WEIRDLAND: Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan (rock biopics), Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy

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Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan (rock biopics), Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy

20th Century Studios this morning shared a first look at Jeremy Allen White suited up as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere, the studio’s forthcoming biopic based around the making of the musician’s 1982 album Nebraska. The film is currently in production. In the first look pic, the lead actor can be seen donning a typically Springsteen-esque fit: a plaid shirt and biker jacket. Scott Cooper is directing the biopic. Also starring are Harrison Sloan Gilbertson, Odessa Young, and Paul Walter Hauser. White and Springsteen recently linked in real life at the premiere of the documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. 

Jeremy Allen White appeared at the film’s screening at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he posed for pictures with Bruce Springsteen. Speaking to Deadline at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards, White teased the project. “I’m so excited to start this thing,” he said. “We’re going to start pretty soon. You know, I don’t want to talk about it too much. It feels wrong before getting there and starting the thing.” He continued, “But I can say I’ve got a really beautiful team of people helping me and Bruce has been really lovely and supportive and available, which has made this whole process an extra joy. His support and Jon Landau, his management support, who has a large role in the film as well. So I feel really lucky.” Source: deadline.com

What’s the plot of A Complete Unknown? While the plot is still largely under wraps, we know that the film will follow a 19-year-old Dylan’s first arrival in New York City from Minnesota, as he seeks a career in music and soon skyrockets to worldwide fame. “It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with, like, two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years,” James Mangold told Collider during a red-carpet interview in April 2023. “First being embraced into the family of folk music in New York, and kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief.” Searchlight Pictures has released a new promotional video for the Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown. The new clip finds lead actor Timothée Chalamet recreating Dylan’s iconic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video; it features Chalamet’s original rendition of the song, too. A Complete Unknown hits theaters on December 25, 2024. 

Columbia Records will release the film’s soundtrack, and it will include Chalamet’s cover of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, the 1965 album that featured “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” reached No. 38 in Pitchfork’s “The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s.” Joining Chalamet will be Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Dylan’s fictional girlfriend, inspired by the musician’s real-life former girlfriend and muse Suze Rotolo. Edward Norton will play Dylan’s fellow folk musician Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro will play a young Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook is rumoured to play Johnny Cash. Chalamet confirmed in a December 2023 interview that 70% of the soundtrack had already been recorded in a Californian studio with Nick Baxter, the film’s music supervisor. In the same interview, the actor also revealed that Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, sent Chalamet 12 hours of unreleased Bob Dylan music from 1959 to 1964. “This might earn the ire and wrath of a lot of Bob fans, rightfully,” Chalamet pre-warned. Source: pitchfork.com

What defined Lou Reed’s best work—besides fearlessness, beauty, intelligence, and switchblade New York City wit—is what places it at the highest level of art making: its empathy. Reed wrote his way into other voices, not all of them pretty. These kindred humans, regardless of gender, spoke as if with Reed’s own voice, a compassionate ventriloquism geared toward understanding both the subject and himself. And when you sensed Reed was writing about himself—in a song like “Waves of Fear,” as visceral a depiction of end-stage addiction and the panic-attack hellscape of withdrawal as any musician is ever likely to record—he seemed to be doing it to commiserate as much as to exorcise. New York, his most consistent and satisfying album attacked the greed and hypocrisy of America’s poisoned political and economic systems as they played out among the haves and have-nots on his hometown streets. And toward the end, in a storybook denouement, he achieved a sort of redemption and grace through love.

“It was a devastating thing for me,” Reed said of Kennedy's assassination. “I thought Kennedy could change the world.” Indeed, a generation looked to Kennedy—the youngest president in history, elected at forty-three—and Jackie Onassis as the ultimate inspiration. Even that nascent counterculture skeptic Bob Dylan was impressed. “If I had been a voting man,” he affirmed in one of his memoirs decades later, “I would have voted for Kennedy.” John Cale believed that Reed’s “fears about sanity” led him toward “provocative behavior, actively and purposefully trying his darnedest to set people off. That made him feel he was in control, rather than living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. This put him in the position of perpetually seeking a kind of advantage for himself by bringing out the worst in people.” 

