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Also this issue: Making Contact Suzanne Vega Dan Fogelberg Brother Ali Elliott The Fleshtones Prefuse 73/Four Tet HearHere |
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May 29-June 4, 2003
music
 Quoth Lou: "I wanted to show people what Poe was all about. Not necessarily in a contemporary language, but in an understandable one." |
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Lou Reed remasters the master.
Ever since he first customized a Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar with a tremolo-feedback unit and sang, in a merciless monotone, of sex changes, speed and heroin with The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed has explored dissonance and discord, both musically and lyrically. Along with the Velvets' output and influence, Reed's series of vivid, diverse solo albums, though sometimes dissed at the time of their making (sometimes by Reed himself), are rock's finest forays into the avant-garde. His only hit, "Walk on the Wild Side," stands out for its chirping musicality and picturesque look at the Warholian milieu that spawned him. (Reed re-recorded the song in 2003 and subtitled it "Georgie Joins the Army.")
Blunt reportage and expressionist imagery have made Reed the Murrow of a city's psychic excrement, a documentarian of the dire and the literary-minded king of kink. He is a writer ripe with bits of Burroughs, Selby and Delmore Schwartz.
But by tackling his most crucial inspiration, Edgar Allan Poe -- both in the stage production POEtry with director Robert Wilson and the recently released musical adaptation, The Raven (Sire) -- Reed has opened himself to criticisms beyond the "rock section." Certainly he's been on this route before, what with the blaring feedback orchestra of Metal Machine Music, which RCA considered for its "Classical" division. The spoken-word-laced Raven is theatrical -- Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi and Amanda Plummer are among its participants -- and vividly 3-D, thanks to Hal Willner's sumptuous, spacious sound-effect-laden production. Reed has rewritten Poe's texts in accordance with the singer's own dark entries, utilizing the depravity of modern life and distant dreams of a youth turning old as a starting point from which to paint his own tell-tale heart.
"Psychological astuteness. A great and incredible use of language. Magnificent rhythm and vocabulary. The sheer amazing urgency yet elegance, the specificity, the uniqueness of his writing -- this is what I think he brought," says Reed of Poe's influence on him. But turning Poe's florid, arcane writings into tart, direct texts required effort. "I used a lot of different very old and very big dictionaries, let me tell you," he laughs. "I wanted to show people what Poe was all about. Not necessarily in a contemporary language, but in an understandable one."
Rewriting a sacred text to accommodate his own vision, of course, opens Reed up to world of criticism. He simply smirks. "I think it all works great or I wouldn't have put it out."
As someone who has made more than 25 of music's most uncompromising albums (solo, group, duet, live) for major labels, he is both beyond commodification and so below the radar he's still subversive. "I have no clue how I did it. Or do it. All I ever wanted to do is make music I'd like to buy. I will say one thing I gave back: Some labels have what they call a Metal Machine Music clause -- that an artist agrees, when he signs up, never to do anything like that. That's my contribution to pop music," he cackles.
After staging POEtry across Europe in 2000 with Wilson and a group of actors who rarely spoke English, Reed and Willner rethought the texts for 2003's Raven. "I rewrote everything with Willner and my band. We realized immediately that the play was something you saw and the CD was something you listened to." If that sounds almost too obvious and easy, to Willner and Reed the change necessitated starting from scratch, creating new sound and vision. "Now it's all about sound effects and mental imagery rather than what you would have seen through Wilson's staging. The thrust became us, me, seeing all that was once live, twice, in order to convey, lyrically, everything from opening a door to lighting a joint. It's very different from the play. It's a thing for the mind. But you can only see it with your imagination."
Reed added scads more music to the CD version: an electronic, feedback-fringed group of instrumentals, ambient-droning spoken pieces and "traditional" songs that prove to be Reed's most fully realized work. They are elegantly orchestral and chaotically lo-fi, off-kilter in stereo effects but also clean and clipped, theatrical and hammy yet stoic and succinct. "Yeah, the things with strings on stage were real players. I had to push that into the recording process."
Whether he's feeling poppy or atonal, Reed has always tended to (or tried to, within the limitations of recording) instill his music with hard, in-your-face clarity and force, as on NYC Man (RCA), the newly remixed and remastered collection of old favorites. Though he pioneered the use of distortion and the binaural sound of "live 3-D" recording (as heard on "Street Hassle," "I Wanna Be Black" and "The Bells"), Reed has often felt the recording industry has dropped the ball in terms of pushing its bounds. "I was able to, on NYC, go back to those old tracks and through the technology of mastering now, correct the problems that negated the binaural effect. Depending on one's ability to hear, you've never heard anything like what we did on ŒThe Bells.' Everything we did then -- and when I say Œwe,' I mean Œme' -- has been perfected on The Raven. That's my thing. I made the sound broader, working on the spatial relationships and the stereo image by approaching every voice and sound from the back."
If you listen hard, in the live setting, says Reed, you'll hear this in his band (featuring angelic singer Antony and cellist Jane Scarpantoni) and their use of his planetary sound system. "Once you hear us, everything else is a joke."
The clarion brass, squawking saxophones (which, on "Fire Music," are ably twisted by Ornette Coleman) and thunderous layers of haunted hammering guitars on The Raven represent a culmination. "Everything I've learned from doing all those records over the years went into this thing. It has everything. Learning how to mic a guitar or how to record a voice or a cello is no small thing. Then making the space between those instruments; it's real. Making the time to do this, to record 40 strings or set up an amp in the right place, too, means something. I know what I like. Experience must count for something."
Lou Reed plays Tue., June 3, 8 p.m., $37.50-$45, Tower Theater, 69th and Ludlow sts., Upper Darby, 215-336-2000.
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