Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

That's my brother Doug's brother ... ah forget it.

(lol at your never ending hatred for Clem Cattini. Do you even like "Hurdy Gurdy Man"?)

by "hilarious" i don't even mean "bad" really (though it's sometimes bad). he's pretty entertaining (and seems to be having a fun time).

Seeing James Corden play Clem Cattini in that film about Joe Meek didn't help tbh.

some very cheesy fills in "I'm Waiting for the Man." Not terrible though

I still think that's Bonham on "Hurdy Gurdy Man." It's a better story that way.

I can't stand the drumming on Max's myself, it's so distracting

I like the story just as JPJ told it.
(xpost)

It's a tad, uh, over-enthusiastic. Don't know what they were putting in those free burgers they were feeding young Billy at Max's.(xp)

i guess that's billy on the studio take of "oh sweet nuthin"? some good drumming there. dude was what, 17 years old?

Thought that was Tommy from Long Island.

wiki sez it was billy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Yule) but could be wrong

I always think it must be the other guy.

I can't stand the drumming on Max's myself, it's so distracting

― Οὖτις

this, I really hate it, as far as I'm concerned that album belongs in the dustbin with Squeeze. I don't think I even own a copy anymore. I can live with the Billy tracks on Loaded tho.

yeah Loaded is fine

i dunno i enjoy max's whenever i put it on, but yeah, it does throw into relief how utterly central to the band's sound moe tucker was

Some good chat from Lou between numbers, "A tender love song, about love between man and subway...", something like that. Yeah, I haven't heard it in years either tbh.

that long "some kinda love" is a highlight ... i dig the off the rails "white light white heat" ... and the general ambiance.

but yes it pales in comparison to the live 1969/quine/matrix stuff of course

(Drum track on "Hurdy Gurdy Man" is not so great actually, it's certainly no "A Day In The Life" which it kind of resembles, drumfills-wise)

Never mind all that..

how do I get that "Loaded" newspaper?

The last time I listened to the Max's stuff I was in high school and it was on cassette and I was having a hard time understanding why anyone liked anything about VU post "White Light" and that record certainly didn't help.

I enjoyed it a lot more this past wknd when I was listening to it, agreed that Billy Yule's drumming is hilarious.

What struck about listening to it again and this is something I think about whenever I listen to "Loaded", the playing and esp Lou's singing, really feels unbound by any sort of expectations. There's an air to these records of "man no one is ever going to hear this, let's just bang it out and go home" which always gives this era of the band a sort of melancholy and that's even more apparent to me now of the Max's stuff.

yeah, i think that is a good point about Lou's vocals -- we take for granted his singing on "sweet jane" for instance, but if you really hone in on him there, it's kind of an amazing (and weird!) performance!

Head Held High!

He's so un-self-conscious throwing in all those soul singer moves...it's exactly the sort of thing you do at practice to try to get the drummer to laugh not when yr in the studio trying to lay down a hit song.

Sadly three or four years later he could barely sing at all, judging by the bootleg I was listening to last night, doing all that shit of getting the phrasing all wrong and not bothering to sing the tune, stuff you associate with latter day Lou.

Makes one wonder if he couldn't have taken some of that discipline he allegedly put into become a Tai-Chi Master and used a little of it to practice a little vocal technique.

something definitely changed post-VU in his vocal attack. occasionally you'll hear him get it back in the solo years, but yeah, his phrasing often seems off (which almost never happened in the VU years).

it sounds like he does it on purpose though, right? like, he's above (or just bored) singing the song the way it was recorded

Apparently he imagined he was singing like Al Green.

Is there a vocal equivalent of body dysmorphia?

something definitely changed post-VU in his vocal attack.

Maybe that he stopped playing guitar?

Stopped playing maybe, but never stopped buying ever fancier custom high tech guitars, with bodies of plexiglass, complex carbon compounds and what not.

love the velvets, can only really grin and bear most solo lou. rock and roll animal is one of the worst live albums i've ever heard.

I can hear some similarities to Chilton with Lou's slide down into IDGAF vocal performances, might have something to do with the fact that in the 70's their rock and roll dreams had mostly been crushed into dust and they just did not care anymore so they started doing all this what-the-hell tossed-off almost improv stuff

in related news, I finally got a copy of Take No prisoners yesterday at a record show

rock and roll animal is one of the worst live albums i've ever heard.

genuinely curious what seems bad about this album to you.

rock n roll animal definitely seemed super cheesy to me when i first heard it, but i've grown to love its oversized glamminess.

Have yet to achieve this level of enlightenment.

http://tuenight.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TN_lou_reed_F.jpg

I've always loved it is why I asked - I love Steve Hunter, love the bombast, love how Lou's attempt to be a glam frontman kinda gets swallowed by the sound of the band. And me being me I love how the riffs get all crunchy, that is the way I like 'em.

It took me a long time but I've come to love R'N'R Animal

"it sounds like he does it on purpose though, right? like, he's above (or just bored) singing the song the way it was recorded

― brownie, Monday, November 9, 2015 9:30 AM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

W/r/t Lou's singing, he seemed obsessed with singing behind the beat, and I don't know if it's lazy exactly but he definitely seems to be wanting do something other than the recorded vers, to the point where it sometimes sounds like he's never even heard the song.

I can hear some similarities to Chilton with Lou's slide down into IDGAF vocal performances, might have something to do with the fact that in the 70's their rock and roll dreams had mostly been crushed into dust

he seemed obsessed with singing behind the beat

He did this to such a degree when playing "White Light/White Heat" with Metallica that I'm pretty sure it bent the very fabric of time itself.

I've recently been learning to tolerate or even like some of Dylan's more radical reinterpretations, wonder if I should extend the same courtesy to Lou.

genuinely curious what seems bad about this album to you.

What Tyler says, except I never grew to love its glamminess. The band feels hammy and flashy, especially when tackling the velvets songs that i love. I haven't owned a copy in over a decade though, so I might feel differently today, and the friend who bought it for me swore by it as his favourite Lou of any stripe.

That album is so different from most other Lou-related stuff, don't know why it would be surprising to those who do like it that some of us might not care for it.

Recently read an interview with Sterling in which he went on and on about how he hated the guitar tone of those guys.

yeah i mean those dudes are basically the opposite of sterling morrison.

hating on Steve Hunter's tone

ohhhhhhhhkaaaaaay

Maybe if that band sounded more like, I dunno, the original Alice Cooper band or the original Elton John band or -what's that other band Bowie produced?- that would be more the kind of glam to my liking.