Lou's Albatross

I first hear Lou Reed whenever Walk On The Wild Side is played as an oldie on the radio.  One time I tape it and later buy it (B-side the as yet uncanonised Perfect Day) from the Oldies Museum. I lie on my bedroom floor listening to it with my young eyes closed. It’s so familiar then but back then it was so calm, haunting and dangerous. And as time-suspendingly beautiful as Albatross by Fleetwood Mac.

Next encounter: May 20th, 1979. David Bowie hosts Star Special on Radio One. I tape the show on my Boot cassette player. The selection of tunes is fantastic I hear 96 Tears by ? & The Mysterions for the first time, Love Street by The Doors, Einstein On The Beach by Philip Glass… but I keep coming back to the sleaziestly sunny sexy song I’ve ever heard. Sweet Jane.

A few months later Tim Curry hosts the same show and plays Rock & Roll. Then Zappa does it and plays All Tomorrow’s Parties. What a sound! How the hell did they do that?

I want some Lou on vinyl and one dark Thursday evening I bag me a whopping double set called Take No Prisoners at The Other Record Shop. I never have had or heard all the way through Rock & Roll Animal. Or Lou Reed Live. Take No Prisoners – I’m sticking with you, you Bottom Line rocking speed jive talking trash talk power chord sax-blasted icon. One disc clear blue vinyl, one disc clear red. I buy it because Sweet Jane is the first song. I drop the needle onto the blue vinyl. A match is struck, a cigarette inhaled. The sound of a tape being very obviously cued in… ”Sorry we’re late but we were just toonin.”  Hey, and guess what? Somebody’s transcribed the whole damn thing, jack...

Bottom Line audience: Lou Reed, best!

[feedback, piano]

Lou:What's the matter, they keep you waiting or something…Are we late?

It's raining out there...

What do you mean it's raining out… We know it's fucking raining out…

Men, the guy who tightened this microphone has just sill in.. I can’t, look at that, look at that.

I better either grow an inch men or I need a boyfriend.

Fan1: Need a what? Need a what?

Lou: A boyfriend, can't you fucking hear what's wrong with you?

Fan1: Need a what?

Fans: Come on now, Sweet Jane!

Fan1: I heard that

Lou: I'm gonna quote a line like like from from Yeats

I think it is like for you

and that's called the best like all convictions,

while the best are filled...,

no no it's the other way round.

The best like all convictions hahaha

and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity....

now you figure out who I am

Fans: Do it men, do it!

One two, one two three four

"Sweet Jane"

Standing on the corner

The suitcase in my hand

Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest

I hear you, I hear you knocking but you can't come in to me

Hey honey, I'm in a rock and roll band

and ridin' a Stutz Bearcat

those were different times

and those ladies they studied rules of verse

and all those ladies, they rolled their eyes

and saying...Sweet Jane...

Now Jack, he is a banker

and Jane, she is just a little bitty clerk

And both of them

Hey you little people out there

I saw you little people

Don't you hate those Academy Awards, man?

You know they said: here's fucking Barbara Streisand

She says: I want to thank all those little people

There's too many little people

I can't get their names

Fuck her and you little people

I like big people

Fuck short people and tall people, man, I like middle people

People from Wyoming

You've ever meet somebody from Wyoming? Not me

Anyway....

Now Jack, he is a banker and Jane, she is a clerk

Hey, clerk. Gimme good clerk, I give good clerk, aha

And both them man, they saved their pennies

and their fucking nickels and their dimes, and it builds up

they got a nest egg

here comes the condominium

oh, shit!

Hey, Miami

You're sitting there by the fire man

So let your fire, you plug it in

I like make believe fire

I like make believe love too

Oohh mama, give me some make believe love

Hey: Make believe love: that's a album title, Michael,

write that down, quick,

and fuck if I forget it

You're listening to some classical music, hey,

you better watch it now

It's only one time one time only to vote

Hey, The March Of The Wooden Soldiers

Have you ever put a quarter in those machines man?

You know: like the bear that plays basketball?

You put a quarter in A-ha

I guess you never put a quarter in it ha?

