The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  “Well, the initial thing they hear is really not that extreme. It’s not so far from, say, ‘L.A. Blues’ by the Stooges. And that came out in 1970.”

  “When I was in Japan they liked it. There are about seven thousand different melodies going on at one time or another, and each time around there’s more. Like harmonics increase, and melodies increase, in a different combination again. I don’t expect anybody with no musical background to get it. I took classical piano for fifteen fucking years, theory, composition, the whole thing, and I’m getting so fucking tired of people saying, ‘Oh, it’s a rock ’n’ roll guy fucking around with electronic music.’ That’s bullshit. One of these days I’m gonna pull my degrees out and say, ‘Does that make me legitimate?’ But I don’t wanna do that because that’s horseshit too. So Neil Sedaka went to Juilliard, so what else is new? But like I told some of the ad people at RCA, they said it’s freaky. I said right, and Stravinsky’s Firebird is freaky.

  “As far as taking it seriously, that’s an individual thing, but when people start saying ‘I have the background,’ they’re getting in a little over their head, and it’s very bad to get in over your head with me when it comes to that because . . . I never pulled a Cale and started talking about studying in a conservatory, but if I ever said what really is my background, a lot of people would have to take their thumbs out of their ass and say, ‘He’s putting us on!’ Well, don’t be too sure. I just happen to like rock ’n’ roll. But all I’m saying now is that I’m sorry about a kid shelling out that kind of bread for that kind of music when I know they wouldn’t like it. But when people start landing on me about their background versus mine, well, I didn’t go to college just to beat the draft.”

  Pomp and circumstance. Fine. What about Coney Island Baby?

  “They’re not what people think of as archetypal Lou Reed songs, but they forgot like on the first Velvets album, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘Femme Fatale.’ I’ve always liked that kind of stuff, and now you’re going to have a whole album full of it.”

  Lou Reed, the Moonlight & You.

  “Right. ‘The Many Moods of Lou Reed,’ just like Johnny Mathis, and if they don’t like it they can shove it.”

  “Are you serious? Is this an album of sensitive songs of love and friendship?”

  “Absolutely. What it is, it’s gonna be the kinda stuff you’d play if you were in a bar and you didn’t wanna hear about it. It’s the Brooklyn-Long Island axis at work. Like you know the Harptones’ ‘Glory of Love,’ doo-wop, I wanted to rip that off them but not use the song, do my own.”

  I observed that Lou did seem to keep rewriting himself, Metal Machine Music to the contrary. “Oh, I’ve been rewriting the same song for a long time. Except my bullshit is worth most people’s diamonds. And diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Sally Cant Dance is cheap and tedious. Had it been done right . . .”

  I noted that the production was very slick. “It was produced in the slimiest way possible. I think that’s shit. I like leakage. I wish all the Dolbys were just ripped outa the studio. I’ve spent more time getting rid of all that fucking shit. I like all the old Velvets records; I don’t like Lou Reed records. I like Berlin and I positively LOVE Metal Machine Music, because that’s the idea I had years ago but I didn’t have the money or machines to do it. I wasn’t gonna put it out except that Clive [Clive???] had sent me over to see [appellation deleted], and [ditto, it’s Mr. ex-Red Seal again] was outasight. Because he caught all those things and said, ‘Ah, what are you doing putting in Beethoven’s Pastoral,’ and it blew my mind that he knew about it. Because like there’s tons of those things in there, but if you don’t know them you wouldn’t catch it. Just sit down and you can hear Beethoven right in the opening part of it. It’s down here in, like, you know, about the fifteenth harmonic. But it’s not the only one there, there’s about seventeen more going at the same time. It just depends which one you catch. And when I say Beethoven, y’know, there are other people in there. Vivaldi . . . I used pretty obvious ones. . . .”

  “Sometime we’ll have to sit down,” I said, “with a tape or the record and you can point these out to me.”

  “Un-uh. Why?”

  “Because I’m not convinced.”

  “Well, I don’t care. Why should I sit down with you and show it to you? It’s hard to do, because they occur at the same time. They overlay and depending on your mood which one you hear. I mean like you’ll have Vivaldi on top of one of the other ones and that’s on top of another one and meantime you’ve got the drone harmonic building.”

