LOU REED RCA

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND LIVE AT MAX'S KANSAS CITY COTILLION

The Velvet Underground were a great American band who never quite became a “success” in the standard sense, and even though most of the crucial former members are not into solo careers, there were reasons why the band remained as relatively obscure as they did, and they are reasons that perhaps have more to do with the nature of Lou Reed, John Cale and the others in the band than with any lack of comprehension or taste on the part of the public.

The Velvets were basically a cult group, which means that they were not particularly commercial and had a hard-core coterie of fans who heard them in a way that other people perhaps did not. They always said that they wanted to be rich and famous, but never went out of their way to attain these goals, and Lou Reed, who did most of the group’s writing, preserved a certain idiosyncratic approach to his music even though he could and did write the most universal type of material imaginable. Even though anybody should have been able to hear a song like “Candy Says” or “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” people didn’t care to or get the opportunity, because for every one of those there was a “Murder Mystery” or “Sister Ray” that not anybody could hear, unfortunately, so the Velvets ultimately lost a wide following because their initial avantgarde stance had stereotyped them as some form of wierdo act even though they insisted they just wanted to rock.

Well, they were always loved in New York, anyway, and incredibly enough Atlantic has finally seen fit to release tapes of their legendary summer-long gig at the perhaps more legendary Max’s Kansas City in their home town. And since it’s already becoming apparent that the Max’s name is gorina be part of the draw for this release, a few words should be said about that notorious dive. It was the avant-garde restaurant for a time, catering as it did to the decadent, deviate underworlds that find a murky home in Gotham. Homosexuals and junkies run riot there on weeknights, and tourists are hereby warned to steer clear of the men’s room unless your idea of a nice vacation in the big city is being gangraped by six speedfreak transvestites with sequined dildos while a greaser in shades and a big black trenchcoat jumps out from his place behind the toilet stall with a banzai shriek and plunges a hypo loaded with smack through your tweed sleeve and into your arm without waiting for consent since he assumes just like all the other habitues with Bob Dylan that “One should never be where one does not belong.” This place is so bad that William Burroughs himself walked in, took one look around and said: “My Gawd, what a collection of slimy crustacean excrescences! Gives me the willies just standin’ here; I’m gettin’ outa here, me, and hightailing it back to Tangeir!” And then he turned, spat on the floor, and walked out the door, never to let it darken him again, leaving in his wake a startled Allen Ginsberg who had thought to please him by turning him onto a friendly bar.

So if Willy B. gets paranoid there, you know it must be one swell hotspot. The Velvets made history there, playing to a crowd of the most degenerated, fin-de-siecle individuals that could be dredged up from the lofts of New York, including a wide array of famous authors, artists and pro football players. Brigid Polk was there, and taped a few sets on an utterly ordinary cassette player. Incredibly enough, Atlantic has bought some of those tapes and put out this album, which sounds like it was recorded on just what it was recorded on, and is consequently being marketed at a reduced price a’la Jamming With Edward.

If you ever cared at all about the Velvet Underground, you should have this record. Despite the poorness of the reproduction (and it’s really no worse than most bootlegs) the excitement comes through on such Velvet classics as “I’m Waiting For the Man,” “Beginning To See the Light,” and “Sweet Jane.” The vocal harmonics are rather ragged, but Lou always comes through with the rock ‘n’ sock just when you need it and the instrumental work, especially on the first side, is dashingly, rousingly good. Not only that, but they even divided it into a Rockin’ Side and a Dreamy Side.

Finally, as a special bonus to all you proto-decadents out there or the curious who’d just like an inside peek at the evil demimonde you’ve heard so much about, the album has, as one Atlantic man put it, “a real Max’s feel.” No, that doesn’t mean that some indeterminate creature will be running its hand up your leg as you’re listening to it and you can hear cocks being sucked in the background, but it does mean that since it was recorded on or under a table near the bandstand you can hear (between songs) people ordering double Pernod s and badgering each other for a few more Tuinals. Even if Lou Reed does put something of a damper on the party atmosphere by responding to requests for “Heroin” with a flat refusal.

