“Lou Reed: Caught between the Twisted Stars” offers glimpses into the life of rock ‘n’ roll – from doo-wop to “Metal Machine Music” – and follows the development of one of the legendary polarizing dialogue of music.
At a glance, it’s a modest artifact: a 5-inch-long audio tape, housed in a plain cardboard box. Its package was postmarked May 11, 1965, and the sender and recipient were the same: Lewis Reed.
But if there’s one “Rosebud” in Lou Reed’s archives – a totem from his youth – it is it. The box, still unopened, was found in Reed’s office after his death in 2013. It was just behind the New York Public Library. buy his material Four years later, from Reed’s wife, artist Laurie Anderson, the archivists finally opened it and played the tape. What they found were some of the earliest known recordings of songs Reed had written for the Velvet Underground, his breakout band of the 1960s, in quasi-folk acoustic versions, possibly astound fans and scholars.
The tape sits at the center of “Lou Reed: Caught between the Twisted Stars,” the first exhibition to draw from Reed’s archives, which opens Thursday at the Library of the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center .
The full archive is enormous, with about 600 hours of audio, along with video, correspondence, legal paperwork, and forms of documents that range from photographs of a 1998 White House visit to the United States. small sums of money from life on the road in the 1970s . There are touring rehearsals, sound experiments, handwritten lyrics, heaps of Velvet Underground loot, and even a Coney Island Mermaid Parade banner from 2010, when Reed and Anderson did king and queen.
For Anderson’s pleasure, it’s discoverable by anyone with a library card, though, as she notes, the full character of Reed himself – unstable, emotional, obsessed with sound bar and technology – cannot be conveyed from his scraps.
“This collection is about inspiring people,” Anderson said in an interview at her TriBeCa studio, where a portrait of Reed performing in the dark looms over the wall. “It’s not necessary to say, ‘This is the real Lou Reed.’ That was never what it was meant to be. Here’s a lot of his music and how he did it. Get inspired by it. But it is not and cannot be the real image of the man.”
Anderson said she originally intended to give the archives to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which hosts articles by literary giants such as James Joyce, Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo. But she changed her mind in 2015 after The law has been passed in Texas allows people to carry handguns on college campuses.
“I woke them up,” she recalls. “’This we talked about a few years? It turns off. Because of the gun. ‘”
A few months later, Anderson read a article in The New York Times about a program at the New York Public Library to digitize archives, and began discussions there.
The exhibit, which runs until March 4, 2023, features samples of items from Reed’s complete archive, takes up 112 linear feet of shelf space and features 2.5 terabytes of digital files, making it a must-have. into one of the library’s largest audiovisual collections. The show was curated by Don Fleming, a music producer and archivist, and Jason Stern, who worked with Reed for the last few years of his life.
First, visitors will come across a video of Reed calmly reciting the lyrics”Romeo has Juliette, “From his 1989 album “New York” (“Manhattan sinks like a rock, getting into the filthy Hudson is a shock”), catapulted Reed as a poet, provocateur, and chronicler of the demimondes of Manhattan. Other galleries showcase Reed’s time with the Velvet Underground, his solo work and poetry, and a listening room will showcase the meditative music Reed created as a tai chi practitioner and a version role-playing of “Metal Machine Music,” his popular 1975 album.
The artifacts provide a glimpse into life in rock ‘n’ roll. A small box contains part of Reed’s collection of 45 rpm records, featuring some of his boyhood doo-wop and R&B hits like 5 Willows'”Lay your head on my shoulder“And Huey (Piano) Smith’s”You don’t just know it,” Along with Reed’s high school rock band, the Jades. There are boxes of Velvet Underground tapes and purchase receipts that are as simple as coffee and stand out as a stone-studded dog collar, almost certainly the one Reed wore on the cover of 1974’s live album ‘Rock’. n’ Roll Animal” ($13.50 from Pleasure Chest on Seventh Avenue).
The cutest is a set of holiday greeting cards by Moe Tucker, the Velvets drummer, calling Reed “Honeybun”; those on display are just a sample of the many that are kept in the archives. The collection doesn’t include any of Reed’s items, but “every Valentine’s Day, he sends Moe a card,” says Stern.
For the performance, Anderson also lent some of Reed’s guitars and tai chi weapons, which are not in the library’s archives.
With the exception of Reed’s personal Rolodex, every item in the library’s collection is accessible to the public. Discoveries have been made, such as a previously unknown song, “Open Invitation”, found on cassette tapes from the mid-80s – a rock ‘n’ roll tune about extremes martial arts became Reed’s great passion towards the end of his life years.
Just last month, Fleming and Stern realized they had misrecorded a tape labeled “Electric Rock Symphony,” claiming it was a 1970s demo for “Metal Machine Music.” After closer examination of the tape and comparison of its sound to that of others in the collection, they now believe it was made in 1966, or possibly 1965, an indication for saw the “Metal Machine” technique, a feedback-driven guitar drone, adapted. from composer La Monte Young – signaled.
The biggest discovery to date was the May 1965 tape. Reed showed it to friends, though its contents were unknown even to The Velvets’ most determined loot hunters. Featuring Reed playing acoustic guitar and mixing voices with John Cale as cafe folk performers, other versions of the tapes “I’m Waiting for the Man”, “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Heroin” far from the explosive sound the two young men would have developed just a few months later with Velvet Underground.
On August 26, special reissue Light in the Attic will unveil a series of Lou Reed archival albums with the release of “Words & Music, May 1965,” featuring 11 cuts from the tape. there, along with other original recordings. Among those early tracks was Reed softly singing the spirit “Michael, rowing to shoreIn 1963 or 1964 with carefully selected guitar accompaniment.
For Anderson, those tapes were a sign of the tortuous path Reed took to becoming an artist. “It’s valuable for people to understand,” she said. “You don’t become Lou Reed overnight.”
Reed may have mailed the tape to himself as an attempt to establish copyright. But why he never opens it, and leaves it so close to him – it sits on a shelf full of his own CDs – is a mystery.
“It was amazing that he had this material from his first song during his time writing with him,” says Fleming. “He just kept it there. He doesn’t have to open it.”
The gallery exhibit includes a listening room where versions of “Metal Machine Music” will play, interspersed with the tape “Electric Rock Symphony” and a track from Reed’s ambient album “Meditating on the Hudson River Wind” (2007). “Metal Machine Music” will be heard in the original quartet mix – for four speakers, instead of the standard stereo recording’s two – and listeners can experience a rich live material from five 2009 by the group Reed Metal machine trio.
The story of the 2009 recording, made in a three-dimensional audio format known as ambisonic, shows Reed’s lifelong fascination with technology, as well as his combination of toughness and sensitivity. he.
In an interview, Raj Patel of Arup, the audio technology company that made the recording, recalled meeting Reed in 2008 and finding him attractive but skeptical of the format. He eventually agreed to have Arup tape a performance in New York, with microphones placed around the venue and stage, including right behind Reed’s head – so listeners could hear the performance. That’s what it’s like from Reed’s own perspective.
A week later, Reed arrives at Arup’s studio, braced for disappointment. After listening for about five minutes, Reed raised his hand to stop the music. Tears welled up in his eyes.
“That,” Patel recalled Reed saying, “was the best [expletive] live recordings I’ve ever heard”.
