I quite like a lot of Lou Reed’s post-Velvets output (I find the Velvets deeply over-rated, though am aware there are other views available). What I find interesting is the free pass his edgy, reformed junkie shtick gives to behaving like an insufferable tool. Did anyone ever stand up to him and give him a lesson in humility? This article has some interesting observations. I suspect he tried to dominate his conversation with Havel, as he didn’t want to be told how important Zappa and the mothers were for independent thinkers behind the Iron Curtain. Behind an opiate curtain you don’t really give a crap about anything except you habit. Lou, then his cheerleaders Lester Bangs and Nick Kent pretty much made being “elegantly wasted” junkies hip (heroic wingman, Keith Richards, who at least laughs at himself). I hope they are proud.
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Thanks for the link. I dislike the term “over rated”. Basically another way of saying “I don’t like them.
I do like them, and am a big Lou fan, however I would admit that the great albums in his solo career are few and far between.
He himself was abused by his parents and among the posturing and drug songs were ones of equisite beauty such as “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Femme Fatale”. Does that mean he wasn’t an asshole? Probably not.
Overrated does not mean you don’t like them. It means you don’t love them, sure. It just means that you don’t understand why there’s quite so much fuss.
Think I said this before :
Overrated = Many others love them, I don’t.
Underrated = I love them, most others don’t.
Hey, dai – what’s your favourite Oasis record?
Whatever
Ha ha
😉
Maybe expecting rock stars to be just plain folks with a proper sense of humility is always going to lead to disappointment. Most of them can be criticised on a personal level for some infringement of moral decency or plain assholery. Back in the golden era of Hollwood, the indiscretions of the stars were kept secret by publicity departments, saving their adoring public from bitter regret. That’s probably the best way to deal with the problem. We know far too much about our celebrities; we know their bad habits and bad behaviour and judge them for it.
Me, I don’t care that much. I don’t let it spoil the music, which is what comes first for me, not the personal failings of the artist. I happen to like a lot of Velvets music, and I like some Lou Reed solo stuff. He was a vile shit and a scag addict. I don’t celebrate that, but if I was put off art by knowing about the artists there’d be precious little left to enjoy. The work stands on its own merits – judge that.
Loved Berlin, maybe fascinated a better word. Fantastic musicians on it too. Surprised an expanded version with all that stuff Ezrin talked about has not been released.
Like Dylan, up there with the best and worst concerts I have seen.
Agree entirely with this. Your relationship is primarily with the work, not the artist. If Martin Shkreli had written Hamlet, it would still be Hamlet, and he’d still be a dickhead.
I’ve been a fan of Lou Reed’s work since my teens, but he was always blatantly an asshole/troubled individual (delete as appropriate).
Okey-dokey.
asshole/
troubled individualYeah, this – I think the way to approach it is, if they turn out to be a mensch, that’s a lovely bonus. Most very talented people have some complex personality traits, and a decent number are total shits. Knowing you’re head, shoulders knees and toes above Joe Public in one particular regard is pretty much a recipe for maladjustment, I imagine.
No-one else is in your tree, but there’s probably a decent number who’d pay to push you out of it.
I really like most of the VU. Lou Reed being literally one of the most interpersonally unpleasant people I’ve ever heard of has little or nothing to do with that.
But it IS difficult to listen to Gary Glitter, just to take the argument to its extreme. Not that I used to listen to him. But I’m not about to start.
Phil Spector?
I listen to the Spector Xmas album with out fail, every Christmas. I also listen to Wagner and Bobby Shmurda, read Eliot and Burroughs and watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (although those aren’t limited to the festive period).
Just my own opinion, but I suspect if I sat down with 90% of the musicians we all love on this site, I’d find them to be world class wristers. The vast majority of them did their best work when they were in their 20s, high as kites and tripping off their own egos. They’re the sorts of people I’d probably cross the road to avoid in the ordinary course of life, but sometimes assholes make great things.
There’s a Spike Milligan cartoon showing a surgeon with a saw about to cut of the legs of his patient, saying “this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to paint like Toulouse Lautrec.” Just being an asshole doesn’t mean you’re going to write songs like Lou Reed.
That’s true. And equally, creating great things doesn’t mean you’re an asshole, thankfully for Michael Bay.
I’m reasonbly friendly, and I’ve never done anything worth while.
It’s only a matter of time, by the sounds of it.
I appreciate your support. Ta!
