The Wire

Give Them Enough Nope

The word 'no' crops up a great deal around Lou Reed. When I first sit down at his table in the New York meatpacking district brasserie where he's attending this morning's interview promoting his new double CD, The Raven, he's standing a few feet away, telling his publicist, "No, no, no no, no, no, no", to a potential photo shoot locale elsewhere in the restaurant. A good few 'no' anecdotes emerge during the interview, too. In 1979, Arista asks him to work some more on his LP The Bells after he hands it in - he says no. He asks another record company to reissue Metal Machine Music in Surround Sound in 2000 - they say no. He brings in a bunch of saxophonists to solo on a track on The Raven: the verdict on each of them? "No, no, no, no, nope, nope. Oh well." (The solo is eventually recorded by Ornette Coleman.) Not to mention the sleeve credits on Metal Machine Music: "No Synthesizers, no Arp, no Instruments?, No Panning, No Phasing, No." (Creem's review of the record was the word "NO" printed more than 800 times.) Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore once called Metal Machine Music "the most positive negative record", and I guess Lou Reed must be the most positive negative artist - because during our conversation the word 'fun' comes up just as often as the word 'no'. Of Metal Machine Music he says, "People think I didn't really like it, that I did it to get out of a contract - Jesus. People can't figure out how you could like that. Or how you could like that and do "I'll Be Your Mirror". Or "Perfect Day", or "Satellite Of Love", or "Walk On The Wild Side". Why not? And The Raven is one huge why not, it's like the why not of all why nots."

Running for more than two hours, The Raven is Reed's longest and most sprawling work to date. He and coproducer Hal Willner have intertwined new (and two old) Reed songs, abetted by cameo vocal performances by David Bowie, Laurie Anderson and The Blind Boys Of Alabama, with poetry and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, Amanda Plummer, Elizabeth Ashley, Fisher Stevens and Kate Volk. Reed and his group provide the musical backing with help from trumpeter Steve Bernstein and many of his downtown New York, post-Lounge Lizards accomplices, such as Doug Wieselman, Paul Shapiro and Jane Scarpantoni. The man who put "I'll Be Your Mirror", a mellifluous lovesong to Nico, next to the forbidding, disembodied poetics of "The Black Angel's Death Song" on The Velvet Underground And Nico; who followed The Velvets' unforgettably assaultive White Light/White Heat with the definitively understated third LP, The Velvet Underground; the surprise glam hit Transformer with the unremittingly morose song cycle Berlin; or a deliberately mediocre hit LP, Sally Can't Dance, with the commercially suicidal, monolithic feedback opus Metal Machine Music, is certainly no stranger to outlandish juxtaposition. The Raven's first 15 minutes alone encompass "The Conqueror Worm", recited by Dafoe over a heavily processed, vertiginous single note wobbling across multiple octaves; an "Overture" with frantic reed blowing from Wieselman and a free jazzstyle rush of descending power chords; a brief musing on "Old Poe" wishing to meet his younger self set against clean, wistful guitar lines; a spoken "Prologue" with cello accompaniment; and a typical Reed rocker titled "Edgar Allan Poe". There's a new version of Transformer's "Perfect Day" sung by Antony (of The Johnsons, whose debut album appeared on David Tibet's Durtro label), which redraws the tune into a tremulous plaint, and two songs which address aging in a shockingly candid way. First, there's "Change":

"Your hair falling out/Your ass starts to sag/Your balls shrivel up in their sac." Then there's "Who Am I?": "A younger man now getting old/I have to wonder what the rest of life will hold... I wonder how much life I can take... I hate that I need air to breathe/I'd like to leave this body and be free." Compare that with Candy Darling's quandary, "I've come to hate my body/And all that it requires in this world", from the old Velvets staple, "Candy Says".
On opposite, extreme ends of the spectrum are "Balloon", a childlike miniature in the tradition of "I'm Sticking With You" sung by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and "Fire Music", a two and a half minute sonic holocaust that takes Metal Machine Music into the new century, and must be heard to be believed.

I comment to Reed on the album's range. "Yeah, you put 'em next to each other, it's like, whoah, who did that?" he replies. "At the time it didn't seem like that because it seemed logical. X happens so you do Y, but that gets blocked so you go over here, something lucky happens and this opens up, ah! OK, you're in there, but later on if you look at the whole thing... you know what I'm saying? Holy shit. Wow. Even a few months ago there were still some little tiny decisions to make, putting a track code next to a speech, separating it from a song so you could isolate it, little things like that when you're going over it yet again for the two billionth time. Willner's a lot better at that than I am, 'cause he remembers things and I don't. We were saying, 'My God, how did this even get done, look at all of this', because Willner had to put together the credits. It did take a seriously long time in serious ways... so many different areas."

