Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

i'm not sure how effectively this is achieved by the documentary -- since ppl are reading their sense of disappointment in its later stages as a flaw -- but it does strike me that its visually contructed as the closing of a trap, from lou's very eary announcment he wants to be a big famous rockstar back in the days when listening to rock still functioned as a potential art-quirk like watching a guy feed his piano hay or whatever, to he (and to a lesser extent cale) actually becoming rockstars

so that the early visual setting is broad and rich -- a little chaotic and historically unstructured if you want to glean an useable sense of all the interracting new york artspaces in like 1960, the paintings, the films, the happenings, and yes it omits some of the strands (ornette shd also be in there if cardew is), but this is what the world they came up in was -- but by the end its just a regimented seauence of album covers everyone has seen a million times: lou got his wish and it was a much more limited world!

against this you have a very specific reading of a throughline, which is cale's commitment to the drone: he is a beguiling figure to encounter telling his own story but no more trustworthy or self-denying as a judge of the true underlying energies than anyone else (i mean i'm not going to argue he's *less* trustworthy in telling the tale than lol lamonte, but in the great young-conrad battle abt rights and legacy he is at best diplomatic in the end) (not that tony conrad wasn't invested: it was a battle!)

the thing is, the cale throughline kinds of fizzles out: JC steps back from it bcz he became involved the fashioning of himself as a project within rock (where is HIS metal machine music?)

i mean most of the throughlines fizzle out bcz nearly everyone dies so young

i mean this seems an extremely very haynes-ish trajectory-framework:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSfjqiOEin0

(also applies to lamonte young and marian zazeela tbh, except for her very good hat)

the thing is, the cale throughline kinds of fizzles out: JC steps back from it bcz he became involved the fashioning of himself as a project within rock (where is HIS metal machine music?)

The new VU & Nico tribute isn't bad.

Venus in Furs by Andrew Bird & Lucius is my favorite track on it. Run Run Run by Kurt Vile is pretty good.

Femme Fatale by Sharon Van Etten is too slow, a bit of a slog.

Michael Stipe on I'll Be Your Mirror is nice enough.

It's not great, but I would say it's much better than the average tribute.

some sort of reliable character actor capable of various shadings

well i'd quibble with "reliable" in its narrative-provider meaning! the only strongly featured talking heads here who probably didn't deserve some kind of anti-bullshit pushback were amy taubin, the ppl animated by family loyalty (= lou's sister and sterling's wife) and *maybe* moe

(i'm not sure the anti-bullshit pushback wd have made for a better doc btw: there's no "uninvested place to stand")

and no, actually i meant that -- given that the first two thirds of the doc is structured so much to be the lou-and-john show -- john's line seems like a promising counter-narraive against lou's wannabe-a-rockstar at the outset (the heroic survival of the old avant garde as everything turns into rock), which JC's eloquence and charm put across well, as does the very viola'd-up ST… except ultimately it kinda dribbles out? even tho JC is still with us large as life and three times as winning (good beard). we end up in the rock wall-of-fame (album covers galore) *despite* all the viola complications

*despite* all the viola complications

we could just dance to the Lou Reed station
and it was all right

as regards this doc i think all the "who's the producer" chat is a red herring

(it was always frank zappa)

Speaking of which, wonder how much everyone knows about John’s second wife and the Zappa connection there. There is even a related Modern Lovers connection.

just goes to show how different everyone's perception of this stuff is--I think Loaded is a masterpiece, and everything that's on there belongs on there. Don't really care for much of Lou's output after that.

though listening to this Ride into the Sun demo someone posted above makes me wish we had a fleshed out loaded version of this

The keyboardy version with Doug singing is gorgeous.

Luna's cover of ride into the sun always satisfied me as the finished version that I wanted to hear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNlPtE63SNo

Yeah

So many booming posts here since I went to bed! One thing: xyzzzz, you quote my "culmination" bit, but I hope you also noticed what I later said about finally checking the Fully Loaded and Re: Loaded track lists, seeing what Loaded could have been...
Oh yeah, and I hope the doc doesn't leave too much room for the impression that Lou became the Rock Star in 70s-on terms while John remained the perennial Artiste---since he had his own great run in the 70s (and maybe after, I dunno), with off-the-wall albums and shows, earning a lot of acclaim as consistently as possible, given the Mad King elements, while bounced off the walls of his own suck-cess, despite making some good (and some not good) albums along the way to The Bells, gateway to his better later albums, more than the bad ones.
Not meant as a complaint, necessarily:I take it as a given that all narrators are unreliable at least some of the time. Including the ones that have had a very long time to polish their stories.

while *Lou* bounced off the walls duh sorry

The doc doesn't touch his solo career except glancingly -- the first album, I think.

