Tulip Frenzy

This morning brings us an interesting interview with Jim Reid.  Link to the piece, but here are some elements that intrigued, especially in light of what we’d written yesterday about their show at 930:

Punk rock didn’t have the melody you were going after?
The Ramones were a huge influence. We just thought, “How far can you take it with the noise aspect?” The blueprint was The Velvet Underground. On the same album, you can have “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Waiting for the Man” and “Venus in Furs” and I thought that was fabulous. We thought, “How far can you push that?” We wanted a Shangri-Las song if it were backed up by Einstürzende Neubauten.

(We’d written:  “Occasionally the glorious mix of the Ramones meeting Lou Reed in the Brill Building basement shone through, and yeah, those hits fromAutomatic and Honey’s Dead were a sound for sore ears. What started out as a noise rock band was transformed along the way into the greatest exemplars of the Velvet Underground who ever got radio play, but it was hard to hear the Velvets influence last night underneath the din, and this is not simply because we are old as the band is.”  Close to how Jim described their own sound, though we didn’t have the Krautrock reference.)

On Jim Reid and sobriety:

Have you stopped using drugs?
Is Jack Daniels a drug? I gave up drinking for five and one-half years. I fell off the wagon about a year and a half ago. I occasionally dabble with drugs. I drink a lot. It’s my poison at the moment. Whatever gets you through the night.

This entry was posted on September 11, 2012 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Music with tags Jesus and Mary Chain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.