WEIRDLAND

The Dick Powell Story by Tony Thomas

2025-11-14T07:16:00.034+01:00

No movie star ever made a more radical change of image in mid-career than Dick Powell. The former crooner turned tough guy in Murder, My Sweet, Cornered (his darkest film), Johnny O’Clock, To the Ends of the Earth, Pitfall, Station West, and Cry Danger, all among the best examples of American film noir. It was, as he admitted, “one hell of a transition.” Dick Powell’s position in Hollywood history is unique in that he is identified as a leading exponent of two vastly different film genres—the musicals of the Thirties and the films noir of the late Forties. The actor of the one is barely recognizable as the actor of the other. Film students might be forgiven for wondering if they are the same man. Despite the complex image, Dick Powell was a relatively simple man. He was the product of an average working-class family, growing up with traditional values, politically conservative with religious views that did not much go beyond a faith in the Golden Rule and The Ten Commandmants. Powell was a classic example of the Great Depression self-made man with a passion for work and seemingly gifted with the Midas touch. Powell believed that anyone can achieve anything if he tries hard enough. For him it certainly worked.

Almost all the songs sung by Dick Powell in his first two years in Hollywood were written by Harry Warren and his lyricist Al Dubin. Dubin quit Hollywood in 1938, but Warren stayed for the rest of his long and productive life. He and Powell remained friends. “Of all the singers I’ve ever dealt with, he was just about the easiest to get along with. I don’t think he ever made an objection to any song we ever handed him. Music was easy for him. He’d been a musician and he’d been singing since he was a choirboy. His only problem at Warners was getting more money. Even when he was doing 42nd Street he was only getting $175 a week, and it was a constant fight to raise it.”

Naughty But Nice brought the long Warner Bros. phase of Dick Powell’s career to a rather abrupt end. The original title of this minor musical was The Professor Steps Out, which indicates the nature of the plot. In something of a change of pace for Powell, he is not a genial dunderhead but a serious minded music professor named Hardwick, who goes to New York to arrange for his symphony to be published. In The Big Apple the poor man is used, abused and confused, and learns that the music business is not run by decent minded academics.

Professor Hardwick is not equipped to deal with the kind of sharks who run Tin Pan Alley. Part of his problem is that he has been coddled and protected by three maiden aunts who believe him to be a genius. Although far from that he does have some ability with melody, which leads to one of his serious pieces being bowdlerized into a snappy jive song, “Hooray for Spinach,” performed by the slinky Zelda Manion (Ann Sheridan), who is in league with a sleazy publisher. She pursues the professor in order to filch more of his melodies but Linda McKay (Gale Page) falls in love with the sweet natured but thoroughly naive professor. Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer wrote four songs for Naughty But Nice. Ann Sheridan, whose career Warners was building, got two of them and Powell got “I’m Happy About the Whole Thing” and “In a Moment of Weakness,” which he recorded for Decca. Sadly it would be the last of the movie songs that he would record.

Dick Powell and Joan Blondell had been married four years by the time they made I Want a Divorce and still happy enough to hazard a film with such a title. While the critics had praised Powell for his performance in Christmas in July they didn't make many comments about any real change of image. That came with I Want a Divorce. Variety noted that there was no singing and commented that “he handles the straight role in capable fashion, displaying ability to carry both dramatic and comedy situations required by the characterization.” The Hollywood Reporter was even kinder: “Dick Powell is genuinely amazing as the boy, his work opening up a fresh screen career to him. Here Powell proves beyond question that glorified chorus boy roles are definitely behind him. He realizes expert understanding of the character changes in his role and plays each to the hilt.” He had been waiting a very long time to get a comment like that.

Murder, My Sweet continues to be a much studied and admired film. Its qualities are many but pivotal is the performance of Dick Powell. Always a confident man, he was here able to focus his intelligence as an actor. Never before had he been able to take such command of a characterization. His Philip Marlowe is not an especially likeable man but he is basically decent, “I’m just a small businessman in a very messy business, but I like to follow through on a sale.”

Much of the effectiveness of Powell’s performance was due to his skill in delivering lines, one of which became a classic, “I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.” Powell could muster the right tone for cynical dialogue, as when seeing the palatial home of the Grayles, “It was a nice little front yard. Cozy. Okay for the average family. Only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox.” After this film Dick Powell no longer had to dog anybody to be considered for a good role. He had made the breakthrough. Now they would come to him. Philip Marlowe would be played by other actors, including Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, but there are those who feel that Powell’s Marlowe was the closest to the part as written by Raymond Chandler.

One of them was Chandler himself, who felt that Murder, My Sweet was the best film adaptation of any of his novels. In his book The Detective in Film (1972), film historian William K. Everson noted: “Purely as a thriller, with a complicated yet logically worked out plot, Marder, My Sweet was near perfect. Powell—because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it—became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart, who had several other competing images against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, Rick from Casablanca. Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks and insults with superbly underplayed style.”

Powell’s emergence as a director and producer was closely tied to the legendary eccentric Howard Hughes when he took over RKO as owner and manager in 1948. The studio’s financial affairs were then in disarray and the assumption was he had acquired RKO as a tax write-off. This proved not to be the case. Production picked up and for a while it seemed as if Hughes would become a movie tycoon, albeit one with highly unusual business practices. Hughes’ office was not at RKO but at the Goldwyn Studios and it is said that he set foot on the RKO lot only once and getting an appointment with him was virtually impossible. RKO functioned as if it had a ghost boss.

However, Hughes appeared to like Powell and gave his approval when producer Edmund Grainger suggested that he be hired to direct Split Second. Hughes’ respect for Powell increased when he found that Powell was not cashing any of the checks paid to him in the period of pre-production. Hughes called and wanted to know what was wrong. Said Powell, “I told him that the script was being altered without my having any say in the matter. Hughes asked for my ideas and immediately phoned the writer to work directly with me. Then I cashed my checks. The movie was a hit and Hughes started cultivating me.”

Dick Powell considered many other projects for Twentieth Century-Fox but none materialized. In 1960 he asked that his contract with them be terminated. It was obvious to Fox and to everybody else that Four Star Television had burgeoned into a major production company and Powell was the man who ran it. It was a matter of too much to do and too little time. He had directed five films, while also producing four of them. Split Second and The Enemy Below deserve special mention as very fine pieces of work. He was never pretentious about anything he did and about his work as a director he made no lofty claims. “I do the best I can with the type of material I am able to get. I have no illusions about joining the company of William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Henry Koster, Elia Kazan, Carol Reed or John Ford. I admire all these filmmakers for the honesty with which they attempt to do their pictures.” Still, it is interesting to wonder how good a track record Dick Powell might have had as a director had he been not so busy.

Ronald Reagan became friendly with Dick Powell soon after he arrived at Warners in 1937. He played an announcer in the film Hollywood Hotel and afterwards played supporting roles in three other Powell pictures. Recalls Reagan, “On Hollywood Hotel, Dick was the star and I had only two lines, but he couldn’t have been nicer. Easily and smoothly he put me at ease. I was one of thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. He always seemed to feel such genuine pleasure at seeing you. Sometimes our paths took us in different directions and months would pass without our seeing each other. Still in these later years, when we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick ever saying an unkind word about anyone.”

Four Star Productions blossomed in the late Fifties, taking over the Republic Pictures lot in Studio City. It quickly became known as a place that gave fresh talent a break. Powell said at the time: “I know what a tough time I had realizing my ambitions, so I’m giving everybody a chance to make money and do what other shows won’t let them do. I’ve been able to sign the best writers and actors in the business because I’m not following the greed principle of the other producers. The actors are coming into my fold because I’m offering them all rights outside of the United States in the shows in which they appear for me. And I’m giving the writers every financial break.” One of the young producers in whom he put his trust was Stanley Kallis: “I was hired as an associate producer for The Law and Mr. Jones and at the end of the first season, we didn’t know if we would be picked up. Dick came to me and told me: ‘I’d like you to stay here. I don’t have anything for you at the moment but I’ll find something.’ I was amazed. This is not the usual way of doing things in Hollywood. I’d been striving to find a niche in this business and he gave it to me. Dick was a very generous man.

There was a decency about him that is unfortunately rare in this business. He was a ‘no nonsense’ character. He had a genius for business but he did it with charm. Dick was a gentleman. I’d have done anything for this man.” According to Kallis, Powell was also a man of vision. “One evening in his office he showed me some plans he had drawn up for a future concept of the studio. He always had a keen regard for real estate and he thought the old idea of sound stages covering acres of ground was a waste. His concept was to build new sound stages one on top of the other, to stack them and thereby leave the cleared ground for location use or other buildings. There’s no telling how far he would have gone had he lived.”

Someone who had a good idea of where Powell wanted to go was June Allyson, who always referred to her husband as Richard. Allyson said: “Richard’s wheeling and dealing in TV boggled my mind. At one point Four Star was buying the stock ownership of Marterto Productions, which owned, among other things, ninety episodes of Make Room For Daddy. It would cost us $1,800,000. Time magazine called Richard ‘one of the major, and sharpest, businessmen in U.S. television.’ Richard's favorite phrase was, ‘Nobody loses, everybody wins.’” About Dick's investments, June sometimes complained: "No sooner would I get used to one house than Richard would move us to another—this time to Bel Air. But I loved English Tudor. And I told him "I love this house. I’ll never move. Never." He grabbed me and mashed the hysterics out of me in a big rough bear hug that ultimately turned into a long evening of lovemaking. The next day I sputtered all the way to Bel Air, grumbling about being thrown out of my house and deaf to his lecture on real estate values and the art of doubling your investment. He turned it into a most impressive estate on Copa de Oro."

MGM intended to star Dick and June as the married couple honeymooning in The Long, Long Trailer (1954) based on a best-selling book. Then when I Love Lucy became a sensation, the studio offered Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz the property. June wasn't happy about it, and Dick Powell never made another film, choosing to concentrate on TV productions. Powell justified all the long hours and the many periods away from home by affirming it as his plan for the future—to turn Four Star into a major film studio, one that would rival MGM. The plans were admirable, but the strain on his marriage was severe. He arose at six, conducted business by phone during breakfast and often put in sixteen-hour days, in addition to the constant trips out of town.

June Allyson complained: “Where was Richard? He was late. He was sorry but he wouldn’t be home early enough, so we'd just go ahead and have dinner without him.” Aside from the fact that they were genuinely in love and attached to each other, the Powell-Allyson marriage was regarded by some friends as a strange one. And in fact they were different kinds of people. He was confident and reserved, she was volatile and emotional. An industry insider once described them as "an oak tree paired with a butterfly." Despite of various rumors echoed by the press, the reality was simple: Dick Powell never really changed despite of his stardom. His views towards his marriage were based on mutual respect, love and family. Despite some obstacles thrown upon Powell and Allyson typical of their Hollywood milieu, it's been difficult to prove infidelity on either side. Powell belongs in that rare category of the consummate Hollywood artist who was also a basically decent man (in the same league of Fred MacMurray or James Stewart). —The Dick Powell Story (Riverwood Press, 1993) by Tony Thomas

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Monster: Ed Gein

2025-10-28T02:51:00.018+01:00

Horror is derived, ultimately, from the unknown. Ultimately, the core of fear is that something will somehow harm you. Harm may lead to death, which leads to the unknown--fear is possible because in the depths of our minds, we're all agnostics. God takes away the uncertainty behind death, and thus, the terror it inspires. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre succeeds at being the finest expression of horror on film because it takes the concept of uncertainty as the source of fear and suggests that if there were no uncertainty, we would still be horrified. It removes the comfort of an afterlife not by delving into the supernatural, but by peeling the veneer of normalcy off reality.

The film is drenched in a post-Vietnam sense of irony and disillusionment, declaring itself a true story or revelation, which instantly crafts a sense of mythology around it. From the old man at the cemetery rasping that there's things they don't tell you about, things he's seen, to the radio broadcasts describing (an obvious series of lies) that the local sheriff has pinned the grave robberies on international jewel thieves, the film underlines the fact that the truth about the world is not only hidden but it's horrible. It also suggests, especially with its characterization of the unseen sheriff, that these lies are intentional and constructed to control the populace. The five youngsters' world is still holding on to Leave It to Beaver; their neighbors are still friendly and helpful. It has been suggested the film anticipated the death of the American Dream and the dissolution of the nuclear family.

These youngsters cannot conceive a world where Leatherface exists, no matter how grim the news reports. So Kirk, Pam, and Jerry, in the space of about 15 minutes, walk to their bloody dooms. Sally's terror is the terror of anyone faced with the dismantling of their illusions. The hypocrisy is shown casually when the cook says he can't take watching the cruelty, but when Grandpa tries it [sorta], he cheers it. Sally, as her horrorscope suggests, is awakened, and is thus able to react to the events before her, whereas her friends all died before they could process it. The only time the score and the sounds come together is to emphasize disorientation and terror, in the single greatest scene in horror movie history: the dinner table scene. Even if she survives, she will be scarred emotionally, mentally, and metaphysically. This is as much a metaphor for America as it is PTSD in its significant change. As dawn comes, it shifts from a misty white (like emerging from the clouds of the afterlife) to the summer gold flare as Leatherface does his infamous dance of frustration.

This is Hooper's true masterpiece. From the moment Sally enters the dining room until she breaks free, everything is composed for the utmost agony. The characterization going on here is chaotic. The hitchhiker snarls and scorns the old man, who insists he doesn't like the cruelty. Leatherface has donned his 50s matronly garb, jarringly discordant with the idyllic domesticity it evokes. Grandpa rests there like a mummy, encased in hard human leather. Marilyn Burns gives one of the most intense performances in horror history, her eyes doing the work of a million lines of dialogue. Hooper zooms into them, lingering on the veins and irises, watching them twitch (and reinforcing his themes of seeing what's truly there), and Burns, drenched in sweat, writhes. It's here that hypocrisies are laid bare, where any vestige of mundanity is scored away by burning light, where the cow stops being meat and becomes a person, where the uncertain becomes certain, and that certainty is a godless, empty void of suffering. Hooper's sense of irony and understanding of hypocrisy is crystal clear in that moment. —Review by Sally Jane Black. Source: letterboxd.com

Sally (Marilyn Burns) is the Final Girl of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Within this horrific tale ("You'd probably like it if you didn't know what was in it") Sally is regarded as a hero and not simply as a heroine. Classically the heroine was saved by the male and the hero endured the hardships that follow in conventional horror films. Yet Sally is the only survivor of her group and has endured the hardships of a ruined society to literally laugh in the face of her iconic assailant. Carol Jeanne Clover (teacher of American Film at the University of California, Berkeley) states that even if often predominantly male, the audience is able to engage and identify with the Final Girl due to the fact that “the threat function and the victim function coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex.”

Therefore it is for this reason that the audience, male or not, is able to sympathize with Sally and identify with her anguish and then to her rise to power. Linda Williams (“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”) similarly states that ‘Not only does this dinner scene provoke a visceral reaction from the audience but the viewer more intensely sympathizes with the femininity of the character. During multiple points within this scene, the audience is given the perspective of Sally who is strapped to a chair.

The fact that she escapes her assailants and laughs in the wounded face of Leatherface demonstrates her new found empowerment and reaffirms her sexuality. The Final Girl must subvert the patriarchal Texan society which is represented by the all male family that is impotent, perverse and gender confused.' Power is for this reason ushered away from the family and given to Sally. Therefore, the film allows the audience to identify with the Final Girl and celebrate her triumph over the killer. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago.

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what the film revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, The Ed Gein Story picks up in 1950s rural Wisconsin, and follows the titular monster — known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul — and tells the tale of his perverse crimes, which would go on to inspire the onscreen horrors seen in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Charlie Hunnam previously admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he doesn't "really like the horror genre or dark, bleak stories," and so the role was always "kind of a strange choice" for him. Hunnam was "truly gobsmacked" when Murphy asked him to play Gein during a two-hour dinner conversation. Of the episodes, Hunnam said, "I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could."

And, he hopes that means viewers are left looking inward after watching. “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he told the outlet. "Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann

2025-09-20T04:51:00.004+02:00

Red Sheet by James Ellroy (2026): "It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The U.S. prevailed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from domestic Communist Party members embedded in L.A. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. Freddy Otash is named lead investigator. He encounters commie malfeasance at every turn. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It links to ex-VP and gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and possibly two homicides eight years back. Now Freddy is working double duty: he’s commanding the probe and is hired to keep Nixon out of trouble. Meanwhile, integrationist fever is sweeping L.A. and the police department comes under its fire. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for city council and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride. And the long-forgotten but still-stunning folk singer Judy Henske is on a collision course with the love of her life, the freewheeling Freddy O." Source: amazon.com

Mystery writer Megan Abbott has already proclaimed Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) the best book she has read on the Black Dahlia case, evidently not pausing to consider just how low the bar is on this subject, given the dismal quality of the aforementioned books, plus John Gilmore’s Severed (1994), Janice Knowlton’s Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer (1995) and Don Wolfe’s Black Dahlia Files (2006), a work so fraudulent that it earned the author a lifetime ban by the district attorney’s office. Mining the well-traversed district attorney’s files in the Black Dahlia case, augmented with FBI reports, news accounts, public records, and occasional interviews with less-informed descendants of the main figures, Mann has amassed the ponderous resources for what could have been a strong book. Mann sets out with two laudable goals: To strip away the numerous myths surrounding Elizabeth Short, and to eschew any attempt to solve the case, which he views as hubris. Mann’s depiction of Elizabeth Short plunked down in Hollywood as Tom Sawyer in ankle-strap shoes brings us no closer to her. The book speculates wildly on one of the usual suspects in a far-fetched solution, then attempts to recant with a “never mind.” Elizabeth Short, the enigmatic victim of the murder, crossed paths with hundreds of random people during her brief time in Hollywood in the summer and fall of 1946. Instead of being the Black Dahlia, who went on hundreds of dates, Elizabeth Short was the woman who went on one date hundreds of times, a carefully scripted encounter with a parade of presentable men who were a safe escort. All but one, apparently. Source: ladailymirror.com

Jon Hamm (Your Friends & Neighbors-Neo Noir), Dick Powell (Pitfall-Classic Noir)

2025-06-01T05:21:00.011+02:00

"Your Friends and Neighbors" is a 2025 Apple TV+ series, categorized as a neo-noir drama, starring Jon Hamm as a disgraced hedge fund manager who resorts to robbing his wealthy neighbors in the affluent Vestment Village. He discovers that the secrets hidden within these seemingly perfect lives are more dangerous than he anticipated. The show features a cool noir aesthetic, with a jaded voiceover that provides commentary on the unfolding events. The series adopts a noir aesthetic, drawing inspiration from classic 1940s noir films, complete with a detached and cynical voiceover, according to the show's creator, Jonathan Tropper. In the prologue, Coop trips and stumbles into a pool (referencing Sunset Boulevard), saying: "I know what you're thinking: the pool is a metaphor. I wasn't the kind of guy who woke up on the floor of someone else's house covering the dead guy's blood before falling into the pool, but here we are. And at that moment, I couldn't help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eyes of the swirling hot mess of my life, and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast." Source: movieweb.com

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband. In "Pitfall" Powell reinvents his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. De Toth said: “Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody here who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.” Miss Scott burnished her noir chops as a loan out from Hal Wallis who had her under contact.

It is one of her favorite pictures and arguably the best performance of her film career. Lizabeth Scott had very positive recollections about 'Pitfall': "The whole experience of making Pitfall was delicious! Dick Powell was so gracious and kind. His attitude inspired me. He was a pleasure to work with. People asks me who is the greatest talent in Hollywood. And I say Dick Powell! I love him. He's just like a big, woolly bear. And June Allyson is very nice. I think of them as the perfect family. I met them in a Hedda Hopper's party, and Dick Powell complained to Hedda "it doesn't matter how many times I tell June I love her, it's never enough!"

When Lizabett Scott was loaned for Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), was right for a story about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his sexless wife (Jane Wyatt). Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is a caustic examination of the American dream, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. —"Lizabeth Scott: Noir's Quicksilver Anti-Heroine" by Anastasia Lin (2010)

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Bikini Kill & Kathleen Hanna)

2025-04-28T01:38:00.024+02:00

Sara Marcus: Three days before the appointed Sunday in April 1994, Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered in a greenhouse in Seattle. I remembered that Newsweek had referred to Courtney Love, now Cobain’s widow, as the riot grrrls’ “patron saint,” but I’d never cared about Nirvana or about Love’s band, Hole. Fearing that a grief-filled meeting would separate me from the other girls right off the bat, I nearly stayed home. Still, I went, and when I finally stepped over the threshold of Positive Force House into its first-floor living room, I found that nobody else at the meeting cared about Nirvana or Hole either. We talked about sexual harassment from classmates and teachers, crushes on boys and girls, our favorite kinds of tampons and ice cream, and our outrage over the sexist stories and images we saw in the newspapers and on television. These girls weren’t all punk, they didn’t all have bands, and while they were the coolest girls I’d ever met, they were cool in a way that drew me closer instead of shutting me out. They were courageous, profane, and powerful. I was going to be one of them. A friend of a friend at school gave me a Bikini Kill tape—I knew that the band was somehow linked to Riot Grrrl—and for a while no other music mattered, just that breastbone-shaking bass line and Kathleen Hanna’s voice singing with all the concentrated fury of a firehose, “Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will!”

Jessica Hopper FedExed a reporter a big package of zines, Hit It or Quit It as well as others. And she went on record in an hour-long phone interview. On the day the November 23, 1992, issue of Newsweek hit the streets, a regular Wednesday night Riot Grrrl meeting took place at the Emma Center. Jessica arrived late; she had stopped off at a newsstand to buy the magazine. The other girls had already picked up a copy of the issue—and although Jessica had warned them of an article—they were aghast at what they saw. “Revolution, Girl Style” occupied a two-page spread in the Lifestyle section, complete with a photograph of Jessica (the caption dubbed her a “prototypical Riot Grrrl”), a portrait Alice Wheeler had taken of Angie Hart and a photo of Courtney Love, whom Jessica had described as “Riot Grrrl’s patron saint.”

That designation stemmed only from the fact that Love had passed out copies of Hit It or Quit It at Hole shows in England. Love actually had an odd antipathy for Riot Grrrl and especially for anybody associated with it who had been close with Cobain before she had met him, namely Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail. Love had recently left a long, rambling answering-machine message for a girl named Nina Cunzio, who was trying to get a Riot Grrrl group started in LA: “We should totally have meetings at my house, I’d love that a lot,” Love had said, sounding to Nina like somebody on drugs. “But you gotta lose this Kathleen Hanna bullshit.” Nina never called back. In just a few months, Love would write a vicious column in Melody Maker, blasting Bikini Kill. How could Jessica Hopper have done such a thing—spoken for the entire movement, to a national magazine, without even consulting with the rest of them? It felt like a gargantuan betrayal of trust, like Jessica had just been using all of them to gain more exposure for her own projects, no matter who else got hurt along the way.

Another malignant rumors about Kathleen spread by Courtney Love: One thing that immediately comes to mind about what Kathleen Hanna's MO is when Mike Watt (from the Minutemen) asked her to be a guest on his first solo album and she wanted to prove a point that she didn't want to be in the company of bros so her contribution was to leave a message on Watt's answering machine with a fake story about how someone who was on the album had raped a girl. Really distasteful stuff. She called it her anti-contribution. To honor this offer, Watt put it on the album. She's just someone who seems to rotate around her own gravity. She's straight up falsely accusing someone of raping a 13 year old girl and calling it art. That's very distasteful at any level. Also she laughs it off as it just being during one of her lying phases, which is ridiculous. Did you see her interview with V magazine? She admitted as a child she would steal her dad's credit card and buy silk blouses. She sounds like a scammer and then she married to a guy who'd bragged about “fag-bashing.” Source: www.hootpage.com

But, unlike Courtney Love, Bikini Kill were always surrounded by controversy just because they were an outwardly and aggressively feminist band. They were very much needed in the 1990s punk scene and respected by all from that scene and Adam Horovitz changed his views considerably since his days in the Beastie Boys. Bikini Kill were one of the best bands of the grunge era, and way more important politically than Hole. Aside from their aesthetic and political differences, I think the motivation of Love to punch Hanna at Lollapalooza festival was mainly jealousy of Hanna's close relationship with Kurt Cobain. Although Cobain ended up dating Tobi Vail, it's between the lines that his main attraction was towards Kathleen, but she allegedly only agreed to a friendship because she was scared of Cobain's substance abuse and wary of his obsessive claim to fame.

Kathleen Hanna: Bikini Kill and The Nation of Ulysses (I was dating Tim Green at that time) all drove back back to Olympia in late August to play K Records’ one-time-only convention, called the International Pop Underground (IPU). “Defeat the Corporate Ogre” was their slogan, and the repetitive mentions of being “anti–corporate rock” seemed pointed at Nirvana, since they’d just signed to a major label (Geffen) and had left Olympia. It felt like a line was being drawn in the sand: Nirvana was no longer welcome in K’s indie purist clubhouse. Kurt had been nothing but supportive of the Olympia scene (he even got a K Records tattoo) and it felt gross that they were publicly slamming him that way. Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn’t afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn’t have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie vs major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on to me.

Sara Marcus: Ian MacKaye had introduced Jett to Bikini Kill, and she was instantly impressed by both the music and the zines. She was particularly heartened that a rock ‘n’ roll feminism was catching on; she could have used some of that in the late ‘70s, when she was a teenage guitarist playing in the Runaways. “The Runaways had nobody,” she said. “I felt like a feminist, but I felt completely dissed by other feminists, ‘cause they were like, ‘Well, you can’t dress sexy.’ Number one, I’m not dressing sexy—even though I did have my pants open from time to time. But what do you mean? You don’t tell me that girls don’t get horny and don’t wanna fuck! You know why they say that girls ‘can’t play guitar’ and ‘can’t play rock ‘n’ roll’? Because rock ‘n’ roll is sex. So meeting people like Kathleen and all those girls, it was really incredible, because I felt like maybe people were starting to get it.”

Bikini Kill had recorded a full-length album that past October, titled Pussy Whipped, but it wasn’t due out till the following fall, and they had already written new songs to record with Jett—glammy, triumphal anthems that explored pleasure and play. And for the introduction to “Demirep,” Kathleen and Jett sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, and played a hand-clapping game they’d both learned when they were little girls: “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black.“ These two songs, along with a new version of “Rebel Girl,” would be released on a 7” in September 1993, a month before Pussy Whipped. Five nights later, the band played a sold-out Rock for Choice benefit to an audience of four thousand at the Hollywood Palladium. Stone Temple Pilots, King Missile, and Kim Gordon’s project Free Kitten were also on the bill, but the biggest buzz was around Bikini Kill.

Kathleen performed in a dress with the words KILL ME printed on her chest, and some men shouted boos at the band. The Los Angeles Times ran a review noting that “while much of the audience seemed unsure of just what to make of this Olympia band, there was a contingent of female fans that seemed wholly enthralled—as if they had found that music really mattered.” Working with Joan Jett had been Kathleen’s first major-label experience, but now the big guys were starting to come calling for Bikini Kill. “Kathleen had a hot band,” Jett’s manager, Kenny Laguna, recounted. “Every label in the business wanted them! Warner Brothers, Capitol, Interscope: everyone.” Kathleen Hanna: Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so Kathi, Bill and me met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. To show us how edgy Interscope was, Jimmy Iovine showed us a Marilyn Manson video that hadn’t come out yet. “You guys could do an edgy video like that!” he said. “Could I hang you from a meat hook?” I asked. Iovine pretended he hadn’t heard me and continued his spiel about how great his label was. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.”