But there doesn't appear to be any grand scheme in structuring the whole shebang. ""The Bed" [originally from 1973's Berlin] was kind of this perfect lead-in with "House Of Usher"," Reed counters, "with houses and flames and all of this... the "Balloon" song always ended act one [The Raven began life as a theatrical piece]. Why? I don't know. I mean I can't give you a logical reason for it, it's just that it did, and it always did, it was always supposed to be there. Having the McGarrigles do it, that's Willner, that's a Willner idea, those amazing harmonies they did, those kind of things, that's where they all come from. Instinct. Or because I like it that way. I mean, I could think of reasons - I used to in interviews - but it's all after the fact, make-believe reasons: 'Oh yeah, we did that because actually there is a balloon mentioned in [Poe's tale] "The Cask Of Amontillado", we're referring back to it' - no there isn't [laughs]. It was because of rhythm, really. It was time to have a little relief from some of the other things that had preceded it."

Hal Willner had previously organised Closed On Account Of Rabies, a 1997 double CD of Edgar Allan Poe's work interpreted by the likes of Iggy Pop, Diamanda Galas, Christopher Walken, Marianne Faithful, Gabriel Byrne and Dr John, and he also worked on Reed's Ecstasy in 2000. Reed has always cited Poe as an influence, not only on himself but on two of his other literary heroes, Hubert Selby Jr and William S Burroughs. Indeed, Poe's macabre corpus seems to linger over much of Reed's work: the eerie vocal approximations of hospital machinery in White Light/White Heat's "Lady Godiva's Operation" (echoed in many of The Raven's sound effects) and the "long dead and gone" woman in "I Heard Her Call My Name" (à la "Annabel Lee" or "The Raven"'s Lenore), to the mutterings of madness, castles, the night tide and "the curse that haunts our family" in the Loaded outtake "Ocean", to The Blue Mask's paranoid lament "Waves Of Fear", to Magic & Loss's tale of selfinflicted disfigurement, "Harry's Circumcision".

The Raven album originated in collaboration with theatre director Robert Wilson as a two act play, POEtry, that began performances in Europe in 2000. The CD was adapted and massively overhauled to the point where, as Reed explains, "We needed a copy of the script. Now that would seem simple enough, right, but it had to be rewritten and rewritten and rewritten for the CD - specifically to be heard, not to be seen. Things were then moved around with Logic [editing software], so now the script isn't the same anymore: that's got to be moved too. But we weren't worrying about that - who cared about that, because it had been done. They said it, it's on tape, and now we're over here. Now here's the final version, where's the script? It's in the box over there, they saved it, and that is where the script is, and the cues... Is it in order? No, it's not in order, so what do you do? Willner tried to put it in some kind of an order. At some point, if there really is a need to see that text, someone's going to have to transcribe that whole thing and go over it again. Things were rewritten to be an audio experience. In the original play you'd see something happening, it didn't have to be explained or someone comment on it, it was right there in front of you, here that's not true. So you would hear things happen, which really is more fun because your imagination comes up with some amazing things, and we were having a lot of fun. Willner has a huge collection of sound effects from old radio shows, things like this, not to mention all the sound effects libraries they have now, CD-ROMs and CDs, plus what we made ourselves, electronically and combining things or using some of my favourite machines linked together, because we wanted our own effects, really, including door knocks, thunder, whirlwind effects. Willner actually had a whirlwind effect - 'Get away from the window, there's a whirlwind!' [Laughs] I love this kind of stuff. It's not like an old radio show: this is way more 3D, the imaging, where things are placed, that is a lot of fun. Things sneaking up behind you - someone's going to appear here, what is it? Or it will just be a sound that's suggestive of an emotion more than anything, then boom, it's gone, there's another one, and it's moving."
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The Raven harks back to Metal Machine Music not only for the simple reason that it's an uncompromising double set, but as a statement of Reed's continuing fascination with sound technology. During his time with The Velvets, his use of a heavily customised Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar, outfitted with built-in pre-amp, tremolo unit and two extra pickups, or of the hand-held Vox distortion box that's responsible for the now classic feedback-laced guitar solo on "I Heard Her Call My Name", is rarely noted, but this attention to the apparatus had much to do with the group's lasting impact. Metal Machine Music took this interest in gadgetry for noise's sake to the ultimate level. The guitar feedback went through three tremolo units and was multitracked, while Reed manipulated the reverb, tone and EQ controls on the tape recorder and varied the tape speed. Significantly, the mix isn't balanced stereo - the volume of each channel is different, and the sound often drops down or even out entirely, only to come bursting in again even louder than before (if you've never heard it on headphones, you're missing half the fun). "On The Raven there's a track called "A Thousand Departed Friends" which is a perfect example of my idea of mixing, which is imbalanced stereo, it's all over the place," he declares. "I can't believe people want to just balance things, it's so insane. On this record - all through it if you pay attention - there's imbalance... not only imbalance, but zooming in to hear one instrument all of a sudden.

