Sci-Fi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback Predicts Telemedicine in 1925
If you’ve ever wondered why one of science fiction’s greatest honors is called the “Hugo,” meet Hugo Gernsback, one of the genre’s most important figures, a man whose work has been variously described as “dreadful,” “tawdry,” “incompetent,” “graceless,” and “a sort of animated catalogue of gadgets.” But Gernsback isn’t remembered as a writer, but as an editor, publisher (of Amazing Stories magazine), and pioneer of science fact, for it was Gernsback who first introduced the earth-shaking technology of radio to the masses in the early 20th century.
“In 1905 (just a year after emigrating to the U.S. from Germany at the age of 20),” writes Matt Novak at Smithsonian, “Gernsback designed the first home radio set and the first mail-order radio business in the world.” He would later publish the first radio magazine, then, in 1913, a magazine that came to be called Science and Invention, a place where Gernsback could print catalogues of gadgets without the bother of having to please literary critics. In these pages he shone, predicting futuristic technologies extrapolated from the cutting edge. He was understandably enthusiastic about the future of radio. Like all self-appointed futurists, his predictions were a mix of the ridiculous and the prophetic.
Case in point: Gernsback theorized in a 1925 Science and Invention article that communications technologies like radio would revolutionize medicine, in exactly the ways that they have in the 21st century, though not quite through the device Gernsback invented: the “teledactyl,” which is not a robotic dinosaur but a telemedicine platform that would allow doctors to examine, diagnose, and treat patients from a distance with robotic arms, a haptic feedback system, and “by means of a television screen.” Never mind that television didn’t exist in 1925. Sounding not a little like his contemporary Buckminster Fuller, Gernsback insisted that his device “can be built today with means available right now.”
It would require significant upgrades to radio technology before it could support the wireless internet that lets us meet with doctors on computer screens. Perhaps Gernsback wasn’t entirely wrong — technology may have allowed for some version of this in the early 20th century, if medicine had been inspired to move in a more sci-fi direction. But the focus of the medical community — after the devastation of the 1918 flu epidemic — had understandably turned toward disease cure and prevention, not distance diagnosis.
Gernsback looked fifty years ahead, to a time, he wrote, when “the busy doctor… will not be able to visit his patients as he does now. It takes too much time, and he can only, at best, see a limited number today.” Home visits did not last another fifty years, but remote medicine didn’t take their place until almost 100 years after Gernsback wrote. Indeed, the webcams that now give doctors access to patients in the pandemic only came about in 1991 for the purpose of making sure the break room in the computer science department at Cambridge had coffee.
Gernsback even anticipated advances in space medicine, which has spent the last several years building the technology he predicted in order to perform surgeries on sick and injured astronauts stuck months or years away from Earth. He would have particularly appreciated this usage, though he isn’t given credit for the idea. Gernsback also deserves credit for poking fun at himself, as he seemed to realize how hard it was for most people to take him seriously.
To non-visionaries, the technologies of the future would all seem equally ridiculous today, as in the pages of Gernsback’s satirical 1947 publication, Popular Neckanics Gagazine. Here, we find such objects as the Lamplifier, “the lamp that has EVERYTHING.” Gernsback’s love of gadgets blurred the boundaries between science fiction and fact, always with the strong suggestion that — no matter how useful or how ludicrous — if a machine could be imagined, it could be built and put to work.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Evolutionary History of Fat: Biologists Explain Why It’s Necessary for Our Survival & Why We’re Biased Against It
The Fat Acceptance movement may seem like a 21st century phenomenon, rising to public consciousness with the success of high-profile writers, actors, filmmakers, and activists in recent years. But the movement can date its origins to 1967, when WBAI radio personality Steve Post held a “fat-in” in Central Park, bringing 500 people together to protest, celebrate, and burn diet books and photos of Twiggy. “That same year,” notes the Center for Discovery, “a man named Llewelyn ‘Lew’ Louderback wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post titled, ‘More People Should be FAT.’” These early sallies led to the founding of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) two years later and more radical groups in the 70s like the Fat Underground.
