A polite round of applause: on The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, Low, sickness, fire, expectations, and a year without music

The members of Low perform Velvet Underground songs, October 12, 2019

In October of 2019 I went with my friend Matt to see the members of Low play a one-night-only set of Velvet Underground covers, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Velvets' lone Minneapolis concert. The show was at Hook & Ladder, a former fire station converted into a pleasantly shabby performance venue just off Lake Street in Minneapolis. For that night at least, it carried exactly the right dingy vibe to suit a faux Velvet Underground concert by my favorite active live band.

It was, predictably, a transcendent experience. (I've never seen Alan Sparhawk provide anything but, and I've seen a lot of Alan Sparhawk performances.) I can't think of many bands more capable than Low of recreating the austere yet ragged intensity of the Velvets without veering into parody, or worse yet, handling the material overly reverently. While the four Velvet Underground albums are legitimate holy texts for music lovers, playing them as such would rob the songs of the dangerous energy that makes them vital.

Low got it just right, lurching through the hits and the deep cuts with equal ferocity. They brought out the reliably amazing local violinist Gaelynn Lea to handle the John Cale string arrangements. They did a live rendition of "Lady Godiva's Operation," for pete's sake. Who plays "Lady Godiva's Operation" live? Alan Sparhawk even managed to exude some of the aloof-cool wit of a young Lou Reed, although there's no hiding the fact that Alan is a nicer guy than Lou by magnitudes.

It was, in short, about as perfect a live Velvet Underground experience as a person could have hoped to see in late 2019. There was no way of knowing then that we were just a few months away from live music ceasing to exist for a year and counting. That the Hook & Ladder would narrowly avoid the righteous flames that would swallow the block across the street later that summer. That I'd soon be sitting on my porch watching Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker put on their brave faces as they tried to make the best of streaming live sets in a musical landscape where artist and audience are forever separated by screens.

I've thought a lot this year about what live music truly means to me. Turns out it's a lot! And as much as I've grudgingly come to accept that not going out to see shows won't physically kill me, I also haven't stopped staring wistfully out the window of my home office in the direction of Turf Club. It's a genuine pain, and the closest I've been able to come to empathizing with the folks who've been agitating to go back to their in-person church services. They're still wrong, of course, but I understand the pain of being physically cut off from your houses of worship. The amounts I would pay to see Low play a Velvet Underground cover show right now could be best described as "unreasonable."

I've been listening a lot lately to The Complete Matrix Tapes, a sprawling box set covering two nights' worth of live Velvet Underground performances from 1969. As with any four-disc collection of live music, it has its hits and its misses, but in my book it's much heavier on the former. The undeniable highlight of the collection is a jittery rendition of "Sister Ray." That song is a 17-and-a-half minute masterpiece of churning squalor in its album version, and here it gets to blossom into a 37-minute epic that never comes close to wearing out its welcome. It's just an impeccable piece of work, starting with a slow chug of gentle Moe Tucker beats and meandering guitar and almost-whispered Lou Reed vocals, all steadily building to a frantic-yet-controlled swell that climaxes with Moe pounding out gunshots on her kit as Lou deadpans couplets about Cecil and his new piece and an electric organ gurgles menacingly. It's a thing of glory, a document of a band at the height of its powers pushing the envelope anywhere they can cram it. And, as I mentioned, it goes on for a full 37 minutes.

 

It's a common music nerd trope to fantasize about what concerts you would choose if you had a chance to go see any band in history. While I love too much music to ever give you a definitive answer, that performance of "Sister Ray" is absolutely near the top of my list. As joyous and visceral as it was to watch a band I cherish recreate the Velvet Underground experience in 2019, being front and center in 1969 watching the genuine article mess with people's heads for 37 minutes sounds like legitimate bliss. Even now, listening on a pair of cheap Panasonic earbuds as I write this, this extended "Sister Ray" is tearing my head apart. I have to imagine witnessing it live would reduce me to tears at the very least.

But here's a curious thing: when "Sister Ray" finally ends after the Velvets have spent one-39th of a day playing it, the crowd doesn't erupt in applause. They don't sit in stunned silence or start shouting angry insults either. They do something much more baffling than any of those options: they clap politely.

