30th Anniversary of "New York" by Lou Reed

A demo by Lou Reed of his famous song I’m Waiting For The Man has been discovered. The track, about buying drugs from a dealer on a New York street corner, was released with The Velvet Underground in 1967. Reed’s demo was recorded two years earlier, with an unknown male voice harmonising, and before the singer had found his distinctive, gravelly tone. Archivists had “goosebumps” listening to the demo, which was unearthed, untouched for decades, on a reel-to-reel tape in what was once Reed’s study. His widow and an archivist were sorting the musician’s belongings to donate his archive to the New York Public Library For The Performing Arts when they found the sealed object. Judith Kampfner, who has produced a BBC Radio 4 show about Reed’s life and music, featuring a one-minute, eight-second “fragment” of the demo, airing for the first time on what would have been Reed’s birthday, said: “One of the last things they found on a shelf, behind his desk, behind a row of CDs was a tape.” She told the Press Association: “They realised that this was something that Lou had sent to his parents’ house in Long Island in 1965.” At the time Lou was working at Pickwick Music, having to write songs very fast for this budget record company, said archivist Don Fleming. “Obviously I’m Waiting For The Man is about going to meet your heroin dealer. Reed was trying to be gritty, writing a song about heroin, but his tone comes across as quite innocent. “He knew what he wanted to say in the lyrics but he didn’t know how to say it musically. He hasn’t found his tone yet.” Source: www.irishexaminer.com

Musically, New York’s among Lou Reed's best. I could talk forever about just the guitar sound on New York, how basic it is, and how infinite. Admittedly, hearing a politicized, socially conscious Lou Reed is weird. Up to now, his solo career was about the choice between his faith in rock & roll primitivism and—contradictory, he thought—high-art aspirations. At least in the liner notes, that schizophrenia crops up again here: Lou goes out his way to say you can’t best the basic rock & roll combo, but also directs that New York should be experienced in one sitting, “as though it were a book or a movie.” In the grooves, on the other hand, snaggly, unadorned riff-rock wins out, to its and Lou’s permanent glory. But while I delight in New York’s great noise, I find the rationale behind it as specious as I did the high art vs. riffraff dilemma. I think Reed was willing to accept basic rock as his best medium on the grounds that today it can carry any message desired. There are melodramatic lapses like the climaxes of “Strawman” and on “Dirty Blvd.,” Reed brings in Dion on the coda, but instead of being brained by the intended irony—here’s what the Belmonts’ street corner looks like 30 years later—you’re just blown away by the beauty of Dion’s vocal. Above all, the sound’s autonomy keeps reminding you that Lou’s coming to his subjects from the outside. The archetypal Lou Reed song makes you feel compassion for somebody you never understood and never expected to feel compassion for. On his Vietnam-vet tearjerker “Xmas in February,” his subject is brutalization: these aren’t the noble poor but the degraded poor, and even at his remove Lou understands that the worst of what society does to you is what it makes you do to yourself. Reed caps “Hold On” ’s catalogue of flashpoints with “That’s New York’s future, not mine.” New York is a musical novella combining humor and squalor, humanity and the devil. Source: www.villagevoice.com