Cheers, Keith! Keith Richards, born December 19, 1943

"I'm gonna booglarize you baby ... "

(Captain Beefheart, 1972)

As difficult as it is to believe in the 21st century, rock music was once a dangerous and provocative force in the booglarizing of America. The age from Elvis through the Rolling Stones were years and years of sheer terror for parents and politicians throughout the land, and even if the floor-shaking noises coming from the upstairs bedrooms of America were the sounds of a consumer-driven teenage market finding its voice (and its feet), the music was definitely something most of its listeners had never heard before.

And that was just the threat in the pounding, amplified beat -- the words were a whole new scare. The Beatles may have wanted to hold your hand, after all, when they could be understood above all that racket, but before that Jerry Lee Lewis was shouting about great balls of fire, and not necessarily about getting burned in the hellfire of damnation. And the Rolling Stones! Prancing about like ... like ... well, who knows like what, exactly, parents weren't sure, but inexplicably, obviously, bad-for-you, do you understand?

As it turns out, for the Rolling Stones time really is on their side after all. Determined to grow older -- if increasingly wrinkled -- with some dignity intact, Keith Richards' autobio, disarmingly titled Life, is filled with stories that somehow amaze with how different the world seemed back then. Now, when the only parental outrage Katy Perry can generate is her outfit on Sesame Street, tales of the Rolling Stones in America seem positively other-worldly.

Why did we stop at the 4-Dice Restaurant in Fordyce, Arkansas, for lunch on Independence Day weekend? On any day? Despite everything I know from ten years of driving through the Bible Belt. Tiny town of Fordyce. Rolling Stones on the police menu across the United States. Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and patriotically rid America of these little fairy Englishmen.

It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation. Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of '72, known as the STP. The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States. All the fault of us, mere minstrels. We had been inciting youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again.

It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter. He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election. We, in turn, they told our lawyer officially, were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.

As much grief as aging boomers get about their increasingly passe memories, rock music remains, if not exactly a threat, at least a thread of connection between generations. The music of the not-quite-greatest generation can still thrill, even if the cultural meaning doesn't quite grab as it once did. The lessons are learned, and age has its privileges: every few years, there's talk of another tour, and the Stones rock machine gears up for another assault on the wallet -- and still (still!) remains the biggest rock show on earth.

The Stones, gentlemen all, are grandfathers these days, but they are attempting to go old gracefully without the albatross of a young man's "hope I die before I get old" lyric in their book. (As far back as 1978 Keith contemplated the wisdom in the words "I'm going to walk before they make me run.") Mick Jagger has always played at the continental charmer, and even Keith seems content to retire most of he bad-boy stories, at least for this (book) tour. Will Mick and Keith play on stage again? As long as there is a five-pound note in The Bank of England's vaults.

Keith-the-estate-gardener may have retired most of his well-told war stories, and in the book de-fuses many of the more outlandish tales, but not all of them. And then there's this, which should give hope to bookworms everywhere: "When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer."

The rock star who played the Pirate King to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow must maintain some wickedness, certainly, if even for press junkets: it seems he did actually snort some of the old man's cremated ashes that had fallen out on the coffee-table. Then again, Keith has given up drinking now, at the age of 66, and a man must surely be allowed at least one vice.

"Any Day Now:" Bowie's big book of ch-ch-changes

 

For those who enjoy tripping down rock's memory lane, David Bowie has the ultra-glam treatment in a coffee-table slab of his own.

Any Day Now: David Bowie The London Years 1947-1974 (Adelita Publishers) is an eye-popping collection of memorabilia that should remind readers of a certain age that the '70s -- in the UK, at least -- certainly seemed ... well, a bit more colorful than here in the drab, Nixon-browed USA at the time.

 

Bowie was always a smart businessman -- he was the first to offer a stock offering in his musical back catalog -- and this book is a memento of a London  exhibition, edited by Kevin Cann, Bowie's gallery assistant and also contributor to the re-release of Bowie's music in the 1990s.

 

The parade of pictures shows The Thin White Duke in his many transformations from Maidstone folkie to Ziggy space case. The resulting tumble of images is a great laugh or a serious head-scratching case of pop remorse ... sometimes on the same page. Lady Gaga's got nothin' on this Aladdin Sane.

