Sterling Morrison, quoted in Rob Sheffield's Beatles book
I'm guessing the VU hated the Mothers ever since that period when the latter were based in NYC and playing on a weekly basis.
It was kind of a battle of cools - but also between great music and shit music, the well and the ill conceived.
Actually, it dates back further - because they shared a label and a producer (Verve/MGM and Tom Wilson), the Velvets were paranoid that the Mothers were getting preferential treatment, which reached a peak when the label decided to bump the VU's debut a few months while Freak Out got released first, and they were convinced that Zappa had conspired to sabotage them (what had actually happened was that MGM wanted a more accessible single - 'Sunday Morning' - and they were nervous about two 'weird' bands releasing records in such quick succession). Besides, like a lot of Velvets targets, Zappa actually liked their music - he told an interviewer in late 1967 '"I think that Tom Wilson deserves a lot of credit for making that album, because it's folk music. It's electric folk music, in the sense that what they're saying comes right out of their environment." http://www.richieunterberger.com/vumyth.html
ReplyDeleteIn general, the Velvets' grudges had more to do with their sense of outrage that the San Francisco bands 'took' their spot as the emblematic musicians of the late 60s - they were apparently very aggrieved that a bunch of third-city folkies had managed to incorporate long feedback drones and multimedia stages into their work simultaneously with them. (Even there they weren't consistent - bizarrely, Quicksilver Messenger Service managed to win over at least Sterling Morrison while touring with them.) The British bands were exempt from that - probably the most astonishing thing I learned from Will Hermes' Reed bio was that Brian Epstein made a fairly serious offer shortly before his death about taking over the VU's management from Warhol.
That is an amazing fact - opening up to a parallel world where the VU are superstars.
DeleteI never fully understand the Velvets vs. the California hippies feud till I saw the image of the band and associates dressed entirely in black, grimacing behind sunglasses, in Todd Haynes' documentary. The amount of speed they were using in the lead-up to WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT probably contributed to their pissiness.
DeleteAbsolutely - there's an incredibly revealing quote from Mary Woronov (then one of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable dancers) in a 1996 Reed documentary about why the Velvets/Warhol crowd didn't fit into San Francisco: (with utmost condescension) 'We actually did things like, y'know, READ BOOKS, and TALK ABOUT them.' Which is especially odd if you consider that the SF scene was initiated mostly by novelists and poets, while the NYC scene was initiated mostly by visual artists and filmmakers - again, East Coast contempt for all things West Coast
DeleteReed seemed to be a Van Morrison style natural asshole for the most part, but the heights of it in the late 60s and 70s have to be asterisked that he was ingesting a truly insane amount of speed/meth during the period, and except for a few teetotalling conservatives like Moe Turner and Paul Morrisey, the same went for everyone else involved - again, from the Hermes bio: during the celebrity-heavy run of the EIP in New York (everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Walter Cronkite to Sammy Davis Jr showed up) Warhol assistants would roam the crowd selectively injecting members with amphetamine-filled syringes, like bizarro-world Acid Testers
Coming back a week later and noting - Moe TUCKER. Ugh.
DeleteSgt. Pepper is a very good record. So is Tommy.
ReplyDeleteMinimalism can btfo.
In a petty way, I have always resented the fact that when Vaclav Havel visited New York in 1968, he took two albums home with him: White Light White Heat, and something by the Mothers, presumably the recently-released Absolutely Free.
ReplyDeleteWhite Light White Heat allows for an uplifting parable about how great art can change the world, even if it's not explicitly political. Absolutely Free suggests that bad art can have the same effect.
(I have never seen it confirmed that Absolutely Free was the Mothers of Invention album that Havel brought back to Czechoslovakia, but as the underground band the Plastic People of the Universe were named after its first track, it seems likely.)
There's a good piece about the PPU and the Czech dissident movement here: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/plastic-people-of-the-universe-czechoslovakia-revolution-b1816340.html
A piece I thought of writing but never got to was comparing VU and Zappa/Mothers as two different ideas of cool and edge... rival ideas of progression for rock.... and the connector was exactly this bizarre world-historical impact they had in Czechoslovakia
DeleteEven after New Wave, Zappa / Mothers continued to have some influence In Eastern Europe and USSR, I think, long after it had faded out in Anglo-America. The idea of satire combined with virtuosity...
