ROBYN HITCHCOCK

Does anyone remember this guy?  Back in the day (I mean, college, 20's), Hitchcock was major.  I mean, all my fellow musical travellers loved this dude.  I was always having to hear what a classic I Often Dream Of  Trains (or whatever) was - that is when I wasn't having to hear I Often Dream Of Trains (or whatever).

And not just that - oh he was in the press all the time.  Constant praise and coverage in SPIN et al.  Here's Trouser Press:

Robyn Hitchcock is one of pop's great surrealists, an artist whose work has the appearance of familiarity yet none of its reassurance. While he often gets compared to poor old Syd Barrett (an acknowledged influence), this London native has closer relations outside the music world: Rene Magritte (logic-defying juxtapositions), Marcel Duchamp (dada absurdity), Edward Lear (whimsical, grotesque fabrications), Charles Addams (gloomy, cartoonish venom). Displaying a keen sense of irony as well as a dry, put-on (and put-upon) wit, Hitchcock's creations — in song, story, graphics and film — erect puzzling layers of incredibility that stymie presumptions about motivation or meaning. At his worst, when his penchant for self-amusement runs away with him (as it sometimes does), Hitchcock can be far too self-conscious in his pretense of eccentricity, making nonsense seem equally glib and random. At his best, however, he wields bizarre imagery brilliantly to make stealth runs at life's most challenging problems, elevating the mundane to provocative art.

Way-ull,  goshamighty!  What are we gonna say to that!??

Me - I was unmoved.  I stayed unmoved.  I heard him and heard him, and I even saw him perform once - opening for R.E.M.  I thought maybe I'd get it when I saw him perform.  Nope.  I was still unmoved.  Yeah, he had an occasional (all-too occasional) gift for a good hook and melody.  Yeah, his lyrical images (and themes) were plenty weird-ass.  But so what?  The hooks didn't hold and the music was always typical 80's pop - keyboard-drenched, chimey guitars, ultra-flat drum sounds (GOD I HATED THE 80'S!!!!).  I took comfort c. `90 when I read this in Christgau's updated Record Guide:

 Hitchcock is the kind of English eccentric who becomes impossible to bear when he's taken up by American Anglophiles. I admired the Soft Boys' 1980 Underwater Moonlight and Robyn's own 1981 Black Snake Diamond Role from a distance, but my enthusiasm dimmed as he and his Egyptians became college-radio idols ... I have no doubt that scattered among his albums are songs strong enough to withstand his professional-oddball attentions, and if I were more spiritually advanced I might even swallow my prejudices and learn to enjoy him for what he is. Which is what? A rock and roll cross between H.P. Lovecraft and Kingsley Amis? Way too kind, but that's as much thought as I intend to give the matter.

I often disagree with Christgau, but on this one I thought he nailed it.
BUT!

(you knew there was a BUT coming, didn't you?)

One night in `89 Hitch hosted MTV's 120 Minutes, which I used to watch in hopes of catching a good vid or two. I should mention here that, not working in the guy's favor was that I had a major case of anglophobia in the 80's.  I really, really hated the fact that college kids were still grooving on foppish British pop bands and gloomy British goth and industrial bands when great rock`n'roll was pouring out of seemingly every state in the union.  Who needed Love and Rockets when we had The Replacements?  Hell, who needed Love and Rockets, period (not me!!)?

Anyway, so Robyn Hitchcock was hosting 120 Minutes and doing his usual darling little British eccentric bit and telling his half-finished stories (which I'd heard so much about - and wasn't impressed by), and he brought along his acoustic guitar.  And he pulled out a number called "One Long Pair Of Eyes."

And, for the length of the song, I was entranced.  For that few minutes, I thought, maybe there was something to this guy.  No, there definitely was.  It's a great song.

Unfortunately, godammit, the version on the CD was back to the full-band, pop-froth crap that ruined everything even remotely promising the guy did.  It wasn't half the song the acoustic version was.  I did kind of like "Madonna Of The Wasps," I admit.  But really, I was only more frustrated, and if I wanted British whimsy, I preferred Bevis Frond (at least he rocked).

Fast forward 19 years or so.  120 Minutes is a thing of the past and so are my 20's and much of what went with it.  I've reevaluated a few things since then.  One night I thought of "One Long Pair Of Eyes" (ahhhh .... sigh....) and I thought, well, maybe Hitchcock's due for a reevaluation.  Or maybe at least there's a recording of "Eyes," unplugged, someplace?

