Meanwhile… I’m Still Thinking

There was a guy who lived on my floor when I was a college freshman – personable, handsome and pretty good taste in music. His claim to fame was that he had gone out with Leonard Nimoy’s (Mr. Spock’s) daughter when they were in high school, and the only time I ever saw him get bristly was when I asked him if he’d checked her ears at any point while they were together. While I wasn’t quite sure how you’d go about doing something like that discreetly, I couldn’t imagine leaving that particular stone unturned for any length of time. He got a little peeved with me when I brought the subject up and told me that, as a matter of fact, he was the ONLY guy that had ever NOT asked to see her ears, and because of it he got to go out with her more than once, lucky him. How could he possibly know that if the subject hadn’t been brought up with her in the first place, though? Maybe he was just giving me a brotherly lesson about what kinds of things you might not want to do on a first date, but it seemed that I had inadvertently pressed one of his buttons and was careful not to do it again.

One day he came down the hall to my room with a record in his hand and gave it to me. “You can have this. It’s the worst record I ever heard… you might like it, though.” He was right: it was terrible, and I loved it immediately. “White Light/White Heat” is as uncompromising an album as has ever been made. It sounds as though nobody was paying attention to recording levels in the studio (a good thing in this case), the songs are laden with drug and sex references and the band plays their instruments as though their lives depended on it, which might’ve been a distinct possibility. There are three kinds of people in this world: those who have listened to “Sister Ray” all the way through, those who haven’t, and those who’ve never tried. My copy of “White Light/White Heat” has the word “Sandler” written in magic marker on the cover, a mark of previous ownership and a representation of something that drifted into the hands of someone who was hungry for what it had to offer.

Just as an aside – I really love drums, and bad (read “busy”) drumming usually makes a song unlistenable to me. In a sense, Mo Tucker is one of the best rock and roll drummers ever… can you imagine how much better Lou Reed’s solo stuff would’ve been with her pounding away back there, keeping him honest?