“I was just this poor little rock and roller,” Reed later lamented wryly, “and here was this German goddess, Nico. We didn’t really feel we had a choice. I mean, we could have just walked away from it, or we could have a chanteuse. So we had a group meeting and said ‘All right, we’ll have a chanteuse, and I will write a few songs for her, and then we’ll still be the Velvet Underground.’ Y’know, why not?” Ronnie Cutrone, a Factory assistant around that time, characterized Nico as “a weirdo” and suggested love was out of her wheelhouse: “You didn’t have a relationship with Nico.” At that time, speed was the ideal New York City drug. Distributed widely via legit prescriptions from psychiatrists and general medical practitioners, as well through gray-market diet clinics and assorted black-market channels, it’s estimated that between 8 and 10 billion amphetamine tablets were ingested annually in the United States between 1963 and 1969. Unlike SSRI drugs, they lent themselves to indiscriminate abuse. 

Shelley Albin, Lou Reed's first steady girlfriend said of ‘I’ll be your mirror’: "that was our conversation, word for word.” According to Albin, whose eyes are not blue but hazel, the title was an in-joke for her. She’d still meet up with Reed occasionally, and it was clear he was still hung up on her. “I wrote this for someone I missed very much,” Reed confessed years later—adding with a chuckle: “Her eyes were hazel.” After their break-up, he kept calling Shelley Albin, wanting to reconnect. Shelley Albin had moved into Washington Square Village with her new husband, who taught at NYU. Reed had remained in touch (“He always knew where to find me,” she recalls) and still carried a torch. When she heard his voice on the phone, she told him “You must have the wrong number”, and hung up. Albin destroyed all the letters Reed had sent her over the years. Albin had been Reed’s great muse, his Beatrice, his Guinevere, his Fanny Brawne and Daisy Fay Buchanan. She was the only woman that Reed had considered having a child with. Whatever hopes he might’ve held out for their reunion, it was clear that she would not be leaving her husband anytime soon.

Reed first met Bettye Kronstad in the spring of 1968. She was visiting their mutual friend Lincoln Swados at Mount Sinai Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Reed was sauntering out of the elevator as Kronstad was leaving Swados’s room. “Hey, you! Beautiful!” Reed snapped as she breezed past him. Bettye Kronstad: "At seventeen, Lou’s parents had sent him to see a psychiatrist who prescribed EST for his depression and mood swings. During the summer of 1959, he was treated at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, New York, where the EST treatments were administered without an anesthetic. At that time, the procedure involved putting him on a wooden gurney with a rubber block between his teeth. This was an experience that scarred Lou for life. It is commonly thought that EST was prescribed to Lou in order to cure him of his ‘bisexual tendencies,’ but he never told me this or even alluded to it. I think he told journalists this to be more sympathetic to the gay community, and in part to broaden his appeal to that audience. From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I would—without fail—leave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles’ heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again." 

Transformer was convoluted in production, and Reed was a hot mess during the sessions. “I think he was on heroin,” recalled Tony Visconti, the glam-rock sculptor who produced T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, of meeting Reed for the first time. “He was just sitting in the corner on the floor kind of nodding off. I remember kneeling down and shaking his hand and saying ‘hello’ and he just looked up and was all glazed over.” For Reed, the stress of what he knew was a make-or-break album must have been overwhelming. Reed often spoke in a troubled whirlwind about his Velvets legacy (“I’m in the odd position of having to compete with myself”), self-doubt, and self-loathing. In a published story, Rolling Stone's writer Ed McCormack collaged Reed’s end of the conversation: "Sometimes I have this horrible nightmare that I’m not really what I think I am… Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in my shoes? I mean, I have made every hip scene and sometimes I think I’m just a phony c*cksucker like the rest of them. I mean, Bettye is not hip at all and that’s why I love her. I want to keep her that way. I mean, she is so pure… And I believe in sparrows… I believe in pretty princesses. There are hip people, brilliant people, yet on another level they are the scum of the earth, so how can I know what I’ve done means anything… But I still love rock and roll…”

In early January, 1972, Lou Reed and Bettye Kronstad were married in their apartment at 402 East Seventy-fourth Street. The couple had upgraded with the help of Reed’s $15,000 Transformer advance: their new place had a small foyer, parquet wood floors, a large living room, separate bedrooms and dining rooms, and an eat-in kitchen with a street view. Kronstad’s family, not thrilled with their daughter’s choice of husband, declined to attend, so Reed chose not to invite his family. Reed was evidently a mess. He was also performing a new role as solo artist, with a new persona, perhaps applying lessons Kronstad had shared from her acting classes and interview strategies he’d gleaned from Warhol. Reed began riffing—on alcohol and drugs (“I take drugs just because in the twentieth century in a technological age there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal”); on the glam-rock embrace of queer chic (“The notion that everybody’s bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited”); and on his unruly creativity (“I may come out with a hardhat album. Come out with an anti-gay song, saying ‘Get back in your closets, you fuckin’ queers!’ That’ll really do it!”).