  Curious image, all those old dead composers stacked atop each other carcass on rotted postpustulant dusty carcass, in layers, strata really, prone yet aligned on a stairway to the stars right there in that old warehouse, the Harmonic Building, next door to the Brill Building. Or do I misinterpret? One must be careful when treading through the rice paddies of the avant-garde, lest a full chute of napalm come slag-screaming down your backbone. R.I.P., John Rockwell.

  “There’s also some frequencies on there that are dangerous. What I’m talking about is like in France they have a sound gun. It’s a weapon. It puts out frequencies which kill people, just like they do operations with sound. It’s a very delicate brain operation, they have surgical instruments that are sound. They’ve had this weapon since 1945. Hitler didn’t have it, the French did of all people. Maybe that’s why they play such bad rock ’n’ roll.”

  “They like you over there.”

  “The only one they liked was ‘Heroin,’ that’s because it’s the center of it. But anyway, if you check out the rules of the FCC, there’s certain frequencies that it’s illegal to put on a record. The masterer can’t put them on, and they won’t, and you can’t record it. But I got those frequencies on this record. I tested the thing out at shows during intermission. We played it very softly to see what would happen. Which was exactly what I thought would happen: fights, a lot of irritation,” he began to laugh, “it was fabulous, I loved it. People getting very uptight and not knowing why, because we played it very low.”

  He rambled on for a while after that, mostly about his former manager, Dennis Katz, from whom Lou recently departed rather acrimoniously. (“I’ve got that kike by the balls,” said Lou, who is Jewish himself. “If you ever wondered why they have noses like pigs, now you know. Just like the operators in this hotel—they’re niggers, whattaya expect?”) Finally we rang off. The highlight for me of this particular conversation with Lou was having JoAnn, a seventeen-year-old friend who positively idolizes the old fraud, listen in for the first ten minutes and ask later: “Lester, why was Lou so boring?”

  “It’s not his fault,” I said. “It’s just he’s like Instant Douse. Like having B.O. or something.”

  She understood, and I got ready to write my article, when not two days later the phone rang, hot wires straight from RCA-NYC to these plains, it was my faverave publicitous agent, and after we spoke briefly of John Denver he said, “I’ve got somebody here that wants to talk to you.”

  Sure enough. And in fine fettle too. “I’m not gonna apologize to anybody for Metal Machine Music,” the New Old Lou snarled, “And I don’t think any disclaimer shoulda been put on the cover. Just because some kid paid $7.98 for it, I don’t care if they pay $59.98 or $75 for it, they should be grateful I put that fucking thing out, and if they don’t like it they can go eat ratshit. I make records for me. Same goes for this new album. I listened to those songs last night, and they’re fucking great songs.”

  “You mean you changed the lineup, and we can expect more sleaze and vituperation?”

  “Yeah. The new song titles are ‘Kicks,’ ‘Dirt,’ ‘Glory of Love,’ ‘I Wanna Be Black,’ ‘Leave Me Alone (Street Hasslin’),’ and ‘Nowhere at All.” Fuck this Dennis Katz bullshit of ‘Oh yeah, sorry kids, the next album’ll be songs you’ll like.’”

  “What about all that stuff you said yesterday, then?”

  “Oh, you know, twenty minutes’ sleep and a glass o
f carrot juice and I’m fine. I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I take amphetamines. Any sane person would every chance they get. But I’m not in favor of legalization, because I don’t want all those idiots running around grinding their teeth at me. I only take Methedrine, which most people don’t realize is a vitamin. Vitamin M. If people don’t realize how much fun it is listening to Metal Machine Music, let ’em go smoke their fucking marijuana, which is just bad acid anyway, and we’ve already been through that and forgotten it. I don’t make records for fucking flower children.”

  I was beginning to feel like Johnny Carson. “Speaking of fucking, Lou—do you ever fuck to Metal Machine Music?”

  “I never fuck. I haven’t had it up in so long I can’t remember when the last time was.”

  “But listen, I was cruising in my car with Metal Machine Music blaring the other day, when this beautiful girl crossing at a light smiled and winked at me!” (A true story.)

  He cackled. “Are you sure it was a girl?”

