Velvet Underground

Todd Haynes Velvet Underground film, a review

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

The Velvet Underground is important to me for two reasons. First, I have a high degree of respect for musical outsiders, those who choose to vary from the expectations for sound. That doesn’t mean I enjoy listening repeatedly to every outsider and experimental musician. I ignore and sample listlessly more of it than most mainstream listeners ever do. And some of it, and the Velvet Underground is one of those “some,” does something for me that other more generally likeable music doesn’t.

The second reason? Despite or because of their musical oddities, they attracted social outsiders. Haynes film reminds us that Cher* was once famously quoted as saying the VU would “replace nothing except suicide.” That was clearly understood as a slam on their dark outlook. It’s also commendably true in another way — that for some people this band of strangeness comforted some who felt unacceptably strange.

It’s OK, really, if you don’t like the Velvet Underground’s music. But I hold that you should still be grateful they existed. So how about Haynes film revisiting their formation and career? Grateful there too, though I want to second-guess Haynes more than most reviewers of this documentary. Before I do that, let me say that I respect the effort to put this together. Just looking at the long, long scroll of rights holders that needed to be placated and credited tells you that this was no easy thing to bring off.

Throughout the film I was thinking “they aren’t putting enough context here for those not already knowledgeable about this scene to understand who and what is happening.” However, reviewers have been almost universally kind, and this section of mid-20th-century NYC history can’t be all that widely known in detail to reviewers in 2021. This indicates that enough must come through for some. Perhaps I underestimate the value of samples of things to satisfy or attract interest, and overestimate the missing details that I personally find interesting or telling.

Am I being fair? The film does supply enough detail to see how the Mekas school of art film and the Fluxus associated music scene became the soil in which the band took root. And while it might not be surprising given that this is a film made by a filmmaker, I had not seen any other account that made an effort to tie those film and music threads together. So, props to that effort, but watching the documentary I wondered how many fresh eyes would be able to understand the variety of things the Jonas Mekas DIY film circle was experimenting with. Early in the film I watched a Stan Brakhage clip appearing on the left split screen, an experiment in drawing with light by scratching directly on the film stock. Annoying pedant that I am, I pointed at the screen and enthusiastically shouted out that that was Brakhage’s work. I stifled myself quickly, but the film didn’t credit it on screen at the time. I could surmise that not identifying it was part of the effect that Haynes wished to convey, that a sense of “what can you do that is novel and different” was ubiquitous then and there.

One hole I noted was any contextualization of how other bands and musicians beyond La Monte Young and John Cage influenced the VU sound and the courage of its exploration. R&B influences appear visually in the film, and early on some doo wop stunningly segues** into what I think was a La Monte Young piece, and I thought this side of VU’s influences would be demonstrated, but that brilliant moment was not repeated or expanded on. As a composer, half-baked musician, and writer I would have gone there, but I’m not Haynes, and he’s the filmmaker who made the film.

In general, other possible musical connections were lightly inferred. Perhaps this area is rock fan trivia? There was a passing mention of how Bob Dylan had opened up songwriting. In one film clip Allen Ginsburg is announcing an event which will include VU, other parts of the Warhol scene, and the Fugs, and Ginsburg nods to Fugs’ principal Ed Sanders in the room. The VU and the Fugs*** seem to have formed close to the same time, 1964, and despite The Fugs not having a John Cale figure, both were groups of Greenwich Village poets forming a band whose material will be unafraid to shock general society. I’ve never found any mention of either band knowing of each other, yet in the small world of NYC in the mid 60 they had to. We do know the Mothers of Invention and VU knew of each other — and in summary seemed to hate each other, perhaps because these two groups clearly competed in format to the degree that any so unique conceptions could compete. Given that the Mothers were West Coast until a summer-long stint in the Village in 1967, it’s less likely they knew of each other at their formation in 64-65 however. Here’s a link to a short run-down of those frictions.

Moving to my poetry side, there was also no mention made of the beatnik jazz-accompanied poetry which must have also fed into this band’s conception, even though Lou Reed’s college teacher Delmore Schwartz’s dark but unaccompanied poetry is covered

The included footage of the ‘66-‘67 Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows looks fascinating. In the interviews regarding the oft-told tales of the VU’s 1966 west coast tour EPI performer Mary Woronov mentions that west coast light shows were not in the same class. Yet another report from eye-witnesses says that the EPI shows were haphazard with inexperienced hangers-on and even audience members running the lights. This might have been a night-by-night difference over the run of the EPI. Or it could just be home team cheerleading by the VU/Warhol entourage. The transience of the multimedia lightshow/music events of this era makes this so hard to evaluate, and that era of improvisational multimedia collage surrounding live music has largely left our culture. In its place we have giant video screens so that we can assay the length of the lead singer’s nose hairs at concerts. It’s likely no one cares anymore who was first or better in this field, alas.****

One fleeting remark made when discussing how the West Coast Scene and the Velvets contrasted was an observation that there was an overlap in fans of VU and the Grateful Dead. I’m reminded of what I wrote here in 2016 about how it was too easy to paint all the West Coast bands as dilettante flower power Pollyannas and the VU as dark, hardened, and street-tough:

“Each band is fronted by a guitarist who has a problem with heroin. The bass player (and sometimes the keyboard player) is really an avant-garde classical composer. They both start out playing to dancers swimming in colored lights at events heavily associated with and promoted by a non-musician guru. Both bands had trouble selling records, at least at first, but those who did buy the records started forming bands beloved by cliques of college students. Both bands are known for an un-compromising poet maudit stance. Of course, one band hangs out with gangsters leading to a well-publicized incident of an audience member getting killed at a show. One wanted to call an album “Skull F**k.” One band put a drug kingpin in charge of its sound system. The other band hung out a lot with artists in lofts and had girl-germs for letting a woman be their drummer.”

