Totally Shuffled- Lou Reed

Bit of a sad day, hearing about the death of Lou Reed. 

This is what I wrote about the Velvets in "Totally Shuffled".

RIP Lou.

December 15^th

The Velvet Underground-Jesus-The Velvet Underground

I remember that the first Velvet Underground record I bought was a double LP compilation called “Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground Featuring Nico”. Not the most inspiring album title ever, but I suppose that it did what it was supposed to. The Nico bit was a bit of a misnomer, as out of the 17 tracks on the two records, there were only two with Nico’s warbling on there-“Femme Fatale”and “All Tomorrow’s Parties”-so in that sense it was a pretty much a good buy. Nico is a bit of a Zen artist to me; less is more. Overall, the compilation was a fairly wide, but shallow representation of The Velvet Underground’s work-it had tracks from all of their studio albums that had been issued at the time of its release in 1970. It must have been quite a popular album because it was still in print when I got it in 1980 or so. But it just contained what you could call the “obvious” tracks-“Sister Ray”, “Heroin”, “Pale Blue Eyes”, “Venus in Furs”, “Sunday Morning” etc. It also had a terrible sleeve-Warhol’s Coke bottle paintings in a 3 x 3 grid and all the gatefold had was one massive copy of part of the Coke painting. The whole thing smacked of MGM slapping something out in 1970 as The Velvet’s broke up and cashing in on whatever Warhol was up to at the time. But as I said, it was a start.

For a long time this was the only Velvet Underground record I had and it seemed to do it for me. I liked the noise of “Heroin” and “Sister Ray” and the wistfulness of “Sunday Morning” and “Pale Blue Eyes”, but overall it wasn’t anything special. I’d play it every so often, but ended up skipping most of the tracks. It all felt a bit disjointed and incoherent, and I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about them.

However, on one crisp and clear autumn morning-and this would have been about 1986 or so-I  woke up with a bit of a cold and generally felt a bit crap. Instead of doing the sensible thing of having a Lemsip and staying in bed, I decided to try to shake it off by going into town and having a wander around. (Man flu? I laughed in the face of man flu back then). It was a day off work as well and I didn’t want to spend it moping around the house. This was in the day well before the advent of the internet, so the thought of spending a day coughing, sneezing and spluttering while wasting the time browsing away was unimaginable. So, I jumped the bus into town, got a cup of tea and wandered around the record shops for the want of anything better to do. It was on a bit of a whim therefore that I picked up the third Velvet Underground album and headed back home with it, a box of Kleenex, a jar of Vick’s Vaporub and a packet of Lemsip. Lou Reed would have been proud.

I collapsed on the bed when I got in, but not before brewing up a Lemsip and sticking the album on. Now maybe it was because I felt so knackered and full of cold or maybe because there was something about the weather-although it was cold, it was one of those autumn days when it was bright and the sun streamed through the window casting a warming light on the room-but something happened as that album spun away on the turntable. I didn’t move from the bed and just lay on my back as the tracks played. My head was swimming and I was falling in and out of sleep, yet it all made sense. This was the Velvet Underground album that I should have bought in the first place.    

Totally Shuffled UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA

Totally Shuffled US:http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA

John Peel

 What I wrote about John Peel-extracted from "Totally Shuffled" 

August 13^th

“Do you ever have a night when you don’t dream about The Fall?”

(This is clearly not a song or a tune on the iPod but it is something that is on there and has just shuffled up. It’s shown as “unknown track-unknown artist” and lasts only a couple of seconds. It’s far from being an unknown artist to me-it’s a brief audio snippet of John Peel, and I guess it was him introducing a track from The Fall. I don’t know when it was broadcast or what track it referred to, but for those brief few seconds it’s like being transported back in time).

There are two ways I could use this track. I could either write about The Fall or John Peel. Or both, I suppose. Whilst I am surprised that I’ve got all the way through to mid-August without a Fall track shuffling up, I’m sure that there will be one along before the year is out. Like buses-there’ll be another one in a minute. This clip of Peel may be the only time that it shows up, so I think I’ll go with that. I haven’t done an analysis of what I’ve written so far (I’ve not even re-read any of it or done any editing), but I think that John Peel must have been mentioned at least once a week since I started this back in January, so it’s fairly obvious that John Peel was a very significant influence upon my musical tastes. 

