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LA stories

My Los Angeles is a place of myths and legends, all bathed in the glow of an endless neon sunset. It’s where the young trumpeter Dupree Bolton, barely into his teens in the early 1940s, secreted articles of his clothing night after night in a suitcase hidden backstage at a Central Avenue club so that when the right day presented itself he could leave home without telling his parents and go on the road with Jay McShann’s band. It’s the El Monte Legion Stadium, outside the city limits, where young blacks, whites and Latinos mingled, avoiding LA’s bylaws against mixed dances, to hear the DJ-turned-impresario Art Laboe presenting great doo-wop outfits like the Penguins and Don Julian and the Meadowlarks. It’s the image of Art Pepper, just out of jail, trudging up an Echo Park hillside in baking afternoon heat, wearing a check sports jacket and carrying his alto saxophone. It’s Richie Valens recording “Donna” at Gold Star Studios, with that perfect echo. It’s Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins inventing the future at the Hillcrest Club on Washington Blvd. It’s Brian Wilson, with the rest of the Beach Boys off on tour, concocting miracles of sound in a series of Hollywood studios. It’s photographs like the one above, which shows the young singer and songwriter Carol Connors, formerly known as Annette Kleinbard when she sang lead on the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him”, celebrating the gift of an AC Cobra from its inventor, the racing driver Carroll Shelby, whose jovial challenge — “If you write a song about my car and it goes to number one, I’ll give you one” — had sent her home to write “Hey Little Cobra” for the Rip Chords (she’s holding up the sheet music).

This is not just my Los Angeles. It’s Harvey Kubernik’s, too. The difference is that Harvey’s LA is real. It’s where he was born, and where he grew up in the 1960s. He attended Fairfax High, listened to Hunter Hancock on KGFJ, B. Mitchel Reed on KFWB and Wolfman Jack on XERB, and saw the Beach Boys at a record store appearance in Culver City in 1962 and the Seeds at the Valley Music Center in 1967. He even danced, so he says, on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. He watched the whole parade pass by: the Byrds, Love, the Doors, Johnny Rivers, Sonny and Cher, the Wall of Sound, the Monkees, Buffalo Springfield, and on and on. He’s been writing about it for 40-odd years. And, best of all, he’s retained every drop of enthusiasm for the place and its history, much of which is to be found between the covers of his latest book: Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972, published by Santa Monica Books.

It’s a large-format book and the photographic content is extremely rich (those familiar with Harvey’s earlier volume, Canyon of Dreams, will know what to expect). But the oral history is the point, and there is no one better to convey it than an indefatigable interviewer with an enviable contacts book. “I conducted over 200 interviews for this book over 38 years,” he writes, and although there are big names here, such as Johnny Otis, Roger McGuinn, Michelle Phillips, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, some of the most fascinating testimony comes from session musicians like Hal Blaine, Julius Wechter, Jim Keltner and Joe Osborn, producers like Russ Titelman, Jim Dickson and Bones Howe, industry figures like Russ Regan and Lester Sill, and scenemakers like Henry Diltz and Rodney Bingenheimer.

Maybe you don’t want a book containing Titelman’s story about how he was studying sitar at the Kinnara School of Music when he met Lowell George, who was then playing shakuhachi. Or the view — shared by Phil Spector and Andrew Loog Oldham — that “Good Vibrations” represented not a liberation but a trap for Brian Wilson. Or the guitarist Elliot Ingber (who became Winged Eel Fingerling of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band) talking about how he felt like he was “landing on another planet” when, as a teenager, he made the bus journey from Hollywood to John Dolphin’s record shop in Watts, where he was able to discover the playing of Lowman Pauling with the “5” Royales and Hubert Sumlin with Howlin’ Wolf. But if you do, this is it. Because there’s one of those on almost every page.

* The photograph appears in Turn Up the Radio! and is from the collection of Carol Connors.

2013: the best bits

I can’t remember a year in which I heard more wonderful music in person, a high proportion of it in Dalston — at Cafe Oto and the Vortex — or at this year’s excellent London Jazz Festival. Bob Dylan’s “Forgetful Heart” on the first night of his return to the Albert Hall, the Necks’ second set on the last of their three nights in London, the rediscovery of John Williams’s Stoner, the ambition and magnificence of The Great Beauty, and a last chance to see Picasso’s Child With a Dove: these are things for which I’ll remember the past 12 months. I’ll probably never get over missing Arve Henriksen perform Andrew Smith’s Norwegian Requiem at St Luke’s, but here are the highlights of the things I did manage to listen to, watch, read and see.

