Abandoned Columns 1.0: Dispatches from the 202 1.0

I've started and stopped a number of written columns in my day -- they're all the same, but with different names. Maybe I began each one with a certain set of parameters I meant to follow, but that never happened. I write one way and one way only -- my way, jack! Here's one of them

(11/20/06)

I flip through my LPs looking for something to help me write. I’ve already got a beer, an 18 oz Shakespeare Stout, but music’s always the real trigger when I want to write.

I’ve chosen Lou Reed’s Mistrial. So don’t expect much. I still think it’s got some great songs, but it was 1986, when even the best succumbed to crappy staccato bass lines and the worst of what a saxophone is capable of. This was clearly not the Ronnie Ross riffs of “Walk on the Wild Side”, but a sound more akin to Eric Carmen’s post-Raspberries dross.

There’s also the electronic percussion. The bane of mediocre Top 40 during the Reagan-Bush years. While it’s great for Kraftwerk, it’s not so hot for Reed. Who trades in Michael Suchorsky for a drum machine?

(If the crickets weren’t so loud, I could hear my sister-in-law rolling her eyes.)

As I write this, however, I’m paying very little attention to the album. Except when I had to turn it over. The same songs that stuck out 20 years ago are still the only ones registering with me tonight. Reed did follow-up this fiasco with New York three years later, returning to his post as statesman for the dark edge of the light of New York. He’s been churning out great music since.

20 years ago, I was still living on Long Island, from whence Lou Reed too hailed. Freeport, New York’s where he’s from. I did a little student teaching there back in the early 90s. Reed had long excised himself from those streets by then. Flavor Flav’s from there too. Well, that’s all I got.

But the last track on Mistrial is pretty good. “Tell it to Your Heart.” I wonder if there’s a live version of it. That friggin’ production stinks!

Wait, I listened to it again. It’s great. It even rises above those lousy synsonic dums. Beautiful words. Fuck you, Lou Reed.

Hey, there is a live version of it. I just downloaded it from iTunes. It’s obvious, isn’t it, that I’m just sitting here drinking a beer and listening to music. The writing is tertiary. Which is a problem I should work on.