Some people say I'm residue. Ha-ha

The March Of The Wooden Soldiers

Where were you on the list when they called you for Vietnam?

Hey man, for Vietnam,

Are you political, Lou? Political about what?

Give me an issue, I’ll give you a tissue

And wipe my ass with it

Ooh, yeah

We're just here to make out

You bend over

We put the head in, you know

if you don't like it, then we'll talk about it

Face north, Jack!

Are we been broadcast tonight?

Fuck Radio Ethiopia, man, I'm Radio Brooklyn

I ain't no snob man...Ha-ha

They said...Sweet Jane...

You know, there's some people man, they like to go out dancing

Why should you?

What about her?

If you write as good as you talk, nobody reads you

What do I look like any young man up here, man?

You know I found my wife in the living room in a Volkswagen

Said: how did you get there?

Made it right through the kitchen

Ain't that funny, haha?

And there's some evil motherfuckers

oh, oh, oohh,

that tell you that life is just made out of dirt

and that eh

ah man, those pretty women they never really fake

Those villains always shut up you

And blink there eyes

There little bitty children are the only ones that blush

And that life

Life is just to die

But I’ll tell you something

Hey man, anyone who's got a heart

a rock and roll heart

Would you turn around and break it?

And you know...Do that again, Michael

Is that control? Watch this now

And anyone who has played the part you know, hey, hey man

they wouldn’t turn around and hate it

they say... Sweet Jane...

You gotta hear him say “Face north, Jack.” At some point I face south and one Saturday make the pilgrimage from Leith to buy Loaded from Ezy Ryder in Greyfriars Market, reputedly Europe's second- largest record store with a stock of 10.000 platters and spitting distance away from Simpson’s Maternity Hospital where I was born. I take this baby home. Lou’s name is third on the credits. Seems a bit off, that, but I love the album.

I now own Sweet Jane and it's perfect. I later read the album was been re-sequenced and re-edited without Lou's consent prior to release and that Sweet Jane had a"heavenly wine and roses" interlude. Hmm. I can't imagine how that could improve in the version I hold here. And I’m into Doug Yule’s voice, too. I can't imagine how Lou could have sung those songs any better  than Doug.

Sometimes when I’m in the record section of John Menzies' bookshop on Princes Street, I’ll read the liner notes to a double album in a PVC sleeve called Rock & Roll Diary. The notes quote from a song called All Through The Night.

I’m intrigued. I want the album, mainly because it has I’m Waiting For The Man on it. I’ve heard Richard Skinner play this on Radio One in the evenings.  How did they make that sound?

I got to Rae Mackintosh's music shop in the West End and purchase a slim volume called Lou Reed, Words & Music. As well as words and chord boxes for Sweet Jane, Rock & Roll, Satellite Of Love etc, the book features some tasty quotes from Lou.

One winter Friday in 1980 we’re supposed to be going on a school history trip to see The Triumph Of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl at the Filmhouse. We turn up but the damn thing is cancelled. I wander up to High Street, 215, pop into Phoenix record shop

and purchase the Banana album. I listen to it that night alone in our living room, the record player on a massive old wooden dining table. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. Run, Run, Run just isn't right. It's fantastic. It seems to run on gnarled electricity syphoned off rickety 1920s projectors, flickering in and out of the ether. What is this Venus In Furs? Ermine psychedelia given a cold vent by the New York subway, guitar rippling of  ragged raga drone like slices of skin shed off the apple of temptation. Or perhaps the banana. All Tomorrow's Parties majestically aquiring the end of side one. with a vibrating pavement made out of squares of glass. By the time the toilet flushes on European Son I’m practically frothing at the mouth. Not only is it the most punk rock thing I’ve ever heard, it’s the most psychedelic thing I’ve ever heard but huddled in an overcoat wih a fresh cigarette rather than kool in the kaftan. I want to phone my friend and band mate Mark and tell him this straightaway. After this revelation electrified my 17-year-old skeleton it was hard to hold my wheesht. Later,I get White Light/White Heat from Ezy Ryder.   Lady Godiva's Operation with its crazy overdubs and melody similar to Gomper off another just-unearthed psychedelic mind-blower, Their Satanic Majesties by The Rolling Stones. 

