Psychotic Reactions: Lou Reed vs Lester Bangs

Lester Bangs's “feud” with Lou Reed comes to some kind of insane mutually drunken apex in 1975, where Bangs “interviews” Lou Reed – heckles him, really – trying to get a reaction. This was one of Lester Bangs’ interview tactics anyway: he went in with guns blazing, asking combative questions of his heroes, usually under the influence of a devastating drug cocktail. There seemed to be a method to his madness, or at least an intention behind it: He was driven to distraction by what he saw as the self-seriousness of “rock stars”, and he wanted to pierce through the veil. You read this “interview” though and what you get is the alcoholism, first of all: it’s front and center in Lester’s writing, and it’s how this whole situation even came about. He and Lou Reed sit around drinking, and Lester heckles Lou, and Lou calmly responds, and even when Lou’s people keep coming over and saying, “Lou, it’s late”, trying to wrap things up, Lou brushes it off. He wants to hang out with Lester. Even though Lester is basically screaming at him, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Knowing what we do about Lou Reed, it is amazing that he lasted so long, that he basically survived the 1970s. We were talking about this the other night at the Algonquin: some people’s constitutions are clearly different than the rest of us. What would kill your or me did not kill Lou Reed. But Lester Bangs didn’t make it. Now he was a serious alcoholic from high school, mixed with a dangerous addiction to amphetamines. He was told at age 16 he would die if he kept it up. And he raced to the bottom.

Drugs were such a huge part of the 70s scene, and Lou Reed (obviously) was a huge part of that. Lester Bangs wants to talk about that and there are sections of this interview that reads creepily like two old drug buddies comparing notes on what they take. But Lester can’t help himself: any time Lou seems to settle in, he has to throw some combative barb at him. He is bored by polite chit-chat. Additionally, Lester Bangs was annoyed at Bowie’s influence over his New York heroes. This was published in Creem in 1975. It was one of the many things that Lester wrote about Lou Reed during those mid-70s years. He was obsessed. These were the years of Metal Machine Music, an entire album just of electronic feedback. Lester Bangs’ love often came out as heckling. You can see that in his interviews with Captain Beefheart, too. He asks questions in a rude blunt manner, with a kind of “Now let’s cut through all the BS, shall we?” – he is extremely obnoxious. As rude as he was, Lou Reed seemed to enjoy Lester Bangs, in his smileless way, and had made the mistake of informing Lester that he liked his writing. So Bangs, already out of his mind with sleep deprivation, uppers, and booze, went nuts with ego: Lou Reed likes me, man!! – and then had to deflate it by attacking Lou. But drugs notwithstanding, I love when Lou Reed turns it around to criticize Lester. Lester wants Lou Reed to take responsibility for glamorizing drug use, and he wants to know how Lou Reed feels about the fact that bozos are now going around imitating his lifestyle. 

Lou Reed refuses to take responsibility: he’s an artist, he was writing what was true for him, the fact that he had all this influence is just a byproduct. I don’t blame Lou Reed at all for being like, “Hey, man, that is not on me.” But Lester Bangs was interested in those intersections of morality and culture. LB: “Hey, Lou, why dontcha turn off all that jazz shit?” LR: “That’s not jazz shit, and you wouldn’t know the difference anyway.” LB: “David Bowie has ripped off all his stuff that’s decent from you, you and Iggy!” LR: “What does Iggy have to do with it?” LB: “You were the originals!” LR: “The original what?” I went on about Iggy and Bowie, and he surprised me with an unexpected blast at Iggy: “David tried to help the cat. David’s brilliant and Iggy is… stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he’d listened to David or me, if he’d asked questions every once in a while… I’d say, ‘Man, just make a one-five chord change, and I’ll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It’s so simple, but the way you’re doin’ it now you’re just making a fool out of yourself. And it’s just gonna get worse and worse.’ He’s not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and Jim Morrison was never any good anyway….” Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer (“You hit me with a flower”) and Berlin. 

I bulldozed on: “Did you shoot speed tonight before you went out?” He acted genuinely surprised. “Did I shoot speed? No, I didn’t. Speed kills. I’m not a speedfreak.” This started out as essentially the same rant Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whisky in 1969, as he sat there in a dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the “energy in the streets of New York,” and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. But now he got downright clinical. “You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do–hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams…?” The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. “I used to shoot Obetrols, man!” “Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols.” Lou was warming to his subject now, rebind up. “You’d be dead, you’d kill yourself.” Then he’s pressing me again. “What’s an Obetrol?” I got mad again. “It’s in the neighborhood of Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyin’ sack of shit! This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed you and you lied every time!” “What’s Desoxyn?” He had just said this, in the same dead monotone. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out. But I was cool. “It’s a Methedrine derivative.” The kill: “It’s fifteen milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some paste to keep it together.” Like an old green iron file slamming shut. “If you do take speed,” he continued, “you’re a good example of why speedfreaks have bad names. There’s addicts and then there’s speedfreaks… Desoxyn’s fifteen milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with paste, Obetrol is fifteen milligrams of  Dextroamphetamine.” 

“Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?” “No… You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. [I told you he’d stop at nothing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don’t mean heroism.] And even if you weren’t poor you wouldn’t know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your metabolism, you don’t know your sleeping quotient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity…” “The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quoting Ralph J. Gleeson for some reason. I was getting a little dazed. “No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure…” I decided to change my tack again. “Lou, we’re gonna have to do it straight. I’ll take off my sunglasses [ludicrously Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album] if you’ll take off yours.” He did. I did. Lou’s sallow skin almost as whitish yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendentally emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day, but he looked straight at me. Maybe through me. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kept rolling off to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I’d pondered over for months. “Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music and your life?” He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about, and he shook his head. “Like,” I pressed on, “I listen to your records shootin’ smack, shootin’ speed, committing suicide–”

“That’s three percent out of my songs.” “Like with all this decadence and glitter – how much of it would have happened if not for you–” “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” “Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc.” “What’s decadent about that?” “Okay, let’s define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence.” “You are. Because you used to be able to write and now you’re just full of crap. You don’t keep track of music, you’re not on top of what’s happening, you don’t know the players or who’s doin’ what. It’s all jive, you’re getting very egocentric.” I let it pass. Because he was half right. But I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated and stood for so many years. He’d done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn’t have anything to do with. But now, post-Sally Can’t Dance, he's apparently ready to clean up much of his act’s exoskeleton. “I dismissed decadence when I wrote ‘The Murdery Mystery.'” “Bullshit, man, when you did Transformer you were playing to pseudo-decadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence….” Barbara interrupted, “Lou… it’s getting late.” Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He seemed now a petulant kid, up past bedtime. “Oh, it’s fun arguing with Lester.” “But you have to get up in the morning,” she insisted, “and go to Dayton.” “Oh,” replied Lou, hardy guy, “I’ll live through it.” Besides other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict! I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album. -"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature" (1988) by Greil Marcus 

“Lou was starting to become enthusiastic about music,” Allan Hyman said of his high school friend, “and he started taking it a lot more seriously than I did at the time.” Once Hyman missed Reed’s cue to end a song one night while playing with The Jades. “Allan was banging away on his drums and he’s looking up at the ceiling and he’s got his eyes closed. Lou reached over and rapped Allan on the head with his knuckles very hard. Allan looked startled and Lou just gave him a glower and we wrapped up the song. I guess that’s sort of indicative of how Lou dealt with a lot of people in his bands over the years.” While it was typical for Hyman and the other boys in Reed’s crowd to find girls to go steady with, Reed took another approach. “We all had long-term girlfriends. Like, for months on end, or a year, we would be going steady,” Richard Sigal said. “All of a sudden Lou would show up with these girls. They were all weird. I had no idea where he found them.” Allan Hyman had a sense of where Reed found some of his girls. “There was a radio station in Freeport called WGBB, and you could call in and make dedications,” he said. “There were so many people trying to call that the line was always busy. But between busy signals you could actually have a conversation with a girl and get her phone number. Lou met a girl in Merrick that way, and Lou took her to the Grove Theater on Merrick Road for an afternoon matinee. On prom night, Hyman was driving and his date was in the front seat, while Reed was energetically making out with his date, a girl from East Meadow, in the back seat. By contemporary standards, such adventures seem relatively innocent. “We didn’t get a lot of sex in the fifties,” Hyman explained. “It was a different time. Most of the people I knew were fairly conservative in that regard.” Sigal noted that some boys in their school were “effeminate”; they appeared gay—or “faggots,” in the nomenclature of that time. Reed, however, was not one of them. “He was always interested in girls—always,” Hyman said. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Jeff Tweedy: Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed are the only lyricists I've heard that come close to Bob Dylan's level. Reed and Dylan are going to rock out. Cohen, no so much.

Anthony DeCurtis: Lou Reed started many genres and he inspired as many artists as Bob Dylan, usually better artists than Dylan inspired. Without Lou Reed (and The Velvet Underground) it’s likely we wouldn’t have punk music, post-punk, college rock, indie rock, noise rock, grunge, new wave, no wave, etc. Dylan reimagined and molded folk-rock genres into his vision and his is a really beautiful vision. But Lou Reed created new genres out of whole cloth. Also, Dylan’s an invented person, a fact he doesn't like to reckon, unlike Lou Reed who has projected a character in order to protect his real self. 

There is no real Bob Dylan and almost nothing he says can be taken as the truth with regards to himself or his life. He’s an entirely manufactured character. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just a plain observation. Of course, it doesn’t diminish the greatness of Dylan's music, but we shouldn’t assume that his songs have much basis in his real life (whatever that is). Indeed, Dylan once got an award from the ASCAP in 1986. There was a celebratory dinner, which Dylan showed up to with Elizabeth Taylor. Leonard Cohen was there and he actually did a little press conference with Jennifer Warnes. Warnes said that at one point Dylan took Elizabeth Taylor by the hand and marched her over to meet Cohen and said, "Liz, I want to introduce you to a real poet." Source: medium.com

Happy Saint Valentine's Day!

 

Bad Valentine (featuring Classic and Modern screen couples) video. Song "Bad Valentine" by Transvision Vamp.

Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart

“Never apologize, never explain - didn't we always say that? Well, I haven't and I don't.” ―Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) RIP

 

"Now it's Andy Warhol's time. Mystic 60's on a dime. Though she kinda likes Lou Reed, she doesn't really have the need. And now she doesn't know what it is she wants and where she wants to go. And will Delon be still a cunt. Yesterday is gone. There's just today. No tomorrow." ―Song for Nico by Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull told an interviewer her former boyfriend accidentally killed iconic rock singer Jim Morrison. Faithfull told Mojo magazine that her then-boyfriend Jean de Breteuil, known as the heroin dealer to the stars, had accidentally killed Morrison by giving him hard drugs that were too strong. "I could intuitively feel trouble," Faithfull told the magazine. "I thought, I'll take a few Tuinals (barbiturates) and I won't go there. But Jean went to see Jim Morrison and killed him. I mean I'm sure it was an accident. The smack (heroin) was too strong? And he died... everybody connected to the death of this poor guy is dead now. Except me." De Breteuil himself was found dead in Morocco some weeks after Morrison's death. Marianne Faithfull: “He was scared for his life. Jim Morrison had OD’d, and Jean had provided him the heroin. Jean saw himself as dealer to the stars. Now he was just a small time heroin dealer in big legal trouble.” Source: www.mojo4music.com

Lou Reed about Jim Morrison's death to Melody Maker (1975): ''I have no respect for him. I didn't even feel sorry for him when he died. There was a group of us in New York, and the phone rang and somebody told us that Jim Morrison had just died in a bathtub in Paris. And the immediate response was ''How fabulous.'' 'In a bathtub in Paris. Fantastic.' That lack of compassion doesn't disturb me. He asked for it. I had no compassion for that silly Los Angeles person. He brought it on himself. He was SO dumb.''

Interestingly, despite David Bowie achieving mainstream stardom sooner than Lou Reed, it was Bowie who was the mega-fan of the Velvet Underground leader and everything Reed represented. “I’d never heard anything quite like it. It was a revelation to me,” Bowie said in a 1997 interview for the documentary Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, recalling the first time he heard The Velvet Underground in 1965. “It influenced what I was to do for the next few years.” Reed had upended all previous tropes. This was a huge inspiration for Bowie, who continued his appraisal by adding, ”One innovation was the use of background noise to create a kind of an ambience that had been hitherto unknown in rock. And the other thing was the nature of his lyric writing. Bob Dylan had certainly brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting, but then Lou had taken it even further into the avant-garde.” It’s why Bowie always referred to Lou Reed as the “King of New York”: “Lou wrote about the New York that I wanted to know about,” Bowie explained in the 1997 interview. “I think probably everybody has their own New York. For me, New York was always James Dean and the Beatniks wandering in the dark streets.” Bowie died of liver cancer in his New York City apartment on 10 January 2016. Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk

An existential dare—cool as a matter of life and death. What happens when mythmaking becomes part of your daily life? The difficulty for any Lou Reed biographer is that sometimes Reed embraced his own persona and took it as far as it would go, and sometimes he talked as though he were merely its pained victim. “I mimic me probably better than anybody,” he told Lenny Kaye in 1975, adding, “I created Lou Reed. I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well.” How to get a critical bead on someone who could go from the delicately tormented “Berlin” in 1973, to the hilarious live set “Take No Prisoners” five years later? Were Reed’s addictions fuelling the spiel, or was he madly doping himself to live up to the myth? 

Most of the iconic images of Reed frame a certain unvarying look: his blank, granite face; black leather; black shades. Is this someone who can’t feel, or who is frightened of feeling too much? A badass stare, or narcotized indifference? He was one of those people who carry the air of a child hurt so bad he never quite recovered. Reed’s complicated relationship with his father seems to have been key for his despair. Alas, his childhood goes by in a blur—before we know it, he’s dating girls, forming bands, and scoring drugs. Right on the cusp of his eighteenth birthday, he suffers a major mental breakdown, which his parents are persuaded to treat with electroconvulsive therapy. Reed's sister Merrill wrote in 2015: “I know our family was torn apart the day the doctors began those wretched treatments.”

Lou Reed’s first musical love was doo-wop; as a teenager, he recorded with a nascent group called the Shades, playing guitar and singing backup. 1950s' doo-wop songs were a kind of brief, spectral reveries on 78rpm. A key lesson for Reed, the aspirant songwriter at Pickwick Records, was that the softest song in the world might easily suggest the harshest truths. Lou Reed met Laurie Anderson at an experimental-music festival in New York in 1992. They were together for twenty-one years, the longest relationship of his life, so his late redemption arc with Anderson was heartening. Two days before his death, in 2013, Reed was floating in the “pale blue water of the heated swimming pool at his East Hampton home.” Terminally weak, Reed’s thoughts drifted to his childhood on Long Island’s South Shore. He told Laurie Anderson about a moment when the family was at the beach and Reed affectionately made to hold his father’s hand; he was repaid, he said, with a smack in the face. This was one of the images in Reed’s mind, as he lay dying, of liver disease, at the age of seventy-one. Reed’s father had died of cancer in 2005 at the age of ninety-one. Reed would occasionally visit him when he was in a hospice in the Bronx, but they never truly reconciled. At the service after he died, Merrill delivered a eulogy. Reed did not speak, and he did not stay long. His mother, too, had entered a hospice on Long Island, and Reed would visit her more frequently but, as with his father, only if his sister was there.

