LOU REED: GOT MY EYES WIDE OPEN

Walter Hitesman

Vibrations, #5

Now that the Velvet Underground has all but dissolved or at least down to one original member and Leader Lou Reed is off to England to record a solo album — now what . . . Their first album the “banana” album was electric 1966. The second White Light/White Heat was electric/“hard” 1968. Third a turnaround - acoustic/ “soft” 1969/and the fourth and last Loaded was neoclassic rock and roll 1970. Bananaalbum is shared by three sensibilities — Reed’s, Cale’s and Nico’s. (Nico by the way left after this one and Cale after two and have since worked together.) The obvious differences are Cale the drone effect Nico reserve (both are European if that...) while Reed himself covers it all and then some having written or co written all the stuff. There are three separate types of material soft ballades (“Sunday Morning”) a New York city rock and roll out of Bringing It All Back Home (“There She Goes Again”) and the outright drone (“All Tomorrow’s Parties”). Of course “Heroin’”s the all time Velvet hit/set-piece and part of its success lies in the fact that it can be taken literally (Cale’s viola ill the rush itself). Not so “Sister Ray” 17 min. in length featured on their second album and one of the all time as they say long tracks ... It is the fusion of Cale and the New York Rock side of Reed. The music has a fundamental ground the drone in which surface-variations swim — the whole primal energy flow chart. This ability of the Velvets to remain constant sans any system (the Byrds from that other flatout town LA had one. LA a space metaphor anyway while NY’s rocket is the subway) this ability of the Velvets to remain constant sans any system required as Wayne McGuire observed “spirit, energy and nervous system.” The band’s ultimate transcendence if you will is in the exact opposite direction of a group like the Byrds — the Underground exerts a concentration/ pressure like a drill which to go anywhere has to remain in one spot. (To keep it up explains “Sister Ray” and even getting it on in the first place their limited output perhaps.) Of course the triumph of the band is that it was never merely repetitious altho that helped — Morrison and Tucker contributing classical concepts of their roles, Tucker on drums for instance committing not a noticeable roll if any over the face of the first three albums - a timekeeper period who during “Sister Ray” makes her transitions by simply bringing it up or letting it down — while Morrison, who used to do laps around Central Park, is a rhythm guitar-middleman of strength whose playing is straight up and down either for emphasis or to divide the rhythm or even carry the thrust. On “Sis” he runs the gamut and endures with Maureen. The essential physicality of the song and the Velvets resting on their back, the almost psychic sustainment Reed’s with Cale’s pure drone a formalized expression of it.

