The Cool School (53 page)

Claude, his arms tightly wrapped around his chest, his crossed legs encased in tight white jeans, said, “I don’t want to discuss the movie.”

“I couldn’t agree more. To hell with the rotten movie. Admit it was torture, so we can talk about us.”

Claude sighed.

“Stop suffering so much,” I cried. “It’s getting all over the taxi.”

A tiny, stubborn, human part of me needed to hear that Claude hated the movie, because, believe me, it’s no holiday for a woman of my refined tastes to discover she’s living with a fool.

I closed my eyes as the taxi shot across Fourteenth Street, barely scraping past a crosstown bus. The driver reacted the way all cab drivers react when they cross Fourteenth Street, which is as though they’ve entered the Inferno. He couldn’t have been more lost or confused. This was the point at which Claude was struck with the terrible possibility of the meter suddenly doubling. He all but rested his head in the goon’s lap, guiding him down Seventh Avenue and into Bleecker Street, as if he were docking the
Queen Mary.
We never got
driven to the door, because that meant circling an entire city block. The taxi came to a shuddering halt at the corner of Bleecker and Morton, Claude breathlessly absorbed in calculating a ten percent tip. The cabbie grudgingly dropped coins, one by one, into Claude’s extended palm, neither of the men considering my prolonged exposure to heat prostration. The transaction completed, Claude went dashing down the street without waiting for me. I scurried after him, already concerned with other matters, such as how I could get to the top floor of our brownstone without being spotted by the psychopath who occupied the ground-floor apartment and spent her days and nights watching for me with murder in her heart.

After Claude
, 1973

Lester Bangs started writing for
Rolling Stone
in 1969 with an unsolicited review, and despite his humorously cranky style he lasted four years there before being fired by Jann Wenner. He moved to Detroit, joining the staff of the upstart journal
Creem,
where he poured more wit and energy into album reviews than were contained in the records themselves. He flaunted an attitude every bit as bad as the rock stars he took on as a critic and interviewer. His lengthy argumentative engagement with Lou Reed is the stuff of legend. Bangs was portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film
Almost Famous,
which was directed by a rock writer he had mentored, Cameron Crowe. Lester suffered “death by misadventure” (involving the prescription and over-the-counter drugs he preferred) in 1982, at the age of thirty-four. Here he takes on his favorite sparring partner.

T
HIS
IS
not Round Three.

By now I am sure there are many of you out there who may have grown a bit weary of this Lou Reed subject. To tell the truth, I’m almost getting bored with Lou myself, and he is certainly not my hero anymore. My new hero is President Amin of Uganda.

You may, however, wonder how such an album as
Metal Machine Music
could be sold, first by the artist to his record company, then by said record company to the “hard rock” consumers of America.

In case you just got here or think
Metal Machine Music
refers to something in the neighborhood of Bad Company, let me briefly
explain that what we have here is a one-hour two-record set of nothing, absolutely nothing but screaming feedback noise recorded at various frequencies, played back against various other noise layers, split down the middle into two totally separate channels of utterly inhuman shrieks and hisses, and sold to an audience that was, to put it as mildly as possible, unprepared for it. Because sentient humans simply find it impossible not to vacate any room where it is playing. With certain isolated exceptions: mutants, mental patients, shriek freaks, masochists, sadists, amphetamine addicts, hate buffs, drug-numbed weirdos too walled off by chemicals to feel anything, other people whose nervous systems are already so bent out of shape that it sounds perfectly acceptable, the last category possibly including the author of this article, who likes
Metal Machine Music
so much that he acquired (did not buy) an 8-track RCA cartridge (on which are imprinted the words “SPECIAL VALUE!”) so that he can listen to it in his car.

The release of
Metal Machine Music
is nothing if not an event in the history of the recording industry, and we at
Creem
are proud to celebrate it. Not since the halcyon days of Bruce Springsteen has there been a public so divided. (That 98% of them are on one side glowering and spitting at the other 2 percent means nothing; we at
Creem
will always stand up for the rights of minority groups, and you won’t find many groups smaller, nor more fervent, than
MMM
fans.) As of this writing, it looks like
MMM
is gonna be a heavyweight contender in our
Creem
Readers’ Poll categories both of “Disappointment of the Year” and “Ripoff of the Year.” Then again, every once in a while a ballot rolls in like that from one Carole Pressler of Rocky River, Ohio, who not only voted
MMM
as all three of the Top Albums of 1975, but voted for sides A and D as Top Two Singles of the year, and side B as Best Rhythm & Blues Single.

