Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

I love "Turn To Me" so much

idk if I think Cale's higher points are higher than Lou's but god damn Cale had an amazing run in the 70's and was/is sporadically great thereafter

lol xposts

Didn’t really intend to use genius twice in such rapid succession, but hey, I’m just an average with an average vocabulary and typing skills, unlike Moe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS8oyl1gygs

Wait, Lou wrote a song about that? How did he know? He got the jump on my psyche once again, the way only a true artist, ordained by a genuine poet, can.

That one's just blah, so point for you.

"Secret Corrida" by Cale (1996) and "Ecstasy" by Reed (2000) are great "late" songs that anyone who likes any era of their music should hear.

(admittedly neither would have fit on White Light/White Heat

Someone made a comment elsewhere, I believe it was noted John Cale enthusiast La Lechera, that one of the things that makes Cale’s use of the English language so appealing is that he is not a native speaker.

Yet another thing Iggy and Bowie do better than Lou, in addition to reading a lot and remembering what they read, is playing the role of Average Guy when it suits them.

At least Lou was not as prolific as Bob Pollard which makes the mixtape playlist thing a little easier.

"Secret Corrida" by Cale (1996) and "Ecstasy" by Reed (2000) are great "late" songs that anyone who likes any era of their music should hear.

Linking this Quine interview for the umpteenth time: http://www.furious.com/perfect/quine.html

Found Walking On Locusts on YT last night (LP not on Spotify), and was disappointed to discover the album take of "Dancing Undercover" pales in comparison to the Leno version.

Cale also torn shit up on a Game Show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mqO-xsRyTM

Which I believe is the beginning of the doc, or nearly so.

My favorite video of John Cale is the Old Grey Whistle Test version of "Dying on the Vine" with Ollie Halsall on guitar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-q-GGiAt8Q

Cale’s use of the English language

I've been listening to Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, and it reinforced that, as a lyricist, Cale excels at setting a scene, and convincing you that something is at stake. "Scotland Yard":

When the hungry days are gone
Then came the hungry nights
Holding on to what you've got
Standing in the spotlight
They'll show you mostly
What they want you to see
Walking the city at midnight
And whistling in the dark

or "Mary":

There's a window in my mind
You can see in
Just look and you'll want to sigh
It inspires you to look away

I guess to describe him as a non-native speaker is not quite correct. His father was an English speaker but he himself only spoke Welsh at home for the first several years of his life.

That one's just blah, so point for you.

On the "I've Got a Secret" segment from the doc, it was fascinating and incongruous to see who was on the panel that was watching John Cale play: Betsy Palmer, who 17 years later played Jason's mom in the first Friday the 13th movie, as well as Bess Myerson, the former Miss America who became a criminal in the 1980s.

Sounds hot, will have to look her up (on the Google that is)
Welsh accent, from land of coal mines and bards, serves him well, w the rasp and lilt (thinking of having seen him touring behind Sabotage/Live: "Now Deeerfrance is gonna help us out here..." sometimes surfacing on records too)
Lots of good talk here too:John Cale S/D

Bess Myerson was also the first (and only) Jewish Miss America, and later acted as an alleged beard for Ed Kotch.

Deerfrance? Don’t know much about her but sending her warm thoughts through the mental theremin since her husband just passed. Also just found this song she did about Nico.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRAPnEiIeA

criminal in the 1980s
Because of her relationship with Andy Capasso. Almost forgot about that.

Myerson also had a shoplifting problem, which I’m willing to overlook, because who among us…

.

I meant "Street Hassle" the song as being the only solo Lou moment that is absolutely essential for a Velvet fan to hear. Not the album. I love the whole thing, it's his best solo album. But it does have filler and I can't recommend an album that has "I Wanna Be Black" without some sort of warning and a signed waiver absolving me of any blame for being triggered. "Street Hassle" the song is kind of a bummer because there's nothing else like that in his catalog. In my mind that is when Spacemen 3 were born.

The album that best captures the essence of classic Lou is Take No Prisoners.

The Velvets are the only band who I have wanted to hear EVERYTHING from. Any fucked up wobbly bootleg is welcome in my ears.

I’d throw “The Bells” (song) up there as well for VU fans

Thanks for the clarification. “Street Hassle (The Song)” is so great because it is kind of like the plot of a Warhol movie without dropping Andy’s name, the hard shiny, shiny surface of the storyline colliding with Terms of Endearment-level sentimentality, all tied together with those embodied cellos borrowed from the pre-Petra Haden sung cello lines of that earlier tale of Redemption Through Bad Romance performed by those crisscross trend line favorites on JoJo’s graph, The Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away.”

Some good stuff on this thread: In Praise Of...Lou Reed "Take No Prisoners"
Including links to one guy’s excellent blog such as this one: https://damienlove.com/writing/babe-im-on-fire-the-making-of-lou-reeds-street-hassle

"Street Hassle (The Song Suite)"

Forgot about it being used in The Squid and the Whale, closing credits was it.

