My First Velvet Underground

Linking two threads, I hadn't before today heard of a Velvet Undreground cd:" The Bootleg Series Volume One" recorded by Robert Quine, ex Voidoids and Lou Reed guitarist who died this week.I put an order straight in: sounds like a good collection - lo fi but not obstructively so and has to be better than "Live at Max's". It's, mainly 1969, pre "Loaded" recording, and features a goods range of songs.

Kevin

Kevin

The Quine tapes are great, although recording quality is variable.

There are many more hours of live VU recorded by Quine, the idea seemed to be to release more, but I've no idea when that might be.

-- Ian

-- Ian

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I hope you are enjoying the efforts from Eamonn and whatever his fake girlfriend was called, as that is obviously the best new music around.

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Well it is as far as the charts are concerned!. This is probably going to be the single of the year and is one of those that comes along every so often that almost makes the charts worth paying attention to (along with the likes of the 1st Tatu and Britney singles). Prime period Prince if you ask me.

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Blue sell lots of singles, and their albums regularly get to number 1,

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Yes we know you are a big Blue fan Alex, but really how many of their songs can you sing? and do you actually think that anyone other than <15 year old girls buy their music. I think it's fair to say the Beatles had/have pretty much across the board appeal (you excluded of course). I wonder how many of Blue's own self penned efforts are going to be covered by the rock bands, crooners, dance acts etc of tomorrow.
Blue ARE one of the bigger chart acts of the last few years so it's fair enough making a comparison to the Beatles. So in that comparison who do you think comes out on top, Hummmm!!!!!!

Ah, I thought he was talking about the 1974 Scottish Beatles-impersonators with a penchant for excessively denim suits. Are this other lot any good then?

Better than the Beatles!

I half agree with Alex. The Beatles were the first truly great modern pop band and were (obviously) the single most important and influential pop band ever. But I think a lot of their success and importance was due to them being the first such great band to come along and if someone else had been The Beatles (IYSWIM) then they would have been judged on their own merits and "merely" be regarded as one of the greatest bands in history. I htink this is possibly what Alex means.

The other problem I have with The Beatles is that I don't like half their stuff -- really for me it's Rubber Soul, Revolver and Abbey Road and could probably do without the rest. Sgt Pepper's has dated horribly I think (in a way that, say, Pet Sounds hasn't) and I can;t bear the thing.

Comaprisons with Blue are unwarranted but personally I reckon that The Stones, The Beach Boys, The Smiths and The Pixies were all better bands. Just not as significant/important.

Matthew

Velvets were one of the first bands I came across, record-wise, when I was 13 or so, around 1970. The others were the Rolling Stones (Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers) Soft Machine (Third) and Quicksilver Messenger Service (Happy Trails).

I was very very impressed by the VU, it was like they came from another world I knew nothing about (which was true of course!).

My favourite album is '1969 Live', favourite songs are 'What Goes On', 'Pale Blue Eyes', 'Waiting for the Man', 'European Son'.

I also love Nico's stuff and some of Lou's solo records ('Transformer', 'Berlin', 'Street Hassle') and the odd John Cale ('Fear'). Not too long ago I bought one of Maureen Tucker's solo albums ('I Spent a Week There the Other Night') which I think is lovely. She's so cool and understated, just like her drumming.

Musically the Velvet Undergrund were a very European band I think. Most of the lyrics of course very American/New York.

The third album holds together better than the first two. The famous Banana album sounds like a collection of singles (love the bits where Nico sings) and White Light/White Heat is really rather heavy in places.

Whenever I'm depressed I play 'Waiting for the Man'... That bassline at the end of the song goes right into your soul.

Happy listening!

willem

Rough Guide to "Blue" by Alex

"Blue sell lots of singles, and their albums regularly get to number 1, so using the argument that sales=quality they must be good."

Alex,

I hope you don't get offended by constructive critisism, but I think you need to cut down on the detail

I recommend you visit a musicalogist to remove your tongue that's firmly stuck in your cheek.

Denis (I've got those Fleetwood Mac Chicken Shack Alexgerrard can't fail blues)

Hey people, get off Alex's case. The point he was making was that popularity is no criteria for evaluating quality. Citing Blue was a reducio ad absurdum - if success = quality, Blue, who are successful must = quality. This was done to point out the flaw in any evaluation of the Beatles that rests on the fact that:

people have heard of them
can whistle their tunes
they sold lots of records.

The Jack Vetrianno debate in the art world is similar. Everyone has seen the dancing butler, he is the best selling artist in Britain, at least as far as reproductions are concerned, his originals now sell for hundreds of thousands, so he must be good. Or J K Rowling novels. Or Wilbur Smith etc etc.

Me, I don't think the Beatles artistic merit comes close to their cultural significance. And I'd agree that their cultural significance was to do with being popular and quite good at a point when the post 1945 population bulge filled the world with an audience which, combined with increased propserity, created the preconditions for the success of such a phenomenon. I wouldn't dispute their fame, their significance or their longevity. I don't, however, think their influence is all that people claim, I don't think they were innovative - play Trout Mask Replica next to Abbey Road, the First Velvets or Pet Sounds, or The Doors, or Forever Changes album next to St Pepper, play any James Brown Greatest Hits next to any Beatles compilation, Bitches Brew next to the White album etc etc ( again). They were an interesting cultural phenomena who made a few good records and popularised things for a ready made audience looking to define the importnace of their own culture. And if you want to hate them listen to"Taxman" and "Yellow Submarine", supposedly off the "best album of all time" back to back. Smug, selfish, indulgent, childish, reactionary, anodyne...... Pah.


