The Night Sister Ray Came to the End of Cole Avenue
[NOTE: This is the first music writing I ever did besides my high school journal. I submitted it to a couple of rags in 1997 or 1998 and never heard anything back. At the time, I was working 60 hours a week for RadioShack, writing user manuals for consumer electronics and editing a product information newsletter – not real edifying stuff, but it paid my child support. I talked to a few people from Fort Worth who were at the shows, the man who recorded them, and somehow or other got to interview Mo Tucker and Doug Yule. Those interviews weren’t very good, so nothing from them is included here, but afterward, I got a Christmas card from Mo, which I still treasure. I lost the electronic file in a computer crash, but found a hard copy when I was going through some files and figured it’d be good to have it in digital form – heavily edited, of course.] First, the facts: On October 18th and 19th, 1969, the Velvet Underground performed two sets a night at the End of Cole Avenue, a club located at 4926 Cole Avenue in Dallas. Jeff Leegood, a fan who worked as a sound engineer for a film company, recorded all four sets and sent a dub of the second night’s performances to Velvets manager Steve Sesnick. In 1974, the commercial success of Transformer having sparked interest in Lou Reed’s earlier career, Sesnick sought to cash in by offering the tapes to Mercury Records, who released four songs from the second night as part of the 1969 Live album (although it was Reed’s management, not Sesnick, who wound up reaping the financial rewards). In 1991, a pair of Italian fans tracked Leegood down and bought the complete tapes from the second night, which they released as the bootleg End of Cole Avenue LP and CD. Two years later, they did the same with the tapes from the first night, which they released as The First Night. Back in ’69, Charles Buxton, the man who brought me here, was a sophomore at SMU, living in an apartment on Fitzhugh Street near Ross Avenue and working at Dreyfus & Son department store. He’d first heard the Velvets as a freshman at Texas Tech. His roommate Scott owned all three VU albums and heard about the End of Cole gig. Over Labor Day weekend, the three-day Texas International Pop Festival drew 30,000 people to hear Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Steve Miller, and Herbie Mann play a speedway in Lewisville. Dallas had a free-form FM station, KFAD, but they never played the Velvets and there were really no venues in Dallas booking bands like the VU. Charles Buxton: The name was actually a misnomer. It was more like the beginning of Cole. One block northwest from there was the beginning of Highland Park. SMU was a couple of miles away. It was an area where you’d find funky little places [side-by-side with] extreme wealth. Mainly, the End of Cole was a place for people who liked to smoke pot. There were usually as many people outside as inside. I heard an entire set by the 13th Floor Elevators from outside. It was just a decrepit little house. You’d walk in and go down a hallway to these two rooms. It was really dark; there were no [house] lights and no stage lights. You’d just go in and sit on the floor. The stage was a stage in name only, just a little step up from the floor. The performance wasn’t exceptional. They just got on stage, played for maybe 30 minutes and got off. It just seemed kind of fuzzy. It was such a small place, but I don’t remember them being exceptionally loud or anything. When John Siebman (Fort Worth Cats, Icicle & the Kid) was six, his parents took him to see Elvis. When he was 12, he started playing in “funky little bands at sock hops at Haltom High School,” and later played with the Nomads of “Be Nice” fame, whose leader Bill Ham “looked like a four-foot-tall John Lennon.” While attending Tarrant County Junior College, Siebman heard the third VU album through his friend David Estes and was unimpressed; his tastes ran more toward the Beatles, the Byrds, and James Brown. He and Estes were present (with their girlfriends) for the second night. David Estes: I remember the whole thing as being so heavy…it was surreal. There were these big spools of electrical wire being used as tables. A large guy dressed as a sea captain turned a spool up on its end and walked around between the band and the audience while the band was playing. Nobody cared. The band looked wasted. They were all smack freaks. Their sound was heavy, droney. I went to use the rest room and noticed that the door was open, looking out on the parking lot. Some