So, thanks to Amazon, file-sharing, Youtube, etc ... I sampled all of Hitchcock's catalog.  And - y'know what?

(Now, in case you're expecting some epiphany here, some moment where I humbly admit that I was wrong all those years and Hitchcock really is a genius and I get it now, well .... I ... hate ... to ... disappoint you ... but ....)

I was absolutely dead fucking right!  Nailed it.  Everything I disliked about Hitchcock then, I dislike now.  BUT...

(you knew there was another BUT coming, didn't you?)

Shorn of his band, he was much more interesting. And, yes, those songs "scattered among his albums  -- strong enough to withstand his professional-oddball attentions" really do exist and, thanks to Amazon and Internet Archive (which is home to a host of Hitchcock shows, from one of which I retrieved an acoustic "One Long Pair Of Eyes" and a startling "She Doesn't Exist," possibly the bleakest I'm-done-with-you number ever, and 15 other tracks that were good enough to want to hear again, and I made myself a nifty little compilation CD (god I love my CD burner!).  It's not something I listen to often, but I'm glad it's there, when I wan' it.

P.S. everything I said here pretty much goes for The Soft Boys, too.  But "I Wanna Destroy You" is a great song.

(I'll still take Bevis Frond, though.  Sorry Katherine)

The Museum of Robyn Hitchcock
Robyn Hitchcock wiki
Robyn Hitchcock Allmusic
Internet Archive - Live Shows

Essential Listening

You're asking me?  After all that shit above?  You think I'm a good judge?
Look, the songs that made the cut for me appear on these albums: Greatest Hits ("Madonna Of The Wasps", "Globe Of Frogs", "One Long Pair Of Eyes", "She Doesn't Exist"), Globe Of Frogs ("Globe Of Frogs" again, "Vibrating", "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask") Obliteration Pie ("Chinese Bones"), I Wanna Go Backwards ("Bones In The Ground", "I Used To Say I Love You","Not Even A Nurse", "Slow Chant/That's Fantastic Mother Church", "Toadboy", "When I Was Dead","Winter Love","You're So Repulsive") Live Death ("The Arms Of Love" - original is on The Soft Boys Live at the Portland Arms) and Moss Elixir ("The Speed Of Things").  Fans will notice almost none of his most celebrated tracks are here. That's cuz I don't like `em!

HOWEVER - of these, only in the cases of "Toadboy", "You're So Repulsive", "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask" and "Slow Chant/That's Fantastic Mother Church" did I use the album tracks.  For everything else, I chose live, solo acoustic versions drawn from shows found on Internet Archive (see link above).  As you should be able to tell by now, I find solo Hitchcock vastly, humongously, infinitely, immeasurably, unimaginably preferable to any band recordings.  Unfortunately, I was too lazy then to note which shows I drew them from, and I'm far too lazy to go back and research it now.  If you're interested, go nuts.  The stuff is free and officially sanctioned, and I gave you a map.

ELVIS PRESLEY

It's been very fashionable since the 90's to trash rock and roll, and no one gets trashed as much as this guy.  If I had a dollar for every time I'd seen some variation on "Elvis' bloated corpse" as a symbol of how corrupt rock`n'roll has become, I'd be richer than most of the musicians themselves.  So let's set the record straight.

Hey, I didn't grow up loving Elvis.  No way. My parents were too old for rock`n'roll (my dad had painfully square tastes - he fancied himself a classical music aficionado, but had no particular grasp on it.  My mom, much cooler, loved Sinatra and especially Nat "King" Cole and Harry Belafonte, and swing music - woo hoo!).  When I was a kid, Elvis was this pudgy guy in ridiculous outfits who sang in Vegas and Hawaii (I did watch a few minutes of his `74 TV special).  He had nuthin' on Alice Cooper or Mick Jagger, lemme tell ya.

I must digress, slightly, but long story short - in my late teens I made a conscious decision to explore the roots of the rock music I loved - all those blues cats the Stones and Clapton were always referring to, and the rockers of the 50's.  I was wary, because in addition to not loving Elvis I emphatically did not love 50's rock - I thought of it all as silly and square.  But the rock books I was then devouring swore by this stuff, and, more importantly, so did the artists.  I well remember reading one of John Lennon's last interviews, and the reporter stated that Lennon had a jukebox loaded with Elvis singles - Elvis, according to Lennon, was The One.