Just went further down the Balloon Farm rabbit hole. Will spare you for now.

Or you could just read this yourself: https://www.mikeappel.com/Balloon%20Farm%20story.pdf

I can't even interest the Velvet Underground thread in the Sunday Morning / MITM link :(

I hear the similarity! No intel to offer, sorry

oh good, I just needed a sanity check!

MITM?

"Mary in the Morning" upthread

Ta. Will check it out

I found the Elvis version, the intro there has a similar chord setup. I don't hear any similarity in Glenn Campbell's.

Heard American Poet (the live album recorded in 1972 with the Tots on the Transformer tour) for the first time yesterday . -*It's really pretty good!

• The sound quality is a lot better than I expected.
• Lou's voice is expressive and he's in fine form playing guitar.
• He fired the Tots halfway through the 1973 tour for some reason.
• The name "The Tots" makes me laugh.
• Lou says "Work it" after every chorus of White Light/White Heat.

that's the WLIR Ultrasonic concert, right? with the interview segment? "where's doug yule now?" "uh, dead i hope." i think i listened to that in real time.

^pvmic

He fired the Tots halfway through the 1973 tour for some reason.

Supposedly because the bass player (I think) was getting too much attention from the crowd - more than Lou that is.

We all know what happened to his original bass player.

Also Fernando Saunders, prob his best solo band bassist, said that after several concert reviewers praised his "New Age" solo, Lou took it away.
Speaking again of "New Age," I'm not trying to argue, but this is the way Loaded hit me a few years after its release (I quoted from this RIP piece, "Lou, Velvet" [doesn't deal w solo career atall] a little bit upthread):

hen I discovered Creem, where any discussion might lead to the Velvet Underground, and I found myself buying or trading for Loaded. When Reed mentioned, as Jack and "Sweet Jane" 's mood (and, hopefully, make-out) music, " 'The March of The Wooden Soldiers'----your protest guests?"----that genial last was an aside, a stage throw-away (not quite hiding his sociable interest), between the beats, right before going back to the sweet street kitty stalk 'n' pounce----the '70s were settling into wartime, despite all the amputations and the protestations----so Pop Art was a reality after all, (here in another counterworld, more fun than Self-Portrait)(though sometimes just as in-your-face: "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" an animated line drawing, straight from the pen, " I Found A Reason" a better-than-Zappa zing ov doo-wop and other romanticism, "New Age" starting like a Tennessee Williams x Warhol soap opera, gradually morphing into an inspirational Rock Anthem, although almost uniquely stately with it: prime example of how VU turning seemingly familiar components to new-sounding results, like Big Star and a few others did in compelling ways, among the popologists of that era)(Reed maybe sometimes writing for Doug Yule's castaway Beach Boy-for-a-day pipes as he maybe sometimes had w Nico profundo in mynd) and I was hooked. And didn't Woody Guthrie say something to the effect that a songwriter should be able to get up in the morning, open a newspaper, point his guitar at some story, and write a song about it? If that paper was the Times, the Daily Worker, Women's Wear Daily or The Enquirer, so be it.

I'd recently decided that I was too moody to become a psychiatric social worker, and thus was ready to seize on the charged smog of Loaded's elliptical momentum----somebody had suggested I should become a city planner, whatever that was, so I'd switched my major to Urban Studies, while also stimulated by the model complex on the cover of Cannibals and Christians (Mailer, who had majored in Engineering at Harvard and once planned to be an architect, co-designed this beautiful mega-D lattice, with pieces of Lego or whatever it was---he could do that and write!). Loaded, in combo with my old portable stereo, set up a grid of flats and volumes, squares and other shapes, in all shades, though brightness remained filtered by the haze. So? Just turn the treble all the way up, and let it all hang out.

There was also an association with the board game played by miners in the frozen bowels of Mars, and in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It was like sort of like Monopoly,especially if Monopoly included a drug called Cand-D, and a Barbie-type doll called Perky Pat, whom you could go riding with in a sports car, under the trees and over the squares. Loaded's layout experienced its own kind of Urban Renewal program, its own aforementioned "New Age", its own "Sweet Nuthin' " too, with no contradiction. Its characters were real enough, and surrounded, though never crowded, by Lou's crew and their regard, eye to eye or sidewise----oh, sweet group therapy; sweet, long gone Psychiatric Social Work syllabi----and what about distinctively rocking social workers Kevin Coyne, Ian Curtis, Paul Morrissey, Richard Riegel, Sonny Sharrock? Maybe I was wrong?! Nah.
"And as I walk down life's highway/Hand in hand with myself/I realize/How many paths/Have come between."

"Maybe I was Wrong?!" to change my major, I meant.

Good post, dow

“––your protest guests?"

Oh, is that the line? I’ve never understood what he’s saying there!

I always thought it was "All you protest kids". Sorry for not paying enough attention, Lou.