At the time, probably influenced by his abrasive wife Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain hinted to various press outlets that he didn't understand why "those riot grrrl groups took themselves so seriously." Kathleen didn’t think Bikini Kill should abandon Kill Rock Stars, but she was curious about getting wider distribution for her music and ideas. Plus, she explained later, “I wanted to say to myself, ‘I looked into it and it wasn’t the right thing,’ as opposed to just assuming things.” Tobi didn’t even want to look into it, though; she saw what Nirvana’s success had done to them. “I was very saddened to see that that success did not make them happy,” she said. “I knew that things were really really bad: Kurt was on drugs and the band was falling apart.” —Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010) by Sara Marcus

Ione Skye, Kim Gordon, Bikini Kill, Grunge

2025-04-16T03:48:00.022+02:00

At 18, Ione Skye met “the first great love of my life”: Adam Horovitz, a man she describes as “a sweetie pie.” They soon moved in together and, for a while, life was “one long daydream”. The pair tied the knot when Skye was 21 when they married in 1992, just as the Beastie Boys’ star was rising, pulling Horovitz away on months-long tours. Alone in LA, she began joyfully exploring her bisexuality, first with the British model Alice Temple, then with two of Madonna’s exes, Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu. Skye’s infidelities became more indiscreet. One day Horovitz arrived home from a tour to find her in flagrante. "With Adam Horovitz I felt completely safe for the first time," Ione Skye wrote. "I didn't know how to be happy unless we were together." But the union wasn't meant to be. Skye described herself as "a serial cheater," and the pair divorced in 1999. Her anguish at hurting Horovitz is still apparent three decades on. “I secretly hope reading my memoir helps him and his family but I kind of know their personalities and I almost think it might be doing the opposite,” she says. Source: theguardian.com

Kim Gordon: Being a woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. Women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. She didn’t care either way. The term "girl power" was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. I was four months pregnant but somehow I managed to wiggle into a skirt and T-shirt for our “Bull in the Heather” video. Bikini Kill and other Riot Grrl bands were still enforcing their media blackout, and asking Kathleen to appear in our video came from my perverse desire to have her infiltrate the mainstream. That way, people could see her also as the playful, intelligent, charismatic girl she is—a woman who controlled the action by dancing around us as we stood stationary in a rock stance, playing the song. It was courageous of Kathleen to appear in a mainstream MTV video and risk criticism from the alternative community she’d created in Olympia.

I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with Kurt Cobain, one of those mutual "I can tell you are a super sensitive and emotional person too" sorts of connections. Thurston didn’t have the same thing going with Kurt; he’d be the first to say Kurt and I had some sort of good, inexplicable connection. We weren’t close the way he was to his friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, or Tobi Vail, who was his girlfriend, or any of his male friends that he grew up with. I didn’t know Kurt all that well, but our friendship was unusual. Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from the depths of his gravelly stream of vocal sound. It wasn’t screaming, or shrieking, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. Kurt seemed always to be working against himself one way or the other.

Courtney Love was utterly self-absorbed; Kurt probably did spend more time with Frances than Courtney did. Looking back, I can’t imagine what life was like in the chaos of their drug-fueled life, and it’s hard for me to remember that they were together for only a couple of years. It took so little time to forge a life, or in this case, a brand. Riot Grrl, the underground feminist punk rock movement that got under way in the early nineties, maintained a media blackout, and for good reason. Bikini Kill and other female bands didn’t want to be co-opted and turned into products they couldn’t control by a corporate, white male world. Later on, Courtney Love would take up the role that the press was always fishing for—a punk princess, thrilling and dark. No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula L.A. glamour—sociopathy, narcissism—because it’s good entertainment!

From the beginning, I had a feeling that Courtney, who was cunning, smart, and ambitious, asked me along only because she wanted my name associated with the record. Courtney was the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing her look for the camera. Some people are just born that way, and in the studio I felt she was performing for us. She was always sweet to Don Fleming and me because we were going to take her somewhere new and better, she hoped, but she yelled and screamed at everybody in her band. At one point during the recording, Courtney told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, “Uh-oh, train wreck coming.” That Courtney was attracted to Billy Corgan came as a surprise, as she was clearly punk rock. But she was also very ambitious and manipulative, as Don and I learned well during the recording process, and knowing she could turn on me at any moment, I always kept her at arm’s length. There had been an incident in Rome, where Kurt had OD’d, but the details were never clear.

Obviously, though, Kurt was headed down an even darker path, and after he hooked up with Courtney, it was only a matter of time before he completely self-destructed. But I was shattered and feeling as if I were moving slow-motion inside some strange dream. The words fell far short in conveying the feeling of loss that everyone, not just me, was feeling. The night after Kurt’s death, during a candlelight memorial service for the public, a recording of Courtney reading aloud Kurt’s suicide note was played. As the vigil continued, Courtney started handing out some of Kurt’s clothes to fans. It was as if she were stepping out into her destiny—a platform of celebrity and infamy. A week after Kurt died, Hole released their major-label debut, Live Through This, which elevated Courtney to a new kind of perverse stardom. The timing couldn’t have been better. If Courtney wanted something from you, she would use 100 percent of her charm and persuasion to get it. Back then Courtney had a ragged scar across her nose. In an otherwise charismatic face, it was hard not to notice. Years later, at Lollapalooza she described to me all the plastic surgery she planned to get. She said, “You probably didn’t know this, but I had a nose job once.” I think by then she’d had a couple more before.

To me, Madonna just seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn’t have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that before the 1980s would have been a male’s idea of marketing and was reclaiming her image and power back. Even if one day dozens pass Madonna’s sales due to the dubious way they count streamings now, no one will ever have the hysteria, the phenomenon status, the organic saturation of our culture Madonna had. There has never been a female star with her reach—in the US or worldwide. Here’s the kicker: she never tried to be America’s Sweetheart. She did this by challenging the conventions, by having unpopular opinions, by daring to be seen in a negative light.

No other pop star dared go there. Every other female wanted to be seen in the most positive light but Madonna did not. Yet, despite that, she continued to dominate the charts. Madonna was a pop star that carried herself like a rock star; it makes sense since she started out in rock bands. And that attitude carried over into her pop career. As a music critic wrote "Madonna's music was pop but her image was punk". That's true in a lot of ways. She wanted to be loved but also hated. That's why Madonna appeals to women across different genres, women from Tori Amos to Nikki Minaj love Madonna. Tori Amos has covered Frozen and Live to Tell. Courtney Love was always a subpar imitation of Madonna, but instead of joie de vivre, she brought dread and corrosive moods. —Girl in A Band: A Memoir (2016) by Kim Gordon

"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

2025-04-03T20:01:00.011+02:00

We opened for Nirvana on April Fools’ Day 1989. Even though it wasn’t billed as a “benefit show,” Nirvana let us keep the money they would’ve made, which kept us afloat for months. Kurt Cobain suggested we go grab a drink and let things cool off. We went to a bar in the back of a restaurant called the Chinatown. Kurt came to our rescue again in June. Tobi kept things local and specific, and she shared the stuff she was in love with (the Go-Go’s, the Pandoras, the Go-Betweens, the Raincoats, the Slits). She also made up words like “hypocrobrats” and “apokalipstick.” When I finally made it back to Olympia, I moved into the same apartment building as Tobi. Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it. When Bikini Kill formed, I was closer with Tobi, but I always saw Kathi as the gravity that kept us tethered to the ground.

Tobi and I are both complete hotheads, though she is more subtle about it than I am. I can count the times I’ve seen Kathi angry on less than one hand. Darren was a tan mountain biker with a short GQ haircut who talked like a Valley girl, so everyone thought he was gay. He was a few years older than me and had a cute squishy baby nose that was the perfect counterpoint for his fitness-model physique. Darren was always exercising outdoors. He was a great cook and started inviting me to eat with him a few times a week. “It’s hard cooking for one, easier for two,” he’d say. He taught me how to make his potato leek soup, which was so good I could smell it a block away. Darren was super supportive of Bikini Kill. I don’t think he loved the music, but he loved the politics. He was a sounding board for me when everyone was calling us man haters and telling us feminism didn’t matter in the punk scene. He loaned me books about race, class, and gender that we’d talk about over the many meals we ate at his desk. He lived in apartment #5, which was a tiny studio. Darren may’ve looked like a square, but he did the brattiest punk shit I’d ever seen.

I’d sneak out of the building and walk up Fourth Avenue to Slim Moon’s house. Kurt from Nirvana lived in the apartment behind Slim’s, so when Slim wasn’t around I started hanging out at Kurt’s place. Spending time with Kurt took my mind off the whole stupid drama with my ex-boyfriend Luke. We’d drink beer and write lyrics on legal pads, handing them back and forth, underlining the parts we liked, and discussing possible changes. When we listened to music together, Kurt was obsessive. He would take the needle off a Vaselines record and place it back like he was sampling it, to hear the perfect intro or the perfect verse over and over again. He studied songs like they were medical journals and he was a doctor, always looking for new techniques he could use at practice.

Kurt asked me if I’d want to put some writing in the liner notes and maybe do the cover art for Nirvana’s upcoming album, so he came to my apartment one day to see my ideas. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw Luke standing in the hallway. Kurt knew about Luke’s behavior and he asked Luke what he was doing there. Luke said he could be wherever he wanted. I was working at my desk drinking a beer when I heard Kurt shouting in the hallway, “Why don’t you just leave Kathleen alone?!” I opened my door to see Kurt about to physically fight Luke. I pulled him away and into my apartment. After drinking probably my fifth beer, I showed Kurt some album art ideas and tried to act cool, but I was secretly elated that someone had stood up for me.

I wasn’t attracted to Kurt, but he definitely glowed. Like he had sounds bouncing off his skin. I always picture his sunken chest barely filling out his white T-shirt as he giggled at some stupid shit on TV. Kurt’s apartment became my escape hatch over time. The bubble I wrapped myself in to get away from Luke. Kurt used to joke that we were brother and sister and the Brawny paper towel guy was our dad. We would smoke pot while watching his turtle walk around his tiny living room. He was the first feminist man I ever met who never thought being an ally meant you couldn’t defend a woman in bold strokes because she was supposed to do it all for herself. He never even flinched. “SCUM” is said to stand for “the Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the book itself is super violent and funny as hell, which reminded me of Kurt. A few days after giving the book to him, I went to a barbecue in his backyard, but every time I came close to him, he’d go into his apartment “to get something.” I came by a few nights later and Kurt let me in. I asked him point-blank if he was mad at me.

“I don’t need you to buy me books,” he said. “I’m not fucking stupid. I can pick out my own books.” It wasn’t the content that offended him, it was me. I was acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt. And then it hit me. Kurt probably wasn’t financially able to go to college, even though he was one of the most intellectually curious people I knew. He was also treated like a local in Olympia even though he was from Aberdeen, because the town was divided that way—college students vs. locals. And now someone he thought of as a friend was telling him, “Here, let me educate you with this cool book because I’m so smart and you need my guidance.” Having being put down as a woman had blinded me to my own power to hurt people. I never would’ve guessed Kurt cared what I thought of him until that moment. I told him I was sorry but I didn’t ask him to forgive me. A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back:

Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead. Kurt and I continued listening to records and hanging out. On one of those nights, we got drunk and talked about everything from how white the scene in Oly was to the massive new building that had just been put up down the street from his apartment on Pear Street. The sign on the building read, “Pregnancy Help,” but when I called to find out more, they let me know what they really were: a pro-life place that wanted to show me videos of infants in trash bags to scare me out of having an abortion. Kurt agreed we needed to take action via spray paint. Of course, he always had tons of stuff in his apartment—all kinds of art supplies. We went to the wooded area across the street from the fake abortion clinic like wasted feminist vigilantes. Once hidden, we staked out the “clinic” with Kurt’s binoculars and put on gloves so we wouldn’t have spray paint on our hands if the cops appeared. When the coast was clear, I yelled, “No cars!” Kurt ran across the street with his Kermit the Frog–in–jeans legs and spray-painted “GOD IS GAY” in ten-foot-tall letters.

After we did our “activism” on the building, we picked up Dave and headed downtown to my apartment in the Martin because I always had forty-ouncers in my fridge. It was springtime and my windows were open. My living room had two things in it, a shitty futon couch and a massive drafting table. That table was my HQ. I wrote both Bikini Kill zines there while listening to Rites of Spring and the Slits on heavy rotation. Pages of “Girl Power,” the second issue of our zine, were meticulously laid out on its massive surface. When Dave tried to touch it, I told him to step the fuck back. At some point, Kurt left Dave and me alone at the drafting table, talking drunk talk. Dave said he used to be in a band called Dain Bramage. And then I saw Kurt climbing through my window. He was holding yellow daffodils that I recognized instantly. “I picked them for you,” he said, like I was Darla in The Little Rascals and he was Alfalfa. “Oh shit, those are Darren’s,” I said. “He’s been trying to grow them for months. Oh shit, you got those from his window box!” Kurt dropped them. I explained loudly not to worry. “Darren is this guy who decided to take care of me,” I said. “He makes me dinner all the time. He’s my caretaker, basically.”

I was a young feminist and I was trying to sound cool, trying to fit into the tough-girl persona I assumed Kurt and Dave had of me. The undertone was: I hate and use all men except you, which makes you special. “I’ve got him wrapped around my finger. He takes care of me so I can make art.” Really Darren was one of my closest friends, my confidant and my lifeline. But I went on to describe him as if he were some loser I was just using. I wanted to give them what I thought they wanted—and I also wanted to make Kurt feel okay about rooting up the three flowers Darren had worked months to produce. We left my apartment and went back to Kurt’s. Kurt and I turned the lights off in his bedroom and went on a rampage, drunkenly destroying everything. We wrecked every inch of his room—his paintings, his blanket, the wall—because it was dark. Because we were drunk. Because we were young and angry and broke. I scribbled above his bed with the Sharpie from my back pocket: “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel. . . Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Earlier in the day, Tobi and I had been at the local supermarket looking at deodorants, and we both laughed hysterically when we saw one called Teen Spirit. What the fuck does teen spirit smell like? we wondered. Capitalism apparently knew no bounds.

After our rampage, I fell asleep fully clothed next to Kurt with the Sharpie marker still in my hand and woke up with the kind of hangover I can only describe as Did we kill someone last night? Kurt called a few months later asking if he could use the line “Smells like Teen Spirit” in a song. I was immediately transported back to that terrible night and wanted to get off the phone as fast as I could, so I just said, “Sure,” thinking it was no big deal. Outside, after the show, a guy walked up to me and said he wanted to make a record with Bikini Kill. He said he loved the show and felt we needed to record something ASAP. I assumed he was a creep. As I walked away, Kathi and Tobi said, “What did Ian MacKaye just say to you?” I was a big Fugazi fan but hadn’t recognized him. We were obnoxious feminist punks, and in the summer of 1991, DC embraced us. “Suggestion” wasn’t a perfect song. I never liked that Ian used the word “I” repeatedly in the lyrics, since it implied he was speaking as a woman. But when I first heard Fugazi play it in Seattle, it was a watershed moment for me. I had never seen punk men stick their necks out for feminism before.

We played with Nirvana at the Paramount in Seattle on Halloween of the same year. We were the opening band. I knew he’d called Tobi over the summer and asked if we wanted to be in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video as anarchist cheerleaders (an image he borrowed from a drawing in our zine). I responded with a HARD NO, because I wanted our band to be judged by the “meritocracy” of the time, not through the lens of association with an all-male band. Tobi, Kathi, and I talked about it and decided to decline. Kurt was hiding in the corner of the biggest dressing room backstage, and he seemed really far away. I assumed he was freaked out by all the attention. Nirvana was touring constantly and probably living out of hotels, so I tried not to take it personally and instead focused on how sweet it was that they’d asked us to open for them. I don’t think any of us realized how huge they were about to become, but something had clearly changed. I knew Kurt was using heroin, because he’d asked me to get him some the last time we’d hung out in Portland. After the show, I was sitting in the van next to the window when Tobi scrunched in next to me. I told her I felt like we’d never see Kurt again, and she knew exactly what I meant. I could tell by her expression and the cadence of her speech that she was also in a lot of pain, but she still played the big sister and calmed me down. She told me she’d lost people to heroin before and knew the drill.

Tobi and Kurt had broken up, but it seemed like they were on good terms. We wore pajamas at the show I’d invited Joan Jett to. It was at the Wetlands in New York City. The owner put us in a room downstairs, and I immediately began snooping around, looking for a sneaky vault of chocolate bars, vintage records, or band shirts left behind. Joan Jett came to see us play that night, just like she said she would. She took me aside after the show and told me she could hear how she would produce us while we were playing. She wanted to make a record with us. The woman who’d produced the Germs’ first album wanted to work with us! She didn’t even ask about the pajama thing. It was like she already knew. Riot Grrrl had become like a hydra monster—super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive. In LA Weekly, Emily White referred to it as “an underground with no mecca, built of paper.” In a way, she was right. Many of us had written the outlines of places where we could be heard in our zines and were now using physical locations like punk clubs and meetings to realize our imperfect dreams. In the punk tradition, we weren’t meant to have a mecca, a center, or a hierarchy. Except we did.

And whether I liked it or not, I’d become the de facto leader. Not knowing what to do, I asked Ian MacKaye for advice. His answer was simple: “Keep your head down and do the work.” Tim Green had quit the Nation of Ulysses and had some downtime, so he offered to teach me to play guitar. But when he encouraged me after I made a mistake, I mistook his patience for condescension, put the guitar down, and stormed off. The thing is, Tim was genuinely trying to help me. He had this way of putting chords together that made me think of angels flying around with sunglasses on. He could bring everything great about Rites of Spring, the Wipers, and the Pandoras into one song. Tim lived at a punk house near the post office called the Red House. He converted the garage into a combination bedroom/music studio and we made a record, Real Fiction, there under the name The Fakes. Joan Jett made good on her promise to record us and we met her in Seattle to lay down our new songs, “Demirep” and “New Radio.” She loved “Rebel Girl” when we played it at Wetlands and had specific ideas about how it could sound better than it had on our album Pussy Whipped.

Joan and her manager Kenny Laguna had me in the vocal booth for hours. I was also sick of being in the fishbowl Olympia had become since I’d become indie famous. Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so just the three of us met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. Needless to say, we did not sign with Interscope. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Their first hit for him: “Just a Girl.” Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.” Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, who I’d met on a previous New York trip when I was writing with Joan. Kim was working on lyrics for the first Free Kitten record. She would sit at their kitchen table for hours with headphones on, listening to instrumentals with mock vocals, writing and rewriting lyrics—a technique I quickly added to my repertoire. Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana, so I tried to get info from Kim and Thurston about how Kurt was doing.

He’d married Courtney Love, who’d been putting Bikini Kill down in the press for a while, so it felt like seeing him with her around was a bad idea. But then Kim told me Kurt was going to be in Seattle without Courtney for a month and encouraged me to go visit him. The last time I’d spoken with Kurt was two years earlier when I was living at the Embassy in DC. He’d called for Tobi, but I’d picked up. When I told him Tobi wasn’t home, he asked if I had time to talk. As we began to chat, he brought up a Seattle show we’d played together at the OK Hotel a while back. After Nirvana’s set that night, a bunch of punk girls had yelled at him about Nirvana’s new song “Rape Me,” and he thought I was the leader of the campaign against him. I was confused by that song and had talked about it with some girls that night. We were all in agreement that a guy making a comparison between being sold out by a friend to being raped wasn’t the best idea, but I hadn’t spearheaded anything. I knew he was still doing heroin and wanted to at least let him know I cared about him and was there if he ever needed help, before it was too late. Just as I was packing my car to drive to Seattle to go see Kurt, I chickened out. I thought: He has a whole new life. He’s in one of the most famous bands in the world!

After Kurt's suicide, everywhere I went I saw pictures of Kurt, which made me feel physically ill. I felt like he had died because he was sick of being exploited and treated like an object, and now that he was gone people were lining up to make money off his suffering. His death made me more secure in my strategy of eschewing fame whenever possible and working toward things that actually mattered. I was having a hard time dealing with the minuscule amount of fame I had; I couldn’t imagine how he had lasted as long as he did. But more than anything I was sad. Sad about the heroin, about the gun, about his not having the happiness he deserved. Sad we would never be old together, sitting on a porch talking about when we were stupid young musicians who thought we could change the world. Why hadn’t I had the courage to go see him when he asked me to? To tell him I loved him and to reassure him that I in no way thought he was a bad person for signing to a major label? I was a fucking coward. Scared of Courtney Love. Scared of Kurt rejecting me when he never had before.

Courtney Love got in my face and started hissing like a cat. She began screaming stuff at me like, “Are you leaving now, Kathleen? Go home and feed the poor!” She held her lit cigarette up to my face and traced my features with it, like she was going to put it out on my face. Then she coldcocked me in the face. I’ll never know why she did it. Maybe because “trauma begets trauma.” Maybe she was on drugs and mourning Kurt’s death; maybe it was the fact that Tobi had dated Kurt while he was writing Nevermind, and it was widely speculated that Tobi was the inspiration for much of that record. Maybe Courtney was embarrassed because I’d seen her using my stage banter as an empty schtick. Whatever set her off, it was ironic that a woman attacked me for no reason and then claimed she was a better feminist than I was. As we left the theater’s parking lot, I got directions to the nearest police station. I just wanted the assault to be written down so no one could pretend it had never happened or say that it was a “fight,” like they had when Courtney assaulted singer Mary Lou Lord.

Later Courtney told the media I provoked her by whispering “Where’s the baby, in a closet with an IV?” referring to her daughter. I absolutely did not say that. The “fight” became national news and was mentioned everywhere from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Weekly to the Washington Post. The media was pushing the narrative that Courtney and I had been in a “catfight,” which just reminded me that pitting women against one another sold magazines. When I handed in my rent check that month, the woman who opened the envelope read my name and said, “Aren’t you the girl who attacked Courtney Love?” A few days later we played the Warfield in Los Angeles, the same venue we’d played with the Go-Go’s a year before. Before the show, I went to a deli and looked at magazines. I flipped through Spin, the one with Green Day on the cover. Inside was an essay by Courtney about Lollapalooza. She claimed I was “Kurt’s worst enemy.” I looked up and saw Krist Novoselic, bass player for Nirvana, walking toward me. Even though we ran in the same circles, we didn’t know each other well. He made a beeline straight for me, sat down at the table, and started talking. And from what he said, it was like he knew I’d just read the interview: “Kurt would have been really upset to hear that someone hit you in the face. He loved you, I know he did.” —"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye

2025-03-31T03:18:00.004+02:00

Born in London in 1970, Ione Skye is the daughter of folk singer-songwriter Donovan and fashion model Enid Karl. Her father Donovan is known for the hits “Catch the Wind,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch,” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

"My parents met in 1966, at the Whisky a Go Go in LA. She was twenty-one and Donovan was twenty. Mom had dated famous men before—Jim Morrison, Keith Richards, and Denny Doherty from the Mamas and the Papas. But the night she spotted Donovan across the crowded Whisky, that was it for her. The Sunshine Superman, as they called him, swept her off her feet and away to Greece, then London. When she got pregnant with my brother Dono, they moved into a fairy-tale house in the English countryside. Mom was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, but England was her happy place. As she once told me, sounding New Agey: “It was as if I’d lived there in another life.” Donovan was happy there chopping firewood and writing poems and songs about their budding family. His album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden is pretty much all about that time. In “Song of the Naturalist’s Wife” you can even hear my brother’s first cries. Donovan ticked all the boxes for Mom: creative, exciting, handsome, and a good provider.

By the time I was conceived in Donovan’s gypsy caravan on the Isle of Skye, he was already drifting back to his ex-girlfriend Linda Lawrence. Then my father won Linda back from Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and initiated a new life. Mom hired a lawyer to get child support, using her first check to move us into a small apartment in Los Angeles, my first real home. Mom didn’t love her husband Billy the way he loved her, but it didn’t hurt that Billy was gorgeous—tall, dark, and shaggy, like a 1960s Keith Richards. After a dozen or so proposals, she’d agreed to marry him, and I was all for it. While shooting River's Edge I was careful not to let my hair fall over my face, I straddled Keanu Reeves and kissed him for real, moving around, parts to parts, missing sometimes and grinding on his leg or stomach. “Cut!” said Tim. “Nice work, kids. Stand by.” We pulled apart, a little bashful, a little breathless. “You good?” said Keanu, and I sensed by the husky edge to his voice that it wasn’t just me who wanted more. Tracing my lips to the side of his face, I whispered, “Can I come to your place after wrap?” On the way there, we stopped at an all-night retro diner, Norms.

It was busy and bright inside, but the clatter and voices fell away as we slid into our booth. I could only marvel at every little thing Keanu did. The way he slung his arm across the back of the booth, tore a sugar packet with his teeth, licked a dot of ketchup from his thumb. Each gesture was sexier than the last. Spacey from lack of sleep and maybe even love, I felt the old diner drifting upward, lifting us into the sky. Just above the city. Just above real life. Keanu had his own barebones studio apartment to stay in during filming. A brown carpet, a mattress on the living room floor. We lay on our sides on his mattress and I ran my hands over Keanu’s smooth back as he kissed my face and neck. I felt both shy and proud of my body, my soft skin and full breasts in my Calvin Klein bra. I knew I was nice looking but wished I were the most beautiful girl in the world. This might have been the most beautiful boy. He was different from any boy I’d known, self-possessed and calm. But when I tried to maneuver him on top of me, he wouldn’t budge. “Let me drive you home,” he said abruptly, pulling up my bra strap.

I wound my way up Mulholland, then Woodrow Wilson, finally pulling up outside the Zappas’ compound. The road was empty, but the canyon was rippling and alive. I sat on my hood and lit a shoebox joint, checking over my shoulder. I didn’t smoke often—yet—partly because you couldn’t at the Zappas’. It was no secret that Frank was staunchly against drugs of any sort, unless you counted the Winstons he chain-smoked. Anything stronger dulled the intellect and killed ambition, he believed. And because Frank was no ordinary father but something more like a cult leader to his kids, they were proud straight arrows too. Me, I was whoever they wanted me to be. Inside the compound, at least. You never knew who you might find there. That was part of the fun. Maybe it was Molly Ringwald on a pool float, pale and lovely as a forties Vargas girl. Molly and Dweezil Zappa were no longer together but still friends. Though newly famous, thanks to Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Molly was wonderfully un-stuckup.

I found her worldly and proper, in a vaguely old-fashioned way. “That’s what makes Hollywood so dynamite,” Anthony Kiedis said. “That desert energy, blowing in. I can really get down with it.” I liked that he thought Hollywood was great and wasn’t too jaded to admit it. But it was the thing about the wind that got me. I’d always had a connection with the Santa Anas. They brought up something in me, a wild yearning feeling. Anthony was now staring at me with focused intensity, his eyes tracing my hair, my mouth, my neck, as if memorizing me. No defensiveness, no beatnik shtick. For hours, we lay there, shedding layers, words flowing into kisses flowing into words. He stroked my face and said I was like an angel and I understood that we were falling under the same spell. And then, like it was Christmas in August, we shared all the things we loved: the Santa Ana winds, and perfect pieces of fruit, and Marilyn Monroe’s arched eyebrows, and the joy of a warm, still ocean, and getting comfortable after being shy and uncomfortable.

The Chili Peppers had just released their third studio album, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, to not much of a bang. Anthony was broke and living with the band’s manager, Lindy Goetz, in the Valley. I’d pick him up at Canter’s Deli, or sometimes we’d just drive around, shouting our life stories over the radio. Anthony drove fast and reckless, and I was driving like a maniac too. Anthony would have to hit rock bottom to quit drugs, just as I’d have to hit my own rock bottom to quit the feeling I had to take care of Anthony. The need to save him was an addiction in itself. I was hooked. If Anthony’s sex drive had a soundtrack, it would be Fun House, the Stooges album he’d turned me on to. He liked to brag that he only exercised in bed and onstage, though I saw him doing push-ups all the time. He was obsessed with leading me to climax, and the pressure could be a lot. After five years of struggle, the Chili Peppers were finally moving on from being just a fringe local band to being played on KROQ. Tickets for the upcoming Uplift Mofo Party Plan tour were selling out and the record was sidling up the charts. If using was what kept Anthony alive, I was willing to help him.

“If you’re going to do it,” I told Anthony that night, trailing him out the kitchen door, “just do it here with me, where you’re safe.” “I don’t deserve you,” he said, hanging his head. “I’m coming with you,” I said. In my pajamas and robe, I drove Anthony to meet a dealer on the corner of Wilton and Franklin Avenue. Then we came home and I watched, biting my knuckles, as Anthony shot up in my bathroom. The same bathroom where Karis Jagger and I used to stand on the tub’s edge, lip-synching in the mirror. That was the first of many times I went with him to score. He didn’t like me tagging along at first, but then we discovered I had a sixth sense for the fuzz. One time we were parked in the Mayfair Market parking lot and Anthony had just smoked some dope; I got a weird feeling and put the tinfoil in my pocket seconds before a cop car swooped up. They searched the car and questioned us separately, and miraculously, we had the same story: We were just going to the market to get bagels. Heroin would make Anthony remote but also snuggly. We’d curl up on the waterbed, listening to Neil Young or Lou Reed. Sometimes we watched old movies, and not just because I wanted to.

