About Sister Ray

[simonm]

This is a thread about what we like about Sister Ray and what it means tio us. If it works, suggest another 'About ...' thread and we'll see where we get.
There's been a lot written about this already but I'll say:
I like the menace and lawlessness in the sexuality of the song, and obviously the wildness and abandon of the music.
The music breaks free of the words after a few minutes, but it all comes back together at the end, like the interlude is an aural representation of the chaos of Duck, Sally and Sister Ray's lives.
It really makes me think of the mad drug-addled drag queens in John Rechy's City of Night and Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, and to a lesser extent the misadventures of the silver Factory mole people etc.

[arjan]

The Mole people -- now there was a depressing read (referring here to Mary Woronow's Swimming Underground book, which is well-written but thoroughly depressing in its telling of the Mole people).

Anyway, Sister Ray. I like the WL-WH version greatly. Tight and compressed at the start, free ranging in the middle, tight again at the end... Yummy. Cannot over-emphasize Maureen's role in the song, though, the way she speeds up the tempo, then lets it go loose by completely abandoning time keeping, then calling the boys back by picking up the beat again. Wow!

The 1969 and 1971 versions of Sister Ray could never really hold my attention. Maybe a Cale-era version could (haven't heard one yet).

Which reminds me, I was supposed to dig up a midi transcript of one of the fragments in that musicological treatise on Sister Ray. I'll have a look, it must be somewhere in that pile of HD backups...

[arjan]

dig up a midi transcript of one of the fragments in that musicological treatise on Sister Ray

Alright, I promised this some time ago, and here it finally is: a MIDI version of Schwartz's transcript of the opening of Sister Ray (get it here: ZIP, 215kb).

As MIDI usually sounds crap played on regular audio players/devices, I've included a MP3 version of it playing through my faithful old AWE32 card).

When the article was still on the web on Schwartz's own web space, circa 1996, I grabbed the score picture, programmed his fragment as he heard it into my sequencing programme and put instruments to it. Reed's guitar part is on the left, Morrison's is on the right, Cale's organ is in the middle and I've added a basic Maureen-like drum part not in the original transcript.

Those of you who have a sequencing program (Cubase or the like) can see in the MIDI file how Cale is supposed to play a strange figure on the organ and not play an F chord when Reed and Morrison do.

Sounds strange to me and anybody who can distill these guitar and organ parts so accurately from the recorded mesh-up must have incredible hearing (and two weeks' worth of headache).

Update - Praise be to Nero's Neptune! I found the original image as well:

[MJG196]

As a sidenote, I was listening to REM's "Document" CD and what hit me like a bullet? Go listen to the song "Strange." If that ain't an homage to Sister Ray, I don't know what is.

[simonm]

"Strange" is a straight cover of a song from the 1st Wire album, Pink Flag. It's great - the REM version is ok, but doesn't add anything to the original.

[Elvis Plebsley]

I like it when the Velvets burn. And Sister Ray, espciallly the studio version, is where they are at their most inflammable. Sex? Check. Drugs? Check. Rock n Roll? Well only the greatest, most powerful riffiest riff that anyone's ever come up with. Aint it great when Lou and Sterling lock? I've never heard anything like it from anyone else, the way the rhythm and the noise twist around each other. It's the ultimate rock n roll song, even when it's all over the top and not very much like what we expect rock n roll to be. Even better because Moe plays with out rolls and other fancy irritations. Cale takes the Vox and makes it the fuzzed up distorted equivalent of the guitars until the only thing you can hear is the whole, impossible, disreputable wail of the thing. A lyric about people so stoned they are indifferent to murder. The rhythm of the vocal pumping, Lou nails it, it's louche and decadant.