I sidste uges Mod Strømmen-udsendelse lovede jeg at lægge Peter Laughners, fra Cleveland-bandet Rocket From The Tombs
og det tidlige Pere Ubu, anmeldese af Lou Reeds 1975-plade, ’Coney Island Baby’,
ud her på siden. Grunden var, at vi spillede 'Arguing With The Ghost Of Peter
Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review' med The Mountain Goats fra
albummet ‘Dark In Here’, der kom sidste år.
Titlen på sangen holder dog ikke,
hvad den lover, men det gør den bestemt ikke mindre uinteressant. John
Darnielle, hovedmand i The Mountain Goats, har i et radiointerview fortalt, at
nummeret handler om den bedste tekstforfatter i sin generation, afdøde David
Berman fra Silver Jews. Og at, netop Berman, der tænkte hurtigt og klart, ikke
ville have haft nogle problemer med at forstå sangtitlen.
Så skarp er jeg ikke. Så jeg
genlæste Laughners kritik af ’Coney Island Baby’ for at finde en vej ind til
sangen. Den vej, fandt jeg så ikke. Til gengæld fik jeg en anmeldelse, der af
mange er blevet karakteriseret som et fadermord. Det skal I ikke snydes for:
“This album made me so morose and depressed
when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn't go to
work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10
mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me,
but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.)
I called up the editor of this magazine (on my
bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for
three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could
give me a clue as to why I should like this record.
I came on to my sister-in-law "C'mon over
and gimme head while I'm passed out." I cadged drinks off anyone who would
come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle
passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had
to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best
friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless
reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of
dissolution...I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums
(and three vitamin B complexes, so I must've figured to wake up, or at least at
the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after
sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with
the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and
exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water...
"Watch out for Charlie's girl...
She'll turn ya in...doncha know...
Ya gotta watch out for Charlie's girl..."
Which is supposed to be the single off Coney
Island Baby and therefore may be a big hit if promoted right, 'cause it's at
least as catchy as "Saturday Night"...if they can just get four cute
teens to impersonate Lou Reed.
Now, when I was younger, the Velvet Underground
meant to me what the Stones, Dylan, etc. meant to thousands of other midwestern
teen mutants. I was declared exempt from the literary curriculum of my upper
class suburban high school simply because I showed the English department a
list of books I'd glanced through while obsessively blasting White Light/White
Heat on the headphones of my parents' stereo. All my papers were manic
droolings about the parallels between Lou Reed's lyrics and whatever academia
we were supposed to be analyzing in preparation for our passage into the halls
of higher learning. "Sweet Jane" I compared with Alexander Pope,
"Some Kinda Love" lined right up with T.S. Eliot's "Hollow
Men"...plus I had a rock band and we played all these songs, fueled
pharmaceutically by our bassist who worked as a delivery boy for a drugstore
and ripped off an entire gallon jar full of Xmas trees and brown & clears.
In this way I cleverly avoided all intellectual and creative responsibilities
at the cleavage of the decades (I did read all the Delmore Schwartz I could
steal from local libraries, because of that oblique reference on the 1st
Velvets LP). After all, a person with an electric guitar and access to obscurities
like "I saw my head laughing, rolling on the ground" had no need of
creative credentials...there was the rail-thin, asthmatic editoress of our
school poetry mag, there was the unhappily married English teacher who drove me
home and elsewhere in her Corvette...there were others (the girl who began to
get menstrual cramps in perfect time to the drums in "Sister Ray").
Who needed the promise of college and career? Lou Reed was my Woody Guthrie,
and with enough amphetamine I would be the new Lou Reed!
I left home. I wandered to the wrong coast.
(Can you imagine trying to get people in Berkeley, California to listen to
Loaded in 1971? Although maybe they all grew up and joined Earthquake...) When
Lou's first solo album came out, I drove hundreds of miles to play it for
ex-friends sequestered at small exclusive midwest colleges listening to the
Dead and Miles Davis. Everyone from my high school band had gone on to sterling
careers as psych majors, botanical or law students, or selling and drinking for
IBM (Oh yeah except the drummer became a junkie and had a stroke and now he
listens to Santana). All the girls I used to wow into bed with drugs and song
married guys who were just like their brothers and moved to Florida or Chicago, leaving their copies of Blonde
on Blonde and White Light in some closet along with the reams of amphetamine
driven poetry I'd forced on them over the years. By the time Metal Machine
Music came out, I'd lost all contact. The only thing that saved me from total
dissolution over the summer of '75 was hearing Television three nights in a row
and seeing The Passenger.
So all those people will probably never pay any
attention to Coney Island Baby, and even if they did it wouldn't do much for
what's left of their synapses. The damn thing starts out exactly like an Eagles
record! And with the exception of "Charlie's Girl" which is
mercifully short and to the point, it's a downhill slide. "My Best
Friend" is a six year old Velvets outtake which used to sound fun when it
was fast and Doug Yule sang lead. Here it dirges along at the same pace as
"Lisa Says" but without the sexiness. You could sit and puzzle over
the voiceovers on "Kicks" but you won't find much (isn't it cute, the
sound of cocaine snorting, and is that an amyl popping in the left speaker?).
Your headphones would be better utilized experiencing Patti Smith's brilliant
triple-dubbed phantasmagoria on Horses.
Side two starts off with the WORST thing Reed
has ever done, this limp drone self-scam where he goes on about being "a gift
to the women of this world" (in fact this whole LP reminds me of the junk
you hear on the jukeboxes at those two-dollar-a-beer stewardess pickup bars on
1st Ave. above 70th). There's one pick up point, "Oo-ee Baby" with
the only good line on the record "your old man was the best B&E man
down on the street," but then this Ric Von Schmidt rip-off which doesn't
do anything at all.
Finally there's "Coney Island Baby."
Just maudlin, dumb, self pity: "Can you believe I wann'd t'play football
for th' coach"...Sure, Lou, when I was all uptight about being a fag in
high school, I did too. Then it builds slightly, Danny Weiss tossing in a bunch
of George Benson licks, into STILL MORE self pity about how it's tough in the
city and the glory of Love will see you through. Maybe. Dragged out for six
minutes.
Here I sit, sober and perhaps even lucid, on
the sort of winter's day that makes you realize a New Year is just around the
corner and you've got very little to show for it, but if you are going to get
anything done on this planet, you better pick it up with both hands and DO IT
YOURSELF. But I got the nerve to say to my old hero, hey Lou, if you really
mean that last line of "Coney Island Baby": "You know I'd give
the whole thing up for you," then maybe you ought to do just that.”
- Creem Magazine, marts 1976