Well, that’s the last we’re ever going to hear from the Velvet Underground, but Lou Reed rolls on, with a solo album for a new record company, made with a new producer and new musicians playing with him and even a new environment (England) to record in*

The result is a complex record with stretches of brilliance and unresolved problems. One thing is for sure: no matter what Richard Robinson or Lou or anybody else close to it thinks, this is not at all a commercial album. Probably not even as commercial, in fact, as any of the Velvets albums. I don’t think there are any hit singles on it, and I’m certain that anybody never reached by the music of the Velvets is not going to turn into a fan because of this album. Because the idiosyncratic quality which was always a part of Lou’s work dominates much of it, and there are going to be plenty of people who’ll find parts of it puzzling, to say the least, even if they like it.

None of that is to say that it is a bad album, just that it’s hardly going to set the world on fire. Especially considering the other factors besides Lou at work here. The first is the cover, which is the most horrendously tacky thing I’ve seen in some time. Mentioning the fact that Lou’s name is spelled out in twined garlands of scarlet posies with hummingbirds twittering around them ought to give you some idea of just about how godawful it is. I don’t know who thought this thing was the way to grab the attention of a kid in a store, but that cover will kill sales.

Also, the production isn’t particulary good — Richard Robinson is probably better suited to punk-rock groups like Hadcamore Brick than this sort of thing, because his hand is rather unsteady here. The overall sound varies, and tends at times to be rather thin just when it should be full and dense, as in “Love Makes You Feel.” And it’s also clear that Lou hasn’t really found the right musicians to work with yet. What he got here is a bunch of technically competent British cats from the session circuit and various bands, and their ability to handle the music varies drastically from track to track. On “Ride Into the Sun” or “Wild Child” they’re all but perfect, but then you come up against “Walk & Talk It”, which is the worst thing on the album and sounds more than a little like the studio band that accompanied Little Richard on the anemic version of “Brown Sugar” included in his last album. And I don’t know who Clem Cattini is, but he’s not much-of a drummer. Inept, in fact.

Now that I’ve told you enough to make you dread the thought of purchasing this album, I’m going to have to try to convince you that you should buy it after all, because its strengths really do outweigh its deficiencies, it’s one of the most fascinating records released this year, and endlessly listenable once you get into it. The technical problems ultimately mean nothing in the light of a whole set of new Lou Reed songs which are not only individually great but impressive by their very diversity. Lou doesn’t look back too often, and almost never repeats himself. And that’s a rare quality indeed.

There are three songs here which are so great that they stand out from the rest of the record by virtue of grabbing you first time out and sucking you in with their drive and humor. “I Can’t Stand It” is a great opening cut with, a deep, throbbing guitar line, the kind of rhythmic pulsation that the Velvets excelled at and which you don’t really hear anywhere else but in this music. The lyrics sound as if they were adlibbed on the spot, which is how probably 30 to 40% of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time came about. “It’s hard bein’ a man/Livin’ in a garbage pail/My landlady called me up/She tried to hit me with a mop/I can’t stand it any more-more! I But if Baby would just come back/It’d be all right.” The way he slurs and all but tosses off the “all right,” with a rusty sort of inflection that speaks as much of his experience as Rod Stewart’s rasp and is a Lou Reed trademark.

The second Event of the set if “Lisa Says,” a song about the pain of being an American adolescent with romantic notions thwarted by inexperience and a wracking shyness. It connects generically with “Sweet Jane,” in a way, and “Candy Says” absolutely, as well as a couple of poems Lou published in Fusion called “Betty” and I forget what. I don’t think we’ve had a writer, in or out of pop music, who’s more sensitive to what it means to be young and awkward, constricted by growing pains, stuck in between as Alice Cooper said, except that this is so much more real than “18”, with a sense of compassion not found in much rock today.

