Discussion Topic |
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| Messages 1 - 72 of total 72 in this topic |
rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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Oct 27, 2013 - 01:55pm PT
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CRAP !
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Kalimon
Social climber
Ridgway, CO
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Oct 27, 2013 - 02:28pm PT
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"White light, white heat . . . "
RIP Lou.
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Oct 27, 2013 - 02:59pm PT
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The other day while climbing I had Lou Reeds great song, "Romeo and Juliette" running through my mind all day. All friggan day. A bit strange as I have only listened to Lou Reed sporadically throughout my life. The Cowboy Junkies version of Sweet Jane on Saturday Night Live years back had brought back the Lou Reed memory and that was all but forgotten it had been so long. I walked into work the next morning and started blasting it via computer to quizzical looks form co-workers. I simply said, "I couldn't get it out of my mind yesterday when I was off work, so I'm playing it today".
Now I reed that the man hiself has passed.
Vios con dios. Play it cranked up.....
[Click to View YouTube Video]
or with some great musicians raging live...Lou is a tad off though.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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defective detective
Trad climber
da gunks
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Oct 27, 2013 - 03:03pm PT
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rock and roll now officially dead as well
it was a good run
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James Wilcox
Trad climber
Goleta/Virginia Lakes
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Oct 27, 2013 - 03:53pm PT
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A founding father moves on. RIP, Lou.
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Tobia
Social climber
Denial
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Oct 27, 2013 - 04:43pm PT
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Afraid the hoax is all too real. Sad Sunday for me.
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mike m
Trad climber
black hills
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Oct 27, 2013 - 05:44pm PT
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Bummer he influenced a lot of the bands I have listened to for the last 25 years. Kind of always thought I would I would see him, I guess not.
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Ricky D
Trad climber
Sierra Westside
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Oct 27, 2013 - 05:53pm PT
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Notice Lou's references to James Joyce, Shakespeare and the like....the pioneers of progressive music had solid backgrounds of exposure to Classical analytical thought and their musical creations reflected that breadth of thought.
I fear that our current and most recently spawned Generations no longer have either exposure or awareness of the history of creativity that preceded themselves.
Werner may be right...we may be quite stupid.
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Urizen
Ice climber
Berkeley, CA
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Oct 27, 2013 - 06:22pm PT
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Songs for Drella. Masterpiece.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Oct 27, 2013 - 06:42pm PT
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"I fear that our current and most recently spawned Generations no longer have either exposure or awareness of the history of creativity that preceded themselves. "
Boy, ain't that the truth.
Waitaminit...'spose the previous generation said the same thing about us?
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mike m
Trad climber
black hills
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Oct 27, 2013 - 06:59pm PT
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Heroine is my personal favorite.
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Rick A
climber
Boulder, Colorado
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Oct 27, 2013 - 08:53pm PT
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Rock and Roll Animal was the most-played cassette for the drive to Yosemite for many years. Will put it on tonight in memory of Lou Reed.
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TYeary
Social climber
State of decay
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Oct 27, 2013 - 09:12pm PT
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One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.
Lou Reed
RIP.
TY
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squishy
Mountain climber
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Oct 27, 2013 - 09:22pm PT
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Years ago I got in the car alone and drove to Seattle to see him play, no one understood, but I just had to see him before he died...I am so glad I did it...rest in peace lou...
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Ikat
Social climber
Carson City
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Oct 27, 2013 - 11:19pm PT
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It's important to pay homage to artists significant in one's own life.
Lou Reed was one of them for me.
Never really expected him to live to 71. It just sounds ancient for such a connected person.
He was always part of my experience in life. Please Walk on the wild side with me.
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Relic
Social climber
Vancouver, BC
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Oct 27, 2013 - 11:52pm PT
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A few years ago, I did something I almost never had the courage to do. I went to the mall.