Anthony had a thing for Veronica Lake and might have seen Sullivan’s Travels as many times as I’d seen The Blue Dahlia. But then there were the nights he shot speedballs, a mixture of coke and heroin. Those nights weren’t sweet at all. I’d try to sleep while he crouched on my floor. “Don’t look at me!” he’d snap when I tried to pull him into bed. “I’m bad. I feel like a demon.” I’d look away for his sake, but Anthony wasn’t a bad person, he was just in a bad way. In the New Year, Anthony and I moved our joint belongings—his duffel, my three suitcases, and whatever else fit into the Toyota—into a quite glamorous 1940s triplex on North Orange Drive. I loved the apartment, with its original pink-tiled bathroom and Art Deco moldings. Heroin was “the worst drug in the world,” the “crossing the line” drug, and needles were so gross. All the same, I’d grown curious about heroin, now that it was in front of me so much. I wanted to know how the drug felt from the inside, why it was so bewitching. “Can I try some?” I asked one night as Anthony laid his lighter and tinfoil on the bathroom sink.

Anthony looked horrified. “No,” he said sternly. Thankfully I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get hooked. Not long after Hillel’s death, Anthony had gone back to rehab and gotten clean again. My worst nightmare was that he’d relapse if he found out I was falling in love with Adam. People thought Anthony was indestructible, but I wasn’t convinced. I was bound by a strange belief that I had to be with him to keep him safe. Then one beautiful September day—just a perfect day, as the Lou Reed song went—everything changed. Anthony sent me a letter. He was working the Twelve Steps and making his amends.

Once it occurred to my brother Dono that he might actually be able to date the models he worked with, he went on a mission to woo his big crush, Kate Moss—and by God, he succeeded. I went to see Nirvana perform on MTV Unplugged in New York while Dono and Kate were briefly an item. That winter I met Anthony on Becky's in Brooklyn, I knew that would be our last date. When Anthony started to yell at me, I was on the verge of tears, but fortunately there was Lou Reed who was leaving the bar and stared him in disapproval, which shut Anthony up on the spot. While we were shooting Four Rooms, all the actors shared a makeup trailer, but Madonna was soon moved to a private space because we couldn’t stop staring at her. I mean, it was Madonna. I’d only seen her in the flesh once before, from the audience at her Blond Ambition concert in LA in 1990. Adam had scored prime seats because the Beastie Boys’ first tour had been opening for Madonna. He and I were secret fans. Commercial pop was uncool to us, so we were acting like, Oh, isn’t it ironic that we’re here at this mainstream pop show?

But from the minute the Blond Queen strutted onstage in her Jean Paul Gaultier bondage gear, all our judgment went out the window. Madonna was very fun and a little bit of a mean girl too. She loved taking the piss out of Tim Roth, who played the bellboy in all four stories. My old friend Paul Starr was Madonna’s makeup artist. Near the end of one long day of filming, when he swooped over for a last touch-up, she playfully smacked his hand and snapped, “If you put any more makeup on my face it will crack!” Paul just laughed and went on doing his thing. “Go ahead, hon,” said Madonna, patting the bed. I’d been summoned! Cinching my terry cloth bathrobe, I lay down next to Madonna. Her eyes were still closed, so I closed mine and we lay quietly, side by side on our backs. Turning my head ever so slightly, I opened one eye to look at her. She was almost otherworldly, with her feathery black lashes and fantastic bone structure. I had the urge to wrap her in a maternal embrace but didn’t dare.

Madonna took care of herself. Madonna might not have been a fan of my brother, but she took a small shine to me. When Four Rooms wrapped, just before Christmas, I was invited to a holiday dinner party at Castillo del Lago, her Mediterranean-style estate perched above Lake Hollywood. A few decades before Madonna, another bigwig, the mobster Bugsy Siegel, had lived there. It was magnificent, the whole exterior painted in ocher stripes inspired by a church in Portofino. The view from the grand dining room, with its honeycombed Moorish ceilings, stretched from Lake Hollywood to the ocean. Best of all, a Frida Kahlo painting, Self-Portrait with Monkey, hung over a small table in the foyer. It was a small group that night. Debbie Harry was there, with a spiky new haircut. I still worshipped Debbie but my attention was mainly focused on Madonna’s ex-lover and best friend, Ingrid Casares. A few years in the future, when Howard Stern asked me about our romance on his show, I’d say she was my true initiation into the lesbian nation. When I married Adam, my bridesmaids were Karis Jagger and Mick Fleetwood's daughter, Amelia.

Adam and I had never once fought in our entire seven-year relationship. I’d always thought that was our strength, but in fact it was our greatest weakness. I was reading a letter that had been sent to Adam, handwritten. It meant something. I scanned the lines, trying to understand what. It was from Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill. They’d met at the Summersault music festival in Australia. They were only friends, Adam said. The letter was not overtly flirtatious or inappropriate. She knew he was married and was trying, at least, to be respectful. But I could tell she wanted to leave an impression by the way she wrote—cool and smart and witty. And he must have liked her too, or why else would he have shown it to me? I handed it back to him, my hand shaking. “Should I write back?” Adam asked, his voice soft. I couldn’t, in good conscience, promise to be faithful to him. If my husband was going to like someone else (“like” was as far as I could let my imagination go), at least Kathleen was a good person. I admired her punk feminist mission and loved her songs, especially “Rebel Girl.” —Say Everything: A Memoir (2025) by Ione Skye

Before the End, Lou Reed (Endless Cycle)

2025-03-22T03:29:00.029+01:00

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison, documentary directed by Jeff Finn. Release date: January 13, 2025 on Apple TV.

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is less an excavation of truth than an exercise in indulgence, a quixotic pilgrimage through the mists of conspiracy and nostalgia. Directed by Jeff Finn, the documentary styles itself as an investigative probe into the final days of The Doors' frontman, but in reality, it is more séance than scholarship. It toys with the well-worn whispers of Morrison faking his death without the burden of serious evidence. Finn and his parade of interviewees seem convinced that the "official story" is somehow suspect, yet they produce little more than speculative embroidery on an already rich tapestry of myth. To his credit, Finn unearths rare archival material and interviews that offer a glimpse into Morrison as a man, not just a spectral figure in rock 'n' roll lore.

But where the documentary might have explored Morrison's literary ambitions, his existential unraveling, or the paradox of his self-destructive genius, it instead opts for the well-trodden path of counter-narratives that fail to hold up under scrutiny. The introduction of a shadowy "Mr. X," hinted to be Morrison himself is laughable because his name is Frank Wagner and he's younger than Morrison. Critics seem divided, with some lauding Finn's passion and others dismissing the documentary as a hallucinatory echo chamber. Jonita Davis of The Black C.A.P.E. magazine acknowledges its compelling storytelling, while audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes skew toward exasperation, one viewer branding it "filled with innuendo, half-baked theories and outright fiction." Before the End is not an exposé but a testament to our inability to let our icons rest. This documentary does little but add another layer of fog to a legend that scarcely needs it.

Jeff Finn: I think Oliver Stone’s a brilliant filmmaker: JFK, Natural Born Killers. I think his documentary work on Kennedy is amazing. But that brilliance is not displayed in The Doors. I was just so disappointed because it just clearly presented a one-dimensional view of Jim Morrison as this dark, narcissistic, self-absorbed asshole. And that’s not to say Jim didn’t have his asshole-ish moments. Of course, he did. We all have a dark side. I was doing street interviews in Virginia, outside the library Jim went to as a child. One young man replied, “He was an asshole.” And he knew that from the Oliver Stone movie. So, I’ve tried to do damage control regarding Jim’s legacy from the fallout of that biopic. Everybody has their version of Jim. The notion of Jim as an introvert, as being neurodivergent is not what we generally think of Jim Morrison. I want people to know the Jim that Gayle Enochs, one of his lovers, knew. A man who drank wine and read poetry. A contrast to this rock god. Where are The Doors of today? Why people today aren’t rising up and forming bands the way it was in the late 60s and protesting? I’m probably unaware of them, but I keep my ear to the ground and haven’t seen anything. It could be just as Jim said that it was an incredible springtime, that moment in the late sixties, and it couldn’t be replicated. Source: bandsaboutmovies.com

“I’m most concerned with compassion and happiness these days. I know things that impede happiness; drugs impede it, tension impedes it. People just don’t want to believe there’s any integrity. They’re always looking for some really ugly little thing. I think drugs are the single worst, terrible thing. And if there was any single thing that I thought would be effective to stop people from dealing in drugs and taking them I would do it. However I don’t think there is, apart from telling people to use them with caution. I find self-destructive people very boring. I would like to think that I’m not one of them.” —Lou Reed, interview for BBC Radio 1 (June 5, 1980)

It took years for The Velvet Underground to be understood. Most people caught on with the rise of alternative rock in the ‘90s, 30 years later. Now matter how bad, low, worthless someone feels there is Lou saying: 'I find it hard to believe you don't know, the beauty you are...' You are being told how, despite what you feel, that you are valued and loved. And Reed pulls that trick again and again in his solo work. And the fans of John Cale must know it’s hard to imagine The Velvet Underground commercially successful with Cale staying in the band longer. If they’d delivered another album like White Light/White Heat there’s no way they'd make the jump to Atlantic from Verve.

MGM kicked the Velvet Underground off the label around the beginning of 1970 as part of its infamous "purge" of artists who supposedly advocated taking drugs. In November 1970 Mike Curb announced the termination of the contracts of eighteen bands that "advocate for drug use." In a December 1970 Rolling Stone news item, an MGM rep claimed that "The cuts were made partly to do with the drug scene—like maybe a third of them had to do with drug reasons. The others were dropped because they weren't selling." Certainly the Velvet Underground would have been at the top of the drug purge list. Sterling Morrison thought so, telling Mix magazine that Curb "wanted to get rid of the controversial bands, including the low-selling Velvets."

Despite of the chronic painting of Lou Reed as the miscreant in his fallout with John Cale and later with Robert Quine, the reality is in fact quite different. In White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day by Richie Unterberger, Michael Carlucci, longtime friend Lou Reed's guitarist Robert Quine said: "Lou told Quine that the reason why he had to get rid of John Cale in The Velvet Underground was Cale's ideas were just too out there," says Carlucci. "Cale had some really wacky ideas. He wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and Lou just couldn't stand it." Cale's autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen?, which was written in collaboration with Victor Bockris is a clear example of one-side reporting. After the dissolution of The Velvets, Sterling Morrison explained that Cale could be also a hard pill: “People talk about Lou, but John was also truly difficult to work with. Once we were doing “Pale Blue Eyes,” which is a quiet song. I’m playing the solo, which is also quiet, and in the middle of my solo, he purposely steps on the button that turns on my distorter. It’s a Vox distorter, so all of a sudden there’s this blast of sound distorted and three times louder than all the rest. John looks at me like I’m the crazy one, turns it off, and then kicks it! I look over at Lou and we’re both going, OK, what the hell?! But if I had done that to him he would’ve had a stroke.”

John Cale obsessively blames Lou Reed of the acrimonious reunion of The Velvet Underground in 1993, with a great deal of jealousy. In What's Welsh for Zen? Cale whines about Reed to no end: "We supported U2 for Swiss stadium dates. As soon as we did that we were no longer the focus of attention and Lou could not bear the fact that he was a small fish in a big pond. Everybody else was having a great time, U2 were fun people to be around. Eden and Rise joined the tour in Switzerland. Rise was very worried and tried to understand what was going on between Lou and me, via Sylvia, which was a big mistake. One afternoon in the first week I was sitting around with a bass riff and Lou started playing guitar through this echo machine he had that was just making gorgeous noise. It was floating around in a miasma and then he started singing. I asked 'What did you say? You said "coyote"?' He said, 'Yeah.' So that song got done. And I expected that when we got out on the road we'd start trying new songs. In the middle of it all, I brought up this thing about publishing. All of a sudden Lou stopped the rehearsal, went outside and got on the phone. Sylvia showed up and came up to me and said, 'You can't talk like that to Lou. If you do, you're going to be very disappointed.' 'This is band business,' I said, 'are you a member of the band? You're not, are you? Right, so why don't you stay out of it?' She said, 'I manage Lou Reed.' That was a dead end. We knew we would attract a lot of ambulance chasers, people who wanted to see us fail. I read an article that said, 'There are some bands who shouldn't even think about re-forming.' We were one of them.

Lou was trying to control everything and I knew a storm was coming. One night in Italy, I was doing 'Waiting for the Man' with a huge orchestral introduction, and I was trying to give them the tempo from the piano, but I was too far away. Lou went and told my tech to turn the piano off. At that point I was ready to knock his teeth down his throat. He was getting stranger and I couldn't deal with that. As soon as the tour was over, Lou was completely lost. I looked at him on the plane back from England to the US, and I realized: this guy is empty. He does not know where to draw the line. He's completely adrift. MTV wanted the Velvet Underground as part of their series of 'Unplugged'. Lou was insisting that he had to produce the 'Unplugged' album. 'I'm the only one who can produce the VU,' he said. I pointed out that we could have Chris Thomas or George Martin. Lou likes to obsess over things. I have different production values, in that Lou will go for the audiophile situation and I will go for the excitement. Everybody left Lou alone and he was very quiet, saying only, 'I must produce.' 'Absolutely not,' I replied. That night I dreamed he did not drive back to Manhattan; he swam away, just drifted off into the wild blue yonder and drowned. The thing about being a star is it's so one-sided that it's corrosive.

Nico, for instance, was really in need of being completed as an artist and at the same time she could hold that grandiose position of being a star. Lou attempted to do the same, but he wasn't truly elegant enough in his demeanour to pull it off. People laugh at Lou a lot, but the thing is, Lou doesn't know when he's funny. He can be absolutely hysterical and have you rolling on the floor grasping your stomach, begging him to stop, and he still doesn't know what's going on. The point is, I don't think that Lou would like it if you told him. Lou and Sylvia had earlier insisted that the reunion tour would only happen if everyone refused to cooperate with Victor Bockris's work on his Lou Reed biography. And now they demanded that the mixing and production of any Velvet Underground recordings be Lou's domain. To me, if he did not want our input, fine, he would not get it. Certainly our only reason to refuse him was our conviction that we were best served by an outside ear. As a solo performer, I had been earning an income the equivalent of what we each could have expected from the reunion tour. What attracted me to the reunion tour, therefore, had not been the financial bonuses that were on offer, but the artistic stimulus of recreating the still uncompromised values of the original entity.

The final stroke in this conflict was a fax Lou wrote Moe in reply to a gentle note from her suggesting another producer. Moe told me it said something like, 'Moe, of course your drums sounded great because I made them sound great. John of course doesn't realize that, because his viola never sounded better because I picked the amplifiers and the PA system.' Now I wanted to say to him, 'While you were making holes in your arm, Maureen was raising her children, so fuck you! And as far as making remarks about my knowledge of recording and production, I've been known for producing people and I've been a successful at it, so I'd be careful if you're accusing me of not knowing what goes on in studios too, because I have my own studio that's fairly well equipped and I know what I'm doing down there.' So I said, 'If you don't stop doing this, you're not going to have me as a friend anymore.'

Moe called me up again and said, 'I just got a very nice fax from Sylvia.' I saw red. Yeah, what does it say?' 'Well, it says, "John's a musician, don't listen to him." The resentment I felt at the end of the day was the same I had felt throughout the years. The situation with him and Sylvia just went on and on like that. I don't want to see Lou and I don't want to talk to him and I don't want to hear anything about him. I went through the roof. My subsequent letter to him was intended to purge him of even the slightest doubt of what I saw as his motives, total control. Moe could not have known how deeply offended I was by the meanness of his tone. I was not going to forgive him again. So I wrote Lou a nine-page fax that I knew he wouldn't get up from and he hasn't. There were many blow-ups. I'm sure there will be many more. The fax machine should have been taken away from Lou and me."

Lou Reed in RockBill magazine (August 1984): “I’ve never wanted to offend anybody. I’ve never wanted to make fun of anybody. This might sound strange coming from me. I have written songs where the characters are very bitter or are borderline psychotics. But I try to be non-judgmental about things.” After his break-up with Bettye, Lou rekindled a relationship with Barbara Hodes, a clothing designer that Lou had met at the Factory. She designed knitwear-style mohair jumpers. Betsey Johnson had given Barbara a whole corner of her boutique Paraphernalia. Barbara and Lou reconnected—he moved in with her and they had a romantic and sexual relationship before Barbara married Michael Gross, a reporter from The New York Times. According to Barbara, Lou was 'tender and polite' while he was not on drugs. She said Sally Can't Dance was critiziced by Lou because of Steve Katz's involvement. "I fear that I am a lone voice in proclaiming the brilliance of that record! Seriously. I think it contains some of his loveliest melodies. “Sally Can’t Dance” is actually about a woman who lived life on the edge and was always into the latest fashions, but later wound up in a rent-controlled apartment living a hum drum life."

“When Lou Reed talks in Coney Island Baby about wanting to play football for the coach and “giving the whole thing up for you,” he is expressing the profound dream of the damned—and his loss is given greater intensity because both he and we know that such wishes were impossible from the very beginning. And it hurts all over again. It's also a way of recapturing his more innocent days.” —Paul Nelson for Rolling Stone magazine (25 March, 1976)

Bob Quine had a singular sound but he was just a sideman. Quine was a Velvet Underground superfan—something Reed’s wife Sylvia appreciated when she scouted him for The Blue Mask. A musicologist, Quine gave Lou a thorough analysis of why Lou’s particular guitar playing was genius and what an impact it had. “We recorded it in this gigantic orchestral soundstage that was built inside a mid-century office tower on 6th Avenue in Midtown,” Fred Maher says about those sessions: “Lou was in very good humor and we really stretched out. It was just me on drums, Lou, Bob, and Fernando Saunders. During the recording, everything was hunky-dory, and Bob and Lou were getting along. But when the final mixes were done, I think Bob wasn’t very happy with the mixes. He complained bitterly to Lou, and that was pretty much that.” “Bob didn’t really have ambitions beyond being a sideman,” Richard Hell recalled: “He didn’t like having his stuff edited. He couldn’t handle it. I talked to him about it. I was like, ‘Bob, it’s their record, not yours.’ But he was not rational that way.”

Even those who say that Lou Reed had "normal parents" acknowledge that his father had a cutting sense of humor, cutting people down to size. That might seem innocuous from the outside, but for a child it can have a big impact. "Beginning of a Great Adventure" shows us Reed facing down the impossibility of being a father. Reed had grown as an artist, as a writer, and tapped into universal truths in New York and Magic & Loss and expressed them in such a crystalline way that almost everyone could relate. The true depth of Reed’s artistry sunk deeper and deeper whereas most of his 60s contemporaries were out of ideas and churning out drivel. The last song on his last album Lulu: Junior Dad is absolutely heartbreaking. It belongs alongside with other songs that paint negative or frightening portrayals of father figures: Kill Your Sons, My Old Man, Endless Cycle, Sex With Your Parents, Rock Minuet, etc. —Sources: Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall and Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Lou Reed: Another Complete Unknown

2025-03-09T00:26:00.088+01:00

Some fans of The Velvet Underground keep dreaming of an adaptation of Lou Reed’s life in a similar style to Bob Dylan's A Complete Unknown. The crux would be in how to approach such a complex character. A scholar fan suggested that adapting Reed’s life to the big screen would play host to a series of difficulties: “I think it’s an interesting idea precisely because Lou Reed seems so unlikeable as a person, but he wasn’t afraid to show his vulnerabilities. I saw a film about John Lennon (played by Ian Hart who then went on to play Lennon in Backbeat) and Brian Epstein, where Lennon mercilessly taunted Epstein about his sexuality. A Lou Reed/Velvet Underground movie could explore Lou’s ambivalent attitude towards Andy Warhol and their fallout. Also introducing his first love Shelley Albin. Lou Reed would have to be some kind of anti-hero and then find a redemption in the figure of Laurie Anderson. I’m totally down with that, but it would be tough for a wide release.” Source: cultfollowing.co.uk

“We were inseparable from the moment we met,” Shelley Albin recalled. “We were always literally wrapped up in each other like a pretzel.” Soon Shelley and Lou could be seen at the Savoy, making out in public for hours at a time. “He was a great kisser and well coordinated. I always thought of him as a master of the slow dance.” For both of them it was their first real love affair. They had a great sexual relationship. They played tennis together. For all of Lou’s eccentricities, Shelley found him “very straight. He was very coordinated, a good dancer, and he could play a good game of tennis or basketball. His criteria for life were equally straight. He was in essence a fifties guy,” Shelley said. “His appeal was very sexy. It was the combination of a gentle lover and romantic and strong. He had the strength of a man. The electroshock treatments were very fresh in his mind. He immediately established that he was erratic, undependable, and dangerous, and that he was going to control any situation. I could play Lou’s game too, that’s why we got along so well. That’s what really attracted me to him. But he wasn’t controlling me. If you look back at who’s got the power in the relationship, it will turn out that it wasn’t him.” Shelley agreed that Lou had picked up many of his twisted ideas about life from Lincoln Swados. “You couldn’t get much crazier and weirder than Lincoln,” she said, “without being Lou.” Reed wrote two songs, “My Friend George” on New Sensations, and “Harry’s Circumcision” on Magic and Loss inspired by Lincoln Swados.

Ever since he had been put on medication following the electroshock treatments of 1959, Lou had been an inveterate drug user. If he wasn’t popping amphetamines, he was smoking pot, dropping acid, taking Placidyls and alcohol. In 1964 he added heroin to his drug menu. Shelley recalled, “He was getting into heroin and he was having some bad LSD trips too.” But Shelley didn't want to show sympathy for Lou’s cries for help. Moreover, Lou had gone into a total decline when he realized that Shelley was not only not coming back to him, but was in fact living with two other adult men just three doors down from his apartment. Once when Shelley was at the Orange Bar with her new lover Ron Corwin and his Korean vet friends, an acolyte of Lou came frantically telling her that Lou was having a really bad time. Although she fully understood that he might not make it through the night, Shelley sent back the reply, “Lou, if you send somebody over here to tell me that you’re dying, die!” Still, Shelley felt sorry for him. “Lou couldn’t have a good time, it was not in his genes,” she stated. “He felt that he didn't deserve it. Because if you said he was nice, then you didn’t see how terrible he was. He couldn’t have a happy time nor he could accept that people liked him. That’s what’s so sad about Lou.”

Onstage Reed erases all memory of the undignified way people like Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger have lurched into middle age. “I’ve always liked this basic thing,” Reed said. “I like to say that any kid could pick up a guitar and knock one of these songs out. They’re not hard to play or sing, but it is hard to write them: they’re very deceptive." “New Sensations” was one of 1984’s great records. Reed is a man with an impassive face and a New Yorker’s acerbic tongue. Asked about which rock lyricists he rated highly, he gave me a typical, “Generally speaking I like catchy lyrics. Like that Foreigner thing, “I Wanna Know What Love Is”. Now that’s a nice dumb lyric, that I find attractive. I like that kind of sappy music. I always have." Reed often equates his musical work with the cinema, but when more personal matters are raised, so are Reed’s hackles. He simply refuses to talk about the mid-seventies, a time when his drug addictions had him shortlisted for the rock’n’roll casualty ward. It wasn’t until his marriage to Sylvia Morales in 1980 that Reed’s career found a consistent direction.

How much does his new marriage have to do with the new equilibrium in his career? “I don’t want to answer anything that has to do with my personal life,” he replied in a flat drawl. “I understand why people might have an interest in how Clint Eastwood’s divorce is going to affect his next Dirty Harry movie. I like gossip too. I read the ‘National Enquirer’ when I have nothing else to do and I need some real garbage. And that’s what I think of it – it’s real garbage.” Reed’s latest songs seem to have narrowed the gap between the writer and his songs. “I’ve thought about that. I think the distance between Lou Reed as an image and Lou Reed as a person has shortened on the last couple of albums. Before, a lot of what I wrote about was extreme situations. Also, because I write so much in the vernacular, I always try to present it as though it’s true, as it had happened to me. But it isn’t true, and it didn’t always happen to me.” While Reed continues to have minimal commercial success, nostalgia for the New York art scene which spawned him is rampant. —Interview for The Sydney Morning Herald (January 10, 1985) by Richard Gulliatt

Lou Reed was not a fan of The Who, once proclaiming how much he disliked the band’s rock opera Tommy. He humorously sneered: “Tommy is such – Jesus, how people get sucked into that.” He added, “So talentless, and as a lyricist Pete Townshend is so profoundly untalented and philosophically boring to say the least… like the record ‘The Searcher’ [meaning ‘The Seeker’]; ‘I ask Timothy Leary…’ I wouldn’t ask Timothy Leary the time of day, for cryin’ out loud!” Financially, things began to turn around for Reed in 1984. His lawsuits with his ex-manager Dennis Katz (target of his vitriolic song Dirt), which had dragged on for over a decade, were finally settled with the assistance of Eric Kronfeld, a successful music industry lawyer.

The settlement cost Reed a lot of money, but it did free up royalties from his RCA catalog, notably for “Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed’s relationship with his wife became more complex when she began to function as his default manager, after Reed, following a familiar pattern, fell out with and parted ways with Eric Kronfeld, the man responsible for pulling him out of his financial troubles. In a letter dated December 4, 1991, he confirmed Sylvia her new role as vice-president of Sister Ray Enterprises, overseeing all his projects. Reed dedicated Between Thought and Expression to his family: Sid, Toby, Bunny, and, “most of all,” Sylvia. In his obituary for Lou Reed, Mick Rock wrote: "I really valued our friendship and I always had a fascination with his image, weathering the slings and arrows of that crazed decade, the '70s. Lou was a true gladiator, a fearless warrior and also a man of extreme kindness and compassion. If he was your friend in the fullest sense, he was your friend forever. He had a singing soul. And I miss him so much already." Source: www.content.time.com

Those who met Rachel found a sweet person with a stoic nature. “In my experience of Lou,” longtime friend Dave Hickey said, “all these supposed digressions from the ‘norm’ were just bullshit. Anyway, if you took that much speed for that many years, you don’t know what the hell you are. Physically, you cannot get an erection. Lou was mostly a voyeur. Sex didn’t offer Lou enough—he was just really bored by it.” Reed’s relationship with Rachel was clearly under strains external and internal. How often she started trouble is harder to say. One story came from a neighbor who saw Rachel in bad shape one morning, bruised and curled up on the lobby couch, evidently locked out of their apartment. A recording made in 1977 of Reed’s side of a phone conversation captured him and Rachel bickering over drugs and cash, though the exact context is unclear. “I know you have money hidden,” Reed insisted, exasperated. Around this time, a couple of Reed’s associates noted a nasty abscess on his forearm, the sort caused by frequent injections, which he made barely any effort to conceal.

Barbara Hodes, a former lover, recalled a harrowing scene in which Reed, in a gesture of bravado and need, stuck a loaded hypodermic into the open wound. Rachel finally had to move out of the apartment they’d shared on Sixty-third Street. On one occasion, Reed received a late-night call from a friend of Rachel, who reported Rachel was suicidal and in need of money. Reed met the friend at an ATM and gave her money to take to Rachel. But Reed wouldn’t go with her to deliver it. After a lifelong struggle with his mental health, his Syracuse roommate and co-conspirator Lincoln Swados died in the fall of 1989. And on January 31, 1990, at age thirty-seven, Rachel Humphreys died. According to Corey Kilgannon's reporting “Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field,” Rachel Humphreys was among the thousands AIDS victims buried anonymously on Hart Island, though the specific cause of Humphreys’s death remained unknown.

The between-song spiels in Take No Prisoners reflected Reed’s satirical writing at Syracuse, his fondness for Lenny Bruce and Henny Youngman. Reed challenged the audience, channeling Yeats. The verbal riffs came fast and furious. He mocked Patti Smith (“Fuck Radio Ethiopia, man, I’m Radio Brooklyn. I ain’t no snob, man”) and Barbara Streisand. “I Wanna Be Black” was performed with Reed ad-libbing T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” and taking mock offense at his backup vocalists when they echo his line about wanting to “fuck up the Jews.” Recasting the song as more overt comedy with Black collaborators in front of an audience clarified its sarcasm. The band comping behind a wired, frequently unintelligible Reed as he spat verbal shrapnel: about working at Jones Beach as a teenager; about quitting the Velvets; about Candy Darling and how he missed her (“and I didn’t even know her that well, she was a scam artist. I’m such a scam artist. She had leukemia from silicone injections, and I’m supposed to feel sorry?”), about Little Joe (“an idiot with an IQ of 12”) and meeting Norman Mailer (“he tries to punch you in the stomach to see how tough you are—he’s pathetic… I told him 'Go write a bible'”).