LIVE

1. Wadada Leo Smith at Cafe Oto (November)

2. Paolo Conte at the Royal Festival Hall (November)

3. The Necks at Cafe Oto (November)

4. Bob Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall (November)

5. Alexander Hawkins Septet at Kings Place (March)

6. Amarcord Nino Rota at the Royal Festival Hall (November)

7. Keith Tippett + Elysian String Quartet at the Vortex (August)

8. Bruce Springsteen at Wembley Stadium (June)

9. Marc Ribot at Cafe Oto (October)

10. Burt Bacharach at the Royal Festival Hall (July)

11. Paula Morelenbaum at Snape Maltings (October)

12. Bryan Ferry Orchestra at the Royal Centre, Nottingham (October)

13. Booker T Jones at Ronnie Scott’s (August)

14. Television at the Roundhouse (November)

15. Compositions by Dobrinka Tabakova at the Warehouse Studio, London SE1 (April)

NEW RECORDINGS

1. The Necks: Open (RER)

2. Arve Henriksen: Places of Worship (Rune Grammofon)

3. Booker T Jones: Sound the Alarm (Stax)

4. Dave King Trio: I’ve Been Ringing You (Sunnyside)

5. Carla Bley/Andy Sheppard/Steve Swallow: Trios (ECM)

6. Boz Scaggs: Memphis (429 Records)

7. John O’Gallagher: The Anton Webern Project (Whirlwind)

8. Giovanni Guidi: City of Broken Dreams (ECM)

9. Willie Nelson: To All the Girls… (Legacy)

10. Mike Gibbs: Mike Gibbs + 12 Play Gil Evans (Whirlwind)

ARCHIVE RECORDINGS

1. John Coltrane: The Complete Sun Ship Sessions (Impulse)

2. Elvis Presley: Elvis at Stax (RCA Legacy)

3. Don Cherry: Live in Stockholm (Caprice)

4. Beach Boys: Made in California (Capitol)

5. Miles Davis Quintet: Live in Europe 1969 (Legacy)

6. Harry Miller: Different Times, Different Places (Ogun)

7. Dionne Warwick: We Need to Go Back: The Unissued Warner Bros Masters (Real Gone/Rhino)

8. The Band: Live at the Academy of Music 1971 (Capitol)

9. Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat (Verve)

10. Various: Beating the Petrillo Ban (Ace)

FILMS: NEW

1. The Great Beauty (dir. Paolo Sorrentino)

2. Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Joss Whedon)

3. Something in the Air (dir. Olivier Assayas)

4. A Late Quartet (dir. Yaron Zilberman)

5=. Bayou Maharajah (dir. Lily Keber) and Muscle Shoals (dir. Greg Camalier)

FILMS: REVIVED

1. Nothing But a Man (dir. Michael Roemer)

2. Classe Tous Risques (dir. Claude Sautet)

3. Point Blank (dir. John Boorman)

BOOKS: FICTION

1. John Williams: Stoner (Vintage)

2. James Salter: All That Is (Picador)

3. Owen Martell: Intermission (William Heinemann)

BOOKS: MUSIC

1. The Jazz Standards by Ted Gioia (Oxford)

2. Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen (Jonathan Cape)

3. Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch (Harper)

EXHIBITIONS

1. Becoming Picasso: 1901 (Courtauld Gallery, London)

2. Sean Scully: Triptychs (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)

3. ECM: A Cultural Archaeology (Haus der Kunst, Munich)

* These lists were inspired by those that Stewart and Barbara Tray produced over the last few years, for their own enjoyment and that of their friends. They are dedicated to the memory of Barbara, who died last year. Stewart’s 2013 list is head by Quercus, the collaboration between June Tabor, Iain Ballamy and Huw Warren (ECM). The photograph is one I took outside Munich’s Haus der Kunst during the exhibition ECM: A Cultural Archaeology last February, in the early weeks of this blog. It was great to see Don Cherry on the poster.

