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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I’ve posted a lot on these lit-up pages about the Satanic Panic of the 1980′s and 1990′s, and I was reminded of the mass hysteria of those times this weekend when I came across an article that looked back to the classic documentary Paradise Lost. It’s hard to believe that the film is 20 years old as the movement that it helped to create is enjoying its high water mark as I type this post. Here’s a bit from Rolling Stone about the film and the movement it inspired…

When filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky arrived in West Memphis, Arkansas in June 1993, they came with an agenda: to document what looked like a new wave of alienated youth-turned-murderers. A few months earlier, two 10-year-olds in the U.K. had made headlines when they abducted, tortured and murdered a two-year-old, and now the filmmakers had read about the brutal murders of three eight-year-old boys ostensibly committed by teenage Satanists. It seemed like a trend. “We went down to make a film about guilty teenagers, like a real Rivers Edge,” Berlinger says, referencing a 1987 Keanu Reeves movie about a metal-loving teen who murders his girlfriend. “How could three teenagers become so disaffected with life that they could do such a horrible thing?”
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Damien Echols: ‘Today Was My Original Execution Date’If it would have been carried out, I would have been dead 21 years today,” Echols noted on Twitter. For months, the documentarians met with the victims’ families and talked to the accused. But something wasn’t adding up. Berlinger recalls looking at defendant Jason Baldwin’s “skinny little wrists” and thinking he would be incapable of using a hunting knife to mutilate and murder anyone; after an interview with the boy and another seemingly innocent defendant, Damien Echols, the filmmakers believed they had a bigger story on their hands. “When we saw Damien and Jason being chained up and taken off, it was just so emotional, ’cause we felt the wrong guys were being carted off,” Berlinger says. It was then that the film that would become the influential documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills changed course.

After it aired on HBO in June 1996, Paradise Lost became one of the most catalytic documentaries ever produced. It presented the story objectively, showing the trial and reactions from the victims’ family members, allowing viewers to make up their own minds about what happened. And it subsequently inspired a movement among viewers who concluded that the accused – who went on to become known as the West Memphis Three – had, in fact, been wrongly convicted.

Moreover, the film’s legacy would span decades, inspiring not only two sequels but a hands-off storytelling style that can be seen in docuseries like Making a Murderer and scripted dramas like Rectify. It’s a film that changed the lives of all involved – including the filmmakers themselves.

Read the whole story at the link above and watch the movie that started it all right here…

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I dedicated one recent Halloween post to the all too real ghost of Lou Reed who died three years ago this past October, 27.

I’ve had a productive week this week: I handed in a final proposal for a community arts grant; I turned in a feature story about the challenges of being homeless in the winter time; I cranked-out a review of a new painting exhibition in Nashville; I started it all off with my first gig at the new Radio Cafe last Friday night. One of my favorite breaks during so much word mashing has been reading Flipboard where I found this Rolling Stone rundown of must-hear Lou Reed records just the other day…

I actually kind of hate the article — its far too reverent for any look at Lou. That said I love some of the selections on this rundown…

Loaded (1970)
Reed disbanded the Velvets before this release, but the swan-song fourth LP featured some of his most refined songwriting, especially the classics “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll.” “New Age” is a slept-on highlight of Reed’s ballad catalog. And “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” blueprints the spirit of Seventies rock from the wreckage of the Sixties.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal (1974)
The live set where “Lou Reed” the character – a gender-blurring, hypodermic-wielding rock & roll id monster – took center stage. Reshaping Velvet Underground classics for a new generation, this also stands as a high point in Seventies guitar rock, epitomized by an epically jammed-out “Sweet Jane.”

Coney Island Baby (1976)
Metal Machine Music’s follow-up was a deliciously tune-driven love letter to doo-wop, Brooklyn, a fictional football coach and a factual trans lover named Rachel. Still underappreciated, it’s ripe for rediscovery.

New York (1989)
Shaken by the AIDS crisis, Reed wrote a set of uncharacteristically political songs rooted in storytelling detail. Robert Quine is gone, replaced by Mike Rathke’s leaner sound, giving Reed more room to serve up vignettes like the inner-city love story “Romeo Had Juliette” and “Halloween Parade,” a doo-wop-steeped, “Walk on the Wild Side”–like requiem for departed friends.

“The Bells,” The Bells (1979) 

Reed enlists trumpeter Don Cherry on this nine-minute spiritual-jazz elegy for a man standing on a ledge, which at the time Reed surely was.

“I Love You, Suzanne,” New Sensations (1984)
Reed retools his sound for the Eighties, with clipped funk-rock underpinning and a touch of the Shangri-Las. A shoulda-been hit.

“Sword of Damocles – Externally,” Magic and Loss (1992)

An elegiac folk rocker about cancer and radiation therapy from an LP that stares mortality squarely in the eye. Chilling and redemptive.

I’ve added this video to past posts, but it never gets dull. Is this the best music video of all time?

And by the way, Rolling Stone, Lou Reed wasn’t a “storyteller.” Lou Reed was a songwriter who showed us how to bring the novel to melody in the same way that Bob Dylan brought poetry to song. Leonard Cohen brought song to poetry, but we already knew that.

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Kim Fowley is dead. Los Angelino, garage rock professor, underground icon and architect of The Runaways, Kim Fowley has been ill with cancer for some time and as of tonight, he’s no longer with us. If the name Kim Fowley doesn’t immediately have your bells ringing, here’s some of his Rolling Stone obit to fill in the big, blank space he’s left behind…

In recent months, he had been undergoing cancer treatments, though no cause of death has been announced. He was 75.
Charismatic and eccentric, Fowley is best remembered as the record producer for the all-female rock group the Runaways. He introduced Joan Jett, who was 15 at the time, to teenage drummer Sandy West and helped them find frontwoman Cherie Currie, lead guitarist Lita Ford and bassist Jackie Fox. He produced the band’s 1976 self-titled debut and co-wrote the band’s biggest hit, the punkish “Cherry Bomb,” with Jett. He also co-produced the following year’s Queens of Noise and helmed the same year’s Waitin’ for the Night.

Fowley was born in 1939 to Singin’ in the Rain actor Douglas Fowley and actress Shelby Payne and grew up in Los Angeles and around southern California. After a bout with polio in 1957, he began a career in the music industry, producing his first single – the Renegades’ “Charge” – in 1959. In the Sixties, worked with Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Seeds and Gene Vincent, among others, as well as launching his own solo career; his 1968 LP Outrageous, Fowley’s third, was the only one to chart in the U.S. Fowley closed out the Sixties by MCing John Lennon’s performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, where he asked the audience to hold up its cigarette lighters, arguably starting the concert fad.

The Seventies found Fowley working with the Modern Lovers, Blue Cheer and Helen Reddy. He also co-wrote songs on Kiss’ hit Destroyer and a “Escape” on Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare. Fowley and the Runaways severed their ties in 1977, after which he set out to find another group he could market as a novelty. Although he worked with a few groups over the ensuing decades and continued to put out his own solo LPs, none reached the success or notoriety of the Runaways.

In the 2000s, he tried his hands at experimental film, and in 2012, he won a special jury prize for innovation and audaciousness at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival for his films Golden Road to Nowhere and BlackRoomDoom. In 2014, Fowley made an appearance in Beyoncé’s “Haunted” video.

In September 2014, Billboard reported that Fowley had been receiving cancer treatments and that Runaways frontwoman Currie, with whom he had been in legal battles over royalties over the years, had been caring for him.

See you in rock ‘n’ roll heaven, brother. Here’s a documentary about Fowley and his obsession with underground music and vinyl…

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40 years ago Chris met Debbie — the pair fell in love and made musical history. If you need more clues than that to know that I’m telling the origin story of the band Blondie than this post is especially for you. Here’s the Wiki‘s take on Blondie:

The band was a pioneer in the early American new wave and punk scenes of the mid-1970s. Its first two albums contained strong elements of these genres, and although successful in the United Kingdom and Australia, Blondie was regarded as an underground band in the United States until the release of Parallel Lines in 1978. Over the next three years, the band achieved several hit singles[2] including “Call Me”, “Atomic” and “Heart of Glass” and became noted for its eclectic mix of musical styles incorporating elements of disco,[3][4] pop,[3][4][5] rap,[4][6] and reggae,[4] while retaining a basic style as a new wave band.[7]

When Rolling Stone magazine reviewed the band’s eponymous debut they wrote that Harry was the “possessor of a bombshell zombie’s voice that can sound dreamily seductive and woodenly Mansonite within the same song” This is a perfect description of the magical center of this band.

Here is a BBC documentary about the band and their music: One Way or Another

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As always, I’ve been reading a bunch of books lately. One of the most interesting is a William Burroughs biography that specifically focuses in on the author’s involvement with the Church of Scientology.

Most fans of The Beats know that Burroughs joined the church for a short time during which he became enamored of their scientific approach to the treatment of neurosis, while simultaneously getting turned-off by the cult of personality that surrounded L. Ron Hubbard. I’m still in the middle of Scientologist! by David S. Wills. I’ll post more about it later.

In the midst of Wills’ Burroughs/Scientology break-down, I came across a small article archive that gathers together samples of Burroughs’ writings on Scientology. These words by the man himself are a great primer for on the subject in the form of a collection of articles and letters published by Rolling Stone, LA Free Press and the East Village Other. This trove also includes the short story “Ali’s Smile.”

Get it here.

Here is Burroughs reading “Ali’s Smile.”

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Cures what ails ya

In an early episode of the Coincidence Control Network podcast, co-host Joseph Matheny and I commented on federal threats to crackdown on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries. As this new article in Rolling Stone points out, this is the kind of arrest-the-sick policy we’d grown to expect from George W. Bush, but which we never dreamed of from Barack Obama.

Framing the Obama administration’s new approach, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske famously declared, “We’re not at war with people in this country.”

Reporter Tim Dickinson continues:

With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts. “There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “He’s gone from first to worst.”

Read the full article here.

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Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!