Some Came Running

If you enjoyed "Metal Machine Music," you might also like...

Arguably, one of the problems with Lou Reed's 1975 electro-acoustic piece "Metal Machine Music" (the first iteration of which was released on the eponymous double LP by Reed)  is that it does too much. The recording is of four tracks feeding-back electric guitar; the mix puts two stacked tracks in the right and left channel. The timbres of the feedback are in some cases determined by the tuning of the guitar plugged into the amplifier. Reed also manipulated tape speed and so on. The result is not (and again this is an arguable point) sufficiently drony to be classified as "minimal" or "minimalist." As Reed observed—in a perhaps more sober frame of mind than which he conceived and executed the composition—to David Fricke, "the harmonics would start mixing, going into something else." There's a lot of action in the sound, enough so that some more credulous listeners might have reason to have taken Reed at his rather vehement word back in 1975 when he protested to critic Lester Bangs that you can hear sections of famous classical works buried in the aforementioned harmonics. "There's like tons of those things in there, but if you don't know them you wouldn't catch it. Just sit down and you can hear Beethoven right in the opening pat of it." Mmm hmm. Below, in order of relative listenability (from most difficult to almost pleasant, depending) are five more possible lease-breakers, or party-enders, or IMPORTANT PIECES OF 20TH CENTURY CLASSICAL MUSIC!

Lou's forebears, and contemporaries, preferred a less busy approach to their sonic monoliths. Take 1) "Fantastic Glissando", a piece realized in 1969 by Tony Conrad. Conrad is of course the artist and musician who actually played with Reed as a "member" of The Primitives, the ad-hoc trash-rock band that cut "Do The Ostrich," and which tuned all their guitar strings to the same note for a drone effect. Conrad was also, with Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, a member of LaMonte Young's Theater of Eternal Music. Made with a sine-wave oscillator and a reel-to-reel tape recorder, Conrad's piece is as the title indicates: a glissando, first reproduced as recorded, then reiterated three times, each time at about a quarter of the speed of the prior version. I don't have the math right, probably. I only listened to it once before filing it somewhere that I don't want to go fetch it from again. It's a toughie. 2) "Bohor 1," by Iannis Xenakis, first featured on a nifty Nonesuch vinyl selection of the great composer's electro-acoustic music, in not a walk in the park either, but its ever-building noise component at times makes it function almost like apocalyptic soundtrack music. While Xenakis never entirely revealed the "instrumentation" for the piece, it's believed he used a mouth organ, and some kind of bells, those of the kind found in ornamental jewelry, perhaps, and shook them in close proximity to a microphone and amplified the sound through a mixing board to produce unholy loudness and distortion. Ginchy. 3) "Modulation With 2 Electric Guitars And 2 Amplifiers," by Japanese super-genius Otomo Yoshihide, is, for all intents and purposes, "Metal Machine Music" only without overdubbing and tape manipulation; the 40-minute piece was recorded live, as it happened, in concert in Hiroshima, of all places. Extremely clean where "MMM" is dirty and teeming with harmonic activity, the drones produced by the amplifiers actually seem to change depending on where you're sitting listening. A fascinating effect, provided you can hang with the sounds themselves. 

The only music I ever played on my stereo that made my late, beloved cat Pinky visibly nervous was 4) "The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (1962)" by LaMonte Young. It caused Mr. Young, an animal lover,  actual distress when I informed him of this, which made me feel bad. Actually, compared to the other pieces discussed above, Young's work, one of the scant officially sanctioned recordings of his groundbreaking music, is relatively pastoral. Trumpeter Ben Neill, leading a horn ensemble, goes through the piece's four pitches ("isolated in the harmonic structures of the sounds of power plants and telephone poles," per Young) over and over again, holding them for long durations. The microtones in the harmonics that emerge during these drones might hit certain cat-unfriendly frequencies, but for hardcore meditating humans, the piece can conceivably serve as a readymade mantra. This kinda nirvana ain't cheap, though; the out-of-print Gramavision CD fetches pretty high prices on Amazon and elsewhere. Finally, Tod Dockstader's epic three-CD set 5) Aerial takes electric/electronic drone into an arena I won't call New Age...but the stuff here, basically edits of shortwave radio signals that the composer has picked up over a series of years,  is certainly good potential late-night listening for those with adventurous tastes. As Dockstader (whose '60s electro-acoustic masterpiece is titled "Quatermass," hmm) himself puts it, "airwaves allow for a silence that is not dead, representing a presence even without a signal." Ghosts in the (metal) machine (music), if you will. 