Now, I understand that it was 1969 and those were different times, but I've heard more than enough concert recordings of the era to know that uproarious applause was definitely an option. If the San Franciscans watching that show had been sufficiently moved by the previous 37 minutes, they would have screamed and hollered and demanded more. But they weren't. They watched one of history's greatest musical combos destroy the parameters of what a live song could or should be, and their reaction was to give them a nice hand.

Obviously the folks attending that show back in 1969 didn't know they were bearing witness to history, that the band they put down a few bucks to go see would eventually stand alongside the defining artists of their era. They were just out to see that hip New York band who palled around with Andy Warhol. A good portion of that crowd probably went out to the venue that night not knowing quite what to expect and were therefore unprepared to watch 37 minutes of repetitive improvisation. I would guess many of them didn't know quite how to react to what they saw on stage, and a good number of them were likely bored or unimpressed by it. In that light, a tepid round of applause makes a bit more sense.

When I go out to see a buzzed-about newer act, I evaluate their shows in a similar context. I don't go in expecting to be blown away the way I would with, for instance, a Low show, where I have a deep knowledge of the band's musical catalog and years of seeing them slay live on which to base my expectations. That mindset can either elevate or detract from my show-going experience.

For instance, I regard King Tuff at Turf Club as one of the best live shows I've seen in recent years, but I know that's partly because I started dipping into his music only a week or so before seeing him play and came in not knowing quite what to expect. On the other side of the coin, I was mildly disappointed seeing Wolf Alice, largely because I'd spent the weeks leading up to the show watching footage of the band playing electrifying sets at massive outdoor festivals, and that specific energy is hard to translate to a weeknight indoor set at First Avenue.

The crowning example of this phenomenon for me is the sole time I was able to see Lou Reed live. If you're bothering to read this, you likely already know that Lou is my all-time musical guidepost, an artist whose work grabbed me by the soul as a young teenager and has twined through my life at every stage. I would not exist as you know me today without Lou Reed. Obviously, that equates to some unreasonably lofty expectations for a live performance.

I couldn't have been more hyped when I got to see Lou play the Orpheum in Minneapolis on his Ecstasy tour in 2000, even though I had fairly lousy seats in the balcony (I was 21 and working in a sandwich shop at the time, so affording tickets at all was an indulgence). In hindsight, I realize that the evening could only have gone two ways: either Lou would nail me to the wall with a life-changing performance, or I'd come away mildly disappointed but glad to have had the experience. Of course it turned out to be the latter. It was a good show and I remember it clearly, but it didn't transform my soul or open the doors of perception. Lou played the hits and the new album, bantered minimally, and got the job done. I couldn't reasonably have asked for more from him, no matter how much I wanted to. When the show was over, I applauded politely.

 

(On the other hand, Lou's opener that night was Victoria Williams, another artist I revere but didn't place nearly as high an expectation upon, and she absolutely killed it with a warm and witty and genial show that made me feel like I was just hanging out in her backyard.)

So where am I going with this ramble? I'm not entirely sure. This most uncertain of years has had a way of shifting my focus, making things that once seemed like hard truths more malleable than I would've thought possible. I suppose what I'm trying to get at is how much a year without the succor of live music has made me reflect on exactly what that experience means to me. Seeing how quickly something that means so much to my personal identity and well-being can simply disappear, seeing the institutions I love the most shuttered by sickness, seeing Turf Club looted and flooded, the Hexagon Bar gutted by flames, Hook & Ladder and the Schooner Tavern narrowly avoiding the same fates, watching the artists I love reduced to streaming awkward sets from their living rooms and closets and empty nightclubs…

It all makes the relativism of what is and isn't worthy of vigorous applause melt away, at least temporarily. I know I'm far too much of a crank and a critic to ever say that I'm going to follow Warren Zevon's advice and enjoy every sandwich once the music venues open back up. I'm sure it won't take long for me to fall right back into my usual practice of grousing about set lists and bad crowds and sound mixes. But I can say without reservation that whenever I do get the privilege of setting foot inside Turf Club once again, it won't matter who is on stage or what kind of show they put on. I am going to cheer as loud and long and earnestly as I would after watching the Velvet Underground reel off 37 minutes of "Sister Ray" on a Thursday night in 1969. I'm going to cheer as if my life depended on it, because damn it, a good portion of it does.

Lou Reed’s 25 greatest characters

Any songwriter who stays active for five decades is going to rack up quite a roster of unforgettable characters. Lou Reed’s cast of grotesques, ghouls and tragic heroines could fill out a stack of novels, but I tend to like them just fine as songs. In honor of what would have been Lou’s 73rd birthday, here’s a rundown of a few of my personal favorites.

25. Lulu (from Lulu, 2011)

Lulu’s had a rough go of it. She’s been neglected, prostituted, abused, idolized and left empty, and the image of her limbless torso on the Lulu album cover suggests there’s more indignity to come. She may be the archetypal Lou Reed heroine, as I think of it. Shame her album is sort of a chore to get through in one sitting.

24. George (from “My Friend George, 1984)

The title character of “My Friend George” is an unhinged gym-rat avenger who spouts incoherent philosophy and attacks people with a stick that he apparently believes to be a sword. Some songwriters would cast George as a tragic victim of mental illness, but in Louville he’s some manner of small-time superhero. I can dig that.

23. Theoretical Children (from “Beginning of a Great Adventure,” 1989)

You have to be careful assuming any artwork is autobiographical, but “Beginning of a Great Adventure” sure sounds like a tongue-in-cheek accounting of Lou’s real life self-debate about having kids. Lou muses on moving to the country and raising a home-schooled “little liberal army in the woods.” His 10-strong “TV brood” would be equally adept at playing guitar, planting bombs and shooting hunters in the nuts and be at Lou’s side when he’s “a wizened, toothless clod.” It sounds like our loss that he never let the baby thing go too far.

22. All of the Jim-Jims (from “Heroin,” 1967)

I don’t know who or what a Jim-Jim is, but according to “Heroin” New York was full of them in the late ‘60s and Lou’s contempt for them makes me believe they’re a thing to dread.

21. Sweaty Dude (from “Animal Language,” 1973)

This guy lives in Heaven or something like it, yet his job involves placing a board between a dead dog and cat to keep them from copulating. Tough gig. On the other hand, the sexually frustrated pets resign themselves to shooting up his sweat, so his body apparently secretes powerful narcotics. I can see that making a crappy day job a little easier to take.

20. Ed (from “Wild Child,” 1972)

“Walk on the Wild Side” is the most famous example, but affectionate lists of weirdos were a recurring theme in Lou’s songs dating back as far as 1967’s “Run Run Run.” “Wild Child” is maybe my favorite of those tracks, and the self-absorbed, cheese-loving Ed is my favorite of the song’s multiple grotesques. “I was talkin’ to Ed, who’d been reported dead by a mutual friend. He thought it was funny that I had no money to spend on him.” Ed’s a jerk.

19. Dude with a Stiletto (from “Kicks,” 1976)

“Kicks” runs neck-and-neck with “The Gun” and “Rock Minuet” as Lou’s darkest delvings into psychopathy. This one gets my nod for Lou’s unnerving use of second-person and chillingly casual delivery. This is a guy who lures his bar pick-ups to their violent ends for no greater purpose than staving off boredom, and the song’s laconic pace just makes the grimness all the more disturbing.

18. Mok (from “My Name is Mok,” 1983)

OK, Mok isn’t technically a Lou Reed character. He’s the villain of Rock & Rule, a bizarre animated fantasy film that plays like the work of Ralph Bakshi on his most timid day. For most of the movie he’s voiced by Don Francks (best known as the original voice of Dr. Klaw on Inspector Gadget) as a smooth but ruthless rock superstar/supervillain clearly modeled after Mick Jagger. But all that changes when Mok finally sings his big show-stopping number, voiced by Lou. Despite its 1983 timestamp, “My Name Is Mok” is pure ‘70s Lou Reed, a snotty, swaggering self-paean that paints the singer as a supremely confident epitome of cool who would just as soon crush you as look at you. Sounds like somebody else I know…

17. Pedro (from “Dirty Blvd,” 1989)

My problem with Pedro is my problem with “Dirty Blvd” overall: as strong as both creations are, they also come awfully close to being too on the nose. Not that there weren’t plenty of real-life impoverished Latino kids with abusive parents living 10-to-an-overpriced-room in New York City in 1989, but Lou lays it on so thick the song falls just short of tipping into caricature. But all is forgiven for that final verse about Pedro looking through a discarded book of magic tricks and hoping he can make himself fly away from his existence. With that finale Lou captures something primal and aching and it’s so tragically beautiful I just want to give poor Pedro a hug.