Will try to be an arse for a few weeks, then start the great European novel.
I’m an obnoxious arsehead and have so far succeeded in creating absolutely nothing, apart from an appalling smell.
You just need to look out for the Window of Opportunity.
And then open it.
And then waft everything out.
For our sake if not your’s.
Wooah, hold on.. . What’s Ferris Bueller done wrong??
So far this semester he’s been absent nine times.
Phil Spector is responsible for a lot of my very favourite pop music. No bloody way am I stopping listening to Then He Kissed Me or Da-Doo-Ron-Ron or Sleigh Ride or Baby I Love You just because he’s a fright-wigged violent misogynist murdiddlyurderer.
Rock n Roll Part one is a monster anthem and a fabulous tune which I will always love.
It’s difficult to listen to the rest of his stuff because it’s not very good.
M y judgment is that Lou’s main crime was his inexplicable decline from the early 80s on (another sad 80s story, I’m afraid). I was obsessed with him in the 70s. Besides writing great songs and great album productions, he just sounded so, well, cool. No other way to put it. All of which declined in the 80s.
His singing took on a strangely unsatisfying quality, never mind the deteriorating songs and productions. It seemed as if he was trying to sing in unfamiliar keys or something. His voice no longer sounded cool. It sounded strained. Sometimes really out of tune too. I first began to notice this tendency on some of the tracks on The Bells, the last of his studio albums to interest me for a long while. Late in his career there were some improvements, for example Ecstasy, but none of the magic of Transformer or Berlin ever again.
New York was a fabulous album. A real – cliché altert – return to form. Released in January 1989. New Sensations (1984) had its moments, too.
Legendary Hearts 1983 is fine too featuring the brilliant band he had then with Robert Quine on guitar, even though apparently Lou did his best to remove Quine from the recording after the event due to a falling out. Bless his little shiny boots. But they toured and the TV specials on youtube from ’83 and ’84 are excellent. Lots of old classics covered too with real panache.
Blue Mask is a personal fave (Quine on guitar again), and that was – it says here – ’82.
See, another example of ’80s music not all bad shock horror!’
Yes, I’ve got a double LP called Live in Italy with Quine et al. It’s OK, has its moment.
Harsh. I enjoy the understated, minimalist style he has in that period. Lou seems almost jolly in those ’83/’84 TV shows. New York is where it all gets rather verbose for me.
That’s a lovely pic of him and Laurie.
Incidentally, this turned 20 years old a few days ago. I still remember the impact it had on arrival, the only turd in the swimming pool for me being Gabrielle’s slightly bum note. Bowie remains breathtaking.
God, that’s a much weirder collection of artists than I’d remembered it as.
The LCGC were on bloody everything that year. They were only not on Mmm-Bop because Hanson barricaded themselves in the studio with a week’s supply of pop and crisps.
I had a friend whose girlfriend died from a heroin overdose. She had bought into the whole romance of the cop-shoot-cop lifestyle as documented in Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized songs, and as far as my friend was concerned, Jason Pierce might as well have been wielding the syringe personally.
Lou Reed was troubled as a child. He was petrified by the gangs in his neighbourhood. One day, he was brought home from college in a comatose state, apparently suffering a breakdown. His parents, didn’t know what to do & acquiesced with ECT. Lou never forgave them, especially his dad (see Kill Your Sons where he expresses his feelings about this in song). There was also the issue of his sexuality.
I know none of this gives him a free pass to arseholedom, but it does provide some context.
Having read a few different books and articles on Reed, it’s really hard to get a sense of where his troubles began. His sister seems to feel that it was the family’s move from Brooklyn to Long Island, and the attendant sense of isolation, that set things in motion. He certainly seems to have spent a great deal of time getting beaten up in high school, but you also get the sense that he was always a provocateur, and that a lot of this stuff might have just been part of him from the get-go.
What’s certain is that he was never really at peace with himself, which is very sad, but also (as others have said above) no excuse for being such a world class prick at times.
According to a recent biographer (name escapes me). who was on The Word podcast, Lou never stopped drinking despite many reports to the contrary. According to him, he was drinking up until the end, even post liver transplant. I do not know how true this assertion is.
His marriage to Laurie Anderson seems to have been a good one, so much so that he struck me as being more mellow in his last five years of life.
Did anyone see her reinterpretation of Metal Machine Music as drone music? A very touching tribute, I thought.
Yes, that is why the drinking assertion puzzled me.