Anthony De Curtis: I met Reed in 1996, for a press interview on the occasion of his album “Set the Twilight Reeling.” And what I remember most are his eyes. I got the sense that he was trying to rustle up one of his trademark badass glares but that his heart wasn’t in it. How does it feel, I wondered, to have to navigate not only media obligations but ordinary social encounters as if you are alone in a jungle of adversaries? Now, years later, with all I know about his hurt childhood and addictions, it occurs to me that, under the bravado, Lou actually looked quite scared. His interviews have always been a minefield of irony and false trails. Even his lyrics, as plain-speaking and personal as anything in rock, were more true to the work than to the author. It's a testimony to his complexity that many fans blend the real Reed with his public persona. Even his first wife Bettye Kronstad seemed obfuscated by that conundrum, as her memoir A Perfect Day reflects. “Lou would tell me how much he loved Bettye and get mawkishly sentimental,” Reed’s friend Ed McCormack said. “He’d go on about how he loved Bettye because she wasn’t hip. He’d say, ‘Most of the people I know are like the scum of the earth in a way, and I sometimes think that’s what I’m like. But I believe in fairy-tale princesses.” 

Like many people, McCormack saw a performative element to Reed’s alleged bisexuality. “There was a deeply conventional part of him that was very real. I think his parents didn’t understand him. My feeling was that he had learned from Warhol the art of asexuality. He just didn’t seem that interested in sex. He seemed more interested in drugs than anything else. I think he was one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known. He was not a happy man.” “Writing songs is like making a play,” Reed said after Transformer's release in 1972, “and you give yourself the lead part. And you write yourself the best lines that you could. You’re your own director and you get to play all different kinds of characters. It’s fun. I write through the eyes of somebody else. I don’t have a personality of my own. I just pick up other people’s personalities.” Bettye Kronstad took a pragmatic view of all the homoerotic imagery suffusing the album. “It’s just showbiz,” she said. “It was marketing. I thought it was clever. We were just selling the album. I was always coming from the point of view of, how do we get his career going?” Angie Bowie arranged for Reed and Kronstad to live in a nice duplex in Wimbledon, a suburb just outside London. 

The most scathing negative review of Berlin appeared in Rolling Stone, written by Stephen Davis: “Lou Reed’s Berlin is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence, and suicide. There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them.” He concluded that Berlin was Reed’s “last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou.” A review like that would sour anyone on critics. “It’s one of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen of anything,” Reed said. “I got one paragraph saying I should be physically punished for putting out the album.” Bettye wanted out: "I didn’t like the way Lewis was treating me. Sometimes he was a total sweetheart. He could be a generous lover, but those nasty mood swings were hell. He accused me of sleeping with my theater teacher. So I said to myself I did try. But it’s not working. That’s what I said to him: We tried. It’s not working. I’m out.” On September 17, 1973, Reed headlined the Olympia theater in Paris, and Kronstad made her escape. Just before she and Reed were set to leave their hotel for the theater, she took off after leaving a message for Dennis Katz that she needed a plane ticket back to New York. Her departure, predictably, had a damaging impact on Reed. 

He would collapse onstage from a drug overdose five days later in Brussels. Bettye recalls that some months after their divorce, “Dr. Robert Freymann phoned me to tell me: ‘Look, I’m calling on Lou’s behalf. Lou says he needs you. He wants you back.’ I don’t know exactly how I answered him, but to myself I thought, ‘No. I can’t get back.’” Kronstad never made an effort to reestablish contact with Reed after their divorce, nor did she follow his subsequent career with much beyond a cursory interest. Of the time she spent on the road with Reed, she said, “Bob Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo dodged a bullet.” Shortly after Kronstad remarried, her testimony was subpoenaed in a lawsuit that Reed had filed against his former manager. 

“Put all the songs together and it’s certainly an autobiography,” Reed declared to NME in 1990, “but not necessarily mine.” On August 23, 1970, towards the end of a two-month season at Max’s Kansas City, Reed walked off stage and quit The Velvet Underground. It came out of the blue. Loaded was going to be Reed’s most accessible outing yet, and Atlantic were already talking up Sweet Jane as a potential radio hit. “I didn’t belong there,” Reed insisted. “I didn’t want to be in a mass pop national hit group.” He was demoralised. Sterling Morrison had lost interest and thought that Reed had simply “gone insane.” There were rumours that his parents turned up at Max’s one night and drove him home. At the time of the release of Coney Island Baby, Reed had told Lenny Kaye that he was done with the stereotypical “Lou Reed” image: “No more bullshit, dyed hair, faggot junkie trip,” he said. 

Street Hassle contains a repudiation of the lifestyle he had been sharing with Rachel. The three-part title track, one of the masterpieces of Reed’s solo career, stands as something of a requiem for their tawdry, druggy street lives. As Rachel disappeared and Sylvia Morales became a romantic force in his life, Reed identified as heterosexual, and in the cover of Street Hassle, he looks more masculine in contrast with his hedonistic image of Coney Island Baby. Reed once described the nearly eleven-minute “Street Hassle” as his answer to the question, “What would happen if Raymond Chandler wrote a rock-and-roll song?” Take No Prisoners was released in November of 1978. Repeatedly, Reed rails against critics, insulting John Rockwell and Robert Christgau. “Fuck you! I don’t need you to tell me I’m good,” Reed spits. Christgau’s response in his Village Voice column was: “I thank Lou for pronouncing my name right. C+.” 

