The Boy Who Cried Freebird Read Online Free Page A

Thursday.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€”For Lenny Kaye

THE SOUND AND THE FURY
    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 releasedshifting 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 Youngand 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