"Why? Why not?" he continues, laughing. "It's like a movie and you're directing - I want you to hear this. Here, got it OK, now we'll go over here. That's why. I really wanted to get into that with songs too: not balanced. See, the thing's not compressed like regular records are compressed. We did not compress this, so the record has a lot of volume differences. And also if you bother to listen on any kind of a system, it'll move forward. "Fire Music" in particular is a real example of that. That was a real thrill, no kidding around, and it kills me that you can put something like that on a little CD, something that has that kind of potency, but it's there. But, if you compress it, you will absolutely defeat it, completely and totally, you'll squash it and you won't hear it. That's why people sometimes really like bootleg tapes - they're unbalanced, they're not compressed, of course you like it. Then they put it on a CD and they compress it. You just undid what you liked about it. Put it out as it was: this is the way it was."
"Fire Music" is The Raven's most direct link to Metal Machine Music. ""Fire Music" was always supposed to be there, all the way back to the original play, but it was different," explains Reed. "And I still had to do a fire music that had the power of fire music, and this is two days after 9/11 - which I was here to witness. I watched it from my building, and I'd been fooling around with these programs, Logic, a whole bunch of machines. It's in real time, and there's no overdubs. I had wanted to pick up where Metal Machine left off, but more. I had a lot of techs over to go over certain things I wanted programs to do, that I could do on guitar. With tape recorders we had different speeds. You're recording over here, you can't record at X speed and then play it at Y speed, doesn't even exist anymore, you'd have to go back to old machine or go frame by frame. I said, no, no no. And then it changes - how can I do it, if I don't want the key to change? So I hooked up a bunch of guitar effects. I've been working with guitar effects with keyboards, and being able to set them a certain way, and then record it with Logic, have a bunch of things going on at once in real time, that's what "Fire Music" is."

Two other factors helped to fuel Reed's enthusiasm for creating this particular track: the remastered reissue of Metal Machine Music in 2000, and the German New Music ensemble Zeitkratzer's performance of Ulrich Krieger's transcription of the piece. "Zeitkratzer said, 'Can we transcribe this and perform it?' I said it can't be done. They said, 'Let us try, we'll send you a sample', and they did and it was fantastic. And accurate. I know that record, I know people think I don't, but I do. I know every little dot in there. So I appeared with them [at the premiere in Berlin] in the fourth section of it, I came out with a guitar and these guys had actually transcribed all these harmonics. I don't know how they did it. It was astonishing to hear an hour's worth of that. Live. I did three or four minutes, where my guitar just completely replaces them, it's awesome, one guitar replaces the whole thing.

"There's this English genius, Pete Cornish, who builds a lot of machines for me, who built some things where I could do some of that live in real time. I really can, no bullshit, this can be proved, it's documented. Not that anyone cares, but I'm just telling you that one of my goals as a guitar player, I wanted to able to do that, without having to go in and layer three more. Which gets to "Fire Music": I didn't want to have to go in and layer it, I wanted it played in real time: real time is real time. It's not a loop; it's real time, and it lasts as long as I can do it [laughs]. Where it ran out, I couldn't keep it up anymore, and that was enough for that. Pete built pedals for me where I could do these things. The orchestra disappears, so the sound had better be big and better be something else. And it does. And then I stop and they replace me. It's so cool."