By turns absurd, appalling, hilarious, and occasionally touching (a stirring “Coney Island Baby” was personalized with Long Island township shout-outs), the brakes-off flow on Live: Take No Prisoners is also a bit frightening. Reed declared he’d “rather have cancer than be a faggot,” then backpedaled vaguely; he savaged the critics Robert Christgau and John Rockwell. Arista issued Live: Take No Prisoners with a warning sticker that read: “This Album Is Offensive.” Reed recorded Legendary Hearts, his follow-up to The Blue Mask, at RCA Studio C. The sessions were marred by Reed’s studio tantrums. The session engineer, Corky Stasiak, fielded worried calls from Reed at all hours about technical glitches. “I had to turn off my phone,” he recalls. “Waves of Fear” describes his DIY rehab as a rough ride. He hadn’t quit drinking entirely: Stasiak noticed his hands often trembled, especially when he first arrived for a session. Reed had worries about his liver, and was exploring channels of alternative medicine. “We had a great discussion about Finbarr Nolan,” Stasiak recalls. By all indications, Sylvia was Reed’s greatest asset in his struggle to stay healthy. Stasiak is among many who believe she likely saved his life at the time.

In 1983, Lou contributed “Little Sister” to the film Get Crazy and made a playful comment about aging rock stars by appearing in his first scene covered in cobwebs in the famous Bob Dylan pose on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Despite the film’s failure the song was well received, particularly by his little sister Margaret Ellen (who would change her name to Merrill), who was proud to be the only member of his family to receive good press in a Lou Reed song. At the Bottom Line in 1977 he’d snapped, “Nixon was beautiful, if he had bombed Montana and gotten away with it, I would have loved him. I am not scared easily.” In private Lou could still not control his shpilkes. Why was Bob Dylan always getting these awards and special editions when Lou received virtually nothing in the way of honors? You could see his point. The Velvet Underground are generally now considered to be the second most influential rock band of the 1960s. Lou Reed had always been an artist on the same level as John Lennon and Bob Dylan, but, until the 1990s, without anything like the recognition afforded to his peers. —Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (2014) by Victor Bockris

"Laurie if you’re sadly listening, the phones don’t work, the birds afire, the smoke curls black. I’m on the rooftop. Liberty to my right still standing, Laurie, evil’s gaunt desire is upon we. Laurie if you’re sadly listening know one thing above all others, you were all I really thought of as the TV blared the screaming, the deathlike snowflakes and sirens screaming." —Poem Laurie Sadly Listening (September 2011) by Lou Reed

Gen Z women on Bob Dylan, Lou Reed's "Women"

2025-02-28T05:33:00.012+01:00

‘I’m literally Joan Baez right now’: Gen Z women relate to Bob Dylan’s toxic situationship: Joan Baez met Bob Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City, a Greenwich Village venue, in 1961, when she was a bonafide star and he was new to the scene. They became creative partners, with Baez believing she inspired Dylan classics such as Visions of Johanna and Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan ended the relationship in 1965 as he shot into superstardom, and Baez has since forgiven him: “We were stupid, and you can’t blame somebody for ever. I certainly tried but finally stopped.” Now 84, Baez has emerged as the unlikely hero of A Complete Unknown: yet another woman who stepped out from the shadow of a guitar-playing alt boy. Another woman analyzes their Newport performance of It Ain’t Me Babe, when Baez and Dylan shared the microphone. “Whenever I see this video of Bob and Joan it lowkey fills me with annoyance. I’ve always loved him but ever since watching the biopic it’s like sir why are you screaming over her.”

One counterpoint, per a comment: “that’s just how he sings I’m afraid.” Stephen Petrus, a scholar of 1960s folk music and director of public history programs at LaGuardia Community College, believes that gen Z is “expressing solidarity” with Baez online. “I think there was a sense of mutual opportunism between the pair,” he said. “But Dylan was not always kind to her, and he wanted to be the dominant one on stage, which is pretty clear both in the movie and certain performances.” Diamonds and Rust was the 1975 confessional Baez penned about her relationship with Dylan. For a generation accustomed to modern dating drudgery, lyrics like “Well I’ll be damned / here comes your ghost again” still hit. Source: www.theguardian.com

‘I’m not in this game for the money or to be a star,’ Lou Reed insisted early on. Of course, all rock stars said that, early on, when they were striving for money and stardom. Lou Reed actually meant it. It was, perhaps, the most truthfully shocking thing about him. Reed grew up playing high-school baseball and taking classical piano lessons. Although he later complained about his musical education (‘I took classical music for fifteen years – does that make me legitimate?’) it left him with an impressive grasp of musical theory and composition and ‘a natural affinity for music’. By 1959, Sidney could stand it no longer and made arrangements to have his terrified but still defiant son admitted to Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital, a state-run facility housing more than 6000 patients. For the next eight weeks, Reed underwent hour-long bouts of ECT. It was a devastating experience that would stay with him, mentally and physically, for the rest of his life. The adult Reed would recall with disgust ‘the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue’. The electrodes methodically attached to his head, held in a brace. His juddering body strapped tight to the bed.

He was eventually put on a tranquilliser, Placidyl, and would continue to take a daily dose for several years. Known on the street as ‘jelly bellies’, it became a contributory factor in the deadpan expression Reed was to assume for the rest of his life. He also began having weekly sessions with a psychiatrist. It could be argued Reed never stopped writing about the therapy that nearly robbed him of his mind. That he would never forgive the ice-cold father who put him in the ward or the ruthless doctors who performed the ‘therapy’ upon him. That he would never trust anyone again until his life was almost over, throwing up a shield that only the similarly damaged could ever truly see through.

When John Cale married Betsey Johnson in April 1968, it drove a further rift between him and Lou. Many assumed Lou was so deep into his drugs and his musical trip that he simply had no time to love anybody but himself. It wasn’t true. In fact, Lou was secretly seeing his old flame from Syracuse, the beautiful Shelley Albin. Shelley was now married and had moved with her husband to New York in 1966, since which time Lou and she had begun seeing each other again but only – much to Lou’s disappointment – as ‘good friends’. By 1968, however, the rumour was that this friendship had blossomed once again into a full-blown love affair. Certainly, Lou would claim so, to friends, and by mentioning his love for someone who was married in Pale Blue Eyes. ‘Lou and I connected when we were too young to really put it into words,’ Shelley would recall years later. But, though she loved his fierce intelligence, his flare for the extraordinary bon mot or surprisingly romantic gestures, Shelley had always been wary of what she saw as his ‘crazy side’. And the more he begged her to leave her husband and come and have a real life with him, the more she shrunk from the idea. No matter how hard he implored, accusing her of choosing ‘security’ over ‘love’, Shelley refused to leave her husband.

The first solo album of Lou Reed (1971) was produced by Richard Robinson for RCA Records. At the insistence of Reed, the cover was designed by Tom Adams, a former illustrator of Raymond Chandler's paperbacks, featuring a forlorn chick looking parentless and doomed. This album bombed in USA and also in the UK. In fact, without the intervention of David Bowie, it seems highly unlikely that Lou Reed would ever have had a career. The two had finally met for real in September that year, when Bowie was flown into New York to great fanfare, in order to celebrate his signing to RCA. Dennis Katz, via Richard and Lisa Robinson, brokered the meeting, organising a party at the Ginger Man, around the corner from Madison Avenue. Lou turned up with Bettye and David showed up with Angie.

Tony Zanetta had bonded with David and Angie in London, and nervously affected introductions. Despite of Nick Tosches having remarked that hordes of girls would never have pursued Lou Reed and John Cale like all the girls who went hysterical for The Beatles, Bowie, however, expressed to Melody Maker that for him "The Velvet Underground talked to me more than the Beatles ever did. For me, Lou Reed is the greatest songwriter in rock and roll." The Robinsons felt that they had brought Lou out of retirement and saw his alliance with Bowie move as the ultimate betrayal. After the breach when they weren’t speaking, Lou would say of the Robinsons: ‘They’re little pop people.’ To promote their new star, Reed had fashioned himself in the image of what his English fans imagined he was—a junkie hustler.

However, Andy Warhol, a man with a telling eye for these things, pointed out, “When John Cale and Lou were in the Velvets, they really had style. But when Lou went solo, he started copying other people.” The figure he presented to the public didn’t really exist. Lou didn’t shut up, his insecurities raging as he confronted the English star he’d been told had been featuring Velvet Underground songs in his set, and who he was now connected directly to through their shared relationship with RCA and, specifically, its vice-president of A&R, Dennis Katz. Bowie for his part remained relatively quiet, overwhelmed by the force of the always heavily loaded New York conversation, not sure who was putting who on, or who was being put down. While Angie Bowie, of course, could match Lou or anyone else for fast-track trash talk, NY-style. Bettye, meanwhile, sat quietly, obediently, in her pants suit, looking like ‘an airline stewardess’. Lou, for his part, hardly looked like the hip young former Factory imp that Bowie had been expecting. While David was going through his ‘Lauren Bacall phase’, his blonde hair long and swept over one shoulder, his eyelashes fluttering under the weight of heavy blue shadow, Lou had turned up looking like the guy who came to fix the plumbing; dressed down in head-to-toe denim, paunchy, his hair cut almost Army short.

As Angie wrote in her autobiography: "David always had that knack of looking you in the eye and making you feel you were his only priority at the time. I think David saw Lou and to a lesser extent Iggy as his competition, and his master game was to drag them to his dominion and try to neuter them in some capacity." Leading the backlash in Britain was the NME, whose Charles Shaar Murray characterised Transformer in his review as ‘a collection of songs witty, songs trivial, songs dull, songs sad, none of them really much cop’. It was in America, though, where Lou and Bettye returned home, in time for its release, that the knives were really out. The New Yorker called the album ‘lame, pseudo-decadent lyrics, lame pseudo-something-or-other singing, and a just plain lame band’. Henry Edwards also panned the album in the New York Times. So it was that Lou Reed began recording the album Berlin, that would both become his masterpiece and effectively end his career as a major recording star at that time. Considering where Lou Reed had spent his entire musical career – in the backrooms of the music biz, making records for the doomed to gaze at their reflections in – the subject matter of Berlin is arguably in keeping with the arc of his own artistic narrative. Yet considering he was now coming off the back of a bona fide worldwide hit, it’s staggering how prepared he was to risk it all for an album, masterpiece though it is, as profoundly disenchanted as Berlin.

That while shrewd David Bowie was busy releasing crowd-pleasers like Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed would almost deliberately sabotage his own career in the name of what? Art? Arrogance? Disdain? While in Creem magazine, Robert Christgau refused to be shocked, just merely "too bored to puke at it." He said that the story was lousy and ‘coughed up by some avant-garde asshole’ and he gave it a C. In response, sales were abysmal. Recorded at New York’s Bottom Line club in May 1978, and featuring a superbly splenetic Lou Reed in absolutely blistering form, Take No Prisoners was the live summation of everything the post-Velvets Lou Reed had become. Before the band comes absolutely smashing into the riff of ‘Sweet Jane’, which then goes on for over eight minutes as Lou digresses again into the kind of backstories that future MTV-style story-behind-the-song programmes could never hope to match, including how much Lou hates ‘fucking Barbra Streisand’ for thanking ‘all the little people’ in her Academy Awards. From there the album takes off into something that is part rock’n’roll, part Lenny Bruce comedy act, part confessional, part pure confrontation. ‘Hey, shut up!’ when someone interrupts his flow. ‘Are you fucking deaf?’ at another juncture. A weird musical milieu where ‘I Wanna Be Black’ is suddenly hilarious and self-mocking: ‘Let’s ask the chicks…’ Where ‘Satellite Of Love’ and ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ are soulful and wincingly revealing, played virtually straight. ‘So now everybody’s gonna say Lou Reed’s mellowed, he’s older. He didn’t act mean, he talked. Oh boy. I say we’ll mug you later, all right? You feel better?’

Along the way we are treated to some more classic asides: ‘I do Lou Reed better than anybody else, so I thought I’d get in on it,’ he announces to braying laughter. ‘Hey, watch me turn into Lou Reed!’ He also takes the opportunity to mock his critics, raging at Robert Christgau, calling him ‘a toe fucker’ for his pathetic A, B, C ratings system, telling on John Rockwell of the New York Times, who ‘comes to CBGBs with a bodyguard’. Back home in New York, when pressed whether it was true he had actually hit David Bowie, an unrepentant Lou snapped: ‘Yes, I hit him – more than once. It was a private dispute. It had nothing to do with sex, politics or rock’n’roll.’ That he had ‘a New York code of ethics’. He scowled. ‘In other words, watch your mouth.’ Word eventually crept out though that the basis of Lou’s rage was in David’s response to Lou’s only-half-joking inquiry about whether he would like to produce Lou’s next album. When Bowie answered in the affirmative, but only on condition that Lou ‘clean up his act first’, Lou went insane. His second wife and manager Sylvia would occasionally accompany Lou on his tours, but mainly her role would be as the traditional homemaker. According to Lou, “Sylvia’s very, very smart, so I have a realistic person I can ask about things: ‘Hey, what do you think of this song?’ She helped me so much in bringing things together and getting rid of certain things that were bad for me, certain negative people. I’ve got help, for the first time in my life. And that’s a real change. I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

As Lou told one reporter a couple of months after the wedding: ‘I now know that certain things will get taken care of and looked out for on the home front… I’ve found my flower, so it makes me feel like a knight.’ There was a temptation for those that had followed his career for longer than 15 minutes to treat such quotes as the further stoned ramblings of an arch-deceiver. But this time Lou actually meant it. Opening with the spellbinding ‘My House’, a hymn to his and Sylvia’s new life at the farmhouse in New Jersey, underneath there was a startling evocation of his old friend and ‘the first great man I ever met’, Delmore Schwartz. ‘My Dedalus to your Bloom,’ he almost weeps, ‘Was such a perfect wit…’ Dissolving into the next track, ‘Women’, a subtle, joyous, almost unbearably straight-talking paean to Sylvia and to the whole concept of womanly love, something Lou had never fully embraced since he’d been a boy, wrapped tight in the arms of his former beauty queen mother Toby. Opening with the rockabilly pop ‘I Love You Suzanne’, a hit single for anybody else, a total flop for Lou Reed, New Sensations was so listenable that attracted the attention of an advertising agency executive, Jim Riswold, then chief copywriter for the Madison Avenue's Wieden & Kennedy. As Sylvia approached thirty, she told Lou the time had come for them to have children, characterizing it as a great adventure. Lou, however, saw the question of children through realistic eyes. Stated one friend, “There’s no way Lou would ever have children, he’s the archetypal constant child. At least he can admit that it would be a big disaster if he had children.“

Then Lou met Laurie Anderson. Ironically, the impending collapse of Lou’s marriage did not do him any harm on the professional front. By the time Lou completed work on Magic and Loss, he and Sylvia had begun to talk about getting a divorce and consulted their respective lawyers. Sylvia knew she was going to be comfortable financially—Lou’s financial situation had changed for the better since they had joined forces and even he openly credited Sylvia for this—but the realization that she was going to lose the glamour and drama of being Mrs. Lou Reed weighed upon her. Meanwhile, her lawyer advised her not to move out of their Upper West Side apartment because that would put her in the position of desertion. “He’s got an image to keep up,” said a friend. “Beyond the fact that he’s thinking, ‘God, I’m alone, I’ve got to find somebody else.’ I’m sure in the middle of the night, that’s the reason he calls Sylvia, because that’s when it hits him—‘Oh my God, I’m by myself.’ That picture of him on the cover of Vox [in May 1993] was so awful. He looks like a ghoul. You heard this thing about his liver.

I’m surprised he’s still alive.” For the most part, the positive chemistry of the former Velvet Underground members overcame their collective fear, and Sterling and Moe worked as a buffer between Lou and John. In fact, the reunion might have been a great success if it hadn’t been for the added pressure of Sylvia, whose ego had ballooned out of proportion. According to several people involved with the shows, Sylvia made no secret of her contempt for John, whom she called stupid and untalented. John was convinced that Sylvia had learned everything in this department from Lou, but others were not so sure. She virtually showered contempt on Cale, going so far at one point as to make the curious remark that as he had grown older John had become exceedingly ugly while Lou had grown more and more handsome. Sources: Transformer (2014) by Victor Bockris and Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall

A Complete Unknown (Bob Dylan), All Through the Night (Lou Reed - Not Attention Junkie)

2025-02-21T00:07:00.093+01:00

Why A Complete Unknown should win the best picture Oscar: James Mangold’s biopic – told very much with the backing of Bob Dylan – somehow achieved the impossible: keeping the people with working knowledge of the musical rota at the Gaslight Cafe as interested as those with little more than an acquaintance with Blowin’ in the Wind. And that’s perhaps the key case for A Complete Unknown to win the best picture Oscar. Sure, it’s an excellent movie with a hair-raising performance from its lead, but I think the reason so many younger or non-Dylan fans enjoyed it is, curiously, its capturing of the notion that one man’s art can give people hope for change.

A Complete Unknown might not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s already one of the great mainstream films about the visceral power of art – and at a time when the modern political moment is overwhelming any sense of cultural resistance. Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan is so good that it’s been written off by some as no more than a feat of imitation. There are also impeccable supporting turns. Ed Norton is utterly taken by the kind utopian spirit of Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro repositions Joan Baez as a vital artist who exists separately from Dylan's shadow.

Unlike in the movie, Dylan traveled to Italy in 1962 in pursuit of Suze Rotolo — named Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning) — who had left New York to study abroad. In 1962, Rotolo left the Greenwich Village apartment where she had been living with Dylan and went to Perugia, where she attended the famed University for Foreigners. The Perugia institution has retrieved from its archives an enrollment document in the name of Susan Elisabeth Rotolo, and issued a statement in which professor Sabrina Cittadini claimed that “the love story between Suze and Dylan was full of painful searches.” Cittadini has done some interviews and gathered testimony that one night in 1962 “a very young man emerged from a black taxi” in Perugia’s central Corso Garibaldi, near the university, “with a bouquet of red roses.”

“It was Bob Dylan and he had come from Rome to Perugia to look for his Suze,” who had moved to a different address, she said. Rotolo was 17 when she met Dylan in 1961, not long after his arrival in New York. A self-described “red diaper baby,” she was the daughter of two Italian immigrants: Gioachino “Pete” Rotolo, an illustrator and union organizer, and his wife Mary, an editor and columnist for the American edition of communist Italian newspaper L’Unità. Rotolo’s separation from Dylan, who didn’t want her to go to Italy, is believed to have inspired the songs “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

Following her return from Perugia, Rotolo famously appeared arm-in-arm with Dylan on a slushy Greenwich Village street on the cover of his breakthrough 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” After their relationship drifted, as is shown in the film, Rotolo went back to Italy and in 1970 married Enzo Bartoccioli, an Italian filmmaker whom she had met while a student in Perugia. Bob Dylan called Suze Rotolo his "Soul Twin" in his book "Chronicles" (2016). Source: variety.com

WHY HASN'T THERE BEEN A LOU REED MOVIE YET: I mean, usually Hollywood can't even wait for the body of a pop/rock star to get cold before the biopics begin to get on production. And Lou Reed's story is unique within the Rock world, full of twists, unexpected turns, and odd life experiences. If handled properly, it would make for a great musical film. So what are they waiting for? Maybe enough drugs but probably not enough sex, and very strange rock'n'roll? Maybe a theatrical release would never fill enough seats or maybe it's Laurie Anderson who acts like an angel custodian of her partner's legacy. There's certainly plenty of source material, like those weird and lengthy conversation between him and Lester Bangs, just imagine the glorious wreck of a set you could have with them. When Lou Reed was asked by VH1 in 1999 about some of his favorite songs, Reed picked “Lovin’ You Too Long” by Otis Redding, “Stay With Me” by Lorraine Ellison, “Outcast” by Eddie & Ernie, “Belle” by Al Green, “I Can’t Stand The Rain” by Ann Peebles and “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies.

Lou Reed was one of the coolest and most vitriolic music artists ever. The stuff that rock and roll legends are made of. It would probably be impossible to make such a film without incorporating his attacks on rock journalists, and possibly offering some straightforward insight into the machinery of the music industry. After all, here is a guy who contributed to Paul Simon's One Trick Pony, which has its own harsh critique of the industry's marketing methods, so it wouldn't be certainly PC. So I really don't think any major studio would invest in a film based only in its ability to draw Lou Reed fans to the theaters. Lou Reed was a cult figure, and with the exception of Take a Walk on the Wild Side and his album New York, he spent four decades in a sort of well-publicized semi-obscurity. What would be the dramatic arc of a Lou Reed biopic? Besides, the most notable highlights of his personal life are probably events a mass audience could not assimilate easily. Another reason why a Lou Reed biopic has never been mooted might be due to some legal protections from Reed's sister Merrill Weiner and his widow Laurie Anderson. Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv

Lester Bangs: Lou Reed just may have a better perspective on this supposed upheaval in sexual roles than any of these Gore Vidals and Jill Johnstons. Dudes are coming outta the closet in droves and finding out they are heterosexual! Ha! After recording Transformer, Lou returned to his New York home and surprised the glam-rock fans in 1973 by getting married to a theatre actress named Betty (stage name Krista) Kronstadt. Today I'm going to walk into the dining room of the Holiday Inn, filled with expectation at finally getting to interview at length one of the musical and psychological frontiersmen of our time, Lou Reed. Although it does disturb his friends and fans to see him in such failing health, Lou can find a joke even there.

At one point I asked him when he intended to die. Lou replied: "I would like to live to a ripe old age and raise watermelons in Wyoming." About the glam hysteria, he deadpanned: "The makeup thing is just a style thing now, like platform shoes. If people have homosexuality in them, it won't necessarily involve to wear makeup. The notion that everybody's bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say that if my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something. But I don't feel that way at all. I don't think an album's gonna do anything. It's beyond the control of a straight person to turn gay or a gay person to turn straight. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn't men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?" —Lou Reed: A Deaf Mute in a Telephone Booth (interview by Lester Bangs for Let It Rock magazine, November 1973)

The Bells is by turns exhilarating, almost unbearably poignant and as vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool. And all through the LP, Reed plays the best guitar anyone’s heard from him in ages. As for the lyrics — well, people tend to forget that in numbers like “Candy Says,” “Sunday Morning” and “Oh! Sweet Nothing,” Lou Reed wrote some of the most compassionate songs ever recorded. This album is about love and dread — and redemption through a strange commingling of the two. To have come close to spiritual or physical death is ample reason to testify, but it’s love that brings both artist and audience, back from that cliff, and back from the gulf that can sometimes, in states of extreme pain, be mistaken for the blue empyrean ever. In “Stupid Man,” someone who’s been self-exiled too long, “living all alone by those still waters,” rushes home to his family, desperate not to have lost the affection of his little daughter. Like all of Reed’s people on this record, he’s looking for love. “City Lights” isn’t only about Charlie Chaplin but about a lost America, the implication being that, in these late modern times, all the lights in the world might not be enough to bring us together. In “All through the Night” Reed sings: “My best friend Sally. She got sick. And I’m feelin’ mighty ill myself. It happens all the time. All through the night. I went to St. Vincent’s. And she’s lyin’ on the ground. And I sat and cried. All through the night.”

“Families” is the most personal of all them: “And no Daddy you’re not a poor man anymore. And I hope you realize it before you die. There’s nothing here we have in common except our name. And I don’t think that I’ll come home much anymore.” With “The Bells,” like in “Street Hassle,” Lou Reed achieves his often stated ambition — to become a great writer, in the real literary sense. Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we’ll be your family. We promise to respect your privacy. It’s like what Tennessee Williams said to Dotson Rader when, as described in Rader’s Blood Dues, the latter made an anguished confession about wanting children. Williams just touched the head of a young artist sitting nearby and said: “These are my children.” Lou, you gave us reason to think there might still be meaning to be found in this world beyond all the nihilism, and thereby spawned and kept alive a whole generation whose original parents may or may not have been worthy of them. —The Bells Review by Lester Bangs (June, 14, 1979) for Rolling Stone magazine

Lou Reed - America (Star-Spangled Banner song), 1992.

Reed explained: “I was one of the first Medicare patients. A drug I shot in San Francisco froze all my joints. The doctors suspected terminal lupus but they were wrong. It didn’t matter since I checked myself out of the hospital to go to Delmore Schwartz’s funeral.” “Into the destructive element, that is the only way,” Schwartz had written on a note found in his hotel room. It proved to be a destructive guide Reed would follow for many years. Before The Velvet Underground, there was no such thing as alternative rock. You either had hits or you didn’t. “‘Lou Reed was a character, you know,” said Bob Dylan's friend Bob Neuwirth, who ran into Reed at Max’s a number of times. “There was Lou the kid from Long Island, and then there was the public persona, the professional Lou Reed. But he was very casual. He wasn’t really an attention junkie. Lou didn't like being pursued by groupies like David Bowie or Iggy Pop. He wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to dance on tables, much less so than people like Bowie and Iggy, who were more obsessed with enticing their audiences. Lou was much more dignified. I never found him to be in competition with anybody else. I never felt he was comparing his music to anybody else’s.”

Reed and the Velvet Underground are often perceived as representing a kind of anti-sixties, a tough corrective to the era’s psychedelic utopianism. As always with Reed, however, that impulse in him was counterbalanced by his intense interest in transcendence. Reed attended the Easter Sunday Central Park Be-In in March of 1967. Rob Norris from Hoboken, who would later join The Bongos, met Reed at the Boston Tea Party. “Lou would hold court,” Norris said. “Jonathan Richman was always there, very quiet. People would ask Lou stuff like, ‘How’s Nico?’ or ‘What’s Jackson Browne [who wrote for Nico on Chelsea Girl] doing now?’ Lou would say, ‘What do I look like, a billboard?’ I remember this fan girl who screamed at Lou, ‘You make me so crazy, I just want to kill you!’ Lou just looked at her very kindly and said, ‘Why don’t you just bake me a cake instead?’ It was the sweetest thing.” Jonny Podell, the agent who managed Reed in 1975, asked about Reed’s relationship with Rachel, replied, “You want me to tell you my real feelings? I almost feel bad saying this, but I mean it with real love. I think Lou was a total act. Look, we all present ourselves a certain way, and for me, he was Lou from Long Island seeing how far he could rebel against Daddy the accountant. I thought he became a drug addict because it was cool and rebellious. I thought he wanted to be with Rachel because it was shock and awe. Lou’s feelings about music were real, but the rest was shock and awe.”

Reed himself would later observe that “I always thought one way kids had of getting back at their parents was to do this gender business. It was only kids trying to be outrageous.” According to his biographer Victor Bockris, Reed later denied any involvement in homosexual relationships, insisting he had seen Rachel as a woman. The edgiest moment of Rock'N'Roll Heart comes on its closing track, “Temporary Thing,” a grippingly dramatic confrontation between lovers that Reed acts out as if it were a play. The singer’s bitterness and angry insistence that the relationship is “just a temporary thing” suggest, conversely, that he’s much more deeply invested than he is letting on, and more than he even understands. The effect is powerful and unsettling. On a few occasions, Reed would admit to having done too many interviews while drunk or stoned. The anger he would often express to reporters was, in part, a projection of the anger he felt toward himself for having allowed himself to lose control. He felt humiliated and, consequently, lashed out. Reed once surmised, “You’re going to get interviewed, and you’d better figure out who you are right now, because that’s who you’re going to be forever for them.” That was a fate Reed viewed as a kind of hell, all the worse because he had condemned himself to it with his excesses. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Psychotic Reactions: Lou Reed vs Lester Bangs

2025-02-17T06:19:00.009+01:00

Lester Bangs's “feud” with Lou Reed comes to some kind of insane mutually drunken apex in 1975, where Bangs “interviews” Lou Reed – heckles him, really – trying to get a reaction. This was one of Lester Bangs’ interview tactics anyway: he went in with guns blazing, asking combative questions of his heroes, usually under the influence of a devastating drug cocktail. There seemed to be a method to his madness, or at least an intention behind it: He was driven to distraction by what he saw as the self-seriousness of “rock stars”, and he wanted to pierce through the veil. You read this “interview” though and what you get is the alcoholism, first of all: it’s front and center in Lester’s writing, and it’s how this whole situation even came about. He and Lou Reed sit around drinking, and Lester heckles Lou, and Lou calmly responds, and even when Lou’s people keep coming over and saying, “Lou, it’s late”, trying to wrap things up, Lou brushes it off. He wants to hang out with Lester. Even though Lester is basically screaming at him, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Knowing what we do about Lou Reed, it is amazing that he lasted so long, that he basically survived the 1970s. We were talking about this the other night at the Algonquin: some people’s constitutions are clearly different than the rest of us. What would kill your or me did not kill Lou Reed. But Lester Bangs didn’t make it. Now he was a serious alcoholic from high school, mixed with a dangerous addiction to amphetamines. He was told at age 16 he would die if he kept it up. And he raced to the bottom.

