The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  Yes, while successive generations of subversive DJs and electroacoustic dronemeisters were still learning to crawl, Lou Reed had already employed the studio as a sound instrument, resulting in an imposing approximation of sonic-electronic doom.

  In interviews, Lou compared his work to those by avant-garde composers like (the late) Iannis Xenakis and La Monte Young (whose name is misspelled on the back cover). Although Reed’s VU bandmate John Cale had actually been a member of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, Lou never really associated with Young and his associates during their own (amphetamine-driven) marathons of minimal music making.

  Rather, Lou insisted that he had been working on MMM by himself for six long years and earnestly discussed his esoteric sound maze in several major music magazines.

  MMM was clearly an artistic gamble, but RCA Records backed Reed to the hilt, releasing the double album on stereo and quadraphonic vinyl, as well as on (quadraphonic) 8-track tape. Of course, none of these well-intentioned efforts saved the release from commercial disaster.

  While MMM was reported to have initially shipped a hundred thousand copies, it was the most returned album in RCA’s history. In its frantic effort at damage control, the record company pulled MMM from store shelves and rerouted it straight into the cutout bins. Before more damage was done, it canceled the disc’s release in England.

  Since that time MMM (subtitled An Electronic Music Composition: The Amine ß Ring) has become one of the most sought after 8-tracks of all time, right up there with vintage oddities like Yoko Ono’s Fly. It was officially entered into the 8-Track Hall of Fame (yes, there is such a thing) on October 10, 1995.

  It should not be forgotten that the late, legendary chronicler Lester Bangs waxed poetically, prolifically, and prophetically on MMM. In his classic Creem Magazine article, “The Greatest Album Ever Made” (later in the posthumous collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung), Lester provided seventeen lively reasons why MMM was superior to his number two choice, Kiss Alive!

  Bangs and Reed jousted brutally when discussing MMM, which was documented in another Bangs’s essay, “How to Succeed in Torture Without Really Trying.” While Lester adored MMM, others disagreed.

  Rolling Stone voted it “Worst Album of the Year.” Billboard Magazine said simply, “Recommended Cuts: None.” Most critics panned it, although Robert “The Dean” Christgau was merciful in his Consumer Guide, giving it a respectable grade of C+. In the Trouser Press Record Guide, Ira Robbins described “…the truly deviant Metal Machine Music” as “four sides of unlistenable noise (a description, not a value judgment) that angered and disappointed all but the most devout Reed fans.”

  All true enough.

  While dismissed as a scam that (simultaneously) took revenge on his manager, fulfilled a commitment to Reed’s record company, and eliminated a growing congregation of unwanted admirers, MMM was undeniably guilty of deceptive packaging.

  The album cover featured a leather-clad Reed, hair peroxide blond, wearing sunglasses and looking every inch the decadent glamhead. Lou used this same punk visage on his sexually ambiguous Transformer album (which included the hit single, “Walk on the Wild Side”) and again on his twin-guitar/arena-rock concert recording, Rock and Roll Animal.

  Imagine teenagers across the country rushing home with their brand-new Lou Reed album, only to conclude that something had gone terribly wrong with their stereo systems, or worse yet, that Reed had ripped them off with a bunch of irreverent white noise.

  John Holmstrom, former editor of Punk (defunct) who interviewed Reed for the visionary fanzine’s first issue in 1976, described the album’s impact this way: “MMM is one of the greatest records of all time. It kicked off the whole punk movement. I mean—it nearly destroyed Lou’s entire career. How much more punk can you get than that?”

  So, MMM: a grand punk statement, an electronic composition of indecipherable depth, or both? Whatever the case, Metal Machine Music was one of the more controversial pop music products of the twentieth century. But looking at MMM as art, one must contemplate the artist.

  Prior to the release of MMM Reed had gone through a divorce and was in a state of near exhaustion. He was cohabiting with a drag queen named Rachel and had been hit in the face with a brick while performing in Europe.

  On MMM, Lou flagrantly trashed the boundaries of decorum with overt references to amphetamines, syringes, and pharmaceutical handbooks. In his bitter, rambling album notes, Reed made apocryphal drug comments—curtly dismissing “those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush.”