The week before starting university in Glasgow I buy a best-of cassette of the VU. It’s just called Velvet Underground. As I bid my parents goodbye from my Baird Hall room that rainy Sunday, I play What Goes On with its long organ fade again and again.

81 or 82 Mark and I go The Nite Club above The Playhouse to see Nico. Radio Forth preview the show by playing what they claim is Nico singing a VU song. It's Sunday Morning and she's only oohing in the background. The gentle lead vocal is crooned, I shout at the radio, by Lou. In the venue before she and her harmonium and can of Kestrel lager begin their show, Sweet Jane II comes on loud over the bar PA. It has the stingiest guitar in it. Oh, yeah! This is Lou, too –  my introduction to the slashy, trashy Vicious.

No matter what might be going on in her private life, it's pretty exciting to have a Velvet Underground chanteuse on stage. On stage, Nico mentions Lou’s coming over to London soon. I can't do justice to how she pronounces "Lou Reed" but she speaks his name as only she can and it's pretty exciting,too, the thought of Lou in the UK, albeit 398 miles away.

Shortly after, at a mezzanine-landing bootleg stall at Strathclyde Union I buy a cassette of Lou out-takes., Walk It, Talk It is one. It’s good but to be honest a Cale outtake that makes its way onto the cassette is better. It’s called Fuck Your Neighbour’s Wife.

Also more entertaining is a Lou interview on a British rock magazine I buy in cassette form called SFX. Along with homegrown tracks such as Love Cascade by Leisure Process, this features an interview with Lou conducted by an incredibly snotty young would-be journalist. Imagine you land a Lou interview and then go and ask your famously truculent quarry: "Is there an element in your work where you say to the audience, 'I've suffered for my art, not it's your turn'?" Reed simply sighed, "Look, I'm not here to play games with you..."  The junior journo didn't deserve the left off.

At the Virgin Megastore they sell a few records and more poppers, badges, burgundy jackets, PVC trousers and hair dye and a whole library of rock&roll reading material. One day, I buy a book on the great man by someone called Diana Clapton. It gives me some VU back story and is good on the mid-70s period. It's simply called Lou Reed. Soon I purchase Berlin on cassette. I listen to it once, get inspired, take a bunch of ProPlus and play piano in a small room on the ground floor of Baird Hall for hour upon hour.

Summer ’83, I see Bowie at Murrayfield in the rain. He plays White Light/White Heat, out as a spin-off single from the just-released Ziggy Stardust film shot ten years before on my tenth birthday. I notice Mick Ronson plays a whopping bum note in the solo which is sort of heartening. I buy the Velvets' third album. It’s just called The Velvet Underground.

I go to a lot of parties where a double album with a white cover and lots of Warhola coke bottles gets pulled out someone's record cabinet and flung on once the party cruises into the wee small hours. Great to hear and pretty sumptuous to look at, sort of an uptown Athena poster take on a VU theme. It’s just called The Velvet Underground.

Sometimes if I stay all through the night, I'll wake up on a sunny Sunday morning to find my host delving into some vinyl that's a little more hardcore, a box set of bootleg stuff. Cycle Annie and Ferryboat Bill. Blasts from antiquity such as The Ostrich, as time worn as the picture I've seen of the early VU on an NY rooftop with their pre-Moe Tucker drummer: yacht-capped, Ginsberg-spec'ed, percussionist, poet and calligrapher Angus MacLise. Tower blocks looming like the Red Road flats behind them but in my head Dakota Building-Gothic, shrouded in unknowable mists of time. 20 years then was forever.

Sometimes mein host might put on Metal Machine Music. The choice of the poseur/connoisseur. Gorgeous cover, Great liner notes. "My week beats your year". 

January 31st, 1884 I hear the tinny Max’s Kansas City album at the end of a long and strange night where I was chatted up by a girl and didn’t even realise it. As a result of my unintended rebuttal I end up with a bloody mouth and thick lip off a guy called Phil a few nights later. Cathedral Street Hassle. But that’s another story. I buy Uptight and everything’s all right. I buy (into) New Sensations. New Sensations is about his GPZ motorbike, My Red Joystick is about...you get the picture? es, we see.... What Becomes A Legend Most – that’s about Nico, right? I’ve seen her play. This guy from Edinburgh, from the Scars...legend has it he dated her.

