vaŕo by kaisa kuslapuu

I FIRST MET KAISA KUSLAPUU in my yard one summer. She was standing outside a neighbor’s apartment and wearing a red sweatshirt with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. I had no idea who she was, and for a while I didn’t even know she was a musician. She was just the “girl with the Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.” Later I learned that these women who were hanging out in the yard were 6hunesseq, and I was invited to a concert. This took place at the Jaani kirik, or Saint John’s Church. The four singers performed from the choir loft, so that we could never see them during the performance. Only when it was over did they emerge, peering down. The loft reminded me of the deck of a ship. I thought they resembled ship captains.

Kaisa was one of the captains.

During this time, my youngest daughter began living with her mother in Võru, a town in the southeast corner of Estonia. Upstairs lived a very energetic older woman — I later learned she was 90 — who spent her days tending to the house’s gardens in spring, shovelling snow in winter, or raking the grass spotless in the autumn. There was something odd about the way she spoke Estonian to me when we passed each other in the stairwell. She would say kuis muudu instead of mis moodi — “what way” — or mine õkva instead of mine otse, “go straight.”

I was sure my Estonian was terrible, but then I learned she was speaking the Võro language. To understand the Võro language, I had to open my ears more. I had to listen and be patient.

It wound up preparing me for Kaisa’s new album vaŕo because Kaisa is from Võru and she decided to make an album in the local language. You have to step back here and appreciate how rare this is. On one hand, we have a very versatile musician and composer, with an incredible singing voice, and on the other hand, she is combining with her finesse for writing jazz and classical influenced pop with a language that is spoken by about 75,000 people.

In this way, vaŕo is already a goldmine for linguists and musicologists.

But the achievements of this album are not just conceptual. When searching for a metaphor, I kept seeing a toy box. Each time you pull one of these songs out of this “toy box,” you discover something new about it. You hold it up, inspect it from different angles. Kaisa’s songs are like that. They are dynamic, they are multidimensional, they are creative. Each one is its own world. You can get lost in these songs, move around in them a bit, and allow your mind to explore. The styles are diverse. Some are more like ballads, others have runosong cadences. Some really swing, some (like “Viktor Viktooria”) have an almost punk-like edginess to them.

Most are on the soft side. Kaisa evem calls her style, “võrosoft.” She told me in an interview that for this project, she wanted to do something for herself, and something in the Võru language, a language she heard all around her as a child. To assemble the songs, she wrote her own lyrics or set the words of writers like Raimond Kolk and Kauksi Ülle to her own music. She also discovered a kind of intimacy in singing in Võru, one that felt different from Estonian.

“The Võro language is in my DNA,” she told me. “My ancestors spoke it.”

For me, as a listener, it was interesting to hear familiar words and phrases in songs. These were the same words the old granny in the stairwell might shout at me — Kuis muudu? Mine õkva! — but now rendered in a lyrical way, against a gently unfolding musical musicscape. The songs drift through you, weaving meditatively, dredging up memories and country melancholy.

The album is collaborative. Eleven different musicians were involved. You can hear Katariina Tirmaste’s flute or Naomi McCarroll-Butler’s clarinet and whistle. There were some Canadians involved in the recording of vaŕo, too, most notably multi-instrumentalist Sam Gleason and bassist Alan Mackie. Some of the tracks were recorded in Tartu; others in Toronto. The guitar leans indie — is that Johnny Marr I hear in there? — the bass is deep, supple, and supportive.

Each has surprises, like the sprawling “Huug,” which runs for 7 minutes and 24 seconds, and takes the listeners through different experiences to the backing sound of an organ, as if they were wandering through a village at night. My personal favorite became “Inglikuur” (“Angel’s Choir”), set to lyrics by Raimond Kolk, and this was the first song Kaisa played during her concert at Heino Elleri Muusikakool in Tartu on 5 November. It was a very black and cool Saturday night, and the evening seemed to sparkle with the promise of something. There she was, accompanied by Gleason on guitar and Mackie on bass, and Marti Tärn on percussion. Seated next to me, was a representative from the Võro Instituut, who was wearing a green pin. “Võru is not a dialect,” she told me. “It is its own language.” I told her about the old Võru woman shouting õkva and how I first came to meet “the girl in the Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.”