16. The Heroine (from “The Heroine,” 1982)

The Heroine’s story is already well in progress by the time we join it, and it seems to be going poorly. She’s standing alone on the deck of a sinking ship in the midst of a ferocious storm while a civil war rages amongst the crew. There may also be a baby locked in a box somewhere on board. Whether she can do anything to save anyone at this point is doubtful, but she can still “transcend all the men” and inspire some faith, however misplaced.

15. The Fat Blonde Actress (from “New Age,” 1970)

A casual ear might easily mistake the Fat Blonde Actress for the butt of the dark joke of “New Age,” when really she’s anything but. Both here and in the song’s semi-sequel “What Becomes a Legend Most,” she comes off far better than the smug fan who asks for an autograph as a preamble to bedding a faded star. Lou’s lyrics (and Doug Yule’s career-best vocal performance) imbue his leading lady with a dignity and presence that exceed her diminished standing on the Hollywood landscape. She may be “over the hill now and looking for love,” but she’s still more of a legend than her courtier will ever be.

14. The Man (from “I’m Waiting for the Man,” 1967)

A perpetually tardy dude in black strolling up the street in P.R. shoes and a big straw hat cuts quite a figure. The song is all about the waiting - and the waiter is a fascinating character in his own right - but when The Man himself is on the scene there’s no question where your eyes go.

13. Sally (from "Sally Can't Dance" and "Ride Sally Ride," 1974)

Sally’s about as punk as they come, a sexually omnivorous New York City libertine who ignores gender norms, dabbles in modeling and imbibes drugs and whiskey on the dance floor. The song arguably casts her as a heroine, but this being Lou Reed’s New York, society isn’t going to let anyone get away with living that freely. Over the course of the song she also gets raped in Tompkins Square Park, is stuffed in the trunk of a Ford and presumably dies of either an overdose or murder. It’s no mistake that the song that introduces her, the album-opening “Ride Sally Ride,” is a somber dirge about hanging out at a party and relishing having a heart of ice.

12. Dirt (from “Dirt,” 1978)

Sardonic vitriol is kind of Lou’s thing, and his venom never stung more sharply than on this ode to an anonymous poseur. It’s Lou Reed’s “Positively 4th Street,” minus the subtlety and wordplay, a spiteful celebration of the comeuppance of a scumbag “who’d eat shit and say it tasted good, if there was some money in it for ‘em.” The repeated invocations of the writ of Bobby Fuller suggest that this miscreant has run afoul of the law, but I doubt it’s the sort of infraction the police would bother with. The Law of Lou is a harsh one indeed.

11. Candy (from “Candy Says,” 1969)

Candy doesn’t have much to like in her life. She hates her body, quiet places and big decisions. The bluebirds pass her by and she worries that other people are talking about her discreetly. Yet somehow her song is possessed of a flickering, sickly hope that lends it an odd beauty and keeps it from spilling into despair. It’s an aching portrait of the quagmire of late ‘60s femininity and life as a trans woman that loses none of its power in a modern context.

10. Jackie (from “Walk on the Wild Side,” 1973)

I probably could have included every character from “Walk on the Wild Side,” what with their soul food and shaved legs and good head. But Jackie’s the one who’s always spoken to me the most, mainly because of that line about how she “thought she was James Dean for a day.” It’s a humanizing touch amidst Lou’s affectionate parade of Factory-made oddballs. Who among us hasn’t convinced ourselves we could be our romantic heroes, just for one day? But then I guess we have to crash...

9. Waldo Jeffers (from “The Gift,” 1968)

Lou Reed managed to create the definitive portrait of the Internet Nice Guy several decades before the internet was a thing. Waldo’s an insecure Pennsylvania college kid spending his summer break obsessing over imagined infidelities perpetrated by Marcia, his sort-of girlfriend in Wisconsin. He’s painted himself as a true romantic who has “intuitively grasped every nook and cranny of her psyche,” but really he’s a sniveling creep who regards Marcia as his inviolable property. Lou’s obvious disdain for his character makes it all the more satisfying when Waldo’s grand gesture goes as wrong as it possibly could.

