Hudson River Wind Meditations - by Lou Reed - Audio Book CD
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About Hudson River Wind Meditations
Lou Reed's fans have learned to expect the unexpected, but his latest work may still come as a surprise. After four decades in the rock spotlight, Lou Reed has turned his attention to the world of meditation music, inviting listeners on a relaxing journey to the hidden territory of his inner landscape. With Hudson River Wind Meditations, the iconic 'art rocker' presents his first album created specifically for quiet contemplation.
About Lou Reed
As the lead singer and songwriter of the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Lou Reed was responsible for a body of work that was alienated from the prevailing optimism of the day and was passionately bleak, and which remains highly influential today. He is often referred to as the godfather of punk. His solo recording career, beginning in 1972, has been more idiosyncratic and iconoclastic marked by sudden turnabouts in image and sound, from self-consciously commercial product to white noise to unpredictable folk rock.
Before the formation of the Velvet Underground (see entry), in 1965, Reed (b. Lewis Alan Reed, Mar. 2, 1942, Brooklyn, NY) grew up in Freeport, Long Island, then attended Syracuse University, studying poetry (under Delmore Swartz, to whom Reed dedicated a song on the first Velvet Underground album) and journalism. Reed's poems were published in Fusion magazine. (In 1977 he earned an award from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his poem "The Slide" and in 1992 was awarded France's Order of Arts and Letters.) After leaving Syracuse, Reed returned to New York City and worked for Pickwick Records, taking part in the studio group that recorded various Reed-penned songs, released by the Beachnuts and Roughnecks. During this period he met the musicians with whom he would subsequently form the Velvet Underground. With two of them he formed a band called the Primitives, which became the Warlocks and made one record.
Reed's 1970 departure from the Velvet Underground was bitter; he did not even stay to complete their fourth album, Loaded, though songs from that project ("Sweet Jane" and "Rock & Roll") would become permanent fixtures of his live show and reputation. He became a virtual recluse for nearly two years, until moving to England and beginning a solo career in 1971. Transformer (Number 29, 1972) was his pop breakthrough. Produced by Velvet Underground fan David Bowie, it yielded Reed's only Top Twenty hit to date, "Walk on the Wild Side" (Number 16, 1973), an ode to the denizens of Andy Warhol's Sixties films. With Bowie's aid, Reed made the transition to the glitter rock of the period, camping up his presumed homosexuality with bleached-blond hair and black fingernail polish. Typically, the next record, 1973's Berlin, was as grim in tone as Transformer had been playful.
Reed's recordings have continued to be unpredictable. A pair of live albums drawn from the same set of concerts (including the gold-selling Rock 'n' Roll Animal, Number 45, 1974) featured streamlined heavy-metal versions of Velvet Underground, while a later tour would pander to theatrics: Reed, for example, pretended to shoot up while performing the song "Heroin." The critically panned Sally Can't Dance (Number Ten, 1974) was repudiated by Reed almost on release. After another live album, he followed with Metal Machine Music, four vinyl record sides of grating instrumental noise, alternately considered high art worthy of RCA's classical division and a gambit to get off the label.
After a final RCA album, Coney Island Baby (Number 41, 1976), Reed moved to Arista where he made impeccably produced, harrowing music like the title cut of Street Hassle (Number 89, 1978), as well as relatively peaceful outings typified by album titles like Rock and Roll Heart (Number 64, 1976), The Bells (1979) and Growing Up in Public (1980). He married Sylvia Morales on Valentine's Day 1980, and his songs about the seamy side of life began to appear alongside paeons to suburban life — "I'm an average guy," he sang on his critically acclaimed 1982 album The Blue Mask.