Yes, these people actually exist, and it would be unfair both to them and to Lou to star
Metal Machine Music
in a snuff film. Which is exactly what RCA is doing right now. But let’s not jump the groove, we gots to hear it
all.
This postmortem begins when I get a call from
a lovely agent named after a British hypnotic sedative who says she is doing free-lance publicity for Lou. She tells me that Lou feels bad about the “misunderstandings” involved in the release of
Metal Machine Music,
wants to clear them up and apologize to all the fans who may have been taken unaware. (But that’s just the
point!
spits the Imp of the Perverse.) She then tells me Lou is preparing a new album, the long-awaited
Coney Island Baby,
whose song titles alone should give sufficient indication of its content and tone: “Glory of Love,” “A Gift to the Women of the World,” “Crazy Feelings,” “She’s My Best Friend,” “Charley’s Girl” (single), “Nobody’s Business,” “Born to Be Loved,” “Oo-ee Baby,” “You Don’t Know What It’s Like,” and “A Sheltered Life,” which, she informs me with tongue so far in cheek it’s lapping the Jersey shoreline, is “reggae.”

Okay. I’m nobody’s dummy. I’m everybody’s dummy. I believe everything I read, see, and hear. If minions close to the cell say Lou is gonna make an album of sensitive songs for friends and lovers, I say it’s right on that the dude should make so as to release concomitant with Valentine’s Day. So I call the old geezer up at the latest hotel he’s holed up in, Room 605 in the Gramercy Park. Above-mentioned agent told me to call him “three-ish,” so I called three-ish, and the operator told me the line was busy. So I waited a few minutes and tried again. Same results. And again. And same still. Meanwhile Louie’s girl is calling me on the other line telling me he just rang her up to ask where the fuck is the interviewer. So I call the hotel back, all of this red tape long distance, mind you, and still busy, so I tell the bitch at the desk to buzz in on the creep and tell him Bangs wants to talk to him. I get dead air. So call back yet
again,
buzz, click, chrk, clack, and there he is: “Boy, do you
believe
the operators in this fucking place?”

“Sure,” I tell him. “I figured anybody that would put out an album like
Metal Machine Music
was the same kind of person as would tell somebody to call ’em up at a specified time and then give out with a busy signal.”

I meant it as a Boy Howdy, but he squared off to fight straightaway: “Fuck you,” etc., etc., etc. I told him poppa don’t take no mess, this
is halftime, so cessation of hostilities. He relaxes his guard, unzips his Frankenstein jumpsuit, and out steps: Jimmy Stewart! A sincere, friendly, helpful, likeable fellow.
This
is the real Lou Reed: a down-home Long Islander who lies through his teeth so good we might as well run the pone poacher for president.
“Metal Machine Music
is probably one of the best things I ever did,” he beams, “and I’ve been thinking about doing it ever since I’ve been listening to LaMonte [Young, whose name Lou couldn’t even remember to spell right on the back of the album]. I had also been listening to Xenakis a lot. You know the drone thing? Well, doing it with a band, you always hadda depend on other people. And inevitably you find that one person is stronger than another.”

Note the tone of humility. Still, I had to demur in the direction of this particular piece of music having no direction. Like, each side is sixteen minutes and one second, ending as abruptly as they begin, with tape slice.

“I did it like that because I wanted to cut it hot,” said Lou. “And since you’re dealing in certain types of distortion up to a certain level of harmonics, I had to have the grooves as wide as possible, because the closer they are, the lower your gain.”

“Then why didn’t you make it eight minutes on a side,” I said, “like an old Elvis album?”

