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Lou Reed comes into sharp perspective in new Jim Higgins book

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Courtesy Trouser Press

Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground,

By Jim Higgins, 250 pages, paperback and e-book, Trouser Press, $20 *

Lou Reed (1924-2013) was the musical bard of New York as the quintessential East Coast big city. He’s worth comparing to Bob Dylan, the great musical poet from the Heartland – who’s certainly America’s greatest poet-musician. Still, it’s worth pondering such a comparison (Brian Wilson might be a West Coast comparable).

In his new book Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Jim Higgins assesses Lou Reed in depth and, for me, even invites such comparisons. Thus, he provides a deepening sense of a major artist’s experience and interpretation of his part of America, the oldest and most diverse part, no less.

Higgins is well known in Milwaukee as the book page editor and an arts writer for The Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel. He previously authored Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar.  

I am a Lou Reed fan but didn’t fully appreciate him until I read this book. Now I’ll continue to explore more fully his oeuvre. I’ve discovered a couple fabulous Reed albums I should’ve known about, The Bells, with the great jazz trumpeter/world-musician Don Cherry and The Blue Mask.

Higgins is a consistently insightful and skilled writer. For example, regarding The Blue Mask, he comments on Reed and Robert Quine on the first two songs: Hear “how gently and beautifully those two famously noisy guitarists are playing. It’s like their making lace out of quarter notes.”

Though a supreme wordsmith Reed invariably realized how important the music was to a song’s success.  His singing, sometimes stentorian, had a surprising range of expression, and his guitar was nearly comparable to, say, Neil Young’s as a singer-songwriter’s adjunct. 1

Lou Reed’s guitar was an important adjunct voice to his art. Courtesy Billboard

So, hats off to Higgins. However, with such a labor-intensive, inclusive survey of a long music career — 50 albums! — the author at times becomes rather workman-like, amid the weeds. He understandably spends a lot of time with specific songs, separating the wheat from the chaff and commenting on the chaff, perhaps fearing he’ll otherwise come off as too hagiographic?

He needn’t worry. His praise and criticism read largely as astute and he often qualifies by saying it’s his opinion or taste choice. And he dutifully acknowledges his predecessors: especially Reed biographer Anthony DeCurtis, and “dean-of-critics” Robert Christgau. So, he’s a knowledgeable and humbly likeable guide who educated me in the substantial depths of Reed’s extensive catalog. His appreciation of the ground-breaking Velvet Underground as a musical band is especially enlightening.

However, I wanted a bit more courage of convictions. He says the title song of Street Hassle “was Reed’s most deliberate attempt at a masterpiece to that point.” His detailed description almost amounts to an argument for “masterpiece.” Along with his comments, I’d call “Hassle” a masterpiece. The extended cello motif beautifully weaves together an 11-minute, three-movement suite, an urban tragedy: the first movement “Waltzing Matilda,” is romantic, the second, “Street Hassle,” cold-eyed about fatal “bad luck,” the third, “Slipaway,” a wrenchingly authentic cry over lost love. Using (uncredited) Bruce Springsteen’s husky voice to extend the chilling second movement feels brilliant, as a contrasting sort of monotone witness, which allows Reed’s voice the drama of spilling his heart in the last movement. Plus, Reed’s use of the phrase “slip away” takes on three very different meanings in each segment. Yeah, masterpiece, worth rehearing repeatedly.

Lou Reed and “The Banana Album” that made him famous as a cult figure, at least. Courtesy Newsweek

Higgins does fine justice to the career-launching “Heroin” from 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, the album that secured the band’s fame. Rock music never had (nor has since) a more laceratingly honest and audaciously immersive evocation of drug addiction. And delusional: “and I feel just like Jesus’ son.” Higgins narrates the song’s tell-tale form: “ ‘Heroin’ begins as gently as a folk song, but speeds up four times in imitation of the rush the addict feels, ebbing each time to a doubled statement of defeat. (John) Cale’s electric viola drones throughout, until it shatters into shrieks during the final rush.” For me, a stone masterpiece, revealing early Reed’s courageous genius.

At times Higgins does go out on interesting limbs, asserting that Mott the Hoople’s take on “Sweet Jane” on All The Young Dudes is the best version of a signature Reed song. However, he then extolls The Cowboy Junkies’ far more tender rendition of “Jane,” so you have your pick of several recommended interpretations, another valuable critic’s task of digging through the music catalog. One provocatively bouncing limb he hits too timidly: He could’ve praised the potency of the song “Sex with Your Parents (Motherfucker), Part II” on Set the Twilight Reeling, which is a laugh-out-loud skewering of hypocritical right-wing holier-than-thous. More controversy over it would’ve been something to see.

As DeCurtis reported, Laurie Anderson’s tribute to her spouse in Rolling Stone for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is extraordinary, eloquent and fascinating though she says “he was kind, he was hilarious, he was never cynical.”

