![]() ![]() A desolate psychic territory where no one else has ever ventured, before or since. The best way to describe it to the reader who has not heard the album is to compare it to someone creating a ghostly new language from scratch. The Marble Index is a singular artistic achievement. It doesn’t seem to have been influenced by anything and there’s nothing else that it can be likened to. (The bowels of Hell?) It is of no musical tradition or recognizable genre. It’s a staggering, absolutely unprecedented work of genius. HOWEVER, when The Marble Index came out on CD in 1991, my fulsome familiarity with it some fifteen years earlier allowed me to “get it” instantly as an adult and from that moment on, I stand in utter awe at what I think, echoing both John Cale and Lester Bangs, is perhaps the greatest work of European avant garde classical music of the latter half of the 20th century. The Marble Index flew completely over my head. ![]() Obviously it’s not an album for everyone to begin with but especially not for a little kid who only the year before was listening to James Bond soundtracks and “Little Willy.” I finally gave up trying and never did get to the bottom of it. In other words, ‘ Metal Machine Music? Hey, no problem,’ but The Marble Index was just a bridge too far for my pre-teen mind. No matter how hard I tried-and I did try hard I promise you, I must’ve played it a hundred times at least-I simply could not wrap my brain around that album. The same could not be said of Nico’s The Marble Index. This inscrutable album presented me with a puzzle that I had to solve: Why do people like this? (Little did I know then that almost everyone hated it.) I played it endlessly AND ON HEADPHONES in an effort to figure out what it was. One of these 99 cent 8-tracks that I picked up-which I still own-was Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. ![]() (I was not in the least an innocent child.) In the mid-1970s Velvet Underground albums were not difficult to come by in my backwater West Virginia hometown-unlike Iggy, whose albums had to be mail ordered-and post VU solo efforts from Lou Reed, Nico and John Cale could easily be found in the cut-out bins of white trash department stores, usually in the form of 8-track tapes. I had no trouble figuring out what the songs were about, the subject matter of “Venus in Furs” or “Waiting for the Man” was well understood by me. I bought one of their albums without ever hearing it, because I just knew it was going to be good. Via an intense David Bowie fandom, and also from being an avid reader of CREEM magazine, I discovered the work of the Velvet Underground at a very young age, like ten or eleven. “I’m very interested in murder.”-Nico, 1970 ![]()
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