So I made a big step for me, and I opened my tiny little mind to the possibility that there was something there I hadn't picked up on.  And what I found was - eureka, man!  I get it now!

You see, I didn't like 50's rock and roll because I didn't know 50's rock and roll.  I knew "Happy Days," with its sanitized view of a 50's sans generational conflict, racial issues, violence and badass music.  And it's constant plays of "Splish Splash" and "Rock Around the Clock."  And if those were all you knew of 50's music, well shit - you'd hate it too.  And, not knowing 50's rock and roll, I sure as hell didn't know Elvis worth a damn.  P.S. - I didn't really like The Stray Cats much either.  But I did love The Blasters almost on sight.

So I learned.  And son of a bitch - I was soon an Elvis fan.

There's a lot of rockers who don't like Elvis.  Hell, there always were.  In Pete Townshend's memoir Who I Am, he mentions hating Presley, infinitely preferring The Everly Brothers.  Elvis was a big yob, a bozo.  He was this dumb clown who made embarassing, gloopy records like "Love Me Tender."  He ripped off black artists and got rich while they got squat.  He made a slew of cheap, stupid movies (with lousy soundtracks).  He was a hardcore drug addict who accepted some ridiculous honorary anti-drug agent title from (to make it all worse), Richard Nixon.  He ended up a fat slob and died taking a shit, ferchrissakes!

Of course, there's some truth to all of those charges.  But look a little closer, o best beloved ... how many Elvis records have you actually heard?  How many of his stupid movies have you ever seen?  How much do you know about a record industry that rewarded white artists over black, or the racial barriers in American society - barriers that have been powerfully chipped away at by the existence of artists, such as ... Elvis Presley, and all those he influenced?  How many iconic rockers have made assholes of themselves as a result of their drug problems (you can start counting at Amy Winehouse and work your way back.  Bring something to snack on ... it's gonna take you a while)?  How many people die in a dignified manner (answer: none)?

See, once I listened, once I heard ... the story was very different.  The early Elvis sides are definitive rockabilly - among the cream of the crop.  These are the Sun sides and most of his early RCA stuff.  But hey, guess what? The icky ballads were their even as far back as the Sun sides.  They're more than redeemed by "Tryin' To Get To You" and "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and "Mystery Train" and "Baby Let's Play House."  At RCA he laid down "My Baby Left Me" (probably my fave Presley rave) and "Jailhouse Rock" (kicks ass!!) and many others.  And yes, as someone once mentioned, it's there that he "sold out to girls," increasingly laying down romantic gloop and leaning away from the r&b and country songwriters he'd favored towards pop songwriters who just couldn't deliver the goods.

After the army and Hollywood, he definitely got soft.  BUT! And this is a BIG BUT!  He also cut a ton of rock and roll outside the soundtracks.  And, while these are slicker than the early stuff, the best of them still kick holy ass - "Little Sister," "Marie's The Name," "Follow That Dream" - woo!

Then came the `68 "comeback" TV special - and the Pres belting out his hits in a black leather cat suit, banging out Sun memories with his old comrades, and blowing away the stodge of his big production numbers (the gospel medley alone is a thrill).  And the Memphis sides.  Uneven, has its share of duds, but the best of it is rock-solid, first-rate, soul-influenced rock, and it stands with any other rock of the era - no doubt.

And yeah, after that, it was into decline.  The seventies weren't good to him.  They were't good to Lou Reed or Dylan, either.  Sure, I'd like to imagine the guy dumped the twinkies and the pain-killers and the nudie suits, sold off Graceland, moved off to L.A. and found himself hooked up with X and The Blasters and rocked the 80's like a motherfucker. I'd like to imagine Al Gore won in 2000, too.  But it didn't happen.

Hey, I ain't done yet.  El was supposed to have been dumb, an ignorant hillbilly.  As biographer Peter Guralnick noted - if he was so dumb, you try to make your way through Madame Blavatsky.  Yeah, the Pres had a profound mystical/religious bent.  He and old non-admirer Pete Townshend (who, by the way, revised his opinion when he came to know the Sun sides) would have had a lot to talk about.  Shit, since he got old Elvis flame Ann-Margaret to appear in "Tommy," maybe he could've roped in the El hisself if he'd played his cards right.  The possibilities are staggering.