Reviewers made much of the film breaking the talking heads format for music documentaries. Now having seen it, this point was oversold in reviews and publicity. Haynes had an authenticity policy of only using “eyewitnesses” who actually saw the band and its circle for his contemporary interviews. This only reduces the candidates, and those used, are used rather conventionally but effectively. I do hope that some of the interview material only excerpted in the movie is made available as a scholarly resource.

The subject of Lou Reed’s mercurial personality gets some play — an inescapable choice. Haynes shows us the VU was a combination of ingredients, but the idea that Reed’s is the largest contribution is hard to argue with. It was good to see Cale given his due here. Percussionist Tucker and guitarist Morrison’s contributions are mentioned but these mentions are comparatively brief. For example, the sole example of Tucker’s contribution to the band’s sound concerns one short (if endearing) featured vocal. If percussion is important to you, this hour-long video is an extraordinarily good dissection and demonstration of Moe Tucker’s musical contribution to the VU sound. On the other hand, I think Morrison’s musical contributions get less than a minute in the film. Was Sterling Morrison just that unimportant to the band? Has anyone who saw the band or witnessed the recordings ever outlined his contributions to the VU unconventional two-guitar attack? Is there just no one to speak for him on musical matters, and so Haynes had nothing to leave out?

Nico was always peripheral to the band, though interesting in her own right. In her case, I think Haynes does justice to the connection.

Back to Reed. The film hints at a more out and homosexual Sixties Reed than some other accounts I’ve read. The Rashomon aspect of who’s talking shouldn’t be surprising. Nods to transgressive gayness and gayness’ connection with the demi-monde (which was common linkage then, in gay and homophobic worlds both) was part of the band’s appeal without a doubt. Haynes presents this visually in a matter of fact way. This became culturally important, as important as the music — and in an odd way helped us into a world where gayness is no longer inevitably connected with a thoroughgoing outsiderdom.

The film once briefly nods to elements of misogyny in the scene. Some documentaries would never have made even that brief mention. My wife noticed this too and added that both the women and the musicians appeared to be treated as merely decorative by the Warhol Factory. In this matter, the scene too often, too easily followed mainstream culture and even the ironic elements of camp are subject to the mask becoming the face. In its defense, we could enter the question if it was less patriarchal, or no worse, than the general Sixties popular music scene.

The loud, aggro VU is fine, but then there’s this side. Here, you can hear the entirety of “Candy Says” referenced below. Doug Yule’s disarming vocal and Reed’s songwriting are superb here.

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All the film’s en passant moves may still capture. Something informative and entertaining did  accumulate over the course of the film’s two hours, but the emotional impact was less than I expected. We are not compelled to care about the human beings on the screen even as we consider them for their exceptional choices. Haynes respects and expects the audience to bring that element themselves. A personal emotional exception within the body of the film: 15 seconds of “Candy Says”  plays to help introduce us to John Cale’s controversial successor in the group, Doug Yule, who sang this Lou Reed song on record. Musically, there’s nothing avant garde about the song, but it’s emotionally gripping to me, more so now. The documentary’s  final sequences help summarize things a little. If an audience sticks it out, and brings their own empathy and intelligence to it, my summary is that the film could encourage some people today who wish to do something off-the-beaten path artistically; and Haynes’ film has rewards for those who are established fans of VU, whatever size that grouping is today.*****   Should I be concerned about the size of the audience? After all, there are still Velvet Underground performances that can all but clear a room in minutes. The principal members of the Velvet Underground consciously chose that path, deciding to choose an audience who would stay for contrasts and experiments, an audience that in turn found a community of understanding when some of those and their experiments weren’t welcomed.

After 2,000 words in this review I’m hesitant to ask any more of your attention today, but here’s a short piece, “Up-Hill”  I did several years ago where I combined Christina Rossetti’s Christian allegory with some VU inspired music. Player below for some, highlighted hyperlink for those that won’t see the player.

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*It’s such a slick quote that I wondered if it was actually written by a publicist to be attributed to her. This was once a common tactic, for ghost-written quotes to be given to nightlife and gossip columnists as the clever things that celebrities were to have said in order to keep the pot of notoriety boiling for their charges.

**This was also something integral to Frank Zappa’s music. Late 60s listeners thought Zappa was just taking the piss out of an outdated pop music format when he’d do R&B vocal harmony, but he would tell anyone who asked that he loved that music and saw it as a valid sound and compositional color. The additional truth that satire was involved was incidental. There was satire involved when Zappa referenced Stravinsky, Berg, and Webern too.

***The definitive third-party consideration of The Fugs remains unwritten and unfilmed. It’s often occurred to me that The Fugs formation was as much or more than the Velvets, or The Stooges, or the Ramones, or the Sex Pistols the genesis moment of Indie Rock, and for punk outrage they easily outranked that list of founders even if the quality of their musical achievement was more inconsistent.