“Lisa Says” is also falling in love for the first time, and being unable to meet it with anything but the helpless acquiescence of inexperience. The pace of the song is hesitant, tentative and tender; and the arrangement is just about perfect in its appropriateness, restrained to let the words and Lou’s remarkable delivery come to thte fore: “Lisa says on a night like this/It’d be so nice if you gave me a great big kiss/ ... Lisa says that, ‘Baby, if you stick your tongue in my ear/Then the scene around here will become very clear’/ Lisa says, ‘Hey, doncha be a little baby...

The album’s third immediate gasser is “Wild Child,” which has much of that acerbically witty and rhythmically distinctive Old Velvets sound, and is another case where you get the distinct impression he didn’t spend ten tortuous years putting it down on paper. The lyrics are a series of random encounters with various first-named friends of Lou’s, conversations mundane enough to fit perfectly into a rock ‘n’ roll song and realistically absurd enough to catch you every time: “I was talkin’ to Betty about her auditions, how they made ’er ill/The life of the theatre is certainly fraught with many spills and chills/But she come down after some wine/Which is what happens most of the time/Then we sat and botn spoke in rhyme, till we spoke of the rain/Awww, it’s always back to the rain ...”

Lou’s sense of humor, which always seemed to inform even the most savagely negative of the early Velvet stuff, occasionally gets sidetracked into some oddball alleys.

“Berlin” is a rather fey song which seems to be some kind of parody of background music for tetes-a-tetes in supperclubs. “In Berlin by the wall/You were five foot ten inches tall/It was very nice/Candlelight and Dubonnet on ice/We were in a small cafe/We could hear the guitars play/It was very nice,” and then he speaks the next line in the familiar rusty voice: “Oh honey, it was paradise.” Yeah, sure. Edith Piaf lie ain’t, and with its fine arrangement it seems almost like some overelaborate musical joke. Right in the middle of all this mock-Romanticism come the lines “Don’t forget/Hire the vet/We haven’t had that much fun yet.” I finally figured it related somehow to that U.S. Government TV commercial which cuts back and forth between this remarkably dogfaced lad slogging through the mud of Vietnam with a rifle in his mitt and shambling down the streets of Yourtown, USA in his uniform, looking for a job and not having much success at it from the look of doltish gloom on his mug. What could be more perverse than taking a song about “candlelight and Dubonnet on ice” and dropping that right into the middle of it? If somebody like the Bonzo Dog Band can consistently be so off-the-wall that their fans love them for precisely that, then I suppose this makes some kind of absurd sense too, but if Lou gets very far into this kinda stuff he may find himself just about as popular as the Bonzos, i.e., about half as popular as the Velvet Underground was. There’s also the question of why does everybody need to be perverse now, instead of simple and direct, as if willfull pointlessness constituted some kind of statement in itself? And I’m damned if I know the answer, unless it be that I’m analyzing all this more than the people who made it ever did or would.

Which suggests that it’s time to pack up and let you discover the rest of the album for yourself. I could mention the mysterious Phil Spector quote in “Goin’ Down,” the J. Arthur Rank gong in “Ocean,” even the jam towards the end of “Love Makes You Feel” which sounds like a cross between Bo Diddley and the one in “Don’t Doubt Yourself, Babe” on the first Byrds album (there are direct quotes from other songs all over this album), but I’ve gotta leave some bait for the buyer.

I’ve said it often enough to qualify as a pest, but when it comes to songwriters for our time, Lou Reed is the best. He has peers, but is one of whom there is no one better than, as Barbra Streisand once said while imitating Bob Dylan in Funny Girl. Lou is every bit as talented and versatile as Dylan, and at this point I prefer him because he’s still a bit of a mere American kid trying to grow up, it shows in his music, while I have this feeling Dylan may just be an old fart by now, posing around in demin jackets and modeling harmonica holders. Now if only Lou’s newfound love and sense of optimism don’t turn him sappy, and if his songs don’t on the other hand get so fucking in-joke oblique a la “Berlin” that only a Velvet Undergroundologist could figure them out, and the sidemen work out a little better next time, and RCA puts a nice picture of him with name and title in simple lettering on the cover, and he continues to walk it like he mostly talks it ... well, he may just be the Sage of the Seventies. Or at least a bit more visible.