Lou Reed comes into sharp perspective in new Jim Higgins book

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”).

Supreme Court’s public respect plummets with Dobbs decision, and here’s why, IMO

 

The outrage of marchers is evident in signage at this protest of the Dobbs V. Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization abortion case, overturning the landmark Roe v Wade decision, in New York, June 24, 2022. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs

Approval of the Supreme Court has traditionally been high, as it is the branch of government seen as most above the taint of politics. However, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the court’s public approval rating has plummeted, from 54% in March to 44% in May to a new low of 38% in July, according to a new national poll by Marquette University.

“The obvious cause is the June 24 decision known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a ruling opposed by almost two-thirds of Americans who have an opinion on it.  The decline in the court’s approval has come entirely from people who disagree with that ruling undoing a constitutional right to abortion.” 1

I’ve read most of the decision and here’s why I think it went far astray from righteousness. The Court’s written majority opinion on overturning Roe v. Wade works hard to delegitimize the varied aspects of the inherent rights of women contained in a variety of established laws and precedents, and Constitutional amendments.

However, Justice Samuel Alito’s written effort is almost completely engaged in the abstract of legal theory and argument, and ultimately funnels all subsequent decisions on actual abortion in America into “a state’s assertion of powers” – which the majority opinion elevates to the status of a secular godliness.

Alito now brings to mind Pontius Pilate washing his hands (symbolically of Christ’s blood) after sentencing him to a public crucifixion. This decision will lead to the unnecessary deaths of countless women, mainly those disenfranchised women (typically of color) with little resources, who will be forced into “back-alley” abortions or self-abortions, or who will die in childbirth — a statistically far more dangerous situation than legal abortion from a qualified doctor.

How smart (and noble?) do the choice opponents think they are in their attempt to reduce abortions? This misogynistic ruling might work about as well as the institutionally racist “war on drugs.” An article in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books details how the now-reversed abortion bans in Ireland did nothing to reduce abortions. 2

Whatever happened to the rights of the individual Americans, under the premise that “all (persons) are created equal,” and due the same rights, as the Declaration of Independence declared? This is a very serious question, which must be answered.

In other words, the majority’s approach epitomizes the “above it all,” and “holier than thou” posture of those who would conceptually separate any potential child from their mother, even as it presumes to save the fetus’s life. ( As a male, I won’t even begin to do justice to such a posture forsaking the mother, the giver, and sustainer, of life). Both mother and child are forgotten, after birth, in this arid moral universe. Yet, a child is born to live a meaningful life, not merely born for the sake of being born. A healthy, nurturing mother is crucial to the baby’s survival, and subsequent growth and development, into a life of hopefully honest citizenship.

The peculiar nature of this doctrinaire separation of child and mother (by prioritizing rights of a fetus) and from their ensuing lives, characterizes the conceptual flaw of such a purity, indeed a Puritan, attitude, with its fixation on the moment of conception. It is profound inconsideration of real life. It is as if to say, there is a pure way to decide upon, and live life when, in fact, life is a complex weave of relative purities and distinct impurities, some which strengthen the corpus by the fortification of layered harmonies, just as a scar naturally strengthens a skin from further defilement or penetration.

Returning to religious terms that I hope some choice opponents might hear, there’s a difference between purity and holiness. Christ noted that “we are all sinners,” thus human purity is an oxymoron, if not an impossibility. We are blessed by God’s grace so that we may be forgiven our sins, or failings. Even the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” does not specify. Have we not all killed a living creature, in some sense, to consume for nutritional purposes? A mother must make the hard decision to bear  another child or not, so she may properly manage the burden of children she has already. Even a childless woman may not be ready for motherhood, for good reasons only she and her doctor know in reality. This is all part of the proverbial Cycle of Life, an often-harsh reality duly blessed by its Creator, to believers, but surely Darwinian to some degree.

Further, if we value the nuclear family, as conservatives typically purport to, how can that be formed or sustained properly when a woman is raped, or a victim of incest?