The combination of two or three chord songs with an obsessive pursuit of electronic extension has made Reed the patron saint of drone rock since The Velvet Underground's nascent days. "Once I got into feedback and having a sustained note doing that, I started playing around with that," he says. "And again, different kinds of machines can really open all those harmonics. On "Like A Possum" [from Ecstasy], that's using a thing Pete Cornish built called a death pedal. The amount of harmonics you get out of that, the thickness of the note - there's the drug of choice. I don't know if people can hear that, but I can. That drone, that can cover a lot of territory. Start out with a Fender Blackface [amplifier] overloaded, then you move on to the Jim Kelly with power amp distortion, then you move on from there, keeping those sounds in mind, because how can you replicate that? That's how I end up with Peter Cornish where I am now, that sound.

"So that drone where you can spread those harmonics all around, this huge wave at you, there's a lot of places it can go, and you can also just break it. You can break it in a way that's OK, it's like a normal right hand turn, or you can break it where it's jolting, like the bottom fell out of an elevator or something. It's fun. Fun with sound. Out of an electric guitar, you can really get some things going, tune all the strings to the same note." That's true of the guitar feeding back on Metal Machine Music, as well as "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "Rock And Roll". And on The Raven's "Guardian Angel" too. "I have this seven string guitar built by Carl Thomson," he attests. "We open with it and close with it. It's the hugest guitar I've ever heard in my life, we gave it the full centre stage. The bottom note on that guitar is piano length, so it's, like, whoah, listen to that drone chord."

Although he namechecked La Monte Young on Metal Machine Music, Reed was tuning all the strings on his guitar to one note all the way back to "The Ostrich", the pre-Velvets pseudo-dance craze single he cut around 1965 under the name The Primitives during his tenure as an in-house songwriter at Pickwick Records. The 'touring line-up' of The Primitives boasted Young's onetime associates Tony Conrad and John Cale, as well as 'earth artist' Walter De Maria. Conrad has said that he was amazed to discover Reed's guitar tuning method mirrored that of The Theater Of Eternal Music, which existed at the same time, unknown to Reed. Cale must have also noticed that the first songs Reed showed him, "Waiting For My Man" and "Heroin", were repetitive I-IV chord progressions, the same one The Theater Of Eternal Music was stretching out over unheard of durations in their 'dream music' improvisation "B Flat Dorian Blues". While the early Velvets included many players in Young's orbit (Cale, Angus MacLise, even Henry Flynt, who substituted for Cale on violin for a few shows at the Dom and took a couple of guitar lessons from Reed), and Reed says that Cale and Billy Linich (aka Billy Name) exposed him to Young's music at the time, his interest in the drone probably goes back to the bagpipe records Sterling Morrison heard him blasting out of his Syracuse dorm room.
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Reed's affinity for Ornette Coleman's harmolodic jazz also goes back to his college days. Back in the early 60s, Reed named the college literary journal he edited Lonely Woman Quarterly, after the track from Coleman's 1959 LP The Shape Of Jazz To Come. On The Raven, he finally got to work with the veteran saxophonist. "I used to follow Ornette around in the 60s," he admits. "I couldn't afford to get into the clubs he played, but I would listen through the grating to him when he was with Billy Higgins, Charlie Haden and Don Cherry. And then I wanted to play guitar like him, after I heard Free Jazz - wow. If you asked me my favourite song I'd have to say "Lonely Woman", because probably not a day goes by I don't hear that in my head. So finally working with Ornette was a big deal. I'd love to put out an album of the seven versions [of the R&B-inflected "Guilty"] he did. 'This one's with the drums, this one's with the guitar, this is with your voice, this is with the bass, this with the other guitar, this is with everybody.' The version we picked was a more accessible version. It was neck and neck with another version that Willner called the 'clear the room version': only true believers will stay for this. It was easy for him to do it. Easy. I was in tears. People were saying it's a bitch of a key for a sax player - not for Ornette it wasn't. For him it was nothing."

This provides an interesting parallel with Reed's 1979 LP The Bells, which has a song co-written by Don Cherry and whose title track features Cherry's trumpet (and was also inspired by the Poe work of the same name). "What a character Don was, what a musician," Reed declares. "Once you get into that, you can't just play with anybody, not when you hear that. Granted, very few people are that good, I accept that. Anytime I run across somebody like that, I try to get as much of that as I can. Don could do more with three notes than most people can do with a thousand. He knew the sax player with these guys I was working with, they knew him, they backed him up sometimes. He came to Germany where I was doing The Bells. He says, 'Hey Lou, we all come from the pussy!' I said, 'Thanks for sharing that, Don, that's great... OK...' But we had a lot of fun from there, once we got over this... hello. He played the Bottom Line with us, played out in LA with us, there's recordings around somewhere of him doing "Walk On The Wild Side" with us. You can hear it in your head the minute I say it, you ought to be able to hear the kind of trumpet Don would play on it... such an amazing player. God, makes it looks so easy - it's just a few notes. But it's that instrument, the sound will break your heart."