There would be no need for fat activism, of course, if there were no biases against fat people. This raises the question: where did those biases come from? They are not innate, says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman in the Slate video above, but are a product of a history that tracks, coincidentally, with the rise of mass marketing and mass consumerism. We have been sold the idea that thin bodies are better, healthier, more attractive, and more desirable, and that fat is something to be warred against. “However, as an evolutionary biologist, “says Lieberman, I’ve come to appreciate that without fat, we’d be dead. Humans wouldn’t really be the way we are. Fat is really life.”
A quick perusal of art history shows us that larger bodies have been valued around the world in much of human history. We now associate fat with poor health, but it has also signaled the opposite — a storehouse of caloric wealth and healthy fertility. “Our bodies have all sorts of tricks to make sure we never run out of energy,” says Lieberman, “and the main way that we store energy is fat.” Leiberman and other biologists in the video survey the role of fat in human survival and thriving. “Fat is an organ,” and scientists are learning how it communicates with other systems in the body to regulate energy consumption and feed our comparatively enormous brains.
Among animals, “humans are especially adapted to be fat.” Even the thinnest among us are corpulent compared to most primates. Still, the average human did not have any opportunity to become obese until relatively recent historical developments — in the grand evolutionary scheme of things — like agriculture, heavy industry, and the science to preserve and store food. When Europeans discovered sugar, then mass produced it on plantations and exported it around the world, sugar consumption magnified exponentially. The average American now eats 100 pounds of sugar per year. The average hunter-gatherer might have struggled the eat “a pound or two a year” from natural sources.
The over-abundance of calories has led to a type-II diabetes epidemic worldwide that is closely related to sugar consumption. It isn’t necessarily related to having a larger body, although fat deposits in the heart and elsewhere can worsen insulin resistance (and heart disease); the problem is almost certainly linked to excess sugar, the constant availability of high-calorie foods, and low incentives to exercise. Our hunger for sweets and love of comfort are not character flaws, however. They are evolutionary drives that allow us to acquire and conserve energy, operating in a food economy that often punishes us for those very drives. Dieting not only doesn’t work, as neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt explains in her TED Talk above, but it often backfires, making us even hungrier because our brains perceive us as deprived.
As scientists like Lieberman gain a better understanding of the role of fat in human biology, those in the medical community are realizing that doctors and nurses are hardly free from the societal biases against fat. Studies show those biases can translate to poorer medical care and bad advice about dieting, a vicious cycle in which health conditions unrelated to weight go untreated, and are then blamed on weight. Evolutionary biology explains the role of fat in human development, and human history explains its increase, but the question of where the hatred of fat comes from is a trickier one for these scientists to answer. They barely mention the role of advertising and entertainment.
In 1979, activists in the “Fat Liberation Manifesto” identified the problem as fat people’s “mistreatment by commercial and sexist interests” that have “exploited our bodies as objects of ridicule, thereby creating an immensely profitable market selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, that ridicule.” Despite decades of resistance, the diet industry thrives. A Google search of the phrase “body fat” yields page upon page of unscientific advice about ideal body fat percentages, as though reminding the majority of Americans (7 in 10 are classified as overweight or obese) that they should feel there’s something wrong with them.
Blame, shame, and ridicule won’t solve medical problems, say the biologists in the video above, and it certainly doesn’t help people lose weight, if that’s what they need to do. If we better understood the role of fat in keeping us healthy, happy, and alive, maybe we could overcome our hatred of it and accept others, and ourselves, in whatever bodies we’re in.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...17th Century Scientist Gives First Description of Alien Life: Hear Passages from Christiaan Huygens’ Cosmotheoros (1698)
Astrobiologists can now extrapolate the evolutionary characteristics of possible alien life, should it exist, given the wealth of data available on interplanetary conditions. But our ideas about aliens have drawn not from science but from what Adrian Horton at The Guardian calls “an engrossing feedback loop” of Hollywood films, comics books, and sci-fi novels. A little over three-hundred years ago — having never heard of H.G. Wells or the X‑Files — Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens answered the question of what alien life might look like in his work Cosmotheoros, published after his death in 1698.