Some observations on the piece "The Unfinished," by D.T. Max, in the March 9, 2009 issue of The New Yorker

"You shouldn't read it," my wife Claire said, just after making me aware of the piece's existence. "It's just too sad."

But Claire of course knew that I would read it anyway. And yes, it did make me cry. Not just for David Foster Wallace, but for...

...and already I sink into the banality that all of Dave's writing life was a fierce and all-consuming battle against, and by the same token I know that what Dave was searching for most in his writing life, and most in all the aspects of his life that he could get a handle on when they weren't being compromised by his disease, was a sincerity—but a sincerity that wasn't dumb. Not to put it reductively, but that really was the rub. When I got the card from Dave announcing his marriage, it finally hit me, that Dave was not against happiness per se, but that he was deeply suspicious of it, or rather what was passing for it, because of all the pernicious simulacrums that PRETENDED to be happiness. In this respect a lot of Dave's work reminded me of the Velvet Underground's third album, with all its obsessive questioning of love and its finally finding some truth in a pair of pale blue eyes or just...well, now I'm sadly rambling.

D.T. Max's scrupulous, sensitive piece in the current New Yorker isn't the whole story—for one thing, it ruthlessly compresses Dave's non-fiction writing, which of course you would expect me to point out, having been one of the custodians of said writing...but still—but it's a true, compelling, awful one. And still some of it made me smile, and some of it made me remember the affinities Dave and I shared. Max, it's clear, carefully read, and re-read, every published word Dave wrote in the process of reporting the piece. Early on, he quotes from a third-personed Don Gately interior monologue in Infinite Jest: "What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all...But he could choose not to listen." Yes; this certainly applies to the noise of the internet today, and while I sometimes argued with Dave's choice not to listen, I always knew he had more than a point. I won't be so vain here as to trumpet what I'm no longer listening to in order to clear my head and keep my blood pressure down, but the matter of choice is really paramount here. 

Other parts of Max's piece made me smile, if not laugh out loud. A passage from a letter to his great friend Jonathan Franzen, wherein he confesses his envy of "you and [WIlliam} Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David fuckwad Leavitt." Yes: Dave and I never ever had to even discuss it, we both knew what a fuckwad Leavitt is, and Leavitt, who's still alive, should never stop being reminded of what a fuckwad  he is. There's envy, there's spite, and there's truth, and...well, you know. The only time I personally ever heard Dave use the term "fuckwad" was in reference to a Premiere fact checker who was sitting on the Batman notebook that he used to take notes for his David Lynch piece. Said notebook having been sat on by said fact checker in the L.A. office for about 8 months, and Dave needing it for the new version of the Lynch piece he was preparing for A Supposedly Funny Thing... It is delightfully funny to read, in Max's piece, about Dave having had a My Little Pony notebook at one point. 

And less funny to read other things. "Ever since he had ended his addiction, drugs had been anathema to Wallace; Don Gately's refusal to take narcotic painkillers after he is shot makes him the hero of Infinite Jest." That brought back the memory of a night in January 1998, walking out of the Adult Video News Awards at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, and Dave begging off from going to a party at Vince Voyeur's suite at the Luxor, because he had the flu, and bad; and him deputizing me and Evan Wright and Nat Welch to go and do recon for him. "Isn't there anything you could take?" I asked him, reflexively, stupidly, knowing, at least vaguely, of his own struggles with addiction (including an ongoing one, to fucking chewing tobacco). "No," he said, abashedly, no doubt feeling he was letting me down as a journalist, whereas I was, in reality, mostly feeling bad at being deprived of his company. 

The other stuff...well, makes me feel rather stupid. My last conversation with Dave, in May of '08, was one in which he commiserated with me on my job loss, and fed me a line not dissimilar to one that Max chronicles him feeding to friends at a dinner at a Los Angeles bookseller's convention shortly thereafter, about a physical illness. I'm not angry at him for lying. And I'm not so vain or self-delusional to think that had I known the whole truth I could have helped him. In the end, it's just like Claire says: just so, so, fucking sad.