“There were countless mornings I found myself sitting, half-awake, on the concrete steps of Dr. Freymann’s office,” Kronstad recalled, “to get his famous injection of vitamins laced with amphetamine. Lou loved them more than any other drug he took.” A week later, after discovering Reed injecting heroin, Kronstad reached her limit, and demanded a divorce. Not wanting to involve her family, she allowed Reed’s legal team to arrange a flight to the Dominican Republic, where she checked into a hotel, and a day later had secured legally binding divorce papers. She was home that night. They’d been married less than a year. The next evening, Reed phoned, and a day later, came to the apartment with roses, wine, and take-out from a favorite restaurant. He pleaded his case, made an impression, and before the month was out, the couple were both on a plane to London for the Berlin sessions. Krondstand recalls: "With women Lou was polite, shy, and almost behaved like a high-school kid. It was how you could tell if he was really interested in you. He could be passionate, although typically maintained his guard up. One day Lou mentioned a dress he thought I could wear, which surprised me."

"He never told me what to say, how to act, or what to wear. He always told me I looked great. The dress Lou was talking about was one I had bought in London, when Angie and I went on a shopping spree on the Kings Road. It was a 1930s white, beautifully draped, crepe floral dress. I wore my red stiletto platform heels to match. Lou kissed me. ‘I love you,’ he said quietly. ‘There are no words to tell you how much, Princess.’ From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I would—without fail—leave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles’ heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again, as he had before we starting going together." According to Kronstad, Reed added heroin to his diet of scotch and cocaine. It was as if, in advance of the album drop, he was determined to stage Berlin as a reality drugs show. By Kronstad’s account, Reed threw a drunken tantrum preshow, accusing her of depleting the coke stash. She tossed a glass of milk in his face and stormed out of their hotel room. The next day, she was on a flight home to New York, and never spoke to him again.

But Reed’s struggle with drug and alcohol abuse was ongoing, and one might reasonably imagine much of his life being shaped by the shadow of panicked anxiety: the need to keep it at bay by self-medicating, lashing out at anyone who might trigger it, and making art that muted it, stared it down, or otherwise defused it. And if “Waves of Fear” was more purely visceral than anything Reed had written to this point, it was at the same time a reminder of the harrowing competition for that honor in the Reed oeuvre: the visions of piled-up corpses in “Heroin”; Waldo Jeffers’s blood-spurting skull in “The Gift”; the body strapped to a table in “Lady Godiva’s Operation”; the orgiastic dope-shooting murder scene in “Sister Ray”; the self-loathing of “Candy Says”; the lacerating loss of “Pale Blue Eyes”; the misty entrails of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams”; the brains served on a plate in “Ocean”; the electroshock treatment in “Kill Your Sons”... But for all its horrors, The Blue Mask was an album, like so much of Reed’s work, about the mythic, and sometimes real, salvation of love. Beyond its titular pun, “The Heroine” posited Reed waiting to be rescued by a figure who “transcends all the men.” And the album’s final song Heavenly Arms is a touching doo-wop tribute to “Syl-vi-a,” whose name Reed incants, breaking it into syllables until meaning dissolves into longing, a love letter to the former Sylvia Morales, who might have reasonably, after hearing the album in its entirety, bolted for the door. But she didn’t.

Lou Reed remarked about “Waves of Fear”: “It’s about anxiety and terror about which nothing can be done. Terror so strong that the person can’t even turn a light on, can’t speak, can’t make it to a phone. Afraid to turn a light on for what they’ll see—for what he is.” “What motivation,” Bruno Blum asked, with astonishment, “could you possibly have to approach that subject?” Reed responded flatly and plainly, as if there was just one conceivable answer: “Empathy,” he said to the French author and journalist Bruno Blum. Reed was performatively frank about his tastes. He called the Beatles “garbage” and claimed he never liked them, while the Doors were “painfully stupid and pretentious.” He expressed dislike for Stephen Sondheim (“Broadway music I despise”) but admiration for Randy Newman. Reed was largely dismissive on the topic of Bowie. He talked, reluctantly it seemed, about working with him in the early ’70s, claiming his own glam-rock turn was basically bandwagon-jumping, “trying to be part of whatever was going on,” that he’d “watch what David did” and “do my version of it.” Blum asked if Reed had “ever looked at Bowie and thought there was some promise there, or some things that you liked?” Reed said flatly, “No,” waiting a beat before adding, “David’s very bright, he knows what he wants and how to do it—I think.”