I had wondered, sitting in the front row there, before Kaisa went on, if she could pull off these songs live. The recordings were so rich, that I didn’t know if a four-piece band could do justice to them. But they did, and they made it look easy. Afterward, Kaisa emerged wearing her cloak and beads, and people hugged her, brought her flowers, and had her autograph new LPs. I thought, “This is how new music reaches people: just like this, with a concert and a hug after.”

Kaisa Kuslapuu on stage with guitarist Sam Gleason, bassist Alan Mackie, and drummer Marti Tärn in Võru in early November. Photo by Aap-Eerik Lai.

free

THERE’S SOMETHING TO BE SAID for public pools, especially ones like these that are way out in the open, drawing in the rays of the sun. Even the faint smell of chlorinated water is pleasant, as are the bath-warm waters that spread around you. How had we arrived here, and who were these people? There were several tour buses that picked us up at the road stop. I stood in one of them, clinging to a greasy metal pole. The others were newer vehicles; this one was a vintage double-decker, the kind Michael Caine rode in Alfie. What’s it all about, Alfie?

It was standing room only. I held on tight. And then here we were, at this retreat in the countryside. I was lying on my back in a pool. From the surface of the water, I could see a house at the top of a green hill. Just a plain country house. Was this Shrublands from Thunderball? She arrived next, dressed in her brown jacket. “There you are!” she said. She unzipped it and came into the pool in a polka-dot one-piece swimsuit. She was grinning at me the whole time, as if she had at last discovered El Dorado. I was terrified. Remember that night? Remember how you had to think of other women to get through that night? And here she was.

She was coming.

She began to swim my way; on impulse I went to the other side of the pool. I hoisted myself out. She kept swimming my way, with that half-maniacal, half-happy look on her face. “It’s you!” Swimming, swimming. Why wouldn’t she just let me swim in peace, alone? Remember that night? Headache, nausea. Somewhere, The Who were playing “I’m Free.” I’m waiting for you to follow me. No! The rough sound of Pete Townshend’s guitar. Where was it cutting in from? A poolside stereo? The silver eagle moon? And freedom tastes of reality. Run, run, run!

‘come on let’s go’ by broadcast

I FIRST HEARD the English group Broadcast in a parking lot, probably in the summer of ’99, or around that time. I remember exactly which parking lot it was. It was the one beside the Presbyterian church in Setauket on Long Island. The song was “Phantom,” off of 1997’s Work and Non Work. I think after that, I fired up the old Napster, and Broadcast’s discography was mine. Even at that time, the internet was nascent and information was scarce and hard to find. I really had no idea what Broadcast was, who was in it. The band was shrouded in mystery.

Since then, there have been some advances in internetting. Thanks to Wikipedia, I know in a flash that the group was formed by Trish Keenan and James Cargill, a bassist (!) in Birmingham in 1995. From what I understand, Keenan and Cargill were a sort of scene super-duo (reminiscent of the Gane-Sadier partnership in Stereolab). I think context is a little important here. There was a 1960s revival going on in the late 1990s (think peak Britpop). This wasn’t just driven by nostalgia. People, including myself, just happened to like music from that time. Why shouldn’t we be able to write our own songs inspired by the music we liked? It raised questions about time and cultural ownership. The bottom line was that no matter the inspiration, what came out sounded different. There was no way to recreate that sound, but a sense of loss infused the music. You can hear this in Belle and Sebastian’s recordings.

In March 2000, Broadcast issued their first proper album, The Noise Made by People, on Warp Records. “Come On Let’s Go” was the second single off the record, released that May. Songwriting credits are attributed to Cargill, Keenan, as well as band members Roj Stevens (keyboards), Tim Felton (guitar), and Steve Perkins (drums). The song received positive reviews, with journalists reaching for familiar words like shimmer psychedelic pop. For a young person, there were haunting lines in the song. “It’s hard to tell who’s real in here, come on, let’s go.” It sounded like spending time with strangers. It sounded like a long, lonely walk home at 2 am.

Broadcast was burned to disc and was my music accompaniment throughout college. Once, while I was walking past the radio station at George Washington University, I heard the Broadcast song “City in Progress” being played over the speakers. There was a young DJ inside, an Asian American girl (I will not speculate if she was Korean or Japanese, etc.) but she seemed so introverted and unassuming, and I was surprised that she too had heard of Broadcast. Of course, I waved at her through the glass. “I love Broadcast,” I mouthed to her. “Me too!” she mouthed back. I later got my friends suspended from their show on the radio, when I was invited on and accidentally said, “fuck you” in response to the hosts’ provocation.