8. Last Great American Whale (from “Last Great American Whale,” 1989)

This is a song about a superhero whale who fights racism and oppression along the American coast (and sometimes as far inland as Chinatown, if you can trust your mother). It doesn’t make a whole ton of sense but gosh, is it a comforting fantasy to have a stoic behemoth lurking out in the depths and looking out for the little guy.

7. Fucked-Up Middle Class College Student (from “I Wanna Be Black,” 1978)

Oy, this guy. You remember this guy from undergrad days, right? Got obsessed with another culture and claimed to empathize deeply with their beliefs, but only knew as much as television told him about their actual existence. This kid rattles off every “cool black dude” stereotype under the sun yet never sees that he’s most racist guy in the room.

6. Little Joey Diaz (from “Romeo Had Juliette,” 1989)

“Romeo Had Juliette” is Lou’s lyrical masterpiece, a little novella of meaningful gestures and perfectly chosen words. While the amorous Romeo Rodriguez and his slick black ponytail are the stars of the show, supporting player Little Joey Diaz is a marvel of economic characterization through dialogue. From his first line - “I bet you I could hit that light with my one good arm behind my back” - he’s instantly recognizable as that motormouth guy in your crew who drives you nuts with his yapping but is strangely endearing nonetheless. In the span of one verse he brags on his pitching prowess, downplays his disability, smokes some grass, engages in some light bigotry and celebrates the death of a cop. Little Joey packs more living into an evening of hanging on a street corner than most folks do in a month.

5. Lou (from “Doin’ the Things That We Want To” and “New Sensations,” 1984)

Again, conflating an artist with his work is always dicey, but there are quite a few songs in the Lou Reed canon that are pretty evidently autobiographical, from the recovering addict of “The Last Shot” to the domestic homebody of “My House” to the cautious optimist of “NYC Man.” His powers of self-observation were never stronger than on New Sensations’ double-shot of “Doin’ the Things That We Want To” and “New Sensations.”

The former finds Lou attending a production of Sam Shepard’s A Fool for Love and getting lost in a reverie of all the art that knocks him out, particularly the films of Martin Scorcese. The latter isn’t much more than a simple recounting of a day when Lou had a good time riding his motorcycle on country roads. Both are filled with such an infectious, exuberant delight in the  little joys of life that they make Lou Reed seem downright human. That’s no small feat.

4. Drella (from Songs for Drella, 1990)

I’ve never seen a movie biopic that captures the soul of an artist and his world nearly as elegantly as does Songs for Drella, and I’ve read precious few biographies that approach it either. Lou’s album-length collaboration with John Cale is a passionate, conflicted, scintillating portrait of Andy Warhol crafted by two artists who cared deeply about their former mentor. Whatever your feelings on Warhol as an artist or a media figure, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone coming away from Songs for Drella without a sense of loss and sympathy for the flawed, frightened, ferocious visionary portrayed in these songs.

3. Flophouse Guy (from “Street Hassle,” 1978)

This guy is a dick, but that’s sort of to be expected from a cat who’s presumably the proprietor of a New York shooting gallery. His amiably callous ramble on how to properly dispose of an overdosed house guest is the calcified heart of “Street Hassle,” a chilling stroll through a world where death and drugs intermingle easily with small talk and half-assed philosophy (“Some people got no choice and they can never find a voice to talk with that they can even call their own, so the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be, why, they follow it. Y’know what it’s called? Bad luck.”) “Street Hassle” is arguably the single greatest piece of music Lou ever recorded and this guy is vital to its jaded brilliance.

2. Caroline (from Berlin, 1973)

To say Lou’s opus of despair Berlin is the story of a failing marriage would be putting it lightly. It’s an account of a marriage simultaneously imploding and exploding and threatening to destroy everyone within its orbit. While the he-said-she-said structure of the album’s narrative gives more or less equal time to her husband Jim, it’s Caroline who emerges as the heart of the story. She’s made her share of bad judgments, from serial infidelity to child endangerment, but Lou’s portrayal of Caroline is by far the more sympathetic. Like so many of his heroines, she’s an emotionally wounded woman butting up against a man’s world that refuses to let her live. By the time “Caroline Says II" rolls around we’ve heard Jim level a litany of charges against her, but her blank delivery of “You can hit me all you want to, but I don’t love you anymore” renders all of his complaints little more than petulant whining. Caroline won’t come to a good end, of course - she slits her wrists in her marital bed after Jim gets her children taken away by the authorities - and her tragedy is only compounded by her husband’s final smirk of “I am much happier this way.” Dark stuff even for Lou Reed, but damn if it doesn’t ring true.