Presley wasn't dumb and he wasn't ignorant.  But he was, I think, afraid.  He never really embraced the world outside of Memphis c. 1957, exactly.  He never really fit in Hollywood (not for lack of trying) and, after the British Invasion, not in rock and roll either.  Yeah, it's easy to laugh at the guy pounding peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, or ordering a pizza for him and his good ol' boy buddies to chow down on during their first/only LSD trip.  But then, Cobain was supposedly homesick for rainy Seattle in L.A., and his grocery list was heavy on Kraft macaroni and cheese.  You can take the boy out of....

Oh, Hollywood?  Y'know, I've seen a bunch of those Elvis movies, and yeah, mostly they're junkola.  But all I've seen are at least amusing, entertaining fluff - something to kill 90 minutes when you've got insomnia (the circumstances under which I've encountered most).  Heck, I even like "A Change of Habit," with El as a concerned inner-city doctor and social activist, and Mary Tyler Moore as a nun toward between being a bride of JC and that hunka hunka burning love doctor/social activist.  But, what I wanted to say is - "Jailhouse Rock" is a non-embarassing, actually pretty good movie with a pretty good soundtrack - and "King Creole," (based on Harold Robbins' A Stone For Danny Fisher) not only has a good soundtrack but is very good movie and features a very good performance by EP - he coulda been a contender.  Let's put it this way: he was never any worse as an actor than Frank Sinatra - and Sinatra gave perfectly credible performances in all his films.

Look, I'll make it simple.  If all you know of Presley is the "ignorant hillbilly" or "bloated corpse" or "The Wonder Of You" then you don't know jack, jack.  Me, the story I like best is this one.  See, I had a job working with this older dude from Texas 15+ years or so ago, and we'd talk about 50's rock and such (which he'd grown up with and was a fan of), and he remembered the night Presley was on Ed Sullivan.  After watching the El do his thing, Bob's dad was, he said, positively shaking with anger, and declared: "that PUNK will NEVER make it!!"  But Bob's mom turned to her husband with an ear-to-ear grin on her face, and told him, calmly: "Oh yes he will."

Official Website
Elvis Presely Wiki
Elvis Presley Allmusic

Essential Listening

This is tricky.  Almost all Presley albums have their share of chaff as well as wheat.  The most reliable of the early ones are Elvis Presley (first album on RCA), The Sun Sessions, and Elvis Golden Records - the best of his 50's hits.

The sixties are a lot tougher.  Elvis is Back!, his first post-army album, is one of his best and well worth hearing.  Memories: The `68 Comeback Special is the soundtrack to same, and unequivocally great - it's got all the outtakes, too. You need to see the DVD, too.  The Memphis Record is the stuff that immediately followed that and is damn fine. Also well worth checking out is Reconsider Baby, a nifty collection of straight blues/r&b performances from throughout his career.

Of course, best move is to do what I did, and download your choices from The King of Rock and Roll: The Complete 50's Masters, From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential 60's Masters and Command Performances: The Essential 60's Masters Vol. II - make your own, baby!

Essential Viewing

I already mentioned the comeback special.  Don't miss it.  Also worth seeing: Elvis `56 - nice documentary narrated by Levon Helm, for a look at the cool, pre-Hollywood Elvis.  It's out of print, but you have a VCR, don't you?  I'm also partial to Elvis: The TV Series - fictional, but a blast for any rockabilly/country/blues/50's fan.

Essential Reading

Peter Guralnick's two-volume bio Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love is likely to remain the definitive bio.

Greil Marcus' Mystery Train is a great book, and the long final section, "Presliad" is a fascinating rumination on the P as an artist and American icon.  Also the extensive notes at the end of the book dissect his catalog nicely, including bootlegs and the score of books that have been written about him.  Dead Elvis suffers from  the coherence issues that afflict much of Marcus' post "Train" work, but the fantasy Elvis film (Elvis teams up with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent to nab a drug-pushing ring at the local high school, being run by Dick Clark.  Natalie Wood is the Only Girl in School.  Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley rumble.  Elvis, Gene and Eddie team up as a rock and roll band in the school talent show, calling themselves The Rolling Stones.  As my buddy said - this should've been made.)

PETER LAUGHNER

I don't know a lot about Peter Laughner.  Like probably most everyone else (outside of those who did know him), I imagine, I first heard about him in connection with Cleveland's underground scene of the 70's, more specifically, in Lester Bang's obit for him, which can be found in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.  All that left me with was a tantalizing, yet also pathetic, picture of a talented guy with mostly superlative taste in music and a gift for Bukowksi-an prose, who couldn't handle his substances too well.  Oh, and he also led a band with one of the coolest names I'd ever heard (Rocket From the Tombs) and who I would've, at the time, given my eyeteeth to hear recordings of (I have since, and if they're not the holy grail I imagined them to be, they still have considerable merit). Clinton Heylin's From the Velvets to the Voidoids gave me some more info, as did a radio special on the Cleveland scene I heard c. 92.

