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The chronicles of Ruin, continued. Call me Ishmael said....intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Anonymous said... When I don't know what to do,I come here. 10 September 2009 22:59
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17 comments:
I didn't know that the Blessed Nico could play an instrument.
Mr. Mongoose. Hail. She played the harmonium, tho' I am not sure if she ever played with the VU. I did see her and Cale performing together and separately at the Round House, at an all night Pink Floyd bash. She on harmonium, Cale on the viola.
I love Waiting For My Man, and all but all but every note of all of White Light, White Heat, which my housemaster quickly banned me from playing at any worthwhile volume.
I never saw her, Mr Elby. Too young, I guess. WLWH, I remember well. (One of those that slipped through the vinyl to CD net. I shall download it this instant.) Alas, most of kids-in-bed Christmas passed in a homegrown haze of the Velvets, Fairport... and even Nick Drake emerged for a day or two to warble away. Five leaves left. Plenty indeed.
I find it fun to put the VU on the jukebox down the pub. "Err, excuse me. Could you turn this one up?" Childish, I know, but it confuses the young people.
As loud as you like.
Nico on harmonium and Cale on viola, Jesus, doesn't get much worse than that, eh, pretentious, over-indulged tosspots. Any justice in rock 'n'roll and the VUs would have crashed and burned after the first album, instead of churning-out decades' worth of dross; Professor Reed managing about one good song for every twenty bad ones.
Zappa and Beefheart, when I grow up musically, that's where I'm bound; that's the real avant garde, not a bunch of Warhol pretend junkies.
A junky I knew, back in the day, used to say They're really into numerology, man, the Velvets, like 1-2-5 adds-up, like, to eight and twenty-six, two and six, man, yeah?, adds-up to eight and that's like heavy shit man because eight's like a really significant number. He died, of course, aged about thirty, encouraged, obliquely, by jumped-up pretentious fuckheads like Reed, endlessly, soporifically strumming his three tuneless chords over some paean to degradation or abuse.
As I said, I still listen to Waiting for My Man for its discordant, jangly, nightmare riffing but I'd burn a thousand copies of it to illuminate one page of William Burroughs.
Mr Ishmael, I went to a Zappa-plays-Zappa gig but last summer (maybe the one before, time dims). Outrageous madness of the finest kind. Great stuff. (Beefheart OTOH I do not get.)
I would not say that the Velvets were trying to be avant garde - although they got polluted and confused by the mistaken paradise of the Warhol crap - they were just doing what they were doing. The VU were punk before punk knew it existed. The root of it was a desire to strip out the Hollywood shit and play the fucking music. That they forgot the moral of their song is regrettable but, hey, at least they tried.
Ahh yes, I can remember seeing Frank Zappa's music c.1982 as it emerged from a speaker. Very colourful it was too.
Don't take the brown acid, Ms Lilith.
Careful you don't wear that pointing finger out Mr. Ishmael.
That's part of the protocol, here, Mr TPF, long settled in the annals of Ruin,since the days of stanislav, the plumber, although the pointing finger also, at times, soothes and rewards.
Big fan of Zappa the man, found his music too cerebral. As for the VU and many others, their "social context" is of little interest to me - it is the RACKET they make that I like. Sister Ray surely performed by ten chain saws attacking 20 washing machines, yes? Most artists it seems are cunts - but if we then turned away from their art, would be left with much at all that is not anodyne?
Rock it.
The ever gracious Van Morrison on his work - "It's just a fucking job". Yet I can testify that he has at time lifted me to the heights of glory. The cunt.
like 1-2-5 adds-up, like, to eight and twenty-six, two and six, man, yeah?, adds-up to eight and that's like heavy shit man because eight's like a really significant number .
Which alone shows you how far ruin has got, because at least it does add up. If Snotty could grasp arithmetic even as simple as that, we might not be in all this trouble. Instead, he thinks it makes something different because he says it does.
