The Stub Project: Lou Reed Should Have Opened for Victoria Williams – Universal Amphitheatre – 6.7.2000
As I came across this stub I could not help but wonder what I was possibly thinking going to see Lou Reed again. This date was just a few short years away from when I walked out on him at the Wiltern. What possibly could have possessed me? After all, the Universal Amphitheatre is not an intimate venue and at $72 ($94 in 2011), this night out was not exactly a bargain. Am I really that much of a masochist? Am I so full of self-loathing that I would once again empty my pockets (and my dignity) at the altar of Lou Reed?
Thankfully, the answer is no.
This ticket stub is, in fact, a surprising testimony to my optimism and love of life itself. While it required a few clicks to jog my memory, there was a reason for my attendance at the show – and much like the last time I had seen Lou Reed, I was not really there for him at all, but was there for the opening act, in this case, the great Victoria Williams.
Despite the fact that Lou Reed’s former wife Sylvia executive produced the Sweet Relief album (a benefit for Victoria) in which Lou (soullessly) covered “Tarbelly and Featherfoot,” it was an especially odd pairing as Victoria Williams is everything Lou Reed is not: eternally optimistic, joyful, and effervescent. Gratefully, I saw her around fifteen times when I lived in Los Angeles. It’s impossible to be in her presence and not smile; she doesn’t even have to play a note. While clearly unfair to hold mere mortals to such standards, in my eyes she is simply all that is good and pure in the world. She’s the kind of singer that can save your life, that is, if you’re looking to be saved.
While I don’t particularly remember Victoria’s set that night, I am quite certain that most of Lou Reed’s fans were too late to see her or, barring that, talked through her too-short performance. I also don’t remember who I went with, but I’m sure we didn’t stick around for Lou. Despite my faded memory, I can almost see us now full of light, blissed-out from our short dose of Victoria, fleeing from the impending shadow of the soul-eating zombie that Lou Reed had become. Wanting to hold onto the Victoria buzz for as long as possible, faster faster faster we scurried. Don’t look back! Just get to the parking lot and go go go, escape the grotesque neon obscenity that is the Universal City Walk and the noxious aura of the Lou Reed Hate Machine for the greener pastures of anywhere else but here …
Behold Victoria at the House of Blues. (There’s video of her and Lou doing Crazy Mary out there, but Lou kind of ruins it.)
Gil Scott-Heron is Not Really Dead
Gil Scott-Heron may have passed on, but he has left a body of work that has made him immortal. His soul will hopefully rest in peace, but his revolutionary message will live forever. As long as the rich exploit the poor, as long as the races focus on their differences and not their commonalities, as long as people long to be free while other seek to enslave them – which is to say, as long as people live on this planet – the voice of Gil Scott-Heron will remain relevant.
In the obit in The Daily Telegraph, it mentions that he wasn’t particularly fond of the moniker The Godfather of Rap, “which he dismissed on the ground that ‘you don’t really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.’ He preferred to describe himself as ‘a bluesologist.'”
Here’s a recording of “Johannesburg” from the Village Gate in New York, broadcast on WRVR in 1976:
Song of the Day: Black Lips – Veni Vidi Vici
Song of the day for any day.
From the Black Lips’ Good Bad Not Evil. Buy it now. Or submit to a life of soul-killing mediocrity. That’s the choice. Deal with it.
Lykke Li is playing the Showbox in Seattle tonight. And just in time. I suspect she is destined to save the world … or, at least, this corner of it. So it’s not like my expectations are very high or anything quite so self-sabotaging as that.
Check out her interview with NPR. She’s great.
Song of the Day: Shannon McArdle – Leave Me for Dead
- “Shannon, that’s a little too close,
can you take a step back please?”
Sometimes it’s just best not to know where art comes from. It is, however, the first question artists are asked: Where do you get your ideas?
Countless forests and endless hours of videotape have been sacrificed to answering this insipid inquiry, yet so little has been gained. It is as if the art itself is a scam unless the artist can persuasively account for its conception. Such interrogations are perhaps to be expected as our culture is pitifully addicted to misguided notions of authenticity.
And no one one in post-WWII America has understood this more than Bob Dylan. When reporters wanted to know where his songs came from, he lied. He spun tall tales. He told them what they wanted to hear … but he didn’t tell them the truth. He had the good sense to keep that to himself. And the thing about Bob Dylan is that I don’t want to know the truth (and I have at least three Dylan biographies with unbroken spines on my bookshelf to stand as my witness). The myth is so much more beautiful than real life. The myth lets the music exist on its own terms.
If an album ever suffered from knowing too much about the circumstances of the artist’s inspiration, it is Shannon McArdle’s Summer of the Whore. Shannon was formerly in The Mendoza Line and was married to bandmate Tim Bracy. Their relationship did not end well and this album is billed as her revenge. (I have probably typed too much.) It is a marketing decision that certainly did Ms McArdle’s music no favors. The album never gets out from under the narrative of its painful inspiration. Summer of the Whore is a confessional, awkward record. It wears its broken heart on its sleeve, but to know the details of its origin does not enhance its enjoyment, it merely makes it cringe-inducing. As so happens to me, it feels like being cornered by a drunk girl in a bar who desperately wants to fuck her pain away and is more than happy to tell you all about the sad story that landed her on the stool next to yours.
And there’s nothing sexy about that.
It’s too bad, there are actually some great tunes on the album, a few that Liz Phair woulda coulda shoulda written had she not chosen to try her hand at being a teenage pop star instead of holding her reign as the broken indie rock blowjob queen everyone wanted her to be.
lonesomebeehive 