This is a strange way to get to know a cult rocker icon, which Laughner has come to be, albeit only, I suppose, among music geeks like myself.  I've yet to see any video footage of him, nor do I know if any exists.  The photos I've come across are almost all small, hazy, grainy and usually b&w.  The only released recordings of him (there do seem to be a fair share of recordings) are similarly lo-fi, scratchy, and vague. Laughner is sort of a punk-rock answer to Robert Johnson - a mystery man with only some flawed artifacts left behind.

Basically, the guy spent a decade plus forming and shattering (or being kicked out of) various bands of varying promise, in all of which he seems to have shot himself in the foot, mainly due to an apparent lack of confidence about his own songs, a tendency to fall back on beloved covers, and a ADD-like approach to direction brought on by his own versatility - do I play "Route 66," or "Heroin," or Richard Thompsons's "Cavalry Cross" - cuz I can easily pull off any of them. Add in the fact that most of his comrades in music don't appear to have had near his range or reach or imagination. And mostly, his main problem - the guy just plain drank way too much (killing yourself at 24 with pancreatitis is an impressive feat that goes waaaaaaaaay beyond the normal, or even excessive, measure of teenage boy partying) and far too many drugs.

I don't mean to sound too harsh on Laughner, because, far from it, I see a lot, and I do mean a lot, of myself in his story.  I didn't and don't have anywhere near his musical talent, but, fortunately, never came anywhere near his substance issues, for which I am resentful (re: the first) and grateful (re: the latter).

The recordings are all basically of bootleg (i.e. rough sound quality) and mostly of very rough, even shaky, performance (some of the live Tombs stuff suffers from seriously sloppy drumming).  The songs are remarkable.  As Peter Scholtes wrote in City Pages a decade ago:

 Where Lou Reed was cool, and Iggy just crazy, Rockets were vulnerable and enraged, singing bluntly about feeling shut out or lost, but with the pride of losers who never had a chance.

If that sounds quite a bit like the kind of stuff that would emerge in the 80s'/90's - you'd be dead right.

The very raggedness of both recording and performance keeps Laughner's legacy from being truly appreciable.  But there's much here worth hearing if you're into this sort of thing (and if you're reading this, you probably are).

Links

Handsome Productions this is the best repository of Laughner info.  Scroll down the home page and you'll find the link.  "Words By Peter" is a selection of his writings, mostly about music but, being very Bukowski-an as I mentioned, also very much about himself.  The liner notes to the first Ubu single are a blast!  "Words About Peter" contains Bangs' obit (an excellent piece in and of itself), a typically terse and sarcastic but honest interview with David Thomas on Peter, the Rockets, and the early days, and "Those Were Different Times," Laughner ex-wife Charlotte Pressler's very moving reminiscence of the Cleveland underground scene of the seventies - essential stuff!
Rocket From the Tombs official website (the reformed Rockets, with much historical as well as up-to-date info, and you can get their records there)
ClePunk good site for all Cleveland underground bands.  Rockets and Pere Ubu are prominently featured there
Ain't It Fun nice article by Jason Gross, with some good notes on their limited discography
Tomb Raider short but insightful City Pages piece on the Rockets

Essential Listening

The Day the Earth Met Rocket From the Tombs flawed stuff but worth hearing for some very fine songs ("Amphetamime," "Seventeen").  Some other archival recordings as well as stuff by the reformed band can be acquired at the same link.

Take the Guitar Player For A Ride demos, live takes, etc from Laughner's short career.  There's some nice stuff here, including slower solo versions of "Amphetamine," a cover of Eno's "Baby's On Fire," "Dear Richard" and several others.  Out of print now, but can be tracked down.