I'm a little confused. Has there been a critical volte-face on the Mothers? Everyone here seems to be singing in unison that they're terrible. Or is it just Frank Zappa attempting a comedy routine so embarrassing that a diamond forms in the rectal canal from the pressure of all that cringing?
ReplyDeleteZappa's standing dropped precipitously with punk and thereafter. The obsession with virtuosity, the guitar solos, the fusion-y element... but also the sexism and the sneery tone... overnight he became the Old Wavest of the lot.
DeleteAs Simon says, if the critical consensus did do a volte-face on Zappa, it happened a long time ago. I have disliked Zappa since I was a teenager. I had a good friend who was a super-fan, and he would insist on putting Zappa records on every time I went round. So I felt like I had a pretty good grounding in what I was rejecting. But hating Zappa always felt like a boring normie opinion. Liking him was definitely the braver option.
DeleteDidn't his free speech crusading during the 80s boost his reputation, if perhaps not musically? Weren't Zappa for President t-shirts rather common during the grunge era?
DeleteZappa had an interesting relationship with punk/new wave - as a virtuoso, he admitted to having no interest in the back-to-basics/three-chords-and-the-truth rhetoric, but in terms of image and attitude it was probably a much better fit for him than the hippies were (he noted that the kind of punk he liked best was 'the Gidget Goes To Hell stuff'), and there were a few groups that he actually liked - he played Blondie's X Offender in between the Bartok and Howlin Wolf on a 1979 guest DJ slot for the BBC; he plugged the Slit's Cut on an interview on Tom Snyder's talk show around the same time (presumably the only reference ever made to it on a nationally broadcast American show), and he offered to produce the B52's debut (they later explained that they turned him down despite being fans because they didn't want to be tagged as 'comedy' music)
DeleteStylo: I think that's exactly right about Zappa's reputation. He won kudos as a campaigner against the PMRC, etc, but that never translated into increased interest in his music. The t-shirts were probably more popular than the records. He had a devoted following, but it's hard to think of a single band he inspired. Phish, maybe? Primus?
DeleteDidn't the VU have an even bigger beef with The Doors? I seem to remember that Lou Reed had some particularly tart things to say about Morrison.
ReplyDeleteI think you are right, although possibly it was tinged more with rivalry - since the Doors was also presenting a darker view of music than flower power. Flowers of evil...
DeleteAlso, most people hated Morrison and the Doors - Garcia, Crosby, Mitchell etc. The only contemporaries who seemed to have liked him (mostly) was Grace Slick, Iggy Pop, and (if you consider her a contemporary) Patti Smith - provocateurs all
Delete"Jim Morrison is dead? How can they tell?" is one Reed quote I do recall.
DeleteRead part of Moon Zappa's new book, and learned from a reference that when a fan angry that he was making eyes with his girlfriend during a performance bum-rushed the stage and threw Zappa into a concrete-floored orchestra pit (which laid him up in traction for the next year), Reed said publicly that he should've been killed. And yet he gave the RRHOF induction speech for Zappa twenty-some years later. The narcissism of small differences...
ReplyDeleteI should also note, in partial defense of/explanation for Zappa, that where both I and I think he thought he really excelled was in instrumental music and what I think of as instrumental music with words - where the lyrics aren't there to make any specific point, satirical/comedic or otherwise, but provide a vocal counterpart to the instruments, which may have been partially what endeared him to Europeans.
Delete(My favorite records of his are Uncle Meat, Hot Rats, Waka/Jawaka, and The Grand Wazoo - the latter two recorded during his convalescence, as it happens.)
The comedy impresario was an act he cooked up that would allow him to 'be' a rock star - with all the money, travelling, and women that entailed - but which eventually ate into him, stunted his art, and made him just that more miserable. Moon describes him suddenly shaving off his facial hair in his last days, and says it felt like him taking off a mask
'both he and I thought' would work better there - I'm tired
Delete