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

Wilco, Jeff Tweedy, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana

Jeff Tweedy: I have hung this corny frame on my living room's wall. How’s everybody doing after Election Day? Not so good, probably. A lot of you are probably feeling about the same way I am, scared. My thoughts on our current moment: I think we all saw a new world and we were all excited about that coming true. And I think a lot of our fellow citizens saw that world as well, but were much more afraid of it. I don’t feel like I should get to hate people I don’t know. So I’ll just say that I think they’re very fearful. And I don’t think we should be fearful. We saw that new world, and I don’t think we should let it go. It’s going to be clearer, and clearer. And maybe we just need to get better at explaining why it’s not to be feared. Personally, I’m making a choice to not be fearful. It’s not easy. But I have good examples in my life of people who saw something far on the horizon, and worked for it, fearlessly, for long long periods of time. I hope that hope isn’t ever an unwelcome message. Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable. But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse. When you heart grows cold, that's when they think they have truly won. Source: siriusxm.com

Jeff Tweedy wishing happy birthday to his wife Sue Miller Tweedy: "Happy birthday to this blinding beam of light and goodness. Everything, every decision I make, every song I write… every ounce of everything I do is an act born from the sincere desire to manifest in myself some sense that I’m worthy of her love—that I really deserve a place by her side. I love you, Sukierae!" When Tweedy met Sue Miller in June 1991 while she was booking Wilco at the Axe Lounge club, Nirvana had exploded in the charts with their anthem "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and Tweedy looked a bit jealous sitting uncomfortably on a chair while he observed her future wife cheerfully listening to Cobain's band. In contrast to Nirvana, Wilco were another underground alternative rock band struggling to be popular. 

Despite of their different personalities, Tweedy fell in love with Sue Miller and proposed to her two years later. At that time, Sue was living with her best friend Julia Adams and she seemed hesitant to abandon her single lifestyle's jollies. Tweedy reacted at first refusing her phone calls, then progressively embracing their friendship and finally wooing her with his charisma. They got married in August, 19, 1995, a year after the grunge star Kurt Cobain's death. According to Greg Kot in his book "Wilco: Learning How to Die", Jeff Tweedy could have tried to replace Cobain's figure in the alternative rock landscape, but Tweedy was always reluctant to be solely associated to a musical genre.

No one can say for certain what went through Kurt Cobain’s mind in the hours before his death. As he said just a month before the end, ‘I feel like I’m performing in a circus.’ It is known that, after struggling to overcome his addiction, Cobain had again fallen prey to heroin. The toxicology report confirmed that, along with traces of Valium, there were 1.52 milligrams of the drug in his blood, three times the normal fatal dose. According to the doctor who performed the autopsy, ‘it was the act of someone who wanted to obliterate himself, to literally become nothing’. Courtney Love would tell a reporter that police could identify her husband only through fingerprints. Dental records were no use, because nothing was left of his mouth. A relative named Beverley Cobain, a psychiatric nurse, adds: ‘Kurt was, without doubt, bipolar – he had a psychological disorder which caused him to swing from wild ecstasy to manic despair. In trying to self-medicate with heroin, he certainly made the problem worse. That was the background to his shooting himself.’ According to this reading of Cobain’s life, an heroic but fragile talent, hemmed in by the demands of the market, took the only way out to maintain his dignity and preserve the legend. Yet another image was that of the young, tormented demi-Christ – a perception Cobain angrily denied yet hastened to play up to – whose early death was somehow of a piece with a violent, beleaguered life. For TV host Andy Rooney, simply ‘Kurt Cobain was a loser’. Yet another view was that Cobain, an admittedly rare and fragile talent, had betrayed his radical ideals, as if by becoming so successful, and thus by inference ‘selling out’, he had in some way impoverished his gifts. 

This was a theory heard frequently in Seattle. Cobain in person was nothing like Cobain the legend. He was an intensely shy man, poorly educated, and prone to the same vanities and excesses he despised in others. Like all his family he was over-sensitive and never forgot a word of criticism. Like anyone who grows up feeling more intelligent and more put-on than everyone else, he was afflicted with a strange mix of ego and insecurity. Cobain succeeded because his voice tapped the eternal themes of frustration, bewilderment and anger. Suddenly a sizeable part of the world’s youth had a hero figure they could relate to. The adulation had just the opposite of the desired effect on Cobain. When he realized that, for the first time in his life, perfect strangers not only admired but worshipped him, he was confronted with all his old feelings of inadequacy and doubt, and it was this weakness that killed him. He had to know that injecting himself with Buprenex or heroin merely exacerbated a craving for more drugs, and that by dulling the nervous system he did nothing for his creative faculties. ‘His addictive side came about then,’ says Beverley Cobain. ‘From early childhood it was a religion for Kurt that everything could be cured by drugs.’ 

As someone whose protest lay chiefly in drugs and punk rather than sex and alcohol, it was true that Cobain was almost blushingly monogamous compared to other rock stars. His shyness was real, as was his modesty. According to Michael Azerrad, ‘he slept with a total of two women on all of Nirvana’s tours. To sleep with someone who he worked with or liked was as natural as playing the guitar, but to screw someone just for sex was out of the question.’ Azerrad saw in Cobain’s taste for independent women a warped reflection of his lost relationship with the mother who abandoned him. Love explained: ‘We bonded over pharmaceuticals,’ she told Azerrad. ‘I had Vicodin extra-strength, which was pills, and he had Hycomine cough syrup. I said “You shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach.” 

In a short time the meetings and chemical exchanges evolved into dating, sex and a full-blown affair. For all the lies, half-truths and skewering of Love as a drug-fuelled opportunist who bought into celebrity, it is certain that she stuck with Cobain when even his immediate family and colleagues deserted him. In a long harangue in Spin, Love would complain, ‘All they want to talk about is how much drugs Kurt and I did. That is not all we did. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We rented movies, and ate ice cream. We would read out loud to each other almost every night, and we prayed every night. We had some fucking dignity.’ All of those things were true. Until he was nine, Cobain was raised in a normal working-class home; although he could never reject Aberdeen enough, some of its habits and customs stuck with him. Among these was a refreshing humanity and simplicity of outlook that survived the ravages of his later fame. When in the mood, he could be exceptionally kind, sensitive and considerate of others. He was, in some senses, the antithesis of rock star vanity.

Once the first delights of marriage had worn off it became obvious to both that, although they complemented each other in many, perhaps most, respects, in others they were woefully incompatible. Love rebelled fiercely against the shackles of domesticity, while Cobain’s vision of a perfect match was of a relationship so close that every confidence was shared, no private agenda pursued. He wanted to possess and to be possessed. This vision filled his wife with horror. Not only was there the matter of her career, there was also the threat of Cobain’s drug habit. Looking at Cobain’s life in full, it is tempting to see a kind of insecurity of which his need for a strong wife was typical. He honestly thought he was marrying above himself. Courtney Love compensated for his crippling lack of self-esteem. ‘She’s my one and only chance,’ Cobain described her to Grohl. What he wanted from marriage was constant encouragement, loyal support, and affection. Within reason, Love gave them to him. That she also valued her independence and her career was understood, and in July 1992 Hole signed to Geffen for a sum that led one cynic to tell Newsweek, ‘sleeping with Kurt Cobain is worth a million dollars.’

According to Frank Hulme, ‘They were not compatible. They may have loved one another. I doubt they’d have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.’ The Vanity Fair article destroyed Cobain’s spirit, hastened his physical decline and almost crushed him financially. In part this was due to the irrational fear that the world was out to ruin him. There was also the ‘suicidal grief’ of losing old friends. Cobain was hurt deeply when his own colleagues began to turn their backs on him, leave the studio when he arrived, and make excuses to be elsewhere when he invited them to dinner. The most shocking feature of Cobain’s outbursts was not his savaging of Nirvana but his scornful dismissal of the world. Cobain recognized that, though ‘one or two people’ were worth saving, ‘the same fuckwits were always around’, that ‘ninety-nine per cent of humanity could be shot if it was up to me’, and that rock music had done ‘literally nothing’ to transform society. By late 1994 rumours had surfaced of a Hollywood ‘biopic’, potentially starring Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt or Stephen Dorff (whose role in S.F.W. is highly reminiscent of Cobain). -Kurt Cobain and the Grunge Scene by Christopher Sandford (2024)