Riding the escalator to hell, I felt lost and out of my element. Searching for an elusive set of new ginch. I got off on the menwear floor, looked around my surroundings for a fruit of the looms sign and there he was.
Lou Reed and his partner Laurie Anderson were riding down the escalator. He looked very old and frail, a ghost of his former way too cool guy self. He had an enormous cowboy hat on his head, no leather jacket, but looked very well dressed.
I stopped and stared until it finally registered that I had just ineed seen my hero Lou in the flesh. I really regret never seeing him play live.
RIP Lou
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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Oct 28, 2013 - 12:23am PT
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In early 1967, the actress Natasha Kaplanova told me there was something going on in San Francisco that night that I just had to attend with her. Natasha knew everyone who was anyone avant garde in the City. Last time she called I'd got to meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and Tim Leary, so I knew something big was up. Natasha and I went to the Old Filmore Auditorium and there, as big as life, was the Velvet Underground on stage at top decibel level with Lou Reed playing lead and Nico the Wonder Girl dancing with whips. At intermission there was a "happening" during which a couch was ripped apart with hatchets and saws by a group of actors in the band's entourage. Hey, that must have been "the exploding plastic inevitable"! I remember going upstairs to the balcony with Natasha to look down on the spectacle and who's up there with us? Andy Warhol himself in private conference with the poet Alan Ginsberg. Natasha introduced me to Ginsberg, but when she introduced me to Andy, he reached out to shake my hand with such a languid, cold clasp that I've never forgotten it. Warhol definitely did seem to inhabit a different world.
RIP Lou etc.
I do remember the Velvet Underground playing "Heroin" and "Venus in Furs". Those numbers seemed to stand out. Lou Reed seemed to be at the artistic center of the group, a commanding presence.
This all must have taken place in February or March 1967, just after the release of the first Velvet Underground album when Andy brought his roadshow out to the West Coast to teach the locals what it meant to be hip in New York City.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Oct 28, 2013 - 12:48am PT
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dang Bruce, that sounds like a cool night,
FYI, the "colored" girls were really Jewish,
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SicMic
climber
two miles from Eldorado
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Oct 28, 2013 - 12:56am PT
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Saw Lou live during the time when he had an assistant whose only job was to keep him off 'junk'. RIP.
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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujo de La Playa
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Oct 28, 2013 - 09:56am PT
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Lou described his ambition to “write the Great American Novel in the form of a record album,”.
Did he succeed?
FYI, the "colored" girls were really Jewish,
Interesting side note! Bob Dylan's back up singers were black Jewish women too.
A good Jewish boy always chooses a Jewish woman for his second wife, ya know.
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TwistedCrank
climber
Bungwater Hollow, Ida-ho
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Oct 28, 2013 - 11:05am PT
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Lou Reed was one of those artists whose work changed my life.
Cheesy? You bet.
I didn't go on to form a rock and roll band. But Lou's work allowed me to see the high energy doesn't necessarily mean loud and fast.
Although Lou could go loud and fast with the best.
Rock and roll is still trying to catch up with the Velvets.
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plund
Social climber
OD, MN
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Oct 28, 2013 - 11:18am PT
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Can't remember the source, but read a comment somewhere re: an old VU album that it only sold a couple hundred copies, but everyone who bought it started a band.
Bon Voyage, Lou...hope you still have your calamine lotion...
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Oct 28, 2013 - 11:41am PT
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"Summing up Reed's influence, music producer Brian Eno once said that although the Velvet Underground sold only 30,000 copies of its debut album in five years, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _
today's LA Times:
Lou Reed dies at 71; rock giant led the Velvet Underground
Also famous for solo hits such as 'Walk on the Wild Side,' Lou Reed influenced generations of artists and resonated around the world.
By Steve Chawkins and Randy Lewis
October 27, 2013, 7:33 p.m.
Like many unhappy teenagers, Lou Reed found more than a measure of solace in music.
"Listening to the radio absolutely transformed me," he told The Times in 1992. "It was like a huge, major-league signal that there was another world, another life out there … that everything wasn't as horrible as where I was."
A giant of rock, Reed sent the same message — as deafeningly harsh as it often was — to generations of punk aficionados and mainstream fans for nearly 50 years. The guitarist whose dark vision colored music for decades and whose 1960s group the Velvet Underground inspired musicians around the world, died Sunday in Southampton, N.Y., according to his literary agent Andrew Wylie.
PHOTOS: Lou Reed | 1942-2013
Reed, 71, died of complications from a May liver transplant, Wylie said. In March, Reed had canceled his scheduled appearance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio.
First as the Velvet Underground's principal songwriter and then as a solo artist, Reed continued to challenge musical and cultural conventions, becoming a pioneer of what came to be known as art rock and punk rock. Summing up Reed's influence, music producer Brian Eno once said that although the Velvet Underground sold only 30,000 copies of its debut album in five years, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."
On Sunday, Greg Harris, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said in a statement that Reed "cultivated a singular musical aesthetic that managed to be both arty and earthy, reflecting his college-educated yet streetwise-honed rock and roll narratives."
His work "provided the framework for generations of artists," Harris said, including Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, R.E.M. and U2.
Reed was inducted into the Cleveland-based Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, well after he was established as a global figure. Vaclav Havel, the writer and Czech president who led the 1989 uprising known as the Velvet Revolution, extolled Reed and hosted him in Prague. In 1998, at Havel's request, Reed performed at a White House dinner in Havel's honor.
Although cutting edge, Reed was credited with "introducing avant-garde rock to the mainstream," Neil Portnow, president and chief executive of the Recording Academy, an industry group, said Sunday. "His uniquely stripped-down style of guitar playing and poetic lyrics have had a massive influence across many rock genres."
Reed reveled in his music's simplicity.
"One chord is fine," he once said. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."
A sonic assault was as important to Reed as his emotionally raw lyrics, and fans delighted in both.
"I met Lou Reed and told him he gave me tinnitus at a concert in 1989 that never went away and it was worth it," comedy star Judd Apatow tweeted Sunday.
John Cale, the Velvet Underground's original keyboardist and viola player, on Sunday called Reed "a fine songwriter and poet."
"I've lost my 'school-yard buddy,'" he said in a Twitter message.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on March 2, 1942, the son of accountant Sidney Reed and his wife, Toby, Reed grew up in the Long Island suburb of Freeport.
It wasn't a happy childhood for him or his family.
"Tyrannically presiding over their middle-class home, he slashed screeching chords on his electric guitar, practiced an effeminate way of walking, drew his sister aside in conspiratorial conferences and threatened to throw the mother of all moodies if everyone didn't pay complete attention to him," Victor Bockris wrote in his 1995 Reed biography, "Transformer."
When Reed was 17, his parents sent him to a psychiatric hospital where he was given 24 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy to curb his homosexual tendencies. Years later, in 1974, he released a song about the ordeal called "Kill Your Sons," a harsh condemnation of "two-bit psychiatrists" and a clueless family.
"They're gonna kill, kill your sons," he wrote, "until they run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run away."
In high school and at Syracuse University, he played rhythm guitar in bands, performing upbeat campus staples like "Twist and Shout." At the same time, he was cultivating the darker artist within, devouring the urban underworld stories of Hubert Selby Jr. and cementing a lifelong friendship with Syracuse instructor Delmore Schwartz, a talented poet who struggled with mental illness for decades.
Graduating from Syracuse with a bachelor's degree in English in 1964, Reed headed for New York City. The following year, he first performed with Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen "Moe" Tucker — a provocative bunch who came to call themselves the Velvet Underground.
The idea was to be exactly what the mid-'60s were not. The Velvet Underground aimed to rip the petals off flower power and focus on grimmer urban landscapes. It would not play blues or indulge in the popular R&B licks of the day, Reed vowed.
