The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  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

  (1948–1982)

  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.

  How to Succeed in Torture Without Really Trying,

  or, Louie Come Home, All Is Forgiven

  THIS 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 bee
n 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?

  Well, I told Lou that I thought Metal Machine Music was a rock ’n’ roll album. “I think so too,” he mutters in that peculiar geriatric code of his which passes for speech (perish conversation). “I realized at a certain point that to really do stuff like ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ right, one, it hadda be recorded right, and two, you hadda have certain machines to do it.”

  “Except it misses certain things,” I said. “Like the beat, the lyrics . . .”

  “That’s not true. If you had a small mind, you’d miss it, but the beat is about like—” and here he verbally mimicked a hammering heart. A Chorus Line of hammering hearts. “Very, very fast. And on each side there’s a harmonic buildup, whether people believe it or not I don’t really give a fuck anymore. It had to be very carefully mastered, because if it was mastered wrong it would all go down the drain because it would go into distortion. It’s using distortion but it’s not distorted.

  “Whether people know it or not, there is a difference between each side, there is a reason why it’s 16:01 because I hadda keep it under seventeen. What people don’t seem to realize is that you don’t listen to it on speakers, because if you do you miss half the fun,” he says delightedly. “It should be listened to on headphones because there’s left and right but there’s no center. It’s constantly changing and sometimes one channel goes out entirely. There’s infinite ways of listening to it.

  “Sometimes I lift the left channel a lot and the right a little and then jack up the left and drop the right almost entirely and it’s as though you got whacked in the head! But if you’re listening without earphones, you won’t get the effect. Each time around there’s more harmonics that are added on bass and on treble, and I went as far as you can go without making the needle hop on the record, which is why I kept it at that time. I made it 16:01 to try to get the fact across that I was trying to be as accurate as possible with the stupid thing.”

  I outlined my feelings re MetMachMus to Lou: that as classical music it added nothing to a genre that may well be depleted. As rock ’n’ roll it’s interesting garage electronic rock ’n’ roll. As a statement it’s great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity—a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless, to say this is what I think of you and this is how I feel right now and if you don’t like it too bad. “Of course,” I added, “that’s also commercial suicide. Which I suppose is the reason for this phone call.�
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  “It was a giant fuck you, but not precisely the way you’re saying it. [The former head of Red Seal] got me curious to see how it would hold up against LaMonte, Xenakis, etc. And I think it held up well against them all, in fact is far better. But I’m not interested in anybody’s opinion except my own. When you say ‘garage music,’ well, that’s true to an untrained ear maybe, but there’s all kinds of symphonic ripoffs in there, running all through it, little pastoral parts, but they go by like—bap! in five seconds. Like Beethoven’s Third, or Mozart . . .”

  “Yeah, but that’s all by accident.”

  “You wanna bet? You don’t do a note-for-note symphonic thing by accident. No way.”

  “Well then, how did you get those in there? With a pair of tweezers?”

  “No, I had the machines do it. It’s very simple for anybody that knows what I’m talking about. Bach and Beethoven both wrote pieces that weren’t supposed to be played by people. Now people play them, and I’m sure if they were around now they’d be amazed but they’d also be playing with machines, because nobody can play that thing. But you don’t accidentally have part of The Glass Harp in there. You don’t accidentally have part of Eroica.”

  “Where are these?”

  “Well, they keep building up. The thing is, you have to listen for it. But most people get stopped by the initial thing they hear, which is fine by me.”