Everyone knows the names Galileo and Isaac Newton, and nearly everyone knows their major accomplishments, but we find much less familiarity with Huygens, even though his achievements “make him the greatest scientist in the period between Galileo and Newton,” notes the Public Domain Review.
Those achievements include the discovery of Saturn’s rings and its moon, Titan, the invention of the first refracting telescope, a detailed mapping of the Orion Nebula, and some highly notable advancements in mathematics. (Maybe we — English speakers, that is — find his last name hard to pronounce?)
Huygens was a revolutionary thinker. After Copernicus, it became clear to him that “our planet is just one of many,” as scholar Hugo A. van den Berg writes, “and not set apart by any special consideration other than the accidental fact that we happen to be its inhabitants.” Using the powers of observation available to him, he theorized that the inhabitants of Jupiter and Saturn (he used the term “Planetarians”) must possess “the Art of Navigation,” especially “in having so many Moons to direct their Course…. And what a troop of other things follow from this allowance? If they have Ships, they must have Sails and Anchors, Ropes, Pillies, and Rudders…”
“We may well laugh at Huygens,” van den Berg writes, “But surely in our own century, we are equally parochial in our own way. We invariably fail to imagine what we fail to imagine.” Our ideas of aliens flying spacecraft already seem quaint given multiversal and interdimensional modes of travel in science fiction. Huygens had no cultural “feedback loop.” He was making it up as he went. “In contrast to Huygens’ astronomical works, Cosmotheoros is almost entirely speculative,” notes van den Berg — though his speculations are throughout informed and guided by scientific reasoning.
To undermine the idea of Earth as special, central, and unique, “a thing that no Reason will permit,” Huygens wrote — meant posing a potential threat to “those whose Ignorance or Zeal is too great.” Therefore, he willed his brother to publish Cosmotheoros after his death so that he might avoid the fate of Galileo. Already out of favor with Louis XIV, whom Huygens had served as a government scientist, he wrote the book while back at home in The Hague, “frequently ill with depressions and fevers,” writes the Public Domain Review. What did Huygens see in his cosmic imagination of the sailing inhabitants of Jupiter and Saturn? Hear for yourself above in a reading of Huygens’ Cosmotheoros from Voices of the Past.
Huygens’ descriptions of intelligent alien life derive from his limited observations about human and animal life, and so he proposes the necessity of human-like hands and other appendages, and rules out such things as an “elephant’s proboscis.” (He is particularly fixated on hands, though some alien humanoids might also develop wings, he theorizes.) Like all alien stories to come, Huygens’ speculations, however logically he presents them, say “more about ourselves,” as Horton writes, “our fears, our anxieties, our hope, our adaptability — than any potential outside visitor.” His descriptions show that while he did not need to place Earth at the center of the cosmos, he measured the cosmos according to a very human scale.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Brian Eno Day: Hear 10 Hours of Radio Programming Featuring Brian Eno Talking About His Life & Career (1988)
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Brian Eno kept busy during last year’s pandemic, telling the L.A. Times this past January about one of his latest ideas, an open source Zoom alternative, just one of any number of projects he’s kicking around at any given time. One of the most prolific and influential artists, musicians, producers, and thinkers of the past several decades, Eno is such a cultural institution, he warrants his own appreciation day. That’s just what he got on February 12, 1988 when KPFA (a radio station in Berkeley, CA) turned over an entire day to hosting Eno for wide-ranging interviews, stories about his collaborations, and conversations about the musical genres he invented. He even takes questions, and his replies are illuminating and urbane.
