PUTTING ON THE STYLE TO COVER UP THE AGONY

Dick Fountain

Friends, #18, November 13, 1970

WHILE SEARCHING FOR AN OPENING TO THIS PIECE, A DISTURBING CHUNK of rock history crept out of the garbage bin that I call my memory. Namely, “Putting on the Agony, Putting on the Style.” As you might expect from such a song, the psychology is all wrong. So to introduce New York I’m going to modify it, so: “Putting on the Style to Cover Up the Agony.” In Rock Music particularly Style is hard to define (if anyone wants to) and even harder to locate geographically. Partly because for a long time everybody has been listening to American records. So all these guys from all over make records but at our end they all come out of one record shop and come out kinda shuffled. Sure you can tie down musical styles pretty well. (In fact, Rolling Stone has raised this endeavor to the level of an art form, i.e., an industry). For example, the Chicago Blues Style, the earlier Memphis–New Orleans Blues Style, the Sun Sound, the Nashville Style, etc. But if you want to go further than just analyzing here are the symptoms of a disease (to wit; capitalism). Of course, some people swallow their distaste and make a living out of it. The point of all this is to show that the mass music termed “rock” consists of different styles; not only musically different but reflecting different ways of living. In particular, to talk about New York and the Velvet Underground. I’ve been digging the Velvets for quite a time and then I noticed that their music on record was different from that of the Seekers, the Jefferson Airplane and, say, Blood, Sweat and Tears, to choose three at random. So far, so good. Profound critical insights. Now having served a stretch in New York I think I can place those differences a bit more accurately, and present my findings for your education and titillation.

So here I was in New York, and with no bread. So I have to get a job. (A defeat in itself.) I get a job as a busboy in Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant of some repute in Union Square.

Take a walk, down Union Square,
You never know what you’re gonna find there.
You gotta run, run, run, run, etc.

Nature of clientele: rich hippies, rich artists, rich fags, fag hippies, hippie artists, arty fags, underground film stars, underground artists, underground rich hippie artists, rock stars and their dogs, rich underground arty dogs, etc.

Nature of busboy: one who cleans up tables, lays new tablecloths, serves coffee, trips over rock stars’ fucking Great Danes and spills coffee on rich arty underground floor. Wears long hair and Mickey Mouse t-shirt.

To set the scene: 1 A.M., low ceiling, dark rooms faintly lit by red lights on the tables. Crowded with long hair, patent leather, buckskin, lurex tights. Air filled with cries of “Too Much! Dynamite! Darling, you can’t mean . . . ! Eat shit! Look it’s Warren! Over here Taylor! I said sour fucking cream and chives! Hey, that bastard hasn’t paid!” The vibes run somewhere between a mental institution and a film set.

Jackie and Candy Darling sweep in fluttering false eyelashes and being charming all over the place.

In the back room ten or so of Wendy Ashol’s “Factory” discuss heatedly a Shakespeare sonnet (!), of which none of them can recite a line. Taylor Mode, of rich underground arty film fame, awakes suddenly as a waitress treads on his drooping eyelid. Behind on the wall, a large pink and purple photoscreen print of a girl getting fucked with her knees up to her ears, smiling sweetly. (For years I thought Burroughs has a lurid imagination. He cheated. He wrote it all down from life.) The waitresses rush around in black, harassed. They come in two sorts, hard and soft. The soft ones often crack up.

The busboys come in three sorts. Fast ones who come in on speed. Slow ones who come in on smack. Spaced out ones who smoke grass in the Gents. I went in straight once or twice.

To continue, impatient reader, after I’ve been working a week it’s announced that a group is going to play in the upstairs room four nights a week for two months. The Velvet Underground playing their first New York gig in three years.

To digress a little. Some people claim that in their third album the Velvets went soft, after the hardness of “Sister Ray,” “Heroin,” “Waiting for the Man.” Well I had my doubts, but now to find out.

