Check out these videos from the recent SXSW tribute show.
Lucinda Williams, “Pale Blue Eyes”:
Sean Lennon, “What Goes On”:
The Black Lips, “Run, Run, Run”:
Suzanne Vega, “Walk On the Wild Side”:
The Fleshtones, “Real Good Time Together”:
Sharon Needles, “Candy Says”:
The Baseball Project (Scott McCaughey, Steve Wynn, Linda Pitmon, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Mike Mills), “Sister Ray”:
– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –
The Boarding House was a club in downtown San Francisco that held about 500 people. The sound was great. It was probably the best club I’ve been in to see live music.
Patti Smith and her band were there on February 15, 1976, less than two months after Horses was released.
It’s an amazing show, and lucky for you and me, it got recorded. Patti Smith is still amazing, but this show (and others from ’75 and ’76, are exceptional.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
This is quite beautiful. The photographer Laura Levine shot Super-8 footage for a still unreleased film, “Just Like A Movie,” in 1983. Here’s Michael Stipe singing “Pale Blue Eyes.”
On R.E.M.’s remhq website, Laura Levine writes:
“it’s an excerpt from the original unreleased Super-8 film “Just Like a Movie.” With the sad news about Lou Reed’s passing last week, it seemed the right time to share this particular scene, of Michael singing “Pale Blue Eyes” by the railroad tracks. (The song itself was recorded earlier that day on a Walkman, with Matthew Sweet on guitar). Jeremy Ayers makes a magical appearance as Puddlefoot.”
Thanks remhq!
Patti Smith spoke about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground in an interview with the Associated Press today (October 28, 2013).
“I was so taken with their [the Velvet Underground] music. I made it my business to study him. His process completely spoke to me, the process of merging poetry with these surf rhythms, this pulsing loop. You could get into a trance listening to 12 minutes of Sister Ray.”
Smith said Reed brought “the sensibility of art and literature” to rock music. Smith and Reed often spoke about poetry, and such poets as Hart Crane or Walt Whitman or Federico Garcia Lorca.
Smith said that “Pale Blue Eyes,” a song she often performed at the beginning of her career, is a favorite, and that it reminds her of her late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith.
“I never fail to think of him and his gaze when I’m singing that or hear that song. Lou had a gift of taking very simple lines, ‘Linger on, your pale blue eyes,’ and make it so they magnify on their own. That song has always haunted me.”
For the whole story go here.
Patti Smith sings “Pale Blue Eyes” in 1976.