Names and Forms

Hi!  Today is Wednesday, the 27th day of October, 2021.  This is the day for knowledge of names and forms, for it clears away many obstacles.  65 more days remain until the end of the year.

It's Fran Lebowitz' birthday. "Romantic love is mental illness," she once said. "But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw."

Lou Reed died on this day in 2013.  Brian Eno once said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years, but that everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.

I had a copy of that record, you know, the one with the Andy Warhol banana peel sticker on the cover, and listened to it a lot around 1971 and '72,  but I never started a band.  Well, that's not completely true.  Me and some of my housemates attempted to form a band around 1974, but it was really more just a bunch of loser guys pretending to be a band.  We'd jam in the house and never played publicly.  We spent more time worrying about a name - I think we eventually came up with "Burnt Member" - and designing a logo (a burning pepper shaker), than learning our instruments.  We came up with a lot of titles for imaginary songs but only bothered to write a few of those songs.  But we had a band name, a logo for our first album's front cover, and a track list of all the songs that we only had to write, after we figured out how to actually play.  If we were inspired by Velvet Underground, we weren't aware of it.  What an embarrassment to look back on! 

I remember once seeing the band Black Lips perform here in their hometown of Atlanta.  At one point between songs, one of the members, I think Ian St. Pe, said to the audience something like, "At this point, you're probably thinking 'I can do that.'  And that's the point - you can.  Go home and start a band with some friends.  Learn two or three chords, that's all you need and you'll figure the rest out from there."  Eventually, he promised, we'd be opening for Black Lips somewhere.

I think it can be argued that Patti Smith inspired more people to form a band than Lou Reed or Black Lips or anyone else.  I've already purchased my ticket for Big Ears 2022, and this week the festival announced that they've added Smith to their already stacked line up.  It'll be my first time seeing her perform, but afterward I doubt I'll be inspired to go out and reform Burnt Member.