The above-cited Handsome Productions had a host of Laughner archival recordings for sale:

Terry Hartman and Peter Laughner Notes On A Cocktail Napkin - demos (I think) of an early folk-rockish band formed by Laughner c. 1970
The Original Wolverines Do Re Mi - live folk/rock/blues c. 1972
Cinderella Backstreet's Last Show Laughner's Rock and Roll Animal-influenced early 70's band - c.1973
Peter Laughner How I Spent My Summer Vacation - live at Case University c. 1974
Cinderella's Revenge Last Show - another final gig, c. 1975
Peter Laughner Dear Richard - late 70's home demos
Peter Laughner Setting Son - home recordings, mostly covers
Friction Hideaway - live and demos of Laughner's post-Ubu band
Peter and the Wolves Time Tunnel - practice tapes of Laughner's final outfit
Peter Laughner Nocturnal Digressions - late-night home recordings, mostly covers, shortly before his death

I've not heard any of these (though individual songs from most of these are on Take the Guitar Player) and all are out of print as Handsome is no longer selling Laughner recordings.  I suspect availability, even second-hand, is very limited.  Another label, Smog Veil, was supposed to be putting a boxed set (or multiple boxed sets), but it's been six years since they were announced and no sign yet.

Essential Reading

From the Velvets to the Voidoids by Clinton Heylin
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs

Plug this into your browser for a cool audio of Laughner and Lester Bangs doing one of Laughner's best songs.  Dunno why I can't link to the video - it ain't lettin' me!

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&ved=0CFAQtwIwBQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DJW3pgFKnS28&ei=xP0fUbn1Ne7aigL_6oBo&usg=AFQjCNFTcmUCUV1SgqRTxHa66jlE7mpimw&bvm=bv.42661473,d.cGE

PS  there are several other Laughner audio's on Youtube, so check `em out.

LOU REED

Oh Lou, oh Lou, what are we to make of you....?

Forever to be most lionized for four (five) records you made the better part of fifty years ago.  To have your entire half-a-century career stand in the shadow of a mere 8% or so of your entire body of work.  An 8% done at the beginning of your career.  To have everything you've done since 1970 judged, usually invidiously, against your first work.

Yes, that has to suck.  No wonder you've got a long-standing rep as a disagreeable shithead.  I gotta tell ya, I don't blame you.

But let's tell the truth.  Those first few years have gotten you an awful lot of slack, man.  I mean really ... even if it just meant music geeks who kept checking in with you all these years hoping for (at first) a taste of the genius (and man, it was genius ... it truly was).  And then later, hoping for a glimpse of it at least.  And then, in the end, all the times we've had to say (to non-believers) "Okay, okay, I know - it sucks - but dammit it's Lou Reed!!"

Of course, the problem is, you did keep giving us that glimpse.  Every now and then.  Not often enough, man.  I remember listening to New York and thinking - "Shit!  He's back!"  


This cop who died in Harlem
You think they'd get the warnin'
I was dancing when I saw his brains run out on the street

No one could pull off Chandleresque lines in a rock and roll song like that but you, man.  And what the late-comers, the imitators, the countless (countless, countless) followers who you inspired never (never, never) could understand about what made you tick, is, when you're on your game, anyway, you never failed to follow up some gloriously ugly bit of gutter poetry like that with an even more gloriously beautiful one:


The perfume burned his eyes
Holding tightly to her thighs
And something flickered for a minute
And then it vanished and was gone

Yeah, Dylan brought the beat poetry in all its surreal glory, but you brought Delmore Schwartz and Raymond Chandler.  It never sprawled.  You were always tight and right and disciplined.  You learned all the right lessons from Delmore, didn't you?  You've always been an academic's dream.  You might have learned from the beats, but yours was a more terse, more biting, more traditional way.  All muscle and strength and hard eyes.

So why'd you have to spend the crucial years, the decade post-Velvets, wandering lost?  A limp, lost first album full of Velvets outtakes that got smoked when the demos leaked out on bootlegs (and later, oh-ficial releases) (damn, you had money - couldn't you have at least tried to talk Sterl and Moe and Doug, if not Cale, back into the fold?).  Followed it up veering from junkie-queen cartoons to morbid rock operas to competent but dull (to really dull) - but every now you'd peek out from behind the masks (bleached blonde, iron crosses shaved into your head, Lou-as-Frankenstein) with something like "Coney Island Baby," or "Walk," or "Street Hassle."  Let's not even talk about the disco album.

Okay, then you kicked your habit and got your ass together and got another tight band and churned out some nice, sober stuff that was too damn literate for its own good.  And it looked like you might really have it with The Blue Mask, thanks in part to Quine, I suspect.  Hell, you even managed another hit.  Cute song too even if it still made us believers kinda cringe ("yeah, it's cute, it's catchy, I'm glad he got a hit but ... damn this is the guy who wrote `Heroin,' fer fucks sake...").  After that it was throwaways, until you dropped New York on us and we knew you still had it.  For sure.

