Andre83 wrote:
I'm there. Tell me a little in advance so I book a flight from Genoa ( Italy ) to New York . I carry with me flags and smoke bombs . The thing that intrigues me is why there is so much reluctance to release the tapes live at that time . The gymnasium was released 50 years after its recording I do not think it's for the money . This is really a ( murder ) mystery to me
ok now two VU fans from Genoa are coming to NYC...
Doc
Doesn't Cale now live in LA?
What happened to Warlock? He had a friend who knows John Cale and who had dinner with him around the same time that the Gymnasium LP arrived.
Another question I have is how come two fragments of the Gymnasium version of Sister Ray showed up on the Twisted Stars box set years earlier?
ok now two VU fans from Genoa are coming to NYC...
Doc[/quote]
Or real? and who the other Genoese ? Thanks for the links guys . Indeed it is another recording but in my opinion it is not a live version , seems more like a demo
Anyone else a little skeptical abut the validity on that proported march 1969 article. Seeing as VU had played BTP several times between summer 68 and March 69, why would someone be writing about that gig six months or more after the fact? Especially about a band that was fairly obscure all thng considered, thought maybe they had a good cult following among the BTP crowd. It just seems weird to me.
Pepper, I'm with you. Disregarding the almost modernist description of the music, I really can't see that the youth of Boston were quite so dissolute and nihilistic back in '68, it sounds like a UK Punk audience from '76, mysteriously transported across space and time.
Wasn't Boston home to the 'Bosstown sound' at that time? Were these doomed youth the same folks who danced to the Beacon Street Union and to Ultimate Spinach? And maybe the Grass Menagerie as well?
It doesn't seem that out of place for something Wayne McGuire might have written.
I was just about to say the same thing. McGuire was a follower of Mel Lyman, a Boston-based cult leader of the era whose philosophy tended toward nihilism. I don't know that Lymanites apart from McGuire were fans of the VU -- Lyman himself, in fact, was an accomplished harmonica-ist who came out of the folk movement, and the Kweskin Jug Band was comprised primarily of his followers -- but in McGuire's writings about the VU for Crawdaddy (founded by one-time Lymanite Paul Williams) he almost made it seem as if the group's music was in solidarity with Lyman's teachings.
The Heights, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachussets
Tuesday , March 25, 1969
Vol. XLIX No. 21 Page S2
"The Velvet Underground: Dispair Still Reigns" By Peter Crowley
Haf page long.
He seems to be a well informed VU fan. He refers in the article having bought the VU&NIco and Wl/Wh albums ... the article last part is dedicated to their March 69 BTP gig ... it goes:
And so it was that when the Velvet Underground returned to the Tea Party a week ago, there were many among us with visions of cosmic indifference dancing in our heads. Then the Velvet Underground arrived on stage, the boys boyish, the girls girlish. They had been there, but now they were back.
Reed's tone was jocular, and the songs had titles like "I'm Set Free" and "I'm Beginning to See the Light". They quelled fears, they had become apple-cheeked
optimists with the old-time terror of Heroin and I'm Waitin' for my
Man, but these were clearly recollective numbers. Now they recognize the evil, but they try to live with it. Although Sister Ray always concludes their
performances, they grasp at one cop-out after another to avoid the
inevitable until the final song. There's nothing they can do,
there's nothing anyone else can do, despair still reigns, and every
action is pointless, but they are desperately trying to escape from
this truth, if only for a little while. In the words of Lou Reed,
"There are problems in these times, but none of them are
mine." Up from indifference to escapism.