1. Jenny (from “Rock & Roll,” 1970)

If you’ve never had an artistic revelation like Jenny dancing to that fine, fine music, that marvelous moment of clarity when a piece of art slapped you in the face and showed you a world beyond whatever doldrums you’d been mired in, then I just don’t know how to respond to you. Jenny’s life was saved by rock and roll. Mine was saved by “Rock & Roll.” Maybe yours was saved by a movie or a book or a photograph or a play or a sunrise. Whatever your particular salvation, I hope you know where Jenny is coming from. Jenny is everyperson.

Don’t Call it a Comeback: Four artists with stellar second acts

[Originally published at MadeLoud.]

From Kurt Warner to Mickey Rourke to the Democratic Party, 2008 was a year of comebacks in American pop culture. For imaginatively bankrupt media outlets, that meant yet another round of glib remarks about the supposed refutation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous statement that “there are no second acts in American lives.” It would be a trite reference even if the commentators weren’t mangling Fitzgerald’s intention, but F. Scott wasn’t talking about second chances.

Theatrically speaking, the second act is where the themes and situations set up in act one come to fruition, where preamble and character sketches develop into a genuine story. Taken in that spirit, Fitzgerald’s quotation looks even more cynical, especially since it’s so frequently true. The following musicians are the exceptions to this off-putting rule, the rare artists who managed to evolve while neither clinging to their early sound nor reinventing themselves to suit their times. In a perfect world, we’d all have second acts as well-conceived as these.

Dr. Dre

Being a member of N.W.A. must have been exhausting, what with the constant pressure to be harder than thou and true to the streets. As the hip-hop supergroup began to splinter in the early ‘90s, most of the members carried their personas through to their solo careers: Ice Cube raged against social and political machines, Eazy-E played the prankish horndog, MC Ren explored the intersection of funk and Islam.

Producer and MC Dr. Dre looked to be heading in a similar direction with the release of his groundbreaking solo debut The Chronic, but it was that album’s guest appearance by an up-and-comer named Snoop Doggy Dogg that pointed the way to Dre’s greatest legacy. Over the next two decades, Dre served as producer/mentor for a string of artists who represented the ever-changing face of hip-hop.

From Snoop Dogg to Eminem to 50 Cent, Dre has helped change the face of hip-hop several times over. He’s also put his unmistakable production stamp on an endless array of projects by industry icons like Raekwon, Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z. And lest anyone think he’s lost his skills on the mic, he’ll still toss out the occasional vocal appearance to fill the massive gaps between his solo albums.

Ike Turner

When you’ve got the lead guitar credit on what’s often acknowledged as the first rock & roll single of all time, you might be excused for wanting to rest on your laurels. Not so Ike Turner, the flashy axe man who laid down the definitive distortion riff on 1951’s “Rocket 88.” As the leader of the roving R&B act The Kings of Rhythm, Turner carved out a decent living and a respected position on the ‘50s night club circuit. If he’d continued down that road, he might well have fallen into an Earl King-type niche: a seminal rocker beloved by historians but forgotten by the general public.

Ironically, Ike achieved his greatest fame by stepping out of the spotlight. He found something special in a powerful young vocalist named Anna Mae Bullock, soon rechristened Tina Turner. As their artistic collaboration grew, Ike took a small step into the background, continuing to write and arrange killer R&B productions but putting Tina’s unmistakable electricity front and center.

Good though he was, Ike was just one of thousands of supremely talented musicians working the ‘60s circuit. Tina, on the other hand, was a once in a lifetime performer. Working together, they were a force to be reckoned with. It’s just a shame Ike chose to end his second act with abuse, violence, and scandal.

Lou Reed

As the face at the forefront of one of the artiest bands of the 1960s, Lou Reed cultivated a brooding, thoughtful persona laced with an acidic cynicism that was directly at odds with the era’s prevailing peace-and-love vibes. The dour influence of author Delmore Schwartz, Reed’s collegiate mentor, ran throughout the band’s early output. When Reed led the Velvet Underground through a paean to heroin, for example, it came off not as a celebration of hedonism, but rather as a combined wail of self-loathing and drugged-out exultation.