Pauline Boty’s colouring book

It’s been a long wait, but at last there is a good exhibition devoted to the work of Pauline Boty, the pioneering Pop Art painter who made a fleeting impression in company with her friends Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and others in the early Sixties but died of cancer in 1966, aged 28, before she had a chance to mature as an artist or to establish herself in the mind of the public.

Boty’s physical beauty (she was a perfect Sixties blonde in the genre of Julie Christie and the model Susan Murray) led her to part-time work as an actress and a model. It certainly distorted perceptions of her work and made it harder for her art to be accepted on its own terms, although those terms included a constant willingness to investigate the meaning of her own attractiveness — and that of other women, including Marilyn Monroe and Monica Vitti — in a world dominated by the male gaze.

Here, if you haven’t seen it before, is a short clip that features her from Ken Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel, a profile of the group of artists among whom she lived and worked, made in 1962 for Monitor, the BBC’s weekly arts programme. And here is Michael Bracewell (whose informative book about the art-school origins of Roxy Music, Re-make/Re-model, you might have read) talking about Boty’s painting “The Only Blonde in the World” in the Tate Shorts series. Sabine Durrant, writing for the Independent on Sunday‘s Review section 20 years ago, brought a lot of information to light, and her piece is still probably the best biographical overview.

What on earth, you might ask, does this have to do with music? Well, the painting in the photograph above, currently hanging as part of the exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, is called “My Colouring Book”, and when Boty painted it in 1963 she was inspired by the hit song of that name, a lovelorn pop ballad which became a hit in 1962 in three different versions, by Barbra Streisand, Sandy Stewart and Kitty Kallen. (Nine years ago Agnetha Faltskog made it the title track of a solo album about which I wrote in enthusiastic terms here last May.)

Boty takes the song’s lyric and adapts a format popular among the girls’ pop comics of the era (Romeo, etc), creating a series of cartoon frames illustrating a selection of its lines. She doesn’t do what Roy Lichtenstein did, copying the comic-book approach by making the illustration a straightforward visual rendering of the text: she does something less literal, more allusive. The denouement comes with the painting of the male figure in the frame at the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, illustrating the song’s concluding lines: “This is the man whose love I depended upon / Colour him gone” in the official version, but she changes it to “This is the boy, the one I depended upon / Colour him gone.” I like her version better.

In one of the captions accompanying the exhibition, the curator remarks: “She did not adopt the cool detachment expected of Pop artists and, speaking of a ‘nostalgia for now’, gave form to the emotional experience of the female fan.” An important job, I’d say, and this fine painting is a good example of her success. I hadn’t seen it before, probably because it comes from the collection of contemporary art at the Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland. Like all her work, it has an open-hearted quality undamaged by the years.

* The exhibition Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman, curated by Sue Tate and first seen at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery earlier this year, is at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex (www.pallant.org.uk) until February 9. There’s a good catalogue.

Dylan at the Albert Hall

On the way in to the Albert Hall tonight, I told a friend that, what with the inconsistent quality of his recent tours and the cost of tickets on the grey market, this might be the last time I would be seeing Bob Dylan live. The first half didn’t do a great deal to change my mind. It had its moments, most of them when Dylan was not at the piano, where his erratic contribution seemed to muddy and confuse the ensemble sound. A brusque “Things Have Changed” gave the evening a challenging statement to start with, and “Pay in Blood” and “Love Sick” seethed with a sullen power, but “Duquesne Whistle” was a bit of a mess and a metrically refracted version of “Tangled Up in Blue” wasn’t exactly a treat. After the interval, however, the lights seemed to come on — the lights inside the music, that is, since the highly effective low-level stage illumination seldom varied.

The band found its range straight away on “High Water (For Charley Patton)”, Dylan delivered a rather beautiful “Simple Twist of Fate”, he growled effectively through “Early Roman Kings”, and then came the moment I’ll treasure. Everything came into focus on “Forgetful Heart”, the lovely ballad he wrote with Robert Hunter for Together Through Life: his voice, the band (with the brilliant Donny Herron on violin) at their gentlest and most discreetly responsive, the melody, the lyric, the restrained harmonica-playing. I’ve been going to see him in concert since 1965, and for me this ranked with “It’s Alright, Ma” from that year at Sheffield City Hall, “Like a Rolling Stone” at Earl’s Court in 1978 and “Barbara Allen” at the NEC in 1989.

