Sunday, October 27, 2013

Lou Reed Dead...and the colored girls sing do do do do do do do do do do do do do doooooooooooo

Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer, Dead at 71

New York legend, who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, underwent a liver transplant in May

October 27, 2013 1:15 PM ET
Lou Reed
Lou Reed
Lex van Rossen/MAI/Redferns
Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.
With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. "One chord is fine," he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."
Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed was born in Brooklyn, in 1942. A fan of doo-wop and early rock & roll (he movingly inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989), Reed also took formative inspiration during his studies at Syracuse University with the poet Delmore Schwartz. After college, he worked as a staff songwriter for the novelty label Pickwick Records (where he had a minor hit in 1964 with a dance-song parody called "The Ostrich"). In the mid-Sixties, Reed befriended Welsh musician John Cale, a classically trained violist who had performed with groundbreaking minimalist composer La Monte Young. Reed and Cale formed a band called the Primitives, then changed their name to the Warlocks. After meeting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, they became the Velvet Underground. With a stark sound and ominous look, the band caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who incorporated the Velvets into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. "Andy would show his movies on us," Reed said. "We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wearing black anyway."
"Produced" by Warhol and met with total commercial indifference when it was released in early 1967, VU’s debut The Velvet Underground & Nico stands as a landmark on par with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde. Reed's matter-of-fact descriptions of New York’s bohemian demimonde, rife with allusions to drugs and S&M, pushed beyond even the Rolling Stones’ darkest moments, while the heavy doses of distortion and noise for its own sake revolutionized rock guitar. The band’s three subsequent albums – 1968’s even more corrosive sounding White Light/White Heat, 1969’s fragile, folk-toned The Velvet Underground and 1970’s Loaded, which despite being recorded while he was leaving the group, contained two Reed standards, “Rock & Roll” and “Sweet Jane,” were similarly ignored. But they’d be embraced by future generations, cementing the Velvet Underground’s status as the most influential American rock band of all time.   
After splitting with the Velvets in 1970, Reed traveled to England and, in characteristically paradoxical fashion, recorded a solo debut backed by members of the progressive-rock band Yes. But it was his next album, 1972’s Transformer, produced by Reed-disciple David Bowie, that pushed him beyond cult status into genuine rock stardom. “Walk On the Wild Side,” a loving yet unsentimental evocation of Warhol’s Factory scene, became a radio hit (despite its allusions to oral sex) and “Satellite of Love” was covered by U2 and others. Reed spent the Seventies defying expectations almost as a kind of sport. 1973’s Berlin was brutal literary bombast while 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance had soul horns and flashy guitar. In 1975 he released Metal Machine Music, a seething all-noise experiment his label RCA marketed as a avant-garde classic music, while 1978’s banter-heavy live album Take No Prisoners was a kind of comedy record in which Reed went on wild tangents and savaged rock critics by name (“Lou sure is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people,” one of those critics, Robert Christgau, wrote at the time). Explaining his less-than-accommodating career trajectory, Reed told journalist Lester Bangs, “My bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds.”
Reed’s ambiguous sexual persona and excessive drug use throughout the Seventies was the stuff of underground rock myth. But in the Eighties, he began to mellow. He married Sylvia Morales and opened a window into his new married life on 1982’s excellent The Blue Mask, his best work since Transformer. His 1984 album New Sensations took a more commercial turn and 1989’s New York ended the decade with a set of funny, politically cutting songs that received universal critical praise. In 1991, he collaborated with Cale on Songs For Drella, a tribute to Warhol. Three years later, the Velvet Underground reunited for a series of successful European gigs.  
Reed and Morales divorced in the early Nineties. Within a few years, Reed began a relationship with musician-performance artist Laurie Anderson. The two became an inseparable New York fixture, collaborating and performing live together, while also engaging in civic and environmental activism. They were married in 2008.
Reed continued to follow his own idiosyncratic artistic impulses throughout the ‘00s. The once-decadent rocker became an avid student of T'ai Chi, even bringing his instructor onstage during concerts in 2003. In 2005 he released a double CD called The Raven, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In 2007, he released an ambient album titled Hudson River Wind Meditations. Reed returned to mainstream rock with 2011’s Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica.
“All through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.” 


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lou-reed-velvet-underground-leader-and-rock-pioneer-dead-at-71-20131027#ixzz2ixAeOdVY 
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Saturday, October 26, 2013

David Gilmour Live In Gdansk Full Version

Prepare for a long sitting, this is one of the most beautiful and amazing video concerts I have ever listened too.  In fact, now I'm going to listen and watch it this time. Crank this shit up!!!!!!!!!

Friday, October 18, 2013

My Long Bike is coming along

Well here it is...My longbike Sportster That I'm building with a lot of assistance from my brother from another mother, Gavin Cranford, better known to most of you as Slim of Slims Fab Farm fame.  He spent almost an entire day making that form fitting oil tank with a cap he spun up in the lathe and a built in filter. We were going to do a Crazy Frank type fender situation but when I slapped that Fat Bob fender on there it just looked perfect, So I have to find a decent old stock fat bob fender if anyone has one. We had planned to get the tank made but it took so long to get the oil bag done we didn't have time (only because people hanging around and flap'n their jib really slows down Slims process) Anywho, if you look close you can see the wire we used to create the shape of the tank to come. The tank will be welded (tigged) directly to the frame and be completely hand formed by Slim. He had this old Denvers springer laying around so we shoved it in the neck just to have some way of rolling the thing around and VOILA! it magically became a chopper. I was going run a super skinny 17" on the front but that 21 with 15 on the back looks just right. So now I also am shopping for a nice spool 21 and also a panhead swing arm so I can run some longer shocks and get a smoother ride. It will wind up with a sissy about as tall as the neck and a queen and king seat with good back support. So that's my idea of a real chopper, there will be plenty more tricks along the way. I took a shit load of pics and video of the process and will be coming out with another production of "Burning Metal With Slim" soon so stay tuned. Between my shit and Dougs shit there should be quite a bit of action on the Ol' blog. Wait till you see the front end we're going to make for this deal. like nothing anyone has ever seen! Laterdaze  


Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Doug's "Snowster" is coming together.

Just a bad camera pic for now, but there has been an achievement made. Doug's "Snowster" is on it's wheels. That means it once again it is a motorcycle! A couple changes that haven't been shown before, the front end has been shortened 2" and I had Itchy run a blue stripe around the wheels that match the pins on the tins. We lost a bunch of fabricated parts that were sent to chrome and somehow vanished so I'm going to have to make all the forward controls and all the oil tank mounts that were made from CB 750 connecting rods. Other than that it all bolts together.....So check in once in a while for more progress pics.  Laterdaze 


Thursday, October 10, 2013

JUST THE WAY YOU ARE, Film Short



Here's a short my Pal Roy Eisenstein wrote and directed. StarringTommy Otis , Martin Flynn with me and Rick Cresse in the back ground. Came out pretty swell if you ask me, but nobody is really asking me. Shot at Tri-C Engineering, that's Rick's blown flatty roadster getting the pinstriping treatment. Thanks Roy!