The manager came rushing in, sweating, cursing too. “I’m going to get fined for that!”

Trish Keenan died in 2011, when I was knee-deep in diapers, basically (my three daughters were born in ’03, ’07, and ’11). She contracted pneumonia while touring Australia. Swine flu. She was only 42 years old. Cargill oversaw the release of the remainder of the Broadcast catalogue in 2024. Spell Blanket and Distant Call covered demos recorded between 2000 and 2009. And that was that. There’s no Broadcast without Trish Keenan. I’m not sure what the other band members are up to now. But maybe some of us might try to make songs that sound as good. Pretty please?

roof

THERE I WAS, dancing with the Alexandrov Ensemble in my living room, when the wind blew the roof off the house. This was the premier song and dance ensemble of the Soviet army. They were used to doing prisyadki, or Cossack squat kicks. They knew how to do povzunets. But once I put the needle on the vinyl of Off the Wall, they were totally baffled as how to perform to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” “Good American music,” I told them. “But how do American soldiers dance to this style of music?” one of the dancers asked. His name was Boris.

Then the wind blew the roof off the house and the soldiers all fled into the street. The house was a single-story bungalow, the type that’s popular in California and other earthquake-prone places. The roof came off intact, hovered in the air. My family members gathered around to observe the sight of a roof being lifted into the air by a spectral, unseen force, then tossed on its side. It wasn’t even that windy. It was like watching the Titanic issue its final deep groan.

How was I ever going to fix that? That was my first thought. In other parts of the house, a table was arrayed with a family meal. Cousins were still seated around, passing buckets of fried chicken. They were unfazed by the loss of the roof. From our side of the house, we could see the roof pitch to one side, then float into some black powerlines. The roof looked like a UFO.

Another gust of wind pushed the roof back toward the house and then across the side yard. Down it came, out by the mailbox, still mostly in one piece, though wooden shingles had started to break off on the sides. Just then, a neighbor boy arrived home from school. The bus had let him off on the street. “Come quick,” I shouted to him. “Maybe we can weigh it down with some rocks!”

All this time, Off the Wall had continued to play on the house speakers. Now it was “Rock with You.” “You fool!” my wife cried out from inside the house. She was cradling our newborn in her arms. She said, “You really think some rocks can stop it from levitating?”

She was right. The wind began its ominous rustling. There was something precise and focused about it. Again, the roof went sailing into the air. Like a zeppelin, it righted itself and began to smoothly float away across a blue sky. “Well,” I sighed and told the boy. “There goes our roof.”

mill:liminal by murmer

*Into the mill. Mill:liminal is the audio accompaniment to the 2018 film The Mill, recorded at the Räpina Paper Factory in Estonia.*

MILL:LIMINAL IS NOT AN EASY RECORD to peg, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or enjoyable. In fact, it’s among the more haunting, thought-provoking, and meditative recordings I have heard in some time. Released this year by Murmer, the handle of sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley, it is the sonic accompaniment to a 35-minute film made with Daniel Edward Allen in 2018 called The Mill. To record The Mill, McGinley and Allen descended on the Räpina Paberivabrik, a paper mill in southeast Estonia that has been producing paper continuously since the 1730s. Here, the old mill’s creaks, whirs, rattles and hums are arranged into drone-like compositions distilled into seven, hypnotic tracks. McGinley reports that he was inspired to record the mill after having been a customer. Räpina produced the packaging for earlier releases, and he was drawn in by its mesmeric sounds.

McGinley’s approach to recording is very cinema verite. His sound recorders are the shaky hand holding the camera, giving you a first-person look — or in this case, listen — at what’s happening. The sounds for mill:liminal were recorded mostly with a Sennheisier MKH 30/40 boomed microphone rig connected to an SD744T hard disc portable field recorder. Additional sounds were recorded with self-constructed contact microphones and some with DPA 4060 miniature omnidirectional microphones. So what can sound like sound captured raw is actually the product of some serious technological sophistication and deep processing.

The result is unsettling, for mill:liminal sounds like consciousness melting off the slate of time. In some moments, the low and steady growl of the paper mill machinery takes on monastic tones, as if a monastery of Tibetan monks were assembled for prayer in the mountains.