Christmas '84, I’m a postie (it’s just a temporary thing) in a yellow pacamac and long hair (I get whistled at by workies in Dudley Crescent) listening to Live 1969 on my headphones. The guitars are divine poetry in the pre-dawn light of Leith as the ancient whiff of the Holyrood brewery percolates in my nostrils.

And Sweet Jane has Lou's beloved "heavenly wine and roses section" in situ.

A couple of months later I have a legitimate, crisp-sounding out-takes album in my hand. It’s just called VU. I adore everything on it except for a song called One Of These Days which leaves me a little underwhelmed. I avidly watch The South Bank Show on the Velvets and buy a VHS of it at a record fair.

In late August '85 I get my Reader's Chart printed in the Melody Maker. A top ten list of my all-time favourite tracks and a fresh photo of me from the Photo-Me booth in Waverley Station, alluring enough for the MM to announce "here's a good-looking boy to thrill our lady readers". And guess, what's number one? Sweet Jane by the Velvet Underground. Straight up Loaded version. Wine? No wine. Roses? Nope. Heavenly? You bet.

Years pass and fall off the scale like Warhol superstars and I don't thrill any lady readers that I know of but I do buy The Bells (finally securing All Through The Night for myself), Street Hassle (a mind-blowing meld of New York studio and German tour recordings that starts with Gimme Some Good Times, kicking off with a hilarious take on the Sweet Jane intro) and Rock & Roll Heart. Oh, another thing about Street Hassle. On I Wanna Be Black Lou says "I wanna be the black" then the colored girls say, "Yeah, yeah I wanna be black". How cool is that?

I get Legendary Hearts and Mistrial (which I initially take to be an ode to the mercurial properties of a Mediterranean breeze) and Growing Up In Public from Hillhead Library. Overall too much fretless bass for my taste on those records but I kinda like a song called Rooftop garden where Lou ask me "How's your tea?" I buy his muffled-sounding first solo album on RCA. It's simply called Lou Reed. This Dylan fan and songwriter I've met called Moore McIlhatton tapes me Coney Island Baby and Songs For Drella. He’s one of a bunch of us who get plastered and finally see Lou live at the Playhouse performing Magic & Loss (a touching performance filled for me with "It's really him up there!" moments of recognition and, thrillingly, Sweet Jane and  Rock &Roll as encores), then a year later return to see the whole VU reunion thing at the Playhouse. I think I’m the only one who goes both nights. The night before tickets went on sale from the Playhouse box office, Stevie came through to Edinburgh to stay at my mum's and we joined the queue up Leith Walk to buy tickets early the following day, a sunny Sunday morning. 

Somehow, despite the enormity of the occasion,  I stay sober.

The first night, Moore correctly predicts what the opening song will be but he’s delayed at the bar so misses the start of We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together. Apart from Lou murdering Venus In Furs and famously using a headless guitar,  I think it’s great stuff. The highlight is Cale playing bass and reciting The Gift. I turn to Stevie a few rows back in the and we exchange, "Oh, my God, this is really happening" grins. Second night, some guys in the audience bawl out at the stage "This is Nico's town!"

I move into the smallest bedsit room in the world and play Coney Island Baby a lot. The production is gorgeous, so crisp. Even when he talks about killing guys who with stilettos. It's dark New York on a sunny sidewalk.

20 years later, having finally followed Lou's example (I'd missed out on heroin, motorcycles and red joysticks)and taken up T'ai Chi myself, I’m listening to the song Rock & Roll Heart from Rock & Roll Heart one sunny, crisp Sunday morning and thinking the same thing. Long before he created official T'ai Chi practice music, Lou Reed, with his after hours drawl, his dark nights of the soul, black clothes, muddy masculinity and blank shades - for all the mullets and beheaded guitars - Lou, to me, captured perfection. My own subjective perfection. Sweet Jane on Loaded is still perfect to me. No extra section required. Lou Reed's music has already given me all the heavenly wine and roses I require.