{"id":16295,"date":"2024-06-24T09:46:58","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T14:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=16295"},"modified":"2024-06-26T16:00:50","modified_gmt":"2024-06-26T21:00:50","slug":"lou-reed-comes-into-sharp-perspective-in-new-jim-higgins-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=16295","title":{"rendered":"Lou Reed comes into sharp perspective in new Jim Higgins book"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Courtesy Trouser Press<\/em><\/p>\n

Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground<\/em>, <\/strong><\/p>\n

By Jim Higgins, 250 pages, paperback and e-book, Trouser Press, $20 *<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lou Reed (1924-2013) was the musical bard of New York as the quintessential East Coast big city. He\u2019s worth comparing to Bob Dylan, the great musical poet from the Heartland \u2013 who\u2019s certainly America\u2019s greatest poet-musician. Still, it\u2019s worth pondering such a comparison (Brian Wilson might be a West Coast comparable).<\/p>\n

In his new book Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground<\/em>, Jim Higgins assesses Lou Reed in depth and, for me, even invites such comparisons. Thus, he provides a deepening sense of a major artist\u2019s experience and interpretation of his part of America, the oldest and most diverse part, no less.<\/p>\n

Higgins is well known in Milwaukee as the book page editor and an arts writer for The Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel. <\/em>He previously authored Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I am a Lou Reed fan but didn\u2019t fully appreciate him until I read this book. Now I\u2019ll continue to explore more fully his oeuvre<\/em>. I\u2019ve discovered a couple fabulous Reed albums I should\u2019ve known about, The Bells,<\/em> with the great jazz trumpeter\/world-musician Don Cherry and The Blue Mask<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Higgins is a consistently insightful and skilled writer. For example, regarding The Blue Mask<\/em>, he comments on Reed and Robert Quine on the first two songs: Hear \u201chow gently and beautifully those two famously noisy guitarists are playing. It\u2019s like their making lace out of quarter notes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though a supreme wordsmith Reed invariably realized how important the music was to a song\u2019s success. \u00a0His singing, sometimes stentorian, had a surprising range of expression, and his guitar was nearly comparable to, say, Neil Young\u2019s as a singer-songwriter\u2019s adjunct. 1<\/p>\n

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Lou Reed’s guitar was an important adjunct voice to his art. Courtesy Billboard<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019ll otherwise come off as too hagiographic?<\/p>\n

He needn\u2019t worry. His praise and criticism read largely as astute and he often qualifies by saying it\u2019s his opinion or taste choice. And he dutifully acknowledges his predecessors: especially Reed biographer Anthony DeCurtis, and \u201cdean-of-critics\u201d Robert Christgau. So, he\u2019s a knowledgeable and humbly likeable guide who educated me in the substantial depths of Reed\u2019s extensive catalog. His appreciation of the ground-breaking Velvet Underground as a musical band is especially enlightening.<\/p>\n

However, I wanted a bit more courage of convictions. He says the title song of Street Hassle<\/em> \u201cwas Reed\u2019s most deliberate attempt at a masterpiece to that point.\u201d His detailed description almost<\/em> amounts to an argument for \u201cmasterpiece.\u201d Along with his comments, I\u2019d call \u201cHassle\u201d a masterpiece. The extended cello motif beautifully weaves together an 11-minute, three-movement suite, an urban tragedy: the first movement \u201cWaltzing Matilda,\u201d is romantic, the second, \u201cStreet Hassle,\u201d cold-eyed about fatal \u201cbad luck,\u201d the third, \u201cSlipaway,\u201d a wrenchingly authentic cry over lost love. Using (uncredited) Bruce Springsteen\u2019s husky voice to extend the chilling second movement feels brilliant, as a contrasting sort of monotone witness, which allows Reed\u2019s voice the drama of spilling his heart in the last movement. Plus, Reed\u2019s use of the phrase \u201cslip away\u201d takes on three very different meanings in each segment. Yeah, masterpiece, worth rehearing repeatedly.<\/p>\n

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Lou Reed and “The Banana Album” that made him famous as a cult figure, at least. Courtesy Newsweek<\/em><\/p>\n

Higgins does fine justice to the career-launching \u201cHeroin\u201d from 1967\u2019s The Velvet Underground & Nico<\/em>, the album that secured the band\u2019s fame. Rock music never had (nor has since) a more laceratingly honest and audaciously immersive evocation of drug addiction. And delusional: \u201cand I feel just like Jesus\u2019 son.\u201d Higgins narrates the song\u2019s tell-tale form: \u201c \u2018Heroin\u2019 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\u2019s electric viola drones throughout, until it shatters into shrieks during the final rush.\u201d For me, a stone masterpiece, revealing early Reed\u2019s courageous genius.<\/p>\n

At times Higgins does go out on interesting limbs, asserting that Mott the Hoople\u2019s take on \u201cSweet Jane\u201d on All The Young Dudes<\/em> is the best version of a signature Reed song. However, he then extolls The Cowboy Junkies\u2019 far more tender rendition of \u201cJane,\u201d so you have your pick of several recommended interpretations, another valuable critic\u2019s task of digging through the music catalog. One provocatively bouncing limb he hits too timidly: He could\u2019ve praised the potency of the song \u201cSex with Your Parents (Motherfucker), Part II\u201d on Set the Twilight Reeling,<\/em> which is a laugh-out-loud skewering of hypocritical right-wing holier-than-thous. More controversy over it would’ve been something to see.<\/p>\n

As DeCurtis reported, Laurie Anderson\u2019s tribute to her spouse in Rolling Stone<\/em> for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is extraordinary, eloquent and fascinating though she says \u201che was kind, he was hilarious, he was never cynical.\u201d<\/p>\n

She must\u2019ve cured him of that unless he was way misunderstood at times. And it\u2019s amazing that Anderson apparently, in his eyes, was a woman \u201cof a thousand faces,\u201d whom he wanted to marry, as referenced in \u201cTrade In\u201d on Twilight<\/em>. Given that desire\u2019s impossibility she must\u2019ve been a miracle soul mate. Over years before, Reed did unforgivable things to people he loved and treated sweetly just as quickly.<\/p>\n

Anderson knew his badness, or of it, but their love lasted for 21 years until his death.<\/p>\n

Also, I think the title song of Twilight<\/em> hardly \u201cstrains for profundity,\u201d as Higgins says. In a simple arrangement, it\u2019s about learning to let go of regrets, accept himself \u201cas the new found man\u201d and \u201cset the twilight reeling.\u201d It may be too poetical for some but it takes plenty for anyone, especially this complex and troubled, to accept himself.<\/p>\n

I understand the new found man as the man in the historical \u201cnew found land\u201d ie: America. Like his image of Anderson, it\u2019s a bit self-mythologizing but also humblingly honest. It\u2019s also self-absolution, but saying as much to us. That\u2019s all very Lou Reed, to me. The album\u2019s most telling, acidic and profound song is \u201cNYC Man,\u201d with Oliver Lake\u2019s lovely horn arrangement. It\u2019s much more confessional than the title song, so Reed\u2019s not really hiding behind his poetry, even if its dense, literary text is Dylanesque.<\/p>\n

Among the book\u2019s distinctive features is \u201cChildren of The Velvet Underground,\u201d persuasively surveying the many artists influenced by Reed\u2019s path-forging group, such as David Bowie, Jonathan Richman, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Yo La Tengo, and Milwaukee\u2019s Violent Femmes.<\/p>\n

Another group of valuable features (especially for iPod users) involves Higgins combing through the repertoire to come up with \u201cOne Hour with Lou Reed\u201d in the 1960s (The Velvet Underground era) and likewise through the \u201890s, by choosing exemplary songs of each decade.<\/p>\n

Three of his selected songs for \u201cThe \u201890s and beyond\u201d are from Magic and Loss<\/em>, an album serving as a nakedly poetic elegy to the agonizing cancer death of singer-songwriter Doc Pomus, seemingly the father figure in Reed\u2019s life. Among the album\u2019s numerous luminous moments Reed likens radiation treatment to \u201cThe Sword of Damocles hanging over your heard,\u201d giving the man\u2019s death mythical resonance. Higgins however, asserts that Magic and Loss<\/em> 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 \u201cA Day in the Life\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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Lou Reed and spouse Laurie Anderson. Courtesy Medium<\/em><\/p>\n

Reed\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, 2003), choked with notable actor-reciters and guest artists. To be sure, this was Lou Reed\u2019s Poe, nobody else’s. As Melville said, \u201cIt is better to fail at originality than to succeed at imitation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Higgins\u2019s valuable book expands the lens of perspective in our experience of our best songwriters portraying and illuminating America.<\/p>\n

____________<\/p>\n

* 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,<\/em> at Boswell, with a live interview with Journal-Sentinel<\/em> music writer Piet Levy:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/youtu.be\/kUdP2I-f7K4?si=Uje371AqePKLh0N0<\/a><\/p>\n

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  1. Higgins delves into the underappreciated significance of Reed\u2019s guitar playing. One of his nifty sidebar features is \u201cOne Hour with Lou Reed and his guitar,\u201d listing ten songs that showcase his guitar work. The list includes the live version of \u201cHeroin\u201d from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live,<\/em> which Higgins suggests is his second favorite VU album after their debut album (known colloquially as \u201cThe Banana Album\u201d).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[366,2510,2500,2493,2487,2488,474,2501,50,2508,1295,1696,2496,143,2497,2503,2514,174,2507,2498,475,2505,2517,2515,1813,2492,218,2516,2502,2504,2494,2499,2511,2509,2490,2491,637,2512,2495,2265,259,2513,2489,2506],"class_list":["post-16295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com","tag-herman-melville","tag-a-day-in-the-life","tag-all-the-young-dudes","tag-anthony-decurtis","tag-boh-dylan","tag-brian-wilson","tag-bruce-springsteen","tag-cowboy-junkies","tag-david-bowie","tag-doc-pomus","tag-don-cherry","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-heroin","tag-jim-higgins","tag-john-cale","tag-jonathan-richman","tag-laurie-anderson","tag-lou-reed","tag-magic-and-loss","tag-mott-the-hoople","tag-neil-young","tag-nick-cave","tag-nyc-man","tag-piet-levy","tag-robert-christgau","tag-robert-quine","tag-rolling-stone","tag-set-the-twilight-reeling","tag-sex-with-your-parents","tag-sonic-youth","tag-street-hassle","tag-sweet-jane","tag-sweet-wild-and-vicious-listening-to-lou-reed-and-the-velvet-underground","tag-sword-of-damocles","tag-the-bells","tag-the-blue-mask","tag-the-milwaukee-journal-sentinel","tag-the-raven","tag-the-velvet-undergroud-nico","tag-the-violent-femmes","tag-townes-van-zandt","tag-trouser-press","tag-wisconsin-literary-luminaries-from-laura-ingalls-wilder-to-ayad-akhtar","tag-yo-la-tengo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-4eP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16295"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16314,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16295\/revisions\/16314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}