Drugs were such a huge part of the 70s scene, and Lou Reed (obviously) was a huge part of that. Lester Bangs wants to talk about that and there are sections of this interview that reads creepily like two old drug buddies comparing notes on what they take. But Lester can’t help himself: any time Lou seems to settle in, he has to throw some combative barb at him. He is bored by polite chit-chat. Additionally, Lester Bangs was annoyed at Bowie’s influence over his New York heroes. This was published in Creem in 1975. It was one of the many things that Lester wrote about Lou Reed during those mid-70s years. He was obsessed. These were the years of Metal Machine Music, an entire album just of electronic feedback. Lester Bangs’ love often came out as heckling. You can see that in his interviews with Captain Beefheart, too. He asks questions in a rude blunt manner, with a kind of “Now let’s cut through all the BS, shall we?” – he is extremely obnoxious. As rude as he was, Lou Reed seemed to enjoy Lester Bangs, in his smileless way, and had made the mistake of informing Lester that he liked his writing. So Bangs, already out of his mind with sleep deprivation, uppers, and booze, went nuts with ego: Lou Reed likes me, man!! – and then had to deflate it by attacking Lou. But drugs notwithstanding, I love when Lou Reed turns it around to criticize Lester. Lester wants Lou Reed to take responsibility for glamorizing drug use, and he wants to know how Lou Reed feels about the fact that bozos are now going around imitating his lifestyle.

Lou Reed refuses to take responsibility: he’s an artist, he was writing what was true for him, the fact that he had all this influence is just a byproduct. I don’t blame Lou Reed at all for being like, “Hey, man, that is not on me.” But Lester Bangs was interested in those intersections of morality and culture. LB: “Hey, Lou, why dontcha turn off all that jazz shit?” LR: “That’s not jazz shit, and you wouldn’t know the difference anyway.” LB: “David Bowie has ripped off all his stuff that’s decent from you, you and Iggy!” LR: “What does Iggy have to do with it?” LB: “You were the originals!” LR: “The original what?” I went on about Iggy and Bowie, and he surprised me with an unexpected blast at Iggy: “David tried to help the cat. David’s brilliant and Iggy is… stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he’d listened to David or me, if he’d asked questions every once in a while… I’d say, ‘Man, just make a one-five chord change, and I’ll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It’s so simple, but the way you’re doin’ it now you’re just making a fool out of yourself. And it’s just gonna get worse and worse.’ He’s not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and Jim Morrison was never any good anyway….” Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer (“You hit me with a flower”) and Berlin.

I bulldozed on: “Did you shoot speed tonight before you went out?” He acted genuinely surprised. “Did I shoot speed? No, I didn’t. Speed kills. I’m not a speedfreak.” This started out as essentially the same rant Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whisky in 1969, as he sat there in a dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the “energy in the streets of New York,” and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. But now he got downright clinical. “You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do–hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams…?” The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. “I used to shoot Obetrols, man!” “Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols.” Lou was warming to his subject now, rebind up. “You’d be dead, you’d kill yourself.” Then he’s pressing me again. “What’s an Obetrol?” I got mad again. “It’s in the neighborhood of Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyin’ sack of shit! This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed you and you lied every time!” “What’s Desoxyn?” He had just said this, in the same dead monotone. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out. But I was cool. “It’s a Methedrine derivative.” The kill: “It’s fifteen milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some paste to keep it together.” Like an old green iron file slamming shut. “If you do take speed,” he continued, “you’re a good example of why speedfreaks have bad names. There’s addicts and then there’s speedfreaks… Desoxyn’s fifteen milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with paste, Obetrol is fifteen milligrams of Dextroamphetamine.”

“Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?” “No… You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. [I told you he’d stop at nothing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don’t mean heroism.] And even if you weren’t poor you wouldn’t know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your metabolism, you don’t know your sleeping quotient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity…” “The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quoting Ralph J. Gleeson for some reason. I was getting a little dazed. “No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure…” I decided to change my tack again. “Lou, we’re gonna have to do it straight. I’ll take off my sunglasses [ludicrously Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album] if you’ll take off yours.” He did. I did. Lou’s sallow skin almost as whitish yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendentally emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day, but he looked straight at me. Maybe through me. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kept rolling off to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I’d pondered over for months. “Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music and your life?” He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about, and he shook his head. “Like,” I pressed on, “I listen to your records shootin’ smack, shootin’ speed, committing suicide–”

“That’s three percent out of my songs.” “Like with all this decadence and glitter – how much of it would have happened if not for you–” “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” “Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc.” “What’s decadent about that?” “Okay, let’s define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence.” “You are. Because you used to be able to write and now you’re just full of crap. You don’t keep track of music, you’re not on top of what’s happening, you don’t know the players or who’s doin’ what. It’s all jive, you’re getting very egocentric.” I let it pass. Because he was half right. But I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated and stood for so many years. He’d done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn’t have anything to do with. But now, post-Sally Can’t Dance, he's apparently ready to clean up much of his act’s exoskeleton. “I dismissed decadence when I wrote ‘The Murdery Mystery.'” “Bullshit, man, when you did Transformer you were playing to pseudo-decadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence….” Barbara interrupted, “Lou… it’s getting late.” Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He seemed now a petulant kid, up past bedtime. “Oh, it’s fun arguing with Lester.” “But you have to get up in the morning,” she insisted, “and go to Dayton.” “Oh,” replied Lou, hardy guy, “I’ll live through it.” Besides other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict! I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album. -"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature" (1988) by Greil Marcus

“Lou was starting to become enthusiastic about music,” Allan Hyman said of his high school friend, “and he started taking it a lot more seriously than I did at the time.” Once Hyman missed Reed’s cue to end a song one night while playing with The Jades. “Allan was banging away on his drums and he’s looking up at the ceiling and he’s got his eyes closed. Lou reached over and rapped Allan on the head with his knuckles very hard. Allan looked startled and Lou just gave him a glower and we wrapped up the song. I guess that’s sort of indicative of how Lou dealt with a lot of people in his bands over the years.” While it was typical for Hyman and the other boys in Reed’s crowd to find girls to go steady with, Reed took another approach. “We all had long-term girlfriends. Like, for months on end, or a year, we would be going steady,” Richard Sigal said. “All of a sudden Lou would show up with these girls. They were all weird. I had no idea where he found them.” Allan Hyman had a sense of where Reed found some of his girls. “There was a radio station in Freeport called WGBB, and you could call in and make dedications,” he said. “There were so many people trying to call that the line was always busy. But between busy signals you could actually have a conversation with a girl and get her phone number. Lou met a girl in Merrick that way, and Lou took her to the Grove Theater on Merrick Road for an afternoon matinee. On prom night, Hyman was driving and his date was in the front seat, while Reed was energetically making out with his date, a girl from East Meadow, in the back seat. By contemporary standards, such adventures seem relatively innocent. “We didn’t get a lot of sex in the fifties,” Hyman explained. “It was a different time. Most of the people I knew were fairly conservative in that regard.” Sigal noted that some boys in their school were “effeminate”; they appeared gay—or “faggots,” in the nomenclature of that time. Reed, however, was not one of them. “He was always interested in girls—always,” Hyman said. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Jeff Tweedy: Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed are the only lyricists I've heard that come close to Bob Dylan's level. Reed and Dylan are going to rock out. Cohen, no so much.

Anthony DeCurtis: Lou Reed started many genres and he inspired as many artists as Bob Dylan, usually better artists than Dylan inspired. Without Lou Reed (and The Velvet Underground) it’s likely we wouldn’t have punk music, post-punk, college rock, indie rock, noise rock, grunge, new wave, no wave, etc. Dylan reimagined and molded folk-rock genres into his vision and his is a really beautiful vision. But Lou Reed created new genres out of whole cloth. Also, Dylan’s an invented person, a fact he doesn't like to reckon, unlike Lou Reed who has projected a character in order to protect his real self.

There is no real Bob Dylan and almost nothing he says can be taken as the truth with regards to himself or his life. He’s an entirely manufactured character. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just a plain observation. Of course, it doesn’t diminish the greatness of Dylan's music, but we shouldn’t assume that his songs have much basis in his real life (whatever that is). Indeed, Dylan once got an award from the ASCAP in 1986. There was a celebratory dinner, which Dylan showed up to with Elizabeth Taylor. Leonard Cohen was there and he actually did a little press conference with Jennifer Warnes. Warnes said that at one point Dylan took Elizabeth Taylor by the hand and marched her over to meet Cohen and said, "Liz, I want to introduce you to a real poet." Source: medium.com

Happy Saint Valentine's Day!

2025-02-14T03:45:00.009+01:00

Bad Valentine (featuring Classic and Modern screen couples) video. Song "Bad Valentine" by Transvision Vamp.

Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart

2025-02-07T20:13:00.099+01:00

“Never apologize, never explain - didn't we always say that? Well, I haven't and I don't.” ―Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) RIP

"Now it's Andy Warhol's time. Mystic 60's on a dime. Though she kinda likes Lou Reed, she doesn't really have the need. And now she doesn't know what it is she wants and where she wants to go. And will Delon be still a cunt. Yesterday is gone. There's just today. No tomorrow." ―Song for Nico by Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull told an interviewer her former boyfriend accidentally killed iconic rock singer Jim Morrison. Faithfull told Mojo magazine that her then-boyfriend Jean de Breteuil, known as the heroin dealer to the stars, had accidentally killed Morrison by giving him hard drugs that were too strong. "I could intuitively feel trouble," Faithfull told the magazine. "I thought, I'll take a few Tuinals (barbiturates) and I won't go there. But Jean went to see Jim Morrison and killed him. I mean I'm sure it was an accident. The smack (heroin) was too strong? And he died... everybody connected to the death of this poor guy is dead now. Except me." De Breteuil himself was found dead in Morocco some weeks after Morrison's death. Marianne Faithfull: “He was scared for his life. Jim Morrison had OD’d, and Jean had provided him the heroin. Jean saw himself as dealer to the stars. Now he was just a small time heroin dealer in big legal trouble.” Source: www.mojo4music.com

Lou Reed about Jim Morrison's death to Melody Maker (1975): ''I have no respect for him. I didn't even feel sorry for him when he died. There was a group of us in New York, and the phone rang and somebody told us that Jim Morrison had just died in a bathtub in Paris. And the immediate response was ''How fabulous.'' 'In a bathtub in Paris. Fantastic.' That lack of compassion doesn't disturb me. He asked for it. I had no compassion for that silly Los Angeles person. He brought it on himself. He was SO dumb.''

Interestingly, despite David Bowie achieving mainstream stardom sooner than Lou Reed, it was Bowie who was the mega-fan of the Velvet Underground leader and everything Reed represented. “I’d never heard anything quite like it. It was a revelation to me,” Bowie said in a 1997 interview for the documentary Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, recalling the first time he heard The Velvet Underground in 1965. “It influenced what I was to do for the next few years.” Reed had upended all previous tropes. This was a huge inspiration for Bowie, who continued his appraisal by adding, ”One innovation was the use of background noise to create a kind of an ambience that had been hitherto unknown in rock. And the other thing was the nature of his lyric writing. Bob Dylan had certainly brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting, but then Lou had taken it even further into the avant-garde.” It’s why Bowie always referred to Lou Reed as the “King of New York”: “Lou wrote about the New York that I wanted to know about,” Bowie explained in the 1997 interview. “I think probably everybody has their own New York. For me, New York was always James Dean and the Beatniks wandering in the dark streets.” Bowie died of liver cancer in his New York City apartment on 10 January 2016. Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk

An existential dare—cool as a matter of life and death. What happens when mythmaking becomes part of your daily life? The difficulty for any Lou Reed biographer is that sometimes Reed embraced his own persona and took it as far as it would go, and sometimes he talked as though he were merely its pained victim. “I mimic me probably better than anybody,” he told Lenny Kaye in 1975, adding, “I created Lou Reed. I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well.” How to get a critical bead on someone who could go from the delicately tormented “Berlin” in 1973, to the hilarious live set “Take No Prisoners” five years later? Were Reed’s addictions fuelling the spiel, or was he madly doping himself to live up to the myth?

Most of the iconic images of Reed frame a certain unvarying look: his blank, granite face; black leather; black shades. Is this someone who can’t feel, or who is frightened of feeling too much? A badass stare, or narcotized indifference? He was one of those people who carry the air of a child hurt so bad he never quite recovered. Reed’s complicated relationship with his father seems to have been key for his despair. Alas, his childhood goes by in a blur—before we know it, he’s dating girls, forming bands, and scoring drugs. Right on the cusp of his eighteenth birthday, he suffers a major mental breakdown, which his parents are persuaded to treat with electroconvulsive therapy. Reed's sister Merrill wrote in 2015: “I know our family was torn apart the day the doctors began those wretched treatments.”

Lou Reed’s first musical love was doo-wop; as a teenager, he recorded with a nascent group called the Shades, playing guitar and singing backup. 1950s' doo-wop songs were a kind of brief, spectral reveries on 78rpm. A key lesson for Reed, the aspirant songwriter at Pickwick Records, was that the softest song in the world might easily suggest the harshest truths. Lou Reed met Laurie Anderson at an experimental-music festival in New York in 1992. They were together for twenty-one years, the longest relationship of his life, so his late redemption arc with Anderson was heartening. Two days before his death, in 2013, Reed was floating in the “pale blue water of the heated swimming pool at his East Hampton home.” Terminally weak, Reed’s thoughts drifted to his childhood on Long Island’s South Shore. He told Laurie Anderson about a moment when the family was at the beach and Reed affectionately made to hold his father’s hand; he was repaid, he said, with a smack in the face. This was one of the images in Reed’s mind, as he lay dying, of liver disease, at the age of seventy-one. Reed’s father had died of cancer in 2005 at the age of ninety-one. Reed would occasionally visit him when he was in a hospice in the Bronx, but they never truly reconciled. At the service after he died, Merrill delivered a eulogy. Reed did not speak, and he did not stay long. His mother, too, had entered a hospice on Long Island, and Reed would visit her more frequently but, as with his father, only if his sister was there.

Anthony De Curtis: I met Reed in 1996, for a press interview on the occasion of his album “Set the Twilight Reeling.” And what I remember most are his eyes. I got the sense that he was trying to rustle up one of his trademark badass glares but that his heart wasn’t in it. How does it feel, I wondered, to have to navigate not only media obligations but ordinary social encounters as if you are alone in a jungle of adversaries? Now, years later, with all I know about his hurt childhood and addictions, it occurs to me that, under the bravado, Lou actually looked quite scared. His interviews have always been a minefield of irony and false trails. Even his lyrics, as plain-speaking and personal as anything in rock, were more true to the work than to the author. It's a testimony to his complexity that many fans blend the real Reed with his public persona. Even his first wife Bettye Kronstad seemed obfuscated by that conundrum, as her memoir A Perfect Day reflects. “Lou would tell me how much he loved Bettye and get mawkishly sentimental,” Reed’s friend Ed McCormack said. “He’d go on about how he loved Bettye because she wasn’t hip. He’d say, ‘Most of the people I know are like the scum of the earth in a way, and I sometimes think that’s what I’m like. But I believe in fairy-tale princesses.”

Like many people, McCormack saw a performative element to Reed’s alleged bisexuality. “There was a deeply conventional part of him that was very real. I think his parents didn’t understand him. My feeling was that he had learned from Warhol the art of asexuality. He just didn’t seem that interested in sex. He seemed more interested in drugs than anything else. I think he was one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known. He was not a happy man.” “Writing songs is like making a play,” Reed said after Transformer's release in 1972, “and you give yourself the lead part. And you write yourself the best lines that you could. You’re your own director and you get to play all different kinds of characters. It’s fun. I write through the eyes of somebody else. I don’t have a personality of my own. I just pick up other people’s personalities.” Bettye Kronstad took a pragmatic view of all the homoerotic imagery suffusing the album. “It’s just showbiz,” she said. “It was marketing. I thought it was clever. We were just selling the album. I was always coming from the point of view of, how do we get his career going?” Angie Bowie arranged for Reed and Kronstad to live in a nice duplex in Wimbledon, a suburb just outside London.

The most scathing negative review of Berlin appeared in Rolling Stone, written by Stephen Davis: “Lou Reed’s Berlin is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence, and suicide. There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them.” He concluded that Berlin was Reed’s “last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou.” A review like that would sour anyone on critics. “It’s one of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen of anything,” Reed said. “I got one paragraph saying I should be physically punished for putting out the album.” Bettye wanted out: "I didn’t like the way Lewis was treating me. Sometimes he was a total sweetheart. He could be a generous lover, but those nasty mood swings were hell. He accused me of sleeping with my theater teacher. So I said to myself I did try. But it’s not working. That’s what I said to him: We tried. It’s not working. I’m out.” On September 17, 1973, Reed headlined the Olympia theater in Paris, and Kronstad made her escape. Just before she and Reed were set to leave their hotel for the theater, she took off after leaving a message for Dennis Katz that she needed a plane ticket back to New York. Her departure, predictably, had a damaging impact on Reed.

He would collapse onstage from a drug overdose five days later in Brussels. Bettye recalls that some months after their divorce, “Dr. Robert Freymann phoned me to tell me: ‘Look, I’m calling on Lou’s behalf. Lou says he needs you. He wants you back.’ I don’t know exactly how I answered him, but to myself I thought, ‘No. I can’t get back.’” Kronstad never made an effort to reestablish contact with Reed after their divorce, nor did she follow his subsequent career with much beyond a cursory interest. Of the time she spent on the road with Reed, she said, “Bob Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo dodged a bullet.” Shortly after Kronstad remarried, her testimony was subpoenaed in a lawsuit that Reed had filed against his former manager.

“Put all the songs together and it’s certainly an autobiography,” Reed declared to NME in 1990, “but not necessarily mine.” On August 23, 1970, towards the end of a two-month season at Max’s Kansas City, Reed walked off stage and quit The Velvet Underground. It came out of the blue. Loaded was going to be Reed’s most accessible outing yet, and Atlantic were already talking up Sweet Jane as a potential radio hit. “I didn’t belong there,” Reed insisted. “I didn’t want to be in a mass pop national hit group.” He was demoralised. Sterling Morrison had lost interest and thought that Reed had simply “gone insane.” There were rumours that his parents turned up at Max’s one night and drove him home. At the time of the release of Coney Island Baby, Reed had told Lenny Kaye that he was done with the stereotypical “Lou Reed” image: “No more bullshit, dyed hair, faggot junkie trip,” he said.

Street Hassle contains a repudiation of the lifestyle he had been sharing with Rachel. The three-part title track, one of the masterpieces of Reed’s solo career, stands as something of a requiem for their tawdry, druggy street lives. As Rachel disappeared and Sylvia Morales became a romantic force in his life, Reed identified as heterosexual, and in the cover of Street Hassle, he looks more masculine in contrast with his hedonistic image of Coney Island Baby. Reed once described the nearly eleven-minute “Street Hassle” as his answer to the question, “What would happen if Raymond Chandler wrote a rock-and-roll song?” Take No Prisoners was released in November of 1978. Repeatedly, Reed rails against critics, insulting John Rockwell and Robert Christgau. “Fuck you! I don’t need you to tell me I’m good,” Reed spits. Christgau’s response in his Village Voice column was: “I thank Lou for pronouncing my name right. C+.”

DeCurtis: I asked him if the Velvets legacy ever became a burden. “Not really,” Reed said. “What could be a cooler thing to be a member of? It’s like playing for the New York Jets when Namath was there. And every lyric that was ever sung by the Velvet Underground was written by me.” In 1989, Reed released his masterpiece “New York,” his grittiest effort after “Berlin” and his best work since 1978’s “Street Hassle.” It was not a celebration of his town. He dealt with the corruption of patriotism, the selfishness of the elites, poverty, drug addiction, and child abuse. While some of Reed’s work seemed intensely personal, he told me that most songs he wrote were “not autobiographical.” “It’s more of an amalgam of people,” he said, adding that even songs he sang from a first-person point of view should be regarded as if they’d been written from the third person. “They’re very personal, done with a great deal of distance,” he said. “I try to keep myself invisible.”

Though Reed was very proud of “Magic and Loss,” he was frustrated by its mixed reception. “I kept getting told, 'This is too depressing,'” Reed said. “I think that “Magic and Loss” was about love and friendship. It is sad, but very emotional, also. These are not bad things. And I don’t see why a contemporary work of music can’t contain all these things. But when they do contain these things, you’re thought of as being too cerebral, or too down. I remember reading this book by Saul Bellow where he was quoting Walt Whitman and he wrote, ‘Until Americans and American poetry can deal with death, this is a country that has not grown up.’ There might be something to be said about that.” Over the years, Reed and I also talked about musical good times.

Reed was not averse to melodic lightness, as can be heard in songs like “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” and "I'm Sticking with You" with the Velvets, and “I Love You, Suzanne,” "Hooky-Wooky" or “Egg Cream” as a solo artist. Sometimes, those upbeat songs took his listeners by surprise. Predictably, the overall sunniness of “I Love You, Suzanne” and New Sensations as a whole alienated some longtime Reed fans who continued to measure his every move by the standards of the Velvet Underground. Reed said they shouldn’t. “There seem to be people who only like it when I write—in quotes—‘depressive’ things,” Reed said. “It’s not that I resent it, but I can’t pay any attention to that. I mean, there’s got to be more to life and more to me than that. And I’m not about to sit down and write another song about drugs. Somebody else will have to do that for this generation. I already did it." Reed noted that one critic’s take on his persona in the ‘70s had been “very dark and foreboding. 'A poet that’s going to burn out quietly at 5:30 in the morning with no one there to care.' A very negative notion that bears no relationship to myself.” Reed admitted he was bipolar and he had certainly wrestled with his demons—in song and in person. Source: www.newyorker.com

Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Lou Reed

2025-01-12T03:41:00.025+01:00

The best way to understand Bob Dylan is through his music, but even then, he still magnificently blurs the line between authenticity and mystery. Since arriving in Greenwich Village and developing a new enigmatic image while romancing Suze Rotolo, the singer-songwriter has kept the public guessing. However, one topic that Dylan speaks with candour about is his love of music and the artists that inspire him the most. Most notably, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams moulded him from a musical perspective, teaching him the key structures of songwriting. Nevertheless, they were from a different generation to Dylan. Hank Williams passed away at just 29 in 1953. Fortunately, Dylan met Guthrie in 1961, and he also inspired the first song he ever wrote, ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie.’ Another early hero of Dylan’s was Buddy Holly, despite their musical differences. When Bob Dylan was Robert Zimmerman, he was another teenager, awe-struck by the magnificence of Buddy Holly and The Crickets.

Despite having a tragically short career due to his sad passing at 22, Holly’s impact changed the music industry forever. Alongside fellow forebearers such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, Holly helped bring rock ‘n’ roll into the mainstream, allowing it to take over in the 1960s. While Dylan had folk leanings rather than rock ‘n’ roll, he admired Buddy Holly greatly. If Dylan could have rocked out like Holly, he would have done. Instead, he knew that his musical instincts lay elsewhere, and if he tried to replicate his brilliance, it would have been an inauthentic impression of his idol. They may have had different backgrounds, but few made an impression on Dylan as Holly did upon witnessing him perform in concert. During his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dylan paid tribute to his first idol, who walked so he could run, explaining, “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18, and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues.”

As Buddy Holly was only a few years older than Dylan, the singer-songwriter felt a strong connection to the star. The concert occurred on January 31st, 1959, when an 18-year-old Dylan saw him perform in Duluth, Minnesota. Heartbreakingly, it would be one of the final times Buddy Holly would ever play rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s an evening which has lived long in Dylan’s memory. Dylan continued: “Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before.” After winning the Grammy for ‘Album of the Year’ with Time Out Of Mind in 1998, Dylan recalled the life-changing concert in his acceptance speech and explained how it inspired his award-winning album: “When I was 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don’t know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.” Every music lover has a specific gig from their teenage years that stands out for sentimental reasons, and for Dylan, it was Buddy Holly in Duluth. From that moment on, he channelled Buddy Holly’s spirit into his craft by carving out his own archetype, just like his hero did.

The late Lou Reed is remembered for many things. After all, he pioneered fusing the avant-garde with popular music, was one of the first transgressives in songwriting, and was a key figure in the avant-garde rock genre. While the New Yorker was synonymous with a certain degree of discomfort musically and theme-wise, this mirrored his nature as a human being and that he was, by most accounts, a misanthrope. Outside of his music, Reed did his bit to prop up this character. This included making it clear that he hated other prominent artists, such as The Doors, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa, and his constant dismissal of journalists. Andy Warhol was angry when Reed fired him as the band’s manager. And at some point later they must have fallen out even further, as a cassette recently turned up of demos Reed had written about Warhol in 1975. In one song he criticised Warhol for his lukewarm attitude toward the death of Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Andrea Feldman and Eric Emerson. In another song demo, Reed expressed the wish that Warhol had actually died in 1968. Of course Reed tried to put these ill-harboured and mixed feelings right when he wrote Songs for Drella with John Cale in 1990.

Laurie Anderson on Lou Reed: "Sometimes we argued about things. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together. When you marry your best friend of many years, it's really special. But the thing that surprised me about getting married to Lou was the way it altered time. And also the way it added a tenderness that was somehow completely new. To paraphrase the great Willie Nelson: “So many people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that’s what makes the jukebox spin.” Lou’s jukebox spun for love and many other things, too: beauty, pain, courage, history, and mystery. Lou was a prince, and a fighter." Anthony DeCurtis: "With Lou Reed, there was this leather‑clad invulnerability that I think he tried to convey, but there was a lot of insecurity underneath that. He was a very private guy; he would never have wanted me to write a book. He had a very complicated relationship with his often contradictory feelings." Bettye Kronstad: “Lou had become abusive with everybody on our last US tour. He almost gave me a black eye after hitting my sunglasses,” Kronstad wrote. “Then I gave him two black eyes, and that stopped him from being violent. Everybody knew he was abusive with his drinking, his drugs, his emotions. He was incredibly self-destructive then.” The problem Reed had finishing Berlin, Bettye sarcastically explained, “might have had something to do with all the fucking drugs and drinking he was doing. With Lou, people that he loved became part of him, so I got to be part of that incredible self-destructiveness.”

Things had gotten so bad that Kronstad flew to Santo Domingo to get a 24-hour divorce from Reed. The legal standing of such a divorce was complicated, and Kronstad demanded alimony for 5 years plus a settlement for her work as assistant at the Morgan studios in London. Kronstad remained in their apartment and Reed moved out. “I don’t know where,” she said. Then, one night, Reed called her from a local restaurant that had been one of their favourites, the Duck Joint, on First Avenue between 73rd and 74th Streets. “He asked ‘Can you meet me here?’” Kronstad wrote. “I was in a pretty good mood so I went. He said, ‘I’ve stopped. I’ve quit it. I won’t do that stuff. I’ll play it straight. We can do this. I need you. Can I just come over and talk about it?’” Kronstad let herself believe in him again. “I had invested a great deal of my life in him, so I guess there was a part of me that wanted to be convinced.” Talking about the character of Caroline, Bettye noted, “I think Nico is in there. Lou had loved her and she was German. Someone once said that Caroline was a combination of all the women in Lou’s life, and I think to a certain extent that’s true.” But even when Reed finally did complete writing the album’s 10 songs, things didn’t get easier. “I remember the morning I woke up and found him in the living room next to a consumed bottle of Johnnie Walker Red,” she wrote. “It was 8.30 in the morning and I became very upset. His drinking didn’t usually begin until at least the afternoon.”

In Perfect Day, Bettye looks back on their initially idyllic life together on the Upper East Side; Lou’s struggle to launch a solo career after leaving perhaps the most influential rock band of all time; his work and friendships with fellow stars David Bowie and Iggy Pop; and his descent into alcohol and drug abuse following the success of Transformer, which sent him spinning out from gentle soul to rock’n’roll animal and brought a swift and calamitous end to their relationship. The result is a poignant meditation on love, loss, writing, and music. Bettye Kronstad was a teacher, freelance editor, and theater professional. She attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, studying with Sanford Meisner and Bill Esper of William Esper Studios in New York City. She attended Iona College for her master’s degree in English education. For twenty years she taught English and theater in inner-city public high schools in the Bronx and Harlem, New York; Minneapolis, Minnesota; New Mexico; and Texas. Widowed, she moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with her two daughters, the loves of her life. Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk

Happy New Year 2025!

2025-01-01T00:38:00.007+01:00

Mae West.

Ann Miller.

Piper Laurie.

Jane Greer.

Rhonda Fleming.

Loretta Young.

Betty Grable.

Dorothy Lamour.

Joan Crawford.

Rita Hayworth.

Anita Louise.