Vintage Violence? I love it, but he later disowned it, said something like it was just an exercise, condisered Paris 1919 his first real album (also implicitly discounting several previous avant instrumental excursions that have been on YouTube, though I guess those weren't properly released in the late 60s etc., if ever).
V V is more subtle than the ones that got all us Collegetown party hipsters jumping up and down, like Slow Dazzle and Helen of Troy and Sabotage Live, that's when he was a Stah (think it was Slow Dazzle designated as Bubbling Under The Top 100, first time I saw that term).

oh I meant Reed

The Lou s/t debut hmm, yeah, I only ever liked a few tracks on that, which seems to have been the case with just about everybody.
Would like to see a more inclusive, maybe multi-part approach, that didn't turn into The Lou Show, not altogether---Scorsese could do it; he really does his homework, and even got Pete Cosey into his blues series (even even found fascinating footage of JB Lenoir--sounding like a link between Skip James, Sam Cooke, and Bob Marley---talking and singing in his Chicago apartment, from a delving Swedish doc, shot on spec for and rejected by Swedish Public TV).

(Pete Cosey even on a new track recorded for that blues series.)

The Lou s/t debut hmm, yeah, I only ever liked a few tracks on that, which seems to have been the case with just about everybody.

Not me.

Not I.

I want to like most of it more than I do. The mix is bad, the lyrical changes he's made to the Velvet-era songs are bad, the back-up singers are bad. Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman are good.

Tylerw's Aquarium Drunkard intro to a posted AD comp of Pre-1980 Velvets covers, chosen by him, I hope, also mentions that xpost A Tribute To The Velvet Underground & Nico is a Hal Willner venture, so I'll check it after all (though first single is a Kurt Vile offering).

That Wilner tribute album is pretty disappointing, though it has a few moments. I really like Michael Stipe's take on "Sunday Morning" and the Iggy Pop/Matt Sweeney "European Son" is cool. Otherwise it all ranges from meh to fine, the Thurston Moore and Bobby Gillespie "Heroin" is not the tour de force you might have expected from their respective heydays.

I tuned in for the Fontaines' "Black Angel Death Song" which I thought would be a good pick, but disappointingly they don't change key at all during it.

Clock DVA did a cover of the song years ago. I think around the time of Thirst so should be interesting.
I remember the story from somewhere about a friend of the VU being amazed that the song had chords etc and i think Cale saying well sure it had chords, it's a song.

Aye, that's in "Uptight" I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGOBx681PTo

JUst looked taht up and its from 83 and the band with John Carruthers who was later in The Banshees and Nick Sanderson who was later in the Gun Club on.

You VU maniacs have probably heard it but I recently stumbled across Lou Reed acoustic demos from 1970.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hph-bX4_WE

yeah those are great

Includes an actual anti-Vietnam War protest song!

Maybe a silly question, but are any of those Spyglass/Keyhole Boston Tea Party boots worth picking up? I'm tempted, but seen a few mixed reviews.

VU bootlegs are not even close to the level of Dead bootlegs, which is a shame. :/

If only! That would be great.

disagree, I've never heard a live VU boot that wasn't worth multiple listens and the BTP ones are particularly great

yes it's all lo-fi as hell for the most part but YMMV

I mean the 1969-07-11 BTP has a 16-minute "Run Run Run", what's not to love?

yeah thats what i'm sayin i hear it and i just wished it sounded better. but i dig what you're saying

Yeah I'm glad they exist for sure, 7/11/69 was the one I was specifically eyeing.

lol I'm listening now and I swear you can hear Jonathan Richman yelling for "Sister Ray" before they do it as an encore

like, repeatedly

yes it's all lo-fi as hell for the most part but YMMV

I mean the 1969-07-11 BTP has a 16-minute "Run Run Run", what's not to love?

I found a copy of The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes recently (from whence came that insane “Run” cubed), and was expecting little beyond a single mic on Lou’s amp. It’s actually far more (and I hate this word) listenable than its reputation suggests, better in some ways than the Quine tapes.

oh yeah that all-amp version of "Sister Ray" sounds like fucking Hawkwind, just tremendous

There's a film on Barbara Rubin on Sky Arts right now taht I only found out about half way through showing. & apparently Andy Warhol foun dout about the Velvets through her and she did the visuals for the EPI. Not sure what the story is on repeats for this.; I know a lot of teh material showing on Sky Arts gets repeated quite a bit.

Repeats on Tuesday Morning at about 3am on the schedule I'm getting in Ireland anyway. Assume that's actually a UK timetable.
Film by Chuck Smith with Lee Ranaldo as musical director according to the credits

The Barbara Rubin documentary is excellent (couple of years old). She was right in the middle of a Warhol-Velvets-Dylan triangle.

Intriguing figure...Speaking of Sky Arts, have any of you seen The South Bank Show's 1986 VU doc? I think that's what I saw in '87 on the first incarnation of Bravo, but South Bank also did one on Warhol in '87, so may have been that---even so, VU content def made strongest impression, and Bravo was smart to start with him and/or them in my neck of the woods---here they are (several posts of it on the 'Tube):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkuBjik4O-g

imdb says also incl. Bockris, Xgau, some others you might not care to see/hear.

I remember Cale's Beethoven t-shirt, I had the same one at some point, wish i still had it!

Yeah had SBS on video so watched several times. Cale looking really heavy at the time did he give up the drink afterwards or something cos he lost weight again by Songs For Drella.