Eno’s always been a generous and witty conversationalist. The Brian Eno Day broadcast hits on nearly all of the major highlights of his career up to that point, with a comprehensive overview of his work, earlier interview recordings, and loads of songs and excerpts from his extensive recorded corpus. Much of this work is obscure and much of it is as well-known as the man himself. One cannot tell the stories of artists like U2, Talking Heads, and David Bowie, for example, without talking about Eno’s guiding hand as a producer. Eno’s renowned for founding glam rock pioneers Roxy Music, inventing ambient music, and for his generative approaches to making art, whether on small paper cards or in software and apps.
Eno once said his first musical instrument was a tape recorder, and he’s been obsessed with recording technology ever since, delivering his influential lecture “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool” in 1979 and demonstrating its principles in all of the music he’s made. In these interviews, Eno not only discusses the major plot points, but also “reveals such tasty tidbits as his dislike for computer keyboards; an admission that even he does not know what his lyrics mean; a preference for the music of Stockhausen’s students rather than that of Stockhausen himself; and the differences between New Age, Minimal, and Ambient Music,” notes the description on Internet Archive.
In the 33 years since this broadcast, Eno has produced enough music and visual art to fill another 10-hour day of interviews and overviews. But his methods have not changed: he has pursued his later work with the same openness, curiosity, and collaborative spirit he developed in his first few decades. Hear him in his element, ranging far afield in conversations about architecture, genetic evolution, and his own video installation pieces. Eno rarely gets personal, preferring to talk about his work, but it’s humility, not secrecy, that keeps him off the topic of himself. As he recently told a Guardian interviewer, “I’m not f*cking interested at all in me. I want to talk about ideas.” Hear Eno do exactly that in 10 hours of recordings just above.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Beatles’ 8 Pioneering Innovations: A Video Essay Exploring How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music
In modern society, some facts are simply accepted: one plus one equals two, the Earth revolves around the Sun, and The Beatles are the greatest band in history. “So obviously dazzling was The Beatles’ achievement that few have questioned it,” writes Ian MacDonald in his study of the band Revolution in the Head. “Agreement on them is all but universal: they were far and away the best-ever pop group and their music enriched the lives of millions.” Today, just as half a century ago, most Beatles fans never rigorously examine the basis of the Fab Four’s stature in not just music but culture more broadly. Suffice it to say that no band has ever been as influential, and — more than likely — no band ever will be again.
To each new generation of Beatles fans, however, this very influence has made the band’s innovations more difficult to sense. For decade after decade, practically every major rock and pop band has performed in sports stadia and on international television, made use in the studio of guitar feedback and automatically double-tracked vocals, and shot music videos.
But the Beatles made all these now-common moves first, and others besides, as recounted in the video essay above, “8 Things The Beatles Pioneered.” Its creator David Bennett explains the musical, technological and cultural importance of all these strategies, which have since become so common that they’re seldom named among The Beatles’ many signature qualities.
Not absolutely everyone loves The Beatles, of course. But even those who don’t particularly enjoy their records must acknowledge their Shakespearean, even Biblical super-canonical status in popular music today. This can actually make it somewhat intimidating to approach the music of The Beatles, despite its very popularity, and especially for those of us who weren’t drawn to it growing up. I myself only recently listened through the Beatles canon, at the age of 35, an experience I’d deferred for so long knowing it would send me down an infinitely deep rabbit hole of associated reading. If you, too, consider yourself a candidate for late-onset Beatlemania, consider starting with the half-hour video just above, which tells the story of the band’s origins — and thus the origin, in a sense, of the pop culture that still surrounds us.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings Collects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-Format Book
Most of us who know Frida Kahlo’s work know her self-portraits. But, in her brief 47 years, she created a more various body of work: portraits of others, still lifes, and difficult-to-categorize visions that still, 67 years after her death, feel drawn straight from the wild currents of her imagination. (Not to mention her elaborately illustrated diary, previously featured here on Open Culture.) Somehow, Kahlo’s work has never all been gathered in one place. That, along with her enduring appeal as both an artist and a historical figure, surely made her an appealing proposition for art-book publisher Taschen, an operation as invested in visual richness as it is in completeness.