  Rumored (and then denied) to have been a candidate for RCA’s classical music imprint, Red Seal, MMM was immediately and forever stuck between rock music and a hard place. Lou even made some faint apologies for not having a proper disclaimer on the album cover—only to angrily deny those regrets the next time he spoke to the press.

  With Reed’s uncompromising electronic maelstrom spread across four sides of vinyl, and each untitled side listed as exactly sixteen minutes and one second in length (this, too, proved to be untrue), MMM was unlike any other record released by a “rock” personality.

  Consumer reactions to Reed’s labor of love (and hate) were equally extreme. Musician/writer Richard Henderson recalled replacing all the tubes in his stereo amplifier before heading back to the record store to return his copy of MMM.

  “I walked in and watched someone bring back an MMM 8-track they had obviously just bought,” Henderson said. “Without a word they stood in front of the cash register and pulled all of the tape out of the cartridge onto the counter. Everyone in the store was watching while he spooled out the entire 8-track, dropped the cartridge on top of the pile of tape, and walked out without saying a word. I decided that if the record had that kind of effect on people, I was going to keep it.”

  For those who bought vinyl copies of MMM, there was the added bonus of a locked groove at the end of side 4, thereby assuring the (unsuspecting) listener of an endless journey into automated sound. While the double LP quickly went out of print, MMM found new life on compact disc. And like the 8-track format, the CD allowed one to hear Reed’s sonic montage from beginning to end without making consecutive decisions to forge ahead with sides 2, 3, and 4 (lengths 15:40, 16:04, and 13:40, respectively).

  When I began this investigation, I hit an unanticipated snag that brought my research to a standstill. That is, I kept listening to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. The more I heard it, the more I liked it, and this concerned me. My desire to hear conventional music diminished, and all my friends stopped visiting. I was discouraged about the whole thing until I bumped into musician/recording engineer Steve Albini at a Chicago nightclub called The Empty Bottle. After explaining my obsession with MMM to Mr. Albini, he kindly consented to discuss the record. He said:

  When I lived in Montana in 1977 a friend of mine told me about this weird Lou Reed album that everybody hated but he thought was pretty cool. He played it for me and I thought it was just totally captivating, really amazing. The thing that we both appreciated about it was that within the noise there are these little fluttery beautiful tiny melodic bits, which are probably part of the generative systems that were put together to make all the sounds. Those sounds may not have been orchestrated or intentional in any way, but were there—and no less interesting. People refer to that record as though it were completely chaotic noise. I have a lot of records that are completely chaotic noise and that is a total misunderstanding of this record. Whatever Lou Reed’s motive for making it, it’s still a really outstanding nonharmonic piece of music. There were clearly choices made about how much density and which sounds in particular would get layered on top of each other. I don’t hear Metal Machine Music as a feedback and improv record; I hear it as a pure sound sculpture. I really enjoy listening to it. It’s not that weird, it’s only weird given that it came out in 1975 and was presented as a pop music record.

  Now that’s exactly what I was looking for. Someone artic
ulate and knowledgeable who thinks MMM was pretty cool and fun to listen to. Perhaps Lester Bangs did know what he was talking about when it came to Metal Machine Music. Even Lou Reed said, “In time it will prove itself.” He also claimed to have laughed himself silly after presenting MMM as a serious piece of music to the honchos at RCA.

  I really don’t know what to believe, but I do know a good controversy when I hear one. Play it again, Sam.

  —MM(M)

  More Musings and Meditations on Metal Machine Music

  I ASKED SOME OTHER PEOPLE WHAT THEY THOUGHT OF MMM; THIS IS WHAT THEY TOLD ME.

  JIM O’ROURKE (MUSICIAN, PRODUCER, SONIC YOUTH, SOLO ARTIST)

  “I first bought it on 8-track at a Walgreens drugstore along with the Jethro Tull album Songs from the Wood. When I listened to it I thought for sure that the 8-track was playing backwards. It was definitely the first noisy album I ever bought. Later on I checked a vinyl copy out of the library and read the liner notes with his reference to La Monte Young. I even recorded it onto tape and slowed it down to hear what he was doing with feedback. When I listen to it now I find it to be quite soothing.”