First evening, a fair crowd, $2.50 to get in. The band comes on and tunes up for about 30 minutes. It consists of Lou Reed on lead in skin tight black trousers and t-shirt, very thin and pale with an amazingly butch hair cut. Sterling Morrison looking hippy on second lead. Doug who looks like Bob Dylan on Blonde on Blonde on bass, and Doug’s bruvver on drums (sitting in for Maureen Tucker who was out of action for the summer). Doug’s bruvver has long, long blond hair.

The tuning up finished, Lou goes to the mike and starts the thing. “Good evening, we’re the Velvet Underground. We’d like to start with a tune we recorded a few years back to get a hit for a poor pop artist.” Sniggers from the audience.

Blat! Straight into “I’m Waiting for the Man.” Very, very heavy. Much more musicianly than the old records (tricky bass and drums, very tight, been together a while). So much for the soft theory.

They sound something like the old Velvets, the old Who and Creedence Clearwater stuck together. Hard rock with the trademark of Lou Reed’s Bo Diddley strumming. Maureen Tucker’s stethoscopic drumming isn’t there, but Doug’s bruvver swings a lot more.

The evening continues with “White Light/White Heat” at pain threshold volume and rocking like fuck. Lou Reed, hand on hip, hand waving, head nodding with a little sneer, makes Jagger look like Val Doonican.

Then Doug sings “I’m Set Free” from the third album, starting soft but building up to Hendrix proportions.

To cut it short, I was knocked out; I came half expecting to be disappointed and left shattered.

Their act was a mixture of oldies: “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (Doug and Lou singing hoarse harmonies), “Some Kinds of Love,” “Beginning to See the Light,” “Candy Says,” and a long Bo Diddley hypnotic version of “What Goes On” that ends up like a dirt track race; a sprinkling of new songs, the best being: “Sweet Jane,” “A Story Song” and “Cool It Down,” which is a somewhat ambiguous warning:

Cool it down, you going too fast
Cool it down, don’t you want it to last?

And a sicky called “The Golden Age of Movies” about a decrepit film star. The chorus would be sentimental:

You’re over the hill right now,
and looking for love.

If it were not for the broad grin with which it is delivered.

The rich arty underground hippie audience danced into a stupor throughout the second set until the last number, a slow country harmony heavy number called “Sweet Nothing”:

Say a word for old Jimmy Brown
he ain’t got nothing at all,
threw the poor boy right out on the street
they even took the shoes right off his feet
Oh sweet nothing he ain’t got nothing at all . . .

Repeat for several verses substituting different names. Build up to climax with Doug playing lead sounding like Delaney and Bonnie’s old lead. Nice stuff.

Tumultuous applause and cries of More! Best fucking band in New York! Best fucking band in America ya fuck! (This from two kids with pupils like full stops.)

Then a chant of Heroin, Heroin, Heroin! Great reluctance and embarrassment on the stand. Final capitulation. “This is an old song.” Subtly altered lyrics.

I know just where I’m going
(What’s this!)
I’m going to try for the kingdom if I can
(Surely not a God freak!)
’Cos it makes me feel like I’m a man
(Wait for it)
When I put a spike into my vein . . .
(Absolute silence—heavy breathing)

A little smoother than the record, a little less menacing, but pretty fucking powerful. The show breaks up in silence, no more encores, snippets of hushed conversation. “Where can we cop at this time.” I start to rearrange the tables.

The next month I got to know a lot more about New York, working four nights a week, getting robbed at knife point on my way home by Jimmy Brown and his friends who ain’t got nothing at all.

And a visit to Co-op City in the Bronx, a stonehenge circle of 70 [story] tower blocks with shops, cinemas, a hospital, schools, everything necessary for a comfortable living death. Too far from anywhere to walk. So ten story car parks form the outer circle. Met a bunch of freaks in the middle sitting on the plastic grass. (It’s washable and it lasts forever, they call it Astro Turf. There’s one thing however, it does burn.) Playing guitars and singing “Down by the River” they greeted us like they’d been on a desert island, which they were. “Got any smack?” “Any downs?” “The cat who was pushin’ here got busted with two ounces of smack. Watch the pig over there, he can spot new faces!” Went up on the roof for a smoke, left in a hurry, with a small shred of comfort. If freaks can emerge and survive in Co-op City they can do it anywhere. The end may be in sight.

Meeting 18 year old school-girls who do up two bags of Meth a day.

Seeing dead guys OD’d and pigs prodding them with their night sticks.

One night an ex-cook throws a wrought iron chair through the plate-glass window of Max’s and tries to cut the owner’s throat with a splinter of glass. I feel great sympathy for this bold act of insurrection. Turns out though, he’s raving about how they stole his left ball and half an inch of his cock after putting drugs in his food. Not far off at that.

Chat to members of the band now and again but can’t face an “interview.” (That lump of Rolling Stone reportage above took a lot of living with.) Sterling Morrison said, “Yes and no” when asked if they still do dope. Cryptic. Yes, they were sorry they had never made it to England. Apparently years ago before Ashol discovered them, Miles of I.T. wanted to bring them over for a show. But hassles and being hassles it had to be done through the business and the business turned out to be Brian Epstein, who died inconveniently before the show could be arranged. And they never made it. And Jim Callaghan missed a chance to shine unequaled since the deportation of Lenny Bruce.

Their fourth album is due out soon, they seemed pleased with it a lot of their new old-time rock and roll stuff on it.

Altogether cooled down a lot from the early smack speed smashed scenes:

Cool it down, don’t you want to last.

But that doesn’t make them a new Plastic Ono Band by any means, the edges are still very sharp. One night Lou Reed gets talkative (usually sits in a booth and drinks beer in between sets) and tells how he’d been in the business for x years when they met Warhol, and talks of clubs in the old days where he had to bus tables between sets to make his bread. Tells us how during tonight’s set two sailors in uniform came in and met two girls and danced and left and he thought that was nice. So did I.

Going from this land and to that, wearing a sailor’s suit and cap.

Fight Love Pollution (venereal disease)—inscription on a New York match box

So back to the beginning, to the question of style. The Velvet Underground have got a reputation as a hard band, a sick band, a badvibes band (leaving aside the question of the third album for rock musicologist historian academic wankers to pick over). What is unsaid but implied is that this is an image they put on, a hype, a good gimmick, etc., like Dr. John and his phony voodoo or Black Sabbath or . . . need I name more. In fact it’s merely an honest description of the experience of most people living in the sickest city capitalism has so far spewed up. But more important it’s not far removed from the experience of lots of other people in London, Manchester, Paris, Rome, Detroit and even, dare I say it, San Francisco.

What makes the Velvets almost unique is that the scene they sprang from, i.e., an unashamedly decadent New York avant-garde art scene, has at least produced sufficient lucidity to describe this experience in some of the best (and most beautiful) songs in rock. (I say almost unique because Bob Dylan managed it before he became just another country station with nothing to turn off.)

Not that describing it changes anything. Not that the Velvets are revolutionaries (even now it’s fashionable to be a Volunteer).

They just want to be a rock band. And just write serious songs about things that happen. And sell records. And they just happen to be a little too intelligent to fall for all the cock about flowers in your hair and golden acid cities in the sky.

They are the only white blues band around. Not a white band that can play black blues. (There are two or three of those who are pretty fuckin’ good.) But a band that has invented a white blues.

’Cause when the smack begins to flow
then I really don’t care anymore about
all the tensions in this town and
all the politicians making crazy sounds and
everybody putting everybody down and
all the dead bodies piling up all around
and thank God that I’m not aware
and thank God that I just don’t care.

Just don’t care. Decadent detached and a bit cruel. But it is a solution of sorts to the problem of how not to die of boredom. It makes more sense than to pretend that there is no problem and that it’s all sweetness and “are you a Scorpio, man.” And it’s less treacherous than singing about revolution whilst raking in millions from your pacified audience.

One day when the Rock Machine has been smashed along with the rest of our chains, I’m going to remember a few of Lou Reed’s songs.