DeCurtis: I asked him if the Velvets legacy ever became a burden. “Not really,” Reed said. “What could be a cooler thing to be a member of? It’s like playing for the New York Jets when Namath was there. And every lyric that was ever sung by the Velvet Underground was written by me.” In 1989, Reed released his masterpiece “New York,” his grittiest effort after “Berlin” and his best work since 1978’s “Street Hassle.” It was not a celebration of his town. He dealt with the corruption of patriotism, the selfishness of the elites, poverty, drug addiction, and child abuse. While some of Reed’s work seemed intensely personal, he told me that most songs he wrote were “not autobiographical.” “It’s more of an amalgam of people,” he said, adding that even songs he sang from a first-person point of view should be regarded as if they’d been written from the third person. “They’re very personal, done with a great deal of distance,” he said. “I try to keep myself invisible.”

Though Reed was very proud of “Magic and Loss,” he was frustrated by its mixed reception. “I kept getting told, 'This is too depressing,'” Reed said. “I think that “Magic and Loss” was about love and friendship. It is sad, but very emotional, also. These are not bad things. And I don’t see why a contemporary work of music can’t contain all these things. But when they do contain these things, you’re thought of as being too cerebral, or too down. I remember reading this book by Saul Bellow where he was quoting Walt Whitman and he wrote, ‘Until Americans and American poetry can deal with death, this is a country that has not grown up.’ There might be something to be said about that.” Over the years, Reed and I also talked about musical good times. 

Reed was not averse to melodic lightness, as can be heard in songs like “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” and "I'm Sticking with You" with the Velvets, and “I Love You, Suzanne,” "Hooky-Wooky" or “Egg Cream” as a solo artist. Sometimes, those upbeat songs took his listeners by surprise. Predictably, the overall sunniness of “I Love You, Suzanne” and New Sensations as a whole alienated some longtime Reed fans who continued to measure his every move by the standards of the Velvet Underground. Reed said they shouldn’t. “There seem to be people who only like it when I write—in quotes—‘depressive’ things,” Reed said. “It’s not that I resent it, but I can’t pay any attention to that. I mean, there’s got to be more to life and more to me than that. And I’m not about to sit down and write another song about drugs. Somebody else will have to do that for this generation. I already did it." Reed noted that one critic’s take on his persona in the ‘70s had been “very dark and foreboding. 'A poet that’s going to burn out quietly at 5:30 in the morning with no one there to care.' A very negative notion that bears no relationship to myself.” Reed admitted he was bipolar and he had certainly wrestled with his demons—in song and in person. Source: www.newyorker.com

Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Lou Reed

The best way to understand Bob Dylan is through his music, but even then, he still magnificently blurs the line between authenticity and mystery. Since arriving in Greenwich Village and developing a new enigmatic image while romancing Suze Rotolo, the singer-songwriter has kept the public guessing. However, one topic that Dylan speaks with candour about is his love of music and the artists that inspire him the most. Most notably, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams moulded him from a musical perspective, teaching him the key structures of songwriting. Nevertheless, they were from a different generation to Dylan. Hank Williams passed away at just 29 in 1953. Fortunately, Dylan met Guthrie in 1961, and he also inspired the first song he ever wrote, ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie.’ Another early hero of Dylan’s was Buddy Holly, despite their musical differences. When Bob Dylan was Robert Zimmerman, he was another teenager, awe-struck by the magnificence of Buddy Holly and The Crickets. 

Despite having a tragically short career due to his sad passing at 22, Holly’s impact changed the music industry forever. Alongside fellow forebearers such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, Holly helped bring rock ‘n’ roll into the mainstream, allowing it to take over in the 1960s. While Dylan had folk leanings rather than rock ‘n’ roll, he admired Buddy Holly greatly. If Dylan could have rocked out like Holly, he would have done. Instead, he knew that his musical instincts lay elsewhere, and if he tried to replicate his brilliance, it would have been an inauthentic impression of his idol. They may have had different backgrounds, but few made an impression on Dylan as Holly did upon witnessing him perform in concert. During his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dylan paid tribute to his first idol, who walked so he could run, explaining, “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18, and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues.” 

As Buddy Holly was only a few years older than Dylan, the singer-songwriter felt a strong connection to the star. The concert occurred on January 31st, 1959, when an 18-year-old Dylan saw him perform in Duluth, Minnesota. Heartbreakingly, it would be one of the final times Buddy Holly would ever play rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s an evening which has lived long in Dylan’s memory. Dylan continued: “Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before.” After winning the Grammy for ‘Album of the Year’ with Time Out Of Mind in 1998, Dylan recalled the life-changing concert in his acceptance speech and explained how it inspired his award-winning album: “When I was 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don’t know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.” Every music lover has a specific gig from their teenage years that stands out for sentimental reasons, and for Dylan, it was Buddy Holly in Duluth. From that moment on, he channelled Buddy Holly’s spirit into his craft by carving out his own archetype, just like his hero did.

The late Lou Reed is remembered for many things. After all, he pioneered fusing the avant-garde with popular music, was one of the first transgressives in songwriting, and was a key figure in the avant-garde rock genre. While the New Yorker was synonymous with a certain degree of discomfort musically and theme-wise, this mirrored his nature as a human being and that he was, by most accounts, a misanthrope. Outside of his music, Reed did his bit to prop up this character. This included making it clear that he hated other prominent artists, such as The Doors, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa, and his constant dismissal of journalists. Andy Warhol was angry when Reed fired him as the band’s manager. And at some point later they must have fallen out even further, as a cassette recently turned up of demos Reed had written about Warhol in 1975. In one song he criticised Warhol for his lukewarm attitude toward the death of Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Andrea Feldman and Eric Emerson. In another song demo, Reed expressed the wish that Warhol had actually died in 1968. Of course Reed tried to put these ill-harboured and mixed feelings right when he wrote Songs for Drella with John Cale in 1990. 

