Saturday, April 10, 2021

Sensitive Boys, Turn Your Amps Up Loud

Yesterday, I had a dream my friend Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen and I were walking the halls of my high school (in truth, our high schools were 700 miles apart). Eric was singing the Lou Reed song "Stupid Man" from the 1979 album, The Bells. I said, "That's the best song," waking up with it in my head. This led me to a day spent, among other things, reconnecting with my intense relationship to Lou's music, particularly between the ages of 15 and, say, 23, really just before I started writing about music.

Anyway, it led me through my email sends to find a eulogy I wrote upon his death in 2013, something I assumed had been lost. It was written the night after the news to the early hours of the next day.

h/t Alejandro

                Lou Reed’s death is a shock. It’s the loss of a very dear old friend, a close friend. Of course, I never met him, and the one time I wrote a short feature about him (for KC’s Pitchweekly, on the eve of his New York tour stop), his press packet convinced me the world didn’t need one more Lou Reed interview. I had a gut-deep sense of what motivated Lester Bangs to famously (and lovingly) antagonize him. With the press at least, Reed’s ego always seemed to get in the way.

On record, he was something else altogether. At fifteen, I was hooked by 1978’s Street Hassle, and got to know Reed’s solo work first, virtually all of the Velvet Underground records out of print until several crucial years later. Hassle drew this adolescent in, at first, because it sounded so cool, and it went to such dark places—from the unconscionable cover up of a drug overdose to the kind of racialized fantasies that got those kids shot at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. Of course, what held me was not only that droning palisade of sound that kept the record cutting forward but also that chin-out tough-talking voice, at once close to violence and close to tears.

Trying to describe the sound of that voice, I jump forward two years to one of Lou’s most emotionally naked songs, “My Old Man.” He has a quaver from the start as he recalls being lined up on the public school playground—“Regan, Reed and Russo, I still remember the names.” It’s a song about a boy who grows to hate his father for his abusiveness, and throughout the song, the singer sounds like the boy he once was, wiping tears from his eyes and bracing for a fight. That song is followed by “Growing Up in Public,” a meditation on manhood over a comic bass line. He calls himself “a Prince Hamlet caught in the middle between reason and instinct…with [his] pants down again.”  That tortured boy from the schoolyard is never far out of view.

When I think of the vulnerability Lou Reed laced through walls of fuzz guitar, the only fitting corollary that comes to mind is John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. You couldn’t be fooled by the distanced cool of “Walk on the Wild Side”—a primal scream side-winded and coiled just out of sight. If a hostile offense was his best defense, Reed’s gift to fans was music that allowed us both sources of refuge.  

But Reed didn’t build strongholds so much as vantage points, like that guy standing on the corner thinking about Jack and Jane, he most often contemplated what went unobserved—a little girl, an amputee (figuratively or literally) dancing to the A.M. radio in her room, a father wondering over the bed where his wife cut her wrists, and that junkie answering “the dead bodies piled up in mounds” with the only thing that makes him feel like a man. Along with the other Velvets, later guitarists Robert Hunter, Dick Wagner, Robert Quine and Mike Rathke, and longtime bassist Fernando Saunders, Reed found musical hooks that both reminded us of the artifice and pulled us in close to everyday hopes and everyday tragedy. And, sometimes, he took us to moments of peace, on the set of a night shoot for a cola commercial in “Tell It to Your Heart,” in a genial country restaurant on “New Sensations” or in his late night conversation with a beloved ghost on “My House.”