I can’t remember when exactly I started listening to Peel, although I’m fairly sure that I didn’t regularly tune into his show back in the seventies, when he’d play the whole of a Pink Floyd album in one go. I think that I must have started tuning in about 76/77 during the advent of punk. From then on in every Monday to Thursday, 10 until midnight, was reserved for hearing a whole panoply of music. I genuinely believe that without John Peel’s influence I wouldn’t have learned to love all the different sorts of music that I do now. Blues, doo-wop, reggae, soul-even Pink Floyd. I think that I may have still got into The Fall, but I can’t really be sure. Listening to John Peel and his clear love of music, beneath his sometimes grumpy exterior, was the best education I ever had. I know this sounds completely over-the-top and something I think he would have snorted derisorily at, but I think my attitudes to so many things, and not only music, would have turned out very differently if I’d never heard his broadcasts. I probably wouldn’t have been as into music as much as I am and wouldn’t have considered approaching it with the same regard that he did. I would have either been not bothered about music (like those people who when you ask them what sort of music do they like they respond with a “oh, all sorts really”- and you know they have a couple of Simply Red albums and a CD by Adele), or overly serious about it all.

 I cannot think of any other presenter apart from John Peel, who just loved music for what it made him feel rather than if it was fashionable or not, and didn’t see that playing records on the radio just as an interruption for “his public” from hearing his wonderful voice. If I hadn’t got into music through his broadcasts, then I wouldn’t have read the books that I have or watched the films I have seen. I wouldn’t have developed the attitude to popular culture that I’ve got. I certainly wouldn’t have ever have gone to Glastonbury in 2010 if I hadn’t  heard John Peel enthusing about it, and therefore by extension not written about it which, in turn, has led to writing this. If Glastonbury was good enough for him, then I knew it would be ok for me. I wouldn’t have followed Liverpool Football Club in the manner I have. (I really wish he’d still been around for the Champions League Final in 2005).

I don’t want to end this by sounding too maudlin, but every time I listen to an old recording of one of his shows I still find it hard to believe that he’s gone. There’s a certain sadness that my children will never have the chance to hear him playing the wrong record at the wrong speed live- but I’ve still got this recording and many others to treasure- and they know that he was a great man. 

Totally Shuffled:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA 

 

Totally Shuffled extract Blind Alfred Reed

June 21^st

Blind Alfred Reed-Explosion in the Fairmount Mines- How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?

Not a comedy record, this one.  A grim tale of death and destruction in Virginia.  Blind Alfred Reed was a bit of an expert in this field. He also recorded such happy ditties as “The Fate of Chris Lively and His Wife”, “The Prayer of the Drunkard’s Little Girl” and “Beware” (the latter being a list of bad things that is best not to get involved with). I bought the Rounder Records compilation of Blind Alfred Reed’s entire output, “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?”, based purely on the title of the album alone. I’d never heard of him or any of his music. The album sleeve was made of thick cream-coloured card and the black and white sleeve photo showed a very stern looking chap clutching a violin (whom I presumed was Blind Alfred himself). I recall that it cost me a fair old amount back in the early 1980’s-I was on the dole at the time and it left me so skint that I had to walk home with the album tucked under my arm and my last 10 pence in my pocket. That 10 pence would have had to last me a couple of days until my next giro. This was fairly appropriate bearing in mind the album title. When I got home -after a long, long walk- and put it on the record player, I was surprised to hear old-time folk/country music rather than pre-war blues. This wasn’t something that I would have actively sought out, but it was so over-the-top that it was worth it; it made Joy Division sound as jolly as Black Lace.

Blind Alfred Reed was born completely blind in Virginia in 1880. Nothing is known about his early life except that he was brought up in a very strict, conservative family and that he learned to play violin at an early age. Apparently he performed at country fairs, church halls and even on street corners, where he used to sell printed copies of his songs for 10 cents a-piece. As well as being a composer and a musician, he also served as a Methodist lay preacher-which accounts for the religious subject of some of his songs, “I Mean To Live For Jesus” and “Walking in the Way With Jesus”, for example. By chance, he was recorded in 1927 by a visiting recording engineer, and he laid down some more tracks (I sincerely doubt that he would have termed it in that way), in 1929. All in all, in his lifetime, Blind Alfred Reed recorded 21 songs between July 1927 and December 1929 in four separate sessions; two in 1927 and two in 1929. (One particular song he must have liked was “Why Do You Bob Your Hair, Girls?” which he recorded twice. As an indication of how hardcore Blind Alfred was, in this song he exhorted women who had the popular 1920’s bob to “ask Jesus to forgive them”). Whilst it’s recorded that he carried on playing after 1929, this all stopped in 1937 due to a Virginian statute being passed which outlawed blind street musicians from performing. Blind Alfred Reed lived to the ripe old age of 76, but sadly died of starvation in 1956. I’m not sure what he would have made of the nascent birth of rock and roll; hopefully it never reached him in deepest Virginia.  

Get/read/see Totally Shuffled here:

UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA

US
http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Music-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA

How I never got to see "Aguirre"

extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a broken iPod" 

Popol Vuh- Aguirre II-Aguirre OST

I have watched Werner Herzog’s film, “Aguirre, Wrath of God” twice and listened to the soundtrack a lot more. I suppose that‘s not strictly true; I went to the cinema to see Aguirre back sometime in the mid 1980’s and subsequently watched it on television once.

On the strength of that, it may be thought that I have viewed the film twice, but my first experience of what was recognised as a masterpiece never actually got off the ground. And it was all my fault. I did go to the cinema one evening to watch it with the best of intentions. I was looking forward to seeing it, having read a lot of glowing reviews and fully prepared for a mind-blowing performance. It was being shown at an art cinema where I probably went at least once a week, so the idea of a foreign language film didn’t put me off. 

This was before the rise of the multiplexes in the U.K. and therefore the only choice cinema-wise was either to go to your local run down Odeon (usually outdated, falling to pieces, shabby and expensive and comprising at most of three screens. The biggest one was always one that was a throwback from the 50’s and had enough seating to be able to comprise of stalls and circles. They never sold out and the whole experience was dreadful, from the sound quality, to scratched films, dreadful local adverts promoting awful restaurants “just around the corner”, seating that hadn’t been clean or changed in twenty years or so and litter all over the floor. If there were any other screens in the cinema, then these generally had been made by slicing off the side of the main theatre with bits of plasterboard and making separate entrances. These other, smaller screens tended only to show either kids films or really, truly terrible British “comedies”. The main theatre was reserved for whatever blockbuster was doing the rounds. There was no choice at all-up and down the country the same films would be playing in identical shit-holes week in and week out. As there wasn’t at that time multi-channels on the TV or the ready availability of videos, then the only choice, if you were at all interested in film, which was in any way out of the mainstream, was to find a film society or the like in your local town that showed something different.

I was blessed by the fact that based in the centre of Liverpool was Merseyside Film Society. This was a brilliant oasis of cinematic culture, situated within a local art gallery, which screened different films twice a night and most days of the week. They’d screen a whole mix of films-from 1940’s classics to more recent art films; from foreign language films to Hollywood classics. Some of the best films I have seen are ones that I saw there; Casablanca, Last Tango in Paris, Sans Soleil, all of Truffaut’s Doinel’s series, a shed- load of Goddard, Taxi Driver, Singing in the Rain and so on. It wasn’t the best cinema itself; the seats were worn and had come from a disused cinema chain. The sound comprised of one big speaker at the base of the screen. I think that it seated about 100 or so in the audience and it was always cold-being situated in a basement. But it was cheap-tickets were at least half the price you’d pay for at the Odeon-and they showed great films.  Being a member of the Society as well allowed you to know what was coming up in advance-they’d send a programme out quarterly so you could plan ahead. But, like all good things, it came to an end. The Bluecoat was “developed”, multiplexes swarmed the land, and although an independent cinema did open in Liverpool, it was skewed towards national art releases and not “old” films that aren’t just the same when you see them on television).

Back to the story of Aguirre though. I had my ticket for the 8.15 showing-they always showed films at 6.00 pm or 8.15 pm. It was winter and I was full of cold. I’d been awake most of the previous night, coughing and sneezing. My eyes were streaming and my throat felt as if I’d been gargling for hours with broken glass. I’d been in work all day and was knackered. The lights went down, I settled in my seat, the opening credits rolled and fell fast asleep.

I woke up two hours later, to the sound of seats lifting and people trying to squeeze past me, as the end credits rolled. I’d missed the whole of the mad Herzog experience and one that I didn’t recapture until years later when it came up on Channel 4 one evening. Now I’m waiting for it to be shown again so I can save it in the TiVo. Maybe I should just try to get it on DVD.     

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA