Sister Ray

Take it away, Maestro!

I'd wager that "Sister Ray" is the most widely-heard track of its violence and aural hostility. What track on a widely available album by a major artist competes with it? Joy Division and New Order and the Sisters of Mercy covered it. (As did, amusingly, author Alan Moore, in a bizarre parody version about an Objectivist (!) comic book superhero.) Jonathan Richman, in "Roadrunner," simultaneously neutered it and made it really appealing. It sits on countless record store shelves worldwide, lying dormant on copies of White Light/White Heat, waiting to perforate eardrums and induce bad trips and anxiety attacks.

The topics, as the Wikipedia entry dryly notes, cover almost every item on the Lou Reed menu: homosexuality, transvestites, prostitutes, heroin use, sudden violence. It's so over the top that it's much more funny than it is threatening. Reed's voice is mesmerizing here - whether he's chanting "whip it on me, Jim," nagging his friends about shooting a man dead ("Aw, doncha know you shouldn't do that? Doncha know it stains the carpet!"), or droning raga-style "Iiiiii'm searching for myyyyy maaaaaaaain liiiiine," you can barely take your ears off him.

And yet if the song were an instrumental, it would be nearly as astonishing. Here's a war on tape: each player tweaking his volume measure by measure, a band whose every part is trying to drown each other out. It's arguably the single point of John Cale's rock career in which real honest-to-god rocking coexists with his earlier systems-music work whole and entire, body-and-blood soul-and-obscenity. His organ part could have been released as a track on the New York in the 1960s records, and nobody would have thought it out of place; but harness it to Moe Tucker's thumping, Sterling Morrison's squawking, and Lou Reed's guitar and vocal assault, and you have one of the most arresting pieces of art ever created.

A band that created music so powerfully destructive and destructively powerful couldn't last for long. It's a shame that Cale's greatest collaborative relationship - the one with Tucker and Morrison and Reed - couldn't have lasted just a little longer, though. But at least we have White Light/White Heat, and "Sister Ray," to show for it.

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The Gift

A word to the wise: I recommend you don't look at the lyrics of this piece unless you've heard it. It's a spoken-word story with an ending that's worth hearing in context.

The Gift (SPOILERS) is the funny, upbeat, accessible track on The Velvet Underground's 1968 sophomore effort, White Light/White Heat. (Given 1. the subject matter; 2. the eight-minute runtime; and 3. the fact that it's a spoken-word piece, that's a little surprising, but consider the album.) John Cale's accent and voice - nimble, underplayed, remarkably nonthreatening and even cute, are responsible in large part for its appeal - though the hilariously sick story and the groovy backing instrumental (also known as "Booker T.") account for much of the rest.

This piece was the first Cale vocal I'd knowingly heard. I'd heard his voice before on his cover of Hallelujah; I'd heard him play bass with Patti Smith on a cover of The Who's My Generation. But this was the first time I'd connected the Velvet Underground guy with the producer with the voice. It was great.

I don't want to give away the absurd plot, but both it and the writing show a sense of humor and a way with language Lou Reed rarely showed again in such force. It makes me wish for an anthology of Reed short stories or something. Cale's delivery certainly helps the text work, though: whether he's speaking from the perspective of Waldo or of Marsha, he makes the characters come alive with his use of tone and emphasis. The one interjection from the band ("awwww") almost makes the track for me.

I said "Booker T." was the backing track. Really, it's the side track: in the tradition of early Beatles stereo mixes, the vocal sits alone in the left channel, the music in the right. You can listen to either alone, if you'd like, by panning your stereo to one side or the other. (Believe it or not, this technique's not dead yet.) But I don't know why you'd want to - the vocal is perfectly timed to the music, and the interactions between the two at the end are highlights.

Listening to Cale's vocals on White Light/White Heat, you get the feeling that he was kicked out because Reed felt threatened, because Reed suspected that Cale would steal the spotlight. Reed may have been onto something there - I know which of the two I'd rather hear.

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