"This is going to be city," he said, reminiscing about the group's origin, at the 2008 South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. "This is going to be pure."
The group's 1967 debut album, "The Velvet Underground and Nico," showcased "Heroin," an ode to the drug by a user who sang that being high made him "better off than dead":
When the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians makin' crazy sounds
And everybody puttin' everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds
At the time, such subjects were off limits for song writers, Robert Hilburn, The Times' former rock critic, said Sunday.
Reed "talked about heroin and illicit sex at a time when the music industry didn't want to hear it," Hilburn said. "Critics loved him, but it took him years and years to find an audience."
The pop artist Andy Warhol was a fan almost immediately. He made the Velvet Underground his studio's house band and gave the group a front-and-center position in his series of multimedia events called Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
By the time the Velvet Underground dissolved in 1970, the group had released four albums and recorded enough material for the release of two others in the mid-1980s. Its best-known songs include "Sweet Jane" and "I'm Waiting for the Man."
As a solo performer in the 1970s, Reed had a distinctive persona.
"Back then he was publicly gay, pretended to shoot heroin onstage, and cultivated a 'Dachau panda' look, with cropped peroxide hair and black circles painted under his eyes," the New York Times reported in 1998. "But in 1980, Reed renounced druggy theatrics, even swore off intoxicants themselves, and became openly heterosexual, openly married."
Along the way, he tested even his most stalwart fans with the 1975 double album "Metal Machine Music," a compilation of guitar noise that has been called "one of the most perverse recordings of the modern era, at least by a mainstream artist."
Reed also had a number of smash hits on his own. In his 1972 album "Transformer," produced with David Bowie, he sang his famous "Walk on the Wild Side," an anthem to a variety of sexual experiences.
PHOTOS: Lou Reed | 1942-2013
In the heat of the 1996 presidential campaign, he released "Sex With Your Parents," a song aiming "to mock and ridicule the right-wing Republican fundamentalists who are so abhorrent to every principle of freedom of expression."
His most recently released recorded work was "Lulu," a 2011 collaboration with the heavy metal act Metallica.
Reed was divorced twice. He is survived by his wife, performance artist Laurie Anderson, whom he married in 2008.
steve.chawkins@latimes.com
randy.lewis@latimes.com
Times staff writers Todd Martens and Jessica Gelt contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times
_ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ___
Well, the electroshock 'therapy' didn't seem to hurt him.
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squishy
Mountain climber
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Oct 28, 2013 - 11:49am PT
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I had the Best Of the VU CD when I was a teen in the 90's. I would drive my Round Table truck around town blasting that sh#t on long play delivering pies. The CD just stayed in there, played over and over again, there wasn't a bad song. Slinging weed between stops, it was the music of my childhood and this was thirty years after it was released.
One day, in high school, me and this guy Ruff went to the city to meet up with Juan, a Mexican who use to live in the burbs with us but moved to the city with his folks. We took Bart out from P-town and walked the rest of the way. As we stood on his porch I looked over at the place next door...125 Lexington...and I was there to pick up from my man...shit gave me goosebumps...
That music is timeless and I hope we can translate it for the future. Ginsburg, Andy, Lou, these guys shaped me more so than any main stream bullshit in the 1990's. That's how far ahead of their time they were, I feel lucky as hell to have been exposed to it.
I am willing to bet there's a lot of people in the world going "what's with all this hubbub about Lou Reed dying? Who's that?" Maybe in death and with time he will finally gain the fame he always deserved...He was a large part of a cultural change, he was the front man of an idea.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Twenty-six dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington, 125
Feeling sick and dirty, more dead than alive
I'm waiting for my man
Hey, white boy, what you doin' uptown?
Hey, white boy, you chasin' our women around?
