In many ways the high point, emotionally, of the Street Hassle performance at the VIFF Centre last night was overhearing an uber-Lou Reed fan named Dickie tell bandleader Aram Bajakian after the show a story about how, after years of following his work, he had finally gotten to see Lou in Seattle and was privileged to meet him after the show and tell him how much his music mattered to him. Lou was apparently very sweet and receptive, and Dickie got choked up telling the story; Aram was moved, too, in turn, and then they had a charming exchange about one of Lou's pedals, which Aram now owns and had with him: "Is that Lou's pedal?!" ...wherupon Dickie asked if he could pick it up, and since I was standing there, I offered to photograph him with it. Something really sweet about that moment. Someone show these to Dickie? Two variants, impossible to pick between them:
...but if that was an impossibly touching human moment to witness, impossible to quantify -- hell, I got a bit misty writing about it just now! -- the songs were pretty fuckin' great too. My favourite moment was "Last Great American Whale," which never in a million years would I have thought they'd tackle, and which shows how fearless they were in trying to capture Lou's inflection, more-or-less speaking his way through the song. There wasn't a flub in the night. The chord structures may have been simple, as Bajakian remarked, but there's nothing simple about delivering a Lou Reed song, capturing his inflections and rhythms. They did this very, very well throughout the night, never with a syllable seeming misplaced or forced.
"Whale" was one of two New York songs they did, the other being the night's most rocking number, "There Is No Time" They were the least-deep of the cuts offered by the band, along with "Cremation (Ashes to Ashes)," which ended up being the only song Bajakian sang himself.
Note that any links here are just to Lou songs. I did shoot a few clips of the night, but have sent them to Aram to do with as he sees fit.
After that, my other favourite tune of the night -- and certainly another I did not expect they'd play -- was "Families," off Lou's terrifically under-rated 1979 album The Bells. I had spun this at the bookstore where I work earlier the day, or at least side two. This is an album no one cares much about, it seems to me, unlike Street Hassle, which has some dark-horse fans out there, but they are very much of a piece, recorded a year apart, and both blessed with one seriously absurd stinker ("Disco Mystic" and "I Wanna Be Black") that makes them very hard to process as a whole, despite having some of Lou's most artful and ambitious music of the decade on them. Side two of The Bells (which has Ornette Coleman sideman Don Cherry on it; he even gets a co-credit as songwriter on one track!) is particularly astonishing (and it's the side "Families" is from). These two records are really where my interest in Lou as a solo artist begins -- completely the opposite of ARGH!!,who was in the audience both nights, and who grew up with those early Lou solo albums. There's no arguing with that sort of attachment, and I learned that his favourite number was probably "Coney Island Baby", which they did a beautiful reading of, for sure. But it's a song I just haven't fully connected with ever. I never much wanted to play football for the coach, even figuratively [and I find the album it's on weirdly produced and a bit too ornate, in a smooth pastel kinda way; it's maybe my least-favourite-sounding of Lou's 70s albums, right down there with Sally Can't Dance, different as those albums are]). I experience each of the studio albums pre-1978 as Lou trying to find his voice as a solo artist. Berlin succeeds, artistically, and Transformer succeeded commercially, but there's a who-am-I quality through the whole decade that only seems to really resolve into self-knowledge on Street Hassle.
That's my thesis, anyhow. With Street Hassle, especially with that amazing title track (which they did, everyone who knows it waiting during the break between movements for someone to start clapping, which, impressively, only one person fell for), things get darker, richer, smarter, and we see the person who would give us Ecstasy and Magic and Loss and Lulu and such discovering his true voice (he'd found it live long before that but in terms of studio albums, they seem like they are all restlessly searching for an identity during that decade and never really finding one that wholly worked). There were still missteps post-1978 (is Mistrial his worst album, or have I misunderstood it?). And there's oddities like New Sensations, which produced two songs that were such hits back in my day that it's easy to under-appreciate the better tunes on the album (two of which were also represented tonight, "Doing the Things That We Want To" and the title track). It's actually a really good Lou Reed album, if you can forget about the singles for a bit.
There were two songs I didn't much know at all tonight; "Ennui" and "Rooftop Garden." The first is off Sally Can't Dance, one of the Lou albums I've owned and sold and do not now have, along with Coney Island Baby; the latter is off an album I have, Legendary Hearts, but I also tend to play one side of that more than the other. All three men sang at different points, with Aiden doing the most (and apparently freaking out a little when he developed an itch in his throat and had to sing through needing to cough!).
All the members of the trio gave stellar performances. All the songs were very enjoyable, even the ones I didn't know. Bits of Stevan's and Aiden's phrasing sounded so close to Lou's at times that it was kind of eerie, really. And Aram really gets into his playing, rocking with his guitar, not in the sense of rocking-and-rolling, but in the sense of moving-back-and-forth with the music, kind of entranced. He goes deep into these songs. He would have been something to see live with Lou. He was something to see, live last night.
Oh hey, look, someone has a video on Youtube of Lou live in Copenhagen in 2012 doing "Street Hassle" with Aram in the band...
No comments:
Post a Comment