Any Lou Reed love out there ?

1.Street Hassle- With all the venom &spit the Pistols brought to R&R here Lou managed the same but in a more subdued &intellectual New Yawk way.The greatest F.U. in R&R history.
2.The Blue Mask -The guitar interplay of Lou&Robert Quine is simply astonishing. Also Lou's best lyrical content in quite a while.Jumpstarted the 2nd coming of Lou&Velvets.
3.New York-The finest documentary on the real New York ever put to music.His finest out put since "Street Hassle"
4.Ecstasy-IMO one of the finest musical epitaths ever recorded.Right up there with"Charlie Rich Pictures and Paintings.May turn out to be Lou's greatest solo venture.Heavy rotation on my TT.
There are 4 artists I consider 60s greatest innovators.
1.Bob Dylan
2.The Beatles
3.Jimi Hendrix &
4.Velvets
Cool story.I grew up in Dallas in 60s and frequented the bohemian/artist area of Travis Street&Cole Ave.I was one of approx 30-40 to witness
the End of Cole performance.Imagine my discovering what the contents of 1969-Live held within its grooves!
Peace.

 

any memories you'd care to share?

 

Yes.But right now I am on the way with my family to holiday shop.I will post later can't say exactly the time but I will share some memories.Thanks.Peace.

 

Played an original US RCA cd of Rock 'N Roll Animal tonight since I picked it up at FYE yesterday.
Best live album I've heard in quite awhile.

 

As promised but will be in 2 posts.
Pt.1.Dallas was never known as a mecca for the hippie idealism of the 60s(that was 200 miles South in Austin)&only a handful of artists&bohemians congregated in a small section known locally as Cole/Travis area.I didn't adhere to the hippie lifestyle.I was at the time a 21yr old street smart,well read pre-historic punk with a ffledgeling garage band (The Everlasting Clefs)
My uncle was friends with Caruth Bird a sibling from the prominent Dallas family(they owned the book depository that Oswald shot Kennedy from) anyway the both knew the Dallas millionaire who owned E of C Ave. where my band played ever so often.Making access to backstage and bands quite easy.
We made the 2nd night of 2 night stand.Only half of the crowd really knew who the Velvets were,you could tell by their attire,black wrap around,turtlenecks,I also wore a black leather vest at the time.Velvets look&presence intimidated a few folk.Some so much they split from the scene.For those of us who stuck with it we were exposed (unbeknownst at the time)to one of the greatest historical moments in R&R history.For upward 1hr& 1/2 the Velvets held sway over a handful of Dallas intellectuals,artists,freaks and other non-conformists.
Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.

 

Velvets at times rearranged our senses beautifully to the point that anything else post would almost definitely be sub par.Improvising from one moment to the next but never loosing the moment.Everything excluding the jam was although subdued executed with perfection IMO.Since Reed did not intimidate me I managed to,between sets to start a conversation.The thing Reed was mostly interested in was,"How did Dallas react as a community to the Kennedy assassination, and how did it affect me on a personal level?(for those wondering let's just say I was approx 100 ft. south of book depository).Reed must of liked what he heard because afterwards his reply was"Wow!that would've been a heavy trip,to experience it first hand".Then he curtly asked,autograph?!I replied"Nah man,just a piece of paper.He then reached in his pocket and said"Guitar pick?I said "F. Yeah! He then excused himself with" Time to split,next set".I've have heard there tapes of the 2nd night but of inferior SQ.I don't desire them.All they could do is tarnish a night of musical magic.And that my dear friends is my memories of The End of Cole;Dallas the fall of 1969.

 

The intro to "Sweet Jane" is almost worth the price of admission alone.

 

For Lou Reed solo, I have a few favorites.

Berlin - The songwriting, delivery and arrangeing on this album is superb. I think this is Lou's best cohesive work outside of the velvets. The story is so lou, and it wraps all the taboo and thought provoking themes from his work with the velvets and transformer all into one narrative. "Men of Good Fortune" makes me a little uncomfortable to listen to, this dry dead pan delivery delivering all these truth bombs over you, insanely depressing but very beautiful and rewarding. When I think of Lou post Velvets, this is usually what my mind goes to on first thought. Berlin is a grower too! I didn't like it the first handfull of times I heard it, But now i think its brilliant.