It’s not hard to find parallels in McGinley’s work, but it does lead one to unexpected places. Is a man in a plaid shirt with a microphone in hand, poised to capture sounds in the field, not unlike Alan Lomax, with his field recordings of world music? McGinley does agree with that.

“I have long-standing thoughts about the world of field recording and experimental music being considered as folk music,” he says. “It’s music that has grown out of a community outside of academic circles, a sort of voice of a population.” Interestingly, he has noted that the mill, in its own way, is a living entity, as people play limited roles in maintaining its processes.

There are also sonic links to the experiments of minimalist composer La Monte Young and his Dream Syndicate. One can see how the hum of a paper mill aligns with Young’s tunings that matched the environmental sounds around him, most famously his reliance on a refrigerator’s 60-cycle electrical hum, which he considered as a foundational drone for his music. Young called the 60-cycle hum the “drone of Western civilization,” but as mill:liminal reminds us, these folk songs of machinery are all around us. If listened to, they can be a thing of beauty.

mill:liminal is available now as a digital download and will be available soon as a cd packaged in paper from the Räpina Paberivabrik. In addition to undertaking field recordings of creepy paper mills, Murmer also produces a regular weekly radio show called Framework Radio. Other recordings are available on Bandcamp.

algún día by tomás del real

“ALGÚN DÍA” by Chilean singer songwriter Tomás del Real is easily one of his most accessible and enjoyable songs. Instantly satisfying, the lead single off his forthcoming album Jakobsoni, is three-and-a-half minutes long and finds del Real expressing all his strengths: gentle, playful melodies, deft guitar work, and that almost half-whispered conversational singing style of his, as if he was confiding in you his most important feelings and thoughts on a walk at night.

The image of the typewriter in the video for the single evokes the literary tradition in pop music and is apt. Think of stories about Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, where the lyrics were composed line by line on a typewriter in the house they shared, or even The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” or “Eleanor Rigby.” While sounding almost nothing like McCartney, it could be said that del Real has similar sentiments, a fondness for novelistic writing, atmospherics that make a song glow at its edges, finding inspiration in the everyday.

Though the song glides along as easily as a ghost, del Real said that it even challenged him to play it. “It has this very complex fingerpicking that I heard in my head at first, but couldn’t figure out,” he says. “It took months for it to become natural.” The lyrics also emerged over time and the whole composition came together during a week of self-imposed exile in Berlin.

“I was able to take a break and finish up four of the songs on the new album,” del Real recalls.

“Algún día” reflects on existential themes of life and death, the temporary and timeless.

Algún día de erosión / Nuestras almas se evaporarán / Al encontrar otra forma en vez de despertar / Quizá, me han de contar

Which translates in English to something like

One day, through erosion / Our souls will evaporate / Finding another way instead of waking / Perhaps, they will tell me.

Finding another way instead of waking;

“I think time and the ephemerality of things is a topic that’s on my mind quite often,” he says. “I was searching for the most vulnerable aspects of myself while writing this song, the real spots, for something valuable.”

The single was recorded in Viljandi, Estonia, where del Real has lived for the past few years and produced with Javier Barría, who added the synths and other instrumentation. “Algún día” was mixed and mastered by del Real’s long-time collaborator Jorge Fortune in Chile. It is available on all streaming platforms, including Spotify, as of 31 July. The new album Jakobsoni will follow soon. It will be the fourth record del Real has put out in Estonia, following 2022’s collaboration with Lee Taul Don’t Chase the Lizard, 2023’s Principios de Declaración and 2024’s Notas Rotas. Despite this prolific output, del Real says that he battles writer’s block all the time, even with “Algún día”.

“This one has been like cold brew,” he says. “Drip by drip. It took a while, but it came out right.”

drummer

I HAD BEEN SEEING Mai for a few weeks when she abruptly left me for a drummer. And not just any drummer, but Giorgio Marrakesh, the rhythm provider for one of New York’s most enduring indie rock ensembles. Mai was my kind of woman: a few years older, self-accomplished, intoxicatingly neurotic, a spicy summer cocktail of the dangerous and ridiculous, well shaken. She had her own TV show, which was called The Mai Show. She would emerge onto the stage of The Mai Show in her lovely pink tablecloth-looking dress as spellbound fans from everywhere applauded furiously. She would spin and settle onto one hip.