Say what you like about VU, at least they could do simple additions and understood about the objective reality of the concept of an integer, even if they lost the plot thereafter.
They are a childhood memory for me: mainly of my father yelling at my brother about being degenerate because he (brother I mean) was listening to them. And Frank Zappa. And my mother said the cover of Trout Mask Replica made her feel ill and would he please keep it out of her sight.
They were all a bit too rich for my blood; I was a Pentangle sort of girl.
Happy days.
One can be both. I saw Pentangle's first national tour gig, with the unknown Roy Harper, at Queens University in Belfast, I was just a boy, giving it all away, but like I said, Mrs N, stick with me, babe, I'll turn your money green.
It is a good question, mr elby and the answer is yes, I feel, we should turn, turn turn, away and make our own music, as in the Days Before Ruin, at least some of the time. Isn't there something horribly Matrix-like about the way we are fed corporatised rock? And not just rock; up here in the North, you can't walk ten paces without falling-over an oxymoronic precious up-her-own-arse professional folk singer and when I say, Hang on a minute, Smirking Wee Fiona, traditional folk singers didn't have recording contracts and lawyers and minders and tours of the Dominions, this is show business you are doing, they pull a face like they had a gobful of Satan's ejaculate. But you know that, anyway, sharing, as you do, matrimonially, my own view of Mr Billy Bragg of the Daily Filth-o-Graph and his claim to be the professional, careerist keeper of the traditional flame.
Someone, really good, a good writer on the mainstreaming of rock 'n' roll, I think it was Lester Bangs, said that once you signed a recording contract that was it, welcome to the machine.
Vastly, vastly over-rated as he is, not least by himself, I know, nevertheless, what you mean about the odd Van Morrison song/arrangement - Healing has Begun, Take It Where You Find It, These Are The Days - being utterly transcendental but then just summons-up the vision of the jump-suited dwarf at The Last Waltz in order to validate your closing epithet.
Yes, Mrs WOAR, it is often remarked hereabouts that Premier Snot knows and believes that something is so because he says it is so and my own tepid insinct is that, so ruined are we that many, enough, share his Mickey Mouse worldview, his disordered wannabee consciousness that he may just mince and pout and stammer his way into another term. If we consider the national preoccupations - the Premiership GangRapists, the manufactured, fleeting celebrity of Cruelty TV and the pre-eminence of worthless, cowardly smutmeisters like Norton and Woss and add to those the entrenched, institutionalised bias of the Beebian then Brown's fevered, bombastic fantasy is only par for this ruinous course; skymadeupnewsandfilth, of course, has taken a handkerchief posture against the snot-eaters but look who they promote, the worthless, catty prefect, Cameron; insufficient numbers will vote for his proposed Black Belt Austerity.
It's hard to see how any of them avoid becoming arseholes. Waited on hand and foot, completely surreal existence, sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll (apostrophes where you want...). Artists of all types tend towards the selfish end of the spectrum too. Achievers being perhaps a more apposite word.
Zappa was, I think, too bonkers to get spoiled; Dweezil too appears to be unhinged. He is, of course, called Dweezil which cannot help.
When Broon closes his eyes, Mr Ishmael, it's night.
My profound and well nigh lifelong love of the Dead is based - apart from the music of course - on their refusal to sign up to the music biz ethos. The surviving member's bands still sell their tickets through their own organisation, thereby boycotting Ticketbastard and their huge hike-ups. They've looked after their staff - roadies and backroom - making sure they all have pension schemes etc. On the "showbiz" side, well, they never dressed up to play, they just went on stage and played. Sometimes they were shite. Sometimes they lifted you to heaven and kept you there. In their own words ... "we rehearsed on stage", and once they had worked through the insanely psychedelic sets of their youth (68/9) they never played the same setlist. And in the early days when they did, the same set list would sound utterly different one night to another.
To live outside the law...
Thanks mr elby, i'm not a deadhead but i know just what you mean; tell your Mama not to worry, becuase, yes, they're just my friends
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