Much of Reed’s early solo career seems dedicated to eradicating his formative days, but not via the whole-cloth reinvention employed by David Bowie. Bowie invented a series of carefully crafted alter egos, each with its own elaborate back story, but his musical output followed a fairly identifiable trajectory. Reed, on the other hand, seemed determined to avoid pigeonholing at all costs, pinballing from the glam rock strut of Transformer to the literate tragedy of Berlin to the atonal mind-fuck of Metal Machine Music.

Reed’s genre-scrambling even included occasional digs at his art-rock beginnings. His Rock & Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live albums featured proto-metal covers of Velvet Underground songs delivered with a snotty sneer that could easily be taken for derision. His Street Hassle album opens with a sardonic reprise of the Velvets’ “Sweet Jane” in which Reed openly mocks his own lyrics. Ironically, Reed’s efforts to defy classification only solidified his reputation as the godfather of art rock, a ballsy risk-taker who wasn’t afraid to fail in his pursuit of something different.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Devo was all about subversion. Their peculiar brand of new wave weirdness took to task the crumbling social and artistic structures of post-Nixon America with a tongue-in-cheek delivery that made their sometimes sardonic message all the more effective. Along the way, they experimented with electronic sounds and mixed media presentation in ways that would have a profound impact on the pop music landscape for decades to come.

There’s nothing in that formula that points to “beloved composer of children’s music,” but that’s exactly the direction Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh took in his second act. Mothersbaugh first caught the film scoring bug while working on Neil Young’s outré musical comedy Human Highway in the late ‘70s. By the early ‘90s, he was working extensively in the field of, film, TV and video game scores.

Like fellow rocker-turned-composer Danny Elfman, Mothersbaugh typically crafts scores that tone down his natural quirkiness without eliminating it entirely. His appropriately eclectic résumé includes “Rugrats,” “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” and “Crash Bandicoot,” as well as several collaborations with his cinematic soulmate Wes Anderson. No one could have forecast that the brain behind “Penetration in the Centerfold” and “Jocko Homo” would one day be entertaining a generation of Nickelodeon-loving youngsters, but again, Mothersbaugh knows a thing or two about subversion

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- Ira Brooker

Me and Lou and everyone we know

On March 2, 1994 I purchased my first Lou Reed album.

I spent a lot of time in the library my freshman year of high school, poring through a large book called, simply, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock. It was a fairly basic overview of popular music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but what I liked best about it was that it listed birthdays for all of the featured artists. I wrote up a long list of notable birthdays in one of my spiral notebooks and entertained myself for a few weeks by wishing my friends a happy Billy Preston’s birthday, or lifting my lunchtime juice box in a toast to the birth of Joe Cocker. (Yeah, I was a real cool kid.)

So it was that I knew March 2, 1994 was Lou Reed’s 52^nd birthday. That afternoon, my mother and I made a brief stop at the Pamida discount store in Sparta, Wisconsin. While browsing the store’s small but eclectic music section, I spotted a cassette tape of 1975’s Lou Reed Live peering up at me from the $3 bin. I didn’t know much about Lou Reed, but my friend Nathan had recently introduced me to the Velvet Underground’s first album and I’d been wanting to learn more. I took the coincidence as a sign from above and bought the tape.

After dinner that night, I made my usual retreat to my parent’s room, where I lay across their bed on my belly and slipped my new purchase into our rickety dual-deck boom box. I closed my eyes and tuned in as the screeching guitars of the opening track, “Vicious,” roared to life, After a lengthy intro, Lou’s nasal sneer broke in: “Vicious / You hit me with a flower / You do it every hour / Ah baby, you’re so vicious.” I was expecting something mellow and quirky, like the only Lou Reed solo song I knew, “Walk on the Wild Side.” This was different. It was weird and loud and, well, vicious. And I knew right away that I wanted more of it.

