Maybe he was a talented person, but I never could get past that "wild side" stuff. RIP.
I like Lou Reid, at least what I’ve heard from him. And that is not much. I have heard some stuff for the 1st time recently on my Sirius XM deep tracks channel .And I really like take a walk on the wild side.
I’ve read the documentary was tame but I like that because quite frankly I don’t want to actually ‘see’ the wild side of NYC in the 70s. I was there and I saw it and it was not a pretty sight.
But I’m waiting to see it on amazon prime. Don’t know if it will ever get there.
Not a huge Reed fan either. I like the album with Nicco the best. But you must admit, he and the Velvets were a huge influence on people like Bowie, The Stooges, Mott The Hoople and others.
Nothing to do with the topic, but I like your screen name. The great Lee Marvin. Back when movies were fun.
A lot of the footage was taken from Andy Warhol’s short films. He seemed to be the intellectual glue that held the group together but Lou Reed was definitely the poet for the group.
I thought it was interesting how much the East Coast intellectuals and radicals hated the West Coast hippie love child types. They thought they were hedonistic children with no interest in real cultural revolution.
The also hated Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention which seemed weird since they were pushing the same antiestablishment themes. I think the real reason they hated him is that he was actually a talented virtuoso on his instruments and a more creative composer than anybody from the VU.
I doubt history will long remember the VU which seemed narsisistic and pretentious compared to real artists in jazz and progressive rock of the time that could actually play their axe although John Cale was fairly skilled. The best example of how shallow they were was their touring with the tone-deaf Nico long beyond her 15 minutes of fame for “La Dulce Vida”.
“New Sensations” by Lou Reed introduced me to the Kawasaki GPz. This has cost me a small fortune over the years, but I am on my third 1981 GPz 1100 now, and regret none of it. In fact, I love that GPz so much I could kiss it.
“...and the colored girls sing, doot, do-doot, do-doot... “
Velvet Underground “Rock and Roll” is one of the great songs of that band with their unique sound...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_bQMsqUoD4
Bflr
I still can’t figure out what the hell Lou Reed was doing with Metallica on “Lulu”. Definitely one of the weirdest collaborations, ever.
I saw John Cale at a place that doesn’t exist anymore in Atlanta, The Metroplex.
Many years ago I was driving some work colleagues to a golf outing. One of them grabbed the tape I had been listening to - which just happened to be VU & Nico - and said “let’s see what you listen to” and stuck it in the cassette player. It happened to be in the middle of “Sister Ray” so we listened to that and “Venus in Furs”. They never touched my tapes again.