Set the Twilight Reeling was an album about Reed’s relationship with Anderson, who’d prove the most lasting of his muses. “The Adventurer” was hard rock addressing “a queen reborn”, declaring her “my one true love.” On “Hooky Wooky,” the narrator meets his lover’s exes at a rooftop soiree and plays it cool, despite wanting to hurl them into the traffic below. In many ways, Reed’s lack of commercial success had worked in his favor. While much of the Beatles catalog and other ’60s–’70s touchstones became frozen in cultural amber, Reed’s work was comparatively timeless. Reed’s relationship with Anderson seems mirrored in “Turning Time Around,” a poignant conversation about the meaning of love. The album also interrogated extreme forms of need and desire. In almost all situations, the presence of Anderson changed Reed. Colleagues breathed a sigh of relief when she joined him on tour. Things immediately became more familial: group dinners were more common, and tensions slackened. “He worshipped the ground she walked on,” says a former Sire/Warner records employee who feels that Reed, quite literally, “would have died for Laurie.”

Although Shelley Albin knew Reed first, Erin Clermon maintained the longest relationship with him, on and off from the late 60's to the early 90's. Erin Clermont recalls going often to the Mineshaft club with Reed. One of the few relationships Reed maintained from his Syracuse days (Erin was a good friend of Shelley Albin), Clermont was frequently a lover and a confidante, someone Reed could call at 3 a.m. to talk or to meet up at some late-night dive. On 3 June 1980 Reed visited Erin Clermont to tell her about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, adding that he was taking Lithium for his problem. Lithium salts have been used as a treatment for depression and manic behaviour, but overuse can result in lethargy and serious side effects. From what Erin could see, lithium ‘completely fucked him up.’ He knew he could count on her. “Lou was a very strange person. I had a lot of fun with him, but he had a cranky side. Lou had an act going all the time. I was eternally interested in him, not in love with him, although we did love each other. There were periods when he gave me the impression of having little or no interest in sex. I’d come home and there’d be like thirty-two hang-ups on my answering machine,” Erin recalls. “I knew then he was trying to get in touch with me, and I’d just have to make up my mind whether I was going to answer his next call or just turn off the phone and get some sleep.” —Lou Reed: The King of New York (2023) by Will Hermes

Kurt Cobain was probably the last rock star when rock music actually mattered as a cultural force. Cobain was the last rock star who (unwittingly) embodied all the profound contradictions of The Rock Star mythology as we know it. He was good-looking, a delicate soul, with an ear for melody and gift for crafting lyrics in a singular way, who both embraced and rejected much of the mythology of rock and roll. He wanted it, and he hated it. He had a great voice and he wasn't afraid to use it to express his inner anguish. Beyond that, he seemed a confused, retiring, angry kid who never got over his parents' divorce and their subsequent (perceived) rejection of him as a teenager. That feeling of rejection uniquely informed his character, and people really latched onto it. Cobain redefined what "rock star" could mean, and all of a sudden a rock star meant someone like him, so a rock star could be an anti-star. This contradiction has stayed with us ever since. Cobain wrote that he first had used heroin in Aberdeen in the late eighties; but former friends contest this, since he had a fear of needles at the time and there was no heroin to be found in his circle. He did occasionally take Percodan in Aberdeen, a prescription narcotic.

In early November 1990, he overcame his fear of needles and first injected heroin with a friend in Olympia, after his break-up with his first official girlfriend Tobi Vail from Bikini Kill. He found that the drug’s euphoric effects helped him temporarily escape both his heartache and his stomach pain. The next day, Kurt phoned Krist Novoselic. “Hey, Krist, I did heroin.” Krist cited his Olympia friends who had died of heroin addiction and warned Kurt that heroin wasn’t like the other drugs he’d done. “I remember literally telling him that he was playing with dynamite.” But the warning fell on deaf ears. Though Kurt promised Krist he wouldn’t try the drug again, he broke this promise. To avoid Krist’s or Grohl’s finding out, Kurt used the drug at friends’ houses. He found a dealer who was selling at Evergreen State College in Olympia. On December 11, 1990, Kurt sought medical help for his stomach condition, seeing a doctor in Tacoma. This time Kurt was prescribed Lidox, a form of clidinium. The drug didn’t seem to help his pain, and he discontinued it two weeks later when he got bronchitis. The year ended with a New Year’s Eve show in Portland at the Satyricon. According to his biographer Christopher Sandford, who painted an unflattering portrait of the grunge superstar: “Cobain was isolated, easily led, and self-obsessed. Cobain was also sick with a bipolar disorder resulting in alternate bouts of depression and mania.”