There’s also the matter of size. Though not conceived at the same scale as the murals of Diego Rivera, with whom Kahlo lived in not one but two less-than-conventional marriages, Kahlo’s paintings look best when seen at their biggest. Hence Taschen’s “large-format XXL” production of Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, which “allows readers to admire Frida Kahlo’s paintings like never before, including unprecedented detail shots and famous photographs.” Presented along with a biographical essay, those photos capture, among other subjects, “Frida, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida’s home and the center of her universe.”
In creating his volume, editor-author Luis-Martín Lozano and contributors Andrea Kettenmann and Marina Vázquez Ramos focused not on the artist’s life, but her work. “Most people at exhibitions, they’re interested in her personality — who she is, how she dressed, who does she go to bed with, her lovers, her story,” says Lozano in an interview with BBC Culture. Putting together a run-of-the-mill Kahlo book, “you repeat the same things, and it will sell – because everything about Kahlo sells. It’s unfortunate to say, but she’s become a merchandise.” Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings is also, of course, a product, and one painstakingly designed to compel the Frida Kahlo enthusiast. Its ideal reader, however, desires to live in not Kahlo’s world, but the world she created.
via Colossal
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Hiroshige, Master of Japanese Woodblock Prints, Creates a Guide to Making Shadow Puppets for Children (1842)
Even if the name Utagawa Hiroshige doesn’t ring a bell, “Hiroshige” by itself probably does. And on the off chance that you’ve never heard so much as his mononym, you’ve still almost certainly glimpsed one of his portrayals of Tokyo — or rather, one of his portrayals of Edo, as the Japanese capital, his hometown, was known during his lifetime. Hiroshige lived in the 19th century, the end of the classical period of ukiyo‑e, the art of woodblock-printed “pictures of the floating world.” In that time he became one of the form’s last masters, having cultivated not just a high level of artistic skill but a formidable productivity.
In total, Hiroshige produced more than 8,000 works. Some of those are accounted for by his well-known series of prints like The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. But his mastery encompassed more than the urban and rural landscapes of his homeland, as evidenced by this much humbler project: a set of omocha‑e, or instructional pictures for children, explaining how to make shadow puppets.
Hiroshige explains in clear and vivid images “how to twist your hands into a snail or rabbit or grasp a mat to mimic a bird perched on a branch,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “Appearing behind a translucent shoji screen, the clever figures range in difficulty from simple animals to sparring warriors and are complete with prop suggestions, written instructions for making the creatures move — ‘open your fingers within your sleeve to move the owl’s wings’ or ‘draw up your knee for the fox’s back’ — and guides for full-body contortions.” The difficulty curve does seem to rise rather sharply, beginning with puppets requiring little more than one’s hands and ending with full-body performances surely intended more for amusement than imitation.
But then, kids take their fun wherever they find it, whether in 2021 or in 1842, when these images were originally published. Though it was a fairly late date in the life of Hiroshige, at that time modern Japan hadn’t even begun to emerge. The children who entertained themselves with his shadow puppets against the shoji screens of their homes would have come of age with the arrival of United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s “black ships,” which began the long-closed Japan’s process of re-opening itself to world trade — and set off a whirlwind of civilizational transformation that, well over a century and a half later, has yet to settle down.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Making of a Marble Sculpture: See Every Stage of the Process, from the Quarry to the Studio
Some marble statues, even when stripped of their color by the sands of time since the heyday of Greece and Rome, look practically alive. But they began their “lives,” their appearance often makes us forget, as rough-hewn blocks of stone. Not that just any marble will do: following the example of Michelangelo, the discerning sculptor must make the journey to the Tuscan town of Carrara, “home of the world’s finest marble.” So claims the video above, a brief look at the process of Hungarian sculptor Márton Váró. That entire process, it appears, takes place in the open air: mostly in his outdoor studio space, but first at the Carrara quarry (see bottom video) where he picks just the right block from which to make his vision emerge.
