Review Lou Reed Chapter & Verse New Yorks Finest
The Landfill Chronicles, Part 3 of the iv-function affiliate on Lou Reed
THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES: Lou Reed Part 3 of Chapter ane: Conversations on Music Elevated to a State of Fine art
Past Dan Ouellette
THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES is the work-in-progress volume on Medium that continues for several weeks with archival articles on stone stars such as Frank Zappa and jazz greats including Wayne Shorter. The writing originally appeared in print magazines and newspapers that take been relegated to the landfill.
THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES
Chapter 1. LOU REED
PART 3: THE RAVEN — CAREER ENDER OR MASTERPIECE?
One time again in 2003, Lou has people scratching their heads. On January 28, he releases his 19th solo album, The Raven, a double CD of music and spoken word inspired past the dismal, macabre world view espoused more than two centuries before by literary wordsmith Edgar Allan Poe. Sire issues it, and Hal Willner co-produces with Lou.
I render to Lou's Sister Ray Enterprises office in SoHo to talk near his latest recording. It's my tertiary visit in three years. Every bit Lou enters his high-ceiling loft part, he'south greeted past Lola, the frisky rat terrier he shares with his partner Laurie Anderson. Lou settles into his inner sanctum and immediately begins scarfing down a lunch of egg-white omelet and lox, leaving the stake green lettuce leaves backside in the tin. He peels off his brown flannel shirt. Clad in his typical all-black attire consisting of a T-shirt and leather pants, he explains that he ran late because of his date at his Chinese acupuncturist'southward part. He tells me his latest attempt at kicking his lifelong cigarette habit now entails getting stuck with needles and drinking sludgy herbal tea for five weeks. Every bit for the event of this latest workout, he says, so far, and so good, only shrugs: "We'll meet."
"I'll go out on a high notation by taking the high road"
Nosotros then begin our conversation nigh The Raven. 4 years in the making, the anthology is the most aggressive project of Lou'due south oeuvre. It clocks in at well-nigh two-and-a-quarter hours and encompasses a broad span of styles (from a lounge show-tune send-upwards to an apocalyptic furnace blast of electronic music). Co-starring with the rocker are such actors as Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, Amanda Plummer and Elizabeth Ashley in addition to recording luminaries like ex-glam buddy David Bowie, jazz iconoclast Ornette Coleman, gospel legends The Blind Boys of Alabama and Laurie
"This could be a career ender!" exclaims the unusually effervescent Lou, leaning back in his desk chair while the window radiator hisses and the horns on Broadway bellow on this cold-snap January mean solar day. "But I'll go out on a loftier annotation by taking the high route."
Is Lou indeed issuing the "nevermore" proclamation by Poe'southward black bird of doom? He sighs and concedes, "I expect even less than I unremarkably exercise, which is not much in the first place. The album is geared for doom. It requires concentration. Information technology's then contrary to everything out there now that I figure this i could well sink." In a soft voice, he whispers, "Information technology's besides skillful," then, in a flare-up of mock melodrama, he booms, "Information technology's too good for them!"
Lou laughs heartily at his disparaging sentiment toward record companies that he insists take lost touch with serious — and at times comic — art released in a pop music setting. But Poe? Is the 19th century poet and brusk story writer — whose grotesque fantasies and paranoia continue to capture the imaginations of inferior and senior high students everywhere — the protagonist of a 21st century creative endeavour?
"Obviously, I'm fascinated by Edgar," Lou says, then admits, "It is the worst time in the world for something like this to come out, particularly with the record business concern the fashion it is." He pauses and so takes some other swipe at the loss-accruing industry: "Just the record companies are essentially getting what they deserve."
However, there is a glint of hope that perhaps The Raven may buck the odds and fascinate both serious listeners fed upwardly with vacuous pop and immature adults hungry for a new twist. Lou reports that the Oct radio-only edited version of Dafoe reading "The Raven" met with favorable reviews during Halloween. "It went to number 12 on 1 alt-rock college station," he reports. "At present, how's that possible?"
The nighttime-bird highlight
"This is a compendium of all the music I've washed in my career," Lou says. "It is the result of everything I've done. At that place's no fashion I could have fabricated this when I was twenty or forty. This is the album that sums up all my experiences. I'm very happy with it. Information technology's exactly what I wanted information technology to be."
In Hamburg, Frg three years earlier, Lou debuted his Poe-attempt commissioned opera collaboration with theater director Robert Wilson at the Thalia Theatre. The projection reacquainted the native New Yorker, a college lit major, with the American author who also lived in Gotham. In the liner notes to The Raven, Reed argues that Poe, with his haunting and terror-stricken tales of the mid-1800s, is "peculiarly attuned to our new century's heartbeat than he always was to his own. Obsessions, paranoia, willful acts of self-destruction surround us constantly."
The staging of Poe-try featured xiii songs, an overture and libretto with spoken-word interludes that wove from biographical detail to liberal adaptations of Poe's works including "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Center" and "The Pit and the Pendulum." Three-quarters of the production was translated into German, a sticking betoken with viewers who attended its ix-day run at BAM'due south Side by side Wave Festival in Brooklyn in late 2001. But past then, Lou was already at piece of work converting the play into a recording.
Is The Raven Lou's masterpiece?
Initially the German division of Warner Bros. wanted to make an album of the play itself. But as Lou began to record some guide vocals to set this in move, information technology became, as he calls information technology, "a Lou project." Then his label, Warner/Reprise in Fifty.A., heard well-nigh it and wanted to release information technology. Lou says, "My first thought was, do they know what this is going to be?"
