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Post by Tull50 on Oct 27, 2013 17:53:25 GMT
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Post by bunkerfan on Oct 27, 2013 18:29:40 GMT
Very sad news. R.I.P. Lou
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Post by maddogfagin on Oct 28, 2013 9:13:59 GMT
Interesting story about "Walk On The Wild Side" from one of the BBC web pages from 2005. www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/songlibrary/indepth/walkonthewildside.shtmlIt may seem pretty tame now but back in the early Seventies 'Walk On The Wild Side' broke new ground with its depiction of transexuals, drugs and bohemia.
The life of Reed's first solo hit began in 1970 when he was approached about a project to turn Nelson Algren’s book "Walk on the Wild Side" into a musical. Reed worked on a title track but never wrote the musical. However the resulting song became one of his most enduring compositions.
In "Walk on The Wild Side" he recounts the lives of the transexuals and tranvestites who hung out with Andy Warhol at The Factory. They were Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis. "Joe" is Joe Dallesandro, a notorious hustler. Later Holly recalled that Reed had simply told the truth.
In London in 1971, after the release of an unsuccessful debut solo album, Reed was suffering a personal and professional low. The sexual ambivalence and avant garde decadence of the Velvet Underground’s music had been a major influence on David Bowie and Mick Ronson and so they both agreed to produce Reed's next album, Transformer. In actual fact Bowie made little contribution to the finished product but Mick Ronson's treatment of Walk On The Wild Side helped Reed to his first solo hit.
At first, Reed didn't want the track to be released as a single fearing it would be banned and never get any radio play. But Bowie insisted and Reed, fortunately, relented. In 1973 the song reached number 10 in the UK charts, no doubt helped by a young Johnnie Walker, who made the track record of the week before BBC bosses realised what the lyrics meant. In America it was the no. 1 jukebox hit, but the censors were more heavy handed, turning the song into a series of bleeps.
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Post by steelmonkey on Oct 29, 2013 6:24:14 GMT
I consider Lou Reed one of the all time greats...as a writer, observer and experiencer of this planet far beyond just a Singer songwriter. He's not going to heaven so when he does get where he's going I think they'll wave him over with the poets like Ginsberg and Whitman, the pioneers like Warhol and Rimbaud and the coolest of the cool ( don't slug me Ray, I know you're not pro-Lou and this will be blasphemy to you) like Miles Davis and Django Rheinhardt. I have almost all his albums and some of his later, obscure ones like 'Drella, Magic and Loss' and 'Set the twilight Reeling' helped me survive and endure my own rough times in the lands of drugs and lost love. Listen to 'Street Hassle' or 'Rock Minuet' and tell me there's been another guy like LOOOOOOOOOOOOUUU. He was not writing songs out of a rhyme book and thesaurus.
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