Like Michelangelo, Váró has a manifestly high level of skill at his disposal — and unlike Michelangelo, a full set of modern power tools as well. But even today, some sculptors work without the aid of angle cutters and diamond-edged blades, as you can see in the video from the Getty above.
In it a modern-day sculptor introduces traditional tools like the point chisel, the tooth chisels, and the rasp, describing the different effects achievable with them by using different techniques. If you “lose your ego and just flow into the stone through your tools,” he says, “there’s no end of possibilities of what you can do inside that space” — the space of limitless possibilities, that is, afforded by a simple block of marble.
In the video above, sculptor Stijepo Gavrić further demonstrates the proper use of such hand tools, painstakingly refining a roughly human form into a lifelike version of an already realistic clay model — and one that holds up quite well alongside the original model, when she shows up for a comparison. The Great Big Story documentary short below takes us back to Tuscany, and specifically to the town of Pietrasanta, where marble has been quarried for five centuries from a mountain first discovered by Michelangelo.
It’s also home to hardworking sculptors well known for their ability to replicate classic and sacred works of art. “Marble is my life, because in this area you feed off marble,” says one who’s been at such work for about 60 years. If stone gives the artist life, it does so only to the extent that he breathes life into it.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Brian Eno Launches His Own Radio Station with Hundreds of Unreleased Tracks: Hear Two Programs
Creative Commons image via Wikimedia Commons
Back in 2013, Brian Eno gave a talk at the Red Bull Academy, the lecture series that has hosted fellow musicians like Tony Visconti, Debbie Harry, and Nile Rogers. Asked when he knew a piece of music was finished, Eno let drop that he currently had 200,809 works of unreleased music. (The actual answer though? “When there’s a deadline”).
Usually we have to wait for posthumous releases to hear such music, like what is currently happening now to Prince’s “vault” of music. Eno is not waiting. He got the deadline.
Sonos Radio HD, the music division of the speaker and audio system company, announced last week that Eno has curated a radio station that will play nothing but unreleased cuts from his five decades of making music. There’s so much material, the chance of a listener hearing a repeat is slim. (Still, the station promises hundreds of tracks, not hundreds of thousands.)
Now, this is not an advertisement for Sonos, but a heads up that in order to promote “The Lighthouse,” as Eno has called the radio station, Sonos has dropped two Eno-led radio shows where he shares just a fraction of the unreleased material, with a promise of two more episodes to come. One features an interviewer, and the other is just Eno talking about the tracks. (And you *can* get one month free at Sonos if you sign up.)
“(A radio station) is something I’ve been thinking about for years and years and years,” says Eno. “And it’s partly because I have far too much music in my life. I have so much stuff.”
The tracks have been purged of titles and have been instead given the utilitarian monikers of “Lighthouse Number (X)”. Anyway, titles suggest too much thought. “Some are pretty crap titles,” he says. “The problem with working on computers is that you have to give things titles before you’ve actually made them…Sometimes the pieces often quickly outgrow the titles.”
If you’re expecting nothing but ambient washes and generative music, you might be surprised at the variety. In the first Eno-hosted show, he plays a funky jam (“Lighthouse Number 002”) co-composed by Peter Chilvers and stuffed with r’n’b samples; and an almost-completed song featuring the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart on guitar, called “All the Bloody Fighters,” aka “Lighthouse Number 106”.
Why call it “The Lighthouse”? “I like the idea of a sort of beacon calling you, telling you something, warning you perhaps, announcing something.” He also credits a friend who told him his unreleased music is like ships lost at sea. The lighthouse “is calling in some of those lost ships.”