Trumpland is ready made for Reed’s bile and acerbic tongue. I miss him.
“Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on them/That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says” (Dirty Bivd) could have been written with Trump in mind.
There is a theory, isn’t there, that a stable childhood knackers the potential for a life spent producing high art?
Off the top of my head, Macca (mum died at 14) and Lennon (complicated parental relations, mum died at 17). Neither took to academia. Would the Fabs have written such good songs if they’d have had stable childhoods and A* A-levels?
Elvis Costello (I’m reading his book) lived from 7-17 without his dad around, and admits to breaking up adult relationships to source songwriting material.
@retropath2 asserts in another thread that he finds Boo Hewerdine worthy and a bit dull. I know that Boo’s early life was stable and happy. Could the two things be related?
I dunno. I think everyone’s childhood was unstable. Instability is sort of baked into all of us, right? No such thing as normal.
Or is that just something that people who had unhappy childhoods say?
I don’t think there is a causal link. If everyone who had a troubled childhood became an artist, we wouldn’t be able to move for creative types.
Mine was a bit crap, too, and I’ve created nothing of artistic worth in my lifetime.
Your avatar’s quite nice.
Somebody’s fishing for a Scooby Snack…
Ability to copy and paste in Paint is not what I call artistic endeavour!
Are you saying Bob Dylan has no artistic value? Is that what you’re saying? Is it? Eh?
The VU reunion was probably the worse gig I’ve ever seen, and that was entirely due to Lou acting like a petulant teen through the while thing.
Sterling, Mo and John were on fine form though, especially when John sang the songs Nico originally did the lead vocals on.
They were great when I saw them, supporting U2 in a football stadium in Basel. I was right up front. Lou was in a good mood, and I swear I saw him and John smile at each other at one point. I watched their set, saw the start of U2 and left, nothing there for me.
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-velvet-underground/1993/st-jakobs-stadion-basel-switzerland-53ca2bc1.html
Was he hanging on right to the end of each line and then cramming all the words in as fast as possible Shinyshinyshinybootsofleather etc?
Did that on every song…
Don’t remember. He didn’t “sing” them like he did when he was 25, but I didn’t expect that.
Dylan’s later live singing style was to flatten every melody to monotone and finish each line on a higher note (probably a fifth). I’d like to hear someone sing in a combination of Bob n’ Lou, hanging on right to the end of each line and then cramming all the words in as fast as possible in a monotone and ending on a higher note: ………….. shinyshinyshinybootsoflLEATHER. If they could adopt the adenoidal tone of E. Costello too, my joy would be complete.
A biologist writes: when you write E. Costello like that, I immediately think of E. coli. Although strictly speaking, the Costello bit should be lower case, and the whole thing needs to be in italics. As in E. costello, or, to give him his full scientific name, Escherichia costello.
By associating the OA hitmaker with a gram-negative, facultatively anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus Escherichia, commonly found in the lower intestine, I suppose I’m saying I’m not a big fan.
That’s the finest appreciation of a bacterium/”greatest living songwriter” I’ve ever read.
Not to mention the only?
The album and film of Songs for Drella is one of the most moving things I’ve heard and seen. There’s real love in that dysfunctional family, and here it shines through to wonderful effect.
Agreed, Black Type. I don’t have much by Lou, but that’s one of my favourite albums of his that I do have. Underneath it all he was probably trying to disguise a soft centre. The spoken vocal at the end of “Coney Island Baby” is very sweet as well…
Yes, a brilliant piece and Lou wrote it all including bits were Cale is singing/reciting as Andy and saying awful things about Lou.
The other solo albums I rate are Transformer, Berlin, Coney Island Bab (partially)y, Street Hassle (partially), New Sensations (partially), New York (his best), Magic and Loss and Set the Twilight Reeling.
Blue Mask with Quine should be there too
Dai’s list is almost exactly my collection of Lou Reed albums, but I would add the two live recordings, Lou Reed Live and Rock’n’Roll Animal, and Songs For Drella, of course.
Well, Take No Prisoners was kind of amusing.
A friend of mine had Take No Prisoners – he used to play Sweet Jane, for the novelty value of Lou’s ranting (Hey! It’s fucking Barbara Streisand!) I never heard any other tracks from it…
Of all Lou’s projects, his flip-up spectacles remain the most memorable. Who’d a thunk that Lou Reed and Navin R. Johnson had more in common than mere jerkitude?
Damn these glasses, boy!