****Is revival possible? A few 21st century artists are still exploring this, for example guitarist Kaki King.

*****I suspect that within later generations now, there may be another grouping unfamiliar with the Velvet Underground, for whom the old joke can be repurposed “You mean, Lou Reed was in a band?”

Awaiting the Velvet Underground film tomorrow

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m working on some new pieces this week, and after all the loud and sometimes abrasive sounds I’ve been exploring this fall, I think some of then verge on pretty — well, pretty as anything can be with my voice. But before we leave abrasive….

I’m looking forward to Todd Haynes film about the beginnings of the Velvet Underground band that is released tomorrow, so I thought I’d put a couple of links to things I’ve done directly referencing that pioneering experimental rock band. Not everyone will be as looking forward to that as I am. I fully understand that. But in case anyone else out there is, here’s my “awaiting” post tonight.

The first piece is one of the earliest pieces I presented here, first posted almost exactly five years ago,  called “The Day Lou Reed Died.”   It’s my own elegy to one of the Velvet Underground principals and it’s principles too. I wrote it after attending a wedding reception filled with kids and Halloween costumes, celebrating the marriage of two brides, held just as the title says, on the day of Reed’s death.

Some will see a player here to play that audio piece, but if your way of reading this blog doesn’t show that, here’s a highlighted hyperlink that will play it too.

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And while it’s still autumn, let’s prepare for winter with a cover I did of a Nico song written by another member of the Velvet Underground, John Cale. To paraphrase Tina Turner (who was not a member of the VU), “we’re going to take the beginning of this song and do it nice’n’easy, but then we are going to finish it nice’n’rough.”

The LYL Band’s cover of “Winter Song” from Nico’s Chelsea Girl LP

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Perhaps I should have included a note that no guitars were harmed in the creation of this piece at the end of the video.

Back with new stuff here soon. Acoustic guitars. Quieter.

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Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

American poet Wallace Stevens constantly spoke in his poetry about the creation of art. This sort of “art looking at itself” move has a danger of being too self-referential and one might fear that it would sit with the reader as unresolved as being between two mirrors. I think today’s subtle poem works, despite those risks, and we’ll see if my performance of it brings out something that you may not have noticed in it.

Stevens, though wordier than Emily Dickinson*, often has his poetry seem like a riddle or puzzle, and though his poems have a surface beauty one can see right off, they also sometimes work like a lawyerly contract with the reader, full of obscure words and fine-print sub-clauses that you may not fully understand.

Let’s listen to Stevens read his poem himself.

One can hear background noises outside the room in this recording, so Stevens’ voice is heard here “Out of all the indifferences.”

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He’s not a bad reader, he does an acceptable job of bringing out the structure and word-music of this poem—but it’s emotionally flat, a default setting for many poet-readers. I think the theory is: if his words are good, well selected and ordered they should be able to convey all. If I listen carefully, I hear just a tiny touch of ruefulness in his voice as his poem nears its end, but it’s just a touch.

So, let’s look at the words again, not just that they might sound unusual and mysterious. Here’s a link to the full text if you’d like to follow along.

There’s an overall image in this poem laid out in the somewhat fussy title: that thing that causes us to create art—in Stevens’ case, poetry—is like a paramour. That is, it’s like a desired lover (and “paramour,” that somewhat unusual word he chooses, has strong associations with an illicit or secret lover). But wait, it’s an “Interior Paramour.” It’s something within ourselves. That internal duality will be dealt with in his poem.

At times he seems confident in speaking of this cause to create art, but look closely at the shading, the little codicils in his statements. “For small reason” we think our imagination is good. We are “poor,” not particularly perceptive or wise, we only choose out of the richness of all things some single thing that we’ll prize over all those things we are indifferent to. We do this to impose or create this intimacy we feel with our art, this imagined, chosen, second self, this internal paramour his title speaks of.

But, but…“God and the imagination are one!” Surely, this is praise.

Look carefully, “We say,” Stevens says: it’s but our  claim. A God in actuality is some higher candle. What we feel we have, in our separate imaginations selected into art, that art that may cohere out of shared human centrality—is a smaller, lower light, shedding on a smaller circle: us perhaps and our work in the moment of imagination choosing creation, or that resulting work and a reader or listener.

That’s the internal paramour, the shame-feared, secret love inside us when we create. It’s a small lit space we make in darkness, where occasional readers or listeners see something like what we saw. Being together with little creation is enough. Being together with some audience out of all the indifferences is enough.

Today’s music is based obliquely on the Velvet Underground, a pioneering indie rock group that explored areas that later groups also chose to explore. On one level they seemed to be like unto a rock band: two guitars, drums, and a further musician who might play keyboards, electric bass or bowed strings–but their genius was to put those things together differently, to use those voices in uncharacteristic ways. How will listeners react when you do that? Well, for a lot of them it will be to reject it as worthwhile music, though some may see a new possibility. Some art comforts. Some art unsettles. Being together with some audience out of all the indifferences is enough.

Here’s an 8 minute animated anecdote about the Velvet Underground’s first official performance. How indie was that band in its early days? The original drummer quit when he heard they took this paying gig. He felt such commercialism violated their art.

