(Sung by a man, “Femme Fatale” arguably becomes a portrait of misogyny rather than jealousy.) drummer Moe Tucker puts it, might not even have worked otherwise. And Nico helped bring a softness, sophistication, and mysterious weirdness to songs that, as V.U. Andy Warhol helped him reach an audience of downtown scenesters and uptown art people who otherwise surely would have had no time for this suburban piker. John Cale helped him find a unique and spellbinding musical counterpart to his lyrics. To get noticed, he needed more than that. But throughout his career he got a lot of mileage from being the guy who could be meaner, more transgressive, and more unflinchingly adept at freaking out the squares than pretty much anybody else. I don’t want to dismiss Reed’s artistry as a gimmick by any means. Reed’s version was more brutal but also maybe more realistic: I need to play guitar and sing in a band, and I need a gimmick. That’s a delightful but arguably naive notion of competition in the pop space. One of my favorite parts of the film is hearing Cale talk about how he was trying to compete with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and felt he had an advantage because no one would ever be able to figure out how he tuned his instrument. The way I see it, Cale was interested in musical innovation, while Reed, as Haynes shows us, had one goal from the time he was in his early teens: He wanted to be a rock star. I don’t know that it was actually that complicated. (His sister has denied this, saying her parents were “blazing liberals” who were trying to address his mental health issues.) But what, then, is one to make of his late-in-life love story with Laurie Anderson, seemingly the only time in his life he came close to being content?Īnyway, back to Reed and Cale. It’s tempting, in retrospect, to simplify the story by saying he was a gay man who could never fully accept that aspect of himself, in part because as a child he was subjected to shock therapy in an attempt to “cure” him. Reed’s sexuality has always been a bit of a puzzle. Haynes is more interested than McCain and McNeil in the Velvet Underground’s roots in (and contributions to) experimental art, film, and music, and in Lou Reed’s complicated role in gay history. Most of the gossipy stuff from the film is there, but the context is obviously different. To answer your question about the memoirs, I think the thing to do is immediately order Please Kill Me, Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil’s profane, insane, and indispensable oral history of punk, which draws a line from the Velvet Underground to the New York Dolls to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, thereby enshrining them as the parents of the entire genre. Watching Haynes’s gorgeous and seductive treatment of the material, I realized that I feel very lucky to have discovered their music when I was a teenager, thanks to a friend who went deep down the Lou Reed rabbit hole. Mike Hogan: Hey, Katey, I’m proud to have had any role whatsoever in getting you to experience this film and the Velvet Underground’s music.
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