lou reed, george jones

for a coupla yrs when i was in high school, i had a running argument with a cat named donnie h., with whom i usedta sit in the back of english class, screwing around and drawing cartoons, over who was a better songwriter: lou reed or john denver. donnie was the john denver partisan, but he got a pass, 'cos when he was 10, he'd come home from school and found a note from his dad, instructing him to stay out of the garage and go get his mother. being an inquisitive kid, he ignored the note, and so he found his father's body swinging from the rafters post-suicide. with that kinda background, i figured he was entitled to listen to "poems and prayers and promises" and "country roads" if he wanted to. myself, i'd just started reading creem magazine, through the pages of which lester bangs pulled my coat to all kindsa good stuff like ornette coleman, captain beefheart, and lou. sure, i thought the fey pseudo-decadence of transformer (for all intents, a david bowie rekkid except for the tuneless, half-spoken voxxx) kinda sukkked, but the first and third velvet underground albs were a revelation. so it goes.

by now, lou reed has had the collective rockcrits of the world kissing his ass and proclaiming each new release "the best thing he's ever done" for over 30 yrs, but in reality, his oeuvre is as hit 'n' miss as, say, spike lee's or oliver stone's is. over the yrs, he's been pompous and overblown (berlin, the overrated blue mask, um, the raven, by which time -- post-marriage to ur-art chick laurie anderson -- flatulent self-importance had kinda become his calling card), pandered unashamedly to the lowest common denominator ("walk on the wild side," the arena-rawk rock and roll animal), and displayed more outright contempt for his audience than any performer rightly oughtta (the four sides of unlistenable white noise he released on rca's _classical_ label as metal machine music, his between-song torrent of vitriol 'n' bile on the live take no prisoners). and yet, and yet. when he's good (the aforementioned first 'n' third velvets elpees, the track "street hassle," legendary hearts), his most transcendant music combines gritty reality with human warmth in a way few songwriters can.

some of my faves we've been listening to a lot lately: his first eponymous alb, which consisted mainly of songs he'd written during the velvets daze and was produced by hack-married-to-rockcrit-brawd richard robinson in england with backing by a buncha moonlighting prog-rockers and session hacks and shoulda been terrible but was quite the opposite, especially the second side, containing as it does one bona fide underappreciated classic ("wild child"); american poet, a live recording of a transformer-era concert that was broadcast live on good ol' lawn guyland rawk station wlir, which is pert damn fine, crackling with energy in spite of the fact that lou's backed by the tots, yr archetypal shitty lawn guyland bar band ca. '72 -- my gawd, they're almost as bad as the buncha bowery losers i saw john cale touring with a coupla times ass-end of the '70s; 1989's new york, the alb that got me back into rawk near the end of my decade spent guarding freedom's frontier (i was stationed in abilene and found a copy in the same mall store where i got my first cd copy of funkadelic's maggot brain, read the legend "you just can't beat two guitars, bass and drums" on the back and was immediately hooked again); and most especially, 1991's magic and loss, a gentle rumination on mortality (by this time, lou had developed a kind of electric chamber music he'd referred to in a musician magazine interview a coupla yrs earlier as "the loud soft sound") that seems very relevant around mi casa of late and just might be my fave work of his.

it's funny getting older and finding myself capable of being moved to tears by a song on the radio in the car on the way to work, but it was happening with disturbing regularity for awhile when the local "classic country" station kept playing george jones' "he stopped loving her today" ("...and put a wreath upon his door") during my morning drivetime. i've spent yrs harassing local solo singers from tim locke to hank hankshaw for versions of "she thinks i still care," and eons trying to find a possum compilation that had those two songs as well as "the window up above," "the grand tour," "two story house" (with tammy wynette), and most crucially, "a good year for the roses." now i've got one: the essential george jones: the spirit of country -- two cd's worth of all good stuff that i can put on before or after johnny cash's prison albs and 24 of hank williams' greatest hits and cry into my beer in the privacy of my own home, anytime.