Lester Bangs, The Velvet Underground, Making Movies etc I'm the worlds least prolific blogger. The last thing I stuck on here was a link to a Beatles video at youtube, was has gotta rate as pretty much the lamest post ever, and even that was two weeks ago. I check out alotta your blogs most days, and the sheer volume of verbiage you cats manage to churn out makes me wanna weep. I figure you must be a buncha speed freaks or summfin. So I figured I'd just sit down with a glass of the cheap red and write about whatever the dickens wanders into my mindspace. I've been re-reading the Lester Bangs anthology 'Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung.' Now there's a cat who could really churn it out. There's a review of 'Astral Weeks' 9 pages long. I dig Lester alot, I mean, the guy was a
Dee-troit bum and he wasted his talent like a shmuck, but at least the cat realised that the important thing 'bout being a rock and roll writer ain't the rock and roll but the writing, and I wish he were still around, he'd be kicking Fall Out Boy's lillywhite MTV Corpro-punk ass all over the parking lot, ranting magnificantly 'bout how Iggy Pop didn't roll around in glass and get beaten up by Hells Angels so this buncha jerks could turn up 30 years later and buy a house in the Hamptons with their Million Dollar advance from Geffen or whoever the hell it is they sold their Mothers to in exchange for drugsmoneygirls. Plus, he loved The Velvet Underground, who I dig the mostest 'cos I've always sorta figured they're like....The Anti-Beatles, mutant Noo Yoik beatnik pop-art wraparoundshades street punk metaphetamine reflections of The Fabs, deepest dark where The Beatles were (gen-er-ally) dazzelingly bright, the distorto-Fabs, influential as hell but didn't sell squat, and, man, were they ever the greatest - jeez, I was just listenin' to The Gift (from White Light / White Heat, der numero uno DEFINITIVE Velvets LP in my humble etc) the other night, and I remembered reading that the lyrics (John Cale recites monotone exitentialist bizzaro short pulp fiction) were recorded on one channel and the music on the other, so you can listen to them both, or just one of them, so I pilled a wire, cut out the lyrics and just sat digging the music, which is pretty much the funkiest the Velvets ever got, (I mean it ain't James Brown but it ain't a million miles away from early Funkadelic neither) - a huge monster heavy fuzz bass riff from hell, Mo Tucker cavewoman stomp drums and, after a fashion, yer standard Velvets freak-out feedback guitar auto-destruction. Check it out, pop-pickaroos: IT'S A HIT!

So I've been listening to der Velvets and readin' Lester Bangs, which I guess makes sense. The other thing I've been doin' is making a film, summfin I've wanted to do ever since I saw Apocolypse Now (I'm a barrel of terrible cliches) back in...I wanna say high school...sixth form (I ain't ashamed of my Yankophilia, but you gotta draw your own line somewhere) and, y'know, turns out making a film is a whole lotta work. I wasn't really expecting that. I write music reviews for a local paper, that ain't work. I DJ at and organise a club (The Revolutionary Freaked Out Fuzz Club, check out our myspace etc) - that's some work, but mainly it gives me a chance to play David Axelrod and Howling Wolf records real loud, so that ain't really work neither. I work, that's some work, but it's work, so that's pretty much parta the deal. I figured Making A Film would probably fall somewhere near the Club Organising level of Work, But Not Really Work. Turns out it's actually just Work. The film I'm involved with (storyboarding, filming, setting up scenes, shifting boxes of props around town like a shmuck yadda yadda yadda) is summfin we're doing for three local bands (Cardboard Radio: post Libertines indie rock'n' roll, Hijack Oscar: heavy blues Carnival music & Boss Caine: Rolling Stones-styled alt. country) who have a big-deal one day festival thing coming up soon and wanted a video to project behind them, so 'cos they all think they're such a big buncha badass rock 'n' roll outlaws we've watched a ton of Leone movies and 'The Cincinnati Kid' and made a 15 minute film noir black and white cowboy poker movie, with 'em all sat round a dingy bar swigging Jack Daniels, smoking fat cigars, talking trash, playing cards, hustling each other outta dollars and chips yadda yadda, all real cliched but it looks super-cool and that's all that really matters anyway (check out the Midsummer Movie myspace, etc). So essentially I've had my first taste of making a music video. I thought it was a lot of hard, slow, frequently dull work. The finished thing's gonna be a stone wig flipper, but the process itself I haven't dug nearly as much as I always thought I would. I studied Film Theory at Warwick University, and the whole experience of making a film (however amateur, low budget, badly organised it's been) has forced me to accept something pretty down-heartening, which is I think a Film Theory course which contains absolutely no practical film making...is completely bunk. You cannot understand film unless you've been exposed on a least some level to how a film is ACTUALLY MADE. I knew alot about film before doing this, (not as much as I should perhaps, but enough), but I was shocked as to how naive I was about the reality of film-making, both the nature of a shoot and the post-production, editing process. "So...it looks like they were in the room together at the same time...but actually the shot of him and the shot of her were filmed on...what...totally seperate occasions?" I'm playing for effect, but it's not so far from the truth.

Which brings us nicely back to Lester Bangs. Lester was essentially a student of music theory, he played harmonica a bit and he wrote lyrics and sang der blues a little, but was basically not a musician, ('cept of course anybody who can bang a cooking pot is a musician, but that's a seperate issue.) In the late 70s he went into the recording studio with a band he'd put together, I guess figurin' 'Hey, if the chumps I bin writin' 'bout all these years can do it, I sure as hell can', and I remeber a quote I read once from his producer which basically went along the lines of "I couldn't believe LESTER BANGS, the man who understands rock and roll more than anyone on the planet, could be so naive about the recording process. He was shocked that not everything- bass, drums etc- were done together, live. He was sort of disapointed."

And that's the end of that chapter.  ¶ 9:59 AM