As a bonus, listen below to Eno’s recent interview with Rick Rubin, where they talk about the Sonos project and much more.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Hear The Velvet Underground’s “Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes,” Which Showcases the Brilliance & Innovation of Lou Reed’s Guitar Playing (1969)
What was the Velvet Underground? A Kim Fowly-like art project that outlived its impresario’s interest? A main vehicle for Lou Reed, rock’s egomaniac underdog (who was no one’s ingénue)? Was it three bands? 1. The Velvet Underground and Nico; 2. The Velvet Underground with John Cale; and 3. The Velvet Underground with Doug Yule after Cale’s departure. (Let’s pass by, for the moment, whether VU without Reed warrants a mention…)
Each iteration pioneered essential underground sounds — dirgy Euro-folk rock, strung-out New York garage rock, junkie ballads, psychedelic drone, experimental noise — nearly all of them channeled through Reed’s underrated guitar playing, which was, perhaps the most important member of the band all along. Whoever taped the Velvets (in their second incarnation) on March 15, 1969, on the last night of a three-show engagement at The Boston Tea Party in Boston, MA, seemed to think so. “The entire set was recorded by a fan directly from Lou Reed’s guitar amplifier,” MetaFilter points out.
The mic jammed in the back of Reed’s amp, a Head Heritage reviewer writes, produced “a mighty electronic roar that reveals the depth and layers of Reed’s playing. Over and undertones, feedback, string buzz, the scratch of fingers on frets and the crackle and hum of tube amps combine to create a monolithic blast of metal machine music.” Known as the “legendary guitar amp tape” and long sought by collectors and fans, the bootleg, which you can hear above, “serves as a testament to the brilliance and innovation of Reed’s guitar-playing — both qualities that are often underrated, if not overlooked entirely, by critics of his work,” as Richie Unterberger writes.
It should be evident thus far that these recordings are hardly a comprehensive document of the Velvet Underground in early 1969. Except for Mo Tucker’s glorious, but muffled thumping and some of Sterling Morrison’s excellent guitar interplay, the rest of the band is hardly audible. Songs like “Candy Says” and “Jesus” — on which Reed does not create sublime swirls of noise and feedback — chug along monotonously without their melodies. “It is frustrating,” Unterberger admits, “to hear such a one-dimensional audio-snapshot of what is clearly a good — if not great — night for the band” (who were far more than one of their parts). On the other hand, nowhere else can we hear the nuance, ferocity, and outright insanity of Reed’s playing so amply demonstrated on the majority of this document.
The tape circulated for years as a Japanese bootleg, an interesting fact, notes a Rate Your Music commenter, “considering this bears more similarity to recordings from the likes of [legendary Japanese psych rock band] Les Rallizes Dénudés than most of the Velvet Underground’s other material.” The recordings may have well paved the way for the explosion of Japanese psychedelic rock to come. They also demonstrate the influence of Ornette Coleman in Reed’s playing, and the liberating philosophy Coleman would come to call Harmolodics.
“Alla that boo-ha about whether Reed really was influenced by free jazz,” writes one reviewer quoted on MetaFilter, “can be put to rest here as he pulls the kind of wailing hallucinatory shapes from the guitar that it would take the goddam Blue Humans to decode a couple of decades later.” It may well overstate the case to claim that “Lou Reed single-handedly invented underground music,” but we can hear in these recordings the seeds of everything from Television to Sonic Youth to Pavement to Royal Trux and so much more. See the full tracklist below, a “classic setlist,” notes MetaFilter, “from around the time of their 3rd LP.”
I Can’t Stand It
Candy Says
I’m Waiting For The Man
Ferryboat Bill
I’m Set Free
What Goes On
White Light White Heat
Beginning To See The Light
Jesus
Heroin / Sister Ray
Move Right In
Run Run Run
Foggy Notion
Related Content:
Hear Ornette Coleman Collaborate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Greatest Moments”
The Velvet Underground Captured in Color Concert Footage by Andy Warhol (1967)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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