When You Are Old

from the French magazine, Les Inrockuptibles in 1990

... you stop searching for new music. When you do buy new music, you still choose to listen, again, to Abbey Road or Zoso instead of the new shiny thing. Anyway the new shiny thing you bought is a reissue of Johnny Cash or Monk & Coltrane at Carnegie Hall or maybe a remastered Radiohead album originally released in '97 (It sounds identical to the initial release, but hey! 2nd disc of rarities and b-sides and three previously unreleased songs).  

Due to a couple of Backtalk posts by 99telepod, I've been listening to virtually nothing but Lou Reed and VU for the last three days. They only released four studio albums and a collection of rarities in 1985 (VU), yet Apple Music informs me that I have 15 hours and 48 minutes of music by the Velvets. Add the Reed solo albums, and it's more than 20 hours.

Currently listening to Bootleg Quine Disc 2, testing my endurance at five tracks totaling an hour and 19 minutes. Not quite as difficult to get through as Peel Slowly Disc 1 which is just a bunch of demos starting and stopping. Feels like I'm suffering mental illness after a while. Still, John Cale singing Venus in Furs in the style of British airs and ballads is now the definitive take for me.

Brian Eno, in an LA Times interview with Kristine McKenna published 5/23/1982. Frequently quoted or paraphrased, this appears to be the earliest, verifiable instance of it:

"My reputation is far bigger than my sales," he said with a laugh on the phone from his home in Manhattan. "I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways."

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a copy of McKenna's interview with bumptious, captious, insolent Lou. It's collected in her book Talk To Her and the book is worth a read even though that interview isn't. Elvis Costello and Orson Welles also come off as jerks. Shocking! Jacques Derrida is very self-conscious about how he looks on camera and film, just like you and me. Iggy Pop is surprisingly soft-spoken and thoughtful - pretty much how he appeared opposite Tom Waits in Coffee and Cigarettes.

Anyway he had strong opinions. He loved many of his fellow musicians, and hated rock journalists, The Doors, The Beatles. Or maybe Shirley Manson?

I seem to have digressed. Originally came here to ask 

WHAT NEW OR NEWISH MUSIC HAVE YOU BEEN LISTENING TO? IF YOU HAVEN'T LISTENED TO ANYTHING NEW, WHAT WAS THE LAST PIECE OR ALBUM YOU BOUGHT?

Tell us a bit about the artist(s) if you wish, and maybe what you like about them.

One last thing. Such a nice looking young man. Probably be a middle manager for Ford someday.

Thanks for reading,

Chit Chatty in Chicago