Pete Seeger Lives

When I was in college, I interviewed Pete Seeger. He was a genuinely nice man, tolerant of an inexperienced upstart.

 It was one of the very first times EVER I asked somebody questions, wrote down what they say, put quotes together in an article and had it published in the school paper (I had mostly wrote reviews and poems).

Pete Seeger was coming to play at the school – they had just built a new arts center – and the interview was part of a review of his concert. He seemed old then, older than my parents, even though they were the same age. You think everyone your parents age are the same and it was a revelation to find out that members of the generation protested the war, supported environmental movements too.

We talked a good while. I asked him about song writers and public affairs. I remember most him being just so warm and friendly. I must have told him I had seen him in concert. Ronald Reagan had entered office and I do remember one joke, what he thought of the new president – “he’s a good cowboy actor.”

I was a punk-er by then, but being a Dylan freak I was knowledgeable about folk music, etc. I had some good questions. I remember I had to get permission for the interview, and could not tape it. The concert was a good show – the school was very left-leaning, the majority of the faculty had been in the movement – and they loved singing along to those old folk songs.

I worked all night on that thing, the process was new to me and did not come easy. Also, it was on a typewriter, manual Smith Corona, onion skin paper.  My philosophy professor and a student-advisor said to me after he read the article in the paper –– “hey Herrick, maybe you actually can write.”

A few years earlier – when I was 15 – me and buddies Danny and Tony – saw a Tribute to Leadbelly concert, with Seeger and Arlo Guthrie – also Sweet Honey in the Rock and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. How we ever heard about this concert or got tickets is lost to the mysteries of time. We loved the show, I remember liking it a lot but what I remember most is that Danny’s mother drove us, went out to dinner, then picked us up. In college, this had become a favorite teenage memory. The concert was released on CD a few years ago, but I never picked it up. I preferred the memory.

My buddy Danny has a story about meeting Arlo Guthrie in the early 90s and how he was astounded he had gone to the Leadbelly Tribute.

 I’ve been a folk music fan since I was a kid. It has to do with being a Bod Dylan freak, which happened like at 13. See, that’s the evolution. Within two years of getting really into – in the parlance of the times – you’re off to the big city to see Pete Seeger sing songs that even then were at least a half-century old. Seeger pre-dated Dylan by about 30 years, although was also a contemporary a solo-artist – he was signed to Columbia also – and if you think of some of the other contemporaries, Seeger outlasted them and was still relevant 15 years or so when my musical tastes were in formation.

Me and the guys did not ask our mom to drive us to see Tom Paxton or the Kingston Trio, not to mention the Highwaymen. We probably had little to no idea who they were anyway.  

Some artist linger past their time and some do not and Pete Seeger is somebody whose music lingered because of its authenticity. His recordings are really not that good, they certainly disdain any kind of polish. The studio was not his forte and his live recordings are more documentations of folk music as opposed to a preservation of a performance.

Seeger connects us to how songs were sung before recorded music. That is, together. His father was a academic folk musicologist, and Seeger had not just an library-sized memory for songs, if you listen to his interviews (there’s a swell one available for free at archive.org with the great Studs Terkel), he studied the evolution of these songs – a recent old song I’ve discovered – the Golden Vanity, a mournful ditty about a sailor who sabotages a ship, goes back to Elizabethan age, according to Seeger. He encourages us to sing along – I remember my philosophy rhapsodizing about how he loves singing along in groups with Pete, a main focus of the concert he performed and I can still recall – but he also engages us with the history of the songs. He was a scholar, but never in an ivory tower and made the scholarship – the backstory of a song – listen to Guantanamera, one of the few distinctively famous recordings of his long career –part of the experience. A.P. Carter collected songs from hither and yon, but he made them all into Carter Family songs and while Seeger was inspired by the Carter Family too, his ethnographic tendencies acknowledged lineages more than A.P. ever cared to, opening up a collective history to all the listeners. In contrast, the Carter Family seems to fabricate some Southern agrarian ideal that may be deeply involved with a grand mythology, yet is weirdly ahistorical. It’s a past without memory.

The context Seeger provides enhanced the song, often distracting from his musical gifts. He had a warm tenor, robust in his youth but as it became frayed and withered, it gained more gravitas without loosing warmth (a quality that eludes Dylan, for example). He was instantly familiar. He sounded like the neighbor you always wave hello to. Eternally optimistic, but convincing and credible.

Totally under-rated banjo player too, as good a picker as any but he wasn’t into showing off. His folk didn’t have a bluegrass flash. He was good as Ralph Stanley or Earl Scruggs, his contemporaries and peers. Musically, critics never gave him his due, but that started to change with reissues and box sets and of course the Seeger Sessions, where Bruce explored the music contained in Seeger’s song. I have both the studio and the 2-CD Dublin Live set. Bruce really performs a kind of exegeses on the music. Seeger sessions is not well regarded by Bruce fanatics – there’s no E-Street or Bruce songs and the lack of starkness that made his first foray into folk music – the Nebraska masterpiece – but it is one of his most rousing records. He has having so much. More importantly, he got me listening to Seeger again. I have a civil rights era Seeger recording of We Shall Overcome, and it is Pete with a crowd infusing a hymn with emotion and an unmistakable insistence on justice. With his Seeger Sessions large jug band, Springsteen opens the musicality of that song – what Seeger could do with a crowd and his sole tenor and 12-string guitar strumming, Bruce needs strings and horns. Bruce’s gifts as an arranger are under-recognized, and this arrangement showcases those powers at their height. We think of this as a simple song, but Bruce shows how much complexity there is that makes a song sound simple.  Bruce moved on from the Seeger Sessions, but as we heard on Wrecking Ball, the influence of Peter Seeger has never left this latter-phase of his art.  

