max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

#547: velvet underground - femme fatale (1967)

one good test for heartfelt love of a band is whether you can listen to one of its best songs played after your favorite member has left the group. and a really good test is whether you can listen to it while it plays over blurry footage of edie sedgwick. you’d think it would be impossible, but then there’s this clip, which uses audio from a show without glorious john cale—the saddest welshman downtown ever saw, not that lou reed ever appreciated him—and footage from warhol’s poor little rich girl. and it’s just beautiful.

#467: lou reed and antony - candy says (2007, dir. julian schnabel)

one excruciatingly sad thing about writing the observer’s column on viciously expensive new york real estate is that it’s very hard to watch julian schnabel’s film on lou reed’s berlin concerts. i want to listen to the music and think about guitars, spiders, whales, wales, wrinkles, velvets, undergrounds, love and death, but instead i wonder why julian schnabel wanted to charge $32 million for his triplex penthouse at palazzo chupi, where richard gere and palo alto bankers scamper around among antique moroccan window dressings, 12-foot doors, seven-foot fireplaces, giant claw-foot tubs, cast-concrete kitchen countertops dyed chromium-oxide green, and a very large swimming pool.

but this long national nightmare is over! mr. schnabel has sold the triplex. he got $10.5 million.

#445: lou reed - coney island baby (1976)

the last time lou reed got this tender, he was a 26-year-old asking pale blue eyes to linger a little. this time, six albums into a troubled solo career and two years into the gerald ford administration, the sweetness smells like a yellowing yearbook: he misses his high school football coach, his friends are gone, he hopes that maybe the nice girl who somehow liked him will come back, he believes in the glory of love, and wants us to, too. this is mellow music with a heavy heart, like van morrison’s astral weeks, except coney island baby—the song and the album named after it—isn’t for the forest, it’s for an empty apartment in a moldy building in a neighborhood no one likes anymore.

#402: lou reed & john cale - style it takes (from songs for drella, 1990)

if this sounds like hallelujah, only with no allusions to the old testament and a lot to pop art, it’s because john cale was a year or so away from making leonard cohen’s song famous when he and lou reed recorded songs for drella, their warhol eulogy. style it takes isn’t just soft and sweet, it gets nostalgic and furious—it’s downy but a downer, the combination that makes hallelujah so good. but leonard cohen’s song is probably better, what with its references to biblical coitus and all.

#314: lou reed (and luciano pavarotti) - perfect day (2001)

today is feb. 20th, which means the vernal equinox and spring are exactly one month—one cruel, cold, whorish month—away. on days like this one it’s important to be reminded what shiny, sunny happiness looks and sounds like, so, from my heart to yours, here’s poor old lou reed, looking like he knows that his leather jacket and headless guitar aren’t quite doing the old aesthetic trick, turning his best vintage junky lovesong into an amazingly, awesomely, spectacularly hideous orchestral duet with the asymmetrically-eyebrowed, white-bowtied, burger king mascot-faced luciano pavarotti. its badness is better than springtime itself.

#232: the velvet underground & nico - femme fatale (1972)

the music john cale made after he left the velvet underground make john lennon’s post-beatles imagine and plastic ono band look like sad little side projects. (see oct. 16th for gideon’s bible and paris 1919, but then there’s also the better-than-bowie man who couldn’t afford to orgy, barracuda, and amsterdam).

i just discovered beautiful, beautiful, beautiful videos from a show in 1972, the year cale’s second post-velvets album came out. it’s just him and his old bandmates lou reed and nico breaking everyone’s hearts and pouring mercury into their arteries and replacing rib cages with pillows.

#131: lou reed and john cale - small town (1990)

i just listened to that monument of 70s-era oversexed sleaze, transformer, for the first time since high school, and remembered that lou reed kept on making pounds of hazy, heavenly, overdosed music well after breaking up the velvet underground. (meanwhile, what’s paul been up to since the beatles? starbucks.)

but even more than transformer’s vicious or take a walk on the wildside, i like small town, one of the 15 (get it?) songs about andy warhol that he and old velvet john cale recorded in brooklyn after the artist died. cale’s sticky ragtime piano part should be sampled into a rap song (hello, lil’ wayne?), but lou reed’s grumpy half-sung monologue couldn’t be done by anyone else, even weezy f. baby.

and “i hate being odd in a small town/ if they stare, let them stare in new york city” belongs on a tee-shirt (which could be designed by john cale’s ex-wife, betsey johnson, who’s in my observer column this week.)