I should note that I was reminded of this poem when the Fourteen Lines  blog included it last month. I immediately thought I’d like to perform it, but it sounded like it was later Wallace Stevens. I did a quick web search to see when it was first published and the return said in Harmonium,  Stevens’ first book-length collection which is in the public domain. I let out a shout and began work on the composition and performance I present today. It was only this morning as I started writing this post that I found that it was, just as I suspected from the title, from late in Stevens’ career when he was as old as I am now, and is therefore likely to still be in copyright, even though Stevens himself has been dead for 65 years. I feel conflicted about going ahead and presenting what I worked on and came up with, but have decided to take this route: if whoever holds the rights to Stevens work objects to this non-commercial use, let me know, I’ll gladly remove it.

My performance of “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”  seeks to be unsettling. The two guitars don’t work like rock band guitars are supposed to work. The drums and their beat are strange, not tying things down as the instrument’s rhythms slide instead of lock. The organ plays low, driving somewhere you can’t see. And I chant Stevens’ words as if I know where they’re going, and yet I can’t yet say where that is yet. That’s what I feel when I create music or poetry. The player to hear it is below. Like some early Velvet Underground tunes, it may sound better around the third time you listen to it. But if you don’t like it, remember I promise various words and various music here, there are other selections available in our archives.

Thanks for sharing this little light by reading or listening tonight.

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*Stevens was an actual lawyer. Dickinson came from a family of lawyers and I suspect either absorbed this manner of written discourse or may have inherited it along with her mental firmware.

Saint (Cecilia) and Translating Mallarmé

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

One of the issues with being half-learned is that one can fall into traps and tasks that are more difficult than you expected. This week I thought, why don’t I translate some Mallarmé? Alternate voice here Dave Moore had given me a book on him for my birthday (which I haven’t had time to read yet, too busy with this project…) but having recently translated and performed another poem by Apollinaire, I was reminded how often the English language Modernists looked to the preceding French Symbolists for inspiration.

So, I look. I see lots of sonnets, which is good. I like short poems personally and I aim for shorter pieces here for performance too. And short should make for a shorter translation task. On one hand, I have my unfamiliarity with French other than my il y a longtemps high school. On the other hand, I’ve tackled French Dada and Surrealist work, so a 19th century Symbolist should be no harder.

The hard to translate word here would be: “Oops.”

Turns out Mallarmé focused on esoteric philosophical ideas and the ideal in his art and manner. Maybe the rough English language analog would be Wallace Stevens, but with Stevens I can lay back and enjoy the color and sound of his English language words without having to worry about translating them into another language, and Mallarmé is very compressed and obscure in his tropes. There’s a reason that 20th century Dadaists found him congenial despite his dour and spiritual outlook: in French he may be interesting without one needing to understand what he’s intent about.

The 16 line poem I picked to translate, “Saint”   is an earlier one, one reckoned to be less obscure than later Mallarmé. I’m not sure how much that helped.

I read one report “Mallarmé was…widely considered incomprehensible—the standard joke was to request a translation of his work into French…” I read that several hours into my translation. I laughed pretty hard.

portrait_mallarme_by Manet

You go for the cheap pun Frank. Look here: I wrote “phalange.” Is that not singular? My friend Manet’s  painting of me will enlarge on this point!

 

Mallarmé’s “Saint”  isn’t incomprehensible. It’s even an admirable poem with something to portray about the ideal nature of music. It probably helps if one has some background in Roman Catholic liturgy as one reads it, but imagery requiring a bit of understanding of other cultures can be a feature not a bug.

Here it is in French, in one of three slightly different versions I eventually came upon:

Saint

A la fenêtre recélant
Le santal vieux qui se dédore
De la viole étincelant
Jadis selon flûte ou mandore,

Est la sainte pale, étalant
Le livre vieux qui se déplie
Du Magnificat ruisselant
Jadis selon vêpre ou complie:

A ce vitrage d’ostensoir
Que frôle une harpe par l’Ange
Formée avec son vol du soir
Pour la délicate phalange

Du doigt que, sans le santal
Ni le vieux livre, elle balance
Sur le plumage instrumental,
Musicienne du silence.

Native French speakers: feel free to mock my audacity to render this. For those interested in translation, I’m going to allow you to look over my shoulder as I worked on this. Note: I almost never try to render rhyme schemes or meter from one language to another. Like Stevens in English, this poem sounds lovely in French even if you can’t figure it out. In English I tried to instead vividly render the images, which is my preference in translation, even if it can lead to approximations and out and out bad guesses. And then to put that to some English word-music that may not reference the other language’s “tune.”

Here’s what I came up with:

Saint (Cecilia)

The window frames
The worn fretboard
Of the splendid viola—
Once played music with flute or mandolin.

There’s the pale saint, opening,
Spreading the old book.
Mary’s Magnificat falls out—
Once for vesper or compline.

This window is a monstrance.
She holds her harp, an angel’s
Customary evening wing,
Played by the delicate phalanx

Of fingers. Without a fretboard,
Without the old book, she strums
On the instrumental plumage,
A musician of silence.

First Stanza. This is an extraordinarily difficult image to figure out, and some of the guesses others have made are not a concrete image, which could even be Mallarmé’s intent. There’s clearly an instrument mentioned, a viol (a larger predecessor to our modern viola, and I imagined a viola da gamba, a wonderful “early-music” instrument for which the viol name was used). I rendered it as viola so that moderns might have a more common instrument in their minds eye. I did the same for “mandore” an ancestor of the now more familiar mandolin. Mallarmé may have meant to add an ancient music air to this, and I could have gone the other way with the instrument names (Stevens would have).

One of the chief problems is some read this description as an instrument that’s out of sight (“recélant” can mean to harbor or to conceal—and a window concealing?). Idealist Mallarmé could have intended it out of the frame. But I wasn’t sure, and I’d rather the reader know about it clearly, particularly as it opens the poem. And his description is puzzling—a point made of it being personified as sandalwood for one thing. Sandalwood is a hardwood. You probably wouldn’t use it to make the soundboard of an instrument, which functionally and surface-area-wise would be the main part. But it can be used for necks and particularly for finger/fretboards. Even though Mallarmé repeats sandalwood later in the poem, and there are fragrance and ceremonial connections with the wood and word, I decided to call it a fretboard, to help us see the instrument. There’s another issue with Mallarmé’s description: the instrument is “étincelant” and yet also “dédore.” I decided that the instrument is “splendid” but also “worn” in the area of that hardwood fretboard: i.e. this is a fine instrument that has been well and often played.

Second Stanza. This one is more straightforward. Cecilia is the “sainte pale” (named specifically in early versions of the poem) and she’s opened a book which seems to contain the score of a setting to Mary the mother of Jesus’ famous passage called the Magnificat in Roman Catholicism. I decided to add the “Mary’s” to the Magnificat just to help listeners hear the word as a proper noun. And something happens regarding the Magnificat: “ruisselant.” This word, best as I can figure has a sense of streaming or trickling. At first I thought the image is that the music represented by the score is magically sounding itself as Cecilia the patron saint of music opens the old book. But I don’t think we are to hear music as the poem develops, and so I wondered if the meanings of ruisselant infer running downhill. I decided that the score of the Magnificat falls out of the book, making itself known, but not making a sound or allowing it to be used to aid the music making, just as in stanza one Cecilia is not availing herself of a fine and once oft-used viola.

Third Stanza. Tougher again. This stanza contains the strongest image of the poem, the fusing of an angel’s bird-like wing with the somewhat-like shape of a harp—and Mallarmé wants to stuff other ideas into the four lines too. I decided that the specific and technical term “monstrance” cannot be replaced: it’s a glass altarpiece holder of a sacred object. Wallace Stevens would have loved to have used that word! The obscurity of the word adds some mystery I think, and no simply understandable single word replaces it. With the stanza’s last word I fell into thinking Mallarmé intended to pun on “phalange” (phalanx) which is from the Greek, meaning a massed formation (usually of soldiers or police)—but also fingers, similarly grouped together in disciplined order when playing an instrument. I decided to use phalanx because either words’ use for fingers is somewhat obscure in English (outside of medical usage) but I liked the idea of the delicate phalanx of soldiers or riot troops. But I think phalange may be singular in French, and if so, I may have misunderstood Mallarmé’s intent. My sin is falling in love with the image.

Fourth Stanza. Home stretch! Easier again, and choices already made set it up. In my reading Mallarmé is saying Cecilia has her spiritual intent on ideal music, the impossible music made with the mythical wings of angels and the impossible music made by strumming a bird’s feathers—such a fine image because it works bidirectionally! Actual music has been left behind as once, and not now (“jadis,” twice in the poem). She no longer needs the viola or the score.

She’s become the unheard melodies that idealist Keats says are sweeter than heard ones.

St Cecilia by Carlo Saraceni
CeCe, you’re messing up the form again! It’s a 12 bar minor blues with a 4 bar tag I’m going to modulate counter-clockwise on the cycle of 5ths each second chorus, and then—what you do mean, “Wing it?”

 

 

In performance, I had to resort to heard music so that the estate of John Cage didn’t sue me for plagiarism. I thought I might try to reference the Velvet Underground when it featured the pale saint John Cale on keyboards and viola. But neither the drum part nor the rhythm guitars I settled on had that VU feel. None-the-less I went ahead and created a top line using viola and a keening combo organ.

Last time I repeated the short poem several times so that I could show the different ways it could be expressed. Today’s short musical piece gathers a sort of meditative power if played on repeat. The player is below.

 

Up-Hill

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Last post I compared late 19th Century cultural hipsters with early 21st Century urban cultural revivalists.  Did modern natural-fiber clad, skin-inked and perforated young people study up on William Morris’ Arts & Crafts movement and visit museums to absorb the Pre-Raphaelites? Some perhaps, not all. And the same can be said for what is carried onward from punks, hip-hop kids, hippies, beatniks, and so on. I’m too old, and too little a sociologist to answer this definitively.

I can say that when I tried to discover what kind of music I wanted to make in the 1970s I copied imperfectly many musicians from the previous decades as well as my contemporaries working down the river in New York City. And those NYC contemporaries? They too were looking backward to move forward. What had been overlooked? What had gone out of fashion for no good reason? What had been uncompleted? So, in listening to them, I was listening to their understanding and misunderstandings of the past too.
 
One of our principles with the Parlando Project is “Other People’s Stories.” Part of the above is “my story”—but my musical story is really made up of other people’s stories.
 