 Pete showed us that music was not just about technique or perfect notes, it was the sound of our collective humanity. His recordings go back to the 1940s, but he was taught by people who did not learn how to play instruments or use their vocal skills by records. Songs were passed down, from generation to generation,  from field to porch.  The musician is just a vessel, creating the means we share our humanity. Dancing at a rave, or joining in a chorus when the band does the hit you loved in high school for their encore – is that really so far removed from singing We Shall Overcome as the cops with dogs and night sticks block the Birmingham Bridge – or expel kids from Zuccotti Park?

 Two weeks ago, I downloaded newly discovered Almanac Singers songs, his pre-Weaver band with Woody Guthrie. The album is State of Arkansas. I don’t really like The Weavers, but loved what I had of the Almanac Singers. The Weavers sound too commercial, over-produced and syrupy. The authenticity of Seeger’s solo work is absent.

Some of the songs were repeats I have on other Smithsonian Folkways collection, they didn’t make a lot of recordings this New Deal era ultra-lefties. The story on them is that they were pro-union and pro-workers, but also isolationist in the pre-Pearl Harbor United States – a total anomaly, because the isolationists were almost all 0—all except for the Almanac Singers – Republicans, anti-Roosevelt folks and committed anti-Semites/pro-Nazis. When World War II happened, the Almanac Singers changed their tune and supported the war. As they became popular, their isolationist past came out and could not find places to gig and broke up. Same thing would happen with The Weavers, who had actual number one hits, but because of Pete’s wobbly past, were blacklisted.

State of Arkansas is really a revealing folk album, shedding light on how even at this embryonic stage, topical songs were interwoven with folklore discoveries. Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston (we desperately need a revival of Cisco Houston, a near-forgotten genesis of a folk singer) were in the band and their repertoire includes some deep folk songs, for instance – Blow The Man Down – yes, the sea chantey I think I remember first in in Popeye cartoons. A revealing recording, they are singing with a serious intent, that whoever in that band first found this song first found it in its orginal authentic setting. Twenty some odd years later, when college kids at Newport were collecting folkways Sea Chantey collections, these songs were not being sang by sailors on the seven seas. When the Almanac laid down that track – which is very strange and its goofiness only makes it stranger.

In the past decade and a half, one of musical revelations is that country music is folk music (duh.) I love Roy Acuff, the Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family – all the stuff that George Jones, Johnny Cash and even Hank Williams learned. A lot of the songs were on records by the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, even Dylan but done in what were unmistakably folkie arrangements, to my uneducated and inexperienced ears. Hell, they were mainly acoustic instruments.

But the songs also sounded like the Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs I got into soon after being stuck with terminal Dylan-Freak-itis at 13.

But listening to that old timey stuff, barely political at all – unlike acoustic blues of the same  era, like Robert Johnson or Blind Lemmon Jefferson or even good ole Leadbelly – who seem to at least imply that the hard times is due in part to society. Woody and Seeger, radical leftist platitudes. But they are set to the same melodies and chords. It’s wild. Union Train is the Wabash Cannonball.

In one of their anti-war ditties, well anti-draft – is C for – the song is a note for note rip off of T for Texas, by Jimmy Rogers. What weirdness, on so many levels. Hearing antiwar song from the World War II era is shocking. Seeger was so far left he didn’t like FDR? Now, that’s radical, but the naiveté both appalls and appeals.

But the other level is how does such a blatant rip-off happen. Were they’re royalties involved. Was it a rip off or a kind of parody? Did they cop the melody knowing it would spark a recognition in the audience, be a crowd pleaser or were thing so dispersed back then, radio so segmented and sporadic, that they could pretend it was theirs?

As tides changed, they became anti-Hitler (This Guitar Fights Fascists was written on Pete’s guitar, or was it Woody’s?) and there’s a great breakdown Rally Round Hitler’s Grave, not a deep song at all, just threats about boiling Hitler in oil kind of thing. It really rocks Great Seeger Banjo licks, fast as Earl Scruggs. This is up-tempo Appalachia and Seeger has an authentic claim to Appalachia, except the northern part of the range.

Too bad, Seeger never played with the Hillbillies, a duet album with Ralph Stanley. The old weird America, the Invisible Republic. Seeger was as much a part of that world as Roy Acuff or the Stanley Brothers or the Elmore Brothers or the Louvins. They were all doing the same melodies, all playing acoustic instruments, yet there was no over cross-pollination. Regional differences, politics, the secular verses sacred or just that the music business was so segmented then. By the time of the 1960s, the folk movement came along and that mountain music was relegated to the New Lost City Rambler re-creations and protest seemed to dominate what people thought of as this acoustic music of the people and it wasn’t until the 1970s with Will The Circle Be Unbroken  by the Nitty Gritty Dirt band did the rediscovery of that pre-honky tonk country music. Seeger wasn’t invited to jam with them either. As a listener, the music relates more than the musicians or the record companies would let it. Maybe if A.P. recorded Union Maid the right to work movement that holds down southern wages could be squelched.

