FBO: 'Astral Week: Thankfully Ends Prisoner-Free'

On Lou Reed's fascinating Take No Prisoners double-live LP from 1978, 'Walk on the Wild Side' fills a side of the vinyl LP, lasting nearly 17 minutes, and never getting anywhere. He starts with a diatribe about why he's no longer bored with the song, and finally makes it to the opening verse ('Holly came from Miami, FLA') then immediately interrupts himself to riff on all sorts of things -- brontasauruses, 'I do Lou Reed better than anybody,' 'enough attitude to kill every person in New Jersey' -- then finishes the first chorus and breaks out to rant again -- why Springsteen is 'groovy,' liner notes in rock criticism, name-dropping New York Times opera critics, why critics shouldn't get free tickets -- then turns into the second verse about Candy -- pausing to explain each lyric ('this is true,' 'I really miss Candy', 'go write a Bible') -- and finally when the supreme back-up singers finally start the water-in-the-desert 'doo doo-doo' refrains, he quickly cuts them off, for a four-minute, pop-culture-psychedelic ramble on how the song got made, at the same time losing the small New York audience who had played along for eight minutes, laughing and yelling back, but eventually lose interest.

It's a mesmerizing self-destruction. On full view of the stage at the (now closed) Bottom Line -- and memorialized in vinyl. It finally ends after 17 minutes, with an open-chord fade: in the end, we don't actually know how long he kept it going that night.

It reminds me, in a way, of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, which, we're told, is one of the great albums of all time. To me it seems like listening in on a loner sprawled on a dog-food-scattered floor and wailing about his agonies, pain, lost loves and plain ol' confusion. Songs stem from tinkly acoustic guitars, often building off two chords. Most build up indiscriminately -- with flutes and strings -- sometimes six or seven minutes, apparently depending on the whim of the plump Irishman with a Florentine nose. He repeats lyrics over and over -- and the lyrics ARE frequently excellent. The band, jazz sessions players I hear, don't really know what's next -- just following as they can in a rushed, three-day recording session.

Many bond with it. FBO Observer Tom Caw recommends we all read Lester Bang's take, which is compelling. But, unlike other 1968 albums ('White Album,' Beggars Banquet), it seems like a long-since sailed ship to me. And I can't get past the overly soulful bursts from Van every third or fourth line.

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Mobile/Semi-Permanent HQ -- Brooklyn, NY

FBO: 'Inducts Lou Reed to FBO Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame'

Paul McCartney is in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, but LOU REED isn't. Let's think this through a bit:


Paul has had one of the driest recording spells in the past, oh, 37 years of any supposed genius songwriter since Mozart faked his death and stopped making music for 42 years. (That didn't happen.) 'Ebony & Ivory' and 'Say Say Say' duets are hardly forgotten, or forgiven, nor that disaster 'Give My Regards to Broad Street.' Paul's band Wings -- which have should have no play in his SOLO inductee to the Hall -- guards really his only tolerable post-Beatles work: debatably 'Band on the Run,' 'With a Little Luck,' 'Live & Let Live,' 'Mull of Kintyre' (for the bagpipes). And, again, those do not count.



If the Hall has room for Paul's tedious solo outings, and allows vastly overrated Eric Clapton to get in twice -- as solo artist (which we reluctantly accept) and the two-year-running Cream (unforgivable) -- why can't Lou get in for Velvet Underground (happened; 1996) and his long-lasting, often interesting and challenging solo career? Lou's Transformer album (1972) is his most famous -- produced by Bowie, with 'Walk on the Wild Side' (jazz and drag?), 'Satellite of Love' and 'Vicious,' while the under-appreciated 1973 concept album Berlin is likely the most depressing of all time -- try 'The Kids' or 'The Bed,' where the narrator sits on the bed where his ex 'slit her wrists' and rethinks what went wrong. More importantly, Lou fell into an often hilarious wave of self-destruction, with the incredibly inconquerable double-live album Take No Prisoners, where his 20-minute version of 'Wild Side' lashes out at the audience and never gets into the song, or his double-album noise instrumental album Metal Machine Music (1976). (Later he'd make a video -- 'Video Violence' -- of a Lou Reed 'robot' pulling its face apart...) There are misfires -- and galling disasters (like his most recent Edgar A Poe concept album The Raven), and too many cover shots with his mug on the cover, but his 27 years of solo recordings have been ambitious and way out of the curve.


The FBO asks:


--> Put Lou in now (or take Paul, and Jackson Browne!, out now). Surely his work has out thought, influenced and performed a Bob Seger?











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