In 2009, NME reported that a film about Kurt Cobain was in the works based on Charles Cross's groundbreaking biography of Cobain "Heavier than Heaven" (2002), which would have likewise been the title of the movie, but the only film that resembled loosely the life and tribulations of the grunge superstar was Last Days (2005) directed by Gus Van Sant, starring Michael Pitt as Blake, a suicidal musician who obviously is a stand-in for Cobain. Courtney Love, who was expected to having been the executive producer of Heavier than Heaven, said she wanted actor Ryan Gosling to play her late husband Kurt Cobain in the film, and she wanted Scarlett Johansson to portray herself. According to Rolling Stone magazine the pre-production didn't ever kick-off, despite having an additional cast lined up aside from Ryan Gosling and Scarlett Johansson: Justin Long as Krist Noveselic (Nirvana's bassist), Topher Grace as Dave Grohl (Nirvana's drummer), Cate Blanchett as Eric Erlandson (guitarist and songwriter for Hole). Also in talks were Emile Hirsch as Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, and Toni Collette as Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Source: www.nme.com
   
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - A Film About Wilco, directed by Sam Jones in 2002. "Both Nonesuch and Reprise are owned by AOL Time Warner. In other words, the same suits who supposedly found Wilco's approach too artistic to tolerate when the band was working for one part of the company apparently found it commercially viable when the band was working for another part. In the movie, this comes across as simply an ironic twist of fate. But it's more than that. In fact, Nonesuch's move makes the whole "victim of multinational capitalism" narrative look rather suspect. After all, if Reprise's axing of Wilco was really the inevitable result of a corporate ethos that privileges commercial appeal over artistic integrity, then Nonesuch's decision makes no sense." Source: www.slate.com

Jeff Tweedy traces his life from his childhood in Belleville, a town he describes as "depressing and depressed in all of the familiar ways common to dying Midwestern manufacturing hubs." He took to music early, listening in his family's attic to the Replacements, discovering "a secret self. A better self than the one I was stuck with." It was in high school where Tweedy made a friend who would change his life. He and his classmate Jay Farrar bonded over their shared love of music, and soon formed the band Uncle Tupelo. The group released just four albums before breaking up acrimoniously; their record No Depression would lend its name to an alternative-country fanzine, and later, to the genre itself. Not unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy actively demythologized the figure of the rock-’n’-roll hero. Instead of painting a self-indulgent portrait of bravado, Tweedy related tales of social awkwardness and panic attacks overcome by hard work, claiming vulnerability as his defining artistic trait. Reluctant to talk about the grunge genre or Cobain, Tweedy said to Pitchfork in 2015 when Montage of Heck was released: "The documentary is about the abrasion of fame. It is a wrenching analysis that many fans have been craving since the terrible suicide of Kurt Cobain, capturing the humanity of a rock star, not just the extent of his image."

Jettisoning the hackneyed image of the womanizing rock star, Tweedy defied that archetype, recounting a haunting story about a sexual encounter with a female friend named Leslie (25) when he was just 14. After Farrar left Uncle Tupelo after a bitter quarrel over Farrar's girlfriend Monica, Tweedy and his remaining bandmates formed Wilco, whose sophomore album Being There gained critical acclaim. Tweedy met his future wife Sue Miller in 1991 at the Chicago club Lounge Ax and they were married on August 9, 1995. In 2001 Tweedy would fire Jay Bennett from the band. Tweedy suggests that he and Bennett were enabling each other's addiction to painkillers, writing, "I fired Bennett from Wilco because I knew if I didn't, I would probably die." Tweedy's music has never shied away from darkness, but he's also never been afraid to celebrate joy. His personality, like his music, has been alternately sorrowful and triumphant. Source: npr.org

Jeff Tweedy and her wife Sue Miller (married August 9, 1995). Jeff Tweedy: "There are only three people I’ve committed myself to completely for the rest of my life: my wife Susie, and my sons Spencer and Sammy. My actual family. My wife is Susan Miller Tweedy. I’m tempted to say that if you aren’t married to her then your life is crap. But hearing her voice in my head, I’m thinking better of saying such a thing. See, even without consultation, she’s been steering me toward a subtler and kinder way of saying what I want to say. Which all goes to show what a force she’s been in my effort to get better. After 29 years of marriage and over 30 total years of going steady, I still can’t believe my good fortune. Somehow the coolest and funniest woman alive thought enough of me to take my hand. I love her more every day and I wouldn’t be here without her." Source: www.avclub.com

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