Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [92]
Just because it's only an A-head playing around with electronics and tape recorders doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. There is a rising line of aggression running through “European Son,” “I Heard Her Call My Name,” “Sister Ray” and the Stooges’ Fun House album which finally achieves psychosis in Metal Machine Music, and Lou plays amplifier as well as he plays guitar.
You know when you get so tense and anxiety-ridden that all the nerves at the back of your neck snarl up into one burning ball? Well, if that gland could make music, it would sound like this album.
This is what it sounds like in Lou's circulatory system.
Most of the people who buy Metal Machine Music are going to be pretty mad at Lou, but it's an even bigger joke on RCA, and the ultimate fall guy is the artist himself. Because what we are witnessing here is commercial suicide. Sally Can’t Dance was the first, and probably only Lou Reed album to go Top Ten. The collection of outtakes from Rock ‘n’Roll Animalhe marketed last spring was proficient but too ballady for a live album and generally inferior to its predecessor. Even hardcore fans like your reporter, who is something more in the realm of a fanatic, found themselves playing it a couple of times and filing it. Animal was a real sleeper on the charts, helping to break Lou on radio in many areas previously hostile to “glam rock” like the South, but Live, after resting at a hardly awe-inspiring 62 for a couple of weeks, died fast. Now he's put out this migraine, which will get zero radio play and bomb so bad it’ll make Berlin look like an Elton John album. All of which will insure that the buyers will stay away in droves when he releases his next set of “songs,” Coney Island Baby, in September. It's refreshing that the guy's not content to merely grind out one album a year, but do you suppose that all this frenzied pseudo-activity is Lou's terrified reaction to having, just once in his life, climbed far enough from his “street punk” roots (pretensions) to make Top Ten? In any case, a death wish is being fulfilled before our eyes, corpo-rately
Anybody who doesn’t jack off at least three times a day is a queer.
Creem, September 1975
Your Shadow Is Scared
of You: An Attempt Not to Be
Frightened by Nico1
In the autumn of 1968, an album came out which changed my life. It is still changing my life, and apparently has had similar impact on others, because the editor of this magazine not only asked me to write this article, but has been calling, cajoling, nearly threatening in her attempts to have me get it in. This from the editor of a national, commercial magazine, over a ten-year-old, out-of-print record which most people haven’t heard and wouldn’t want to if they knew what was in it. So I guess my editor and I are smitten. But the quality of the smiting is more than just peculiar; this article was assigned and written for fear as much as love, or the love of fear. In Stargazer, his poetically definitive book on the Andy Warhol universe of the 1960s, Stephen Koch tried to come to some understanding for himself as much as his readers of Warhol by resorting to a quote from Baudelaire: “Half in love with easeful death.” Then, just to drive home the point he was making about the intimacy between narcissism and Warholvian deathly otherness, he wrote: “Half in love. Exactly.”
Anyone more than half in love with death would have to be a monster, of course.