Laurie Anderson on Lou Reed: "Sometimes we argued about things. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together. When you marry your best friend of many years, it's really special. But the thing that surprised me about getting married to Lou was the way it altered time. And also the way it added a tenderness that was somehow completely new. To paraphrase the great Willie Nelson: “So many people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that’s what makes the jukebox spin.” Lou’s jukebox spun for love and many other things, too: beauty, pain, courage, history, and mystery. Lou was a prince, and a fighter." Anthony DeCurtis: "With Lou Reed, there was this leather‑clad invulnerability that I think he tried to convey, but there was a lot of insecurity underneath that. He was a very private guy; he would never have wanted me to write a book. He had a very complicated relationship with his often contradictory feelings." Bettye Kronstad: “Lou had become abusive with everybody on our last US tour. He almost gave me a black eye after hitting my sunglasses,” Kronstad wrote. “Then I gave him two black eyes, and that stopped him from being violent. Everybody knew he was abusive with his drinking, his drugs, his emotions. He was incredibly self-destructive then.” The problem Reed had finishing Berlin, Bettye sarcastically explained, “might have had something to do with all the fucking drugs and drinking he was doing. With Lou, people that he loved became part of him, so I got to be part of that incredible self-destructiveness.”

Things had gotten so bad that Kronstad flew to Santo Domingo to get a 24-hour divorce from Reed. The legal standing of such a divorce was complicated, and Kronstad demanded alimony for 5 years plus a settlement for her work as assistant at the Morgan studios in London. Kronstad remained in their apartment and Reed moved out. “I don’t know where,” she said. Then, one night, Reed called her from a local restaurant that had been one of their favourites, the Duck Joint, on First Avenue between 73rd and 74th Streets. “He asked ‘Can you meet me here?’” Kronstad wrote. “I was in a pretty good mood so I went. He said, ‘I’ve stopped. I’ve quit it. I won’t do that stuff. I’ll play it straight. We can do this. I need you. Can I just come over and talk about it?’” Kronstad let herself believe in him again. “I had invested a great deal of my life in him, so I guess there was a part of me that wanted to be convinced.” Talking about the character of Caroline, Bettye noted, “I think Nico is in there. Lou had loved her and she was German. Someone once said that Caroline was a combination of all the women in Lou’s life, and I think to a certain extent that’s true.” But even when Reed finally did complete writing the album’s 10 songs, things didn’t get easier. “I remember the morning I woke up and found him in the living room next to a consumed bottle of Johnnie Walker Red,” she wrote. “It was 8.30 in the morning and I became very upset. His drinking didn’t usually begin until at least the afternoon.” 

In Perfect Day, Bettye looks back on their initially idyllic life together on the Upper East Side; Lou’s struggle to launch a solo career after leaving perhaps the most influential rock band of all time; his work and friendships with fellow stars David Bowie and Iggy Pop; and his descent into alcohol and drug abuse following the success of Transformer, which sent him spinning out from gentle soul to rock’n’roll animal and brought a swift and calamitous end to their relationship. The result is a poignant meditation on love, loss, writing, and music. Bettye Kronstad was a teacher, freelance editor, and theater professional. She attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, studying with Sanford Meisner and Bill Esper of William Esper Studios in New York City. She attended Iona College for her master’s degree in English education. For twenty years she taught English and theater in inner-city public high schools in the Bronx and Harlem, New York; Minneapolis, Minnesota; New Mexico; and Texas. Widowed, she moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with her two daughters, the loves of her life. Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk

Happy New Year 2025!

Mae West.

Ann Miller.

Piper Laurie.

Jane Greer.

Rhonda Fleming.

Loretta Young.

Betty Grable.

Dorothy Lamour.

Joan Crawford.

Rita Hayworth.

Anita Louise.

A Complete Unknown film: A story of Bob Dylan (The Grinch) for Christmas Day

Blonde on Blonde is food for speculation. As usual, Dylan’s explanation doesn’t get you any wiser: “I have no idea where that came from, but I’m sure it was with the best of intentions … No idea who came up with it. I certainly didn’t.” This was also the case with Brecht On Brecht, a play that Dylan attended in the autumn of 1961, on the advice of Suze Rotolo. The piece about Bertold Brecht made a great impression on him. Another possibility is a reference to Warhol's actress Edie Sedgwick – reportedly an inspiration for many of the songs on the record – who had her hair bleached. After her return from Italy, Dylan and Suze Rotolo did reunite, but Dylan seems to be stuck in the role of the abandoned, wounded lover. Moreover, Joan Baez was now in the picture. It could be argued that the song, at least in its original design, was written with his first great love Suze Rotolo in mind. The subtitle in that sketching stage is “Fourth Street Affair” and that is not very cryptic – it refers to the apartment in which he and Suze lived until August ’63, 161 West 4th Street. The reverie in the autobiography Chronicles, that Suze might have been his spiritual soul mate (“I still believe she was my twin”) and he records his memory of the end of the relationship with Rotolo: “Eventually fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop”. 

Many testimonies of intimates from the mid-sixties make a point of Dylan’s nasty side, his habit of verbally insulting less gifted guests to the bone, surrounded by a few loyal disciples such as Phil Ochs and especially Bob Neuwirth. Suze Rotolo: "When he was on his “telling it like it is” truth mission, he could be cruel. Though I was never on the receiving end of one of his tirades, I did witness a few. The power he was given and the changes it entailed made him lash out unreasonably, but I believe he was trying to find a balance within himself when everything was off-kilter." Although, according to Marianne Faithfull, Dylan's friend Bobby Neuwirth was the worst: “Dylan had a reputation for demolishing people, but when people told these stories it was really Neuwirth they meant. Neuwirth and Dylan did such a swift verbal pas de deux that people tended to confuse them. But the most biting commentary and crushing put-downs came from Neuwirth. I never saw Dylan’s malicious side, nor the lethal wit that has often been ascribed to him. I never thought of him as amusingly cruel the way I thought of John Lennon. Dylan was simply the mercurial, bemused center of the storm, vulnerable and almost waiflike.”

“Visions Of Johanna”: The discussion focuses on the questions about who Louise is, and who Johanna could be. Joan Baez and Sara Lownds? Suze Rotolo and Edie Sedgwick? In any case, Dylan sketches a contrast between a sensuous, present Louise and an unattainable, idealized Johanna, and lards the sketch with dream images, beautiful rhyme play and impressionistic atmospheres. Who are these ladies? Louise: Joan Baez, friend and former lover, a great folk singer. Suze Rotolo, an idealistic fighter for human rights and women liberation. The electricity howls in her face. Mona Lisa: Maybe Edie Sedgwick. She was the muse of the famous artist and painter Andy Warhol. Her lifestyle was shocking. Maybe she is smiling because she has got a fix of heroin. Sedgwick was subject of speculation as having caused the motorcyle accident and Dylan hiding her temporarily at his house while he recovered to avoid further gossip. Dylan and Sedgwick had a strong argument and she left him for Bob Neuwirth, whom she left later to be admitted to a physchiatric hospital in Santa Barbara.

In A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, Suze Rotolo talks about her grandparents who had immigrated from Sicily. Her parents were blue collar but also imbued with culture, affiliated to the American Communist Party. Rotolo recalls with affection his romance with Bob Dylan, then a young up and coming artist recently arrived to New York and she introduces to the bohemian Greenwich Village. He proposes marriage to her, but Rotolo's family didn't like his cynical persona and she leaves him after aborting a child of his. Rotolo thinks she contributed to the awakening of Dylan about the civil social causes in the Kennedy era but she doesn't want to exaggerate her role in the inspiration he took for his songs. Rotolo surmises that Dylan juggled three romantic relationships at once with her, Sara Lownds and Edie Sedgwick, and that Sedgwick rebutting Dylan inspired the folk-rock milestone Like a Rolling Stone.

This idea of self-mythologizing, but as the theme is underexplored, it can’t help but come across as indicative of A Complete Unknown’s unwillingness to fully realize Dylan, or make him enough of a rounded character is his own biography. This is further apparent in Chalamet’s performance, which isn’t “bad” only to say that eventually it goes from being distracting and strange to just something that you’re suddenly used to. Chalamet sounds a bit like Dylan if Dylan spoke mostly through clenched teeth, keeping his lips very close together, recreating Dylan’s distinct, nasally cadence. But his interpretation manages to draw out the adenoidal qualities of Dylan’s voice beyond reality, and the effort to match Chalamet’s vocal recreation to the original owner wades into caricature. At the end of the day, Chalamet is a competent actor. But he isn’t Dylan. He never once truly feels like him, no matter how well his hair is coiffed or the cigarette hangs off his lips. 

This isn’t realloy a chameleonic triumph where the actor disappears into their subject. Mangold’s characterization is admirably non-obsequious, portraying Bob Dylan as an aloof genius prone to selfishness and bitterness, navigating tumultuous relationships with his mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and his romantic partners: artist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and folk contemporary Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Strangely, Edie Sedgwick and maligned Phil Ochs are conspicuously absent from his story. In the end, A Complete Unknown neither meaningfully conveys Dylan’s mythology nor exposes him as a complete human being. Source: https://awardswatch.com

Like A Rolling Stone - Edie Sedgwick

Jeff Tweedy: I had a girlfriend in high school who dragged me to big arena rock shows. I went to see Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar, and the Who’s first “farewell” tour at the Ralston Purina Checkerdome in St. Louis. It all sounded so bad to me. I wasn’t just bored, I hated those shows. Nothing about the experience was exciting to me. Something always seemed overly macho about how bands postured themselves on those enormous stages. I’m not sure why the macho-ness bothered me. I loved Black Flag, and there was nothing more macho than Henry Rollins at that time. Actually, that was my least favorite part of Black Flag, but it was a different type of macho. For some reason I’ve always been stupid or arrogant enough to walk away from negotiations when they start to feel gross or insulting. It looks like it’d take a lot of confidence, but I don’t feel like an exceedingly confident person. I think I’m just stubborn. And I hate feeling greedy. “No record deal? Okay, it’s back to small budget for me.” And I’m stubborn because there’s only so much I’m willing to compromise artistically. I met Bob Dylan when Wilco played a College Media Journal showcase in New York City in 2006. “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man? Good to see you!” Bob had spoken to me! And I was left in his wake trying to play it cool, but I could feel all of the other folks around us looking at me. It was impossible to play it cool. “Dylan talked to me. Did you guys see that?!”