A Complete Unknown film: A story of Bob Dylan (The Grinch) for Christmas Day

2024-12-22T03:55:00.015+01:00

Blonde on Blonde is food for speculation. As usual, Dylan’s explanation doesn’t get you any wiser: “I have no idea where that came from, but I’m sure it was with the best of intentions … No idea who came up with it. I certainly didn’t.” This was also the case with Brecht On Brecht, a play that Dylan attended in the autumn of 1961, on the advice of Suze Rotolo. The piece about Bertold Brecht made a great impression on him. Another possibility is a reference to Warhol's actress Edie Sedgwick – reportedly an inspiration for many of the songs on the record – who had her hair bleached. After her return from Italy, Dylan and Suze Rotolo did reunite, but Dylan seems to be stuck in the role of the abandoned, wounded lover. Moreover, Joan Baez was now in the picture. It could be argued that the song, at least in its original design, was written with his first great love Suze Rotolo in mind. The subtitle in that sketching stage is “Fourth Street Affair” and that is not very cryptic – it refers to the apartment in which he and Suze lived until August ’63, 161 West 4th Street. The reverie in the autobiography Chronicles, that Suze might have been his spiritual soul mate (“I still believe she was my twin”) and he records his memory of the end of the relationship with Rotolo: “Eventually fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop”.

Many testimonies of intimates from the mid-sixties make a point of Dylan’s nasty side, his habit of verbally insulting less gifted guests to the bone, surrounded by a few loyal disciples such as Phil Ochs and especially Bob Neuwirth. Suze Rotolo: "When he was on his “telling it like it is” truth mission, he could be cruel. Though I was never on the receiving end of one of his tirades, I did witness a few. The power he was given and the changes it entailed made him lash out unreasonably, but I believe he was trying to find a balance within himself when everything was off-kilter." Although, according to Marianne Faithfull, Dylan's friend Bobby Neuwirth was the worst: “Dylan had a reputation for demolishing people, but when people told these stories it was really Neuwirth they meant. Neuwirth and Dylan did such a swift verbal pas de deux that people tended to confuse them. But the most biting commentary and crushing put-downs came from Neuwirth. I never saw Dylan’s malicious side, nor the lethal wit that has often been ascribed to him. I never thought of him as amusingly cruel the way I thought of John Lennon. Dylan was simply the mercurial, bemused center of the storm, vulnerable and almost waiflike.”

“Visions Of Johanna”: The discussion focuses on the questions about who Louise is, and who Johanna could be. Joan Baez and Sara Lownds? Suze Rotolo and Edie Sedgwick? In any case, Dylan sketches a contrast between a sensuous, present Louise and an unattainable, idealized Johanna, and lards the sketch with dream images, beautiful rhyme play and impressionistic atmospheres. Who are these ladies? Louise: Joan Baez, friend and former lover, a great folk singer. Suze Rotolo, an idealistic fighter for human rights and women liberation. The electricity howls in her face. Mona Lisa: Maybe Edie Sedgwick. She was the muse of the famous artist and painter Andy Warhol. Her lifestyle was shocking. Maybe she is smiling because she has got a fix of heroin. Sedgwick was subject of speculation as having caused the motorcyle accident and Dylan hiding her temporarily at his house while he recovered to avoid further gossip. Dylan and Sedgwick had a strong argument and she left him for Bob Neuwirth, whom she left later to be admitted to a physchiatric hospital in Santa Barbara.

In A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, Suze Rotolo talks about her grandparents who had immigrated from Sicily. Her parents were blue collar but also imbued with culture, affiliated to the American Communist Party. Rotolo recalls with affection his romance with Bob Dylan, then a young up and coming artist recently arrived to New York and she introduces to the bohemian Greenwich Village. He proposes marriage to her, but Rotolo's family didn't like his cynical persona and she leaves him after aborting a child of his. Rotolo thinks she contributed to the awakening of Dylan about the civil social causes in the Kennedy era but she doesn't want to exaggerate her role in the inspiration he took for his songs. Rotolo surmises that Dylan juggled three romantic relationships at once with her, Sara Lownds and Edie Sedgwick, and that Sedgwick rebutting Dylan inspired the folk-rock milestone Like a Rolling Stone.

This idea of self-mythologizing, but as the theme is underexplored, it can’t help but come across as indicative of A Complete Unknown’s unwillingness to fully realize Dylan, or make him enough of a rounded character is his own biography. This is further apparent in Chalamet’s performance, which isn’t “bad” only to say that eventually it goes from being distracting and strange to just something that you’re suddenly used to. Chalamet sounds a bit like Dylan if Dylan spoke mostly through clenched teeth, keeping his lips very close together, recreating Dylan’s distinct, nasally cadence. But his interpretation manages to draw out the adenoidal qualities of Dylan’s voice beyond reality, and the effort to match Chalamet’s vocal recreation to the original owner wades into caricature. At the end of the day, Chalamet is a competent actor. But he isn’t Dylan. He never once truly feels like him, no matter how well his hair is coiffed or the cigarette hangs off his lips.

This isn’t realloy a chameleonic triumph where the actor disappears into their subject. Mangold’s characterization is admirably non-obsequious, portraying Bob Dylan as an aloof genius prone to selfishness and bitterness, navigating tumultuous relationships with his mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and his romantic partners: artist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and folk contemporary Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Strangely, Edie Sedgwick and maligned Phil Ochs are conspicuously absent from his story. In the end, A Complete Unknown neither meaningfully conveys Dylan’s mythology nor exposes him as a complete human being. Source: https://awardswatch.com

Like A Rolling Stone - Edie Sedgwick

2024-12-07T04:13:00.011+01:00

Jeff Tweedy: I had a girlfriend in high school who dragged me to big arena rock shows. I went to see Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar, and the Who’s first “farewell” tour at the Ralston Purina Checkerdome in St. Louis. It all sounded so bad to me. I wasn’t just bored, I hated those shows. Nothing about the experience was exciting to me. Something always seemed overly macho about how bands postured themselves on those enormous stages. I’m not sure why the macho-ness bothered me. I loved Black Flag, and there was nothing more macho than Henry Rollins at that time. Actually, that was my least favorite part of Black Flag, but it was a different type of macho. For some reason I’ve always been stupid or arrogant enough to walk away from negotiations when they start to feel gross or insulting. It looks like it’d take a lot of confidence, but I don’t feel like an exceedingly confident person. I think I’m just stubborn. And I hate feeling greedy. “No record deal? Okay, it’s back to small budget for me.” And I’m stubborn because there’s only so much I’m willing to compromise artistically. I met Bob Dylan when Wilco played a College Media Journal showcase in New York City in 2006. “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man? Good to see you!” Bob had spoken to me! And I was left in his wake trying to play it cool, but I could feel all of the other folks around us looking at me. It was impossible to play it cool. “Dylan talked to me. Did you guys see that?!”

The alternative rock scene has been in a constant loop of stagnancy. Nothing explosively innovative or inventive has really burst onto the scene in years, in my opinion. I may just be too harsh a critic, but even the bands I admire like the National Post, Beach House, Animal Collective, Paramore, Tame Impala, or the '90s acts still going like Mercury Rev, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Kim Deal and such seem a bit pessimistic about the future. Rock isn't where it's at in terms of mainstream appeal any longer – I think Arcade Fire's The Suburbs was the last time a rock-oriented record did massive success. I do not count ear bleeder monotony like Imagine Dragons. The 2020s is the decade of the singer-songwriter pop star (usually with half a dozen or more co-writers), Reggaeton beats, EDM, and generic hip hop. Underground rock artists are the ones with substance, but they haven't a prayer of a chance of hitting it big. Even quality groups like the Last Dinner Party or the Warning just don't have the appeal of, say, nepo babies who have become pop stars. One thing I appreciate about Rick Beato's chart review videos is how he demonstrates many things are regurgitated endlessly by producers and force-fed to the public. Most of mainstream acts play it safe on new records with little divergence or variety – they stay within a comfort zone. Whatever has certain substance or innovation is more or less pushed to the fringes on the outskirts of the Internet, booked in some clubs or as opening acts, and you just have to become familiar with them via name recognition. It's lamentable but I don't anticipate another big indie era or alternative rock era. That ship has sadly sailed. Source: pitchfork.com

Was Bob Dylan The Mystery Man in Like a Rolling Stone? Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez, Marianne Faithfull and Bob Neuwirth have been suggested as possible targets of Dylan's famous song. Dylan's biographer Howard Sounes warned against reducing the song to the biography of one person, and suggested "it is more likely that the song was aimed generally at those Dylan perceived as being clueless". Sounes adds, "There is some irony in the fact that one of the most famous songs of the folk-rock era—an era associated primarily with ideals of peace and harmony—is one of scorn." Mike Marqusee has also written at length on the conflicts in Dylan's life during this time, with its deepening alienation from his old folk-revival audience and clear-cut leftist causes. He suggests that Like A Rolling Stone is probably self-referential: "The song only attains full poignancy when one realises it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home.'" Dylan himself has noted that, after his motorcycle accident in 1966, he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me." Edie Sedgwick inspired Bob Dylan to produce Blonde on Blonde, one of the best records he ever produced. “Just Like a Woman” — “with your fog, your amphetamines and your pearls” — was clearly written directly to her; “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” — “You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine” — was written directly about her too. Source: popmatters.com

Edie Sedgwick was the “heroine of Blonde on Blonde,” as Patti Smith stated. From my memory, I thought that we learned that they did have a love affair and that’s why she was the “heroine” of that album, and also indirectly referenced in Like a Rolling Stone. However, in 1985 Dylan pretty much affirmed he never had a relationship with her but knew Bob Neuwirth did. Andy Warhol commented: “I liked Dylan, the way he created a new style… I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I’d ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I’d invariably get hearsay answers like ‘I hear he feels you destroyed Edie [Sedgwick],’ or ‘Listen to Like a Rolling Stone — I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse, man.’ I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that, but I got the tenor of what people were saying — that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.” Warhol took to satirizing Dylan in films like “More Milk Yvette” (which included a harmonica-playing Dylan lookalike); a spoof called the “Bob Dylan Story”; and the repeated playing of a Dylan song at the wrong speed in “Imitation of Christ”. In reality, Dylan hadn’t damaged the Elvis painting, but he had gotten rid of it. All accounts — including from Dylan himself — have him trading the Elvis to his manager Albert Grossman for a sofa, a decision he’d come to regret. Grossman’s widow, Sally, later sold the painting at auction for a reported $750,000.

There are those who maintain (notably Michael Gray) that Edie Sedgwick probably had no relationship with Dylan at all. She had an affair with Dylan's sideman Bob Neuwirth, however. One theory is that "She's Your Lover Now" is directed to Neuwirth and that Sedgwick is the "she," with Jack Elliot as "your friend in the cowboy hat." Sedgwick was quite a significant part of Dylan's life in the mid-60s so it wouldn’t make sense to not include her in A Complete Unknown but I don’t imagine Dylan gave his approval. I can imagine Like A Rolling Stone being shown in the movie as being his hit song rather than what the song is actually about. In Like A Rolling Stone, besides the Edie Sedgwick subtext, I've always felt like he's singing to himself. As if to say, "now that you got everything you ever wanted, how does it feel?" I think this song illustrates what Dylan mentions in Blood on the Tracks, that "you find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom."

Dylan may have barely known her but multiple sources from the Warhol/Factory camp thought they were dating. As far as Nico she was gifted I’ll keep it with mine and she had an intimate relationship with Dylan, so if they weren't not intimate, that would explain why Dylan ended up so burned out by Edie's volatility. “You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns. When they all come down and did tricks for you.” This could refer to the many suitors that Sedgwick had. Dylan refers to them as “jugglers and clowns”, as in, men trying to entertain her, trying to catch her attention. Dylan thought of them quite literally as desperate clowns. He comments that she had little care for their feelings, and probably refers to himself as one of these “clowns”, as he was well known to have pursued her vigorously. Dylan's first wife Sara Lownds accused him of 'accidental' violence domestic and received near 40 million dollars. Since 2000 Dylan is rumored to have a common law marriage with Susan Pullen. —The Double Life of Bob Dylan (2024) by Clinton Heylin

Wilco, Jeff Tweedy, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana

2024-11-11T05:01:00.019+01:00

Jeff Tweedy: I have hung this corny frame on my living room's wall. How’s everybody doing after Election Day? Not so good, probably. A lot of you are probably feeling about the same way I am, scared. My thoughts on our current moment: I think we all saw a new world and we were all excited about that coming true. And I think a lot of our fellow citizens saw that world as well, but were much more afraid of it. I don’t feel like I should get to hate people I don’t know. So I’ll just say that I think they’re very fearful. And I don’t think we should be fearful. We saw that new world, and I don’t think we should let it go. It’s going to be clearer, and clearer. And maybe we just need to get better at explaining why it’s not to be feared. Personally, I’m making a choice to not be fearful. It’s not easy. But I have good examples in my life of people who saw something far on the horizon, and worked for it, fearlessly, for long long periods of time. I hope that hope isn’t ever an unwelcome message. Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable. But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse. When you heart grows cold, that's when they think they have truly won. Source: siriusxm.com

Jeff Tweedy wishing happy birthday to his wife Sue Miller Tweedy: "Happy birthday to this blinding beam of light and goodness. Everything, every decision I make, every song I write… every ounce of everything I do is an act born from the sincere desire to manifest in myself some sense that I’m worthy of her love—that I really deserve a place by her side. I love you, Sukierae!" When Tweedy met Sue Miller in June 1991 while she was booking Wilco at the Axe Lounge club, Nirvana had exploded in the charts with their anthem "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and Tweedy looked a bit jealous sitting uncomfortably on a chair while he observed her future wife cheerfully listening to Cobain's band. In contrast to Nirvana, Wilco were another underground alternative rock band struggling to be popular.

Despite of their different personalities, Tweedy fell in love with Sue Miller and proposed to her two years later. At that time, Sue was living with her best friend Julia Adams and she seemed hesitant to abandon her single lifestyle's jollies. Tweedy reacted at first refusing her phone calls, then progressively embracing their friendship and finally wooing her with his charisma. They got married in August, 19, 1995, a year after the grunge star Kurt Cobain's death. According to Greg Kot in his book "Wilco: Learning How to Die", Jeff Tweedy could have tried to replace Cobain's figure in the alternative rock landscape, but Tweedy was always reluctant to be solely associated to a musical genre.

No one can say for certain what went through Kurt Cobain’s mind in the hours before his death. As he said just a month before the end, ‘I feel like I’m performing in a circus.’ It is known that, after struggling to overcome his addiction, Cobain had again fallen prey to heroin. The toxicology report confirmed that, along with traces of Valium, there were 1.52 milligrams of the drug in his blood, three times the normal fatal dose. According to the doctor who performed the autopsy, ‘it was the act of someone who wanted to obliterate himself, to literally become nothing’. Courtney Love would tell a reporter that police could identify her husband only through fingerprints. Dental records were no use, because nothing was left of his mouth. A relative named Beverley Cobain, a psychiatric nurse, adds: ‘Kurt was, without doubt, bipolar – he had a psychological disorder which caused him to swing from wild ecstasy to manic despair. In trying to self-medicate with heroin, he certainly made the problem worse. That was the background to his shooting himself.’ According to this reading of Cobain’s life, an heroic but fragile talent, hemmed in by the demands of the market, took the only way out to maintain his dignity and preserve the legend. Yet another image was that of the young, tormented demi-Christ – a perception Cobain angrily denied yet hastened to play up to – whose early death was somehow of a piece with a violent, beleaguered life. For TV host Andy Rooney, simply ‘Kurt Cobain was a loser’. Yet another view was that Cobain, an admittedly rare and fragile talent, had betrayed his radical ideals, as if by becoming so successful, and thus by inference ‘selling out’, he had in some way impoverished his gifts.

This was a theory heard frequently in Seattle. Cobain in person was nothing like Cobain the legend. He was an intensely shy man, poorly educated, and prone to the same vanities and excesses he despised in others. Like all his family he was over-sensitive and never forgot a word of criticism. Like anyone who grows up feeling more intelligent and more put-on than everyone else, he was afflicted with a strange mix of ego and insecurity. Cobain succeeded because his voice tapped the eternal themes of frustration, bewilderment and anger. Suddenly a sizeable part of the world’s youth had a hero figure they could relate to. The adulation had just the opposite of the desired effect on Cobain. When he realized that, for the first time in his life, perfect strangers not only admired but worshipped him, he was confronted with all his old feelings of inadequacy and doubt, and it was this weakness that killed him. He had to know that injecting himself with Buprenex or heroin merely exacerbated a craving for more drugs, and that by dulling the nervous system he did nothing for his creative faculties. ‘His addictive side came about then,’ says Beverley Cobain. ‘From early childhood it was a religion for Kurt that everything could be cured by drugs.’

As someone whose protest lay chiefly in drugs and punk rather than sex and alcohol, it was true that Cobain was almost blushingly monogamous compared to other rock stars. His shyness was real, as was his modesty. According to Michael Azerrad, ‘he slept with a total of two women on all of Nirvana’s tours. To sleep with someone who he worked with or liked was as natural as playing the guitar, but to screw someone just for sex was out of the question.’ Azerrad saw in Cobain’s taste for independent women a warped reflection of his lost relationship with the mother who abandoned him. Love explained: ‘We bonded over pharmaceuticals,’ she told Azerrad. ‘I had Vicodin extra-strength, which was pills, and he had Hycomine cough syrup. I said “You shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach.”

In a short time the meetings and chemical exchanges evolved into dating, sex and a full-blown affair. For all the lies, half-truths and skewering of Love as a drug-fuelled opportunist who bought into celebrity, it is certain that she stuck with Cobain when even his immediate family and colleagues deserted him. In a long harangue in Spin, Love would complain, ‘All they want to talk about is how much drugs Kurt and I did. That is not all we did. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We rented movies, and ate ice cream. We would read out loud to each other almost every night, and we prayed every night. We had some fucking dignity.’ All of those things were true. Until he was nine, Cobain was raised in a normal working-class home; although he could never reject Aberdeen enough, some of its habits and customs stuck with him. Among these was a refreshing humanity and simplicity of outlook that survived the ravages of his later fame. When in the mood, he could be exceptionally kind, sensitive and considerate of others. He was, in some senses, the antithesis of rock star vanity.

Once the first delights of marriage had worn off it became obvious to both that, although they complemented each other in many, perhaps most, respects, in others they were woefully incompatible. Love rebelled fiercely against the shackles of domesticity, while Cobain’s vision of a perfect match was of a relationship so close that every confidence was shared, no private agenda pursued. He wanted to possess and to be possessed. This vision filled his wife with horror. Not only was there the matter of her career, there was also the threat of Cobain’s drug habit. Looking at Cobain’s life in full, it is tempting to see a kind of insecurity of which his need for a strong wife was typical. He honestly thought he was marrying above himself. Courtney Love compensated for his crippling lack of self-esteem. ‘She’s my one and only chance,’ Cobain described her to Grohl. What he wanted from marriage was constant encouragement, loyal support, and affection. Within reason, Love gave them to him. That she also valued her independence and her career was understood, and in July 1992 Hole signed to Geffen for a sum that led one cynic to tell Newsweek, ‘sleeping with Kurt Cobain is worth a million dollars.’

According to Frank Hulme, ‘They were not compatible. They may have loved one another. I doubt they’d have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.’ The Vanity Fair article destroyed Cobain’s spirit, hastened his physical decline and almost crushed him financially. In part this was due to the irrational fear that the world was out to ruin him. There was also the ‘suicidal grief’ of losing old friends. Cobain was hurt deeply when his own colleagues began to turn their backs on him, leave the studio when he arrived, and make excuses to be elsewhere when he invited them to dinner. The most shocking feature of Cobain’s outbursts was not his savaging of Nirvana but his scornful dismissal of the world. Cobain recognized that, though ‘one or two people’ were worth saving, ‘the same fuckwits were always around’, that ‘ninety-nine per cent of humanity could be shot if it was up to me’, and that rock music had done ‘literally nothing’ to transform society. By late 1994 rumours had surfaced of a Hollywood ‘biopic’, potentially starring Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt or Stephen Dorff (whose role in S.F.W. is highly reminiscent of Cobain). -Kurt Cobain and the Grunge Scene by Christopher Sandford (2024)

Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan (rock biopics), Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy

2024-10-30T05:42:00.031+01:00

20th Century Studios this morning shared a first look at Jeremy Allen White suited up as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere, the studio’s forthcoming biopic based around the making of the musician’s 1982 album Nebraska. The film is currently in production. In the first look pic, the lead actor can be seen donning a typically Springsteen-esque fit: a plaid shirt and biker jacket. Scott Cooper is directing the biopic. Also starring are Harrison Sloan Gilbertson, Odessa Young, and Paul Walter Hauser. White and Springsteen recently linked in real life at the premiere of the documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band.

Jeremy Allen White appeared at the film’s screening at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he posed for pictures with Bruce Springsteen. Speaking to Deadline at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards, White teased the project. “I’m so excited to start this thing,” he said. “We’re going to start pretty soon. You know, I don’t want to talk about it too much. It feels wrong before getting there and starting the thing.” He continued, “But I can say I’ve got a really beautiful team of people helping me and Bruce has been really lovely and supportive and available, which has made this whole process an extra joy. His support and Jon Landau, his management support, who has a large role in the film as well. So I feel really lucky.” Source: deadline.com

What’s the plot of A Complete Unknown? While the plot is still largely under wraps, we know that the film will follow a 19-year-old Dylan’s first arrival in New York City from Minnesota, as he seeks a career in music and soon skyrockets to worldwide fame. “It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with, like, two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years,” James Mangold told Collider during a red-carpet interview in April 2023. “First being embraced into the family of folk music in New York, and kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief.” Searchlight Pictures has released a new promotional video for the Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown. The new clip finds lead actor Timothée Chalamet recreating Dylan’s iconic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video; it features Chalamet’s original rendition of the song, too. A Complete Unknown hits theaters on December 25, 2024.

Columbia Records will release the film’s soundtrack, and it will include Chalamet’s cover of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, the 1965 album that featured “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” reached No. 38 in Pitchfork’s “The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s.” Joining Chalamet will be Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Dylan’s fictional girlfriend, inspired by the musician’s real-life former girlfriend and muse Suze Rotolo. Edward Norton will play Dylan’s fellow folk musician Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro will play a young Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook is rumoured to play Johnny Cash. Chalamet confirmed in a December 2023 interview that 70% of the soundtrack had already been recorded in a Californian studio with Nick Baxter, the film’s music supervisor. In the same interview, the actor also revealed that Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, sent Chalamet 12 hours of unreleased Bob Dylan music from 1959 to 1964. “This might earn the ire and wrath of a lot of Bob fans, rightfully,” Chalamet pre-warned. Source: pitchfork.com

What defined Lou Reed’s best work—besides fearlessness, beauty, intelligence, and switchblade New York City wit—is what places it at the highest level of art making: its empathy. Reed wrote his way into other voices, not all of them pretty. These kindred humans, regardless of gender, spoke as if with Reed’s own voice, a compassionate ventriloquism geared toward understanding both the subject and himself. And when you sensed Reed was writing about himself—in a song like “Waves of Fear,” as visceral a depiction of end-stage addiction and the panic-attack hellscape of withdrawal as any musician is ever likely to record—he seemed to be doing it to commiserate as much as to exorcise. New York, his most consistent and satisfying album attacked the greed and hypocrisy of America’s poisoned political and economic systems as they played out among the haves and have-nots on his hometown streets. And toward the end, in a storybook denouement, he achieved a sort of redemption and grace through love.

“It was a devastating thing for me,” Reed said of Kennedy's assassination. “I thought Kennedy could change the world.” Indeed, a generation looked to Kennedy—the youngest president in history, elected at forty-three—and Jackie Onassis as the ultimate inspiration. Even that nascent counterculture skeptic Bob Dylan was impressed. “If I had been a voting man,” he affirmed in one of his memoirs decades later, “I would have voted for Kennedy.” John Cale believed that Reed’s “fears about sanity” led him toward “provocative behavior, actively and purposefully trying his darnedest to set people off. That made him feel he was in control, rather than living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. This put him in the position of perpetually seeking a kind of advantage for himself by bringing out the worst in people.”

“I was just this poor little rock and roller,” Reed later lamented wryly, “and here was this German goddess, Nico. We didn’t really feel we had a choice. I mean, we could have just walked away from it, or we could have a chanteuse. So we had a group meeting and said ‘All right, we’ll have a chanteuse, and I will write a few songs for her, and then we’ll still be the Velvet Underground.’ Y’know, why not?” Ronnie Cutrone, a Factory assistant around that time, characterized Nico as “a weirdo” and suggested love was out of her wheelhouse: “You didn’t have a relationship with Nico.” At that time, speed was the ideal New York City drug. Distributed widely via legit prescriptions from psychiatrists and general medical practitioners, as well through gray-market diet clinics and assorted black-market channels, it’s estimated that between 8 and 10 billion amphetamine tablets were ingested annually in the United States between 1963 and 1969. Unlike SSRI drugs, they lent themselves to indiscriminate abuse.

Shelley Albin, Lou Reed's first steady girlfriend said of ‘I’ll be your mirror’: "that was our conversation, word for word.” According to Albin, whose eyes are not blue but hazel, the title was an in-joke for her. She’d still meet up with Reed occasionally, and it was clear he was still hung up on her. “I wrote this for someone I missed very much,” Reed confessed years later—adding with a chuckle: “Her eyes were hazel.” After their break-up, he kept calling Shelley Albin, wanting to reconnect. Shelley Albin had moved into Washington Square Village with her new husband, who taught at NYU. Reed had remained in touch (“He always knew where to find me,” she recalls) and still carried a torch. When she heard his voice on the phone, she told him “You must have the wrong number”, and hung up. Albin destroyed all the letters Reed had sent her over the years. Albin had been Reed’s great muse, his Beatrice, his Guinevere, his Fanny Brawne and Daisy Fay Buchanan. She was the only woman that Reed had considered having a child with. Whatever hopes he might’ve held out for their reunion, it was clear that she would not be leaving her husband anytime soon.

Reed first met Bettye Kronstad in the spring of 1968. She was visiting their mutual friend Lincoln Swados at Mount Sinai Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Reed was sauntering out of the elevator as Kronstad was leaving Swados’s room. “Hey, you! Beautiful!” Reed snapped as she breezed past him. Bettye Kronstad: "At seventeen, Lou’s parents had sent him to see a psychiatrist who prescribed EST for his depression and mood swings. During the summer of 1959, he was treated at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, New York, where the EST treatments were administered without an anesthetic. At that time, the procedure involved putting him on a wooden gurney with a rubber block between his teeth. This was an experience that scarred Lou for life. It is commonly thought that EST was prescribed to Lou in order to cure him of his ‘bisexual tendencies,’ but he never told me this or even alluded to it. I think he told journalists this to be more sympathetic to the gay community, and in part to broaden his appeal to that audience. From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I would—without fail—leave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles’ heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again."

Transformer was convoluted in production, and Reed was a hot mess during the sessions. “I think he was on heroin,” recalled Tony Visconti, the glam-rock sculptor who produced T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, of meeting Reed for the first time. “He was just sitting in the corner on the floor kind of nodding off. I remember kneeling down and shaking his hand and saying ‘hello’ and he just looked up and was all glazed over.” For Reed, the stress of what he knew was a make-or-break album must have been overwhelming. Reed often spoke in a troubled whirlwind about his Velvets legacy (“I’m in the odd position of having to compete with myself”), self-doubt, and self-loathing. In a published story, Rolling Stone's writer Ed McCormack collaged Reed’s end of the conversation: "Sometimes I have this horrible nightmare that I’m not really what I think I am… Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in my shoes? I mean, I have made every hip scene and sometimes I think I’m just a phony c*cksucker like the rest of them. I mean, Bettye is not hip at all and that’s why I love her. I want to keep her that way. I mean, she is so pure… And I believe in sparrows… I believe in pretty princesses. There are hip people, brilliant people, yet on another level they are the scum of the earth, so how can I know what I’ve done means anything… But I still love rock and roll…”

In early January, 1972, Lou Reed and Bettye Kronstad were married in their apartment at 402 East Seventy-fourth Street. The couple had upgraded with the help of Reed’s $15,000 Transformer advance: their new place had a small foyer, parquet wood floors, a large living room, separate bedrooms and dining rooms, and an eat-in kitchen with a street view. Kronstad’s family, not thrilled with their daughter’s choice of husband, declined to attend, so Reed chose not to invite his family. Reed was evidently a mess. He was also performing a new role as solo artist, with a new persona, perhaps applying lessons Kronstad had shared from her acting classes and interview strategies he’d gleaned from Warhol. Reed began riffing—on alcohol and drugs (“I take drugs just because in the twentieth century in a technological age there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal”); on the glam-rock embrace of queer chic (“The notion that everybody’s bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited”); and on his unruly creativity (“I may come out with a hardhat album. Come out with an anti-gay song, saying ‘Get back in your closets, you fuckin’ queers!’ That’ll really do it!”).

