Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico
Le Bataclan '72

For the young unknowing lad who might happen to pass by here, here's a little Velvet vade mecum for you.

So...

"The Western equivalent of Shiva's mystical dance played as if Babylon were on fire." (Quotation from I don't remember who)

Feedback...the suburbs' tam tam...poetry far removed from any psychedelic sky....

Chaos then, but not only that, as we are talking about a two-headed monster here. So here are sinister little songs, screeching madrigals, ballads with celesta.

In summary (even though I don't like summaries), what we have is sonic ruthlessness and surprising elegance....

John Cale was the sound architect, the alchemist.

Lou Reed, the excellent songwriter.

Nico, on the other hand, the passing goddess, just three songs in the first groundbreaking album.

Three songs and three voices: punished child, hieratic Valkyrie, underground Dietrich.

And that of the punished child is among the ten that will play at my funeral...

End of the vade mecum.

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"Le Bataclan 1972", report of a memorable concert, is an astonishingly beautiful record.

It's just John, Lou, and Nico, those three, those three and no one else.

If you listen to it, the magic invades the room, the perceptual state changes.

A mysterious and subtle glue binds all the songs, and that glue is a certain idea of a ballad. "High voltage inside," as someone once said.

With the harshest Velvet pages transforming into a narcoleptic rite of initiation or, if you prefer, into a kind of chamber music for desperados.

No feedback, no suburbs' tam tam.

And only John's viola occasionally throws the bait so that, for a moment, the ancient noisy madness might bite again.

No wonder, then, that even the solo moments (the psychic middle ages of Nico, the horror instinct of John, the genius always and in any case of Lou) partake of the same gathering and the same magic.

It's the ballad, beauty...

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A miracle... indeed two.

The first miracle is that those three are together.

And, damn it, Lou, four years earlier, had kicked John out of the Velvet!!! Artistic differences (more chaos John, less chaos Lou) and pure egocentrism.

Oh Lou, I loved you so much, really so much, and now I can afford to get some stones out of my shoe. You were unbearable and arrogant as few.

When I read about that time Nico, after your usual bloody scene during rehearsals, came out with that fabulous phrase, I laughed to tears.

"I must stop going to bed with Jews," she told you. She was one of the few who, sometimes, managed to put you down.

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And anyway...

Here's "I'm waiting for the man" at a slow pace...

The fabulous half boogie of certain ballads of our Lou.

Intimate, closed, vibrant with miraculous alchemy, lays, so to speak, the carpets. Please, make yourselves comfortable.

No rock'n'roll, it's John's piano that accompanies us who knows where.

Here's "The black angel death song"...

How did the story go? You were in that place, right? And what did that guy, the owner, tell you? Oh yes, something like: "play that bloody song one more time and you're done."

Apart from the fact that you then played it, what exactly bothered him so much?

The strange aulic words coupled with a perverse sonic sadism? Or that "ai ci ci ci ci ai ci ci ci ka ta ko choose to choose," as if to say that only from the senseless can some kind of wisdom emerge?

In any case, in Bataclan, of that chaos remains just a tiny bit of a viola and an acoustic guitar, And, let's say, that's more than enough.

"Heroin" speaks the same language as the black angel. Both stripped of ancient chaos, their skeleton reveals the quintessence of the darkest ballads.

Then Nico, the Germanic whisper of "I'll be your mirror" and "Femme fatale," and the oddity of an "All tomorrow's parties" just voice and guitar. And here I say nothing, what can you say indeed.

Perhaps only that my Velvet heart is breaking...

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Then the solo moments...

Nico gives a recital, four pieces each more beautiful than the last, of her apocalyptic chamber folk: hypnotic textures, sounds captured on the edge of the precipice.

And the eloquent and desperate declamation of an icy voice.

Lou offers two songs from his not essential first album, here however they are something else.

It's especially "Berlin" that's astonishing.

Like a good red wine that needs to decant, it takes air. And the air, even if it's that of a smoky and crowded venue, is just what it needed.

Lou presents it as "my song to Barbra Streisand," but let's say that, with that bored and languid singing and the spine-chilling piano interludes, it's a kind of cabaret of the underworld.

For John, instead, three ballads just voice and guitar, a really unusual attire for him. A lovers' kiss to "Ghost story," my favorite track from "Vintage violence," his only solo album at the time and first step of a career as a great, marvelous eccentric...

Bye...