Tracing the path of influence is often hard to do. Today’s piece “Up-Hill”  is an example. The words were written by Christina Rossetti, that sister of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Obviously, she’s familiar with the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle—but she’s also deeply interested in a Christian religious revival, and that too gets reflected in “Up-Hill.”  Would she have known Anna Coghill’s poem that was set as the hymn “Work for the Night is Coming?”  That’s unknown to me, but “Up-Hill”  and “Work for the Night is Coming”  are both poems understood in context as being Christian devotional, while containing not a single specific utterance about a deity, salvation, or an afterlife. With revivals, context changes things.

Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti thinking about an up-hill journey?

 

And here’s another way that influence is hard to trace: it becomes unconscious. As I was writing the music for “Up-Hill”  I was mostly interested in varying my customary harmonic cadences while keeping it to just two or three chords, a short number that often works best for performance with the LYL Band. And “Up-Hill”  is, after all, a work of beautiful simplicity, saying something profound without pretentious elaboration.  I settled on a simple I V IV I progression, and tried it with the band last month, but my vocal wasn’t working. Trying again this month, the unconscious struck.

VU - Shall I Meet Other Wayfarers At Night

“Shall I meet other Wayfarers at night?” The Velvet Underground  certainly think so.

 

I didn’t realize until I was working out the rhythm track that I was falling into a Velvet Underground groove, like the one they used in “I’m Waiting for my Man,”  a tune that is also understood as devotional in context—though to drugs, not a deity. Both songs feature a journey to a destination (up-hill or up-town), both engage in conversation along the way. Was this subconscious choice a sly comment on Christina’s brother Dante Rossetti’s addictions? A comparison of recovery to salvation, or of addiction to salvation?  No, the groove was just working, and it helped me get a better vocal down. If I understood anything about what I was choosing while doing, it was that I was linking sub-cultures and following the near invisible web connecting Other People’s Stories.

Velvet Underground and Christina Rossetti Cover

So what would that sound like? Use the player below to find out.

 

Same as always, the player should appear below.to hear the performance of “Up-Hill.”  And keep sharing the links, subscribing, and telling folks about the Parlando Project.

The Blood of Strangers

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

As we go forward, following Leonard Cohen’s suggestion “Let Us Compare Mythologies,” I’m going to take you to another very dark place. If Siegfried Sassoon was hesitant to publish the last piece Christ and the Soldier, I too am somewhat hesitant to publish this piece, The Blood of Strangers. For The Blood of Strangers to work it must achieve its aim to be provocative. Let’s take that word seriously: it means to provoke you, it means to make you uncomfortable.

That’s one of the things art can choose to do, but it does not give me any lasting pleasure to do so. As an attempted artist I do not believe I must have any greater insight to things than you do, but the nature of art is to try convey things vividly, and in this case I’m going to convey two viewpoints on revolutionary violence.

A year ago, only hours after the terrorist attack on the rock concert at the Bataclan in Paris France, I was scheduled to record as part of the work of making this Parlando project combining spoken word and music. As a musician, I felt compelled to address this event simply and parochially because the attack intentionally targeted music. I chose to use two texts to examine that event: excerpts from a first-person account by Isobel Bowdery, a member of the audience attacked that night, and a section of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Bowdery’s account is to my mind extraordinary, even more so for having been composed so shortly after the attack. Whitman, in contrast, had much more time with his text, as he famously worked and reworked Leaves of Grass over his lifetime. The Whitman piece I used “France”  first appeared in Whitman’s 1860 third edition of Leaves of Grass and was retained in the final edition of 1891. Moreover, Whitman is particularly writing about the French Revolution, events already over 60 years old.

I believe I need say no more about Bowdery’s eloquent words. They are close enough to our time as to speak for themselves. Whitman’s are more problematic.

Modern American poetry has a father and a mother. Its mother is Emily Dickenson; its father is Walt Whitman. As a child, I can’t help but sometimes take after both parents. The Parlando project has already presented work of Dickenson, but this is the first piece we’ve published using Whitman—and this may be an unfortunate introduction, for Whitman’s France is a somewhat mythologized but unwavering appreciation of violence and revenge in the furtherance of a cause. Near the start I told you that I would not tell you what to think of this, but in the just-hours-past the Bataclan attack I was appalled at Whitman.
 
I suggest at this point, assuming you are prepared to visit a dark place, that you listen to The Blood of Strangers now and have your own experience of it. Musically this is another piece that takes after The Velvet Underground, a band I’ve talked about before this. My intent in speaking the two texts at the same time was not only a homage to a tactic the Velvets used, it was aimed at breaking up the flow of either text so that you will not experience them in isolation from each other, or as a logical “Point Counterpoint” debate, but rather a simultaneous experience in two different frames. The last half of the piece is an “instrumental” where The LYL Band gets to synthesize their feelings in the aftermath of that attack speaking only with music.

 

 

OK, if you’re still reading, what can I say in defense of Whitman?

Whitman Leaves of Grass Table

Whitman wanted Leaves of Grass to be all-inclusive. That was one of his core ideas. And this piece, France, was only one small part of this great, lifelong work. In his own copy of the 1860 edition that introduced this piece, he wrote down a table of the word counts of that edition of Leaves of Grass compared to other epic poetic works, proudly noting that he had already exceeded the word counts of the Bible, the Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, and Paradise Lost. His radical inclusiveness wanted to take in all manner of despised and un-praised things in his great work. Although writing 60 years after the end of the French Revolution, he is writing on the eve of America’s great blood bath, the Civil War. So, as he continued to work on Leaves of Grass, where he kept and expanded the piece called France, he was intimately acquainted with the results of gunfire and bombs. I often thought of that Whitman, the wound-dresser, when I myself was applying bandages or tending to the ill and injured. Whitman famously declared:

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

The Day Lou Reed Died

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Unlike jokes, you can explain a poem without killing it. Explanations may wound or amputate the poem a bit, but sometimes the dissection reveals things you couldn’t see before. My rule here on the Parlando project is to generally not explain the poem or the music, to let you experience it as it unfolds. But I like to break rules, so today I break this one. If you’d like to hear the The Day Lou Reed Died before the explanation, go ahead and click the gadget you’ll see at the end of this and then come back to this.

I started writing The Day Lou Reed Died on that day, exactly three years ago, but it took me about a month to come up with version you hear here. I did the music shortly after finishing the words, playing all the parts myself.

The poem takes a rhetorical stance of negation. It tells you what it thinks using the dark illumination of telling you what it doesn’t think. The first part parodies Frank O’Hara wonderful poem on Billie Holiday’s death, which is full of details of life in New York City in the high 1950’s. In that same section I remind the listener that Lou Reed was part and not part of that time, a man (like myself) a generation younger than O’Hara. Like O’Hara apparently, it was a surprise and not a surprise for me to hear of Reed’s death while planning for a social occasion. Holiday, like Reed, was known to be sick, but there was no public death watch.

The next section is a list, continuing the rhetorical negation. I start right off with saying I’m not thinking of Andy Warhol, whose connection to Lou Reed’s first band, the Velvet Underground, was something of a platinum-blond albatross around its neck. The assumption was that Warhol was the mastermind behind the Velvet Underground, which slighted the real innovators inside the band (Lou Reed and John Cale), and it allowed folks to contextualize the band, as many of Warhol’s pieces were then, as a put-on, a commercial parody of real art. As the list goes on I use the Warholian tactic of linking to a variety of commercial Andies, humorous in their inapplicableness to Lou Reed. I end the list with two unlike entries: the title of a famous avant-garde film and then “androgyny” to turn the incongruity one more time, as we might well associate Lou Reed with either.

The next section “I put on the indie rock station” starts, like the unexpected death announcement, with an actuality of the day I experienced. I expected them to be playing a lot of Lou Reed songs if not a full-fledged format change to all Lou Reed. Instead there was nothing—but so influential was the Velvet Underground to indie-rock, that as each song began I wondered if this was going to be a Lou Reed song or a cover version of one. No one put it better than Brian Eno did when he said:

The first Velvet Underground record sold only a few thousand copies, but everyone who bought a copy started a band.

This section was my way of saying the same thing, while noting that Lou Reed’s death did not get the public attention that David Bowie or Prince’s deaths a few years later did.

And the social event I was preparing for in the first section? The wedding reception for two women who had married that year after same-sex marriage became legal in my state. I try to recount the great sweep of change in my lifetime in this section. The young Lou Reed helped pioneer portrayal of gay, bi and trans people in his songs. The emergence of that portrayal in Reed’s art is a complex subject I’ll largely skip here, as it would take too long. In short, at least at first, Reed associated his gay characters with the demi-monde he sought to portray in other aspects. Like the term demi-monde I just used, this was something of a 19th century, or early 20th century way of looking at things—but I use it because those of Reed’s age (or mine) grew up in a world in which the culture and still living authority figures were from before WWI or its aftermath.

And at this reception, there were many children, grade school age and younger, and to keep them occupied there was a gymnasium dance floor and, a boombox and some rented lights. Their parents were dancing with these children, and as the swirling lights drifted over these single-digit-age dancers my mind recalled the young adult faces attending the Sixties “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” happening that was the public debut of the Velvet Underground, documented on the back cover of their first record. As much as an old man can while dancing, I figured the actuary tables on these children. Some of them may well live into the 22nd century. From a world where homosexuality was unspoken, to a world in which it was roundly denounced, “treated” and imprisoned, to a world where there is a homey, pot-luck Midwestern wedding reception, to a world I will never see or be able to predict almost 90 years from now. This is the arc of our culture and our experience of and as living artists.

1966

Exploding Plastic Inevitable

2013

Dancers in pin spots

The last section has gotten a rise out of a few people. What I wrote is somewhere between subtle and a mistake I fear. Staying with the negative rhetorical tactics I’ve used throughout the poem. I say:

As artists are inessential to art,
Art is inessential to change.
As beauty and justice pass through us,
Let us stop, and feel this
Beating through our veins.

More than one has heard those lines and missed that it’s a two-part equation. Are artists inessential to art? No, in that obviously living artists are necessary to make art. But also, yes, in that we know that art continues to have impact past the lifespan of the artist. Perhaps in that 22nd century someone will still listen to the work of Lou Reed. The second part says this artist/art comparison is equal (“as”) to art is to change. So, to the same degree that living artists are necessary to art, art also creates change; but in the passage of time in which immortality may allow art to outlive artists, that change will become something that is no longer “change” as it becomes part of everyday life.