“Scarlet Town” was almost as good, another example of the marvellously warm and alert support given to him by Charlie Sexton (lead guitar), Stu Kimball (rhythm guitar), Tony Garnier (bass), George Recile (drums) and Herron on pedal steel and rhythm guitars, mandolin and banjo as well as fiddle. At these moments you could hear the sound Dylan is after nowadays: a wonderfully flexible blend of bluegrass, Western swing and Chicago R&B. And it was a treat to watch the musicians catching each others’ eyes as they tried to predict the dynamic shifts and unpredictable endings, mostly with success. And by this time, too, his piano-playing had sorted itself out.

There were seven songs from Tempest included in the set list, and Dylan delivered them with such a persuasive sense of an engagement in his own creative present that if I didn’t have it already, I’d be out buying it this morning. “Roll On, John”, not a song I’d previously cared for much, turned out to make a perfect finale. So probably not the end of the affair, then.

Last tango in Kilburn

A corroncho, Phil Manzanera tells me, is a particularly ugly fish found in Colombia. When fisherman pull one out of the water, they take a look and throw it straight back. It’s what the people of Bogota call the inhabitants of Barranquilla.

The Two Corronchos is the name of a project on which Manzanera is currently working with his friend Lucho Brieva, a Colombian sculptor who occupies part of the mews in north-west London where the former Roxy Music guitarist has his recording studio. Manzanera was born to a Colombian mother, spending much of his early life in Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba, and the album will tell the possibly somewhat picaresque story in music of two men travelling round the Americas, providing social and political commentary while reflecting local sounds and styles.

A profusion of Brieva’s iron gates and railings are a feature of the buildings, which were once a stables and a railway depot. The main line from Euston runs a stone’s throw away, necessitating considerable efforts to sound-proof the rooms when the studio was built. On Manzanera’s walls are the posters and gold records and other bits and pieces of memorabilia that you’d expect, but also lots of South American art and several large paintings by Nick de Ville, the professor of visual art at Goldsmiths College and the art director of the early Roxy Music album covers.

I first met Phil in November 1970, when he and Bill MacCormick, one of his fellow members of a band called Quiet Sun, came to see me at the Melody Maker. They’d sent me a tape, I’d liked the sound of it, and after we talked in the Red Lion, the pub round the back of Fleet Street where artists used to come to be interviewed, I wrote a piece about them. The next time I saw him, several months later, was at an old cinema in Battersea, where he was doing a spot of roadying for the embryonic Roxy Music. They were auditioning for EG Management and he was about to step into the shoes of the departing David O’List.

When I paid him a visit this week, Manzanera was welcoming a string quartet led by Ros Stephen, the violinist and arranger whose work made such an impact on For the Ghosts Within, the album she made three years ago with Robert Wyatt and Gilad Atzmon. Like Wyatt’s previous two albums, it was made at Phil’s studio. This time she and her colleagues were here to add their contribution to a piece from the Corronchos project and to a track from Manzanera’s next album of his own guitar music.

The latter came first, and presented Stephen with the challenge of writing an arrangement for a piece called “Rosemullion Head”, a gentle, lyrical acoustic guitar improvisation (inspired by a coastal path in South Cornwall) to which minimal piano, bass and percussion had been added later. The sobriety of the lines for two violins, viola and cello placed a gently restraining hand on any hint of romantic indulgence, and after a handful of takes — in which adjustments were made to compensate for metrical irregularities in the original improvisation — an interesting phenomenon emerged: what had started out sounding like an accompaniment began to create the illusion of a dialogue. As one playback followed another it seemed as though the guitar, recorded long before, was now responding to the strings.

Next came “El Tango Infinito”, in which the two Corronchos visit Buenos Aires and whip up a fantastic groove, something of which the Gotan Project mob would be proud, with a laconic rap from Brieva and a fine guitar solo. Here, too, Stephen found a way of making the string quartet sound integral. Later in the day her husband, Julian Rowlands, would be arriving to add his bandoneon to the mix. He’s also her partner in their bands Tango Siempre and Orquesta Tangazo; you’ll find an example of their work here.

Outside in the courtyard, the early winter sun was setting on Lucho Brieva’s exotic ironwork. I left with the echoes of two pieces of music that won’t make their public appearance for some time, but which I’m looking forward to hearing again.