She must’ve cured him of that unless he was way misunderstood at times. And it’s amazing that Anderson apparently, in his eyes, was a woman “of a thousand faces,” whom he wanted to marry, as referenced in “Trade In” on Twilight. Given that desire’s impossibility she must’ve been a miracle soul mate. Over years before, Reed did unforgivable things to people he loved and treated sweetly just as quickly.

Anderson knew his badness, or of it, but their love lasted for 21 years until his death.

Also, I think the title song of Twilight hardly “strains for profundity,” as Higgins says. In a simple arrangement, it’s about learning to let go of regrets, accept himself “as the new found man” and “set the twilight reeling.” It may be too poetical for some but it takes plenty for anyone, especially this complex and troubled, to accept himself.

I understand the new found man as the man in the historical “new found land” ie: America. Like his image of Anderson, it’s a bit self-mythologizing but also humblingly honest. It’s also self-absolution, but saying as much to us. That’s all very Lou Reed, to me. The album’s most telling, acidic and profound song is “NYC Man,” with Oliver Lake’s lovely horn arrangement. It’s much more confessional than the title song, so Reed’s not really hiding behind his poetry, even if its dense, literary text is Dylanesque.

Among the book’s distinctive features is “Children of The Velvet Underground,” persuasively surveying the many artists influenced by Reed’s path-forging group, such as David Bowie, Jonathan Richman, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Yo La Tengo, and Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes.

Another group of valuable features (especially for iPod users) involves Higgins combing through the repertoire to come up with “One Hour with Lou Reed” in the 1960s (The Velvet Underground era) and likewise through the ‘90s, by choosing exemplary songs of each decade.

Three of his selected songs for “The ‘90s and beyond” are from Magic and Loss, an album serving as a nakedly poetic elegy to the agonizing cancer death of singer-songwriter Doc Pomus, seemingly the father figure in Reed’s life. Among the album’s numerous luminous moments Reed likens radiation treatment to “The Sword of Damocles hanging over your heard,” giving the man’s death mythical resonance. Higgins however, asserts that Magic and Loss is merely one half of a great album. Hmm. I just know when I first heard it, Reed carried me right through and, by its end, I was stunned into silent reverie, a bit like hearing “A Day in the Life” for the first time. Deeply shaded with superb writing, this underappreciated album is a chiaroscuro masterpiece. Or perhaps “classic” is better if “masterpiece” seems too exalted a term for such a muted work.

Lou Reed and spouse Laurie Anderson. Courtesy Medium

Reed’s best songs and albums feel as real and poetically moving as any American sing-songwriter of his generation, in that sense comparable to Townes Van Zandt, or more recently the more storytelling James McMurtry, very different stylistic geniuses of yet another fecund American region of singer-songwriters, Texas.

Being married to an atmospherically avant musician-artist like Laurie Anderson helped Reed understand himself as a kind of literary musician-artist of substantial merit. He was unafraid to do a somewhat over-reaching album-length interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, 2003), choked with notable actor-reciters and guest artists. To be sure, this was Lou Reed’s Poe, nobody else’s. As Melville said, “It is better to fail at originality than to succeed at imitation.”

Higgins’s valuable book expands the lens of perspective in our experience of our best songwriters portraying and illuminating America.

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* The Higgins book is available at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., in Milwaukee and directly from Trouser Press. Here’s a link to the author’s May reading from Sweet, Wild and Vicious, at Boswell, with a live interview with Journal-Sentinel music writer Piet Levy:

https://youtu.be/kUdP2I-f7K4?si=Uje371AqePKLh0N0

  1. Higgins delves into the underappreciated significance of Reed’s guitar playing. One of his nifty sidebar features is “One Hour with Lou Reed and his guitar,” listing ten songs that showcase his guitar work. The list includes the live version of “Heroin” from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, which Higgins suggests is his second favorite VU album after their debut album (known colloquially as “The Banana Album”).

Vocalist Faye Victor accepts the ingenious challenge of singing pianist-composer Herbie Nichols

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This ambitious concept grabbed me: a jazz singer adapting tunes of iconoclast bop-era pianist-composer Herbie Nichols. He’s a fascinating, under-sung, short-lived jazz hero (dead at 44). But I never thought of him as vocalist material. 1 Well, leave that to Victor, who knew her idea demanded a leap, imaginatively and technically, a leap as serious — and playful — as Nichols was. 2.

So, failing to find the block of listening space I felt the two-album set deserved, I finally put it on while I was doing something else at the computer. Almost instantly Victor, and her concept band Herbie Nichols Sings, began insinuating themselves into my consciousness. There was something almost intoxicating to hear her lovely voice wrap itself around the asymmetric intervals of Nichols’ “Double Exposure” which, with lyrics, she’d re-dubbed “Life is Funny that Way.” More, she’d swallowed the tune whole and made it her(bie) Herbie.

Then she scats the second chorus of “Life,” totally embracing its pure musical powers, just as she purely scats throughout “Shuffle Montgomery,” the one tune she doesn’t rename. By then you know how brilliantly she’s inhabited Herbie’s “Third World” of Calder-esque, mobile-like sound constructions deeply dipped in the blues. She succeeds because she, like a major influence Betty Carter, is always right with her fellow musicians, never merely “accompanied by.” Yet Victor, for the average listener, is more listenable than Carter, for having a pearlescent voice. On “The Culprit is You” and “Sinners, All of Us!” she pursues themes of honesty. “Culprit” embraces the courage to be yourself, not what you think others think you should be. “Sinners” calls out those too hip to think they’re not guilty of snobbery. Victor’s wisdom radiates in unsurpassed beauty and strangeness, and conviction, demonstrating the value of her philosophy better than mere words could ever.

On disc 2, “Tonight” is about a “House Party Starting,” a swaggering minor-key affair with Michael Attias’s baritone sax lending sly gravitas, and pianist Anthony Coleman painting slashing lines while swinging hard. Then, an oozingly mordant take on “Lady Sings the Blues,” first recorded by Billie Holiday, and “Descent into Madness” is exactly that. But it ends in two offbeat, upbeat Herbie tunes.

Here’s a concert video of the quintet that recorded the album:

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1 However, trombonist Roswell Rudd, a great Nichols friend/interpreter/expert, asserts that Herbie’s music is meant to be sung, even if virtually nobody has until now. Aside from Nichols’ own recordings of his cubist-bop, mainly on Blue Note, also worth investigating are three recordings by the Nichols tribute band The Herbie Nichols Project. An all-star band of sorts, it was co-founded by recently deceased pianist Frank  Kimbrough and bassist Ben Allison, and featured trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, saxophonist Ted Nash, drummer Matt Wilson, and others. The most revelatory and even poignant album is the last, Strange City which, except for two, comprises tunes Nichols never got a chance to record himself.

The aforementioned Rudd recorded two albums, The Unheard Herbie Nichols, Vol. 1 and 2, of unrecorded Nichols work. Floodwater had destroyed much of Nichols’ possessions and undocumented compositions. He was a modernist who played all types of jazz, except that which he loved, to make a living. He died in 1963 at age 44. See A.B. Spellman’s classic study Black Music: Four Lives.

  1. I previously knew Faye Victor only from her 2004 album Lazy Old Sun: Live/Life in the Lowlands, which I hadn’t paid enough attention to at the time. I went back to listen again and recommend it, too. It was recorded in Amsterdam after eight years of living in The Netherlands, another prophet-without-honor jazz story. It’s ingeniously unpredictable, ranging from interpretations of Johnny Mercer’s “Laura” to the Doors’ “People are Strange” to Randy Newman’s “Last Night I had a Dream” to “Heading West” from Sonny Rollins’ classic Way Out West, to a 100-proof shot of Jackie McLean dissonant-bop.

 

Bill Frisell and the artful power of improvisation

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A large crowd (and bar crew) sit in rapt attention as The Bill Frisell Trio casts its evocative spell, in the aptly atmospheric and light-blessed concert space Vivarium, on Tuesday evening. All photos by Dan Ojeda, Pabst Theater Group.

Having awoken after an evocative Bill Frisell Trio concert, a psychic analogue arose, like a forgotten fairy tale carrying you to yonder realms, enchanted yet vivid fantasia of alluring charm, amid shadows of danger, darker forces, and truths.

Wilhelm (Bill) and Jacob Grimm published their first fairy tales in 1817, hoping to find “some essential truths about the common people.” They even had a scholarly readership in mind, though eventually becoming popular worldwide. (Remember “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” etc.”? Of course.)

Similarly, Bill’s trio comprises some of the most popular masters of jazz spell-casting. Especially in person at Vivarium Tuesday, the threesome seemed like tellers of tales mysterious and timeless, with quicksilver and wayward imaginations. Not to search out hidden “parables” in this largely instrumental music. But their sonic scenarios signify much of their artful power. Another recent review called the trio “bewitching.” They offer a few standard songs along the way, to provide signposts of familiarity.

Guitarist Bill Frisell (right) and bassist Thomas Morgan.

But much of the concert was purely improvised. The potent qualities gestate in the moderate-to-slow grooves they mainly work in, as if communing in magic tongues. Often Frisell would pick out a few curious notes that summon a “once upon a time” feel, as bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston add dialogue murmur, following Frisell’s myriad harmonic overtones and quirky phrase-turns, at times slightly venomous, elsewhere whispering sweetly. It’s like a person who really thinks before he speaks, thus fragmenting his sentences into disarmingly uncertain-sounding grace notes. Yet at times the small silences work like perfectly-timed pauses for dramatic or comic effect.

