“Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock 'n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch.” -- Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or How I Slugged it out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake," March 1975.
One of the things that spurred me to start This Ain’t The Summer Of Love was a sort of throw-away comment in this post from Timedoor: “Hey, people of 1970s Earth: how were you ever able to sit through the ‘Intro’ to Lou Reed’s Rock & Roll Animal to find out if the record was any good or not? I can’t last 30 seconds through that atrocity without turning it off. How in the sam hell did you do so when skipping ahead meant getting up, picking up the stylus, and putting it down again and again until you found where the lameness mercifully stopped?”
Rock & Roll Animal (recorded live at Howard Stein's Academy of Music, New York, on December 21, 1973 – the day before my thirteenth birthday, for you completists out there) was one of the touchstone albums of my teenage years. I played the hell out of it at home; on my show at the high school radio station, I don’t think I ever completed a shift without playing either “Sweet Jane” or “Rock & Roll”. It was just huge for me, a key album that led to exploration of things other than the hits of the day. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that it helped make me the musical idiot I am today.
I hadn’t played the album in a thousand years – mostly because I’d played it so much it was burned into my consciousness – but when I saw that attack on R&R Animal, I figured I’d have another listen to it and set some people straight. When I had the time and the spare $9.99 to drop on it at iTunes, I did so, fully expecting to write a lengthy defense thereof.
All of which makes it that much more of a drag for me to have to say that, by and large, Chaka got it right. What seemed such amazing virtuosity and sweeping grandeur now sounds swollen and bloated beyond salvage. Guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner (apparently not the composer of “The Ride of the Valkyries”, although his work here is almost as over-the-top) wank on and on for three and a half minutes (!) on the cocaine psychosis egofest that introduces “Sweet Jane”, and somehow the self-same “Rock & Roll’ that more or less saved my life gets stretched out for over ten minutes.
Now, don’t misunderstand me – it’s not the length of the tracks that bugs me so much as it is the fact that they don’t go anywhere. Television’s “Marquee Moon” goes on for just over 10 minutes as well, but the difference is that it moves forward the whole time rather than simply chasing its own tail. If it takes ten minutes to say what needs to be said, then that’s what you do. If you can say it in three, STOP THERE.
Of the superannuated Velvets covers, the really overdone stuff, “White Light/White Heat” holds up fairly well, actually. It seems to be pretty indestructible. “Lady Day” has always seemed lugubrious, and it remains so. I skipped over it back in the day, and I still do. “Rock & Roll” is nothing on the original, of course, but I have to admit a certain soft spot for it. To a certain degree, it really did save my life, in that it made an unbearable time markedly less so. I don’t know that you can ask more from a recording. Even if I don’t dig it nearly as much as I did thirty years ago, I’m willing to cut it some slack.
The remastered version of the album has a couple of tracks that didn’t appear on the original vinyl, “How Do You Think It Feels?” and “Caroline Says (I)”. Their inclusion gives the whole thing a more holistic feel; as originally issued, the album consisted entirely of live versions of old Velvets tunes. Now, with these new additions (both from Reed’s previous album, Berlin), it seems less like old-home week and more like an actual recognizable show. I’m guessing the marketing folks at RCA took another look at the dismal sales figures for Berlin and 86’d each and every tune thereof as fast as they possibly could. That’s too bad for them; they could have used “How Do You Think It Feels?” as another amphetamine number to help “White Light/White Heat” balance out the opiate vibe. No foresight.
The playing on the record: well, as mentioned previously, Hunter and Wagner tend to coat everything with a film of egojizz, so take that as you will. Even for the time it was a bit overdone. Prakash John’s has always impressed me with his nimble and inventive bass playing here. Rather than getting lost in the sea of guitar spooge, he forges his own trail. I usually tend to zero in on the bass, so he gets a big thumbs up from me. Sadly, Pentti Glan (drums) isn’t really left much room in which to maneuver. He does the best he can, by which I mean he doesn’t let the team down. And Ray Colcord (keyboards) is pretty much an afterthought, as far as I can see. His Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor-esque additions to “Heroin” just add to the mystic “smack as sacrament” vibe that’s laid on the song here. Blech. I blame his employer, though.
Listening to this album as a 46-year-old, what struck me, aside from the wanky nature of some of the arrangements, was the blithe way in which hardcore narcotics were endorsed. OK, yes, I’ve heard what Lou was up to in the Velvet Underground, but in that context I never really got the feeling that he was advocating their use so much as documenting it. Maybe I missed the bus in that respect. As far as I can see, “Heroin”, in the original version, is a spare, sparse documentation of junkie life and thought. No romanticism, no leering nudge, no pandering to the audience (least of all that), just laying it out for what it is. The same song presented here is a vile travesty: the sonic representation of Reed in bleached blonde buzz cut, black nail polish and junkie pallor cheerleading for opiate abuse, tying off and miming shooting up onstage while the dopes out front bask in the reflected transgressive glow. He aims for that lowest common denominator and scores a bullseye, which is true of the album as a whole but this track particularly. I know he needed to give RCA a hit, following the financial bloodbath of Berlin, but such base pandering is beneath him.
I am far from being Mr. Straightedge. I’m not opposed to recreational drug use, nor do I advocate it; it works for some people, but not for everybody. Recreation isn’t really what Reed is espousing here, though, is it? He’s gone right past that to what you might call vocational drugs. Full-time vs. part-time, if you follow me.
“Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse” has got to be one of the stupidest Romantic notions ever cooked up. It’s ha-ha funny when you’re 22 and feel absolutely bulletproof. And maybe you are, compared to some middle-aged hack bashing away at his keyboard and nursing the daily dram of Maker’s Mark – but only relatively so. I had a nineteen-year-old friend drink himself to death, literally; he died of acute alcohol poisoning. His younger brother died in a car wreck later that year – also drunk. (That entire family had booze problems. The father died about a year later, when the tractor he was driving – drunk, of course – rolled over on him. I think there’s one son still alive. I haven’t seen him in almost thirty years, so I can’t tell you if he drinks.)
So, while I’m still a fan of Lou’s, I can’t say I dig this particular album so much anymore. I respect what he did with the Velvets, I like a lot of his solo work (The Blue Mask especially, with all that wiggly Robert Quine guitar work backing up Lou’s perfect description of alcoholic paranoia, “Waves of Fear”, etc.). I just can’t get behind this one anymore.
I gotta tell ya: every time I would hear that interminable, abominable introduction to "Sweet Jane," my reaction was always the same: "what IS this crap? omg, WNEW, why must you play this ridiculous overblown live track by [insert name of dinosaur prog rock band here]"...
...and then the riff would start.
"oh. fucking rock and roll fucking animal."
what on earth did lou see in steve hunter?
Posted by: caryn | February 09, 2007 at 08:33 AM