“There were countless mornings I found myself sitting, half-awake, on the concrete steps of Dr. Freymann’s office,” Kronstad recalled, “to get his famous injection of vitamins laced with amphetamine. Lou loved them more than any other drug he took.” A week later, after discovering Reed injecting heroin, Kronstad reached her limit, and demanded a divorce. Not wanting to involve her family, she allowed Reed’s legal team to arrange a flight to the Dominican Republic, where she checked into a hotel, and a day later had secured legally binding divorce papers. She was home that night. They’d been married less than a year. The next evening, Reed phoned, and a day later, came to the apartment with roses, wine, and take-out from a favorite restaurant. He pleaded his case, made an impression, and before the month was out, the couple were both on a plane to London for the Berlin sessions. Krondstand recalls: "With women Lou was polite, shy, and almost behaved like a high-school kid. It was how you could tell if he was really interested in you. He could be passionate, although typically maintained his guard up. One day Lou mentioned a dress he thought I could wear, which surprised me."

"He never told me what to say, how to act, or what to wear. He always told me I looked great. The dress Lou was talking about was one I had bought in London, when Angie and I went on a shopping spree on the Kings Road. It was a 1930s white, beautifully draped, crepe floral dress. I wore my red stiletto platform heels to match. Lou kissed me. ‘I love you,’ he said quietly. ‘There are no words to tell you how much, Princess.’ From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I would—without fail—leave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles’ heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again, as he had before we starting going together." According to Kronstad, Reed added heroin to his diet of scotch and cocaine. It was as if, in advance of the album drop, he was determined to stage Berlin as a reality drugs show. By Kronstad’s account, Reed threw a drunken tantrum preshow, accusing her of depleting the coke stash. She tossed a glass of milk in his face and stormed out of their hotel room. The next day, she was on a flight home to New York, and never spoke to him again.

But Reed’s struggle with drug and alcohol abuse was ongoing, and one might reasonably imagine much of his life being shaped by the shadow of panicked anxiety: the need to keep it at bay by self-medicating, lashing out at anyone who might trigger it, and making art that muted it, stared it down, or otherwise defused it. And if “Waves of Fear” was more purely visceral than anything Reed had written to this point, it was at the same time a reminder of the harrowing competition for that honor in the Reed oeuvre: the visions of piled-up corpses in “Heroin”; Waldo Jeffers’s blood-spurting skull in “The Gift”; the body strapped to a table in “Lady Godiva’s Operation”; the orgiastic dope-shooting murder scene in “Sister Ray”; the self-loathing of “Candy Says”; the lacerating loss of “Pale Blue Eyes”; the misty entrails of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams”; the brains served on a plate in “Ocean”; the electroshock treatment in “Kill Your Sons”... But for all its horrors, The Blue Mask was an album, like so much of Reed’s work, about the mythic, and sometimes real, salvation of love. Beyond its titular pun, “The Heroine” posited Reed waiting to be rescued by a figure who “transcends all the men.” And the album’s final song Heavenly Arms is a touching doo-wop tribute to “Syl-vi-a,” whose name Reed incants, breaking it into syllables until meaning dissolves into longing, a love letter to the former Sylvia Morales, who might have reasonably, after hearing the album in its entirety, bolted for the door. But she didn’t.

Lou Reed remarked about “Waves of Fear”: “It’s about anxiety and terror about which nothing can be done. Terror so strong that the person can’t even turn a light on, can’t speak, can’t make it to a phone. Afraid to turn a light on for what they’ll see—for what he is.” “What motivation,” Bruno Blum asked, with astonishment, “could you possibly have to approach that subject?” Reed responded flatly and plainly, as if there was just one conceivable answer: “Empathy,” he said to the French author and journalist Bruno Blum. Reed was performatively frank about his tastes. He called the Beatles “garbage” and claimed he never liked them, while the Doors were “painfully stupid and pretentious.” He expressed dislike for Stephen Sondheim (“Broadway music I despise”) but admiration for Randy Newman. Reed was largely dismissive on the topic of Bowie. He talked, reluctantly it seemed, about working with him in the early ’70s, claiming his own glam-rock turn was basically bandwagon-jumping, “trying to be part of whatever was going on,” that he’d “watch what David did” and “do my version of it.” Blum asked if Reed had “ever looked at Bowie and thought there was some promise there, or some things that you liked?” Reed said flatly, “No,” waiting a beat before adding, “David’s very bright, he knows what he wants and how to do it—I think.”

Set the Twilight Reeling was an album about Reed’s relationship with Anderson, who’d prove the most lasting of his muses. “The Adventurer” was hard rock addressing “a queen reborn”, declaring her “my one true love.” On “Hooky Wooky,” the narrator meets his lover’s exes at a rooftop soiree and plays it cool, despite wanting to hurl them into the traffic below. In many ways, Reed’s lack of commercial success had worked in his favor. While much of the Beatles catalog and other ’60s–’70s touchstones became frozen in cultural amber, Reed’s work was comparatively timeless. Reed’s relationship with Anderson seems mirrored in “Turning Time Around,” a poignant conversation about the meaning of love. The album also interrogated extreme forms of need and desire. In almost all situations, the presence of Anderson changed Reed. Colleagues breathed a sigh of relief when she joined him on tour. Things immediately became more familial: group dinners were more common, and tensions slackened. “He worshipped the ground she walked on,” says a former Sire/Warner records employee who feels that Reed, quite literally, “would have died for Laurie.”

Although Shelley Albin knew Reed first, Erin Clermon maintained the longest relationship with him, on and off from the late 60's to the early 90's. Erin Clermont recalls going often to the Mineshaft club with Reed. One of the few relationships Reed maintained from his Syracuse days (Erin was a good friend of Shelley Albin), Clermont was frequently a lover and a confidante, someone Reed could call at 3 a.m. to talk or to meet up at some late-night dive. On 3 June 1980 Reed visited Erin Clermont to tell her about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, adding that he was taking Lithium for his problem. Lithium salts have been used as a treatment for depression and manic behaviour, but overuse can result in lethargy and serious side effects. From what Erin could see, lithium ‘completely fucked him up.’ He knew he could count on her. “Lou was a very strange person. I had a lot of fun with him, but he had a cranky side. Lou had an act going all the time. I was eternally interested in him, not in love with him, although we did love each other. There were periods when he gave me the impression of having little or no interest in sex. I’d come home and there’d be like thirty-two hang-ups on my answering machine,” Erin recalls. “I knew then he was trying to get in touch with me, and I’d just have to make up my mind whether I was going to answer his next call or just turn off the phone and get some sleep.” —Lou Reed: The King of New York (2023) by Will Hermes

Kurt Cobain was probably the last rock star when rock music actually mattered as a cultural force. Cobain was the last rock star who (unwittingly) embodied all the profound contradictions of The Rock Star mythology as we know it. He was good-looking, a delicate soul, with an ear for melody and gift for crafting lyrics in a singular way, who both embraced and rejected much of the mythology of rock and roll. He wanted it, and he hated it. He had a great voice and he wasn't afraid to use it to express his inner anguish. Beyond that, he seemed a confused, retiring, angry kid who never got over his parents' divorce and their subsequent (perceived) rejection of him as a teenager. That feeling of rejection uniquely informed his character, and people really latched onto it. Cobain redefined what "rock star" could mean, and all of a sudden a rock star meant someone like him, so a rock star could be an anti-star. This contradiction has stayed with us ever since. Cobain wrote that he first had used heroin in Aberdeen in the late eighties; but former friends contest this, since he had a fear of needles at the time and there was no heroin to be found in his circle. He did occasionally take Percodan in Aberdeen, a prescription narcotic.

In early November 1990, he overcame his fear of needles and first injected heroin with a friend in Olympia, after his break-up with his first official girlfriend Tobi Vail from Bikini Kill. He found that the drug’s euphoric effects helped him temporarily escape both his heartache and his stomach pain. The next day, Kurt phoned Krist Novoselic. “Hey, Krist, I did heroin.” Krist cited his Olympia friends who had died of heroin addiction and warned Kurt that heroin wasn’t like the other drugs he’d done. “I remember literally telling him that he was playing with dynamite.” But the warning fell on deaf ears. Though Kurt promised Krist he wouldn’t try the drug again, he broke this promise. To avoid Krist’s or Grohl’s finding out, Kurt used the drug at friends’ houses. He found a dealer who was selling at Evergreen State College in Olympia. On December 11, 1990, Kurt sought medical help for his stomach condition, seeing a doctor in Tacoma. This time Kurt was prescribed Lidox, a form of clidinium. The drug didn’t seem to help his pain, and he discontinued it two weeks later when he got bronchitis. The year ended with a New Year’s Eve show in Portland at the Satyricon. According to his biographer Christopher Sandford, who painted an unflattering portrait of the grunge superstar: “Cobain was isolated, easily led, and self-obsessed. Cobain was also sick with a bipolar disorder resulting in alternate bouts of depression and mania.”

In 2009, NME reported that a film about Kurt Cobain was in the works based on Charles Cross's groundbreaking biography of Cobain "Heavier than Heaven" (2002), which would have likewise been the title of the movie, but the only film that resembled loosely the life and tribulations of the grunge superstar was Last Days (2005) directed by Gus Van Sant, starring Michael Pitt as Blake, a suicidal musician who obviously is a stand-in for Cobain. Courtney Love, who was expected to having been the executive producer of Heavier than Heaven, said she wanted actor Ryan Gosling to play her late husband Kurt Cobain in the film, and she wanted Scarlett Johansson to portray herself. According to Rolling Stone magazine the pre-production didn't ever kick-off, despite having an additional cast lined up aside from Ryan Gosling and Scarlett Johansson: Justin Long as Krist Noveselic (Nirvana's bassist), Topher Grace as Dave Grohl (Nirvana's drummer), Cate Blanchett as Eric Erlandson (guitarist and songwriter for Hole). Also in talks were Emile Hirsch as Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, and Toni Collette as Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Source: www.nme.com

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - A Film About Wilco, directed by Sam Jones in 2002. "Both Nonesuch and Reprise are owned by AOL Time Warner. In other words, the same suits who supposedly found Wilco's approach too artistic to tolerate when the band was working for one part of the company apparently found it commercially viable when the band was working for another part. In the movie, this comes across as simply an ironic twist of fate. But it's more than that. In fact, Nonesuch's move makes the whole "victim of multinational capitalism" narrative look rather disconcerting. After all, if Reprise's axing of Wilco was really the inevitable result of a corporate ethos that privileges commercial appeal over artistic integrity, then Nonesuch's decision makes no sense." Source: www.slate.com

Jeff Tweedy traces his life from his childhood in Belleville, a town he describes as "depressing and depressed in all of the familiar ways common to dying Midwestern manufacturing hubs." He took to music early, listening in his family's attic to the Replacements, discovering "a secret self. A better self than the one I was stuck with." It was in high school where Tweedy made a friend who would change his life. He and his classmate Jay Farrar bonded over their shared love of music, and soon formed the band Uncle Tupelo. The group released just four albums before breaking up acrimoniously; their record No Depression would lend its name to an alternative-country fanzine, and later, to the genre itself. Not unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy actively demythologized the figure of the rock-’n’-roll hero. Instead of painting a self-indulgent portrait of bravado, Tweedy related tales of social awkwardness and panic attacks overcome by hard work, claiming vulnerability as his defining artistic trait. Reluctant to talk about the grunge genre or Cobain, Tweedy said to Pitchfork in 2015 when Montage of Heck was released: "The documentary is about the abrasion of fame. It is a wrenching analysis that many fans have been craving since the terrible suicide of Kurt Cobain, capturing the humanity of a rock star, not just the extent of his image."

Jettisoning the hackneyed image of the womanizing rock star, Tweedy defied that archetype, recounting a haunting story about a sexual encounter with a female friend named Leslie (25) when he was just 14. After Farrar left Uncle Tupelo after a bitter quarrel over Farrar's girlfriend Monica, Tweedy and his remaining bandmates formed Wilco, whose sophomore album Being There gained critical acclaim. Tweedy met his future wife Sue Miller in 1991 at the Chicago club Lounge Ax and they were married on August 9, 1995. In 2001 Tweedy would fire Jay Bennett from the band. Tweedy suggests that he and Bennett were enabling each other's addiction to painkillers, writing, "I fired Bennett from Wilco because I knew if I didn't, I would probably die." Tweedy's music has never shied away from darkness, but he's also never been afraid to celebrate joy. His personality, like his music, has been alternately sorrowful and triumphant. Source: npr.org

Jeff Tweedy and her wife Sue Miller (married August 9, 1995). Jeff Tweedy: "There are only three people I’ve committed myself to completely for the rest of my life: my wife Susie, and my sons Spencer and Sammy. My actual family. My wife is Susan Miller Tweedy. I’m tempted to say that if you aren’t married to her then your life is crap. But hearing her voice in my head, I’m thinking better of saying such a thing. See, even without consultation, she’s been steering me toward a subtler and kinder way of saying what I want to say. Which all goes to show what a force she’s been in my effort to get better. After 29 years of marriage and over 30 total years of going steady, I still can’t believe my good fortune. Somehow the coolest and funniest woman alive thought enough of me to take my hand. I love her more every day and I wouldn’t be here without her." Source: www.avclub.com

Dennis Quaid and The Substance

2024-10-21T06:04:00.013+02:00

Bad movies are very common in Dennis Quaid’s filmography, particularly recently, but it is rare for him to actually give a bad performance. When you write a great deal about acting, a question like “Is there a good actor with such a terrible filmography as Dennis Quaid?” is the kind of thing that can keep you up at night. When I’ve posed this question to colleagues over the years, some doubt my assertion that Quaid is a good actor, others that his filmography is uniquely bad, but I think any honest examination of his work will lead to the same conclusion. Let’s start with the filmography. He’s had over 110 film roles with very, very few high points. In stark contrast to other prolific actors like Nicolas Cage, Quaid hasn’t led a classic or important film, and he’s made a lot of terrible ones. Many of his films don’t even have the decency to be worth hate-watching and instead, like The Long Riders and Wyatt Earp, are merely boring. Yet he is almost always good in these films. Often, he’s the best thing about them.

In The Day After Tomorrow, he undergirds Jack Hall, the sad dad and prophetic scientist, with real vulnerability and need. His performance as the tubercular Doc Holliday in Wyatt Earp, which required a punishing physical transformation, is electrifying in its death-soaked charisma. Unfortunately for Quaid, his scene partner for much of the film is Kevin Costner, whose performance seems borderline comatose. Quaid managed to make another epic during this period, 1983’s The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman. The film, originally a box-office flop, now a beloved and influential classic, chronicles the true story of the first Americans in space. Quaid is again not the film’s focus; instead, he plays Gordon Cooper, an Air Force test pilot whose nickname (Hot Dog) tells you a lot about him. Hot Dog is filled with the same yearnings, ambitions, and rage as Mike from Breaking Away.

After The Right Stuff, Quaid began racking up leading roles. He starred in three sci-fi films: Dreamscape, Enemy Mine, and Innerspace. The latter, which co-starred Martin Short and Meg Ryan, remains surprisingly charming. In it, Quaid plays Lt. Tuck Pendleton, a down-on-his-luck Air Force test pilot. The Rookie is a sentimental, sun-dappled story of a man who, in early middle age, makes a long-shot attempt to pitch in Major League Baseball. This Disney film would not work were it not for Quaid’s world-weary turn as Jim Morris. He eschews the kind of big, star-centered performance he could have given and instead embodies Jim Morris as a real man with real struggles, working his ass off to make his dream come true. Quaid doesn’t flash that typical smile once in Flesh and Bone. Instead, he plays the damaged Arlis Sweeney, a drifter who stocks vending machines in rural Texas. Arlis is a decaying isotope of a man, the leftovers of a childhood spent with his criminal father Roy (James Caan) and, as a result, being witness to a horrible crime. Instead of wearing his heart on his sleeve, he keeps everything inside. Instead of ambition, he has stasis.

Quaid was a bigger than life character as Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire (1989), whom he impersonated really well. Alongside, Quaid has done stellar work in supporting roles. He’s excellent in Far From Heaven, Postcards From the Edge, and Traffic. In the satirical body-horror film The Substance, he's playing an ogre of a TV executive named, unsubtly, Harvey. Quaid’s performance in The Substance is at once subtle and also so over the top it breaks the surly bonds of earth. But it is, again, exactly the right style of performance for this film. It’s that sense of fitting a genre that makes Quaid such a good actor. Put him in a blockbuster as a cardboard-cutout dad devoted to finding his kids, and he’ll make him believable. Want him to play a psychic who solves people’s issues by going into their dreams? As Dreamscape proved, he can do that too. He can be the divorced dad in a wholesome kids movie like The Parent Trap or the uptight reverend in Footloose.

Whether playing the GOP president Ronald Reagan or a sleazebag TV mogul in The Substance, he adapts himself to the project, never signaling to the audience that he thinks the work is beneath him. The vast gulf between his dedication and his judgment has resulted in a remarkably varied body of work, one that has very few good movies but even fewer bad performances. Perhaps this is why we like Quaid so much, even if getting to enjoy his acting means watching films that make us want to die: He does the work. That is the job of most actors—to do a good job day in and day out, regardless of the project. That is what it means to be a professional, rather than a star. A professional spends their life working in a largely interpretive art form in an industry that rarely grants them much control over the final product. Few of them win awards. Many of them, like Quaid, wind up in a lot of crap. But there is beauty to be found in the work of artists who always show up, even, or maybe especially, when the project doesn’t deserve it.

We’ve all dreamt, at one time or another, of being better versions of ourselves. But the notion of relentless self-improvement is something filmmaker Coralie Fargeat pushes to the extreme in her new feminist film The Substance. A bone-chilling body horror that’ll make even Cronenberg disciples squirm, it stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-esque, ex-Hollywood movie star who’s made to believe that she’s aged out of the industry by a slimy executive, pointedly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Shaken by her careless discardment and more self-conscious than ever, Elisabeth is drawn in by a mysterious advert for The Substance, a fluoro-green fluid that, if taken correctly, will produce “a better you.” A younger, more beautiful you.

Enter Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, a younger doppelganger who promptly replaces Elisabeth as the face of the hugely popular televised exercise class she once taught and embodies every facet of her life – with only the halo of youth as her shield. Fargeat makes the horror of insecurity tangible, blowing it up into a living, breathing monster. Because injecting The Substance comes at a cost: Sue and Elisabeth can only swap roles for two weeks at a time. And increasingly, Elisabeth and Sue are at odds, battling for dominance and power.

Whereas Elisabeth clearly loathed Harvey, shallow Sue seems flattered by his leering attentions and adulation. And although the faceless suits at The Substance HQ repeatedly instruct Elisabeth to work with Sue rather than against her, that’s easier said than done when you’re literally being ripped apart from the inside out. Self-inflicted violence, ultimately, sits at the very heart of The Substance. But Fargeat has brought it to life as a bitingly satirical, absurdly funny, nauseatingly gory (we can’t emphasise that enough) film version. Coralie Fargeat said in the Q&A at Toronto International Film Festival that she was influenced by Requiem for a Dream and Cronenberg's body horror.

"I love genre films that allow you to dive into an alternate reality that’s so far from the real world, where the rules can be whatever you want them to be. There’s also Robocop by Verhoeven or Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. I’m interested in societal violence and how that gives way to horror. I think that’s what generates real horror–society. The fear of invasion. That’s what I relate to most strongly." And her advice to actresses Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley was: "I hope that we can feel at ease in our bodies the way we want. I hope we feel empowered to feel sexy or not to feel sexy, that we don’t feel judged, that we feel free. But In The Substance, when the characters finally like themselves, is when both become a monster. So here's a huge tongue-in-cheek element to their story, and I think that is very key to the point of the film.” Source: slate.com

The five best horror films of all time (Variety)

2024-10-10T04:03:00.014+02:00

Diabolique (Les Diaboliques) (1955): Only in France would a man’s wife and mistress team up to do him in. But it’s what happens next that makes Henri-Georges Clouzot’s black-and-white shocker most interesting. Véra Clouzot (who was married to the director at the time) and Simone Signoret drown Paul Meurisse’s character in the tub, then dump his corpse in the school pool. Instead of being discovered there, as they’d planned, the body goes missing—and eerie, impossible things start to happen. Seconds after the twist ending plays out, a warning appears: “Don’t be diabolical,” pleads the message, instructing viewers not to spoil the surprise for others. We wouldn’t dare, other than to say what makes the movie so effective even today is that audiences don’t know what they’re watching. Is it a murder mystery? A ghost story? No wonder Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make the movie himself—but Clouzot beat him to it.

Rosemary's Baby (1968): By the end of the 1960s, the idea that the devil was at large in the world didn’t seem like a far-fetched notion. Roman Polanski’s brilliantly disturbing thriller is rooted in a fearful vision of pregnancy but it also winks at a society that’s warming up to court the apocalypse. It’s the most intimate movie about Satan ever made. Mia Farrow, in a Vidal Sassoon haircut that becomes a ghoulish form of death-camp chic, gives a memorable performance as Rosemary, the innocent wife of an ambitious stage actor (John Cassavetes) who supposedly makes a deal with the cult of devil worshippers next door. They will summon Satan to make Rosemary pregnant, and he’ll get the career he wants. Ruth Gordon, as the devil’s noodge who assigns herself to look after Rosemary, personifies the banality of evil, and the film generates such supreme paranoia and suspense that it stands as one of the last great pieces of classical movie-making to emerge from the New Hollywood.

Psycho (1960): Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film is such a landmark of cinematic horror that it’s almost hard to believe how it was greeted in 1960: as an effective but decidedly low-rent affair, a kind of sordid fun house. Sixty-four years later, there’s a reason that every detail and motif of “Psycho”—birds, drains, eyes, windshield wipers, stairway, swamp, madly shrieking violins, not to mention Mrs. Bates’ Victorian-bunned head—is nothing less than iconic. Hitchcock took his TV crew and made a trapdoor Gothic mystery of primal terror that invites us to watch ourselves watching it. In the film’s most famous scene (78 shots of agonizingly protracted living death), he pulled the plastic shower curtain out from under us so profoundly that it’s as if the movie were killing off not just Marion Crane but God himself: the sense, going forward, that anyone’s goodness would be not enough to protect them. The more you watch “Psycho,” the more you see that Anthony Perkins’ performance channels an instrospective terror for the ages.

The Exorcist (1973): William Friedkin’s film is about a twelve-year-old girl who either is suffering from a severe neurological disorder or perhaps has been possessed by an evil spirit. Friedkin has the answers; the problem is that we doubt he believes them. We don’t necessarily believe them ourselves, but that hardly matters during the film’s two hours. If movies are, among other things, opportunities for escapism, then “The Exorcist” is one of the most powerful ever made. Our objections, our questions, occur in an intellectual context after the movie has ended. “The Exorcist” is one of the best movies of its type ever made; it not only transcends the genre of terror, horror, and the supernatural, but it transcends such serious, ambitious artistic efforts in the same direction as Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film contains brutal shocks, almost indescribable obscenities. That it received an R rating and not the X is stupefying. The evil feels extreme to the viewer at times, but also it feels always believable. In this day and age, would you trust the Catholic Church to fix it?

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): Very few horror movies possess the quality of a true nightmare — that transcendently scary bad dream you can’t wake up from, because it feels like it’s really happening. Yet as more and more people have analyzed it, most critics and film buffs agree that “Texas Chain Saw” turned out to be a true masterpiece of terror. Tobe Hooper directed it with a lyrical suspense worthy of an existential grindhouse Hitchcock. He took the story of five post-hippie teenagers driving a van through the Texas wilds and turned it into a plunge into the American abyss. The film’s central image is that of a mentally arrested mute named Leatherface, who wears a mask of human skin and wields a power tool that metes out torture and death. He’s the granddaddy of the slasher genre’s masked killers (Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger), but those all operated out of rage. Leatherface was driven by something else—he was a butcher, going on a rampage that seemed to act out something larger than mere homicide. You could call it the slaughter of human empathy.

And there’s another reason “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” has cast such a shadow over the last half-century of horror films. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” it created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago. The film channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what “Chain Saw” revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot

2024-09-14T06:02:00.007+02:00

Heading out West, Ronald Reagan was joining one of the largest population migrations in American history. Between 1935 and 1938, roughly a quarter of a million people fleeing drought and dust would pack up all their belongings and relocate to California. But, unlike the destitute and desperate Okies, Reagan was joining one of the most influential, fabled industries in the entire country—and one of the few to stage an economic rebound by the late 1930s. The movie studios had been battered by the Great Depression but had recovered faster than most other sectors. By 1936, average weekly attendance was up to eighty-eight million people a week, a new high, as moviegoers flocked to these “dream palaces” to escape the misery of their lives. By 1939, the nation had more theaters (15,115) than banks (14,952), and Hollywood was producing 80 percent of all motion pictures in the world. Louis B. Mayer—head of the most successful studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—was the highest-paid executive in the country, with an annual salary of $1.3 million. This era would later be acclaimed as the Golden Age of Hollywood, with 1939 dubbed the “Greatest Year in Motion Pictures.” Even movies that seemed to have nothing to do with the Depression offered much-needed psychological balm to audiences of the 1930s. As noted by cultural critic Morris Dickstein, The Wizard of Oz included “plaintive longing for something better, that place at the end of the Yellow Brick Road,” while Gone with the Wind reminded viewers that, however much adversity they faced, “tomorrow is another day.” Hollywood’s cultural cachet was immense: Tens of millions of Americans learned how they were supposed to look and behave while watching flickering images in the dark.

Hortense Powdermaker, the first anthropologist to study the industry, wrote in 1950, “The star is not only an actor, but one of the gods or folk heroes in our society.” Yet the stars, while objects of veneration for the moviegoing masses, were, like millions of Americans in other fields, simply salaried employees. The studio bosses, who would do so much to shape American culture, were themselves outsiders who were looked down upon by the Los Angeles business elite. Because so many of them were either Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe or just one generation removed from the proverbial shtetl, they were denied entry to L.A.’s country clubs and so created their own in the Hillcrest Country Club. As Neal Gabler wrote in his magisterial history An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the Hollywood Jews would help fabricate on the screen an imagined, idealized country “where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” The Warner brothers were unusual among the Hollywood moguls in backing Franklin D. Roosevelt early on, although they reverted to the Republican fold in 1936 when Alf Landon challenged FDR, and many of their pictures displayed a New Deal sensibility. Warner Brothers would be the first studio to produce an anti-Nazi picture: Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939.

But they also made frothy Busby Berkeley musicals such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, notable for their surrealism and sensuality, and exciting Errol Flynn swashbucklers, such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. In 1940 another demanding star would join the Warner Brothers roster: Bugs Bunny. Overseeing this assembly line of dreams were Harry Warner, the company’s genteel president based in New York, and his younger, more vulgar brother Jack L. Warner, the vice president and production chief in Los Angeles. The two men loathed each other. Harry once chased Jack around the studio lot with a lead pipe, screaming “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch,” and Harry’s widow later accused Jack of driving him to an early grave in 1958 by stealing the studio out from under him. They were, in fairness, very different personalities—Harry was kind and honest, a devout Jew, and a devoted family man. He stayed married to the mother of his three children, and there was never a hint of scandal around his life. Jack, by contrast, was irreligious, foul-mouthed, and hedonistic. He wagered large amounts of money in the casinos of the French Riviera and scandalized Harry by divorcing his first wife and marrying his pregnant mistress. Reagan expected a lot of ribbing because he was the new kid on the set, but he was pleasantly surprised to find what he imagined to be a supportive, small-town-like atmosphere. He wrote that “everyone has been helpful and friendly and I have yet to encounter the slightest trace of ill-will or jealousy among my fellow workers.”

Dick Powell had wished luck to him on his first day on the Warners lot. Reagan was in awe not just of Hollywood but of the whole city of Los Angeles. It was already the nation’s fifth-largest metropolis, with more than 1.5 million residents, and growing fast. The architecture was a dizzying hodgepodge of styles very different from Dixon, Des Moines, or any other city. Middle-class residents lived in modest stucco bungalows or low-rise apartment houses, while movie stars, noted the journalist Margaret Talbot, built “imitation French chateaux, sprawling Spanish-style haciendas, columned replicas of stately plantation homes, Moorish castles with pointed arches.” Added to the air of unreality—many observers remarked that parts of Los Angeles looked like a movie set—some stores and restaurants were built to resemble the products they were selling. The original Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, for example, was constructed in the shape of a big brown derby. The soundtrack to the city was provided, Talbot observed, by the nonstop “swish-swish of sprinklers” that kept lawns green in this desert-by-the-sea. William Demarest—a fatherly figure who was known for not putting the make on female clients—was just what Jayne Wyman was looking for in an agent.

