Lou Reed - The Blue Mask

I think the second track of an album, and the second verse of a song, and the second line of a verse, should usually bring extra weight, as it comes after the listener has settled in but before they can drift away.

Though it has long been one of my favorite albums, today I can’t figure out why Reed made most of the choices I notice on The Blue Mask. “The Gun”, repeating the line “carrying a gun” over and over, is the only song I can understand, but it is about such a twisted bunch of stuff that it still won’t make it onto a list or anything.

“Women”, the second track, succeeds at grabbing the attention and the bass in this song is still the awesomest thing on the album, but today the bass seems overdone, too harmonically complex and muddy, and the lyrics (“I love women, I think they’re great…”) seem like what you would write while conferring with your psychologist.

On the other hand, I still remember most of these songs even though I lost my cassette dub ten years ago and just now found it to hear again. I was a bit disappointed, though, because I remembered the song “The Power of Positive Drinking” being on this album - that’s a great song too, and one which I will probably be utterly flummoxed by should I ever hear it again.

The Grateful Dead – Live / Dead

The thing about the music of the Grateful Dead in 1969 is that they were still improvising essentially by repeating a short phrase with variations. They had some good songs, like “St. Stephen”, which is musically fantastic and lyrically psychedelic to the max if not particularly meaningful. Most of the tunes were essentially just excuses for the aforementioned primitive jamming. “Dark Star” allowed instrumental wheedling and deelding on a chord, and “Turn On Your Lovelight” offers Ron McKernan the chance to hop up and down like he’s James Brown for a half an hour. It’s fine. Hippies would certainly use the most violent power they have, ostracism, to thwart my disdain, and I wouldn’t blame them. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” is phenomenally performed. The feedback jam is enjoyable, and you have to appreciate the Dead inflicting such noise on parents of hippies and on “hippies” everywhere.

“Death Don’t Have No Mercy”

Good improvisation develops harmonically, structurally, melodically, in the same fashion as any good piece of music. Simply repeating a short phrase while one player improvises melodically is essentially performing a composition, and a poor one at that, even if the phrase has not been previously determined.

The problem is really not that the music is limited compared to the Dead’s later output, but that it’s limitations mean that any attempt to understand what is truly happening has to be primarily concerned with the social context of San Fransisco in the late Sixties, which has already been written about by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. It would be wiser to think about other such culturally driven music works, like early bluegrass, or punk rock, which aren’t nearly as played out.

A number of Grateful Dead albums succeed specifically on musical grounds, like Workingman’s Dead, Wake of the Flood, Terrapin Station,and American Beauty. The last is the album people will point to as the Dead’s classic studio album, but I find songs such as “Operator” and “Til the Morning Comes” drag down “Ripple” and “Box of Rain” a little too much.

As a result, I’m not convinced one can investigate any single classic Grateful Dead album on purely musical grounds.

Free Kitten - Inherit (listen to “Seasick”)

Albums are difficult. You have to have it all in one place, at a bare minimum. You have to know what order the tracks go in.

If you are serious, you listen to a CD. You have to have a specific object which maps only to the one album, the specific intent of people in time. You can’t let it get scratched, you break the case, the booklet gets little half-circles imprinted in its sides if you don’t reinsert it into the case correctly. There’s not enough information in the booklet, and you can’t just look it up in Wikipedia, because your CD player doesn’t have Wikipedia, it doesn’t even tell you what track is playing any more, not since the light burnt out two years ago. You have to imagine what instruments made the sound, who played it, where they recorded it.

An LP makes things a little more complicated, because you have to be in one place, the place where your record player lives. Then at some point you have to get up, turn over the record.

It’s like a puppy, reminding you it likes to eat, to walk, to play.  Focus.

Well the main question about something as cool and hip as this, is if it would be as cool if it weren’t as hip. In other words, without Kim Gordon or at least the mark of Sonic Youth, would this sound have the same effect? Am I listening to music, or to culture? I can imagine a sort of self-congratulatory mode in which the local mode love of the unknown is combined with the mass mode imprimatur of a taste maker.

I wanted to post “Help Me”, because it’s funny and awesome, but mundane problems arose.  Listen to it above, if you want.