When I was a teenager the crowd I was hanging with had discovered Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’. We listened to it on good old fashioned vinyl. This was, after all, the eighties. It was an iconic album, intense, creative and whimsical. We were just into the music then and didn’t really get the entire scene that this artistic creation represented.
Fast forward many years and I’m walking up several flights of stairs at the Adelaide Uni, which is hosting the Royal Croquet Club this year, with a bunch of people who looked like they were fans of Reed when the album first came out. It seemed so unusual to see all these grey heads going to see a show about a counter culture legend. I see a guy who looks in his sixties with a Dead Kennedys t-shirt on. It seemed so incongruous, but this is the reality of the fans of counter culture bands of the 60s and 70s. Lou Reed is dead, Iggy Pop is in his seventies and even Johnny Rotten is in his sixties. Time has moved on and the punks of yesteryear are now senior citizens.
For this show, it is another Jonny, Jonny Woo who is the central figure of this production. Jonny Woo, for the night is Lou Reed.
The performance begins with a fairly solid rendition of ‘Vicious’. The musos are tight, and Jonny is truly doing Lou Reed justice. It’s a great number with which to start any homage to Reed.
However this is not a tribute band. This is a glimpse into history, a look at a bygone era. A tumultuous era where Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie hung out together at Max’s Kansas City, which despite the name, was actually in New York. Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground regularly performed there and in fact had a residency during some of this period.
Lou tells the story of this time in Max’s Kansas City in a series of lyrical monologues that recount a tale of incredible excess. Of immense quantities of drugs and alcohol imbibed. Of rubbing shoulders with such luminaries as Andy Warhol and revolutionaries such as Valerie Solanas, an angry paranoid schizophrenic who wrote the SCUM manifesto.
Solanas makes an appearance by way of the backing singer donning a red woolen hat and a camouflage jacket. She proceeds to recite some of the anti male screed of Solanas. It gave the impression that the scene in which Reed and the Velvet Underground mixed was a melting pot for many ideas, some radical and unpleasant, yet worthy of inclusion in a great meeting of minds where nothing was out of bounds.
Candy Darling, the transsexual muse of Andy Warhol, was also onstage as a backing singer. The term backing singer is a bit misleading however, as she also had her moment in the spotlight.
Candy Darling
The night was a melange of music and monologue, with Lou painting a fairly vivid picture of how it would have felt to have been part of that scene.
The music that accompanies the show isn’t for purists. If you want faithful renditions of Lou Reed songs, go see a tribute band. The arrangements are creative adaptations of the songs. It fits with the whole feel of the show as a window to the era.
In total the show is a compelling glimpse into an era and a scene of great decadence, creativity and . It made me wish I had been around to witness it first hand.
The Wild Side is at The Attic, RCC, Adelaide University until 15 March.
Tickets available from the Fringe website:
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/the-wild-side-af2020