Ronald Reagan was just what she was looking for in a husband: a consummate gentleman who would treat her respectfully. As she later said, he was someone she could truly trust. Demarest said that, from Jane’s perspective, Ronnie was “the knight on the white charger. . . the dream of true, perfect manhood.” That Reagan and Wyman were spending time together was mainly her doing. “She did the chasing, and doesn’t give a hoot who knows it,” Modern Screen magazine reported. “She was the aggressor, the intent pursuer, from the start,” Demarest confirmed. Although younger than Reagan, “she was far more worldly and experienced than he was.” They first met when she asked him to sit at her table in the Warner Brothers commissary—reportedly giving him “the full benefit of her big brown eyes.” “I liked Ronnie the first time I ever saw him,” she recalled. “‘He is no fop,’ I thought.” She tried to convince the Warner publicity department to fix them up only to be told that each of them needed to date bigger names. The romance finally blossomed when they were on location in San Diego making their first movie together in July and August 1938.

The noted film critic Richard Schickel, in an astute appraisal of Reagan’s acting, wrote that he did “his famous line in Kings Row unimprovably—anguish and panic in his voice, in his facial expression, in his thrashing movements under the covers. Hard to ask for anything more from any actor.” Schickel added that Reagan’s shortcomings as an actor were more evident earlier in the movie, before the amputation, when his character was still “a careless womanizer and ne’er-do-well heir to a small fortune.” “At this stage of the movie Drake McHugh is not a nice guy, and Reagan is visibly uncomfortable, straining, in these passages,” Schickel noted. “He does not exhibit the born actor’s relish at playing a heel. Instead, he exhibits the born public figure’s discomfort at being mistaken for one. He has no enough technique to help him get under the character’s skin or to distract us from his own discomfort.” Being a nice guy himself, Reagan was only comfortable playing nice guys on the screen. Reagan’s inability or unwillingness to play parts far removed from his own personality would eventually help bring his Hollywood career to a premature and inglorious end.

But in 1942 Reagan was still on the ascent in Hollywood. He received the best reviews of his career for Kings Row, and it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Dark Victory also was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, but, like Kings Row, did not win any. The New Yorker wrote that watching Kings Row “will give you that rare glow that comes from seeing a job done crisply, competently, and with confidence.” Reagan, the magazine added, “capably breezes through the part of the town sport who becomes a victim of Dr. Gordon.” The Des Moines Tribune was even more effusive, pronouncing that “Des Moines’ own Dutch Reagan is swell as the rich kid gone to pot.” Once it was released in 1942, Kings Row catapulted the boy from Dixon onto the Hollywood A list. By the middle of 1941, a Gallup survey ranked Reagan among the top one hundred stars in the movie industry. A 1942 survey found him tied for seventy-fourth place with Laurence Olivier, and he was receiving more fan mail than any Warner Brothers actor except Errol Flynn. Reagan, a Warner executive wrote in an internal evaluation, was “a very talented artist who had started at a meager salary of $200 per week and rapidly developed in artistic ability and box office value until he was assigned to top productions . . . and was undoubtedly a star in his own right.” Those who would in later life denigrate him as merely a B-movie actor—an accusation that would generally be accompanied by a chuckle and a mention of Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)—were not quite being fair. For one brief, shining moment, before America’s entry into the war, Reagan had become an A-list star. Then, on December 7, 1941, came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The world would never be the same again—and neither would Ronald Reagan’s acting career.

The Reagans had genuine financial concerns, but they were far removed from those of average Americans. They had just built a seven-room, so-called dream house in the Hollywood Hills modeled on one they had seen in This Thing Called Love, a 1940 romantic comedy with Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas: truly a case of life imitating art. It had a magnificent view of the city and cost $15,000—not a lot by movie-industry standards but five times more than the median American home at the time. (In 2022, the extensively remodeled house at 9137 Cordell Drive would sell for $70 million.) Wyman, a free spender in her single days, had been deeply in debt. Now Ron, a stickler for paying bills before they were due, insisted on putting them on saving half of what they earned. Taxes took another big chunk of their income: The top marginal tax rate for couples filing jointly in 1941 with an income between $90,000 and $100,000 was 83 percent. So money was not flowing with typical film-colony abandon even before Ron’s military service would cut his monthly pay from $6,660 to $250. Reagan’s answer to the question of whether the Communist party should be legal was painstakingly noncommittal: "As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party, and I think the Government is capable of proving that, if the proof is there, then that is another matter. I detest, I abhor the Communists’ philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it."

Reagan’s performance earned rave reviews. “Intelligent Ronald Reagan stole the show from his better known colleagues,” wrote a liberal columnist, Quentin Reynolds, adding, presciently, that the actor might “have a future beyond show business.” Ron was fascinated by politics, Jane bored by it. A glowing, but unintentionally revealing, profile in December 1946 reported Ron coming to the breakfast table eager to share the news of the world. “I’ve got news for you,” Jane pointedly replied. “I’m not interested.” The actress June Allyson, who was married to Reagan’s friend and fellow actor Dick Powell, later wrote that Jane “seemed upset with her husband’s obsession with politics”—and with his long-windedness. Don Siegel, who directed Reagan in Night unto Night, reported an even more scabrous put-down from Jane. One night, while they were all going to dinner together, Ron “spouted off endlessly” until Jane snapped at him: “Hey, ‘diarrhea-of-the-mouth,’ shut up! Maybe we can get in a word edgewise.” But, Siegel wrote, “Ron continued soliloquizing.” Shortly after the dour dinner with Ron on the Sunset Strip, Jane decided to head off for a vacation in New York—by herself. While there, she was tracked down by a gossip columnist. She told him that she was considering a separation from her husband: “There is no use in lying. I am not the happiest girl in the world.” At around the same time, she told a friend, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.”

And it was true that Jane Wyman had trouble staying married. Having been married twice before, after divorcing Reagan she twice married and twice divorced the same man: a handsome studio composer and bandleader named Frederick Karger. After her second divorce from Karger in 1965, Wyman stayed single for the final forty-two years of her life. “Some women just aren’t the marrying kind—or anyway, not the permanently marrying kind,” she later said, “and I’m one of them.” “What they do to food is what we did to the American Indian,” Reagan wrote in a jocular letter of complaint to Jack Warner during his stay in London filming The Hasty Heart with Patricia Neal. “The average meal should go from ‘kitchen to can’ thus avoiding the use of a middleman.” The actresses he was seen with included Betty Underwood (said by a magazine to have “one of the six best figures in America”), Doris Day, Ann Sothern, Monica Lewis, Adele Jergens, Rhonda Fleming, and Ruth Roman. Edmund Morris later counted “at least sixteen different young and beautiful actresses” that he dated during this period. One of the few non-actresses he went out with was the witty gossip columnist Doris Lilly, who in 1951 published How to Marry a Millionaire, which became a hit movie starring Marilyn Monroe, and who would be cited as the model for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Many years later Lilly described Reagan as “truly the all-American boy, never a lothario,” and not a “come-on-strong type of man.” “He behaved himself beautifully,” she said.

Piper Laurie: As filming progressed, Ronnie Reagan took an increasing interest in me. He began calling me into his dressing room when I passed the door. I was quite flattered by his attention. He’d invite me to sit down and ask how I was feeling about everything. Was I comfortable? Could he help me with anything? He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time, and sometimes he asked me to just sit there while he did guild work and I studied my script. Occasionally he would step into my dressing room, sit down, and chat. I was very shy at first but gradually our relationship seemed more like one I’d have with someone in my acting class. He was becoming quite a friend and was sympathetic about my frustrations with the script. He drove up the hill on one of the small streets off the Sunset Strip and parked in the carport behind the apartment he’d been living in since his divorce. We went up the back way very discreetly and into his apartment. I made a decision, when I said, “Yes, I’d like that very much,” that this would be my first love affair. When I thought about it later, I knew the reality was, I had picked him. And he gave me a beautiful pearl necklace which looked to have cost a pretty penny. At this moment the fact of my virginity seemed irrelevant, and I didn’t want to be coy.

I knew I wanted to make love with him. I wanted to be completed by this wonderful man who clearly desired me. He would know what to do. The evening up to that point had been quite romantic. Ronnie was more than competent sexually. He was also a bit of a show-off. He made sure I was aware of the length of time he had been “ardent.” It was forty minutes. And he told me how much the condom pack cost. In all fairness, I suppose that just was to reassure me. The experience was a stunning revelation for me, to be so physically close to someone. So amazing to look up and see the familiar face and that naked expanse of chest above me. But more than a few times during intercourse, he said, “There’s something wrong with you? You should have had many orgasms by now—after all this time. You’ve got to see a doctor about your abnormality.” He used that word. “Maybe a doctor can find out which is your problem. There’s something wrong with you that you should fix.” I was no stranger to orgasms, having discovered this miracle of our bodies when I was a young girl. But it had been a secret activity, and I know now that the uninitiated need a trusting environment to blossom. I suppose I should have spelled out the mortifying fact of my virginity, but even now I still expect people I admire to know more than they really do.

Ronnie took my hand as we walked through the beautiful tree-lined side streets of Chicago around the Ambassador East Hotel. Our conversation covered a lot of territory, including what I thought about our age difference. Apparently it troubled him that I was only about nine years older than his daughter Maureen. But he said not a word about the evening we had had together. We stopped under a streetlamp. He looked at me with that nice face and those warm flirty eyes, and I let him kiss me. Then he steered the conversation to the possibility of our being together. I told him I couldn’t possibly because I was dating someone else. I had been going to the Chez Paree where I was serenaded by the handsome, glorious-voiced Vic Damone. It was an awkward moment, he looked so disappointed and hurt. I was embarrassed to be turning him down and wanted to say something kind, so when we started walking again, I said truthfully, “I’m very honored that such a respected and admired person was my first lover.” He stopped quite suddenly when I said that, almost did a double take. There was a quizzical look on his face. Was it possible he still didn’t know? Even with the colorful evidence I had left behind? Perhaps at that moment he got it—perhaps. He was very quiet as we walked back to the hotel. I wondered what he was he thinking. Whatever it was seemed impenetrable, and I didn’t try to break through. He saw me to my door and looked at me so strangely as we said goodnight.

Reagan gave amnesty to over 3 million illegal immigrants. He paid reparations to Japanese Americans wrongly interned by FDR. He pulled the US out of a long recession. He laid the groundwork for strategic missile defense. He assisted in driving the Soviet Union to collapse. He publicly called out Gorbachev leading to civil rights reforms in Russia and the Baltics. He reassured our allies and NATO that the US could and would counter the Soviet Threat. He led the charge for nuclear arms control as part of his “nuclear free world” vision. He worked well with democrats in the Congress with most of his actions receiving bipartisan support. If you looked at the data, the number of patients in state mental hospitals had dropped by 90% by 1980, the year Reagan was elected. So that was out of Reagan's responsability. Another false myth is that some historians have attributed the collapse of union jobs to Reagan, but there were 16.45 million union workers in 1995, while it was 19.8 million in 1980. So it had fallen by 220,000 a year since 1980. But it had peaked at 20.2 million in 1978 and fallen to 19.8 million in just two years, meaning it was already falling by 200,000 a year before the 1980 election. In other words, labor unions were already shrinking (and at basically the same rate) before Reagan as after. In 1981, the average mortgage interest rate was 16.63%, and the average home cost $69k. In 1989, the average mortgage interest rate was 10.32% and the median home cost 119k. If you borrowed 60k in 1981, your mortgage payment was $837. If you borrowed 105k in 1989, your mortgage payment was $946. So mortgage payments went up 13%. But the average wage in 1980 was $12,500, while in 1989 it was $20,100. So while mortgages went up 13%, wages went up 60% in the same period. People do like their myths, though, and the data won't change anyone's minds. Back in 1980 there were only 13 billionaires in the USA. As of 1987, that number was 44. In 2024, it exceeds 700 billionaires.

Reagan had a keen eye on who our actual enemy was and still is. He is probably spinning in his grave learning about how the GOP has turned into a party of Putin's appeasers. Reagan’s policies were right for the time, the problem was subsequent politicians not adjusting it with the times. No economic policy is meant to be kept in place forever. Monroe had an excellent tariff policy for his time; it was changed a few decades later because what worked in the 1820s didn’t make sense in the 1850s, yet that didn’t make Monroe’s tariff policy bad. When Reagan took office the national GDP was under 1 Trillion dollars. When he left, the national GDP was over 8 Trillion dollars. Democracy and capitalism swept the world. Third-world poverty began to disappear. The poverty that existed world-wide at that time no longer exists. The Soviet Union fell as a direct result of his presidency and the United States emerged soon after his time in office as the sole super-power in the world.

Reagan rejected the notion that AIDS was a gay disease. “I don’t want Americans to think AIDS simply affects only certain groups. AIDS affects all of us. What our citizens must know is this: America faces a disease that is fatal and spreading. And this calls for urgency, not panic. It calls for compassion, not blame. And it calls for understanding, not ignorance.” He similarly rejected the moralistic finger-pointing that had characterized too much of the discussion of the disease. “Final judgment is up to God; our part is to ease the suffering and to find a cure. This is a battle against disease, not against our fellow Americans. We mustn’t allow those with the AIDS virus to suffer discrimination. It’s been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last four years, and including what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS. So, this is a top priority with us.” Reagan defended his policy and sent his budget to Congress, including AIDS research as a “high priority” program. In the spring of 1987 Reagan announced the creation of a special commission to study AIDS and seek a cure. “AIDS is clearly one of the most serious health problems facing the world community, and our health care establishment is working overtime to find a cure,” he said. “To think we didn’t even know we had a disease until June of 1981, when five cases appeared in California. The AIDS virus itself was discovered in 1984. The blood test became available in 1985. A treatment drug, AZT, has been brought to market in record time, and others are coming. Work on a vaccine is now underway in many laboratories.” He explained that the federal government continued to expand its budget for AIDS research. “Spending on AIDS has been one of the fastest growing parts of the budget, and, ladies and gentlemen, it deserves to be.” Washington was also removing regulatory barriers to bringing new drugs to the market.

As both California governor and president, Reagan's overall record was not particularly conservative. California’s state budgets grew as much under Gov. Reagan as they had under his Democratic predecessor, while he also liberalized abortion and no-fault divorce, strengthened gun controls, pursued conservationist environmental measures, and increased funding for state universities by 136 percent even while attacking them as hotbeds of radicalism. Federal spending rose nearly as fast during his presidency as it had under his governorship. Boot concludes that Reagan “practiced Keynesian, not supply-side, economics by financing an economic expansion with government borrowing.” Yet right-wingers “sensed that he was on their wavelength, and they took comfort from his words while ignoring many of his deeds.” In point of fact, Reagan was a pragmatist far more than an ideologue. He understood “the difference between campaigning and governing,” as well as the importance of appealing to voters who didn’t share his conservatism. His greatest successes came when he listened to the counsels of moderate advisers, including Nancy who had the insight into people’s characters that her husband lacked.

Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to his son Michael on the eve of his wedding, saying: “Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till 3 A.M., the wife does know, and with that knowing some of the magic of this relationship disappears. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating... But if you truly love a woman, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary, or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors."

Max Boot: I think he was a better actor than some people give him credit for, and it's kind of interesting because Reagan, in some ways, had very little ego. I mean, you criticize his policies all day long, and he wouldn't really care one way or the other, but if you criticized his acting, then he became sensitive. He was actually very proud of his role as an actor. And the skills that he learned as an actor, he began to translate into politics in the 1950s, working for General Electric. That was really the job that saved his career after his movie days were over. He became the host of General Electric Theater on CBS, and he began touring the country and began speaking to all sorts of audiences. And that's really where he learned to do a stump speech, and he was writing his own speeches. His shooting was probably the most traumatic event of his presidency, but it was also, in some ways, the most uplifting. Reagan was undoubtedly courageous and heroic in the face of this terrible adversity where he almost died, and yet he was telling Nancy, "Honey, I forgot to duck." And when the public heard about that, that really cemented Reagan's bond with the public, a bond that would never really be broken. Today's Republican Party has moved very far to Reagan's right. Reagan certainly would not recognize Donald Trump, because Trump is, in many ways, the anti-Reagan. So, you can't imagine two presidents more different from each other than Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, even though they were the only two U.S. presidents who ever hosted a national TV show before assuming office.

One of Reagan’s senior aides believed that without Nancy, “Ronald Reagan never would have been elected to anything.” It's necessary to credit Reagan for being unlike most ideologues of the left or right in his readiness to “abandon the dogmas of a lifetime when it became evident they no longer applied to a changing world.” What most Americans remember about Reagan today, however, are his geniality, cheerfulness, optimism, humor and ability to speak to the public’s hopes as well as fears. Perhaps his ongoing high approval ratings among Democrats as well as Republicans also stem from the fact that, “his support for immigration, free trade, and alliances are as much a quaint relic of the past as his gentlemanly demeanor, willingness to compromise, and reluctance to attack opponents by name.” Nostalgia for Reagan underscores his irrelevance to today’s brutal politics. Ronald Reagan was the leader many Americans felt they needed at a time when they were looking for national restoration, and they may seek his like again. —Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot

Ronald Reagan: His Life and Legend

2024-09-08T00:19:00.023+02:00

Son of the Midwest, movie star, and mesmerizing politician―America’s fortieth president comes to three-dimensional life in this gripping and profoundly revisionist biography. In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date”. The story begins not in star-studded Hollywood but in the cradle of the Midwest, small-town Illinois, where Reagan was born in 1911 to Nelle Clyde Wilson, a devoted Disciples of Christ believer, and Jack Reagan, a struggling, alcoholic salesman. Max Boot vividly creates a portrait of a handsome young man, indeed a much-vaunted lifeguard, whose early successes mirrored those of Horatio Alger. Reagan’s 1980 presidential election augured a shift that continues into this century. Boot writes not as a partisan but as a historian seeking to set the story straight. He explains how Reagan was an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. A master communicator, Reagan revived America’s spirits after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. With its revelatory insights, Reagan: His Life and Legend is no apologia, depicting a man with a good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing and Hollywood westerns. Source: amazon.com

From dusty small-town roots, to the glitter of Hollywood, and then on to commanding the world stage, REAGAN (2024) is a cinematic journey of a great man overcoming the odds. Told through the voice of Viktor Petrovich, a former KGB agent who followed Reagan's ascent, REAGAN captures the indomitable spirit of the American dream. Starring Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller and Jon Voight.

Some big names on the entertainment circuit regularly dropped by Nancy Davis’s East Lake Shore Drive apartment. Spencer Tracy, chaperoned by Katharine Hepburn, came to visit “so often,” Nancy recalled, “that he practically became a member of the family”—and often to dry out; Walter Huston and his wife, Nan, moved in while they were starring in Dodsworth; Helen Hayes was a regular, as was Colleen Moore, Mary Martin, and Lillian Gish; Carol Channing brought Eartha Kitt. “Jimmy Cagney was always there,” Nancy recalled. Mary Martin, a longtime patient of Nancy's step-father Dr. Loyal Davis’s, was rehearsing Lute Song, a Broadway musical with Yul Brynner. There was a small part—a Chinese handmaiden—that suited Nancy’s nascent talents. Three weeks into rehearsal, however, the director disagreed. John Houseman found Nancy’s acting skills “awkward and amateurish” for a top-drawer Broadway production. “I suggested to the producer that she was not physically convincing,” recalled Houseman, who had been hired after Nancy joined the cast. He was told to take it up with Mary Martin. Fire Nancy Davis?—not a chance, Martin argued. Her bad back took precedence, and she wasn’t about to alienate her precious doctor by sacking his step-daughter.

On January 2, 1949, Nancy Davis got a call from her agent, informing her that “someone from Metro” had seen one of her TV appearances and suggested she fly out to Los Angeles for a screen test. Who that “someone” might be wasn’t a mystery. On and off, she had dated Benny Thau, MGM’s collegial vice president, who was said to have employed the practice of the casting couch. Though he was short, balding, and, at fifty-one, old enough to be her father, Nancy found in Thau an enthusiastic and supportive companion. No doubt his influence in Hollywood lent her countenance an attractive glow. However, despite an embarrassment of riches invested in her test, there was no heat on the screen. George Cukor was one of Hollywood’s A-list directors—MGM’s top director—who drew remarkable performances from his female stars. The scene Cukor chose for Nancy was from East Side, West Side, a high-priority studio project. He recruited hunky Howard Keel to read opposite her. It still didn’t add up to much. Cukor knew what a star looked like when he saw one. After watching a print of the finished test, “he told the studio Nancy had no talent.” In most cases, if a tastemaker of George Cukor’s esteem delivered such a verdict, the star-making machinery would have ground to a halt. But Thau had the power to veto the director’s opinion.

On March 2, 1949, MGM announced that the studio had given a seven-year contract to Nancy Davis at a starting salary of $300 a week. She was twenty-eight years old (dropped down to a more marketable twenty-six on the official document). One of her professional goals was snagging an eligible bachelor from among Hollywood’s leading men. Six months later, Ronald Reagan separated himself from the pack. During her Hollywood career, Nancy Davis dated many actors, including Clark Gable, Robert Stack, and Peter Lawford; she later called Gable the nicest of the stars she had met after Reagan. Dick Powell had been instrumental in securing Ronald Reagan a seat on the board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Reagan later wote in his memoirs about Dick Powell, “I was one of the thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. Sometimes, our paths took us in different directions, and months would pass without either of us seeing the other. When we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick Powell ever saying an unkind word about anyone.”

When Nancy Davis met Ronald Reagan on November 15, 1949, he had risen to president of the SAG. She had noticed that her name had appeared on the Hollywood blacklist. Davis sought Reagan's help to maintain her employment in Hollywood and for having her name removed from the list. Reagan informed her that she had been confused with another actress. The two began dating and their relationship was the subject of many gossip columns; one Hollywood press account described their nightclub-free times together as "the romance of a couple who have no vices."

On March 10, 1947, three days before the Academy Awards ceremony, the board of the Screen Actors Guild met in a hastily called session to resolve a thorny jurisdictional problem. Because of a newly enacted resolution that prohibited members with production interests from serving on the board, Robert Montgomery, its president, announced his resignation, along with Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell, Franchot Tone, and John Garfield. Replacement officers were pressed into immediate service, along with a vote to name Montgomery’s successor. George Murphy and Gene Kelly were nominated from the floor. Gene Kelly rose and placed Ronnie’s name in contention. Ronnie, as it happened, was conspicuously absent. He was attending a gathering of the American Veterans Committee, a group that linked veterans to potential employers, unaware that a consequential summit was taking place. When the vote was tabulated, the outcome was decisive. William Holden called later that night with the results. Ronald Reagan had been elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. The news delighted Ronnie. Whatever burden SAG had caused him, whatever turmoil in its ranks, deep down he loved the politics. He was as proud of the role he had played in the guild’s evolution as of any movie he had ever made.

The presidency of the Screen Actors Guild gave him the soapbox from which to launch an anticommunism campaign, and a faction of his membership was ready to ride sidekick. There had always been a predominantly conservative element at the top of the guild. Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, Ronald Colman, George Murphy and Adolphe Menjou, among others, were determined to oust the leftist influence that they said corrupted Hollywood and was a threat to American ideals. They belonged as well to the Motion Picture Alliance, whose members included Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, John Wayne, Ward Bond, Charles Coburn, and ZaSu Pitts. The MPA’s charter made no bones about its ultimate goal. “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals and crackpots,” it stated. “We pledge to fight any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.” The MPA set its sights on suspected sympathizers—“subversives,” as it labeled them. The Screen Actors Guild became a hotbed of infighting. On September 12, 1947, at a routine SAG board meeting, a proposal was raised that would require all SAG members to sign a loyalty oath. Ronnie felt it was self-defeating, and instead he proposed making the oath voluntary. It was passed after little debate. About the HUAC hearings, Reagan said: “It’s so simple. All you’ve got to do is just name a couple of names that have already been named.”

His divorce from Jane Wyman took Hollywood by surprise. “Such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me,” Ronnie later admitted. He had a more conventional outlook, the product of Midwestern expectations. In a town where marriage was the shakiest of propositions, the Reagan-Wyman union had seemed like a solid bet. It was almost as though the film community had a stake in its success. Friends like the Powells and the Hustons were disheartened by the news, but no one took it as badly as Ronnie. He was back in Eureka, Illinois, back as Dutch, for the weekend, visiting his old coach Ralph McKinzie and anointing the Pumpkin Festival queen, when the story broke in the local Illinois papers. It hit him, people said, “like a ton of bricks.” When he returned home, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons circled like a pair of vultures. Louella, his longtime advocate, picked at him first. No match for her meddling, Ronnie poured out his heart, unmindful that the seal of the confessional didn’t apply. Indiscreetly, he admitted that Jane had told him she still loved him but was no longer in love with him. That distinction seemed beyond his grasp. Even so, he was willing to give her plenty of space, hoping it would reignite a flame. “Right now, Jane needs very much to have a fling,” he said. “And I intend to let her have it. She is sick and nervous and not herself.” Hedda Hopper piled on in a subsequent Modern Screen column that aired all the couple’s private affairs.

As early as 1940, with the world on the brink of war, Dick Powell had tried persuading Ronald Reagan to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. The likelihood of that happening, at the time, was low. Reagan's flag was still firmly planted in Democratic soil, and switching parties was unthinkable. It was a nonstarter in 1950 when someone put his name up as a candidate for mayor of Hollywood, an honorary position. That left a cheesy, tinsel aftertaste. Local Democrats had asked him to run for Congress in 1952. Not to be outdone, that same year, Holmes Tuttle, an influential Republican contributor and prominent L.A. businessman, proposed that Reagan seek a Senate seat. Reagan loved Roosevelt’s view that common people can have a vision that included all social classes for the good of the country. Reagan had even supported the election of Harry Truman, whom he admired. But, lately, he’d become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and its penchant toward “encroaching government control.”

Reagan deplored “the problems of centralizing power in Washington,” which he felt took inalienable rights and freedoms away from citizens. To him, it seemed the party’s liberal faction also went to great lengths to defend the shady Hollywood clique that had romanticized and dabbled in communism. All this served to redirect Reagan’s political antennae. His closest friends—Dick Powell, Bill Holden, Robert Taylor and Bob Cummings—were steadfast Republicans who had tirelessly drawn him to their side. And he’d gone for Ike in 1952, the first time Reagan had ever voted for a Republican candidate. From the 1970s on, the movies had turned away from the old studio era. By the time he took office as President of the USA, the Hollywood dream factory had turned its gaze to stories of anti-heroes, moral ambiguity, cruelty, and violence. Ronald Reagan never liked those movies. The sex scenes embarrassed him, too. On the national stage, he tried to project the old-style moral certainty of the classics he loved.

The key to Reagan’s success, like that to Roosevelt’s, was his ability to restore Americans’ faith in their country. Reagan was called the “great communicator” with reason. He was the most persuasive political speaker since Roosevelt and Kennedy, combining conviction, focus, and humor in a manner none of his contemporaries could approach. Reagan’s critics often dismissed the role of conviction in his persuasiveness; they attributed his speaking skill to his training as an actor. But this was exactly wrong. Reagan wasn’t acting when he spoke; his rhetorical power rested on his wholehearted belief in all the wonderful things he said about the United States and the American people, about their brave past and their brilliant future. He believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too. Reagan told stories and jokes better than any president since Lincoln. He understood the disarming power of humor: that getting an audience to laugh with you is halfway to getting them to agree with you. He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics is more important. Many people loathed his policies, but almost no one disliked him personally.

Democratic elections are, at their most basic level, popularity contests, and Reagan knew how to be popular. Like Roosevelt and other successful presidents, he realized that progress comes in pieces. If he got four-fifths of his ask in a negotiation, he took it and ran. He knew he could return for the rest. Reagan’s timing—some called it his luck—was no less essential to his success than his ability. “I know in my heart that man is good,” Reagan had said at the dedication of his library. “That what is right will always eventually triumph.” These lines of the Reagan creed were etched over his grave at the Reagan Library. But the closing words of his poignant farewell to the American people were the ones that were better remembered, that captured the belief that made him irresistible to so many. The shadow of forgetfulness was growing long across his path, yet his optimism and faith in his country remained undiminished as he wrote, “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” —Sources: "Reagan: The Life" (2015) by Henry William Brands and "Ronald Reagan: An American Journey" (2018) by Bob Spitz