 

Bowie, au-courant, by Kenneth Pitt (1969)

340 pages, 850 images, pull-outs, signed glossies, concert tickets, lipstick traces: if you're interested in Bowie's history, you can read between the promo shots, coy backstage glances, and space-age album-cover art. Cann has put together all the details, as well as "the most concise listing of Bowie performances ever published," according to the Guardian UK.

 

At a length of 140,000 words, there's not much more to be read about Bowie's UK years. One must admit it was a nice gesture on Bowie's part to ask Dudley Moore to add piano to Hunky Dory, though. (Moore declined.)

 

Pin-up boy: Bowie by Terry O'Neill (1973)

 

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the price of the book (originally published in the UK at £24.99 for the no-frills paperback, £175.00 for the all-you-can-collect limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies) is a bargain. A history stopping at 1974, when Bowie left the UK for his Stateside dukedom, should give the collector and his wallet pause. If you have any quid left over from buying this book of ch-ch-ch-changes, better start saving it for Bowie, vol. 2.

Up-Tight: "she couldn't believe what she heard at all"



Ultra Violet is gone, Lou Reed is gone, Nico is gone, Andy Warhol himself is gone, and photographer Billy Name died this year on July 18. Many of the mainstays and scene-makers that entertained a club-centric, drug-fueled New York downtown scene in the late 1960s are disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

 

Isabelle Collin Dufresene [aka "Ultra Violet"] was a Warhol creation as much as her own -- artist, playwright, and Warhol superstar who in 1980 wrote the autobiographical play "You Are Who You Eat." As early as 1988 she published her memoirs Famous For Fifteen Minutes, My Years With Andy Warhol. It received the Frankfurt Library Award and has been  published in 12 languages.

 

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the mid- to late sixties, Warhol's Factory and the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

 



The Velvet Underground's third album

(photo by Billy Name)

 

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far distance from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

 

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise oral biography that details the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

 

Out-of-focus Lou, with Sterling Morrison, Nico,
Maureen Tucker, and John Cale:
 The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

 

  

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

 

Bockris' and Malanga's collection of great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.

The Lennons & the Learys, 1969: "people won’t go where somebody hasn’t already gone".

Tomorrow never knows: 34 years after his murder, John Lennon's legacy is still a touchstone for those looking  for peace in a confusing world. 

Michael Horowitz, Timothy Leary's archivist, found a tape-recording of a conversation between Timothy and Rosemary Leary and John and Yoko Lennon recorded during the Bed-In for Peace, May, 1969. The taped transcript was later included in early drafts of an anthology Leary was considering putting together for publication around 1978 with the title Heroes of the Sixties: Meetings with Remarkable WoMen, but the project was never completed. The tape and transcript were put aside.

Horowitz sent a copy of the transcript to the Timothy Leary Archives, which has published it on the website.  "I’d completely forgotten I had it. In an archival lapse, I had put it in an unmarked envelope in a box of miscellaneous papers.” he wrote. 

The curator of the Archives added:  "Michael’s guess is that Tim was given a copy of the tape at the time it was made, or later, and had it transcribed by one of his assistants, whose penciled editorial notes appear on the first two pages, and on the contents and permissions sheets. Michael remembers Tim invited him to assist on the project, “ but he (Tim) was too involved in the Future History Series, where some of these chapters ended up in one form or another, and abandoned ‘Heroes of the Sixties: Meetings with Remarkable WoMen.’”

The article and transcript was to be Chapter 16 under a new title, “The Beatles As Unconscious Evolutionary Agents (with Conversation with John-Yoko).” 

An excerpt:

TIMOTHY:  ... But it’s the old story. In the past, societies fought over territory. They thought, “We’ll hold this space, or we’ll force you out.” It’s an old mammalian tradition. As you pointed out about Reagan, what we’re doing in the United States is transcending this notion of the good-guy cowboy. That’s Governor Reagan: he’s gonna shoot down hippies, shoot down blacks and college students. So we gave up Millbrook, because there’s no point in fighting over the land, and making it a thing of territorial pride. If they want it so much that they’re going to keep an armed guard there all the time, they can have it. We’ll be back. ...