Oh pardon me sir, it's the furthest from my mind
I'm just lookin' for a dear, dear friend of mine
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squishy
Mountain climber
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Oct 28, 2013 - 11:56am PT
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There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
Lou Reed
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Edge
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Oct 28, 2013 - 12:05pm PT
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Lou Reed Live was my accompaniment for many a caffeine and Mary Jane fueled early morning ride to the crags and frozen waterfalls of my youth. The old LP was long lost, as those plastic grooved frisbees tend to do, but the incredible intro to Sweet Jane lives on forever in my soul. Thank you, Lou. RIP.
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ydpl8s
Trad climber
Santa Monica, California
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Oct 28, 2013 - 12:30pm PT
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Of course I had the banana Andy Warhol cover album. But, Rock n Roll Animal is still my favorite, killer backup band. The intro to Sweet Jane on that album is my favorite instrumental intro to any song, ever.
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GDavis
Social climber
SOL CAL
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Oct 28, 2013 - 01:27pm PT
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A city is a hive, a natural facet of the inner workings of our own mind and imagination. The sewage, the night clubs, the drugs, the love... the city is People, and Lou was our Bard.
I'll be climbing Walk on the Wild Side oct 31 in Josh, whowever would like to join and dine on the buffet of life is more than welcome :)
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squishy
Mountain climber
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Oct 28, 2013 - 01:31pm PT
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A city is a hive, a natural facet of the inner workings of our own mind and imagination. The sewage, the night clubs, the drugs, the love... the city is People, and Lou was our Bard.
Well said...
More and more, I am reminded of Howl...By Alen Ginsburg
For Carl Solomon
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and c*#k and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f*#ked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate c#&% and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally **, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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Oct 28, 2013 - 02:40pm PT
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Yes, Herr Dr.Sprock, that evening really was way 'cool'. But that was because the scene was so nonchalant back then (before the Summer of Love later that same year) that I wasn't even aware I was in the company of giants. The whole upstairs lounge at the old Filmore was completely empty, except for me, Natasha, Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. Wish I'd had a camera to photograph those guys having a private conference about aesthetics or their next drug deal. Which was it? No way to tell.
That was the way it was the night I met Ferlinghetti, McClure and Leary in a big private suite at the Fairmont Hotel. I think Big Brother played while Jerry Garcia and Janice Joplin danced up front. Bobby Weir and Pig Pen were in the audience dancing too. Janice hadn't joined Big Brother yet but I think she was already James Gurley's GF. I think Janice debuted with Big Brother next week at the Avalon. First live performance of "Ball & Chain"? Probably.
It really was cooler and more sophisticated before the whole 'Hippy' thing started and the pimps, junkies and speed freaks occupied the Haight. Tim Leary was still a very persuasive speaker too. After listening to him, I knew I really wanted to do that magic stuff he was talking about and take back religion from the organized churches! Heck, LSD was still legal that winter. The right wing backlash hadn't even got rolling yet. What do you want? The kids in the 'burbs still had crew cuts and horn-rimmed glasses.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Oct 28, 2013 - 02:47pm PT
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Nothing before or since beats "Berlin" for that soul-numbing-lost-faith-in-humanity feel. Just a horrible experience, and yet....
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Oct 28, 2013 - 02:57pm PT
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Sheryl Crow & Emmylou Harris (Live) : Pale Blue Eyes
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Rhodo: There are times when Marlow find soul where others find none.... ;o)
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Rhodo-Router
Gym climber
sawatch choss
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Oct 28, 2013 - 04:57pm PT
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Kinda slick and soulless there Marlow. Emmylou didn't look too proud of it at the end.
Lou had a good run. I'll miss him nonetheless.
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goatboy smellz
climber
Nederland-GulfBreeze
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Oct 28, 2013 - 05:57pm PT
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Any fan of Lou's should pick up this book.
Lester was a big fan and really knew how to relay Lou's sound.