Metal Machine Music - Don't roll your eyes at me! My opinion is MMM is a genuine impressive experiment and feat in Noise / Industrial music. A great amount of effort went into the production and the recording, reversing guitars, speeding them up, slowing them down, warping them, ect. He creates a really harshly interesting textured wall of feedback from these experiments. Plus, if you listened to the velvet underground, why is this album even a shock to you? The Velvets in studio for their first two infamous albums had feedback and noise all over those things. Their 1965-66-67 Live bootlegs at times were just pure noise-jams too. Of course there were other things AROUND it, but MMM is the logical step after albums like Banana and WL/WH. Lou loves guitar, and MMM is the ultimate "Guitar" album, No lyrics, chords, riffs, melodies, nothing. Just pure guitar. The fact that he released this is a estimate of his true screw accessibility attitude , its all for the art. Even if its pure noise. Good noise mind you! Absolutely lovely and amazing, it still blows me away! and you thought John Cale was the only avant-garde one. I love the **** out of it.

Transformer - I think this is an obvious one, a very fun and lyrically solid Glam release. I don't really have much to say about it, the melodies are wonderful as well. Just solid.

Rock and Roll Animal - I personally like this more than Transformer. The EXPANDED edition with the whole performance, will really mess you up in the best way. Lou's sloppy staggering snotty delivery over these god like guitar leads is pure unadulterated "punk" before there even was a proper term. I love the renditions of "Heroin" and "Satellite of Love" on this especially. I dont have much to say either! Just a very amazing ESSENTIAL performance of Lou at his real live element in my opinion, shows you how much of a showman he can be. My highlight isnt even neccesarily a musical moment, I THINK it's in the start of 'Caroline Says I', where you hear someone from the audience shout some gurgle mess, and Lou just yells "SHUT UP!" makes me laugh every time I hear it. Amazing album.

 

Just found this video that shows Lou came to my hometown in 2008, climbed our bell tower to listen to Perfect Day. Plans to play the song simultaneously on several bell towers in our country later on Queensday sadly were never realised, because of a deadly assault on members of the audience who came to see the royal family early that day. Here's the sweet clip (Dutch language) of Lou's visit.

 

Everything up to CIB.

 

Yes! I think its Lou's homage to 'Empire', the Warhol film that dared you to watch a single slow motion shot of the Empire State Building for 8 hours with no sound, at night! Lou supposedly was one of the few that stayed the whole film. ps Warhol loved long films, Chelsea Girls was 6 hours, **** was 25.
Lou made MMM last for 2 album and doesn't end till you pick up the needle. its kind of the opposite of Empire, instead of silence it give you a wall of nonstop guitar noise.

 

I'm one of those people who basically learned to play guitar thanks to Reed's songbook. The said, my top five solo Lou LPs would be:

Coney Island Baby
Sally Can't Dance
Legendary Hearts
Transformer
Ecstasy

Never cared for The Blue Mask as much as other fans. It's good, but I always felt Legendary Hearts was better. Coney Island Baby is perfect to my ears. It's economical, to the point and there isn't a song on it I don't like. I love Sally Can't Dance almost equally. It's good and trashy and I think a better snapshot of Lou at that time in NYC than Transformer.

 

Best album thread ???. I looked !!!!

Coney Island Baby

 

Reading Dave Thompson's Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell from the mid-00's, about the rise of Bowie, Iggy and Lou. Very interesting book, great read, but there are a few things that bug me about it. Thompson spends an inordinate amount of time on the Factory people, and wastes a ton of page space on the the post-Lou Velvets led by Doug Yule. He also strangely, completely bypasses the self-titled Velvets album as well as Loaded.

Still, there's some invaluable information on the early Velvets, Reed relationship with Nico, Reed's immediate post-Velvets career, making Transformer with Bowie and Ronno, and his ups and downs with the press and his fans over his 70's musical output.