I don't know exactly what year it was, sometime in the late 70s I guess. I was lying on my back listening to a bootleg recording of a Patti Smith concert with my girlfriend.
Like most bootlegs, the sound quality was horrible. But I worshipped Patti Smith and really, back then, it was enough for me to hear her sing.
She started a song I didn't know, not one of hers. I couldn't understand the spoken intro because it was garbled, and after a few minutes, I sat up. "What... what is this?" I asked my girlfriend.
"White Light, White Heat," she said. "It's a Velvet Underground song."
"Oh," I said. "Oh."
And that's how I discovered Lou Reed.
What got me remembering this is that a friend posted a snippet of Antony singing a Leonard Cohen song to her Facebook page last night. Antony is not well-known by the general public, but musicians know him and his slippery, bewildering, beautiful voice very well.
One of those musicians is Velvet Underground founding member Lou Reed, who invited him to be part of a series of now-legendary performances of Reed's album "Berlin" that were filmed by Julian Schnabel and became a concert movie that debuted last year at SXSW in Austin.
I was at that screening, and just after the lights went down, Lou Reed himself walked down the center aisle and slipped into the seat directly across from mine. It's a testament to the film and the concert that I eventually forgot he was there; it can be very distracting to have one of your idols sitting three seats away from you while you watch him perform a work that itself had affected you powerfully from the very first time you heard it.
"Berlin" has been described as a "rock musical," but that's not how I see it. I'd say it's more of a concept album, although to be honest, it really couldn't matter less. It's a collection of songs about a time, a place, and a small group of people; about destruction and suffering, and little pieces of love that never add up to enough.
Some of its songs, well, I don't know what to call them except for perfect: "Caroline Says," "Sad Song," "Oh, Jim."
And you know, that album sank like a fucking stone when it was released in 1973, and now it's on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest rock albums of all time.
I went to YouTube to find a link to Antony singing in the film of "Berlin" to share with my Facebook friend. And I found one; it's at the end of this post. It's actually from the encore and is an old Velvet Underground song called "Candy Says," not from "Berlin" at all, but it should give you an idea of what Antony's voice is like, and also, what Lou Reed's is like now.
Which isn't good, as several clueless folks pointed out in the comments, as if Lou Reed fans are just stoopid and somehow hadn't noticed and if it were only brought to our attention, we'd stop liking him.
And then I realized why I got so angry last night, in my post ranting about an email I got saying that Scott Walker's music sucks.
Scott Walker isn't like Lou Reed in the sense that he's lost his voice; his voice was always one of the most beautiful in rock, and it's still an incredible instrument, haunting and pure, even if the music he's using it to sing is unsettling. But his music has gone off in a direction most of his fans, including me, find difficult to follow. Or even impossible.
But he's like Lou Reed in that both men have had incredible influences on other musicians, and sparked huge musical transformations that are still going on today, while themselves flying under most people's radar. I think it's fair to say that had Lou Reed never recorded "Walk on the Wild Side," most people reading this would not know his name at all. It's probably apocryphal, but Brian Eno supposedly said that almost no one bought the first Velvet Underground album, but everyone who did went out and started a band.
Of course I know Lou Reed can't sing. (Neither, for that matter, can Leonard Cohen.) Of course I think Scott Walker is, at least creatively, batshit insane. It's just that I don't care, because those artists are at the roots of pretty much every single bit and shred of music that I've cared about in my entire life.
Lou Reed's "White Light, White Heat" is the song that invented punk. Scott Walker transformed the face of alternative music forever. They can't just be dismissed because they're obscure or the voice is gone. They're legends. It's not about liking them; it's about knowing who they are.
My mini-review of "Lou Reed's 'Berlin'" from last year's SXSW film festival, and notes on an audience Q&A with Reed, are here; my liveblogging of his keynote address is here. The photos on this post were taken by my Club Kingsnake colleague, photographer Clint Gilders, during that address.
And this is Antony, singing "Candy Says" with Lou Reed:
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