Since then you've gone all respectable on us, and at least we can count on a Lou album to be interesting and have one or two moments.  But man, ever since you decided to be a literati (c. The Raven), its getting hard to follow.  I don't like this shit coming out of Pete Townshend and he's got a better sense of melody than you anymore, man (p.s. love the clip of you and Pete - how'd it take this damn long for you to get together?  Was it cuz he used to drink with Cale?).  Metallica was a bad (bad, bad) move, man.  Someone else (very sagely, and I wish I knew who so I could credit him) said it was the first time you'd ever played with a drummer who didn't groove.

Oh, I know.  You don't give a shit what I, or anyone else thinks.  And that's one of the things I love best about you, man.  And I do love you, y'know, you old shithead.  Cuz every time you put something out, whether its genius (New York, Spanish Fly) or an unlistenable piece of shit (Lulu), well, dammit, you're Lou Reed!

Lou Reed Allmusic
Lou Reed Wiki
Official Page
The Rock and Roll Animal page (very comprehensive!)


Essential Listening

New York most consistent Lou album out there - barely a weak track to be found.

Sally Can't Dance despite being condemned by many Lou fans as a cheap sellout, I find this one pretty  consistent and good listening.

Rock and Roll Animal a legendary late `73 recording from NYC.  Lots of guitar wank and noodling, and I think his solo numbers benefit more from the metal/arena workout they get here than most of the Velvets material, but he's in fine voice anyway and, well, it is pretty great for guitar wank.  Lou Reed Live is more of the same - nice workout on "Walk On The Wild Side" makes it worthwhile.  Download both and slap `em on a CD and you've got the whole show.  

Live in Italy with Bob Quine on guitar.  A tough, tight, terse show.  More disciplined than Animal and I'll take Quine/Reed over Johnstone/Hunter (with all due respect to Davey and Steve) any day.  Great workouts on "Sister Ray," "White Light White Heat" and "Some Kinda Love," done as a hard blues.

Street Hassle a weird mess of an album, but the title track and "Dirt" and "I Wanna Be Black" are must-hears.

Take No Prisoners as much stand-up monologues as music - Lord Buckley he ain't - but I admit his ranting during "Sweet Jane" is hilarious, and his extended babbling and attack on rock critics during "Walk" comes close.  Forgotten in most discussions of this one is that the band is hot and kicks ass.  Funniest record he ever made.  Essential just for shock value.

Between Thought and Expression anything else essential (as far as I'm concerned) can be found here.  Most essential - extended workout on "Heroin" with Don Cherry backing him.  Amazing track and the best non-Velvets version of that one ever.  Although Roky Erickson's is pretty fun, too.

Essential Viewing

Rock and Roll Heart rock solid documentary, tracing the r'n'r animal's career from Velvets days to the end of the 90's.  Some great rare footage.

Spanish Fly - Live in Spain live in (surprise!) Spain with guitarist Mike Rathke, bassist/backing vocalist Fernando Saunders, drummer Tony "Thunder" Smith, and secret weapon cellist Jane Scarpantoni.  Very cool stuff.

Essential Reading

Transformer by Victor Bockris highly controversial bio.  Anything that pisses dedicated Lou fans off this much has to have something going for it.  Not a flattering picture of the man but a fair assessment of him as an artist.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs essential reading for anyone who likes good rock writing, or good writing period.  Several pieces are here from Bangs near-legendary battles with Reed - hysterical reading in more ways than one.

NIRVANA

Y'know I almost didn't write this.  I didn't want to write it.  Even as I'm sitting here typing, I don't want to write it.  I wonder if I'll post it.  I wonder, if I do post it, if I'll take it down.  Edit it.  Forget it.

The thing is, I hate Nirvana.  Well, that isn't true.  I hate Nirvana as a band.  Or maybe that isn't true.  Maybe I just hate Nirvana as an image, an idyll, one that may not be entirely accurate, given how carefully it's hair's been tousled before it goes in front of the camera.

Or maybe it's just Cobain that I hate.  But, no, that isn't true either.  I never knew the guy.  Still, I must confess ... there were certain things I hated about him.  The ratty, old man sweaters.  The creaky speaking voice.  The drugged-out, mascara'd look he adopted for photos.  No doubt about it: Cobain was the first rock musician I ever dug musically who disgusted me.