great big guy came up and said, “Don’t look” with such seriousness that you didn’t look. John Siebman: There was one big long extended song – maybe “Ocean” – that went on and on, droning, with a rhythm track. It almost put me out. I just remember being really sleepy. They couldn’t cut it musically. There was no lead guitar. Lou Reed sounded like a folk guy who wound up playing in a rock and roll context. He’d be strumming. There was no Chuck Berry muting the bottom two strings like you would if you were playing rock. Back then there was no honor in not being able to play; there was no “so bad you’re good.” Either you could play or you couldn’t play, and if you were bad, you were just bad. There was no double entendre. Jeff Leegood, the engineer who recorded the End of Cole shows, was born in New York City in 1947 and moved to Hicksville, Long Island, with his parents. Following their divorce when he was 13, he moved to Texas with his mother, but spent summers with his father in Manhattan. As he crossed the threshold from adolescence to adulthood, he was more attuned to “the dark side of life than the peace-and-love shit.” In 1969, while working for a film company in Dallas, he saw Jimi Hendrix open for the striped-shirted Beach Boys at SMU’s Moody Coliseum and sensed that music was changing. He bought The Velvet Underground and Nico from Montgomery Ward’s at Forest and Josie Lane. “Because of where I came from, I could relate to what they were singing about, and got all three [VU] records as they came out. I’d play them for people, but they didn’t dig it.” Driving home from work one evening, Leegood heard on the radio that the Velvets would be appearing at the End of Cole – “a hippie club with no furniture…cushions on the floor.” The band had played a Vietnam Moratorium benefit at White Rock Lake the night before, and when he heard they’d be playing again, he ran by his office and grabbed a portable Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder with built-in speakers. Arriving at the club, he wasn’t even sure he’d be able to bring recording equipment inside, but when no one stopped or questioned him, he set up his equipment near the back of the club. After he’d recorded the first set, the band took a break and the roadies came and asked if they could hear the tape. After hearing it, they invited him to record the second set from the stage. “I wasn’t patched into any soundboard, I just had one mic on Lou’s mic stand, one mic on the floor.” Leegood returned with a coworker to record the following night’s performances. Some songs were recorded after the club was closed, with audience members playing the group’s instruments. He recalls one of the roadies playing drums, and he himself played bass for a moment. Those events appear on the Italian bootlegs as “Blue Velvet Jazz Jam” and “End Cole Ave. Jam.” The festivities ended when an irate neighbor called police, and Leegood ended the night eating breakfast with the Velvets at the Fitzhugh Street Steak Pit, where they encouraged him to “quit your job and come with us.” Jeff Leegood: I was already married. Who knows where the hell I’d have wound up? [The Velvets were] regular people. Sterling used to smoke, so he was quiet and stoned. Lou and Mo were pretty nice. Doug Yule was kind of a dick. They weren’t into drugs. Lou might have done some diet pills, but they didn’t do hard drugs, at least not then, and they didn’t like being around people who did. They just sang about it. Lou would say, “I saw it on Dragnet.” In hindsight, I wish I’d taken films. There were no videos then, but I had access to an Aries 16mm camera. The next day, Leegood and his coworker drove to Austin to see the Velvets play the Vulcan Gas Company, a room somewhat larger than the End of Cole. At one of the Austin shows, Leegood was standing by the sound booth when Reed walked offstage mid-set and fired the soundman, instructing Leegood to “stay right there.” Later in the tour, a business trip took him to Los Angeles, where he saw the band perform at the Whisky A Go Go. He also got manager Sesnick’s address and sent him a dubbed copy of the tape from the second night in Dallas. When the Italians approached him, he gave them one of several DAT copies he’d made from the master tapes. Legal action against European bootleggers and the car-crash death of the Italian who funded the unofficial releases have made End of Cole Avenue and The First Night extremely scarce, which Leegood says was part of the original intent in releasing them.
[copied from facebook notes for posterity]
No comments:
Post a Comment