My interest in Lou Reed continued to grow over the following year, although the financial realities of being 15 and jobless prevented me from purchasing any more albums. I dubbed a copy of Lou’s first album and half of his 1989 masterwork New York from my friend Paul’s parent’s collection. My copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico, dubbed over one of the dozens of poor quality self-help tapes left over from my parents’ brief 1980s involvement with Amway, became my “pump-up” music before JV football and basketball games. While the other jocks jammed out to Soundgarden and Dr. Dre, I shut my eyes, turned up my walkman and drifted away on a cloud of “Heroin.” I’d never had so much as a can of beer in my life, but I was fairly certain that the sensation I got from that song measured up to any drug trip I could have taken. Yes, I was about as deeply into the smack shooting, leather bars and filthy streets of mid ‘70s New York City as any devoutly Christian teenaged honor student from mid ‘90s Western Wisconsin could be.

I celebrated Lou’s 53^rd birthday with the purchase of 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance from a used record store. That same year I got my driver’s license and my first job, working the concession stand and running projectors at Sparta’s brand new six-screen movie theater. The sudden combination of cash and a car opened whole new avenues for music buying. I started delving into Lou’s more recent work as well as his ‘70s output. I was amazed at the literacy of the lyrics. I couldn’t believe that someone could get away with working a verse like

“Some people are into sadistic pleasures
They whet their desires and drool in your ears
Theyre quasi-effeminate characters in love with oral gratification
They edify your integrities, so they can play on your fears”

into a nationally released pop song. My respect for the man just grew and grew. I kept up my birthday tradition, but I started snatching up other albums throughout the year as well.

Near the end of my sophomore year of college, I purchased Lou’s 1978 Live: Take No Prisoners from The Exclusive on State Street in Madison, thereby completing my collection of every Lou Reed and Velvet Underground album then available, a grand total of 17 studio albums and five live releases. But it didn’t stop there. I purchased five, count ‘em, five Lou Reed t-shirts. I decided that one copy of each album was not enough – I wanted to own every one on both CD and vinyl. I also set a goal of owning every unique recording Lou had ever released, even if it was only one song on a compilation. This explains why my music collection includes the soundtracks to Get Crazy, White Nights, the TV show Friends and Perfect. Yes, I own the soundtrack to Perfect, the 1985 aerobicsploitation movie starring John Travolta as a jaded Rolling Stone reporter and Jamie Lee Curtis as the fitness instructor who teaches him how to love again. And the Lou Reed song, a raunchy dance number called “Hot Hips,” is really, really bad.

But Perfect was not the low point of my Lou worship. No, that came on March 2 of 2000, when I strolled into Know Name Records in Minneapolis and laid down ten bucks for a Lou Reed interview record. I don’t mean the kind of “What’s your favorite color?” “When did you start making music?” interview disc that teen idol pop bands pawn off on gullible middle school girls. No, this record was intended for distribution exclusively to radio DJs who were willing to fake an interview with a rock legend. It was released in 1982, along with Lou’s The Blue Mask album. Here’s how it worked: the DJ read a prompt from a pre-written list of questions, then dropped the needle on the record to hear Lou’s canned response. On side one, Lou answers questions about each of the album’s ten songs; on side two, he addresses softball questions about his career. Obviously, this is not an album you’d want to play at a party. Or by yourself. Or anywhere, under any circumstances, ever. But I went ahead and purchased in nonetheless. At this point, I realized I had a problem.

Today, fifteen years after I struck up my musical love affair, my feelings toward Lou have cooled. I still adore most of his work, and I’ll maintain that there are great things about each of his albums, but I’m not nearly as rabid about it. That has something to do with his 2003 release The Raven, a staggeringly pretentious two-disc tribute to Edgar Allan Poe on which Lou re-writes several of Poe’s poems. Most of it is near unlistenable, and it forced me to acknowledge how self-important Lou can be. Lately, he’s seemed obsessed with casting himself as a serious artiste, doddering around NYC with his ultra-chic girlfriend Laurie Anderson and spending more time on tai chi and his photography collections than on his music. I almost gave up on him all together when, on 2004’s live Animal Serenade, he directly compared himself to Hubert Selby and William S. Burroughs.

I guess most heroes eventually reveal their feet of clay, but Lou can still inspire a certain fervor in me. On March 2, 2009, I listened to eight Lou Reed albums in their entirety, then headed over to Cheapo Discs on Snelling Avenue and forked over 16 bucks for a live disc of songs from Lou’s 1973 masterpiece Berlin. Old habits die hard, I guess. And besides, Lou and I have been through a lot together.