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Rating: And in the name of mental jerking that I will be accused of, I return with the latest review.
Curiosity suggests discovery, discovery is not free. There's always a price to pay and something to receive.
Listening to this Live a year and a half ago, I paid for the time lost not having discovered Velvet Underground earlier, and received a new life of literary inspiration. Going back to books thanks to music? The Velvet Underground were the architects of it all for me, and this Live marked my personal new beginning, at 22 years old with no evident musical or literary knowledge except a few poems by Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, to give an example and stay on theme.
Loving the ignoble, the filthy, what is ungrammatical and pathological is for me a natural human reaction. E. A. Poe spoke of a "Genius of Perversion" that, like from Aladdin's lamp, comes out to extract torments, uncertainties and, above all, the desire for self-destruction from your existence. Something mystical, romantic, acted out just for the pleasure of doing it.
The seventh track of the album, divided into two CDs and included in the "45th Anniversary Deluxe Edition" of the banana album, is called "Heroin" and highlights this thought. The technical quality of the entire offering is horrendous: this performance of the notorious Exploding Plastic Inevitable was recorded on clearly improvised media. Reed thus speaks in the distance and the whole creates an even more obsessive detachment.
The mind cuts short and excludes, becomes a witness, and 40 years of elapsed time are sent to the pyre. Heroin, the underworld, drag queens and the Factory: all ancient, all collapsed.
For me one thing remains: perversion, today more modern than then. The signifier dies, the meaning remains. The tribal, violent, noisy musical background (Cale's whistling viola, Tucker's beats, Morrison's accompaniment) underlies a story devoid of morals, devoid of social positions. Right and wrong cancel each other out, and Reed professes all this with ten times more passion than in the studio album (which will be published a year later, in 1967). That repetitive "I just don't know" at the end of each verse never managed to convey consolation or well-being to me. "Nevermore", "Nevermore", "Nevermore"... ask the abstract (not really) protagonist of Heroin and it will not be more consolatory than Poe's raven.
Always pay the attention a performance of this type deserves and you will never feel the same again. Connect the "piled up dead bodies," the "screaming politicians," the desire to escape, the return to square one ("the stormy seas, the city where one cannot be free") and you will understand how right the Velvets were despite the brain-death drug declared in the title in stark contrast with the LSD of the "west coast."
The beginning of the record with "Melody Laughter" will be a good test of resistance. Feedback at full volume and noise. All improvised by the Velvets. It directly refers to the last track: the "Nothing Song," a good 27 minutes of improvisation, with a cold Nico who intones a wrapping song, is the best Live document to understand what has already been said about the Velvet Underground.
Other tracks like "Venus in Furs," which was probably accompanied on stage by the famous Gerard Malanga armed with a whip, should be cataloged in the above-described perspective. Unlike the 1993 reunion, Reed really feels what he says and here "Venus in Furs" is covered with a conveyance, even musical, "terribly" valid.
Recommended to anyone who wants to hear the real Velvet Underground, how they were conceived, how they were thought, and how Warhol managed to give them a new expressive method: that of the mirror. Reflecting what is around you, now and forever, the Velvet Underground did this, and if you don't like it, declare them old and outdated: I don't give a damn, just as the now proven egomaniac, liar, heartless Lou Reed would. Why? Because it's all so "perverse" and I myself feel so good sending everyone to hell.
Have you ever felt something like that? Then the Velvet would be perfect for you, depending on your level of hypocrisy. Think you can disillusion yourself? Listen to these four madmen who seem to have changed the idea of making music and you will find yourself as you really are, as if in front of a mirror.
Good-thinking people, fuck off.
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