The Bill Frisell Trio; (L-R) bassist Thomas Morgan, guitarist Frisell and drummer Rudy Royston; plays closely but freely, with and for each other. 

This was a high level of artistic playing, just as it contained a childlike level of playing, of odd whimsy, either of which can be subverted at any given moment, creating small wonders and striking suspense. At times Morgan’s bass hung so close in the linear weave to be the guitarist’s breathing counterpoint of charm and tension. These musicians seem to play with and for each other, in the best sense. Royston’s drum set sat sideways, to directly face the bassist, and so master tale-spinner Frisell watched each other closely as the music spun a web of simpatico possibility. 1

The audience, in effect, overhears all this sometimes strange and wondrous creativity. One segment involved a slightly ominous descending line that Frisell hooked into a pedal loop, the instant echoing, which sometimes creates a modal raga effect, for him to musically meditate. And yet here it disappeared after two minutes, just as we began to feel it’s subtle powers. Frisell’s then modulates into a fully-formed melody sounding as familiar as one’s favorite recurring fantasy-dream, then collapses into moody cinematics that few guitarists can reach. 2

All this context occurred after a half hour had passed, and Morgan and Royston had taken the only substantial solos. Frisell possesses a kind of leadership modesty like someone far more involved in being a sonic lab scientist with fellow researchers, than making big theoretic pronouncements. Yet later he charged a sequence of rippling Hendrixian flashes and pungent power chords, in a tough but probing passage also recalling Jeff Beck, and all placed precisely in the unfolding way to truth.

Bassist Thomas Morgan

After a lovely, Charlie Haden-esque bass solo from Morgan, and some dissonant Frisell garlands, the guitarist fired up another loop pattern opening into a floating harmonic flow reminiscent of the Grateful Dead, with a crystalline asymmetric phrase ringing like vintage Jerry Garcia. Frisell’s various foot pedals, including “loopers” for the recorded-repeat effect, form a sort of extension of the creative beast in him. One is called a Jam Pedals Tube Dreamer. Perfect. At times, his innate wandering lyricism finds firmer footing and the band kicks up funk and pulsing R&B sorties.

And then the trio unfurled “Who Can I Turn To?” the haltingly beautiful Anthony Newley melody, with a lyric theme wholly befitting this lost-romantic soundscape traveler. Yet the trio really swung mid-song, lifting the mood. These days, Frisell’s hardly a lonesome cowpoke, and he smiles constantly at his fellows. “You Only Live Twice” offered a different philosophic idea, in a captivating old James Bond theme.

After an encore call brimming vintage Cream City Gemütlichkeit, they came back and played “Shenandoah,” which Frisell has played and recorded so often (and superbly) that you could imagine him tattooed with the title, on his forehead, like a Native American headband. Surely, it’s his favorite theme song.

Like the titular river, the song meandered alluringly, then ended with a couple of Frisell-ish pauses, with grungy fuzz-tone chords, and then a pedal chord — reaching for the Vivarium basement, or the dark mud at the bottom of The Shenandoah.

Frisell marveled, “What a great place! This is the first time I’ve ever been to Milwaukee!”

Count on this beautiful monster returning, as surely as Grimm’s tales echo through the dreams of generations. 3

Bill Frisell speaks to the audience at Vivarium

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1 This trio also works in another Frisell project called “When you Wish Upon a Star.” which involves the addition of vocalist and violist Petra Haden, daughter of the great late jazz bassist-bandleader and conceptualist Charlie Haden. Frisell has commented on the project: “I’ve been watching TV and movies my entire life. What I’ve seen and heard there is a huge part of, and is embedded so deeply into the fabric of what fires up my musical imagination. The music we play with this group draws from that deep well and hopefully pays tribute to the countless, anonymous, uncredited, unsung, extraordinary musicians who brought that wonderful world to life.”

2 Another Frisell project is The Mesmerists, a collaboration of the guitarist-composer and his other long-standing trio of bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, with innovative film maker Bill Morrison. This project combines the music of Frisell with the films of Morrison “to create musical alchemy…Morrison often combine rare, degraded archival material with contemporary music.  The Great Flood, a collaboration with Bill Frisell was honored with a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for historical scholarship.”

3. Frisell’s sometimes childlike sense of wonder manifested right after he stepped onstage to face the audience. He looked around and said, “Are we gonna keep all these lights on like this?” He then peered up and noticed the eight large skylights extending much of the length of the Vivarium concert space. It’s 7:40 p.m. in Milwaukee, so there’s plenty of friendly sunlight and blue skies still smiling from the heavens.

“Ooops!” he said, chuckling to himself, and his perfectly timed gaffe drew warm laughter from the growing crowd (which reached 276, with some standing-room patrons, a good draw for an act largely identified as “jazz.”)