--Butch Hancock, singer-songwriter
"Growing up in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and that you should save it for someone you love."
--Butch Hancock, singer-songwriter
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For whatever reason, I wasn't expecting Lou Reed to die at 71, as he seemed to have had so much music left to give us. An improbable feat, Reed made interesting, riveting--if occasionally disappointing--music continuously since The Velvet Underground and Nico, the landmark album of 1967. When there was naive, hippie music on the radio (not just FM but on Top 40), a sort of watered-down consciousness about the sexual revolution, race relations and other issues, the Velvets countered with that album of gritty, big city tales that only jazz artists were making at that time.
I first heard one of my all-time favorites, "I'm Waiting for the Man," on Detroit's WABX-FM (somewhere I've got a tape where there's a nice segue between that and whatever was played previously). As I mentioned on my radio tribute, John Sleziak played "Heroin" at a get-together of my church youth. He was older than most of us and probably thought a bunch of sheltered, white suburban brats should experience a record as devastating as that. Besides bringing The Velvet Underground and Nico to the gathering that day, I also recall that he had LPs by John Coltrane and Yusef Lateef. There are tons of Lou Reed tracks that take a haunting guitar figure and spin a song around it. "Goodby Mass" from 1992's Magic and Loss (his recollections of songwriter Doc Pomus) sounded great on my show yesterday. And when Reed reinvented his sound with the fury of 1989's New York, I loved that as well. The only time I saw Lou was on that tour, where (at Detroit's Fox Theatre), he played the entire New York album and came back with an encore of audience favorites. What a show. Nothing wrong with the flat intonation that Reed projected as a vocalist. It made what he was singing about less sensationalized and more powerful than what any sweet sounding vocalist could have done with the same material. And what material. Too many faves to list here, but each live album had a different feel to it and I find every one of them quite special. Of the studio stuff (besides the third album, The Velvet Underground, with so many understated, lovely songs) it is music to treasure, from 1978's filthy Street Hassle to 1982's The Blue Mask to Songs for Drella, the Andy Warhol chronicle Reed recorded with John Cale in 1990. I always wanted to play "Rock & Roll" in a band, starting with the Velvet Underground Loaded version and then going into Detroit with Mitch Ryder's cover that was released the following year. Well, I got halfway there--in 1981, when I moved back to Michigan from Texas, old pals Dave Grenville and Mike Mulvahill got part of our teenage band together and we fooled around with the Detroit version. It was a blast; "Two TV sets/two Cadillac cars/don't mean nothin' at all." Lou, we're sure going to miss your amazing music. Now you have to contend with the spirit of Lester Bangs floating around nearby. |
The J2 Blog J.J. Syrja (born in Detroit, 1955) is a journalist and radio broadcaster. The son of an electrician and a teacher, he has written for Goldmine magazine,
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March 2024
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