A guy can dream can’t he?

Seeger is a hero whether you agree with his politics or not. He was always for the working man Die hard leftist and environmentalist, supporting civil rights, worker rights and our right to clean air and water long before those movements were popular and when doing so landed you in jail or blacklisted, which it did for Seeger many times.

A friend of mine pointed out that if it wasn’t for his Clearwater activities, the Hudson River would still be unflushed toilet bowl. People can swim in it now, eat its fish.  That is thanks to Seeger and his banjo. His wife of like 70 years died in July, but he greeted canoers during an anti-fracking demonstration on the Hudson, playing his banjo on the shore.

What an amazing link to the past, playing for dustbowl refuges, union strikers, civil rights demonstrations, anti-war and Occupy Wall Street. I can't think of a another example of dedication to idealism and utter absence of cynicism combined with the longevity commitment. He did it when it was cool, when it was not cool. In the news or ignored by all but a handful, Pete and his banjo were found. He’s a hero. A true American hero.

 

And because he was New York –based, he was often in the news, part of our own firmament for as long my memory goes back. His death is strange. Not unexpected, he was 94 but it’s not like another celebrity of advanced years, when you hear he died you are not prompted to say, I thought he was already dead. We knew Pete was alive and with us and our side.

It’s like hearing a mountain or a river is dead. How can that be? But the mountains and the rivers, they’re not gone and neither is Pete Seeger or the songs or the human truths only music adequately expresses.

 

I found out something new about Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs that jarred another memory about my encounter with him.

What sparked this insight into the recollection was this article about Farm Aid this year, the last public appearance by Seeger.

Here’s a link

But here’s a snapshot.

Neil Young, one of the show’s longtime headliners, had stopped in to pay his respects, and the conversation soon turned to the night in 1976 when Phil Ochs hanged himself… Ochs, a good friend and fellow folk singer, was in trouble. He’d been depressed and drinking for a long time, and he reached out to Pete… “Phil really wanted to talk,” Mr. Young recalled. Pete had to choose between staying in the city another night or getting home. He chose the train. “Pete remembered shaking hands with him, and when he said goodbye to him for the last time,” Mr. Young said. “He regretted not talking to him.” For 37 years, the decision to leave that night ate at Pete. “ ‘I wish I’d done something more to stop that from happening,’ ” Mr. Young recalled him saying shortly before he took the stage.

 The way my long ago interview with Pete ended was sort of odd, he just stopped talking and his manager, Harold Leventhal (I know because he is interviewed in No Direction Home and he was a memorable man, when I saw him in the documentary I instantly recognized him).

The questions were going good but he just sort started mumbling and shut down.

I remember asking him about Phil Ochs, not about the suicide or anything like that. I recall asking him about newer song writers and mentioned Phil Ochs – Pete Seeger had a semi-hit, one of his last somewhat commercial cuts with Draft Dodger Rag. Seeger wasn’t known for interpreting new songs and even that one was 15 years ago. By the 80s, Seeger wasn’t putting out records much anymore.

I swear this is true.

What I remember is him just getting quiet, ending the interview. I was asking him questions before he went on stage, hanging out. I had to get permission and stuff. It was a big deal. The article was the interview and the concert. I have done tens of thousands of interviews since then, but like I said, this was my first, and so it is still sort of vivid and it’s been a favorite story. I’ve told it many times through the decades, a short anecdote. In retrospect, I just assumed he was just sick of answering questions and wanted to end the interview. Celebrities, I’ve read, will just shut you out when they don’t want to talk anymore. I assumed that’s probably what happened.

It was very odd though and now I think I have the explanation. This was about five years since Ochs hung himself by a belt from the door of his sister’s bathroom, an apartment in Queens.  

Could just mentioning Ochs have shut him down? The manager was all over me, not in a mean way, but was sudden. It was not like I asked an obnoxious question – shoot, I was too nervous to be proactive or confrontational – and I had been talking him to for a good while, he gave me good stuff. But I did ask him a question with Phil Ochs in that question and he did stop talking, the rapport abruptly ending, and the manager, who was in the same room and listening I am sure to me and Seeger – he was the star and center of attention after all.

I’ve always been a little bewildered about that moment. I have also read a few Phil Ochs biographies, the New York times piece that appeared after his death was the first time that piece of news was released to the public. It was not in the Phil Ochs film, for which Seeger was interviewed.

I know that must sound a little bit out there, but I am telling you this happened. I am sure that’s why the manager cut me off, he probably knew this history – I think he managed Ochs for a while too, he published Sing Out I believe. He was a luminary in that circle, although I had no idea of that either.

Anyway, I read that thing about Ochs after I posted a FB post on the day Pete died from which I have expanded here.

