Just a New York conversation rattling in my head

Most of us simply agree with the fact that Transformer is one of Lou Reed’s greatest albums ever; the more skeptical need proof. And not the highly-acclaimed-by-the-critics’ kind of proof, but tiny details that indicate the supremacy of this Reed’s album among many others of its time and genre.

Although I’ve already written about this subject many times, published reviews and made everything a good shepard must do in order to evangelize his sheep, one can never have too much of the little facts that have built this early 70s masterpiece; one of them is a small track placed on side B called New York Telephone Conversation. Enjoying the fabulous arrangements Bowie provided to the whole album, the track lasts only for a minute and a half with Bowie himself providing the backing vocals. What could appear to be only two people having a laugh during a studio session transforms itself – and here is the “transforming” theme all over again – into a metaphor for Warhol’s shallow interest in glossy cocktails, social vernissages and everything that provided his Factory with a few more Superstars, keeping it rolling through the years as a living machine.

So New York Telephone Conversation comes as a catharsis; Reed is finally set free – as he himself declares one track later – from that 47th street loft, and the goodbye to the Velvet years is politely placed in an album that never denies its roots. Fifteen minutes were not enough, so Reed was taking the first steps to make them last a few hours more.

Lou Reed’s New York Telephone Conversation (Transformer, 1972)

 

A sticky 1971

1971 was a fertile year for rock music. And not just any rock; new, experimental types of fusions happened within musicians and bands that already had their name safe and sound when it came to the music business.

One of those examples is, obviously, Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Released in April, the album is considered one of the group’s masterpieces – containing major hits like Brown Sugar, Wild Horses or Sister Morphine , immortalized by Marianne Faithful – and was recorded between UK and the States in several small studio sessions.

With an album cover designed by Warhol himself, Sticky Fingers was the first Stones’ album not to contain any Brian Jones material, and marks not only the beginning of a new decade for Pop music but also a drug-influenced maturity that mingles softly with unchanted ballads, creating a connection between both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Dead Flowers, Wild Horses and I Got the Blues sound like mourning songs for the recently disappeared teen idols – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones himself -, working in a numbful, comfort-seeking basis instead of a rebellious one.

Not a Stones’ specialist myself, I can only state an opinion based on the emotional side; it is, however, undeniable that Sticky Fingers illustrates  major American influences suffered by the Stones when it comes to composing and the so-called desperate teen-attitude that the end of the sixties gave birth to. Three months later, the mourning would be extended to Jim Morrison and the revolution would seem to be further than it had ever been before; so long, flower children – adulhood has arrived.

Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers, 1971)

‘oh, but she breaks just like a little girl’

‘- And what would I have to do in one of your movies?’
‘- Just be yourself.’
‘- Well, which one?’

Edie Sedgwick (1943 – 1971)

this is The Factory, after all

Paul America (1965)

Marcel Duchamp (1966)

Ingrid Superstar (1965)

Ivy Nicholson (1966)

Salvador Dali (1966)

Sally Kirkland (1965)

Billy Name (1966)

Lou Reed (1966)

(stills from Andy Warhol’s screen tests – 1964/66)

and 40 years later I humbly join the happy family, honouring Andy Warhol’s memory:

Ana Leorne (2005)

(stills from self-portraying screen-tests, 2005)

[if I ever find the short-films from which these two stills were taken from I'll gladly let you know]