Lou Reed Book Launch

 

Sun Ra | Egypt '71

Sun Ra
Egypt '71
London, UK: Strut, 2020
5 LP box set
Edition of 600

Last week Record Store Day released a list of forthcoming recordings, which includes this 5 LP set reissue, with unreleased material, which will be available on August 29th.

"In December 1971, Sun Ra made an impromptu trip to Egypt with his Arkestra, his first time in the country. Hosted by drummer Salah Ragab and Goethe Institute's Hartmut Geerken, they performed hastily arranged concerts at Ballon Theatre in Cairo and at Geerken's house in Heliopolis. The performances emerged on three LPs released by Ra during the '70s: 'Horizon', 'Nidhamu' and 'Dark Myth Visitation Equation'. These three LPs now receive their first reissue on vinyl alongside two LPs of previously unreleased recordings. Rare photos and extensive new liner notes by Geerken and Paul Griffiths complete a definitive package celebrating Sun Ra's iconic trip to the Land of Ra. "

- Press release

Other releases include Philip Glass, Brian Eno,  and the first vinyl reissue of the Lou Reed/John Cale Andy Warhol tribute Songs for Drella. 

See the full list here. 

Laurie Anderson on Stephen Colbert Show tonight

"Hello Friends,

This is just a last-minute email announcement to let you know that Laurie will be appearing on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert this evening on CBS at 11:35pm Eastern.  She will be performing her concert for dogs.

Looking forward to tonight!"

- Laurie Anderson website promotional email

"Laurie Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. Anderson wrote and directed the 2015 documentary “Heart of a Dog”, which reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, and her beloved dog. “Heart of a Dog” received its digital premiere with The Criterion Collectionʼs release of the film in the United States on March 1st for an exclusive engagement on iTunes and VUDU, through March 29th. “Heart of a Dog” includes musical excerpts from several of her pieces, such as “The Lake”, “Flow”, “Beautiful Pea Green Boat”, and “Rhumba Club.” On March 4th, 5th, and 6th, Anderson performed her new multimedia work, “Language of the Future: Letters to Jack” at The Kennedy Center, which features stories about love and power, the artist’s own correspondence with JFK, and a few of Anderson’s classic stories. She will perform “Letters to Jack” again in St. Paul, MN on March 19th."

- From the "Better Know a Guest" section of The Late Show's website

Holly Woodlawn, RIP

Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side,
Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.

- Lou Reed

Holly Woodlawn died yesterday of brain and liver cancer. Born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl, Woodlawn was a transgender Puerto Rican actress and Andy Warhol superstar who appeared in his films Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1972).

Laurie Anderson | The Heart of a Dog

Laurie Anderson's new feature film is about love, death and grief, but her partner of 21 years, Lou Reed, who died almost two years ago, has less than three minutes of screen time in the entire piece. He is seen very briefly in some home movie footage at a beach, he is credited as playing a doctor in a hospital scene (though I didn't notice it) and the film ends on a still photograph of him tussling with their dog, while his song "Turning Time Around" plays over the closing credits. It's the dog - a rat terrier named Lolabelle - whose life and death is recounted in the film. And Anderson's mother, who she is not certain if she loved or not.

Although The Heart of a Dog features drawings and animation from the artist, filmed re-enactments, and both recent home video shot on iPhones and old family home movies filmed on super8, the project never loses sight of Anderson's vocal storytelling as its core. Anderson also composed the score, but it is rarely front and centre (the one exception is perhaps the film's main misstep).

Anderson's previous feature, Home of the Brave, celebrates its 30th anniversary next year. That film documented a full band live concert, in support of the artist's Mister Heartbreak LP. Here the film itself is the performance, and it can be sent out into the world in lieu of a new tour. Anderson, though, is hardly seen throughout the 75-minute film.

"I guess I learned you should never take that many pictures of yourself," she said of her experience as both the director and star of Home of the Brave. "Once, in the editing, we were on a freeze frame of a close-up of me and I thought I should shoot myself if I ever had to look at me again," she told the LA Times in 1990.  

Chris Marker is thanked in the credits of The Heart of a Dog, and his filmmaking style is clearly an influence on her "essay-poem" approach. Anderson's melodic narration centres around the death of her pet, but also manages to touch on some of her ongoing concerns: homeland security, the surveillance state, 9/11, Buddhism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc.