In the mid-Eighties Reed gained more of the spotlight when a number of postpunk bands, including R.E.M., U2 and Sonic Youth, began singing his praises and vocally claiming inspiration by the Velvet Underground. The second creative wind that began with the alternately hopeful and frightening Blue Mask continued with the more accessible New Sensations (Number 56, 1984) and Mistrial (Number 47, 1986). Reed then moved to Sire Records, where he hit an artistic plateau with New York (Number 40, 1989), Songs for Drella (1990), and Magic & Loss (1992). A brutal song cycle about urban decay, New York was his first Top Forty album since Sally Can't Dance, and it produced the Number One Modern Rock hit "Dirty Blvd."
In 1989 Reed played guitar on former Velvet Underground drummer Maureen "Moe" Tucker's solo album Life in Exile After Abdication. The same year, he reunited with another UV mate, John Cale, for a work-in-progress performance of Songs for Drella, a pop requiem the two wrote for their late friend and mentor, Andy Warhol, who had died three years earlier; in 1990 an album and video were released. The Velvet Underground reunited in 1993 for some well-received European dates, but again broke up bitterly before their planned U.S. performances (reportedly because Reed insisted on producing the album of the band's upcoming MTV Unplugged appearance, which was subsequently canceled.) The band reunited once more in 1996, after the death of member Sterling Morrison, to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and perform a tribute to the late guitarist.
Reed's 1992 album Magic & Loss (Number 80, 1992), a somber meditation on the process and pain of aging and death, inspired by the cancer deaths of two friends (including songwriter Doc Pomus), was considered his most inspired work since The Blue Mask. The same year, RCA released a boxed set of Reed's music, Between Thought and Expression, which followed a 1991 book of selected Reed lyrics of the same name.
Throughout the Eighties and into the Nineties, Reed showed a newfound political-activist side, appearing at the 1985 Farm Aid benefit concert, the 1986 Amnesty International Tour, and contributing to the Artists United Against Aparteid Sun City record. In 1993 he performed at an inaugural event honoring the home state of former Vice President Al Gore. Reed had also moved into acting, and has appeared in the 1980 movie One Trick Pony, 1993's Faraway, So Close, and 2001's Prozac Nation, as well as in advertisements for Honda scooters, which used "Walk on the Wild Side" as a theme.
Over the years Reed has found affinity with some of rock & roll's romantics and mythologists: Bruce Springsteen appeared uncredited on 1978's Street Hassle, and Reed inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; he also cowrote songs for Kiss and Nils Lofgren. Reed's sidemen have included Jack Bruce (ex-Cream) and jazz trumpeter Don Cherry; for The Blue Mask and Legendary Hearts he toured with an acclaimed band that included ex-Voidoids guitarist Robert Quine and drummer Fred Maher, as well as former Jean-Luc Ponty bassist Fernandoi Saunders; and for New York and the Magic & Loss tour, he brought along R&B crooner Little Jimmy Scott as a backup vocalist. Split from his wife Sylvia by 1994, Reed was frequently seen in the company of avant-garde performance artist Laurie Anderson, with whom he began improvising instrumental pieces at home.
Anderson served as an emotional influence on 1996's Set the Twilight Reeling (Number 110, Top 200), an album that mixed romance and nostalgia amid Reed's darker interests. That same year, reed collaborated with theatrical director Robert Wilson on the production of Time Rocker; they collaborated again in 2000 on Poe-try, based on the works of Edgar Alan Poe.
After another wait of four years between studio albums, Reed returned in 2000 with Ecstasy, which continued his commitment to minimalist rock & roll with thoughtful, if sometimes confrontational lyrics on dreams, desire and despair. Anderson performed electric violin on two tracks. Reed also published Pass Thru Fire – The Collected Lyrics. In 2003 he released his Poe-try work as a two-CD set, The Raven. After the live Animal Serenade in 2004, Reed lay low for three years. He returned with an all-electronics album that's a sort of anti-Metal Machine Music. The sounds he and producer Hal Wilner created for Hudson River Wind Meditations (2007) are more in line with new age music or the ambient works of Brian Eno. Also in 2007 artist/director Julian Schnabel released a live performance of Reed playing the entirety of his 1973 "lost" masterpiece Berlin at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn — the first time in 33 years the music had been performed.
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