JOHN: Pioneers. Pioneers are very important today, because people won’t go where somebody hasn’t already gone. Yeah! That’s what we’re saying: what did your forefathers do? How did they make it?

YOKO: And it’s a healthy thing to do, isn’t it?

TIMOTHY: What do the kids say when they talk to you?

JOHN: About peace, or about anything in general? On the phone? Well, if they’re not saying, “Welcome to Canada,” they’re saying, “What can we do?” y’know?

ROSEMARY: That’s good.

JOHN: They’re saying, what can we actually do, and then I say, we say, “well we can’t tell you what to do?” y’know, we can only sort of say, “there’s other things to do.”

TIMOTHY: You’re in charge. You don’t have to ask.

JOHN: Yeah, think about it. But they’re getting it, y’know, I mean they must be. Our voices must be going out solid about every quarter of an hour. And if it isn’t singing, it’s talking, and we’re just repeating the same bit, y’know, and there’s very little “Me eyes are brown and Paul’s …," y’know? I mean I do that for the ones that need it. Most of it’s just, “let’s get it together,” and it must be going out now like a mantra. We’re trying to set up a mantra, a peace mantra, and get it in their heads. It’s gonna work.

TIMOTHY: It’s Pierre Trudeau that got us in Canada. Because, about a year and a half, two years ago, there was a big university thing in Toronto [Footnote from the Leary website: the reference is  to Perception ’67, a conference / cultural event featuring, in addition to the two named by Leary, Humphry Osmond, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Ed Sanders, and Ali Akbar Khan], and they invited people to speak about drugs. Paul Krassner came, McLuhan was there, and I was supposed to come up to give a talk, but the government wouldn’t let me in. So I sent a tape, and they confiscated it.

Then I went to the International Bridge in Detroit and handed it across, and the Americans busted me ’cause I wasn’t supposed to leave the country. That was two years ago, before Trudeau was premier. This time they checked with higher-ups. They kept us waiting about an hour. They were very polite. They were getting instructions from -– wherever they get their instructions.

JOHN: They kept us about two hours, searched through everything. Yeah, well, we wanted to get to Trudeau, we’re really headed for Nixon.

TIMOTHY: I am too.

JOHN: We’re just telling them that we want to give them two acorns—a piece of sculpture that we entered in an exhibition. So we wanted to get that to Nixon and tell him all we want you to do is make a positive move, y’know. And then they’d either have to accept it or deny it publicly, and then we’d ask, “Why, why, don’t you give us that time schedule?” ...

The film "Bed Peace" was made available for free on YouTube in August 2011 by Yoko Ono, as part of her website “Imagine Peace.” Tim and Rosemary’s participation is also documented in  another video on YouTube (also courtesy of Yoko’s Imagine Peace website), where they are seen singing on the recording of “Give Peace A Chance.”

John Lennon wrote another song that week, the earliest version of “Come Together,” for Leary’s campaign for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan. It was the prospect of Tim debating Reagan on television that, as much as anything, led to his imprisonment for a miniscule amount of marijuana. With the campaign aborted, John decided to rework the song for the Beatles’ Abbey Road.

(Photo by Stephen Sammons: Rosemary Leary, Timothy Leary, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, reading the local paper about their "Bed-In." From the Leary Archives site.)

Ultra Violet and the Warhol set: "You Are Who You Eat"

Ultra Violet is gone, Lou Reed is gone, Nico is gone, Andy Warhol himself is gone, and photographer Billy Name died this year on July 18. Many of the mainstays and scene-makers that entertained a post-Woodstock, club-centric, drug-fueled New York downtown scene are disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

 

Isabelle Collin Dufresene [aka "Ultra Violet"] was a Warhol creation as much as her own -- artist, playwright, and Warhol superstar who in 1980 wrote the autobiographical play "You Are Who You Eat." As early as 1988 she published her memoirs Famous For Fifteen Minutes, My Years With Andy Warhol. It received the Frankfurt Library Award and has been  published in 12 languages.

 

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the mid- to late sixties, Warhol's Factory and the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

 



The Velvet Underground's third album

(photo by Billy Name)

 

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far distance from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

 

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise oral biography that details the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

Out-of-focus Lou, with Sterling Morrison, Nico, Maureen Tucker,

and John Cale: The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

 

Bockris' and Malanga's collection of great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.

