Between 1969 and 1970 David Bowie and his producer Tony Visconti began searching for a distictive guitar player who could match their creativity in the studio as well as play a magnetic foil to Bowie live on stage. The new documentary Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story takes viewers back to the Swinging London of the 1960′s to tell the origin story of the titular guitar player who played the Keith to Bowie’s Mick during David Jones’ first great era as rock ‘n’ roll’s slipperiest chameleon.

This tale is told through interviews with eye witnesses like Bowie’s ex-wife Angie and British music luminaries like John Peel, Rick Wakeman and Ian Hunter. Bowie himself makes an appearance of a kind in the form of a disembodied interview recorded before his death last year. The voiceover narration sounds a bit slow and sleepy and viewers are aware that they are listening to Bowie near the end of his days, but Bowie’s commentary is invaluable here and his praise for his guitarist, co-producer and arranger is unreservedly enthusiastic.

Ronson played with bands like The Rats and Julia’s Eyes before hooking up with Bowie and Visconti to play a set on John Peel’s radio show the very afternoon when they’d all first met. Of course, that’s how it works with rock ‘n’ roll — that’s how it works or it doesn’t. Ronson only played on one track of Bowie’s Space Oddity LP, but he joined in the final mixing and mastering process and became a key figure behind the board as well as on the stage and in the studio. Next came The Man Who Sold the World (1970), Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), and Aladdin Sane (1973).

Beside Bowie revisits Ronson’s one-of-a-kind guitar tone and style, his contributions to Lou Reed’s classic Transformer album, his own solo career, his stand with Mott the Hoople, his work with Bob Dylan, his production of John Cougar’s chart-topping hit “Jack and Diane,” and his production of Morrissey’s Your Arsenal. But, most importantly, Beside Bowie makes a convincing case that Ronson played a direct and indispensable role in making David Bowie into a star, and that he was never duly credited or financially reimbursed for his crucial contributions. At least this film can serve as a kind of witness to Ronson’s genius.

Here are Ronson and Bowie reunited in 1993 during the sessions for Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise LP…

Back in May I wrote a bunch of posts about the 50th anniversary of the Velvet Underground’s debut album. Here’s another Velvety post, celebrating the great John Cale. Here’s the word from a recent Rolling Stone interview celebrating the anniversary…

The way John Cale tells it, he had a revelation one day in the mid-Sixties. He’d dedicated the majority of his first two decades to classical and avant-garde music, to such an extent that, he says dryly, “I may have missed out on my puberty.

“I woke up one day and said, ‘Wait a minute, there are people running around singing Beatles songs,’” he recalls. “The Beatles Invasion was going on. All the enjoyment that I’d gotten as a kid out of rock & roll was receding, and I thought, ‘Let’s put something together that blends the two.’ I wanted to cross-pollinate rock with the avant-garde, and then I met Lou Reed, and that was the solution.”

The union of Cale’s musical wanderlust, spurred on by collaborating with minimalist composer La Monte Young, and Reed’s rock-steady songwriting, which he had been exercising as an in-house songwriter at Pickwick Records, became the soul of the Velvet Underground. This weekend will mark the 50th anniversary of their most daring experiment – their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico – the Andy Warhol–produced LP that found Cale, Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker fusing gritty garage rock with overdriven viola noise and, on some songs, the lilting, expressionistic vocals of German chanteuse Nico.

The record, whose songs vividly described drug abuse and sexual deviance at a time when the Beatles were dominating the charts with a gentler, more whimsical countercultural vision, was far from a commercial hit, but its influence over the past half century has been undeniable. Artists ranging from David Bowie to Duran Duran have covered its songs, and Brian Eno is fabled to have once said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

Read the whole article at the link above and watch this documentary to find out more about Cale’s extraordinary career in the Velvets and beyond…

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Yesterday the folks over at Dangerous Minds posted about an upcoming Mick Ronson documentary which had mysteriously appeared on Vimeo ahead of its release which is being hinted at for later this year. Beside Bowie: The Story of Mick Ronson spotlights the man who played Keith to Bowie’s Mick, and whose guitar playing, onstage persona, and behind the boards chops helped to define the glam rock era and beyond…

Mick Ronson might be considered the #1 Spider from Mars. He certainly will go down in history as one of David Bowie’s chief collaborators and one of the people most responsible for the glam sound.

Ronson worked on several of the core albums of Bowie’s early period, including most obviously The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as well as The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, and Aladdin Sane. He played on All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople and Transformer by Lou Reed, on which he was also a producer. In 1974 Ronson released his first solo album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue on which appeared the Elvis cover “Love Me Tender” and “Growing Up and I’m Fine,” co-written by Bowie.

“All the Young Dudes,” “Perfect Day,” and “Walk on the Wild Side” are just a few of the legendary songs Ronson was significantly involved with. He also worked with Bob Dylan and Morrissey. Sadly, Ronson passed away of liver cancer on April 29, 1993, at the age of 46.

Of course, by the time I saw the post the video had already been yanked, but it’s the kind of thing I’d probably rather see in a big theater with a loud sound system anyway. In the meantime here’s a long interview with Ronson from 1992 to whet your appetite for the new film…

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Back on track with my site live again, and keeping good to my word about celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground and Nico, here’s a short documentary film that brings viewers as close as they can come to getting their hands on a ticket to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It’s important to remember that The Velvet Underground were originally one element in a multimedia extravaganza that included pioneering light displays, dancers and very very loud music. Here’s the word from UBUWEB…

Title: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground
Director: Ronald Nameth
Show Co-ordinator: Paul Morrisey
Lights: Dan Williams
Sound: David Faison

Music: The Velvet Underground & Nico, I’ll Be Your Mirror and European Son from The Velvet Underground & Nico LP and It Was a Pleasure Then from Nico’s Chelsea Girl LP, and two live songs from the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Poor Richard’s, 1363 No. Sedgwick, Chicago, 1966/06/23, Heroin [5:14] and Venus In Furs [3:24]. That show was without Lou Reed who was at New York’s Beth Israel Hospital for hepatitis, and without Nico who took off for Ibiza at the beginning of June. John Cale on lead vocals and keyboards, drums, Sterling Morrison on guitar, Maureen Tucker on bass, and Angus MacLise was on drums.
Running Time: 22 minutes (long version)/12 minutes (short version)
Release Date: 1966-08-00 [US]
Cast: The Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale (vocals, organ), Sterling Morrison (rhythm guitar), Maureen Tucker (bass guitar), Angus McLise (drums)
Gerard Malanga: Dancer
Ingrid Superstar: Dancer
Susan Pile
Edward Walsh

Note: An alternate version of this film was broadcasted on French TV channel Canal + on 1990-08-26. That version is edited to 12 minutes and the soundtrack is different: Venus In Furs [3:57] and Heroin [3:19] are not the versions sung by John Cale but those from the Columbus Valleydale Ballroom 1966-11-04 tape. Credits titles are also different (John Cale’s name appears correctly spelled even though it was mispelled as ‘John Cahill’ in the 22-min version). It was this shortened version which was shown at the Fondation Cartier exhibition in Jouy-En-Josas on 1990-06-15 and is available on the Re:Voir VHS.

Andy Warhol’s hellish sensorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similarly, Ronald Nameth’s cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a parangon of excellence in the kinetic rock-show ganre. Nameth, a colleague of John Cage in several mixed-media environments at the University of Illinois, managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere record of an event. Like Warhol’s show, Nameth’s EPI is an experience, not an idea.

Here’s the film…

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Driving home from a carnival today I caught the first bit of a public radio show shouting out the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground’s debut album. These cats were arguing that the record is the most influential album in the history of rock. For me that’s a stretch, but there’s no doubt that the record launched thousands of music projects — the regular anecdote is that nobody bought the record but everyone who heard it started a band, and the late 1980′s alternative music scene was sort of like one big tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico.

Right now I’m staring down an exhibition installation and a beach somewhere in Florida. I’m not sure how much I’ll be posting here in the next ten days or so, but I’m feeling a lot of Velvet/Lou/Cale/Nico love combing on so if you’re a fan of the band be expecting several posts starting now.

Here’s a documentary about the early Velvets from MOMA film library…

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Along with all my Halloween horror posts, I’m going to dedicate some of this month’s content to Lou Reed who left this plane three years ago on October 27, 2013. This year we’re also celebrating the 40th anniversary of Lou’s sixth solo album, Coney Island Baby, released in February, 1976. Here are some words from a Pitchfork review published on the album’s 30th birthday…

By 1976, we had already heard Reed do pretty much everything that could be done in a pop song: shoot heroin, suck on a ding-dong, kiss shiny boots of leather. And yet nothing he had done was quite as shocking as the revelation on Coney Island Baby’s devastating title track that he always “wanted to play football for the coach.” But as the song drifts along its elegiac six-minute arc, the idea moves from the ridiculous (Lou as linebacker?) to the sublime (nothing fuels a young man’s burgeoning homosexual impulses like getting pat on the butt by brawny alpha males in tights) to the unspeakably poignant: rock’s reigning iconoclast admitting that he just wanted to fit in all along.

Coney Island Baby was the Lou Reed album that introduced me to the artist’s music beyond “Walk On The Wild Side.” When I was a freshman in college I borrowed lots of music from a friend down the hall in my dormitory. That education included most of Lou’s wider catalog, but Coney Island Baby was my first deep dive, and it’s still one of my favorites. Here’s Coney Island Baby…

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Warhol Superstar Joe Dallesandro made his name as an actor in Warhol productions like Flesh and Trash before finding more mainstream success in supporting roles like playing Lucky Luciano in The Cotton Club. Dallesandro is the “Little Joe” in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wildside,” and that’s his zippable fly on the cover of the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album.

Today we celebrate Joe’s birthday on December 31, 1948. Here’s a NSFW tribute to Little Joe…

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“Romeo Rodriguez squares his shoulders, curses Jesus
runs a comb through his black ponytail.”

That’s one of my favorite lines in a Lou Reed song. It’s from “Romeo had Juliette,” the opening track on Reed’s fifteenth solo album, New York.

While Reed was always preoccupied with and identified with the city, the New York album is a concentrated, focused poetic study of the place that is by turns a heartbroken love letter and a flaying satire: In a song like “Halloween Parade” Reed addresses the AIDS epidemic as effectively as any songwriter ever has, while in “Dirty Boulevard” he rewrites the words on the Statue of Liberty, intoning in a sepulchral mumble:

“Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I’ll piss on ‘em
that’s what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ‘em to death
and get it over with and just dump ‘em on the boulevard”

Also, Lou Reed’s guitar has never sounded better than it does here.

Lou Reed’s New York is celebrating a 25th birthday this year and it’s one worth remembering. Some folks might say that some of the album’s themes are a bit dated, but, I don’t know — I still hate Rudy Giuliani, don’t you?

Here’s the record in its entirety…

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Bob Dylan brought poetry to pop music and Leonard Cohen brought pop music to poetry, but it was Lou Reed who brought the literary ambitions of the great American short story to the 3 minute single. An iconic New Yorker, Reed’s place among American rock’s most important singer/songwriters was secured through an inspired, intoxicated, cantankerous, contradictory five decade career which ended on Sunday (10/27/13) with the loss of the singer’s life. At this writing, the cause of death is thought to be complications from a recent liver transplant.

“Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart” (PBS’American Masters, 1998) traces Reed’s art from the early inspirations of doo-wop music and fifties rock ‘n’ roll to his classic records with The Velvet Underground, through his challenging, experimental solo works like Transformer, Berlin, Metal Machine Music, New York and Magic and Loss — Reed’s tribute to his friend and mentor, songwriter Doc Pomus.

Linger on, Lou.

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