Venus In Furs

Venus In Fears from The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) evokes a lot of semi-repressed, early-70s memories.

I was going to post Heroin from the same album, but in light of the current opioid epidemic, it didn't feel right.

Velvet Underground

One from the vaults.

Chelsea Light Moving

 

This blog was born out of the feral energy of Velvet Underground, Chelsea Light Moving, and William S. Burroughs, so it's fitting that we finally get a chance this evening to hear Thurston Moore and his Chelsea Light Moving project at The Earl.

Burroughs

I know that I'm skipping ahead by more than a few chapters, but there is a direct lineage from the music of the Velvet Underground to Thurston Moore's Chelsea Light Moving, and in honor of my Thanksgiving tradition, I want to post CLM's Burroughs.

A little William S. Burroughs goes a long way, of course, but this being Thanksgiving and all makes me want to indulge in a just a little more.  Director Gus Van Sant cast Burroughs as a character in his brilliant 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy, but the role was really more of a elegiac tribute to the man than any element of the film's plot.  Someone stitched all of his scenes together into one clip, presented below.  With his Kansas accent and odd cadence and rhythms, Burroughs talked like almost no one else before or after, but he was also about the most honest, direct, and insightful individual you'd ever want to meet.  Just listen to his prophesy starting at about the 3:56 mark in the Drugstore Cowboy clip, and the wisdom evident in an excerpt from an interview with journalist Jurgen Ploog after the Cowboy clip.

Finally, here's a fascinating clip in which Burroughs explains not only his cut-up technique but also hints at possibilities for time travel and also foreshadows Steve Reich's early phasing experiments.  There's a direct  path from this spoken word piece to Reich to My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and to all of hip-hop.

Forward Into The Past

The time has come, if not already passed, to move the Water Dissolves Water music content off of Live Journal, where I've already used up most of my 1 gig of free storage and where I've experienced all manner of technical problems, and back to a Google Blogger platform.  I liked the "cut" feature of Live Journal that allowed me to post pictures behind a "(Read more...)" link, but that's about the only thing I'll miss.  The posts from the time I used the site will stay over there, sort of a document of that period, but for at least the time being, my music posts will appear here.

The real dilemma was in deciding what music I should post for my first entry here. All music, without exception, is a direct expression of the buddha-dharma, so there was really nothing "wrong" to post, and the most natural thing might have been to simply just pick up the postings where I had left off without any self-conscious deliberations.  On the other hand, I remember a day back in the late 1970s when Boston radio station WBCN moved into their new studios, and for the first song played from their new location they reached way back to the 60s for a somewhat ironic airing of Iron Butterfly's Inna Gadda Da Vida, generally considered even at that time to be the very epitome of unhip "dinosaur rock,"  but at the same time, "familiar sounds in a new setting."

I guess I could have posted the same as a tribute to 'BCN's decision, but I really didn't want to hear that song again nor did I want to subject whatever readers wander over here to it.  But I did want to post something that would qualify as "familiar sounds in a new setting," something that reached way back into my own musical experience and at the same time still informs my current tastes.  After perusing some old American Bandstand and Shindig videos (and don't even get me started about the Soul Train clips), it did not take too long to arrive at the Velvet Underground, and this rare footage of Nico (1938-1988) singing Femme Fatale, a song written by Lou Reed for Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick.  

By my recollection, I was listening to Velvet Underground and Nico at least as early as 1970.  I can remember the 1967 Velvet Underground & Nico album, the one with the Andy Warhol-designed cover featuring a banana with a sticker for its peel, scattered among all the other psychedelic flotsam and jetsam at my secret hideout during my high-school years - the VU music was required listening for when the dissonance of too much acid rock began inducing paranoia.  Brian Eno once said that although that album only sold 30,000 copies,  "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."  I may be the one exception (although, to be honest, I never actually purchased the album myself, only listened to it, and my friends who had purchased it did in fact play in occasional bands), but to this day, the Velvet's droning folk rock and frequent forays into noise and musique concrete (check out Black Angel's Death Song before writing the band off as "soft rock") are the very templates for my understanding and appreciation of modern indie rock.

It was equally tempting to post videos of some other Nico gems, like All Tomorrow's Parties or Chelsea Girls (not to mention VU standards like Venus In Furs and Heroin), but one clip seems like enough to get us started, no?

So that's the past and the springboard back to the present.  The usual postings will begin soon enough. Meanwhile, enjoy the video and follow the links if you've got the time. . .