And yeah, I do dig Nirvana musically.  Some.  Enough that, when they first came around, I wanted to like them.  I heard the early numbers ("Stain") on college radio and thought they were pretty good. When "Teen Spirit" hit I found it a good record.  Still do. But even then I was a bit saddened that these guys had made the Top 40 while Husker Du, the Mats, et al had already crashed against the rocks and sunk.  And I was more saddened, disappointed, when Nirvana turned out not to be the start of round two of a generation of great Amurrican rock bands, but a rather erratic outfit (though in this they were no different than any of their precursors, few of whom were really consistent) who, far from kickstarting a positive musical trend, merely dragged into the limelight a horde of phony art-metal poseurs who promptly became the new hierarchy of rock for a generation (not for me!).  Sure, some said, it was better than Motley Crue.  I guess.  Me, I found Eddie Vedder and Billy Corgan just as insufferable as Nikki Sixx any day.

And I was more saddened when hordes of rock critics - ones who knew a lot better welcomed them as the second coming:

The teen spirit that is always a component of the ether can hover for years without coalescing into anything more than a haze — that vague, uneasy, something-in-the-air feeling rising like swamp gas as a byproduct of living young and unsteady in a hostile world that hasn't yet made its intentions clear. But it can also go off with a spectacular atmospheric bang. The catalysts that ignite such cultural explosions rarely survive the experience, and the havoc they instigate is invariably all out of proportion to their efforts. But the changes so wrought can be vast, leveling the land and ushering in an era to which old rules no longer apply. 

So writes Ira Robbins over at Trouserpress.  And I call bullshit.  What cultural explosion?  A generation of kids in ripped jeans and flannel shirts?  Armies of glum, pretentious pop-metal (aka "grunge" and "alternative") bands?  Look, even Everett True, who wrote a pretty flattering bio on the band, said of their legacy:

Smashing Pumpkins. Puddle of Mudd. Silverchair. Bush. Muse. Ash. Courtney Love. Better Than Ezra. Pearl Jam. Stone Temple Pilots. Live. Staind. Creed. Candlebox. Some legacy!

And that's coming from a fan of this stuff!   Thank you. Ev.

But if I want to condemn Cobain for his failures of person, or artistry, or integrity (all of which there were many), then I must condemn every other artist on this blog, for all of them stand guilty.

And I cannot ignore the truth.  To a whole generation plus, Cobain is a legend, a hero, an icon.  It doesn't matter that that same generation never got to know D. Boon, or Henry Rollins, or Bob Mould, or Paul Westerberg.  Cobain was their first fuck, and that's the end of the story.  As I watched those kids in their punk`n'grunge dress, weeping while Courtney Love (I could condemn him for her, too) read his suicide note and swore, I felt a lot like I imagine Pete Townshend felt, looking at a crowd of neo-mods in 1980.  "We don't have much in common with you lot," he said.

The criteria for inclusion here is simple: if I like an artist enough to own/have owned a recording and/or seen them perform, they're in. And, yes, I own a Nirvana CD.  It's a comp I burned, the best of.  And I had to stretch a little to fill it.  But, as much as I don't want to, I think "About A Girl" is a great song with a nice Rubber Soul feel to it.  I think "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" is one of the finer covers of "In The Pines" (as the song is better known) around.  I think "Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam" and "Molly's Lips" smoke The Vaselines', and I think the Meat Puppets covers on Unplugged are definitive - because, in truth, much as I want to like the Meat Puppets, I've always liked their songs best when someone else was covering them, and giving them the kick in the ass I've always felt they needed.

Links

The two best pieces I've read on Cobain are this one by Billy Bob Hargus, who, even though he cuts the boy some slack on his essential phoniness assesses him, I think, fairly; and this one by Dave Marsh, who, even though he couches the whole sorry mess in far more heroic terms than is likely true, and overrates him as an artist, does a good job putting him in much-needed context.

"Essential"

There are a score of books about the band.  The one I read, by Everett True, is an amusing if at times self-serving chronicle of the band and the early-90's Seattle-region scene. Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life is pretty good and insightful, thus it's possible his Come As You Are might be as well.  But I haven't read it.

As to the recordings - you're on your own, man.  Three albums, a compilation of outtakes, a live "unplugged" album ... those I culled from.  Unplugged probably ended up the most represented on my personal comp.  Make your own.  A lot of people consider these classics.  Since then there's been a live album and a boxed set out of outtakes, but these guys weren't a compelling enough to get me to check into them.  Good luck.