But I have to go back to the album Growing Up in Public for the moment that, for me, best illustrates how the vulnerable boy Lou Reed fights his way forward. It’s the album opener, “How Do You Speak to an Angel,” in its own way as weird (and somehow also plainspoken) a record as he ever made. Over Ellard “Moose” Boles’ bass glissandos and Michael Fonfara’s faux harpsichord keys, the singer describes a boy who has no clue how to talk to a girl he likes—a childhood commonplace delivered as a matter for serious consideration. By the second verse, he’s talking about an adult with the same concerns, and when he sings “how do ya/speak to a,” the bass doubles down, Michael Suchorsky’s drums rage at the problem, the keys escalate, Stuart Heinrich kicks in with metal guitar and everything builds to a break—“How do ya/Speak to a,” voice and handclaps, part opera, part gospel. This is no longer simply a serious matter; it’s THE serious matter.

The band roars forward with some punk metal version of a full tilt boogie, Reed continuing to ask the same question. Over the course of the song, his voice has moved from a kind of gentle lilt to, now, a bellowing, grunting, growling call to charge. He finally shouts, his voice a roar—“You say ‘hello, Baby!” It’s a Hail Mary.  

“Baby! Angel” he shouts as the band plays on, and as the backing vocals swell and the band rages, he says, “Aaaanggell, Aaaaanngggelll,” and the roar is primal. When I played this record on Sunday, that cry brought tears to my eyes. It still does now. I’m already missing this man who found that boy’s voice. They both helped me find mine.

Friday, April 09, 2021

No Ordinary Blue--Thoughts on John Prine Revisited

April 9, 2020

These are just some late night thoughts as I get my first moment to think in the past 30.
Stephen King once described finding stories like digging up gems, excavating, finding the solid center underneath. Funny thing (though I love him for reasons that overlap with Prine), I don't really think of his sprawling stories the way I think of Prine's songs, those gems, that rock underneath.
I think it's because, when you hear the epic sounds of something like "Lake Marie," you hear the little moment that makes a connection to a tale, an epiphany at its heart. As my friend Steve Messick stuck in my head without even saying it, in "Hello in There," you hear an epic sweep in that refrain about rivers growing wilder every day. "Hello in There" is a song that seems so sentimental and small you can hold it in your hand, but you hit that refrain, and you realize this song's about all of life, but particularly the whole of a certain couple's lonely life, and how that life is shoved aside in our society, where we put people away when they no longer turn a dollar, when they may be fading (or, let's be frank, when we're hit by something like Katrina or COVID-19) and if so, they need to go--"23 skidoo," "skedaadle," "beat it, old man."
It's what it's like to feel less powerful, and since that's the trajectory of life, it's as big as Lake Marie. And I mean musically; it's just, in this case, the infinity between two plucked notes and a little steel instead of "Lake Marie's" blasting outward.
And then there's that "Jesus, The Missing Years," a song about storytelling that so hilariously and precisely begins with the bar talk about "no one knew where he was?....Nobody!"
Since "Bethlehem's no place for a 12-year-old," the protagonist of this movie strikes out on his own only to find himself in a series of Chaplin-esque traps. Then he finds his way to fortune and fame and Beatles and Stones and even George Jones.
But like all such tales, it takes its dark turn, when the kid's vision gets the best of him, maybe he begins to talk about who's left out, and society shuts him down. This is what happens when the yarn hits reality, and Jesus went to heaven "awful quick."
It's a big old goofy world we live in for sure, but that fascination for the song and the story and how it gets across gave John Prine a way of snatching it up and collecting it in a ball of wonder--right down to the plucks of guitar, the playfulness of a note, the humor or pain at the edge of his voice. He found this zen that made you listen and think about whatever he was talking about, even if you didn't know what he was talking about, in a way you never thought about it before.
Of course, generally, his main ideas were clear enough, if especially in tone and timbre behind the words. He was such an easy friend to keep. I don't think any of us ever thought about what it would mean to lose him. Friends like that don't come around every day.
Never mind anyone who would start his recorded career with a goof as the best ending to a song ever--"I'm just trying to have me some fun!
Well done!
Hot dog bun!
[Bump bump]
My sister's a nun!"
Thank you for that fun, and a lifetime of gems that continue to do their work, giving us light in the darkness, illuminating our way forward.