Lasting over nine minutes on the original LP, "The Bells" is one of Reed's most experimental and overlooked tracks. For the first four minutes, Cherry's minor-key licks dance over a lush pedal point created by Reed and co's guitar and bass synthesizers, while thundering percussion lurks just below the surface. The vocals come in over a byzantine series of chords that transmute the menacing Gothic drone into an art song reminiscent of Scott Walker. It closes with a massive drum crescendo that gives way to an odd, blurry noise section (reminiscent of the ending of "The Cask" on The Raven), then a couple more keyboard chords reappear just in time for an abrupt fade out. "One of my favourite, favourite tracks," Reed affirms. "I love that track, I just love it. That was done live too, and it's a spontaneous lyric, which I used to do a lot in the studio [for example, on Coney Island Baby]. There's something so emotional about that track, there's Don's plaintive trumpet... God. Amazing." When I mention "Melody Laughter", the 30 minute drone opus that The Velvets would play at Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, Reed grins. "Oh, I love that, I love those things. But with the right musicians. Wow. That's the kind of thing, since you brought it up, that gave me an interest in wider, longer experience. I mean you just start out with that, and then you can go from there. That's why The Raven starts out the way it does, and actually, I hadn't even thought of that before. "The Bells" starts out that way too. It's the same ethos behind the overture in The Raven."
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I keep thinking about something Reed said about The Raven: "It's not compressed, and not balanced. There's so much fun to be had the other way. It's like uncharted territory or something." You could really say the same thing about Reed's entire oeuvre, and not in the technical sense. He wasn't balancing "The Murder Mystery" with "Afterhours", Transformer with Berlin, or Metal Machine Music with Coney Island Baby, because they don't balance out. He was exploring imbalance as a master plan. If his 1970 essay about the deaths of Brian Epstein, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Janis Joplin, "Fallen Knight & Fallen Ladies", from No One Waved Goodbye, a 1973 book edited by Robert Somma and styled as a "casualty report on rock 'n' roll", is any indication, it was also a survival tactic and a method of control. "Hendrix... depended on his audience to take him anywhere but where he was," he wrote. "But, as he insisted on taking their trip rather than taking them on his, he was ultimately forced to face a vision of himself which screamed clown. One cannot get to the top and switch masks. The lover demands consistency, and unless you've established variance as your norm a priori you will be called an adulterer. You can accept illogic as logic if it's presented all the time, but not when sprung as a ripe pomegranate in a grove of erstwhile peaches."

Bob Dylan and Neil Young have followed a similar strategy. For Young to follow his mellow, Country-tinged hit LP Harvest with the raucous live LP Time Fades Away from a tour he hated is certainly the move of a maverick, but nowhere near as radical as the convolutions of Reed's career. Young's fascinating shifts are, ultimately, compressed - after all, he cancelled the release of his Homegrown album in the 70s because it was "too dark". Reed has never set or followed any such limits, whether it was singing about heroin and S&M back when even The Stones were writing songs about mother's little helper and spending the night together, or for that matter, singing about your ass sagging and your balls shrivelling up at the age of 60.

Something else he said about Ornette's playing on "Guilty" sticks with me too: "We put a total take down, because his thoughts are really long. You can't say, 'Well, I like that thing he did, drop this and we'll put that here', y'know, and edit it, you can't do that with him. Take him for what he is, take the idea for what it is, it's one long idea, you can't interfere with it. Which actually sits very well with me, 'cause I have a long idea too." That certainly says something about Reed's penchant for extended, one-take, droning, improvised tracks like "Sister Ray" or "Like A Possum", but also about his 35 years as a musician. The scope of The Velvet Underground And Nico and The Raven, and everything in between, is not merely for variety's sake, whatever his predilection for the inverse, obverse, perverse or reverse - it's one long idea. Don't compress it, don't interfere with it, take it for what it is, take him for what he is.

© The Wire 2008