This is immense, fuck Neil Young and that pissant multimedia young generation on ice Greendale crap.
THIS is what you want.
The best stuff in the canon, treated with love and care and the distance and experience of age.
Oh Lou’s a giant - we all know that.
But to be giving your best show now, at his age?
With some album of noisy ambient wind chimes music out as his current release?
Sheeeit this is what we want, this is someone setting themselves an artistic challenge, to be true to the music and the characters of a masterpiece gone back more n 3 decades in time.
And its like Blake said, innocence AND experience, that which Lou has now - 35 years on. The focus and the clarity and the distance from the work, a distance that allows, well yes, love to grow.
And the generosity, sharing the art out to so many collaborators - the sound of Detroit on fire Steve Hunter guitar, Christ the blistering interplay tween him and Lou.
The girls choir. The strings the horns, the Schnabel backdrop and projections, the Hal Willner production this was… too much.
The sound, ahh the sound. Ive been coming to Ham Odeon for years never had that sound so rich so rip so full so monstrous .
Of course the show isn’t new.
But Pam saw it start in new York New Yearish and this , she said, was so much better.
The line up had changed, alittle, but that wasn’t why.
It was because of the work and dedication, the focus on feeling the lives of the people the heat and miracles that take place in the songs, thats what made Berlin breath and live, live beyond your wildest most far out and beautiful, dreams.
You can get dizzy in the face of such art.
From the pre publicity I expected greatness but not this, this teeming show of love and humanity , these waves of gigantic marvellousness falling over us in a kind of psychic shock therapy for the soul.
It was, my astrologer told me, going to be a heavy weekend.
Mercury in retorgrade and he advised fish.
And you could feel the pressure the heat the rain outside and it was …a night built for Berlin
And Lou, Lou was so great, the performance, the acting of it.
The little touches, rearing up, cocking his leg and growling, suddenly, into the microphone.
The jutting elbow, signalling a violent denouement, the raised eyebrow or just the quick flick of the wrist bringing it all to silence, the asides, the shrugs, the method actor method made real, as he is the star architect of his destiny in his own art dream.
Oh he felt the love alright - the crowd ovations were real and full - and he spread it around, Wasserman, Tony Thunder Smith, giants all giants, Katey the singer, the Kids who provided the choruses on songs about suicide and sexual transgressions, the strings and horns who zizzed from Wagner to Stax, from Deep Soul to searing concret
They had fun too as they soared and eagle glided to completeness.
I mean such a fulsome recreation it zissed and sizzled and awakened more than memories in the encores of Sweet Jane and Satetelite, Lou finding so much new and wonderful in time honoured warhorse.
Was that a clip of Mama Ma in Caroline Says, a cheeky nod to another maternal pop classic?
I think…it was.
How beautiful then is Lou, as a man, as an artist?
How beautiful is this thing this sheerly human tenderness felt by a man (a man ect’d by his own parents for displaying supposed homosexual leanings as a child), a man without kids of his own, for a character who he created, having her kids taken away?
Making the choir and the kids choir rage and sing.
I never heard or seen anything like it.
There’s so much in there - the declamation of Sinatra, with the brassiness of Billy May.
The strippin it all down to the crucible sounds of blues and gospel the way they give you a little walk through the bulilding blocks, the sheer nakedness of it, the gall and the LOVE, in showing where blues and Velvets and gospel and Berlin, where it all matches up with the before and the then and the after.
And the backdrop, the chinese scripted curtains, a sofa hanging from the ceiling, ripped, suspended, the back projection featuring scenes of couples, characters, of scenes from the songs.
Fucking hell all you cheapskate workaday pay the bill cunts. THIS is art. This isnt filling in the next tour to pay off the yacht mooring rights this is great and fulfilled and a challenge thrown down to any of peers who care to take it up.
HOw well do you know and how well can you treat your best stuff?
Of course its a small dream, for me, come true.
35 years after recording the album from the radio, I had to keep pinching myself this was really real, this was going to happen as advertised.
And the fulfillment of it, the sense that everyone there on the stage - from the girls in the choir to the ever engaged, ecstatic Tony Thunder - knew the all raging, the all seething, rolling wonder of Berlin. Knew they were engaged in something special.
And in their knowing they assured it became even more special.
The timing, the pinpoint, kneedrop finger pointing bringing it all down timing. Like when he cuts Steve Hunter frentic iridescent squall off , stone cold dead, and asks if you know how it feels to sppeeding for 5 days lost and lonely.
You can see it on TV, or a Dvd (though you cant because it wasnt filmed) but its nothing to being there.
Then it gets really nasty, totally real, unpc shit (the guy mistreating the whit female in the clips is black) and
“they’re taking her cjhildren away,” this is it the hot place in the furnace, the white heat in the crucible, her transgressions -that slut wouda had ANYon -, itemised in graphic detail, the ultimate act of bulldog defilement.
And right then, snap, Lou slugs a mouthful from a can of Red Bull.
Timing, so much in the timing.
And the discordant squall of the entire troupe keeps keeping on and the flute just holds the precious melody like a lifeline somewhere on the top?
EXTRAbloodyORDINARY!!
Lou Berlin. So real. So alive. So….