I will concede this, that an abortion should occur before the point of fetal “viability” or, if later, only if the mother’s life is otherwise seriously threatened by birth.

To another large point, imagine the consequences of widespread abortion bans in this vastly overpopulated world, a profound reason for the overconsumption of fossil fuels and overdevelopment bringing us the climate change threatening the planet. This gargantuan reality single-minded anti-abortionists seemingly ignore as well, with astonishing hubris.

By contrast, the dissenting Supreme Court opinion (from Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) delves directly and profoundly into the personal realities of pregnancy, in all its threatening uncertainties. This is the real life that any woman or legal child, regardless of how she is impregnated, must face and endure. Regardless of what opponents of choice may think, she must face these realities, because the saving of a would-be child can, and ought, to be a blessing.

But that is always accompanied by the realities and hardships, psychological as well as physical, that the human body, even at its most empowered and exalted, struggles to transcend. This brings us again to her naturally endowed rights, to be able to live a humane life.

Read this from the court’s minority dissent:

“Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves. And in thus safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom, the Constitution also protected “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in [this Nation’s] economic and social life.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 856. But no longer. As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions.

“A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare. Some women, especially women of means, will find ways around the State’s assertion of power. Others—those without money or childcare or the ability to take time off from work—will not be so fortunate. Maybe they will try an unsafe method of abortion, and come to physical harm, or even die. Maybe they will undergo pregnancy and have a child, but at significant personal or familial cost. At the least, they will incur the cost of losing control of their lives. The Constitution will, today’s majority holds, provide no shield, despite its guarantees of liberty and equality for all.” 3

***

Finally, and so sadly, we now have the disgraceful revelation of actual behavior of the majority’s principal author, Samuel Alito. We get a good sense of the man behind this atrocious decision. Alito showed some of his true colors in a recent public speech by mocking foreign leaders who condemned the decision, in manner dripping with condescension, because they have no right to an honorable opinion on “American law.”

Mother Jones magazine pulls no punches in reportorial response (below). But judge for yourself, in the video clip. Why is this man playing for laughs, about this matter?

Even more, he implicitly derides Macron, Johnson and others for being mere politicians. Yet what has Alito, Thomas and the three Trump appointees become, beneath their august robes, with such radical judicial activism, defying the opinion of the American majority, and of legal precedent?

Of Course Samuel Alito Is Bragging About It

 

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  1. Craig Gilbert, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/analysis/2022/07/21/supreme-court-approval-plummets-after-overturning-roe-v-wade-marquette-poll/10090372002/
  2. Fintan O’Toole, “The New York Review of Books, August, 18, 2022. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/the-irish-lesson-fintan-otoole/
  3. Dobbs v. Jackson “dissent opinion” https://mcusercontent.com/9bf6688d862fa3f207663b22d/files/e86e5e71-e7d5-4c6b-16e3-ac3cbdd0ed95/Dobbs_v._Jackson_Full_Report.pdf?utm_source=General+Interest&utm_campaign=fc993a020e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_08_08_56_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_43aff8a587-fc993a020e-235388005&mc_cid=fc993a020e&mc_eid=c5ebe83bc4

 

 

 

Wisconsin’s great cranes announce spring’s prelude and summon an extraordinary memory

Wisconsin sandhill cranes and one white whooping crane arise recently. Photo by Mark Hoffman, courtesy The Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel.

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Paul A. Smith’s excellent Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story is on springtime when young (and aging) men’s fancy can turn to…cranes!

Yes, the natural romance is the mystique and magnificence of Wisconsin’s cranes – the sandhill and, now the reviving whooping crane. It’s well worth a read, here:

Cranes as Spring Harbinger

I was immediately struck by the photographer Mark Hoffman’s lead image (above) of ten sandhill cranes and one white whooping crane taking flight – and Smith’s story, because they swept me back to one of the most dramatically intimate experiences of my life.

They were hard times for me. I was recovering from a rather stunning divorce, initiated by my ex-spouse right when I felt I, and we, were finally emerging into the manageable light from the long, rather surreal darkness of my bilateral neuropathy, Continue reading