Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
My obituary for Lou Reed is now up at The Millions: http://www.themillions.com/2013/11/lo...just happened upon this one while perusing a stranger's library here on goodreads. Man, this brings me back...I think for some people (the cool people, the artsy people, the sensitive weirdos and budding poets and intellectual geeks) there's this space of time which opens up in highschool where you become aware of all this cool, alluring, obscure countercultural stuff through hearsay and, at least back in the 90's when I was but a lad, you don't really have the resources to access it. No downloading, cds cost $ you don't really have, the library's picked clean, internet was just a toddler, radio's a joke...where are you going to turn? Who ya gonna call?Well for me it was sort of about amateur research. I dug in to archived copies of Rolling Stone from the 80's (Lou Reed cover interview! Van Morrison speaks! Marvin gaye re-releases! I was so lonely, so, so very lonely! At least I didn't go to gym class...) and read myself dizzy, imagining the world outside the leafy suburb I called home.I got into the VU more or less even before I heard them, due to their ubiquity in all the usual places. I went to the over-the-counter-culture store in the city (the lights! the cars! the concrete! smudges on the sidewalk! So innocent!) and timidly asked the supercilious clerk behind the counter what VU record I should pick up first. He looked at me and then sort of titled his head in a kind of bored way, with that "why do you waste my time" look the senior gives to the interloping freshman and said I'd have to pretty much pick up everything. Thanks, fucko. 'preeshiate it.As luck would have it, Columbia House was having a fire sale on box sets and my friend was picking one up so I could get the beautiful 5-disc retrospective for a pittance. I hurried home. I plopped it into my boombox (yup, yup) and didn't look back. I take great pride in claiming to be the first kid on my block (hell, immediate vicinity) to listen to the VU and of course evangelize among my peers. This is the real shit, folks, nevermind the green day here's white light/white heat...This was the book my best friend bought after having borrowed (I think) the first and second records- I mean Compact Discs, for accuracy's sake, but indulge me- over a weekend. We passed it back and forth in the library, where we skipped out on gym class and left the relatively less courageous Dave to suffer amid the indignities of parquet and floppy shorts, hearing such tales of derring-do as we sober, well-scrubbed Reagan Babies had never seen...guitars leaned up against amps at the end of a concert, blaring hostile feedback at the already confused and skeptical audience; statuesque, robotic Nico intoning doom and sexual confusion; "Heroin"; the whole Exploding Plastic Inevitable thing (wide-eyed speedfreak runaways accosting curious hipsters amid the silver and charcoal walls of the Factory, shouting "are you a queer?" and "does he eat you out?")....the whole bit.I'm not especially saying it's a great book. It does the job, it explains some of the myth and gets the milieu right, but it's not as comprehensive as it might be and sort of sketches over the really interesting early backgrounds of the band- Lou's prodigious songwriting skills and misanthropic romanticism, Maureen Tucker the androgynous computer programmer who beat on telephone books to Olatunji and Bo Diddley on weekends, the chilly, intense, classically traind Welshman John Cale...But when you're 15 and starting to think there's more to life than KISS 108, Forrest Gump and L.L. Bean backpacks this book can be used to keep some doors ajar long enough to hear the music from the other side.
Možná je to překladem, snad redakcí, ale určitě sám autor nepomohl k zážitku ze čtení určitými nedořečenostmi, nesouvislostmi a útržkovitostí textu popřípadě i nepochopitelnou absencí popisu (např. charakteristika What Goes On na albu The Velvet Underground). To vše naštěstí vyvažuje fascinující příběh zrodu legendární kapely a vnitřní pnutí, které vede k postupné a zákonité erozi. Její stylotvorný význam i osud by mohl být s přimhouřením očí připodobněn Kafkově vlivu na moderní literaturu. A podobně jako magická Prahou na prsou nebude ani kabelka s banánem zárukou pochopení jejího génia.
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