tunes, but nothing too major.

Re: fassbinder, I do have a fantasy of him filming a Lou concert sometime in the 1970s. Could've been GREAT.

Hermes bio is stellar — definitely the best Lou bio ...

i interviewed him for a yet-to-be-published thing — they sent me the book a few months back.

nice!

Cool! Started reading from the beginning but now just skipping around and my jaw is dropping at how good it is, the organization and level of detail. Not really too surprised though, since I loved loved loved LOVE GOES TO BUILDINGS ON FIRE.

Looks like this is yet another step up in his fine, fine, superfine career.

You’ve got to give a little
Take a little

another excerpt on Vulture - dealing with Lulu, amazing

https://www.vulture.com/article/lou-reed-biography-the-king-of-new-york.html

But the finale, “Junior Dad,” was something else. The album’s quietest song, with lyrics written roughly two years prior, it was delivered with a tenderness that had scant precedent in Reed’s work. The verses moved through a Freudian minefield of parental failure and childhood
fears. The singer asks to be saved from drowning, to be kissed on the lips, and envisions their dead father driving a boat. Awakening from a dream, the singer sees how time had “withered him and changed him,” perhaps both of them, invoking the “greatest disappointment.” A father’s disappointment in a child, a child’s disappointment in the father, the child realizing they’d become the parent: Take your pick.

Listening to the playback, the lyrics cut Reed’s bandmates to the core. Hetfield’s dad abandoned him when he was 13; Hammett’s had been physically abusive toward him and his mother, then abandoned them, and had died just a month prior. “I had to run out of the control room,” Hammett said; “I found myself standing in the kitchen, sobbing away. James came into the kitchen in the same condition. He was sobbing too.”

Loved that article, the Lulu details and the stuff around the end of his life was very affecting.

from the vulture excerpt…

"that suggested the guitarist Kirk Hammett had, like most hard-rock guitarists of his generation, been weaned on Rock ’n’ Roll Animal."

Hammett may have been familiar with Rock 'n roll Animal. But "most hard rock guitarists of his generation' have very very little truck with that record/Wagner and Hunter. For sure, that record was an FM hit in 1974 and not only put him in the front rank with Alice Cooper and Dave Bowie, but had a greater penetration with the lumpen rock audience at the time than Berlin and definitely any VU record. But R'nR' Animal didn't stick around at all in the hard rock canon afterwards: the overwhelming majority of Hammett's metal/hard rock cohort could have very easily gone through their formative periods never hearing that record. Will Hermes damn well knows this, and it seems like he should have gone back and come up with another claim.

I gotta think that Hetfield was the least into the whole Lou Reed thing… he likes country, hard rock, metal and hardcore, and that's it. in 89, David "this new stones album is the best since some girls' Fricke profiled the band for RS for the first time, and while on the bus, someone put on "I Want you (She's so Heavy") and hetfield goes "whoa, what the fuck is this? this is HEAVY as fuck!!!" He had never heard it.

^Good post, vm. I thought the same thing about that RnRA quote.

Also still think Jenny Scheinman is kind of an unacknowledged secret weapon of "Junior Dad."

I make no apologies for being the ringleader of our double precovers album but I will be interested to read all of this.

kirk and lars seem to have pretty catholic tastes for metal guys but agreed the RnRA isn't exactly part of the general hard rock canon on which i was reared.

Wasn’t Berlin supposed to be a double album

According to Bob Ezrin, who produced the record and then performed the editing, all that he removed were interludes, instrumental solos and other interstitial material; no songs or vocal parts of songs were excluded.

If anything I thought this went in the other direction: it was a way for Xgau to say “hey, I appreciate hard rock too!”
(xp)

Lou reed live > rock n roll animal imo

ha same show! I don’t know things

kirk and lars seem to have pretty catholic tastes for metal guys

The core dynamic of Metallica is James vs. Lars; when Lars wins the argument, you get Load & ReLoad (especially their album covers) and Lulu, when James wins you get "let's just be Metallica, dammit" albums like Death Magnetic.

Re Rock 'n' Roll Animal, the live version of "Sweet Jane" got airplay on NY classic rock radio into the mid '80s, because junior high unperson was definitely influenced to buy the album.

You think? Lars has the conceptual side for sure, but I got the impression that a lot of Load/Reload was James wanting to express his blues-y side musically. Idk which one of them is more of the driving force behind the 'return to form' thrash records, I'm curious though.

Lars has the conceptual side for sure, but I got the impression that a lot of Load/Reload was James wanting to express his blues-y side musically.

I wrote about Load and ReLoad for Stereogum a few years ago and started the piece off with this quote:

“Lars and Kirk drove on those records. The whole ‘We need to reinvent ourselves’ topic was up. Image is not an evil thing for me, but if the image is not you then it doesn’t make much sense. I think they were really after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter ego. I couldn’t get into it. The whole ‘OK, now in this photoshoot we’re going to be ’70s glam rockers.’ Like, what? I would say half — at least half — the pictures that were to be in the booklet, I yanked out.” — James Hetfield, Classic Rock, May 2009

(If you want to read the whole piece, there's a hilarious quote in there from a Rolling Stone review that describes Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and ...And Justice for All as "transitional albums" between Kill 'Em All and the self-titled album.)

Lol. James is just talking about the artwork/fashion/photos there though, not the music. I came across this quote from him that makes it sound like he's often trying different styles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZh7Fw1j0qk

I'm sure the truth is that sometimes one of them is tired of reinventing the wheel while the other is more ready to go back to the well, and vice versa.

Btw the ending of this is way more metal than Lulu -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym9-r1-G8Gg

The core dynamic of Metallica is James vs. Lars; when Lars wins the argument, you get Load & ReLoad (especially their album covers) and Lulu, when James wins you get "let's just be Metallica, dammit" albums like Death Magnetic.

― read-only (unperson), Tuesday, October 3, 2023 5:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this just doesn't seem true at all but whatever

Lol. James is just talking about the artwork/fashion/photos there though, not the music.

Bought this book last night and great so far. Thanks for the rec Ilm

Btw I've been continuing to enjoy getting introduced to the '90s Reed & Cale albums via the Jokermen podcast.

just learned today that LITA is reissuing this obscurity I have never heard, sounds cool

https://www.discogs.com/release/1051337-Lou-Reed-Hudson-River-Wind-Meditations

it's nice, like if metal machine music was a new age album

One of the comments suggests playing it in concert with MMM

am halfway through the Will Hermes book omg i love it

i have only been a casual Reed fan at best … like, I always loved him in theory? but never fully immersed myself in the albums & bootlegs & lore idk

but man this book is like the best kind of immersion in Lou. I love the way Hermes so beautifully situates you in that time/place for each moment, surrounding you with the key players, the sounds, the vibes, it all feels so effortless and far less dull than so many biographies-at-a-distance can be.
and still always providing interiority for Lou that is empathetic, but not hagiographic.

there’s so much immediacy in every chapter, it’s very heady

especially during that 1973 tour

I need to check it out. Is there any new VU stuff?

I read the Bockris book when it came out, it would be good to have something meatier. I also want Laurie Anderson stories!