We had met at the Strand Bookstore downtown on a Wednesday afternoon. I had been paging through reproductions of 17th-century Swedish imperial maps; she had been reading a feature article about herself from 1994. She had just finished filming the day’s episode. She was sipping from a coffee cup. She wore those big glasses that famous people wear, to both draw attention to themselves and to avoid being seen. But those pink lips gave her away. It was all going swimmingly and summerly until Giorgio re-entered the picture. She went back to him at once. “He’s a drummer,” she said and shrugged. She related the end in a careless and wonderful way.

A drummer. Drummers sat in the back, surveying all before them. Drummers were steady, reliable. Drummers kept the beat. Drummers had their own philosophy. “But he’s just a drummer,” I wrote Mai. I sent telegrams to her apartment every hour on the hour, relayed by real messenger boys. “He’s just a drummer,” I continued. “He knows about cymbals, he knows about snares and tom-toms, he knows if it’s 4/4 or 6/8. Would a drummer write you a haiku?”

He’s just a drummer / Always playing with his sticks / Can’t write a haiku

A drummer, she was with a drummer, not a writer. But what is a writer? A writer is always writing. A writer is found in bookstores. A writer runs his fingers along old paperbacks by Salinger and Vonnegut, wishing he had written them, but secretly feeling superior to both.

“But can a writer also be worthy of your love?” I penned Mai. She read the letter while she was lounging around in her loft apartment, eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her agent. She never wrote back.

two a.m.

I GOT A TICKET to see a show at the old Main Street Theatre. A former vaudevillian hub that had retained its gilded, art deco elements even though it had been long since upgraded into a modern performing space and hosted all kinds of B-level musicians. These included up-and-coming singer-songwriters who would soon graduate to bigger and better things but miss its cosy intimacy. My seat was on the left. From its plush cushion, I could see everyone come in.

This was how I spotted Mai. To my surprise, her seat was next to mine, and to my double surprise, she was soon in my lap. She was still clutching the program in one hand as she embraced me. It was good to see Mai. She wore a red sweater, the kind J. Geils once sang about, soft and fuzzy, just magical to touch. I soon became lost in its textures, how they rose and fell, rearranging themselves along her abdomen like desert sands. Her chestnut hair was pulled back. Her eyes were blue. “I’ve missed you,” she said. There was a sincerity there. I had sincerely missed her too. My hands soon found their way under her sweater and we sat joined, like frogs. Sometimes you don’t need anything else but to be and be still. Most times, I think.

When I woke up, the shape of my lovely friend was still there but the band leader was shouting down at us from the stage. This was an old soul group, straight out of New Orleans. “If all of y’all is going to sleep, then none of us is going to play!” the band leader said, gesturing with his trumpet. I looked around the theatre and could see that everyone was asleep, not just us. Many blank and groggy faces, old ones, young ones yawning. “Oh, I’m so tired,” Mai whispered.

“If you are going to put on a show at 2 a.m., you shouldn’t expect people not to fall asleep!” I yelled back at the band leader. “You don’t know nothing,” he said. “We always play at night!” “Two a.m. is when most people sleep! It’s the middle of the night. Maybe your band should have its concerts during the day.” “Tell you what, man,” the band leader shouted back. “We are done playing for squares.” The band came off the stage, slowly, sorrowfully. They funeral marched up the aisles past their audience, sullen faces down, sad not to play, horns and all.

‘twilight haze’ by fuzzolini

FUZZOLINI’S NEW RECORD is called Beauty Exists in Everyone. I’ve seen this group perform a few times, and both times they were so loud, I thought I was about to go into cardiac arrest. Which is what makes listening to an actual recording, where I can control the volume, so refreshing. “Ah, so that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.” I wouldn’t blame them for the sonic dissonance. One aspect is that’s how rock clubs do it. It’s supposed to be loud. And I also think the group is going for the wall-of-sound effect. On the song “Twilight Haze” they manage to create that same kind of full noise tapestry without suffering from too much messy distortion.

I’m kind of impressed by Fuzzolini’s guitarist, singer and frontman (I guess you could call him that) Valter Nõmm, who looks like he fell asleep in about 1997 or so and just woke up in the forest somewhere, still wearing the same flannel shirt. He has maintained that kind of sensibility, as if he’s still listening to Soundgarden on his Walkman with his sunglasses on.

