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Episode 54, October 20, 2018: WALK ON THE WILD SIDE
Please note that while this episode of the show does not use explicit language, there are some adult themes discussed, which you may want to discuss further with your children later. Especially if you didnât understand something I talk about, and you want them to explain it to you.
[THEME]
Well, hello there! Youâve found the next episode of How Good It Is, a weekly podcast that takes a closer look at songs from the rock and roll era, and we check out some of the stories behind those songs, and the artists who made them famous.
My name is Claude Call, and sometimes I say doo, di-doo, doo, doo-di-doo
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Itâs got cross-dressing, male prostitution, drug abuse, and a touch of racism, but Lou Reedâs âWalk on the Wild Sideâ still managed to make it onto the radio and into the Billboard Top Twenty.
[SWEET JANE]
Lou Reed had left the Velvet Underground in 1970 to strike out on his own. The Velvet Underground was a pretty influential band, but not an especially successful one from a commercial standpoint. Reedâs first album had pretty much tanked, but he still managed to enlist some high-powered talent to assist him with putting together his second one, which was called Transformer. Two of those people were David Bowie and Mick Ronson, who produced the album.
Bowie, of course, was at the cutting edge of Glam Rock, which has always had a tinge of sexual ambiguity to it, and this was a facet of the entertainment industry that audiences were drawn to as an entertainment form, if not a specific lifestyle choice. Now, while Lou Reed wasnât really struggling with his sexuality by then, he understood the hassles that the LGBTQ communityâwho didnât even have that name yetâwent through on a personal and professional level. So he decided to write a song that would introduce some of these people to an audience who may not have had a real idea what some of these people were about, and either hadnât met before, or perhaps hadnât even considered meeting.
[WILD SIDE OF LIFE](Hank Thompson)
The title for the song has a more convoluted parentage than most songs. Reed himself has said that the direct inspiration for the songâs title was a novel by Nelson Algren, titled âA Walk on the Wild Sideâ, but that book got its title from a song from this song from 1952, called âThe Wild Side of Life.â Now, âThe Wild Side of Lifeâ has nothing to do thematically with Lou Reedâs song, but the book has a little bit more of an alignment. Reed once said that âWalk on the Wild Sideâ came out of a request that he score a musical for the book. However, over the year that followed, as the show became more remote, the stories of people he actually knew, rather than characters from the book, started to make their way into the lyrics.
[WALK ON THE WILD SIDE]
So who are the people named in âWalk on the Wild Sideâ? Well, all of them were members of Andy Warholâs studio, which was known as The Factory. By that time, Warhol had moved The Factory from its original location on East 47th Street, down to East 16th Street near Union Square Park. Warhol was really cranking out his work at that time, and he brought in a bunch of people to assist him with production of his art and his films, most of whom were drag queens, socialites, musicians and drug addicts. And Warhol called all of these people his âSuperstarsâ. And Reed, as one of the Superstars, started working other Superstars into âWalk on the Wild Sideâ.
The first verse refers to someone named Holly. That would be Holly Woodlawn. Holly was born as Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhaklin, in Puerto Rico and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, where she came out at a pretty early age. This sort of thing didnât go over very well in Miamiânot in the early 1960s, anywayâand she was bullied pretty regularly. So in 1962 when she was 15, she sold off a lot of her stuff and started making her way north, making it to Georgia before she ran out of money. So, she began to hitch-hike the rest of the way, and during that journey, like the song says, she learned how to pluck her eyebrows. In her autobiography she writes, âAt the age of 16, when most kids were cramming for trigonometry exams, I was turning tricks, living off the streets and wondering when my next meal was coming.â It wasnât until 1968 that she met up with Warhol and joined The Factory. Whenever she performed she had kind of a look somewhere between Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, but she never bothered changing her voice. New York Times critic Vincent Canby once wrote that she sounded more like Phil Silvers than Marlene Dietrich.
[SILVERS AUDIO CLIP]
Unfortunately, Holly Woodlawn died in December 2015 of liver and brain cancer.
The second verse tells us about Candy, who was everybodyâs darling. That was a pun on Lou Reedâs part, since heâs talking about Candy Darling, who was born James Lawrence Slattery in New York City. Candy grew up in the town of Massapequa Park, on Long Island and, like Holly Woodlawn, came out at an early age and was bullied for it to the point where she was nearly lynched. She dropped out of high school after that and went to a cosmetology school. She met up with Warhol in 1967 and he cast her in his movie titled Flesh. Candy also makes an appearance in the Velvet Underground song, âCandy Says.â
Candy Darling died of lymphoma in 1974 at the age of 29. This verse in the song is the most curious one, in the sense that it has the line referring to oral sex, which seemed never to be censored by the radio stations. But as far as anyone can tell, thatâs because the program directors simply had no idea what the phrase âgiving headâ meant, and by the time they figured it out, the song had been played so many times that censoring it at that point would have been meaningless. Itâs kind of like the Whoâs âWho Are Youâ, which drops an F-bomb repeatedly. There is supposedly a version of the single that doesnât have the reference to oral sex, and replaces the phrase âand the colored girls sayâ with âand the girls all sayâ, but youâd be hard-pressed to find a copy nowadays.
