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July 28th, 2000

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - New Age (from Loaded, 1970)

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - New Age (from Loaded, 1970)
It was Mark E. Smith, of course it was, who came up with the ultimate indie rock snob put-down: “He couldn’t tell Lou Reed from Doug Yule“. Confession time: I was that clueless indie boy. Back when I first heard Loaded I had no idea of the VU’s absurd history, I only knew that they were some kind of important rock thing and I should best get my head round them as soon as possible. Deep in my heart I didn’t like any of it much, and Loaded became my favourite album pretty quickly. As Yule writes in his article on the making of the album, “Every song was looked at with the understanding that there was a need to produce some kind of mainstream hit.”, and it showed: Loaded still sounds like a sweetened, edgeless singer-songwriter album.

But I didn’t realise then that there were two singer-songwriters at work, and you were only meant to like one of them. Some of Doug Yule’s prettily anaesthetic tunes were some of my favourites, after all, the dazed “Oh, Sweet Nuthin’” and “New Age”, a wide-eyed mock-epic which seemed beautiful to me when I was 14. Now? Well, now I can reluctantly concede that Yule’s critics had a point - it’s a cloying track, though still a little better than the several Reed-penned knock-offs that clog the record (”Train Round The Bend” et al.). In fact its gospelly builds and stylings and big soft rock fade-out sound queasily familiar in our giltless age of Richard Ashcroft solo records, and coming to the end of this review-purposes listen I’ve decided I never want to hear it again.

That makes me rather upset - my memories of Loaded were good ones, my untutored, out-of-context schoolboy listening memories, sitting round in massive threadbare armchairs with “Sweet Jane” on the stereo because it was the only record my friend and I had which the rockin’ seniors would let us play. I didn’t want to know about Lou and Doug, didn’t want to know about how the one with the banana and that frightful German woman was the Best One, didn’t want to know about Squeeze for God’s sake. And now I’m 27 and I know all of that crap and where does it get me? It gets me to buy a dear old record which I’ve not heard for years and hate it.

Posted by Tom in New York London Paris Munich, Pop | No Comments

John Cale News

John Cale News is a neat and sharply designed site and does what it says in the title. Photos of Mr.Cale if that’s your thing. Right now I’m listening to Inside The Dream Syndicate Vol.1: Day Of Niagara, a first release on Table Of The Elements of some of the legendary music made by Cale, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad and La Monte Young in the early 60s before Cale went off to co-found indie rock with some band or other. Frankly the world would be a much different place if all those mid-80s indiepop bands had been listening to this stuff and not “She’s My Best Friend”.

La Monte Young has reacted with predictable squawkings to this release, predictable because of the lengthy dispute between him and Conrad over who owns the rights to the tapes, made between 1962 and 1965. Young says the music was all his composition, Conrad says it was improvised by the group. Since Young owns all the tapes and has them locked in a big old safe somewhere, the argument has been somewhat moot until now, with the “re-discovery of a fresh cache of tapes”. Conrad and his ally Cale have had the best of the argument in the media thus far, because historical interest in this music is obviously pretty high: this release is an opportunity for them to put their case further, and an opportunity for us to hear what the fuss is about.

If you buy Niagara for historical reasons only, you might well be a bit of a wanker. You might also not like it: on first listen I personally like it a hell of a lot, and I’m trying not to think of the contextual stuff because the implications are too boggling. This is heavy drone music. Heavy not because it’s unchanging - as is often the case with this stuff, initially monolithic sound just teems with movement once you’re deeper inside it. No, it’s heavy through its high-minded intensity. A lot of ‘minimalist’ music, no matter how enveloping, comes off like one person’s attempt to express or simply reach some transcendent reality. But this group minimalism, whether improvised or composed, feels different, like these five people are trying to overpower reality, or for a half-hour’s time replace it. Very highly recommended.

Posted by Tom in New York London Paris Munich, Pop | No Comments

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