As good an ending as “And everyone and I stopped breathing” then? Probably not, but I’m trying. And Frank O’Hara didn’t play no electric guitar.

August Moonlight

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I promised last time that we’d move on from Emily Dickinson’s church of the August crickets to another take on something like the same thing. Dickinson’s words are set in the afternoon, but this one, “August Moonlight” moves on to August nighttime.

I knew nothing of this poem’s author, Richard Le Gallienne, before I found these words looking for some material on the end of summer. I still know little about him. He’s from Liverpool England, but his lifetime only overlapped the Beatles a little at the end, and besides he’d moved to France by then. In his youth he wrote for The Yellow Book, a short-lived but influential periodical of the ‘90s. No, not the grunge ‘90s, though the thought of Husker Du, Nirvana, or The Replacements being drawn by Aubrey Beardsley (the Yellow Book’s art editor) gives me pause to think. No the 1890s, the “yellow decade,” when using art to throw light on difference, and difference to throw light on art was all the rage.

I’ve always loved the visual art associated with The Yellow Book and the circles surrounding it, but frankly, I’m not a big fan of most of the writers associated with that movement. There’s a kind of dead-end romanticism about a lot of it. Even in my youth, when such things might have been attractive to me, the writers, taken as a group, seemed stilted, like it was a paint-by-numbers picture of a Keats poem.

The visual art however gets past any of that, because it’s just so beautiful in line and color. 70 years afterward, the art of The Yellow Book circle was one of the chief influences on San Francisco rock poster art. So I could have thrown Le Gallienne’s words in with my take on a slinky Grateful Dead space jam or maybe some Beatley folk-rock. I did neither. Instead I paired it with the night-time side of the Velvet Underground, the representative New York City rock group of the 60s.

While I’m at it: Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground. They’re supposed to be in complete opposition. Sonically there is a bit of a gap there, I’ll admit, though nothing that music couldn’t bridge. But nothing alike? Each band is fronted by a guitarist who has a problem with heroin. The bass player (and sometimes the keyboard player) is really an avant-garde classical composer. They both start out playing to dancers swimming in colored lights at events heavily associated with and promoted by a non-musician guru. Both bands had trouble selling records, at least at first, but those who did buy the records started forming bands beloved by cliques of college students. Both bands are known for an un-compromising poet maudit stance. Of course, one band hangs out with gangsters leading to a well-publicized incident of an audience member getting killed at a show. One wanted to call to call an album “Skull F**k.” One band put a drug kingpin in charge of its sound system. The other band hung out a lot with artists in lofts and had girl-germs for letting a woman be their drummer.

Seriously folks, I kid. I think it was John Keats who said that great artists must be capable of liking both the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground. He called it Negative Capability. Coleridge was always reminding him of that whenever Keats couldn’t clamp onto a good ground when trying to jump-start Coleridge’s rusty Borgward sedan.

Alas I’ve run out of time. You could have been reading “William Morris and Andy Warhol, pretty much the same thing.” Feel free to use the rest of your time listening to “August Moonlight” as Richard Le Gallienne thinks about what it all means out behind the barn. The gadget to play it should be right below this. And you know, that rhythm guitar part might have been a little influenced by the Beatles “Rain…”

Further In Summer Than the Birds

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

William Blake wrote “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” Brothers and sisters, it’s time to testify, and I want to know: are ready to testify? I give you a testimonial:

Emily Dickinson!

Okay, that’s a metaphor. The poem that provides the words to this piece “Further In Summer Than the Birds” uses a similar trope. Dickinson starts with a joke, yoking the language of a high church Christian service (instead of the rock’n’roll revivalist call I supply above) with–what? Late summer, the laziest time of year, before harvest. And worse yet for the comparison, she leaning down to the grass and hearing not mighty choirs or church organs, but those famous orchestrators of silence: crickets.

Dickinson, like Blake, was a religious rebel. Many members of her family were swept up in the 19th century religious revival, while she, an otherwise dutiful family member, actively resisted this. I think the poem starts off drawing us in with satire of religious services, but then we get to the mysterious last stanza. Dickinson’s syntax is so abstract that I (and other readers) are tempted to just let the sound of the words flow over the ear without need to extract meaning. Perhaps this was effect Dickinson wanted, as my best understanding of that last stanza is close to that. That line “No Furrow on the Glow” sounds great, but is also seems to say: no easily extracted message can be “farmed” or “gardened” from this church of the crickets.

Similarly, I don’t know exactly what “A Druidic Difference” is. Might be more satire. Or it might be that this glowing August sound which can’t be used to raise crops of meaning, is the meaning. The Druidic difference may be the isness of nature itself. But that’s me attempting to cultivate the experience, furrowing my brow to plow another furrow on the glow.

I think this speaks to the heart of something the Parlando project seeks to highlight. Poetry is not merely meaning, Poetry’s sound. It’s statements, its way of saying, has the structure of music; and music, it has the beautiful structure of thought and the human voice without the burden of specific meaning. That is why music and words meet here.

The music for “Further in Summer Than the Birds” shows a little of my Velvet Underground influence, and specifically with this piece, their eponymous 3rd album. Later this month we’ll visit another set of words about August and crickets along with some louder Velvets influenced music.

To hear the “Further in Summer Than the Birds” as played by The LYL Band, use the gadget below: