THE SQUALID LYRICISM OF BOB QUINE

This post was inspired by a bad review I saw of a Lou Reed live video. I've been a fan of Lou Reed since I was a teen, and I still remember my excitement when his "Blue Mask" LP came out. Although I didn't know it at the time, this record represented a kind of return to Reed's roots. He'd made a lot of records since the Velvet Underground days; some were great, some were awful, some were a little bit of both. The main thing missing from even the great stuff he'd done was Lou Reed's guitar playing. With the Velvets, Reed played some of the most definitively twisted guitar solos ever heard-- "I Heard Her Call My Name" being perhaps the best example. (Years after my own ears were bent by listening to these early Reed solos, I found out that he'd been influenced by, among others, Ornette Coleman.) In his solo career, he'd mostly left the guitar playing to others, with mixed results. For this new album, Reed assembled a band that (with some variations in the drum chair) would set a standard for rock ensemble playing very nearly as important as the original Velvet Underground. The rhythm section was killer, but the wild card was guitarist Bob Quine. Quine was a highly unusual player, influenced by (among others) James Burton and John McLaughlin (specifically his work on the "Jack Johnson" album with Miles Davis), as well as by Lou Reed.

Here's a live clip of "Martial Law." (note-- I think this clip is from the Coney Island Baby live dvd. I haven't been able to find a copy, but at this writing all the clips from it seem to be on youtube. You can buy the "Night with Lou Reed" dvd, which has plenty of great solos by both Reed and Quine.)

Quine's collaboration with Reed on the "Blue Mask" album caused some reviewers to compare this group to a jazz combo. Although the triad-based diatonic/blues harmonic vocabulary they worked with has none of jazz's complexity, the interactive ensemble approach (highly unusual for rock, unfortunately) really was similar to an old Blue Note session. Reed's monotone voice was at its most effective in this apt setting-- a tight band, with the metallic twang and trash of Fender guitars coursing around the edges of the sound. Even the ballads had a kind of ugly beauty, with Reed's romantic streak being perfectly offset by Quine's sometimes dissonant counterpoint. With Quine's encouragement, Reed played some hot guitar also, and the album remains a point of reference for me for what two guitars, bass, and drums can do together.

Sadly, this magic collaboration didn't last. I won't dwell on it here, because the story is well documented by Victor Bockris in his book "Transformer," but apparently all the attention Quine was getting from reviewers didn't sit well with Reed's ego. Their relationship deteriorated when Reed mixed a lot of Quine's hotter playing off the followup album, "Legendary Hearts." This album still sounds good to me, but it is instructive to watch live performances of some of the songs where Quine gets a little more space.

Around 1:42 of "Martial Law" in this clip, Reed says, "Okay, babe," and Quine slashes his way through a characteristic solo. I wish the album track had some of this nastiness-- with Quine's playing on this live version, the song really comes to life.


This song "Martial Law" is particularly interesting, for a few reasons. It's basically blues changes in D, and as such is a great primer in how blues language and structure can be endlessly recast. It also illustrates how the 10th fret position (or 12th fret if you're tuned down a whole step as Quine seems to be here) of the key of D (playing out of an E shape) has a special timbre and resonance on the guitar. (Other players who made great use of this register are Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Hazel.) I once read that Beethoven's major scales sound different from other people's (to paraphrase another great composer whose name escapes me). I think this tune shows that Bob Quine's pentatonic scales sound different from other people's. Quine worked from a lot of the same pentatonic vocabulary that countless lame bar band and living room hackers use, but somehow made it personal. Even when he was using pentatonic material, his idiosyncratic tone, attack, phrasing, and note choices kept him light years away from the rest of the pack. It sounds to me as if he was paranoid about playing anything mundane, and if he heard himself edging toward cliche, he would throw in something unorthodox to right himself. I read somewhere that Quine preferred Fender guitars because Gibsons made it too easy for him to fall back on dull rock licks, and that quote helped shape my theory here about how he would think while playing.
Quine played a lot more crazy stuff with his classic earlier band the Voidoids. This seminal punk group is mostly ignored or forgotten by succeeding generations of punk fans. Punks have mostly identified with the example of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, both obviously great, but arguably conservative by comparison with Hell, Quine, et al. The Voidoids added dissonance, "fusion" sounds, etc. into a rock context, just as Reed had brought the avant-garde jazz of Ornette Coleman into the Velvet Underground sound. The Ramones and the Pistols, for all of the rudeness of their image, never really moved beyond an appealing amalgam of Chuck Berry and bubblegum pop. The music of those two bands has an accessible musical base beneath the obnoxious lyrics, making the Ramones/Pistols model tailor-made for the young fan. (You could say that snotty words sung over a nursery rhymelike musical setting is arguably a kind of universal kid thing-- my classmates and I were certainly making up songs like that in elementary school.) For me, the Hell/Quine approach, with its jagged musical ideas and existential lyrics, represents an adult version of punk rock. Maybe this is why the Voidoids have been overlooked; most punk rockers have a kind of juvenile outlook. They're often more clear about what they're against than what they're for, and as a result sometimes age uncomfortably into a kind of "Peter Pan and the Lost Boys" existence. Much the same could be said of rock musicians in general, accounting for the rarity of actual musical development in the typical rock musician.
(Richard Hell apparently had no problem letting Quine grab much of the spotlight on their records, and it should be said, in light of the endless critical praising of Quine's Lou Reed period, that the Voidoids albums are probably Quine's finest hour. The Reed group with Quine is fascinating in a different way because of the brooding intensity-- the sense that ugliness is often being held in check. The Voidoid albums don't skimp on romanticism, either, but there's always plenty of over-the-top nastiness and surreal guitar alongside it.)

You can check out Bob Quine's website, www.robertquine.com/
where they've left up some observations of Quine's about his own playing, influences, sound, etc. These are now sad to read, because of Quine's 2004 suicide following the death of his wife.

The bad review I mentioned earlier was on amazon. Some pinhead dismissed the Lou Reed live video that remains one of the best documents of Quine's work, even though by the time of the concert he was basically there for the money. The reviewer referred to Quine as the "lead guitarist who should be sent back to the greasy diner where Lou found him." I wish I could walk into a diner and find a guitarist as good as Bob Quine.