I feel weird about it, I swear it’s true though. I didn’t mean to offend him and I know I didn’t, it was just inadvertent. He’s talking to some college kid who accidently sparks a regret. He was still friendly and polite and warm but the way that interview ended was perculiar. The gregariousness disappeared. 

Sorry Pete. 

I Question Dave Van Ronk

 

 

 

 

I haven’t seen the new Cohen Brothers Inside Llewyn Davis yet, but I will. The film is based on Dave Van Ronk, whose music I didn’t follow but as a lover of folk music and all things Bob Dylan, I have always been aware of him. I seem to recall seeing Van Ronk in concert, it was in Central Park, where during my youth they used to have miller or schaffer or dr pepper musical festivals where tickets were only a couple of bucks and it was a great way to spend summer night. I think he opened up for David Bromberg or Leon Redbone. I think he was also at the Fast Folk outdoor festival on the pier in the 1980s. Checking out any type of folk music in NYC you were bound to see Van Ronk and it was always like, Dave Van Ronk, I know the name. I never felt compelled to buy any of his music. His records were not exactly available at the Harmony Hut, Sam Goody’s or Discomat or other surburan music resources supporting emerging personal soundtrack.

 

Anyway, with Van Ronk fever all the rage, I found this bit of journal of a Dave Van Ronk evening, which I’ve revised slightly here. It was originally a Dylan newsgroup posting, written after Van Ronk died of Colon Cancer.

 

About two years ago, I went to this thing at the New School of Social Research in New York, it was Dave Van Ronk with this writer, whose identity i cannot recall, but was not Elijah Wald, who went on to write the biography, the Mayor of MacDougal street (I thought it was, but after emailing him he corrected me; although he did say that Dave did tell him that he did do this clas). 

 Van Ronk did not look healthy, uncomfortable in a classroom setting, with maybe 100 people.

 

Anyway, the panel discussion – it wasn’t a panel, it was just was Wald and Van Ronk, and I think it’s because other panel members were no-shows – was about that Anthology of American Folk, Harry Smith music thing, and Dave Van Ronk was saying how it technically was out of print for a while, but boot leg copies and what not had always been passed around, and they did stuff like played Penny’s Farm then Maggie’s Farm and there was a lot of glowing stuff about Dylan.

 

Van Ronk told this one Dylan story that took place during the 80s, when they were sitting around his apartment talking about the old songs and Dylan was saying how there’s no more tradition, that folksingers or singer song writers didn’t play the old songs before writing new ones any more and Van Ronk told him that’s because of you, Bob. And, soon after, Bob game out with Good as I’ve been to you and later, World Gone Wrong.

 

I also asked this question. It was about when I was growing up, while I liked folk music it was always political to me. It was the 60s folk boom records, like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Phil Ochs and Bob of course. It wasn’t until much later, there were these real weird songs of real people, that were evident on the Folk Anthology. I can’t remember how I phrased, although people told me it was an intelligent question and basically, why did the protest thing totally over-shadow folk music.

 

So the writer goes, that’s a very good question, Dave…

 

It was funny. Dave cleared his throat. He said the first divisions were between secular and religious music, and that back in the 20s and such, that the anthology songs were being sung, but so were union songs. There wasn’t the division, and the fact was, that between Woody Guthrie and the Weavers, it was the protest songs that were selling. By the 1960s folk boom revival, the protest songs predominated, dovetailing with the social upheavals of the time.

 

He also told a funny story I will never forget about meeting Mississippi John Hurt. Finger picking was the big thing and there was this anthology song that all the finger pickers, including Van Ronk, learned to pick from. So, when he met the bluesman, he was pretty old and so Van Ronk figured that his fingers were just slowed down which was why when he played the song it wasn’t quite the same. So after talking a bit, the bluesman says how everybody is picking too fast, loosing the subtlety of finger picking, and Dave says they were learning from this one cut so Mississippi laughed and says, they sped up the cut to fit into the wax, I think it might have been on a 78 originally, changed the key and everything. Anyway, so folkies were learning to pick from an artificial version of finger picking.

 

It was a funny anecdote.

 

The following sounds fragmentary, but Dave Van Ronk had a last record, appeared on Prairie Home Companion, right before he died he was getting some attention, the Mayor bio I believe was posthumously published.

 

Gee, wasn’t there just a benefit concert, I think maybe Garth Hudson might have showed up, to pay for Dave’s medical care? Cancer can linger and linger and then take you real quick. Death don’t have no mercy indeed.

Hard to conceive of a new York folk scene without Dave Van Ronk, who stayed around long, longer after it was gone. There was a real integrity to the guy. Anyway, I will always remember asking him that question. He was saving folk music from itself way back when and then in the 90s too and I have to wonder, anybody around who can still save it.

 

Anyway, I remember not liking his last record that got at least NPR and folk music circle attention, it was jazz standards or something. In addition to the Dylan connection, Van Ronk is directly responsible for Hot Tuna and Leon Redbone. I should pick up the new C.D.. Also, I realize I do have some Van Ronk. It’s a collection of Sea Faring Shanties, he sings Haul Along the Bowline. Folk music is also folklore, and just like union songs, sea faring songs fueled the tradition.

