When you heard this music for the first time, other than just taking it in, what were you listening for?ĭon Fleming: We thought it was going to be a tape we already had a copy of because of the date on it. Stern and Fleming spoke to Vulture about making sense of the Words & Music tape, Reed’s creative process, and working with the rock icon in his final days.
Crucially, the recordings are available for listening in the library - part of Anderson’s goal to make Reed’s archive, which the NYPL acquired in 2017, readily accessible. “The last thing we wanted to do was approach it as a Hard Rock Cafe thing,” Stern says. The show features everything from old paperwork and memorabilia to copies of Reed’s poetry, the Words & Music tape, and other recordings. Many of those finds are currently on display at the New York Public Library, where Stern and Fleming have curated Caught Between the Twisted Stars, an exhibition of Reed’s archive. “We just continue to find things that are somewhat mind-blowing in the collection,” Fleming says.
#Three amigos buttercup song lyrics series#
It’s the first in a series of archival Reed releases from the Seattle independent label Light in the Attic, coming on top of recent archival releases with Sony, Reed’s eventual label. It contains the earliest known version of “Heroin,” old takes on “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Men of Good Fortune” with vastly different lyrics, and near-mythic never-heard tracks like “Buttercup Song.” Stern and Fleming found it years ago and brought it to release with the help of Reed’s widow, the avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson (“She’s kind of our editor,” Fleming says). With abundant surprises, Words & Music is far more exciting than a typical demo release. The renditions, recorded with Reed’s future bandmate John Cale, are surprisingly bare, having more in common with the folk music of the West Village at the time than the innovative rock Reed would become known for.
The songs were captured for what is known as a “poor man’s copyright”: Reed said “Words and music, Lou Reed” before each song in an attempt to own credit for the ideas. Stern and Fleming oversee Reed’s archive, and in those roles, they have just released Words & Music, May 1965, a collection of recently uncovered performances Reed recorded on tape. For Jason Stern and Don Fleming, it took the discovery of a long-lost artifact from the late rock musician and Velvet Underground singer. It can be hard to find something new to say about Lou Reed more than 60 years after his debut.
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