  JON LANGFORD (MUSICIAN, MEKONS, WACO BROTHERS, SOLO ARTIST)

  “I thought it was a great bash against the record company, the critics, and his fans as well as an exploration into that kind of music. It’s Lou Reed’s easy listening album and much less whiney than the rest of his work, probably my favorite.”

  BOB NEUWIRTH (SONGWRITER, PAINTER, PERENNIAL INSIDER)

  “The reason I respect Lou Reed is because he never writes about anything he doesn’t have intimate knowledge of. So I’m sure Metal Machine Music was exactly what he was hearing in his head at the time or something very close to it or a ‘Lou-ization’ of what he was hearing, and that’s what makes him authentic. I don’t think artists make insincere efforts.”

  ROBERT QUINE (FORMER LOU REED GUITARIST, DECEASED)

  “My friend Lester Bangs was a major fan of it. As a gesture it’s absolutely 100%. It’s 150% it’s 200%. It’s great as a gesture, a fuck you, giving the middle finger to the record industry, his fans—just don’t ask me to listen to it. If you want real intelligent improvisation go back and listen to “Sister Ray.” I spent about a half an hour listening to it and I think that’s more time than he put into it. My humble opinion is that it’s a total shuck, there’s nothing happening there, it’s a bunch of fucking noise. He did nothing; it’s garbage. As a gesture, it’s magnificent. It took a lot of courage to do it.”

  BILL BENTLEY (INDUSTRY STALWART, MUSIC PUBLICIST)

  “That’s what it sounds like when you’re trying to go to sleep and you can’t. I was very close with a guy who was quite partial to Methedrine for a period there—that was his favorite record. I don’t think [Lou] did it as a joke.”

  GLENN BRANCA (SERIOUS COMPOSER)

  “I think Metal Machine Music is one of the great classics of late-twentieth-century music. Certainly, if Lou Reed had decided to pursue a career as a serious composer he would probably be one of the best composers in the world today.”

  DAVID THOMAS (SINGER, PERE UBU, SOLO ARTIST)

  “I remember Peter Laughner liked this record a lot but I was never sure if it was for the noise or the attitude. I listened to one side and didn’t see the point. It would be interesting to return to it years later, I suppose. My opinions should always be considered in light of my basic dogma: Music without vocals is utterly pointless.”

  STEVE WYNN (MUSICIAN, DREAM SYNDICATE, SOLO ARTIST)

  “I like side 3 the most.”

  SYLVIA REED (LOU’S EX-WIFE)

  “I first heard it at a party Lester Bangs gave where he drunkenly swore at everyone that it was the greatest album ever created. He drove everyone out of his apartment by putting it on right then and there. I had just met Lou and was head over heels in love with him and so I went and got my own copy. I intended to listen to it straight through. In spite of my affection, I could only make it through the first three sides before giving up. I still respect it as a great piece of concept art.”

  KRAMER (MUSICIAN, PRODUCER, BONGWATER)

  “In high school I worked in the record department of a large department store. I had the opportunity to steal anything I wanted. I took everything I possibly could out the back door. I liked just about everything with the exception of Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed. I thought it was shit stacked higher than the band he used to be in, the Velvet Underground. Cut to ten years later: I now understand those awful sounding records I used to hate, from the Velvets all the way to MMM. Pure white noise, pure cacophony, pure chaos. I understood, I had respect, but I didn’t really like it. Cut to the present: I now own all Velvets’ recordings on both LP and CD. I still have not found a way to start my day with Metal Machine Music. I still listen unconditionally. I do not think of how the recordings were made, or how they were released, or who signed them, I only wonder why.”

  PENN JILLETTE (ILLUSIONIST, MEDIA PERSONALITY)

  “Teller says ‘—————’”

  PAUL WILLIAMS (WRITER, EDITOR OF CRAWDADDY!)

  “With MMM, Lou definitely made one of the most memorable and effective conceptual art statements in rock recording since the Beatles and before, um, Laurie Anderson….”

  LEE RANALDO (GUITARIST, SONIC YOUTH)

  “I love the thing and it is a crucial record, both conceptually and in the history of seventies rock (a major label put this out! Did Lou have that much clout??). We used a loop of it as the background bed of a song off Bad Moon Rising (‘Society is a Hole’). I’ve always wondered exactly how the sounds were created (not that it matters)….”