One used record store: £300K, no offers

A seemingly nondescript little doglegged cut-through just north of Soho, linking Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, Hanway Street is the sort of alley that has always given central London its character. It’s a mess of scaffolding and construction at the moment, with a big hole where something’s been torn down and something grander will no doubt be erected.

For me Hanway Street was aways notable for its musical associations. In the early 1970s there was the office of John Abbey’s Blues & Soul magazine, which I read principally for the magnificently obsessive columns published under the name of Dave Godin. The same building was also the headquarters of the magazine’s associated record labels, Contempo and Mojo, whose catalogues included such names as Oscar Toney Jr, Doris Duke and Timmy Thomas. I’m pretty sure I did my first interview with the great Mable John on those premises. More recently there have been JB’s Records, a collectors’ vinyl-only shop which closed a couple of months back and is now a place where you can get your eyebrows plaited or your nether regions waxed, and On the Beat, a shop selling vinyl of all types along with old music magazines and books.

You might have read in the last few days about On the Beat, whose proprietor has put it up for sale on eBay, at a buy-now price of £300,000 with a guaranteed 10-year lease on the premises. I stopped by there today, and he told me that if a buyer isn’t found by the end of January, the shop will close.

For old times’ sake, I dropped a tenner on a copy of Joe Tex’s “A Mother’s Prayer”, a 1973 B-side on the Dial label that US radio disc jockeys preferred to the designated A-side, “I Gotcha”. It’s one of my favourites of Tex’s sermons, and I think I might have heard it for the first time when it was part of the repertoire of Kokomo, the great English pub-soul band. Anyway, the copy I found in On the Beat looks unplayed, which is more than you can say about the UK Mercury version already in my collection (or the rather battered one that some kind soul has uploaded on to YouTube).

It would certainly be welcome if a buyer stepped forward. But these places are disappearing, one by one. Maybe we were just lucky to have them for so long.

Lou Reed 1942-2013 (2)

You might feel you’ve read enough about Lou Reed in the last couple of days (and here is my Guardian obituary), but here are a few last thoughts.

1.

You’ll have heard a lot about how difficult it was to interview Lou successfully. Without wishing to criticise my colleagues, it always seemed to me that the journalists who had a hard time with him were the ones who felt he owed them answers to questions he had already been asked a million times. I mean, “Were you really on heroin when you wrote ‘Heroin’?” — asked 40 years after the fact — was unlikely to elicit a positive reaction.

Not to say that he was a little ray of sunshine even in the most propitious circumstances. But, like a lot of artists, he preferred contemplating the present and anticipating the future to raking over the past. He was proud of the early stuff, but you can tell just by reading the later interviews that he didn’t want to spend his life discussing it. He usually responded well to people who showed that they had taken the trouble to keep track of what he had been up to in the years since the achievements that brought him his legendary status. If an interviewer wanted to talk about Ornette Coleman (as Bob Elms did on Radio London) or Tibetan philosophy (as Mick Brown did in the Telegraph), he was likely to show genuine enthusiasm and engage in something resembling a real dialogue.

I suppose I was lucky to get to him before the period that began when Transformer and “Walk on the Wild Side” made him a hot act, the point at which large numbers of reporters started to interrogate him. He hadn’t yet met David Bowie — and might not even have heard of him — when I sat down with him at the Inn on the Park in London one day in mid-January, 1972.

He was in London to record his first solo album, accompanied by his producer, Richard Robinson, and Richard’s wife, Lisa, then the New York correspondent of Disc and Music Echo. The Robinsons were friends of mine and they knew I was a Velvet Underground fan of long standing, and soon after their arrival we all had lunch together at the hotel. Lou was quiet and a little preoccupied but perfectly good company.

A few weeks later, after they’d recorded and mixed most of the album with a very heterogeneous bunch of English musicians at Morgan Studios in Willesden (where Rod Stewart had cut Every Picture Tells a Story), I sat down with Lou in his room to listen to some of the near-completed tracks, with the intention of writing a piece for the Melody Maker. It was a very congenial experience. He was so relaxed and willing to talk about his past that when I read the piece now, I feel guilty that I didn’t convey more of his thoughts about the new material. As things turned out, the album — called Lou Reed — created barely a ripple of public interest; soon to be overshadowed by Transformer and his liaison with Bowie, it acquired the dismal aura of a failed project. Give it a proper listen today, however, and you’ll find that “Wild Child”, “Love Makes You Feel” and “Ride into the Sun” are more than worth their place in his canon.