The alternative rock scene has been in a constant loop of stagnancy. Nothing explosively innovative or inventive has really burst onto the scene in years, in my opinion. I may just be too harsh a critic, but even the bands I admire like the National Post, Beach House, Animal Collective, Paramore, Tame Impala, or the '90s acts still going like Mercury Rev, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Kim Deal and such seem a bit pessimistic about the future. Rock isn't where it's at in terms of mainstream appeal any longer – I think Arcade Fire's The Suburbs was the last time a rock-oriented record did massive success. I do not count ear bleeder monotony like Imagine Dragons. The 2020s is the decade of the singer-songwriter pop star (usually with half a dozen or more co-writers), Reggaeton beats, EDM, and generic hip hop. Underground rock artists are the ones with substance, but they haven't a prayer of a chance of hitting it big. Even quality groups like the Last Dinner Party or the Warning just don't have the appeal of, say, nepo babies who have become pop stars. One thing I appreciate about Rick Beato's chart review videos is how he demonstrates many things are regurgitated endlessly by producers and force-fed to the public. Most of mainstream acts play it safe on new records with little divergence or variety – they stay within a comfort zone. Whatever has certain substance or innovation is more or less pushed to the fringes on the outskirts of the Internet, booked in some clubs or as opening acts, and you just have to become familiar with them via name recognition. It's lamentable but I don't anticipate another big indie era or alternative rock era. That ship has sadly sailed. Source: pitchfork.com

Was Bob Dylan The Mystery Man in Like a Rolling Stone? Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez, Marianne Faithfull and Bob Neuwirth have been suggested as possible targets of Dylan's famous song. Dylan's biographer Howard Sounes warned against reducing the song to the biography of one person, and suggested "it is more likely that the song was aimed generally at those Dylan perceived as being clueless". Sounes adds, "There is some irony in the fact that one of the most famous songs of the folk-rock era—an era associated primarily with ideals of peace and harmony—is one of scorn." Mike Marqusee has also written at length on the conflicts in Dylan's life during this time, with its deepening alienation from his old folk-revival audience and clear-cut leftist causes. He suggests that Like A Rolling Stone is probably self-referential: "The song only attains full poignancy when one realises it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home.'" Dylan himself has noted that, after his motorcycle accident in 1966, he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me." Edie Sedgwick inspired Bob Dylan ​​to produce Blonde on Blonde, one of the best records he ever produced. “Just Like a Woman” — “with your fog, your amphetamines and your pearls” — was clearly written directly to her; “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” — “You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine” ​— ​was written directly about her too. Source: popmatters.com

Edie Sedgwick was the “heroine of Blonde on Blonde,” as Patti Smith stated. From my memory, I thought that we learned that they did have a love affair and that’s why she was the “heroine” of that album, and also indirectly referenced in Like a Rolling Stone. However, in 1985 Dylan pretty much affirmed he never had a relationship with her but knew Bob Neuwirth did. Andy Warhol commented: “I liked Dylan, the way he created a new style… I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I’d ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I’d invariably get hearsay answers like ‘I hear he feels you destroyed Edie [Sedgwick],’ or ‘Listen to Like a Rolling Stone — I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse, man.’ I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that, but I got the tenor of what people were saying — that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.” Warhol took to satirizing Dylan in films like “More Milk Yvette” (which included a harmonica-playing Dylan lookalike); a spoof called the “Bob Dylan Story”; and the repeated playing of a Dylan song at the wrong speed in “Imitation of Christ”. In reality, Dylan hadn’t damaged the Elvis painting, but he had gotten rid of it. All accounts — including from Dylan himself — have him trading the Elvis to his manager Albert Grossman for a sofa, a decision he’d come to regret. Grossman’s widow, Sally, later sold the painting at auction for a reported $750,000.

There are those who maintain (notably Michael Gray) that Edie Sedgwick probably had no relationship with Dylan at all. She had an affair with Dylan's sideman Bob Neuwirth, however. One theory is that "She's Your Lover Now" is directed to Neuwirth and that Sedgwick is the "she," with Jack Elliot as "your friend in the cowboy hat." Sedgwick was quite a significant part of Dylan's life in the mid-60s so it wouldn’t make sense to not include her in A Complete Unknown but I don’t imagine Dylan gave his approval. I can imagine Like A Rolling Stone being shown in the movie as being his hit song rather than what the song is actually about. In Like A Rolling Stone, besides the Edie Sedgwick subtext, I've always felt like he's singing to himself. As if to say, "now that you got everything you ever wanted, how does it feel?" I think this song illustrates what Dylan mentions in Blood on the Tracks, that "you find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom." 

Dylan may have barely known her but multiple sources from the Warhol/Factory camp thought they were dating. As far as Nico she was gifted I’ll keep it with mine and she had an intimate relationship with Dylan, so if they weren't not intimate, that would explain why Dylan ended up so burned out by Edie's volatility. “You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns. When they all come down and did tricks for you.” This could refer to the many suitors that Sedgwick had. Dylan refers to them as “jugglers and clowns”, as in, men trying to entertain her, trying to catch her attention. Dylan thought of them quite literally as desperate clowns. He comments that she had little care for their feelings, and probably refers to himself as one of these “clowns”, as he was well known to have pursued her vigorously. Dylan's first wife Sara Lownds accused him of 'accidental' violence domestic and received near 40 million dollars. Since 2000 Dylan is rumored to have a common law marriage with Susan Pullen. —The Double Life of Bob Dylan (2024) by Clinton Heylin