  Well, yeah, reasonably as you can be these days. And I’m also reasonably sure about some other things having to do with this whole sequence of alleged events. The way I see it, Metal Machine Music is the logical follow-up to Sally Can’t Dance, rather than any kind of divergence. Depersonalization in action: first you make an album that you did not produce (though you got half-credit), played guitar on only one track, used for material either old shit outa your bottom drawers or dreck you coulda scribbled in the cab on the way to the sessions, and do all but a couple of the vocals in one take. The only way you can possibly remove yourself more from what you are purveying after that is to walk into a room, switch on some tape recorders, push some buttons, adjust some mikes, let the static fly, and cut it off an hour later. And the reason for all this is that it simply hurts to feel, anything, so the more distance the better. Also indicative of an artist with total contempt for his audience (and thus, by all the laws of symbiosis and parasitism, himself). Note that if we can believe Lou when he says he doesn’t like any of his solo albums except Berlin and Metal Machine Music, he is beginning to let his audience in on the nature of his relationship to them, which is, to put it mildly, slightly askew. Every time he does something he really likes or cares about, it bombs; every time he slings out some cheap trough of chintz dimestore decadence, the little scads eat it up. And never the twain shall meet.

  Which, actually, is in his favor. Because now, and only now, when everybody in the Western world has written him off as either a bad joke or a drug casualty, is he free to finally make a record that feels, that hurts, that might be real and not just more jokes. Because he’s kicked up such a dirt storm that everybody’s blinded anyway, they’re just waiting for the old lunatic to speed himself to death and they positively would not notice if he made a record with the depth and sensitivity of his best work for the late Velvet Underground. Now, I hope that Coney Island Baby, which as of this writing he has realigned again back into the Valentine’s Day package originally promoted, might be that record. Of course, I don’t believe it will be, or that Lou will write anything but loony toons ever again, because a few too many brain cells have took it on the lam from that organism that treated them so hatefully. But all that’s okay too, because I live for laughs, which is why I love Lou. As far as Metal Machine Music goes, I listen to it all the time, but I’ll never forget what Howard Kaylan told me Lou said to him after unsuccessfully trying to sell the layers-and-layers-of-sonic-frequencies concept (which was only a speed trip in the first place) to Flo and Eddie: “Well, anybody who gets to side four is dumber than I am.” So, slimy critter that he is, we’re right back where we started from. The joke’s on you, kid. And if I were you, I’d take advantage of it.

  Creem, February 1976

  Richard Hell

  (b. 1949)

  His real last name is Meyers, but Richard Hell seemed better for a student of the French Symbolist poets and revisionist rocker. He cofounded Television with Tom Verlaine (another fan of French Symbolists), and when the band discovered a bar with a good PA system called CBGB they set the tone for a movement with a jagged beat, spiky hair, and ripped duds. Hell was also writing poetry and published a collaboration with Verlaine under the pseudonym Theresa Stern. After leaving Television, he briefly joined Johnny Thunders in The Heartbreakers, then founded Richard Hell and the Voidoids, whose promising debut was derailed by lifestyle issues or, perhaps, ennui. Hell has continued to make music on and off, but since the nineties his main focus has been writing lively poetry, fiction, and essays.

  Blank Generation

  I was saying let me out of here before I was

  even born. It’s such a gamble when you get a face.

  It’s fascinating to observe what the mirror does

  but when I dine it’s for the wall that I set a place.

  I belong to the blank generation and

  I can take it or leave it each time.

  I belong to the ________ generation but

  I can take it or leave it each time.

  Triangles were falling at the window as the doctor cursed.

  He was a cartoon long forsaken by the public eye.

  The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first . . .

  The doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, “God’s consolation prize!”

  (Chorus)

  To hold the TV to my lips, the air so packed with cash

  then carry it up flights of stairs and drop it in the vacant lot.

  To lose my train of thought and fall into your arms’ tracks

  and watch beneath the eyelids every passing dot.

  (Chorus)

  1977; Hot and Cold: Essays Poems Lyrics Notebooks Pictures Fiction, 2001

  Lynne Tillman

  (b. 1947)

  Lynne Tillman came up in the punk /New Wave era but she wasn’t a punk, more a “Pictures Generation” classical novelist (Cast in Doubt, No Lease on Life, American Genius) adept at exploring the new art world and downtown paradigms. With her persona Madame Realism (not to be confused with Sir Realism), Tillman created a feminist narrator who pulls no punches in describing the chaotic world and maze of mixed signals she finds at Culture Central.

  Madame Realism Asks What’s Natural About Painting?

  MADAME REALISM, like everyone else, had a mother, and her mother had bought and hung two prints by old masters in her home. One, by Van Gogh—a bearded man sucking on a pipe. One, by Renoir—a red-headed girl playing with a golden ball or apple. Since there were redheads in her family, Madame Realism assumed that the girl was a relative, just as she assumed the bearded man was one of her grandfathers, both of whom had died before she was born. As a child Madame Realism thought that all pictures in her home had to do with her family. Later she came to understand things differently.

  With some reluctance Madame Realism went to a museum in Boston to look at paintings by Renoir. By now she felt a kind of despair when in an institution expressly to look at and judge something which she could no longer feel or experience as she once had. Boston itself was a site of contradiction and ongoing temporary resolution. She knew, for instance, that in Boston the arts were led by the Brahmins, the Irish dominated its political machine, and the black population was fighting hard to be allowed anything at all. But in an institution such as a great museum, where lines of people form democratically to look at art, such problems are the background upon which that art is hung.

  Madame Realism was moved along by the crowd, and in another way she was moved by the crowd. “Sinatra is 70 this year,” she heard one woman say to another as they looked at a picture on the wall. There’s nothing of Sinatra in this picture, Madame Realism thought. Not the skinny New Jersey guy who made it big and for a brief moment was married to Ava Gardner, also thin, then. On the other hand (one has so many hands these days), he did rise like cream to the top, not unlike Renoir, whose father was a tailor. The crowd swelled, especially at the paintings whose labels had white dots on them, as they had been chos
en by the museum for special auditory instruction through machines. Madame Realism loitered in the clumps and listened as much as she looked.

  In front of a nude, one young woman asked another: “Do you think that’s how fat women really were?” Automatically, Madame Realism moved her hand to her hip. She strained to hear the answer, but the crowd advanced, and she completed it as she thought it would be. Women were allowed to be fatter, it was the style. You’d be considered more desirable, voluptuous. There’s more of you to love. Diets hadn’t been invented. Madame Realism felt self-conscious standing alone, if only for a moment, in front of that nude, her hand resting on her own 19th-century hip. And she thought again of Frank Sinatra and supposed, whatever other troubles he’d had, he’d never had a weight problem. Quite the reverse, she thought, giving the phrase her version of an English barrister’s accent.

  She didn’t like these paintings. They were almost ridiculous when they weren’t bordering on the grotesque, and then they became interesting to her. What had happened to this guy on his rise to the top? Was he so uncomfortable that what he painted reflected his discomfort by a kind of ugliness? The women were all flesh, especially breasts, and the faces of men, women and children were notably vacant. Madame Realism imagined a VACANCY sign hanging in front of Sketches of Heads, like a cheap hotel’s advertisement that rooms were available.

  In the middle of her own mixed metaphor, which unaccountably made her think of The Divine Comedy, Madame Realism followed a museum instructor, whose students were trailing her with the determination of ducklings after their mother. The woman was saying something about the differences between the 18th and 19th centuries, but became confused as to whether the 18th century meant the 1800s, or the 19th century the 1800s. Madame Realism’s heart went out to her on account of this temporary, ordinary lapse, and she wondered how this might affect the students’ imprinting. The instructor recovered quickly and said, “You have to look for the structure. The painting, remember, is flat.” It wasn’t hard to remember that these paintings were flat, she thought, and stood in front of a painting of onions. Renoir’s onions are flat, she said to herself. His onions. It’s funny that in the language of painting what someone paints becomes his or, sometimes, hers. His nudes. His people. Madame Realism recalled a still life of peaches by Renoir that she’d seen in the Jeu de Paume. Years ago she stood in front of the painting and thought they were perfect, just like peaches. The peaches of Europe, her grandmother was recorded as having said, how I miss them. And there they were. In a bowl. His peaches. Nature at its best. Not vacant like those happy faces. His happy faces.