The title tune “White Light/White Heat” is an updated “Let’s Go to the Hop” a wildcatting number in which Reed talks New York City jive in the intervals and “1 Heard Her Call My Name” is “Waiting for the Man” from the first album all hopped up featuring a noletup guitar solo from Reed the implications of which according to Modern Lover Jonathan Richman have never been explored since but by Stooge Ron Asheton. The second album was made around the summer of love 1967 but it would be a disservice to Lou Reed to say that he was simply “right.” The band has always rather embodied reality rather than taking a stand on it and some things are real. Which is to say that in this context the Velvets whose first three album covers were in black and white (second one black and black) were not merely non pyskilldellic or however you spell it and it is to Reed’s credit too that he avoided on the other hand self-rightiousness or somekind of perverse Calvinistic thing. A word about production values. On the surface this album has a cruddy mix but the fact is it is a part of the sound of the record and inseperable from it original then and intrinsic. It’s great when you realize that White Light/White Heat is recorded worse than the 45 version of “Let’s Go to the Hop” and that is no mean feat. It is fitting too that a prime electric album like about close to 2/3’s of the way through “Sister Ray” the thing which sounds as if you were tuned to a radio station loudly but a bit off the beam and the whole thing anyway was awash in an all-pervasive wetblanket of distortion — suddenly stops as Reed’s guitar regurgitates out into a few growls before honing in on a razor thin beam which stops just short of Cale’s entrance on the viola. But that sound had seemed a “given” of “Sister Ray” and to suddenly be without it is not unlike say a racecar driver at the Indy 500 starting to slow down and suddenly having his car disappear from under him (why the band gives you those transition splinters to grasp). Or “Candy Says” which begins the next album and is quiet and drawn out and deliberate and the tone . . . has changed. What an amazing period in between — Candy, Ray. The mix is now rock clear and stark purposely lacking resonance like a Bresson film I’ve been told. Exemplified perhaps by Tucker’s lone cymbal smash in “I’m Set Free” which having no reverberation is all the more emphatic, tied to the action itself. “Candy” is the girl who hates her body and having to make the big decisions and the do-do-wahs at the end of the song are almost to sooth her. It is almost as if the remainder of the album were meant to help. The next song “What Goes On” upbeat and “Lady be good ... you know it’ll be all right.” Next “Some Kinda Love”: “The possibilities endless” and/but “Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision.” Followed by “Pale Blue Eyes,” an incrediably beautiful, obscure delienation of an affair. The side closes with “Jesus”: “Help me in my weakness . . . Help me find my proper place ...” Turn it over for Reed’s triptych of personal salvation (ya listin Candy?) in which his subtle command of tempo becomes obvious — (I’m) “Beginning to See the Light” which is not so much chugging as constantly revolving (and also happens to include the classic skitzo situation: “Here comes two of you/Which one will you choose?/One is black and one is blue/Don’t know just what to do”) proff of the pudding being the line “There are problems in these times but whooo - none of them are mine.” Followed by “I’m Set Free” . . . “and I’ve been bound . . . I’ve been blinded by pain/Now I can see/What in the world has happened to me.” The song peaks and subsides, builds and drops back with a gorgeous level guitar break midway through. Also a word about Velvet chorus work usually minimized but most effective when used like the chorus on “I Heard Her Call My Name” or here where Maureen says the word “pain” and Lou is joined on “I’m Set Free” — refrain by male stark open-throated singing. The Velvets never threw their rescources around. And thirdly the cryptic “That’s the Story of My Live” the entire lyric of which is “That’s the story of my life/That’s the difference between wrong and right/But Billy said both those words are dead” - this one done to a bouncy, plucky beat . . . Maureen sings the last song (as Candy?) “Afterhours”: “If you close the door the night could last forever/Leave the sunshine out and say hellow to never.” This record No. 3 is Reed’s word move. (Prior to that of “Heroin” was the soliloquy “Sister Ray” was the situation. The sailor from the former (“1 wish that I’d sailed the darken seas on a great clipper ship”) materializes in the latter (“he aims it at the sailor - and shoots him down dead on the floor”) to perish. Where Dylan, the other NY poet, went to Greenwich Village for words Reed stuck to the street (“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands/“Sister Ray”), and held adjectives in healthy contempt. Adjectives can be a dime a dozen. Dylan left the city with JW Harding and turned to myth while on the corresponding Velvet album No. 3 Reed keeps his city roots and writes in nonmythic terms - Candy being the only “made up” character on the album. Reed seems to be complex where Dylan is ambiguous - and sticks to New York playing music indigenous to the city rather than scenes there (like early folk). No. 3 turns out to be an incredibly sophisticated inner city folk/blues album. With Cale gone by No. 3 (replaced by Dougie Yule) the obvious drone is gone but not the Velvet ability to sustain. Even Loaded has a deliberateness to it and the obvious (highly colored) surface variety can not obscure. And while Loaded has its share of problems, not the least of which is that Reed was in the process of leaving the band at the time, it is still a lot of fun, parodying incidently the Beatles, Fleetwoods, CCR and even Dylan (vocal to “Sweet Jane”). And “Rock & Roll’”s five year old heroine Jenny is perhaps but a budding Candy. On “Jane” Reed in one fell swoop deals with a theme Dylan has been fencesitting for years - that of identity and adjustment. Right off Reed establishes who he is (“I’m in a rock and roll band”), and is an outsider to the conventional young couple he subsequently describes. He feels no compulsion to either join them or put them down. Reed had opened the song “Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand,” and one can only assume he himself was finally shoving off to another city — London — to make his solo album. Watch for it.