After 9/11, and the hysteria that followed, Anderson decided to get out of Manhattan and visit California with her dog. She has read that dogs can typically understand 500 words. Her project was to ascertain which. But running around in open fields together was too much fun, and she lost track of her goal, and just enjoyed the vacation. At one point hawks began circling, presumably mistaking the dog for a rabbit, or some easier form of prey. They swooped down a few times, before re-thinking their attack and flying away. Anderson recounts seeing a strange look in her dog's eye as a result of this, as if he had just became aware that danger may now also come from the sky - the very anxiety the New York neighbours she left behind were coming to grips with.

A few years later, when Lolabelle becomes blind, the terrier is only comfortable running along the shoreline, where there's the safety of knowing that there are no obstacles. Anderson describes her as running at full speed into the darkness. Later, the dog's trainer decides that it should learn to play piano. We are shown raw footage of the terrier playing along to records, and eventually performing at benefit concerts.

Remarkably, for someone whose work is primarily about storytelling, the film includes two unfamiliar and incredible stories that Anderson has not told before in her work, both about jumping into water. In the first, she miscalculates her ability to do a backflip into a pool, despite never having done one before. She hits the concrete side and his hospitalized with a broken back for two years. Here she learns not to trust adults, when the doctor tells her that she will never walk again. The skepticism doesn't come later, when she eventually does regain her ability to walk, but immediately. She thought it was a crazy notion and dismissed it out of hand, as a twelve-year old.

The second story involves taking her younger brothers on a frozen river late at night, to see the moon. The ice cracks and both boys, one in a stroller, fall through. She dives in to save them, one at a time, and carries their freezing bodies back home. Expecting to be admonished for jeopardizing their lives, she is instead praised by her grateful mother, who was unaware that she was such a competent swimmer. Anderson remembers the moment as the one time when she felt unequivocal love from her mother.

The dog's love is more unconditional, but her grief in dealing with the loss is no less rich or complicated. And while there are a few scenes where it felt clear that the sorrow she was expressing was about her late husband, he is never mentioned by name. It's as if the only way to truly express her grief was to get a few steps removed, or perhaps the acknowledgement that the topic was too painful to ever address in her work.

For Anderson's written tribute to Reed, read her Rolling Stone obituary, here.

The Heart Of A Dog will be released on October 21st. It played last night and this morning at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it can be seen one more time: next Sunday morning. Click here to reserve tickets.

RRR-100

RRRecords is a record store and label ran by Ron Lessard, out of Lowell, Massachusetts. The label were the first to focus exclusively on 'noise', publishing Merzbow's first American vinyl release in the early 80’s (and then later issuing a 5 cassette box set). The have also released projects by Alan Licht, Jon Oswald, Kevin Shields, Nurse with Wound and dozens of others. The label reissued one of my favourite artist records ever: Pop Record by Roger Miller (of Mission of Burma, not the easy-listening crooner).

Other than their elaborate (and often unique) packaging, they are perhaps best known for a series of influential compilation recordings. The first was released in the early nineties, and includes tracks by Jim O’Rourke, John Wiggins, Controlled Bleeding, Ron Rice, Merzbow and, ah, ninety-five others. On a single 7” single.

Each artist is represented with a single lock-groove.

Lock grooves are typically silent, designed to prevent the turntable tonearm from drifting into the paper label at the centre of the disk. Eventually it was released that the final groove was usable record real estate. The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper LP originally contained looped audio after the extended fade of the crashed E Major piano chord that closes A Day in The Life. The collaged backwards studio chatter was briefly controversial as fans mistakingly took the indecipherable dialogue to be “we will fuck you like supermen...we will fuck you like supermen...”

Later in the same year The Who employed a lock-groove to close their Who Sell Out record, and the technique reappears every few years, from bands such as The Arcade Fire, Abba, Godspeed You Black Emperor, The Dead Kennedys, Stereolab and Sonic Youth. Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief closes with an endless loop of a man in a record store listening booth saying "Sorry Squire, I scratched the record”. I suppose they were the forerunner to DVD Easter Eggs.

A year before Sgt Pepper, John Cale released Loop as his contribution to the Andy Warhol curated issue of Aspen Magazine. Considerably more experimental than even the more difficult of songs that he and Lou Reed were releasing as The Velvet Underground, the piece consists of seven and a half minutes of feedback, followed by a lock-groove, extending the assault. Reed’s much celebrated (and much despised, see review below) Metal Machine Music nine years would build on this approach, including the use of the lock-groove.

Other sound artists who employed the technique include Boyd Rice, Lee Ranaldo and The Hafler Trio. RRRecords upped the ante by turning every groove on the disk (50 per side) into a lock-groove. This is surely the first Various Artists 7" to feature a hundred contributors, if not the last.