The album started minor simply quickly grew exponentially as Lou rewrote major sections of the play for the recording. He then enlisted his longtime band mates — guitarist Mike Rathke, bassist Fernando Saunders and drummer Tony Smith — and recruited several guest musicians and dramatic readers. In addition to the two-CD set, there will be a single CD issued with a focus on but the songs (in Lou'due south words, the "petite" version of the "thousand mal" Poe attack).
The get-go CD opens with an anguished rock overture, two readings (Dafoe every bit young Poe, Buscemi as old Poe), a cello-backed Prologue, so Lou and co. cranking up the stone spirit with the anthemic "Edgar Allan Poe" (with Lou comically wailing the chorus: "These are the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, non exactly the boy next door"). The rest of the disc includes soft-edged tunes, a rocking instrumental, a lengthy rendition of the morbid "The Fall of The House of Usher" (with eerie sound effects), a reworking of "The Raven" and ii numbers Lou revisited from old albums, "The Bed" from Berlin and "Perfect Day" from Transformer.
"These songs both fit," Lou says. "But I besides wanted to bring back memories to fans who know my piece of work." As for the poetic license he took with the "mournful chaos" of Poe'due south works, Lou says, why not? "In Willem's reading of `The Raven,' he recites the line 'big-headed, dickless liar.' And someone asked me, did Poe really say that? And I replied, 'No. Lou said that in a Poe style.'"
The 2nd CD is the stronger of the double album. The pacing is better, the tunes weave into the mix with more than fluidity and the spoken-word sections are highly dramatic and conversational, especially in "The Tell-Tale Centre" suite that brims with exclamatory utterances and distorted guitar fury. "Hop Frog" is another brilliant multi-song section, showtime with Bowie singing the straight-up rocking theme (backed by Lou'southward obliterating guitar) and ending with "Fire Music," a three-minute surge of electronic effects of annihilation.
Lou cites this piece when asked how Poe is relevant to today's globe. "Just remember of the twin towers, which I saw fall from my loft [in the West Village]," he says. "'Fire Music' was recorded two days subsequently September 11. People inquire me my reaction. Words can't describe it. 'Burn down Music' does."
Lou'due south been on the record for saying that he rarely listens to his work after the studio sessions. But during our conversation, he notes that he'southward listened to The Raven several times. When asked nigh that, he cites "lousy" audio quality on past releases and says, "Why heed to your own stuff anyway?" Simply with The Raven, he'south not simply proud of the sonics (mastering the music to his high standards) but besides of the performances of his Poe troupe.
Is The Raven his masterpiece? Lou hints that it may be. "This is a compendium of all the music I've done in my career," he says. "It is the event of everything I've done. There's no mode I could accept fabricated this earlier in my career. This is the album that sums up all my experiences. I'thou very happy with it. It's exactly what I wanted it to exist."
- **
The Raven takes flight on the road
In 2004, a year after The Raven release, Lou went on the road and taped his show for Sire/Reprise that was released as Fauna Serenade. Recorded live at Fifty.A.'southward Wiltern Theater, the ii-CD drove covers a latitude of historical and stylistic ground. From thrust to caress, the New York bard and his band crisis through four-chord rockers ("Dirty Bvld.") and flow with elegant lyricism through gentle numbers ("Sunday Morn").
Lou revisits his gritty Velvet Underground repertoire (a slow-to-burn down "Heroin" that's both a blitz and a lament) and his concluding, tragically off-the-radar disc The Raven (the hushed "Vanishing Act"). Underneath the gruff/droll, tough-guy demeanor, Lou is a romantic, evidenced past "Tell It to Your Heart." Cellist Jane Scarpantoni excels on her dark-toned, grace-and-fever solo on "Venus in Furs," and primo vocaliser Anthony flies loftier on "Candy Says." Talking to the crowd, Lou says the melody was always likewise difficult for him to sing. But what's missing from this song's performance is the raw gloom of Lou's distinctive voice and his powerful cardinal authority.
Subsequently, Lou engaged in several projects, but never returned with a new total-blown studio recording of such poetic mastery every bit Ecstasy and The Raven. But of annotation, he did not go silent, engaging in 2 contrasting recording projects. Four years later The Raven in 2007, he again collaborated with Hal Willner on Hudson River Air current Meditations, a new-historic period meditational journey that was deliberately hushed. He wrote in the liners: "I equanimous this music for myself as an adjunct to meditation, Tai Chi, bodywork, and every bit music to play in the background of life — to supersede the everyday cacophony with new and ordered sounds of an unpredictable nature." He also drove into the opposite zone to explore more than in the vein of metal automobile music, including a 2011 collaboration with heavy metallic rock ring Metallica for the anthology Lulu.
Lou continued to tour, merely liver illness forced him to cancel dates. He received a liver transplant in April 2013, merely so recovered enough to hope fans more bout dates. But he lost his boxing with end-stage liver affliction on October 27, 2013 at his and Laurie's East Finish house in Amagansett, NY.
CONTINUED
In Part iv of this 4-office Affiliate 1 of The Landfill Chronicles, to exist published on Medium next calendar week, Laurie Anderson weighs in on Lou'south inventiveness and wisdom. The calendar week after: a multi-office Chapter two: Moments with Wayne Shorter.
Source: https://medium.com/@danouellette/the-landfill-chronicles-part-3-of-the-4-part-chapter-on-lou-reed-d0d942ff1a7f?source=read_next_recirc---------0---------------------cadd2a5f_717a_4e29_b4eb_8ebe7853230b----------
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