Lou Reed archive series to start with Words & Music, May 1965


Lou Reed Words And Music




The Lou Reed archive series will be launched on August 26th in a variety of formats.

Lou Reed’s pre-Velvet Underground days with John Cale will be the subject of the first of a new archive series from Light In The Attic Records and Laurie Anderson.

Words & Music, May 1965 goes back to some of Reed’s earliest songwriting days which produced the first versions of future avant-garde classics such as Heroin, I’m Waiting For The Man and Pale Blue Eyes – straight-to-tape recordings which had been left undisturbed for 50 years.

“The poverty in these songs – the bathtub-in-the-kitchen you hear in their clumsiness, the fifth-floor-walkup you can hear in their defiance – lets you hear them, now, as chalk on a wall, not the markings that wash away in the next rain but inscriptions that somehow become part of the brick, even if in a year or two no one will be able to read them,” Greil Marcus writes in the liner notes.

“Each of these songs is its own bildungsroman. They make a darkness, and Reed and Cale try to feel their way through it. In ‘Heroin,’ there’s just a hint of the hurricane it will become and the enormous authority it will carry two years later. Pale Blue Eyes’ says go farther, there’s no end to this, and you know that they will go farther – they’re almost there.”

Words & Music, May 1965 (2LP tracklist):

I’m Waiting for the Man (May 1965 Demo)
Men of Good Fortune (May 1965 Demo)
Heroin (May 1965 Demo)
Too Late (May 1965 Demo)
Buttercup Song (May 1965 Demo)
Walk Alone (May 1965 Demo)
Buzz Buzz Buzz (May 1965 Demo)
Pale Blue Eyes (May 1965 Demo)
Stockpile (May 1965 Demo)
Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (May 1965 Demo)
I’m Waiting for the Man (May 1965 Alternate Version)


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