 

By reviving a tradition, Dave Van Ronk not only became part of the tradition, he is now a new access point to that tradition. History is never past.

 

 

 

Dave Van Ronk with Bob Dylan backstage at the Phil Ochs Friends of Chile benefit in 1974. I always loved this picture, they both look so soused. I had a friend whose sister brought him to this show. I am still jealous. It was a benefit for Salvador Allende, who was soon assassinated. Ochs wanted the live record to revive his career, but the performers were so inebriated the tapes were deemed unusable. This concert was an attempt at reviving the folk music revival of the early 60s, and was a brief political cause celeb – one of the first, post-Vietnam, Post-Civil Rights – supporting a freely elected socialist. Tragedy all around, and when the next year Dylan attempted a more successful revival of the folk music revival, The Rolling Thunder Review, Ochs and Van Ronk were not invited on that train.

 

Lou Reed Rules

 

One of the few Lou Reed records I never owned was Transformer.  I was never a David Bowie fan.

David Bowie worshipped Lou Reed, but Lou Reed was always a different story. The best thing about Lou was that he was not commercial, why get his most commercial record?

I was way too cool for commercial.

I had most of the other  Lou’s, up to and including New York. Transformer? Why indulge this pandering to the mainstream. Of course, Lou’s going commercial meant a song about transvestite and junkies with a transcendent saxophone solo when that instrument had become nearly absent from the top 40.

I later warmed up to the song (and record, which I would ask friends to play when we hung out at their pads) when I found out it was written for a Broadway show that never happened based on the great novel by the same name by Nelson Algren.

I listened to Lou in my late teens and into my early 30s, but truth be told, Lou Reed was much of the soundtrack of my 20s. That’s the period where I wore out those lps. I’m sad he’s dead, another part of line now designated to the dustbin of history, another new crevice forms on that face in the mirror.

 I grew out of Lou by my 30s, certainly by the time my music went to CDs/MP3s , he was barely making any music and what he was making was forgettable. By then, I was dipping back into the punk and related rock less and less often.

Lou left music, I left Lou. But Lou never left me.

 It’s not like I ever proclaimed, I am never  listening to Lou again. I listened to him lots and lots, then less and less. The months turned to years and to decades. Same is true for Bob Marley. Why?  Why not?  So it goes. Our soundtracks shift, but that shift is always gradual.

By the end of the 1990s and the dawn of new century, Lou seemed to have retired, doing lackluster stunts like songs based on Poe writings, or more recently, a record with Metallica. I had zero interest, especially when I heard these late-period misfires.

 

 

Berlin being resurrected was cool. He toured with, performed the entire record live, reissued it.

Berlin is the greatest concept records ever made, dark and uncompromising but I had moved on to be excited enough to buy the re-introduced versions.

I was glad he reunited the Velvet Underground, but ticked that he never brought them to the United States. He only toured Europe. Kind of shitty to his fans.

He seemed to be happy with the marriage to Laurie Anderson – an artist I like and admire; I respect her music but never wanted to hear any of it twice – I  liked them as a couple, it doesn’t get more New York than them two, but the New York they embodied is gone. That New York was dead before Lou.

 Lou’s passing has dozens of implications, none of them positive.

Anderson and Reed seemed to have found happiness together, they liked each other, you could just tell. I feel sad for her, the grief she must feel. There were news reports about his liver transplant and then no news until now. He couldn’t afford New York hospitals, he had to go to Ohio. The transplant happened in May. He spent the last summer of his life where he grew up, Long Island.  There would be no more songs.

Lou never had his Time Out of Mind. I always wish, like Bob Dylan or Neil Young or a few others, his fellow elder statesmen, Lou would put out a late-career masterpiece. I wish like Johnny Cash, he could have found his Rick Rubin and put out a NYC version of American Recordings. Lou sang about desperate hours, his back was against the wall, his candle burned at both ends. To longevity, those artistic obsessions lend themselves not.

Considering the rumors of his drug use, it’s remarkable  he made through to and through his sixties. In the 1990s, he produced a great comeback record for Dion, King of New York which put that 50s era star back in the charts and in the hearts and minds of Rock & Roll lovers everywhere. More recently, he o produced  his wife’s  comeback record, which garnered great reviews. Think about that contrast. Who could more different than Dion and Anderson, doo wop and electronica. Lou was comfortable in both worlds.  This dichotomy that makes so much sense you could not make it up.

Lou was an original. No one else was like him, although many tried.

Unlike other rockers, he had no interest or apparent musical influences beyond Rock & Roll.  He did not dabble or listen to the blues, folk or country – tributaries that not only flow into and out of rock and roll, but welcomed songs inspired by experience and age . Rock & Roll, especially the 50s and 60s that Lou great out of was about youth, anything else was simply irrelevant.  He was Berlin Stories than Sun Sessions.  He only required enough technique to tell his dark tales. The sound was simple, the subtext was as complex as Joyce, Artaud or Celine.  

Lou was about youth, but his youth was the pursuit of experiences, of finding what it meant to FEEL alive.