“That would have been a ripoff. It was marketed wrong as it was. There was an information breakdown. They wanted to put it out on Red Seal, and I said no, because that would have been pretentious. I wasn’t going to put it out at all. But a friend of mine at another record company asked to hear it, and said why don’t you play it for [appellation deleted]. He was the head of classical music at RCA. I think
Metal Machine Music
got him fired. I played it for him and he loved it. I thought he must be mad, but he said we really must put it out. He bypassed the A&R people there and went right to Glancy, said ‘We have to have it out on Red Seal.’ I said no way. He said why. I said ‘Because it seems dilettantish and hypocritical, like saying “The really smart, complicated stuff is over here, in the classical bin, meanwhile
the shit rock ’n’ roll goes over here where the shmucks are.’” I said ‘Fuck you, if you want it out you put it out on the regular label with all the other stuff. All you do is put on a disclaimer.’ Which didn’t happen, unfortunately. In other words if a kid saw the cover where I’m standin’ with a microphone and said, ‘Wow, a live album!’ they’d say ‘What a ripoff!’ What they shoulda had was a disclaimer that said before you buy it listen to it for two minutes, because you’re not gonna like it, and I said in the liner notes you’re not gonna like it.”

Breathes there a fan with soul so jade he’d not grant Lou the mantle of an Honest Man. A Patrician, even. Yet vexatious vanity hath wrought a whoozis azzole tryina fool. He may not be a knickerbocker but he shore do can lie. And quoth high sware in frae. Gibberish is as gibberish does, and gibberish stands and beats its monkey footpalms ’pon the strand at 6th Ave. and 44th St. When you try to ask people at RCA about
Metal Machine Music,
they get uptight. They ask not to be quoted, then they launch a fusillade of Styrofoam to the effect that Lou is an artist and an intellectual they respect greatly, thus sub-clause respecting his right to “experiment.” Then they fervently assert that I would be doing Lou and everybody else a favor if I would just let
Metal Machine Music
die a quiet death and slip away forgotten, because, of course, his next album is “the best thing he’s ever done” and everybody’s gonna love it.

I tell them that I think that sort of attitude is unfair to Lou and his fans. They sit there on the long-distance lam telling me that if I really care about Lou as much as they suspect I do, I won’t want to hurt him by digging this
thing
up
now.
Get the picture? “An act of necrophilia,” one of the anonymous RCA execs called my labors here. He also concurred, albeit under his breath, when I pronounced
MMM
a sort of schizophrenic ultimatum. He made strange noises when I brandished this album as prima facie evidence in the case against this curious practice known as “Artist Control.” Only one RCA employee stonewalled. Ernie Gilbert, new A&R director of Red Seal: “I profess total and complete ignorance.”

But a picture begins to emerge. Lou took this thing to the very
top of the corp. The guy who headed Red Seal when he first walked in with his machine tapes now works for another company, was not fired as Lou had said, and while demanding that his identity be held in strict secrecy is not afraid of speaking the truth on this caper: “Well, as soon as he came walking into my office I could see this guy was not too well connected with reality. If he was a person walking in off the street with this shit I woulda threw him out. But I hadda handle him with kid gloves, because he was an artist in whom the company had a long-term commitment. He’s not my artist, I couldn’t get his hackles up, I couldn’t tell him it was just a buncha shit. So I told him it was a ‘violent assault on the senses.’ Jesus Christ, it was fuckin’ torture music! There were a few interesting cadences, but he was ready to read anything into anything I said. I led him to believe it was not too bad a work, because I couldn’t commit myself. I said I’m not gonna put it out on the Red Seal label, and then I gave him a lotta classical records in the hope that he’d write better stuff next time. All I heard of it after that was that he was supposed to write a very strong disclaimer, which I guess he never did.”

So now we have our scenario. Just imagine that wired little weasel, marching through the offices of one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world with his machine music tapes in his hand, not just confident but downright
cocky
that what he had here was the greatest (had to be, since most unbearable) masterpiece in musical history. Lou took
Metal Machine Music
straight to the top, to Kenneth Glancy, president of RCA Records, and worked his way down from there. Office to office, and every one he goes into he just presses the button and out comes ZZZZZZZRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEGG GGGGGGGRRRRRAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNNIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRR . . . all down the line ebrey one-a-dem egg-zecks past de bucks. “Sure, anything, just get it outta my office!” Right! And into the STREET! From whence it came. Kinda reminds you of Melville, don’t it?