Wow, I feel better for that!

Kevin

The popularity thing is important, in this respect:

Go anywhere in the world, pretty much, and ask just about anybody, of any age, to sing a few lines of, say, half-a-dozen Beatles songs. Result: most people can, most people know and love these songs, irrespective of race, cultural background, religious conviction, politics, age. This despite the fact the band split up 34 years ago, and some of these records were made 40 years ago, long before many of these people were even born. This is beyond simple "popularity", this is something etched deeply into the popular musical folk memory of a very large percentage of the world's population. No other pop group in history has this legacy, and no other group ever will. To compare this to the popularity of Blue, or even the Rolling Stones, is utterly absurd.

As for Kevin's point about innovation, it's undoubedly true that, say, Trout Mask Replica is more formally innovative than, say, Revolver. Captain Beefheart is a true original, one of the very small handful of geniuses who have worked within popular music. He's also, ironically, very rooted in a delta blues tradition that gives him the basis on which to invent. When I listen to Trout Mask, I hear an album that has an organic connection to much older musical forms, despite its modernity. It's uncompromisingly an art music, clever as you like and hard as nails.

The Beatles' innovation is a different thing. They took American folk forms that had already been filtered and reimagined through a UK 1950s blues and folk tradition, and turned them into timeless pop music, and they did this when the modern conception of pop music was only a decade or two old. Sure, this is an accident of history as much as down to the particular skills of those particular four musicians, but this shouldn't detract from the fact that, as it turned out, these four people were the Beatles and nobody else was. Lennon and McCartney wrote a huge number of songs in a comparatively short space of time and only a handful of them can truly be described as poor, even when they weren't really trying. Anybody who cares about pop music and doesn't get a tear in the eye when listening to side 2 of Abbey Road is probably dead.

It's quite popular nowadays to dismiss the Beatles, but that's just fashion. Their songs are part of all of us, and I suspect will be for a very long time to come.

-- Ian

Ian:

Nicely put.

Who the hell are Blue?

Davie

I'm deeply honoured.

-- Ian

Citing number of singles/albums sold won't work. In the 60s you had to sell a load more to get chart positions or gold/platinum discs.
Now its 100 for gold 1000 for platinum I think.

Howard

"Result: most people can, most people know and love these songs, irrespective of race, cultural background, religious conviction, politics, age."

An argument that equally applies to Coca-Cola of course. But I take your point.

For the record I wasn't saying the Beatles were bad (quite the opposite) or that they are merely popular, only that their music isn't inherently, per se, an order of magnitude better than absolutely everybody else.

Matthew

Am I on drugs or at some point during this thread did someone say that Oasis were better than the Beatles?

Rich

Too tired to get stuck into this but still capable of pointing out that Lennon went from Love Me Do to Revolution 9 in a little over 5 years; Gallagher went from Live Forever to.....any number of songs that sound exactly like Live Forever (but crapper)in 5 years - probably more actually. I think the eyebrowed one made his third album at the same age that Lennon had left The Beatles - perspective is a handy thing!

I can't stomach the Beatles, having had their fruity songs drilled into my head by radio stations, amusement park rides, Nike and other ads, grade school choirs, etc my entire life. I put Elvis in that same camp. Enough already innit?

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Originally posted by Matthew Robinson:
For the record I wasn't saying the Beatles were bad (quite the opposite) or that they are merely popular, only that their music isn't inherently, per se, an order of magnitude better than absolutely everybody else.

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Nobody's music is inherently, per se, an order of magnitude better than everybody else's, unless it's John Coltrane's or Charles Mingus's or Ornette Coleman's or Albert Ayler's (but that's a different question...)

Having said that, I can't think of any definitively greater pop singles than Strawberry Fields (you could argue for Good Vibrations, but it's a toss-up IMO), or definitively greater pop albums than Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or the white album, or Abbey Road. We could argue the toss about this ("album x by band y is better than Abbey Road"), but regardless of the outcome only somebody being deliberately contrary could deny that these Beatles records would be close to the top of the list in any serious history of popular music culture, and that nobody else - yes, even Elvis - could contribute so many records to such a history. This doesn't seem to me to be a matter of opinion. It's like gravity, it's just a fact.

-- Ian

Alex, you are so asking for a slap...

-- Ian

If overall contribution to the history of popular music culture = "definitively" the greatest, I'm in trouble 'cause I don't like Hank Williams' clucky old tunes.

Alex,

I'd like to add Michael Jackson-

Beat It
Billie Jean

I bet Ian's a closet MJ enthusiast.

The greatest pop single of all time is "This Charming Man" by The Smiths.

So ner, ner, ne ner nah.

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I bet Ian's a closet MJ enthusiast.

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Well, I confess to liking "ABC" and "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5.

Nick, you're a very cruel man. Hope you're right though.

-- Ian

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Originally posted by Matthew Robinson:
The greatest pop single of all time is "This Charming Man" by The Smiths.

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Good god man, that's not even the greatest pop single by The Smiths.

Ludwig - not liking Hank Williams is worse than murder.

Argh, I'm taking hits all over...

-- Ian

Too much Ornette and Ayler has obviously addled your brain, SSB.

Matthew