At one point I asked him about the Velvets’ third album, and if he would be willing to support my theory, aired in a review when it came out in 1969, that its 10 songs constituted a single narrative. He seemed delighted. “I’ve never known whether it worked for other people,” he said. “I’ve always written with the idea of putting songs into concepts so that they relate to one another. I always thought of these like chapters in a novel, and that if you played the first three albums all in order, it would really make huge total sense. No one ever seemed to pick up on that, and why should they? I don’t put out that many albums anyway, so by the time Chapter Three arrived, you had to go running back to the archives to find where Chapter Two left off.”

When the song on Lou Reed called “Berlin” mutated, a couple of years later, into the entire album called Berlin, with its cast of characters and single continuous and coherent narrative, he seemed to have achieved his ambition to make a rock and roll album that worked like a novel.

2.

No doubt there will be a great deal of reassessment of Reed’s work in the coming years. Given the way the once-despised Berlin was rehabilitated, don’t bet against something similar happening to Lulu — his recent album with Metallica, even more voceriferously despised by US critics — one day. I’ve been listening to it over the past 24 hours, and it seems to me that anyone who claims to adore the harsher moments of White Light/White Heat yet dismisses this one needs to have a serious rethink.

A more likely beneficiary, however, could be Songs for Drella, the album he made with John Cale for Sire in 1990 as a farewell to Andy Warhol, their former patron. Originally performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it’s a biography in music, beginning with Warhol’s origins as a youthful misfit in Pittsburgh and tracing the story through his early days as an advertising artist and his rise to prominence as a succes de scandale in the New York art world of the 1960s to Valerie Solanas’s attempt to kill him and his eventual death from a heart attack following gallbladder surgery in 1987.

Reed and Cale were close to Warhol, but their view of his world is as clear-sighted and illuminating as it is generous and affectionate. Musically, it gains impact from its sense of intimacy: the instrumentation is restricted to Reed’s guitars and Cale’s various keyboards and viola. They both sing, the simplicity of the surroundings highlighting the restrained emotion in their voices. There’s a lot of contrast, effectively employed, like the jump from the elegance of Cale accompanied by strings on the delicate “Style It Takes” to Reed’s rapid-fire delivery over the chattering keyboard and buzz-saw guitar of “Work”, but the whole song-cycle coheres beautifully, forming a perceptive and touching tribute to a man who played a significant role in their careers. It’s easy to imagine its reputation increasing as the years pass.

3.

If you don’t already know it, try to hear Lou’s version of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s “This Magic Moment”, included in a CD called Till the Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus, issued in 1998 by Forward/Rhino. The album features a stellar cast — Dylan, B.B. King, Brian Wilson, Irma Thomas, Los Lobos, Roseanne Cash, Dr John, Aaron Neville, Dion, Solomon Burke, etc — but his track is a standout. Originally a Top 20 hit for the Drifters in 1960,  it allows him to demonstrate both his deep affection for R&B and his gift for stripped-down rock and roll, his two guitar parts — one skirling, the other snarling  — accompanied by Fernando Saunders on bass and George Recile on drums. And he really was among the most unorthodox and creative of rock guitarists, a fact often overlooked in the desire to acclaim his more headline-friendly characteristics.

Lou Reed 1942-2013 (1)

The death of Lou Reed has just been announced. I’m thinking back to the early weeks of 1967, and the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico, which had such a profound impact on all who were prepared to be receptive to such provocative music: “I’m Waiting for the Man”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, “Black Angel’s Death Song” and, of course, “Heroin”. And then White Light/White Heat and the third album. Each of them a map leading to a different future. He was a strange, difficult and brilliant man.

Forty five years ago I managed to get an extended review of the first album into the local paper for which I was working as a junior reporter, serving my apprenticeship. It made a change from covering juvenile court and golden weddings. And now I have to sit down and write his obituary for the Guardian. So although I’ll keep any further thoughts for that, I didn’t want his passing to go unmarked on this blog. The pages above are from the copy of Screen Tests (Kulchur Press) I bought in the year that The Velvet Underground and Nico was released. Words: Gerard Malanga. Photograph: Andy Warhol.