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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujo de La Playa
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Oct 28, 2013 - 10:29pm PT
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Damn, no Velvet Underground on this thing
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scaredycat
Trad climber
Berkeley,CA
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Oct 29, 2013 - 01:58am PT
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I don't know. I liked his "Heroin" when I was 19, but I'm kind of with FortMental. HIs music just began to remind me of a lot of bad times, and acquaintances taking too many opiates and killing themselves. That's not to mention reminding me of risky sexual behavior that seemed coincided with the emergence the AIDS epidemic, although that came later. OK, his music still does get to me in good ways, too.
Hey; I liked EmmyLou and Sheryl's rendition!
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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Oct 29, 2013 - 04:07pm PT
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To correct myself, Dr. Sprock, after watching a documentary on the Velvet Underground and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable show at the old Fillmore auditorium, I'd hazard to guess that it took place in 1966, not 1967. That was before the release of the Banana album and also when LSD was still legal. Interesting to note that the members of the Velvet Underground found the hippies they encountered in SF to be disgusting. They were glad to get out of town. The VU's orchestrated S&M violence and NY street smarts just didn't go along with that group generational hippy scene. About as compatible as English muffins and Irish stew. Something about a male-female S&M dance duo whipping themselves while Lou banged out "Heroin" just didn't fit into the peace, love, granola scene that was then unfolding in SF. I do remember that the audience didn't really know what to make of it and how to respond to a light show with pictures of people hitting up with syringes.
The shock of the new!
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Oct 29, 2013 - 11:38pm PT
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has anybody here ever done the Big H and listened to Lou?
besides Herbert Huncke? who probably does not hang here, me bad,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Huncke
artists reflect what they see in the pond, so if you live in junked out new york...
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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujo de La Playa
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Oct 29, 2013 - 11:40pm PT
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has anybody here ever done the Big H and listened to Lou?
do speedballs count?
anyway, not me, but I can point to some who have
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Kalimon
Social climber
Ridgway, CO
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Oct 29, 2013 - 11:57pm PT
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artists reflect what they see in the pond, so if you live in junked out new york...
The Dr. is in!
Lou is a cultural icon. You can learn a lot about the City life from his music.
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Kalimon
Social climber
Ridgway, CO
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Oct 30, 2013 - 12:27am PT
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Yeah, I also got turned on to Lou in the early 80's. He really resonated then and now. When you get down to it he is probably underestimated . . . another genius of sorts. He is capable of the full range of human and musical emotion.
Thanks for the "A Night With Lou Reed" video Jim . . . Special. Did you see Warhol in the audience?
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Rhodo-Router
Gym climber
sawatch choss
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Let X equal X:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/laurie-andersons-farewell-to-lou-reed-a-rolling-stone-exclusive-20131106
"I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love."
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nita
Social climber
chica de chico, I don't claim to be a daisy.
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Rhodo-Router, Yesterday, Timid TopRope read out loud to me ~ Laurie Anderson's Farewell to Lou Reed. ...I was very moved by the openness and beauty of her tribute to Lou..
Thanks for putting up the link, it was sweet to read it for myself...
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dee ee
Mountain climber
citizen of planet Earth
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Jan 18, 2015 - 07:08pm PT
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I bow down to Lou.
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couchmaster
climber
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Jan 18, 2015 - 08:13pm PT
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I wore Lou Reeds Sweet Jane out on a cassette tape. Fell in love all over with the Cowboy Junkies version when I heard it. Margo Timmons singing.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Mar 13, 2015 - 06:00pm PT
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"I had faith in my own vision."
Would have made a fine epitaph for anyone, but it's a bit pretentious, nonetheless.
Even though he's underground,
We still have his way-out sound.
Thanks for post-huming that, Jim.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jul 10, 2015 - 05:38am PT
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True to his own vision and totally in your face, Mr. Reed nails it on SNL. Complete with cheesy intro by Paul Schaefer and some discrete work by the censor (but I wonder, will this video get taken down?)
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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