I’m gearing up for the album length collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica. I’m currently in the most dire and dismal period of my writing I’ve ever been in. What happened is that with the new blog, I can see exactly what gets hits and what does not, the top five blog entrees in terms of hits right now are-a review of Their Only Dreams by miserable musician David Lyudmirsky, an article about how there where a series of low budget horror films in the 80’s that revolved around women being raped and impregnated by aliens and other monsters. I will do what I can to get hits, but Lyudmirsky, that’s just worthless. There are just a lot of bands that have no reason to be. The collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica came about through a fundraiser for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an excellent entity to bring up in this context. I can understand roughly, roughly why people like Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, and Iggy Pop are in there. Joy Division is not in there, don’t know if they ever will be, but there are three movies about them. I expect in coming years you will see Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana and Beck- the big rock stars when I was a teenager- I’m sure they will get in eventually. I like the original Norwegian black metal bands they won’t make it in there, but so be it. Goblin who did the soundtracks for numerous Italian horror films are amazing, I doubt they’ll get in there, but if there was a horror cinema hall of fame, I’m sure they’d be in that. Then there are a million little bands that no one gives a fuck about. Clubs are full of a lot of terrible little bands no one really cares about. Art scenes in U.S. cities like Boston, San Fran,New York produce a million little miserable bands. What we forget is that Lou Reed and Metallica got where they are for reasons. I feel part of that is because what I’ve heard of Lou Reed and Metallica jamming is the best that Metallica has sounded in 20 years and the best Lou Reed’s work has been in almost 30 years. With Lou Reed I hesitate to say 35 or 40 because there’s the Blue Mask from 1982, which is an excellent album.
Lou Reed I think, made two very poor musical decisions during the 70’s and I’m not even referencing the Metal Machine Music album of pure feedback, which is kind of funny. For pretty much all of the 70’s he didn’t play guitar on any of his albums or live. The other mistake that I think Lou Reed was that he spent a good part of the 70’s trying to sound black. His drug problems at that point are stuff of legend, I think for a good part of the 70’s, 74 on almost, you had a white drug addict trying to imitate soul music. At the same time in London and New York these bands in England and New York (Joy Division I mentioned above) tried to imitate the musician he’d been in his 20’s during the late 60’s. For 1982’s the Blue Mask he went back to a hard guitar sound by a. picking up the guitar again and b. hiring for a second guitarist Robert Quine from the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidiods. A couple years later he’d gone back to making total crap with the album New Sensations, which is a hundred times worse then his 70’s music. Briefly though, he returned to a guitar sound much like the Velvet Underground. Similarly confrontational lyrical themes about substance abuse (Underneath the Bottle, Waves of Fear) and violence (The Gun, the lyrics to the song The Blue Mask are some weirdness about castration) that recalls the Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat. Back in the 60’s the Velvet Underground did not go over well because of their musical aggression and use of taboo lyrical subject matter. You wouldn’t get that from most music he’s done since. He did, however, make one very unfortunate move on the Blue Mask, which is one that marred his music increasingly since then, which is the use of cheesed-out studio musician Fernando Saunders on bass. I think Saunders came out of a jazz-fusion background to give you a sense of how bad Lou Reed’s solo career has gotten in its lowest points.
That’s why it is so exciting to see him working with Metallica. For one more time he is the Lou Reed of the Blue Mask or even the Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground. The Lou Reed of New Sensations actually song about being friends with Martin Scorsese. That track features Fernando “lame studio musician” Saunders on the funky base. I kid you not. That is all very unfortunate.
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