The edition size is unclear, though a second edition (with the above blue xerox cover) was limited to three hundred unnumbered copies.


[Various]
RRR-100
Lowell, USA: RRRecords, 1993
7” 45 rpm single
Edition size unknown

Laurie Anderson on Lou Reed

If last week's Lou Reed obituary by his partner Laurie Anderson felt a little underwhelming, from someone so adept with language, this longer tribute, from the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone, is considerably more satisfying:



I met Lou in Munich, not New York. It was 1992, and we were both playing in John Zorn's Kristallnacht festival commemorating the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, which marked the beginning of the Holocaust. I remember looking at the rattled expressions on the customs officials' faces as a constant stream of Zorn's musicians came through customs all wearing bright red RHYTHM AND JEWS! T-shirts.

John wanted us all to meet one another and play with one another, as opposed to the usual "move-'em-in-and-out" festival mode. That was why Lou asked me to read something with his band. I did, and it was loud and intense and lots of fun. After the show, Lou said, "You did that exactly the way I do it!" Why he needed me to do what he could easily do was unclear, but this was definitely meant as a compliment.

I liked him right away, but I was surprised he didn't have an English accent. For some reason I thought the Velvet Underground were British, and I had only a vague idea what they did. (I know, I know.) I was from a different world. And all the worlds in New York around then – the fashion world, the art world, the literary world, the rock world, the financial world – were pretty provincial. Somewhat disdainful. Not yet wired together.

As it turned out, Lou and I didn't live far from each other in New York, and after the festival Lou suggested getting together. I think he liked it when I said, "Yes! Absolutely! I'm on tour, but when I get back – let's see, about four months from now – let's definitely get together." This went on for a while, and finally he asked if I wanted to go to the Audio Engineering Society Convention. I said I was going anyway and would meet him in Microphones. The AES Convention is the greatest and biggest place to geek out on new equipment, and we spent a happy afternoon looking at amps and cables and shop-talking electronics. I had no idea this was meant to be a date, but when we went for coffee after that, he said, "Would you like to see a movie?" Sure. "And then after that, dinner?" OK. "And then we can take a walk?" "Um . . ." From then on we were never really apart.

Lou and I played music together, became best friends and then soul mates, traveled, listened to and criticized each other's work, studied things together (butterfly hunting, meditation, kayaking). We made up ridiculous jokes; stopped smoking 20 times; fought; learned to hold our breath underwater; went to Africa; sang opera in elevators; made friends with unlikely people; followed each other on tour when we could; got a sweet piano-playing dog; shared a house that was separate from our own places; protected and loved each other. We were always seeing a lot of art and music and plays and shows, and I watched as he loved and appreciated other artists and musicians. He was always so generous. He knew how hard it was to do. We loved our life in the West Village and our friends; and in all, we did the best we could do.

Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. 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.

It was spring in 2008 when I was walking down a road in California feeling sorry for myself and talking on my cell with Lou. "There are so many things I've never done that I wanted to do," I said.

"Like what?"

"You know, I never learned German, I never studied physics, I never got married."

"Why don't we get married?" he asked. "I'll meet you halfway. I'll come to Colorado. How about tomorrow?"

"Um – don't you think tomorrow is too soon?"

"No, I don't."

And so the next day, we met in Boulder, Colorado, and got married in a friend's backyard on a Saturday, wearing our old Saturday clothes, and when I had to do a show right after the ceremony, it was OK with Lou. (Musicians being married is sort of like lawyers being married. When you say, "Gee, I have to work in the studio till three tonight" – or cancel all your plans to finish the case – you pretty much know what that means and you don't necessarily hit the ceiling.)

I guess there are lots of ways to get married. Some people marry someone they hardly know – which can work out, too. When you marry your best friend of many years, there should be another name for it. But the thing that surprised me about getting married 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: "Ninety percent of the 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, history, courage, mystery.

Lou was sick for the last couple of years, first from treatments of interferon, a vile but sometimes effective series of injections that treats hepatitis C and comes with lots of nasty side effects. Then he developed liver cancer, topped off with advancing diabetes. We got good at hospitals. He learned everything about the diseases, and treatments. He kept doing tai chi every day for two hours, plus photography, books, recordings, his radio show with Hal Willner and many other projects. He loved his friends, and called, texted, e-mailed when he couldn't be with them. We tried to understand and apply things our teacher Mingyur Rinpoche said – especially hard ones like, "You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad."

Last spring, at the last minute, he received a liver transplant, which seemed to work perfectly, and he almost instantly regained his health and energy. Then that, too, began to fail, and there was no way out. But when the doctor said, "That's it. We have no more options," the only part of that Lou heard was "options" – he didn't give up until the last half-hour of his life, when he suddenly accepted it – all at once and completely. We were at home – I'd gotten him out of the hospital a few days before – and even though he was extremely weak, he insisted on going out into the bright morning light.

As meditators, we had prepared for this – how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart and out through the head. I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

At the moment, I have only the greatest happiness and I am so proud of the way he lived and died, of his incredible power and grace.

I'm sure he will come to me in my dreams and will seem to be alive again. And I am suddenly standing here by myself stunned and grateful. How strange, exciting and miraculous that we can change each other so much, love each other so much through our words and music and our real lives.

- Laurie Anderson, Rolling Stone

For Lou Reed

For Lou Reed

October 31, 2013 - 2:15pm

To our neighbors:

What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.

Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.

Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!

Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.

— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend


(from the East Hampton Star today)

Lou Reed | Parkett Insert

From issue number 65 of Parkett magazine (2002), the artist's insert by Lou Reed:


http://www.parkettart.com/downloadable/download/sample/sample_id/176

Lou Reed, RIP

There's a bit of magic in everything
and then some loss 
to even things out
some loss to even things out


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0jHPRO98lM





Update: Twitter tributes:


"He was a master" - David Bowie

"I met Lou Reed and told him he gave me tinnitus at a concert in 1989 that never went away and it was worth it. Dirty Blvd. Love to Lou." — Judd Apatow.

"The great & amazing Lou Reed has died my condolences 2 his wife Laurie Anderson.Lou was1of a kind & this colored girl still says dededede..." — Whoopi Goldberg.

"One of the greatest artists of our time." — Ricky Gervais.

"New York lost one of our greatest gifts today." —Russell Simmons.

"My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day." - Salman Rushdie

"We are all timebound, but today, with the loss of liberating Lou, life is a pigsty." - Morrissey

"The world has lost a fine songwriter and poet…I’ve lost my ‘school-yard buddy’." - John Cale

ACBA: John Cale's Honi Soit by Andy Warhol

Songs For Drella, Lou Reed and John Cale's first reunion record after the Velvets (twenty years after the Velvets) is a memorial for Andy Warhol, initiated at the suggestion of Julian Schnabel. First performed in 1989, the album included a six and a half minute track called A Dream, spoken by Cale in the first person of Warhol. The lyrics seem to be verbatim transcripts, the bulk of the which are presumably taken from Warhol's diaries. Along with candid lines like "I hate Lou Reed", the lyrics include mention of Cale's 1981 LP Honi Soit:

"And then I saw John Cale. And he's been looking really great. He's been coming by the office to exercise with me...it was good seeing John, I did a cover for him, but I did in black and white and he changed it to color. It would have been worth more if he'd left it my way but you can never tell any body anything, I've leaned that."

It was not uncommon for Warhol to be dissatisfied with the end results of album covers he had designed. He had a similar complaint about the Rolling Stones' Love You Live, four years prior. From his diary: "After we left the Carlyle I told Jerry I thought Mick had ruined the Love You Live cover I did for them by writing all over it—it's his handwriting, and he wrote so big. The kids who buy the album would have a good piece of art if he hadn't spoiled it."

In an interview with Rolling Stone from October 1996 John Cale told a story suggesting Warhol had also proposed title a name for his then untitled LP:

"I had this album, and I said, "I don't have a title, and I don't have a cover." And he said [imitates Warhol], "Oh... John. I'm very close friends with Yoko. Why don't you have your picture taken with Yoko and call it JOHN AND YOKO?", a somewhat macabre suggestion, given that John Lennon had just recently been shot dead in front of Yoko Ono.

Cale elaborated further in February 2002 in an interview for the Guardian:

"I went to see him to ask for a cover. He said, 'I'll get Yoko Ono to pose naked with you and we'll call it John and Yoko.'"

In his autobiography What's Welsh For Zen, Cale recounts that the John & Yoko title came from Fred Hughes, Warhol's business manager, who noted that Cale needed a "big, big seller". Warhol's response to the proposed title was "Ooh, John, it would sell thousands".

Also in the autobiography, Cale also confesses regret over his colourization of the cover, noting that "Andy's eye was surer, and when I saw the finished product I had to admit I'd made a mistake".

The album version of A Dream can be found here, the live version here, Cale performing it solo here and Lou Reed solo here.