Mick Jagger, [great-grand]daddy rolling stone at 70

Mick Jagger, Denmark 1963

Mick Jagger, 70, is a great-grandfather. Imagine that. Literally a generation ago (or several), the frontman for the Rolling Stones gave pop culture a whole new level of sex and suggestiveness that shocked parents and seemed to liberate teenagers in a way the moptop Beatles never could. And now Sir Mick seems to be giving Sir Paul another rivalry that would have seemed impossible back in 1964: changing the great-grandbaby's nappy.

 Sympathy for the devil indeed.

Whether one wants to imagine the aging Stone still gathering no moss at least onstage, Sir Mick has always been quick with his lip in interviews. While he squirmed at the idea of sitting still for interviews he always knew their value as publicity and gamely cooperated -- unlike Dylan or even Mick's partner in rock, Keith Richards, for example.

There will always be more re-packaged hits for the Stones' many music labels, who have never been shy about mining gold from the band's half-century of pop history. And if the home-life gets sleepy between his great-grandpa chores and batting away rumors of touring with the Stones, Mick can revive his supergroup with Eurythmics legend Dave Stewart, reggae star Damien Marley, jazz soulstress Joss Stone and Indian musician and producer A.R. Rahman.

Here's Mick in 1995, talking to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone magazine at the ripe old age of 52, looking back at a professional career that even then had spanned 33 years. And although the Stones are more an industry than a rock band at this late date, who's to say that Mick, Keith, and Charlie won't continue to put on a show as long as there's a five-pound note left in the Bank of England's vaults? But who's counting, indeed: Last July the Stones staged the 50 And Counting tour.

Sir Mick, 2011

WENNER: What did you think was going on inside you at 15 years old that you wanted to go out and roll around on a stage?

JAGGER: I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, “Well, I can do this.” And I liked doing it. It’s a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn’t have gone on with it. But they all liked it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces.

WENNER: Shocked by you?

JAGGER: Yeah. They could see it was a bit wild for what was going on at the time in these little places in the suburbs. Parents were not always very tolerant, but Keith’s mum was very tolerant of him playing. Keith was an only child, and she didn’t have a lot of other distractions, whereas my parents were like “Get on your homework.” It was a real hard time for me. So I used to go and play with Keith, and then we used to go and play with Dick Taylor [who was later in the Pretty Things]. His parents were very tolerant, so we used to go round to his house, where we could play louder.

WENNER: What was it like to be such a success at such a young age?

JAGGER: It was very exciting. The first time we got our picture in the music paper called the Record Mirror – to be on the front page of this thing that probably sold about 20,000 copies – was so exciting, you couldn’t believe it. And this glowing review: There we were in this club in Richmond, being written up in these rather nice terms. And then to go from the music-oriented press to national press and national television, and everyone seeing you in the world of two television channels, and then being recognized by everyone from builders and people working in shops and so on. It goes to your head – very champagne feeling.

WENNER: You became quite the pop aristocrat in swinging London.

JAGGER: Well, it’s quite a while until all that. But the earlier bit was even more exciting. The suits, the ties and getting ready for “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” the innocence and naiveté of it all, and famous photographers wanting to take your picture and being in Vogue. In England they were very ready for another band. It was funny, because the Beatles had only been around a year. Things happened so quickly. Then there were a lot of popular bands, and all these bands were from the North of England. Most people in England don’t live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South. We were it. ...

Jumpin' Jack Flash, 1980

WENNER: Can you define rock & roll for me? What is it about? Is it about sex, violence, energy, anger?

JAGGER: All those things: energy, anger, angst, enthusiasm, a certain spontaneity. It’s very emotional. And it’s very traditional. It can’t break too many rules. You have certain set rules, certain forms, which are traditionally folk-based, blues-based forms. But they’ve got to be sung with this youthful energy – or youthful lethargy, because youth has this languorous, lethargic, rebellious side to it as well. So they can be sung as an alternate mode of thrashing, this slightly feminine languor, the boredom of youth as well as the anger, because youth has those two things. To represent those emotions, this form seems to work very well.

WENNER: Boredom and anger, which are both a form of rebellion.

JAGGER: Yeah, a statement of rebellion. Drawing the line where your generation is. ...

