Medialine - The Lodge

AOL TIME WARNER SHOPS DISC MANUFACTURINGwww.medialinenews.commedia, manufacturing & storage for the entertainment industryMarch 2003◗business newsMusic Shipments Still SlidingThe RIAA continued to fault piracy andpoor economic conditions for waningrecorded music shipments, down over11 percent last year from 2001's totalfigures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .◗packagingGrammy Winner, Best Boxed SetArt director Susan Archie explains hermeticulous work on Screamin’ andHollerin’ The Blues: The Worlds ofCharley Patton, which won three awardslast month. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .◗ replicationColumbia TriStar Super-Sizes‘Spider-Man’ OrderThe Spider-Man DVD, manufactured bySony Disc Manufacturing, boasts to be thelargest optical disc order of all time at 44million units. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .◗ dvdThe Making of the ‘Lord of theRings’ Special Extended EditionInside the production of one of the most feature-packedDVD sets yet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Lou ReedThe Artist on the BizMedialine is part of the One to One Group

compilation for BMG (NYC Man: The UltimateLou Reed Collection, due out May 6) that I didlocally at [New York-based] The Lodge withEmily Lazar. It’s a two-CD set where I picked[and sequenced] everything. Mastering is suchan astonishing experience. The technology hasimproved in a staggering way. [BMG] gave mea shot at it. I was able to go back to all the oldVelvet Underground records on up and reallymake them sound the way they’re supposed tosound.”“I don’t like to listen to my old stuff. But whenI do hear [older CDs], it’s only upsetting becauseyou say, ‘If only I could do this, listen to that—Why didn’t they clean the vocal track? Thereshould be more bass on this.’ If you made a[vinyl] record that’s 20 minutes long, you lostbottom, you lost volume. Then they made a CDof it and kept it that way. So you have these CDsfloating around that have no known bottom.There’s no reason for it—they’re just mimickingthe vinyl. If you can go back and remaster it, asopposed to them—all they’re going to do is theSome artists will end up selling their musicdirectly from their websites, but not Reed. “Idon’t want to get involved in the business side ofthings. That’s not my interest. But I won’t havea choice if this thing (The Raven) doesn’t doanything.” Asked if he’s been told that byWarner, “No, I’m making a supposition. I’vebeen saying that for a long time now over theyears.”Reed believes one way the industry could helpdrive CD sales is by putting more attention intopackaging. He asks rhetorically, “Why couldn’tyou have a CD in a beautiful, normal-sized albumcover like you had for records? I think peoplewould buy more CDs if they did that.”He often uses friends like graphic designerStefan Sagmeister and artist Julian Schnabel todo his CD covers. “It’s my choice and I dorecommend them, but they don’t have to listen.”At the height of his popularity after the 1974live album Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, Reed pushedthe envelope by delivering a two-recordelectronic music set, Metal Machine Music,NY. Reed says The Raven was initially “instigated”by the Warner Music classical subsidiary inGermany. As The Raven “grew, it was adopted byU.S. Warners, amazingly enough.”The U.S. company ended up footing the bill,which was “the same budget I always have”—asum Reed declined to divulge. “I couldn’t affordto pay what [the actors, Dafoe, et al.] wouldnormally get,” he observes. “They were a verynoble bunch; they did art for the art’s sake, agreat bunch of people.”Asked whether The Raven, which is full ofsound effects and spatial relationships that playwith the listener’s imagination, would havebeen better suited for a surround mix, Reedresponds, “Yes, I would [still] like to do a 5.1.”But he’s more inclined now to mix in the StereoBinaural System, a recording process developedby German recording engineer ManfredSchunke that Reed used on three albums in thelate 1970s mixed at the Delta Studio in Wilster,Germany.“Play the whole thing for a head. I’ve beenminimum—you can address these problems,which is what I did.”Reed clarifies that when he says “them” hemeans the record company. “Yeah, they’re justgoing to throw it in and reproduce it—badly. I’velistened to some of those reproductions thatthey’ve done. It’s unbelievable how chintzy theyare. That’s because no artist or A&R personwho’s really passionate about it was involved.There’s now [at BMG] a guy named Rob Santos[who cares].” Santos has produced a half dozendeluxe reissues with insightful essays; two morewill be released in September.Reed is not surprised by the record industry’scurrent woes. “There’s nothing I can do about therecord companies causing some of the problemby overcharging for those ugly, miserable, plasticjewel cases that break as soon as you open them.It makes you furious, myself included. You buy aCD, you open up the thing and it cracks in yourhand. And you feel like you’ve been ripped off. Ithink that encourages people to download.”From the artist’s perspective, completing analbum only to find that people are downloadingit for free can “put you out of business. But asfar as the record company, most people wouldsay ‘good.’”comprising four sides of feedback with each sideat 16 minutes and 1 second, much to the dismayof RCA. To anyone uninitiated with avant-gardemusic, the release would appear to be nothingmore than an exercise in cacophonous squelch atrandomly selected frequencies. But Reed wasvery serious about it then, and continues to be so.In fact, he feels vindicated as a result of a seriousGerman orchestra, Ensemble Zeitkratzer, lastMarch performing the seemingly unperformableMetal Machine Music with concerts in Berlin andVenice, at which he played along for the final movement.“It was a staggering thing to see that live.”BMG’s Buddah imprint last year releaseddomestically on CD for the first time MetalMachine Music, remastered by renownedengineer Bob Ludwig, who originally masteredthe vinyl album for quad. Reed adds, “And yeah,after 25 years, to have that rereleased, masteredproperly, that was wonderful vindication. I’mtired reading that I did that to get out of acontract.”Reed conceived The Raven following hiscollaboration with theater director Robert Wilsonon POEtry, a “rock-theater” production alsobased on Edgar Allan Poe’s writings, staged inHamburg, Amsterdam, Paris and in Brooklyn,obsessed with that for a long time,” explainsReed. “Now it works. We figured out what waswrong. It was a phasing problem. On the way tovinyl, something happened with phasing and theeffect went away. But it’s back and is prettyastonishing. If you sit in the sweet spot, it’samazing. That was 1978. I’ve waited 24 years toget a shot at this again.”He “begged and pleaded” with the Warner topbrass to give The Raven a binaural treatment, butto no avail. Still Reed is pretty happy with thesonic qualities of what has been released. [TheRaven’s] stereo imaging is pretty large. You’vegot things coming at you from the back,diagonally. You don’t have anything comingdirectly in back of you, true.”Among The Raven’s 36 tracks is the single,“Who Am I?”—a song so well written to myears that it has the potential of becoming astandard across different genres, sung byeveryone from Tony Bennett to Johnny Cash tosome cabaret diva.Reed, who once duetted with Pavarotti on“Perfect Day,” loves to hear “people other thanme” sing his songs, and agrees: “‘Who Am I?’ isanother ‘Perfect Day,’ another ‘[Walk on the]Wild Side’ for sure, no question.”Copyright© 2003 United Entertainment Media, a CMP Media Information Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.