The Southgate House, a venue across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio closed last month. They say it will re-open elsewhere, but that just won’t be the same. Here’s a video of Arcade Fire killing it there on their original 2004 Funeral tour.
A scientific study made some news recently declaring that, when playing blindfolded, even professional violinists cannot tell a Stradivarius from a modern instrument.
Except it didn’t. As often happens when a ‘finding’ jumps from a journal to the news, the nuance was lost. Laurie Niles, a violinist and blogger who participated in the study, explains how it was done and what conclusions were actually drawn. Essentially, they were only asked their personal preferences and not to identify instruments.
In their coverage, NPR has side by side audio samples of a Strad and a modern instrument. Who knew they had that kind of budget.
Listening to Loaded and reading about Doug Yule, I came across a neat mini-documentary that sheds some light on his Velvets involvement while focusing on his more recent violin pursuits.
You can read Yule’s own comments on the recording of Loaded here, including a perceptive take on Lou Reed:
Sterl and Lou had no set roles. Lou always played basic rhythm when he was singing and Sterl alternated between rhythm and parts. When it was solo time, they divided the songs up by some method known only to themselves. Sterling always wound up with the more organized breaks while Lou favored the longer, louder, raunchier ones. He had a brilliant sense of melody but an imperfect instrument. Sterling seemed to be just the opposite, more a process of technique that lacked a soaring vision and relied on the acquired skill of filling in the final pieces of a puzzle without overdoing it.
I have a vision of Lou’s mind as filled with beautiful, transcendent melodies that are trapped inside and every time he tries to push one of them out through his fingers or his throat it gets distorted by the imperfection of the vehicle. When it does finally arrive in the world, it is cloaked in the struggle which gave it birth and its beauty only partly visible to the casual observer. Lou’s best work takes some effort to get to.
This is on display in the unreleased tracks from the special edition, like this early take of Satellite of Love, which would eventually become a Lou Reed solo track.
Apollo 1 crew during water egress training, June 1966. Embiggen.
I love how perfectly this photo captures the transition from atomic age to space age. All that’s missing is some TV dinners. Tragically all three astronauts pictured died in the Apollo 1 test launch fire six months later.
Chasing a heavier sound, Lou Reed tuned all six of his guitar strings to D for a pre-Velvets party song called The Ostrich. The Ostrich guitar was born and its peculiar drone was later used to great effect on tracks like Venus in Furs.