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe, just '60s kids in the Village

"I was a dreamy somnambulent child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with my inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat." (Patti Smith)

The young, daydreaming wizard of southern New Jersey soon intuits that New York City is a more appropriate stage for her talents, and by the summer of 1967 Patti Smith is sleeping in Village doorways and living for art. Her bohemian dreams coincide with those already there and just as hungry. Robert Mapplethorpe is dropping LSD and already drawing his visions of the universe when they become friends, Dante and Beatrice on the Lower East Side.

Just Kids (Ecco/Harper) is a valentine to the blossoming relationship they shared and which deepened until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The memoir is Patti being tough and tender, romantic in the way artists often remember their own struggle, and filled with the people who made music and art their passion in New York of the 1970s. Robert's drawing and photography develops its challenging reputation as Patti begins to sing her own music, and this became a common creative bond that propels them in their personal life as much as their careers. For Patti the book allows her to wrap her troubles in dreams, even as the threadbare bohemian life becomes a distant memory through rock and roll.

As she re-traces the past, the book's real charm comes in the personal glances at Robert's life and career. His death in 1989 from AIDS and a portfolio of controversial images has made him, still, a confounding figure to many art historians. Just Kids allows a look at the artist as a friend and a companion, with his own troubles and dreams: he meets John McKendry, married and the curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:"John's devotion to Robert's work spilled over to Robert himself. Robert accepted John's gifts and took advantage of opportunities that John opened up for him, but he was never interested in Robert as a romantic partner. John was sensitive, volatile, and physically fragile, qualities that would not attract Robert. He admired (John's wife) Maxime, who was strong and ambitious with an impeccable pedigree. Perhaps he may have been cavalier with John's feelings, for as time went on, he found himself entangled within a destructive romantic obsession."

The savvy curator and the romantic bohemian are a good match: "John McKendry could not have given Robert a better gift than the tools he needed to devote himself to photography," Smith goes on. "Robert was thoroughly smitten, obsessed not only with the process, but also its place in the arts."

This is a carefully-written and nicely detailed memoir, more gracefully artful than gratuitously salacious, although there is ample opportunity to read between the well-phrased line. Patti writes of the first musician she knew: "I never knew if his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe."

For the girl who loved Motown and r & b, New York in the 1970s became the land of a thousand dances as she wanders in and out of the music and poetry scenes that are quickly developing. The names and locations are already familiar, from nights at the Chelsea Hotel to CBGBs. Robert is on his own trajectory, but together Patti and Robert became so entwined that Patti's marriage to Fred Smith, in 1979, sent an unexpected tremor of apprehension between the two of them. "What about us?" Robert asks. "My mother still thinks we're married." Patti hasn't considered that. "I guess you'll have to tell her we got a divorce." "I can't say that," Robert shoots back. "Catholics don't divorce."

And like the good Catholic boy who's being bad, Robert understood his work wasn't meant for everyone, and he went out of his way to show it. His first hard-core photos were in a portfolio, marked with an X, and placed in a glass case for viewing only to those over eighteen years of age. Once these images became public, he didn't hide from the eventual storm of protest and notoriety, although they formed a fraction of his work. 

Soon enough there were more important personal issues -- he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. The story is an old and eternal one: in Just Kids, passion, art, and love are redeemed by youth. If the outlines are familiar, the book is told with enough toughness to avoid being overly sentimental.

As Robert wanes, the operatic overtones of their artful romance are often leavened by Patti and Robert with wit and humor, even to the end. After his death, as his belongings are sold at auction, Patti can't make herself attend the sale, afraid she couldn't bear to watch. She recalls a phrase Robert used if he obsessed about something he couldn't have: "I'm a selfish bastard. If I can't have it I don't want anyone else to." Patti has given readers no small gift by sharing her continuing love and affection for Robert with the rest of us.

December 30 is Patti's birthday; in William Burroughs' rare admiring phrase, the poet/performer is still a "rock'n'roll shaman" at 67.

"Up-Tight": she couldn't believe what she heard at all ....

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the late sixties, the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far way from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock Nation. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise, interview-and-comment biography edited by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga tracing the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

Out-of-focus Lou: The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Bockris and Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

Great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and an electric introduction to the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net. The New York yawp evident on every page of the band's history ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.