The Boy Who Cried Freebird (3 page)

The year is 1968 and it's a quiet Tuesday afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio. Sid Garfinkle is on the phone with one of his more friendly business associates. Sid's office is a mess. Stacks of papers are everywhere, remnants of Chinese takeout litter the room, and the ashtrays are all filled with half-smoked butts. The shades are drawn and Sid is doodling on a yellowed invoice for an entire season's worth of secretarial services.

“I don't know, Manny,” Sid groans into the phone. “It was a hell of a lot easier when I was promoting comedians like Morey Amsterdam and Shecky Green.”

Sid crumples the unpaid invoice and tosses it toward an overflowing garbage can where it bounces off the rim and lands on the floor. He pauses for a quick slurp of hot coffee and burns the roof of his mouth.

“Shit,” he mutters. “I'm telling you, Manny, all I can do nowadays is book these crazy rock-and-roll acts for a living. I don't even know where half of them come from. Every single region of the United States has more Beatles and Stones imitations than you can shake a stick at. These pimply-faced kids, most of them aren't twenty years old and
never even been laid! They think they're so frigging clever with their ‘secret' drug lingo—one look at them and you know they're smoking more reefer than all of the jazzmen in Harlem. And the clothes! One group came onstage wearing electric suits, no less. Most don't bother wearing matching outfits—except for the ones dressed up like colonial soldiers. And I've never seen so much long hair since Flossie and I drove Bobby to college out in Berkeley, California.”

Sid moves an empty pizza box from his desk and spreads out the mail.

“You wouldn't believe some of their gimmicks,” he laughs. “I swear, one group has a kid that blows an electric jug, and another bunch wear capes just like Dracula. They all look completely ridiculous! I've booked two different bands that actually had a guy with a hook for a hand.”

Sid plops back in his chair and says, “At least some of the kids have a sense of humor, or their managers do. I got one bunch an entire week in Boston on the strength of their single, ‘Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?' These groups each have one hit single and then fade back into the suburban garage oblivion from whence they came. Honestly, most of them should stick to teen dances and stay away from the big time; they're just not ready. I canceled one tour because some parents decided that their kids needed to go to summer school! Can you imagine?

“Yep, three weeks of music lessons and they all think they're going to be stars. Of course, some get so scared when they first see an audience that they piss themselves. Occasionally, I'll recognize one or two kids from the last big dance craze—they think that just because they're wearing bangs now or singing with English accents that no one will remember what snotty punks they were.”

Sid Garfinkle counts the cash in his wallet and places a bank deposit
slip in his breast pocket. “All this talk about psychedelic music doesn't mean anything to me—it all sounds pretty much the same. Well, at least somebody's buying something. I'd be totally screwed without these bands.

“You know,” Sid says. “The funny thing is that almost every rock concert I've been to has one moment that stands out from the rest. Most of these groups have the sense to wait until the end of their show before playing their hit song; otherwise, the crowds would go home long before they're finished. Anyway, the audience is there for the song they've heard on the radio, and when the band finally plays their hit single, the room goes wild. The band is so cocksure that they bear down on their instruments, and for one brief instant everything falls together. The crowd adores the band and the band gives every bit of intensity they've got right back to the audience. I hate to admit it, but the music sounds magical in a freaky, ominous kind of way. It feels like I'm being pulled into a strange cult ritual of a very secret society.”

Sid Garfinkle rises slowly from his chair. “I have to head over to the bank, Manny. If I don't deposit some money quick, every check that I wrote this week will bounce from here to Akron. Hey, don't forget to say hi to Gladys for me and I'll catch you at the pinochle game next Thursday.

“You know,” Sid adds. “As far as all those bands are concerned, nobody's going to remember them in six months. Any kid in America can make music like this. The only thing I would do is take each one of their best records and put them together in one big fancy package—maybe then you'd have something worth remembering.”

—For Lenny Kaye

Since first released in 1975 Lou Reed's
Metal Machine Music
has been scrupulously analyzed by a number of pop culture journos. This includes serious analyses and not-so-serious prose. Reed himself has caused much of the confusion, but there have been so many details, myths, lies, half-truths, accusations, and discussions devoted to this radical piece of work that a more thorough investigation has long been in order.

So, consider these disparate bits of information if you will.
Metal Machine Music
was Lou Reed's seventh solo release after leaving the Velvet Underground. It was also his first double album, which affirmed RCA Corporation's faith in the marketability of their most notorious recording artist. Developed in Lou's west Long Island studio out near Pilgrim State Hospital, the sonic opus was created without the use of conventional instruments
or
the human voice.

Instead, Reed chose to stack multiple combinations of reverberating electronic sound to create a vast industrial howl. Derived from a process of manipulating aural frequencies and distorting both intensity and pitch, Reed's mechanized drones and harmonic buildups released
shifting waves of pulsing white noise and emitted squeals of pure feedback into two separate (but equal) stereo channels.

Now, what's up with that?

On the back cover of the original album—above an incorrect chemical diagram of some unholy amphetamine—there was a specifications list that included such things as ring modulators, tremolo units, high-filter microphones, and Jimi Hendrix's very own Arbitor distortion box. The spec list further asserted, “No Synthesizers No Arp No Instruments? No Panning No Phasing No.”

In some way, that last lone “No” betrayed the true underpinning of
MMM
's conception. Representing a diametric swing away from his then-popular identity as the androgynous rock 'n' roll poet laureate of Manhattan's mean streets, Reed's oppositional soundscape could hardly have been anticipated, even as an extension of the feedback/noise/distortion found in Lou's early work with the Velvet Underground on their groundbreaking performance of “Sister Ray.”

This new (metal machine) music, Reed contended, was “the perfect soundtrack to the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Lou also claimed to have inserted tiny snippets of classical music into the mix and that many of the sound frequencies were dangerous, even illegal to put on a phonograph record.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All true enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—MM(M)

More Musings and Meditations on Metal Machine Music

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

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

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

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

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

BOB NEUWIRTH (SONGWRITER, PAINTER, PERENNIAL INSIDER)

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

ROBERT QUINE (FORMER LOU REED GUITARIST, DECEASED)

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