  PAUL SCHUTZE (ESOTERIC BRITISH MUSICIAN)

  “I bought MMM as a teenager the week it came out. At the time I was a devoted Krautrock and electric jazz fan and not remotely interested in American rock music. I had never heard a Velvet Underground album. The relentless single-mindedness and clarity of this most minimal piece excited me in the same way that Outside the Dream Syndicate by Tony Conrad and Faust had a few years before. Rock had become more and more about timbre and less about melody and rhythm. MMM is pure sound. Rock reduced to its essence.”

  ENDLESS BOOGIE

  “Hey baby, you wanna boogie?” According to Richard A. Spears’s Forbidden American English, “to boogie is to copulate or have sex.” Spears goes on to say that there are “many other general slang senses, such as those having to do with dancing, partying, departing, etc.” The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll maintains that “the term [boogie] derives from the jazz-based ‘boogie-woogie,’ which generally referred to a style of piano playing that featured a ‘hot’ rhythm based on eight-to-the-bar figures with the left hand.”

  Pinetop Smith hailed from Alabama but settled in Chicago, and for a time he lived in the same rooming house as two other boogie pianists, Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis. The three men drove cabs for a living, but they were all serious musicians. Sadly, Pinetop was gunned down at a dance hall before he was able to record a follow-up to his trademark boogie tune.

  Some historians say that boogie-woogie echoed the railroad rhythm of the steam locomotives that beckoned plantation workers in the Mississippi Delta, promising a life found better elsewhere. Along those (railroad) lines, “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie” by Clarence “Pinetop” Smith was an influential piano boogie recorded in 1928.

  Two-fisted boogie-woogie was all the rage in the 1930s. By then, the unrivaled triumvirate of boogie pianists was Meade “Lux” Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Kansas City’s own Pete Johnson. The jumping boogie piano style even made it into high society when those three, calling themselves the Boogie Woogie Trio, performed at Carnegie Hall for the now-famous “Spirituals to Swing” concert in 1938.

  Those same boogie rhythms were the building blocks of early rock and roll. In Hellfire, Nick Tosches’s fine biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Tosches recounts a scene where young Jerry Lee is playing a Pentecostal hymn at a chapel service and, “the
preacher shot him a glance of reproach, for he was playing it boogie-woogie style…and he beat the boogie so hard there was nothing left of the hymn, nothing but the sounds of the Holy Ghost that inspired it.”

  The phrase boogie-woogie possibly came from “booger-rooger,” which meant a wild party or a musical good time—and was first coined by Blind Lemon Jefferson, a Texas bluesman who came to prominence in the 1920s. By the 1940s, “boogie” was used to describe a chugging guitar style, as illustrated by tunes like Albert Smith’s “Guitar Boogie.”

  Of course, the most famous boogieman of all time is John Lee Hooker, whose primal “Boogie Chillun” was a hit for the Modern record label in 1948. In “Boogie Chillun” Hooker sang these now-immortal words,

  One night I was layin’ down,

  I heard mama ’n papa talkin’

  I heard papa tell mama, let that boy boogie-woogie,

  it’s in him, and it got to come out

  John Lee’s fanatical one-chord stomps are classics of the boogie genre and his haunting, stream-of-consciousness boogies inspired musicians like the Lovin’ Spoonful, Van Morrison, and ZZ Top, to name a few.

  The most notable boogie band of all is Canned Heat. Canned Heat was named after a brand of cooking fuel that came in small metal containers—from which desperate members of Skid Row would filter out the alcohol to drink.

  Formed in 1966, Canned Heat featured heavyset singer Bob “The Bear” Hite and nearsighted Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson on guitar, harmonica, and vocals. With songs like “Let’s Work Together,” “Goin’ Up the Country,” and “On the Road Again,” the Heat were much loved and they boogied the world over, including an appearance at the original Woodstock festival, where they played (what else?) the “Woodstock Boogie.”

  Canned Heat even made a couple of albums with Sir John Lee Hooker, thereby confirming their claim to the estimable boogie throne. Sadly, “The Bear” and “Blind Owl” died before their time and it fell to the band’s drummer, Adolfo “Fito” De La Parra, to keep the Heat boogieing on down the road.