He’s not afraid of big, crunchy guitar sounds, but these bold strokes are applied sensitively, with the finesse of an artist. According to Nõmm, “Twilight Haze” was one of those songs that came out of nowhere. “Come out of nowhere” songs are mystical. Think of “Get Back,” which Paul McCartney conjured out of nothing. Better yet, nobody is quite sure of where they come from. They just come. Getting a few words out of this tight-lipped cat Nõmm is always an effort. He is a man who speaks in gestures and prefers to let his guitar do the talking. But he did manage to tell me that the song “was created spontaneously in the studio,” in one take.

The original track was just his guitar and drums, played by Lauri Pajos. Later Margus Voolpriit’s bass and Kristi Jõeste’s synths were added to the mix. “I decide to go for something cosmic,” Jõeste says. ” I started to feel a little bit like Sven Grünberg.” The synths give the track its “beamed in from space” feel. The vocals are performed by Mari-Liis Rebane, an audiovisual artist and producer, who sings with Fuzzolini. This too was improvised, which preserved its “raw emotion and exploratory style,” in her words. Rebane and Nõmm have known each other for 20 years and had collaborated before, but Fuzzolini gave them the opportunity to do more. She sings on several songs, including “Balloons,” for which she created the synth sequence.

“Twilight Haze” was the second track they recorded for the record. It seems they’re happy with it. “It carries within it the fluid feeling of moving through the night,” says Rebane. “I like it’s hypnotic quality,” Nõmm agrees. Cosmic synths, heavy guitars, smart vocals, big drums. What’s not to like?

Photos by Nicolas Bouvy

‘i guess i’m falling in love’ by the velvet underground

EVENTUALLY ONE ENCOUNTERS the Velvet Underground. They are the godfathers of punk, the remakers of rock, the anti-Beatles, or something along those lines. Much has been written about them, much has been attributed to them. In reality, they were a creative New York rock group that enjoyed limited commercial success in the late 1960s. They are probably best known as Andy Warhol’s house band, and the Velvets toured to support something called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia experience, for lack of a better term, that included loud rock and roll. These events included film showings, light shows, and noise experiments. The Velvets played one of these EPI shows at a venue called The Gymnasium on East 71st Street in New York on April 30, 1967, during which their set was recorded. This has to be some of the best rock of its era captured on tape and the standout is “I Guess I’m Falling in Love.”

Authorship of this song is attributed to the whole band, which at that time included Lou Reed (guitar, vocals), Sterling Morrison (guitar), John Cale (bass), and Maureen Tucker (drums). I’m guessing that it was the scholarly Morrison who ripped the amazingly fluid guitar solo, which sounds fantastic with The Gymnasium’s acoustics. This live version later surfaced on the Velvet’s boxed set, Peel Slowly and See, which yours truly acquired as a teenager. I honestly was contending with the winter doldrums when I was in my Velvets phase, and probably some hormonal stuff, I think I was having periods of mania followed by collapse and depression. High school started early too, and I believe I suffered from sleep deprivation, which happens when you wake up at 6 am every day. And which made this the perfect band to listen to. While they have their dark mood music, “I Guess I’m Falling in Love” was a rare splash of sunshine.

Yes, even Lou Reed had his up moments. Otherwise, it was mostly down. There were tensions with Nico (“You’re out of the band!”). There were tensions with Cale (“You are also out of the band!”). And there were tensions with Warhol (“You’re not the boss of me!”). There was just a lot of Lou-related tension and probably the greatest tension he had was with himself (hint, his future involved a lot more heroin and some transexuals). But he was from Long Island — Freeport, to be exact — and as a moody teenager I could relate to his desire to blow the whole place to smithereens with some infectious rock and roll and set it ablaze with the help of Morrison, Cale, and Tucker. Especially Cale seemed dangerous, with his greasy dark hair and undertaker’s countenance. A few people have told me that I look like this brooding Welshman, which I take as the greatest compliment. Before forming the Velvets, Reed was a songsmith for a record company called Pickwick Records, by the way, where he imitated a lot of bestselling 60s pop and produced knockoff hits. A little Ronettes over here, some Beach Boys there, an inverted Four Seasons progression to serve as the foundation. One can appreciate Lou Reed’s taste for memorable changes, propulsive rhythm, and great hooks on this recording from ’67.