Lou was ornery, challenged his audiences. He could be inconsistent – Growing Up In Public and Rock & Roll Heart, for example, are dreadful records. You had to buy his records on faith, there rarely received airplay, listening booths were long gone. Which Lou would should up this album? Luckily, the cynical but honest Lou  more often than not showed up, plugged in his loud, very electric guitar and told us of his latest dark nights of the soul.

He was neurotic and self-absorbed, like the city that he loved and lived in. Metal Machine Music is stupid crap, although the liner notes are extraordinary, almost worth it (I bought it as a cut-out; maybe it was worth 99 cents).

The Velvet Underground never got their due, which seemed to piss him off his entire life.  He kept on returning to those songs – his earliest solo album is a re-recording of the Velvet Underground playlist; Rock & Roll Animal a heavy metal reinterpretation of the same songs. To be a Lou fan is to own dozens of versions of Sweet Jane. He never matched the original, and there always seemed to be misgivings by him over those songs he wrote in his 20s.  He was angry about his audiences or his record companies that seemed to mask some deeper resentment. He was one of those artists whose art could never make him as happy as it made his  audiences.

 Those Velvet songs are so classic – in terms of influential, influence being inspiring emulation, Lou Reed comes close to Bob Dylan as being the most influential musician of his generation. There are hundreds of acts that made the charts when the Velvet Underground was making records that are entirely forgotten and we are still talking about the Velvet Underground with awe and respect. I can sing most of their songs and I never play their records anymore. My shower  sounded like a Max’s Kansas City set this morning.  Lou has a lasting power as a Lieber & Stroller or Doc Pumus, he knew great hooks, but he played through a distorted guitar and layered them with subculture obsessions.  I think he was pissed because he never understood why the mainstream continued to ignore the outsiders he extolled.

 

 

 

 

After the RCA years – the on again off again search for the Walk on the Wild side follow up – he made tremendous, classic records for Arista, that should have been major sellers. Many of them masterpieces, but mostly they were ignored. Even few of my friends liked them. You either loved or hated them. I loved them. Street Hassle, The Bells and The Blue Mask are a tribology of Rock & Roll that belong in -

I saw him around this time, right after Street Hassle, at the Bottom Line – a table so close to the stage that he knocked over my buddy’s drink with his guitar cord; This was during the I want to Be Black shenanigans.  Man, he rocked out. Street Hassle, followed by the Bells, are great, under-rated albums. Then he realized The Blue Mask, must have been Junior year in college. I think it is one of his best records, his best non-Velvet for sure.

Interest in Lou was revived as New York Punk gained some acceptance and began to spread around the world. The Sex Pistols made the headlines, the Clash made the charts. Lou Reed records were heralded in the review sections of magazines and newspapers, but sales and radio play were not forth coming. Lou was stuck in clubs when bands he inspired, from Talking Heads to the Replacements, were playing theaters and arenas. Lou was putting some of the greatest Rock & Roll of the time, but there was also a feeling his moment had passed.

His work was consistent through the 1980s, even though he had calmed down and the songs about the grit of the city seemed more inspired by headlines than all-nighters. He always had a reportage approach, now he was reporting on what he was seeing on television, not quite the same as describing going up town to meet his man.

 The album New York at the end of the decade, was his last great record.

Around the Magic & Loss period, my buddy Tony dragged me to see Lou at Radio City. I was not listening to Lou, I had moved into New York and instead of listening to my Lou Reed tapes, I got deeper into Bruce and soon enough the downtown that welcomed me was the one on the other side of the Hudson.

Tony said to me, “if we don’t go see Lou Reed, who will?”

Well, it was a good show, even though Magic & Loss is a pretty lackluster effort

Ole Lou was insistent that the show would not be about his hits, but only his new record, which I found lame, although he did play some of those New York songs too, a melancholic yet elegiac record – Halloween Parade, which I am sure will be played extensively  this week – is a downtown folk-anthem, a eulogy for the victims of the AIDS crisis. It has that Lou Reed feel; a song when you hear seems like you’ve always heard it.

Lou had this book of lyrics on an easel, and wore glasses to read them. The encore, which was extended, was a bunch of Velvet material and solo hits. I believe he played the title track of The Blue Mask too.

Around this same time, Lou appeared on the Bob Dylan 50^th Birthday bash, known as Bob Fest by his fans, and did a killer version of the unreleased song, Foot of Pride, one of the highlights of the evening. I also have a tribute to Doc Pumus record where he rips into This Magic Moment. The sales may never have arrived, but he was respected as rock’s elder statement?

How did we start listening to Lou out in the hinterlands, the suburbs of Bergen County where most of our music came from Scott Muni and WNEW 102.7 and they never played Lou or the Velvets or even the then emerging Punk Rock?

 I was not a glitter rock guy at all – T-Rex, Alice Cooper, Bowie – I never listened to that crap – Kiss, even the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop, I always thought were over-rated. T-Rex? Dopey.

 I was a smug purist.

If you had to wear a dress to sing your song, I didn’t want to hear it.  Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side seemed to be part of that Gary Glitter, show-boat crowd. It never entered into my purview, but when it was a hit I had just started buying records – or was it a hit just before my first 45s –  and those hits, they came and go. Lou was barely on my radar, the associations were not cool to me and then he was off that radar. There were other records to buy (Aqualung, then Music from the Big Pink).