âLittle Joeâ would be Joseph DâAlessandro. DâAlessandro was born in Florida, and moved to New York when he was a child. As a teenager, he was expelled from school for punching the principal. He continued to get into trouble until finally he was sent to a rehabilitation camp in upstate New York in 1964. Year later he ran away from the camp and supported himself by doing nude modeling. DâAlessandro met Andy Warhol in 1967, and immediately became one of Warholâs superstars. In addition to the Andy Warhol films, DâAlessandro has appeared in several mainstream properties, and guest-starred on several television shows. DâAlessandro has also appeared on two album covers. The cover of the Rolling Stones album sticky fingers features a close-up photograph of the crotch bulge of Joeâs tight blue jeans. The photograph was taken by Andy Warhol, and was just one of several photos in a stack, rather than being a photo made specifically for the album cover. The other appearance happened in the 1980s when the British band the Smiths took a still from the film âFleshâ featuring DâAlessandro and used it as the cover of their debut album. DâAlessandro turns 70 later this year, and at last report was living in Los Angeles.
Jackie Curtis was born John Curtis in 1947 in New York City. Throughout her career she performed as both a man and a woman, and in the late 60s produced a lot of her own place which frequently featured others in the Warhol superstar stable such as candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn. Her parents and the song features both her drug addiction and her fascination with the actor James Dean. She died from complications of HIV in 1985.
The sugarplum fairy was a reference to an actor named Joe Campbell, who appeared in a 1965 film by Andy Warhol titled âMy Hustler.â And again, a drug reference managed to slip past censors because a sugar plum fairy is another term for a drug dealer.
[CENTRAL PARK ARREST]
So who are the colored girls who go âDoo, di-doo, di-doo, doo-di-dooâ? Well, as it turns out, they were a British trio known as Thunder Thighs, and oddly enough, they were all Caucasian. They got a lot of work in the 1970s singing backup for different artists including Arthur Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Mott the Hoople, and they managed to record a few singles of their own. This one, called âCentral Park Arrest,â made it to Number 30 in the UK.
[WALK ON THE WILD SIDE END CLIP]
And no discussion of âWalk On The Wild Sideâ would be complete if I didnât talk about some of the musicians on the song. There are two bass lines on his record and they provide most of the propulsion on the song. One was an electric bass and the other was an acoustic double bass, and both of them were played by Herbie Flowers. According to an interview that Mr. flowers did in 2005 with the BBC, the idea behind the twin bass line was that, as a session musician, he would get paid double playing two instruments on the same track. But the fact is, he only got 17 pounds for the session, not 34.
Also of special note is the saxophone solo at the end of the song, which often gets cut short in some single versions. Those same versions also cut out at least one of the verses, but itâs strictly a time cut rather than a censorship one. At any rate, the saxophone was provided by Ronnie Ross, who was a childhood friend of David Bowie and taught him to play the sax when they were kids. The story goes, however, that Ross had no idea that Bowie was even there until after heâd finished recording his part.
The single was released in November of 1972 and by early 1973, âWalk on the Wild Sideâ went to Number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached Number 10 in the UK, and it did pretty respectably in other countries as well, though it never got above 100 in Australia.
Now, this is kind of interesting. Lou Reed said once that he was worried about the reactions that Warholâs superstars were going to have to the record, but when he got back to New York, it turned out that they were all pretty excited about the song and really liked it. However, in 2017 a college in Ontario, Canada included the song on a playlist at a campus event, and then decided they needed to issue a public apology for it the next day. The apology essentially suggested that the song is transphobic, reading in part âWe now know the lyrics to this song are hurtful to our friends in the trans community and weâd like to unreservedly apologize for this error in judgment.â The student group also promised to be more mindful in their music selection for future events. Now, Lou Reed himself was already dead by this point but his producer Hal Willner told the press âI donât know if Lou would be cracking up about this or crying because itâs just too stupid.â He continued, âThe song was a love song to all the people he knew and to New York City by a man who supported the community and the city his whole life.â Another friend of Reeds, Jenni Muldaur, who also did some backup singing for him, noted that âLou was open about his complete acceptance of all creatures of the night,â pointing out that the album is called Transformer. âWhat do they think itâs about?â
[WILDSIDE]
The song has never truly been covered, although the bass line is frequently sampled by the hip-hop crowd. Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch took the instrumental line and set up a rap song called âWildsideââall one wordâbut the lyrics were completely different. Having said that, the words to Marky Markâs version are also referencing real people.
[U2]
And the band U2 vamped a couple of lyrics during the 1985 Live Aid concert, getting the audience to sing the âdoo, di-dooâ part. Then Bono walked offstage while the band finished playing.
Oddly enough, the band thought the performance was a low point in their career, but it turned out to be one of the highlights of the entire show.
And, thatâs it for this edition of How Good It Is.
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Next time around, weâre going to find out How Good It Is to bust ghosts.
Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you then.