I'd Love to Turn You On #73 - Lou Reed – The Blue Mask

This is where Mr. Heroin grows up. There had been increasingly overt hints that he might go this way on his previous three albums, but here he’s fully engaged with opening up his adult side rather than merely flirting with the idea. Which is not to say that he’s given up the extremes of his youth. Or rather, he may have given them up – when the album was recorded he was clean and sober, had married and settled into a home in New Jersey – but he hadn’t forgotten those extremes. Maybe he wasn’t the reporter filling us in on the seedy underbelly of New York nightlife anymore, but his writing stemmed from that base even if he wasn’t sending his reports from the gutter. Predictably, fans of his early sex/drugs/rock & roll phase have had strong reactions against the album, connecting only with the music at its most brutal as in the harrowing title cut’s examination of a masochist that makes “Venus in Furs” seem like a naïvely decadent tale and in the illumination of a paranoid drug addict’s mindset in “Waves of Fear,” featuring a brilliantly splintery and abstract solo from co-guitarist Robert Quine. Some may also connect with the straightforward examination of the alcoholic of “Underneath the Bottle” or the disturbingly deadpan delivery of “The Gun,” recalling his unjudgmental tales of squalor from the early Velvet Underground days.

But the claque of fans expecting him to live out their sordid fantasies for the rest his career don’t get Lou. And since the record’s release in 1982 they’ve had a hard time understanding the simple beauty and delicacy of songs like “My House,” celebrating his friend and mentor Delmore Schwartz, or "Women," in which he extols Bach, poetry and wine with his sex, and "Heavenly Arms," in which he extols the virtues of then-wife Sylvia. And there’s no parallel in his catalog for the direct, adult rumination of something like “The Day John Kennedy Died,” featuring Doane Perry’s light touch on the drums and Fernando Saunders’ evocative fretless bass work, both of which help define the sound of this album. Of course Perry and Saunders can also rise to the occasion to meet the muscular drive of “The Blue Mask” or “Waves of Fear” on command but it’s the way the band interacts across the board in all modes here that defines the way Lou’s career would move from this album forward. It’s not that he’d never married delicacy and noise, he did that from the very first Velvets album, but he’d never written things in such a direct and straightforwardly adult manner before. He’d also never delivered a vocal performance like this, putting aside the “flat bark” and sneer Lester Bangs identified in his 1970’s albums in favor of a vocal with real strength and reach, especially on the two powerhouse cuts, and made all the more affecting because of the simple beauty and understatement of his love songs.

Sure, there’s some rough stuff here, but it’s something Lou is decidedly positing as part of his past, and it’s that dichotomy between the rockers and the ballads that more than ever in his career throws people for a loop. From here, he’d continue to mine this vein of material for several more albums, most notably this one’s terrific follow-up, the (presently) import only Legendary Hearts, culminating in his most likeable album, New York. But The Blue Mask is where he first drew together the threads of his 70’s and with a new, great group in tow knotted them into one of his best ever albums that would point a new way forward for his career. -Patrick

What Are You Listening To Lately (Part 9)?

Neil Young - Tonight's the Night
I know a lot of people think this record is just a bummer, but I absolutely love it. And to counter the idea that all it is is a big downer, you've got two songs two in which Neil expresses his joy about Pegi as his young wife and mother of his kid - "Speakin' Out" and "New Mama" - the latter ending on the words "I'm livin' in a dream land." And the songs that do explore darker, grimmer material - and they are many, lest you think I'm missing the point - are countered and buoyed by these, by the joyous energy of "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown" that explodes right on the heels of the melancholy "Borrowed Tune," by the overall framework in which he sings a lament for his friend Bruce Berry but still offers Danny Whitten - both Berry and Whitten dead of drug overdoses by the time of recording of this album - the lead vocal on "Downtown." He's tying together the life-affirming and the skirting-the-edge-of-death, he's offering the idea that having the world on a string don't mean a thing, but knowing that shouldn't prevent you from being living life, that in fact it should strengthen your resolve to see what's good out there. Every song is distinct, makes its mark; it rocks hard, it plays it mellow, it's got meaning, it's got life, death, joy and sadness - how much more can you possibly want from a rock and roll record?


Q-Tip - Amplified
I think this is better than any Tribe Called Quest album (excepting compilations). There, I said it and I mean it. Part of the reason is that the vocals come through loud and clear, never submerged in a smoky aura or underproduced to sink underneath the weight of the beats and samples; part of it is the unity of the minimal style that threads through the record. There’s a varied, yet non-stop rhythmic drive pushing every track, each of which is then decorated with an ornamental sound effect or simple melody to mark it in the mind. Just when you think it’s gone to all beats and voice, a shift in the rhythm or a melodic line will ring through and sweeten things enough to carry you to the next riff. And that’s not even bringing in Q-tip’s mellifluous tones. He really is one of the greats, and he doesn’t need a foil to provide counterpoint – he’s got enough variety on his own. Certainly the rhythmic drive is something this shares with some of the Tribe’s albums, but even on the vaunted Low End Theory I find myself waiting a few tracks for the next great song once one’s over, examining in too much detail, for example, the space between “Butter” and “Check the Rhime.” Here, even the lower-key tracks – like “Things U Do” – give me a charge, and true to the album format they’re propped up and strengthened by their surroundings. I love the Tribe when they’re great, but they were never this consistent for me, never made an album whose whole overshadowed the constituent components. Oh yeah, and “Vivrant Thing” stands for me as the greatest single he’s ever made. Ever.


Lou Reed - Mistrial
Unlike, say, Berlin, the failure here is one of execution, not of inspiration. Songs could be better, sharper, more exciting, but as ideas, as an album concept, it’s a continuation of what he’d been doing over the last three or four records – a way less successful attempt, yeah, but where this is a rough stone that may contain nothing but mica and iron pyrite, Berlin is just an over-polished turd. Whether its surface sheen makes it worth exposure to its rotten core is purely up to you. I’d probably rather dig into this one’s shallower lyrical and musical pleasures – again, a continuation of his adult ruminations on his real-world relationships, and a street level look at contemporary problems of New York and of the country – than the feel-bad vibes and overly ornate production of the earlier record. At least he’s gunning for something that can be construed as a positive, rather than a heavy dose of second-hand pessimism. In the same way that The Blue Mask and Legendary Hearts explore the tail end of his “dark” years, this is a counterpart to his explorations of a newer, positive and personal songwriting outlook on the world that starts in New Sensations (or really, in Growing Up in Public, though that one’s got its own problems, starting (and perhaps ending) with a band that's not in synch with him). Despite its bad rep amongst Lou fans, I don’t mind this at all, I dig what he’s striving for even if he falls short of the mark – there are at least three other records of his that leap to mind immediately as ones I would less like to hear. And though it’s out of print on a US available CD, it’s a safe bet that you can always find the vinyl used. And cheap, too.