I loved Dylan (Always Dylan), but also the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. When high school started,  the 70s at that point were still steeped in 1960s. Acid Rock and psychedelics songs spoke to me. I was also a literary young man, Ken Kesey and thus The Beats were   connected to the Grateful Dead. My record collection was basically dictated by my older brothers, who were hippies and war protestors. In fact, it was mainly their records I was listening to. They had nothing produced by Andy Warhol.

And then came Horses. My older brothers and sisters HATED Patti, which only made me love that record more. She was mine.

 And while I still loved that 60s stuff – some of my earliest memories are of hearing Beatlemania era Beatles, and my tastes always tend towards simple Rock & Roll –Patti Smith was Rock  & Roll, but who was this Rimbaud guy. The Doors were rediscovered. The Ramones appeared and my favorite at the time, Television. Smoking, reading, listening to music – for a while, everything coincided and all I needed was a girlfriend.

By college, the Brits were invading again. But inbetwen then and the before then, this buddy Kevin Ford had Velvet Underground records. Now, Kevin was an interesting cat, a proud cynic and nihilist, really into film; also a conservative, hated anything hippie, thought Nixon was a great – just like Johnny Ramone. And, he had these Velvet Underground records. He was the first one to speak well of the Moloch of our childhood, tricky dick, and point out that the North Vietnamese were evil communists. And he listened to the Velvet Underground. Somebody other than California hippies made rock and roll music – records that Patti loved?

See, when Punk changed everything, the Velvets (and Iggy, and to some extent, Jonathan Richman)  were seen as the prototypes. We’d go to Kevin’s house, smoke (he was not that much of a conservative, I’ll tell ya that), and listen to his Velvet records. They were revelatory. They sounded very similar to the psychedelic records, like Crown of Creation, but these were songs about Sadomasochism, drugs, getting high and feeling confused and lonely by it, not in love with everything.   These were issues of youth, but instead of just the optimism of love conquers all, these were about what we were experiencing then. The alienation basically. All that Gnarly confusion that teenage hood instills. Nihilistic and real, which the 70s were; what a nightmare. My life was not After Bathing at Baxters or Europe 72.  Lou spoke to me in a way so much of the music I was listening to at the time never did.

Kesey, Rimbaud, Ginsberg – oh they were important – Lou introduced   Delmore Schwartz – European Son was on his first record, another tribute to Delmore was recorded on Blue Mask. Delmore was Lou’s creative writing teacher. Delmore was a troubled guy, brilliant writer but always broke, substance abuse problems. He is actually buried in a Jewish cemetery near the house I grew up in, we visited his tombstone and partied on his grave. Delmore was not counter cultural, we was a serious writer and a true intellect of modernism. An American existentialist who still is not truly recognized, except as a writer’s writer.

 Delmore basically has two books, his collected poems and his collected stories, the latter being titled, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. There’s some posthumous work of note as well.  Now, Delmore is a difficult read, and in the end, I prefer his short stories, which are perfect. But with Delmore I began to understand his peers, such as T. S. Elliot, and also Jewish writers like Saul Bellow, whose Humboldt’s gift is based on Delmore’s life.  He has some great essays, an interesting translation of Season in Hell (which my buddy Tony, Photostat and had bound for me to read way way back in the day, we’re both Delmore fans, thanks to Lou), and this fascinating Verse Play. Delmore often wrote about identity, one his poems compares his self to a bear that he carries within in – who is the real person, the image in the mirror, or the one we present to others. I have not read him in years, but his writing was challenging for my young mind – I had read enough to read him by the time I started listening to Lou – and his obsessions was stuff you think about in the late teens and early 20s. Delmore died at 45.

The thing with Lou, it was hard to find those Velvet Underground records, but except for Transformer and Rock & Roll Animal, his other RCA records were available as cut-outs. I paid 99 cents for Berlin and Sally Can’t Dance. Incredible to think about. At the Grandway. Lou was in the cutouts when every punk rocker was citing him as influence in every article on punk being printed.

Where and when I went to college, Punk had not quite happened yet – the Brits were just started to invade, bringing with them Reggae (deadheads like myself already were listening to Bob Marley) – but this one woman, Stephanie, loved Lou. She had graduate high school early. Now, I had a girlfriend and she was dating my roommate, neither of whom cared about Lou. Needless to say, Stephanie and I had a torrid affair and cementing our adultery was Sally Can’t Dance. The romance lasted a few more years after college, longer than the adultery. We did bad, bad things. We were lurid, erotic, secretive. I think of Lou as that soundtrack, of that period if youth when few temptations go unfulfilled. I remember reading to her Delmore Schwartz poems. I best resist the rest telling the rest of that memory here. Lou revealed to us new yet satiable appetites, but never avoided the psychological under-pinning of those same appetites.

Want to really enrich a torrid affair when you’re 20, get naked and listen to Kill Your Sons!

 

Later in the 80s, Lou was coming out with interesting records, like New Sensations, which had I Love You Suzanne, a fun song. I wasliving with Donna at the time, listening to Lou – being decadent, which basically meant sex and drugs and rock and roll. Lou was making some of the best Rock & Roll of the 1980s, which is not saying a whole hell of a lot because what a terrible decade for my favorite genre of song. We also dug Rock& Roll Animal, especially that version of Heroin where he bellows, you can all go take a f-ckin walk! Donna loved that. Rock & Roll Animal is intense, raw and loud.

The soundtrack to our lives.

Give me a song, I’ll give you a girl.

 Lou though, was particularly memorable, because nobody else listened to him. The Stephanie affair – she was a deep reader; so was Donna – seemed started by Lou. She grew up in rural South Jersey, Lou was a personal thing for her and she was surprised to find somebody who knew his music. In Jersey City, NYC is just next door, as safe and little different than all our urban settings. But back then, nothing was further than New Jersey than Lou Reed’s Manhattan. His reality was the stuff of our dreams, promising an intensity to living the suburbs denied.

Lou probably does not make what anybody would consider make out music, for moments on the edge, he’s the perfect accompaniment. Acting on urges, seeking experiences Rushing on your run, feeling just like Jesus’s Son.

I’ll be your mirror/reflect what you are/in case you don’t know.

Lou never went into elaborate rhymes, There’s very little word play. He avoided metaphor. He’s not like Dylan. His lyrics are more direct, elliptical. Unadorned slices of life that cut to the core.

All your two bit friends, they shoot you up with pills. God. Berlin. By the wall, you feel six inches tall. Very nice, it was paradise, dubonet on ice.  Broken lives, a sordid tale of hopelessness. The honesty of the witnessing is itself haunting. They’ve taken her children away, because they said she was not a good mother. 

I was in a punk rock band – The Urgency, and later the Altered Boys – and we did Rock & Roll, Sweet Jane and I’ve Been Set Free. (I’ve been set free/and I’ve been bound/let me tell you people/what I found), which was their third, mainly overlooked album. Sweet Jane & Rock & Roll are so easy to play on guitar. I was lousy believe you me, although the other guys were really talented – the drummer actually made a living as a professional musician – but I had the punk records. I knew enough chords. Enough for Lou. Anybody can play Sweet Jane.

Lou was as great a songwriter as anybody, did for New York what Hank Williams did for the South, universalizing subjective experiences of place.

I grew out of him, he doesn’t appear on any recent playlists. But I have always thought of him fondly.

I just read the Clive Davis biography and the chapter on Lou is worth reading. Clive signed him to Arista, and he apologizes that his Arista records did not sell better. Punk was hot, and Lou was the godfather of Punk and the Arista records, well Street Hassle, The Bells, and Blue Mask are GREAT, yet Lou never could get close to the hit of Walk on the Wild Side. Besides that over-exposed anthem, he never got much airplay. He  rarely even shows up in film soundtracks.

As he aged, he ran out of ideas, seemed limited by his own convictions, unlike Bruce, Neil, Dylan, Leonard Cohen – even Patti Smith or Tom Waits – never could adapt to his aging voice. Never a great singer, always a limited range, the previously mentioned songwriters may not have put out music as good as their hey day sound, but their late career records are noteworthy and of merit. They still got it. They  write songs for their new voice that can stand alongside the re-interpreted classics in a set. Lou never could. He seemed to just stop… then he died… one wonders how ill and for how long he truly was.

I may have grown out of listening to Lou – and maybe Lou grew out of himself – but man oh man, back in the day, Lou and the Velvets made so much sense when so little did.  I can sing and quote his songs entirely from memory.

Families that Live out in the suburbs/often make each other cry (that’s from the Bells)

There was nothing happening at all/TV set and two Cadillac Cars, baby they are nothing at all/ but then one fine day, you turn on a new york station and you can’t believe what you heard at all/you started dancing to that fine, fine music/you’re life was saved by rock and roll

Lou was one of the last one to make Rock & Roll When you’re young – at least when I was –  danger is enticing, and romantic. Rock & Roll wasn’t everywhere yet, punk was still underground and the other counter culture,  hippies, hated punk.  Hated anything urban.

 By the end of college, Punk was morphing into New Wave – Elvis Costello everybody loved. The Clash and the Sex Pistol. Funny, people hated punk when it was New York, loved it when was London – and ignored it entirely when it was Los Angeles. When it became Seattle, it was suddenly Wal-Mart.  Lou  never crossed over. But he sung about truths, he sung about people on the outside, people who were otherwise ignored by pop culture and politics and society. They weren’t on TV or even many films. They were in books,  like Jean Rhys or William S. Burroughs or Hubert Selby or Breese J. Pancake or Charles Bukowski., but not that often.

They are in Lou songs. They are his songs.  They were you and me. Lou was always there for us when not much else was.

My buddy Kevin use to say, Lou Reed Rules. He got married on a cruise ship that circled Manhattan. There was a DJ. His wife planned the wedding, he was only allowed to choose one song. It was We’re Going to Have a Real Good Time Together. Patti Smith used to play the tune, it’s on the great live Velvet record, 1969. The couple pogoed. He is an insurance executive now and lives on Park Avenue.

Kevin used to scrawl Lou Reed Rules on the walls of public bathrooms. There was a time in my life this statement was true. Today it still is.