![]() Strip away the noise and flash and references to illicit drugs and sex, and "White Light/White Heat", "Here She Comes Now", and "I Heard Her Call My Name" are all the sort of simple rock'n'roll readymades that Reed had been cranking out at Pickwick Records a couple of years earlier. For one thing, Lou Reed's songwriting is often a lot more conventional than it's reputed to be. Listening to White Light/White Heat now, it doesn't quite fit the template of its legend. As always, the title track, which seems like it should start cold with Cale and Sterling Morrison's backing vocals, sounds like it's had a little trimmed off the top to remove an extraneous sound-although, of course, extraneous sounds are kind of the whole point of this album. For its 45th anniversary-closer to its 46th, but keeping time was never their strong point-it's been reissued in expanded, remastered form, as if what this pinnacle of sloppy noise needed was remastering. ![]() That's the White Light/White Heat of legend, anyway. It clung to the bottom of the album chart for two weeks, disappeared, and went on to become the glorious, tainted fountain from which all scuzz flows. And the album was a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time: six songs with lyrics designed to horrify the bourgeoisie (not that they'd have listened to the Velvet Underground in the first place), ending with a one-take, two-chord, 17-minute speedfreakout. Nico was out of the band, although bassist John Cale would continue to work with her for years. White Light/White Heat is easily the least accessible of the Velvet Underground's studio albums, but anyone wanting to hear their guitar-mauling tribal frenzy straight with no chaser will love it, and those benighted souls who think of the Velvets as some sort of folk-rock band are advised to crank their stereo up to ten and give side two a spin.By the time they released it, the Velvets were downplaying the art-world connection (despite the very arty slash in the album's title, and the fact that its black-on-black sleeve was designed by the Factory's Billy Name). The album opens with an open and enthusiastic endorsement of amphetamines (startling even from this group of noted drug enthusiasts), and side one continues with an amusing shaggy-dog story set to a slab of lurching, mutant R&B ("The Gift"), a perverse variation on an old folktale ("Lady Godiva's Operation"), and the album's sole "pretty" song, the mildly disquieting "Here She Comes Now." While side one was a good bit darker in tone than the Velvets' first album, side two was where they truly threw down the gauntlet with the manic, free-jazz implosion of "I Heard Her Call My Name" (featuring Reed's guitar work at its most gloriously fractured), and the epic noise jam "Sister Ray," 17 minutes of sex, drugs, violence, and other non-wholesome fun with the loudest rock group in the history of Western Civilization as the house band. ![]() Recorded without the input of either Nico or Andy Warhol, White Light/White Heat was the purest and rawest document of the key Velvets lineup of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, capturing the group at their toughest and most abrasive. The world of pop music was hardly ready for the Velvet Underground's first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968's White Light/White Heat was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |