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    The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum

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    Browne wrote “These Days” at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: “If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.”When he was 16, Jack Browne sat down at his parents’ kitchen table in Fullerton, Calif., and started picking out a tune on an old Kay guitar.It was the fall of 1964, and the fledgling songwriter and high school junior — inspired by books, records and his own suburban disaffection — began weaving together an existential number about loss and regret called “These Days.”It would be a year until he finished the song, nearly a decade before he recorded it properly. By the time Jackson Browne, as he would be known professionally, cut it for his 1973 album “For Everyman” — which will be reissued on Sept. 20 — it had already been done in two distinct, definitive versions: the first by the German chanteuse and Velvet Underground collaborator Nico, then later by the Southern rocker Gregg Allman.“These Days” has proved a remarkably durable composition, reinterpreted by Cher, St. Vincent, Glen Campbell, Miley Cyrus, Paul Westerberg and Drake, to name a handful. It inspired Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and more recently has become the unlikely soundtrack to a series of TikTok trends.While Browne has had bigger hits as an artist (“Doctor My Eyes,” “Running on Empty”) and as a writer (Eagles’ “Take It Easy”), “These Days” has rambled through the decades, morphing musically, changing lyrically and taking on added layers of meaning. “In that regard, it’s sort of like a folk song,” Browne said on a late August afternoon, sitting in the control room of his Santa Monica recording studio, Groove Masters.“I come from folk music, that was my school,” continued Browne, somehow still boyish and bright-eyed at 75. “You’d learn several versions of the same song and adapt the parts of it that you liked and it’d become something else. That’s what’s happened with ‘These Days.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      9 Inspiring Songs for the New Year

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      Get inspiration in songs from the Zombies, Solange, Jenny Hval and more.The Zombies always know how to kick off a fresh year.Stanley Bielecki/ASP and Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,Happy New Year! I’m going to keep things relatively brief today, because I’m kicking off 2024 with the head cold that every other person in New York seems to have right now. But isn’t that always how it goes when we’ve set high expectations and lofty resolutions for the new year? Life promptly steps in to throw some annoyingly timed obstacles our way.That’s kind of what the playlist I’ve created for today is about: Welcoming these next 12 months with optimism, grace and even a little humility.First, though, here’s a story about 2023.Each year, most of the goals I set for myself — the word “resolution” makes me clam up — have to do with cultural consumption. For the past few years, I’ve intended to read my age in books (a number that stubbornly keeps rising!), and last year I also attempted to watch 200 movies. Though certain social media sites were probably distractions, logging my books on Goodreads and the films I watched on Letterboxd helped keep me on track as the months went on.But December got frantically busy, as it always seems to, and I found myself obsessively planning my holiday downtime in service of hitting those noble but ultimately meaningless numbers: If I spend all of the 26th reading a novella and watch a movie every evening between now and New Year’s Eve …During that last week of the year, though, something clicked, and I loosened my grip. I started the longer and more challenging book I actually wanted to read instead of the more easy-to-finish novel that felt like an obligation. On one of the nights I’d planned to watch a movie, I accepted a spontaneous invitation to catch up with some old friends instead. My year was that much richer for both of these small decisions.What I’m saying is this: Set your objectives high, and also be kind to yourself. I am weirdly proud to report that I fell just short of my 2023 goals: In the end, I logged 198 movies and read one fewer book than I’d intended. So what? My decision not to kick it into overdrive at the end of the year does not negate all the films I discovered in 2023, nor the 30-*ahem* books I finished. It just meant that I’d added a smidgen of perspective to my annual acquisitions, too.Plus, ironically, it looks like I’m about to spend a few days on the couch with ample opportunity to catch up on some movies. Be careful what you wish for.I hope today’s playlist — which features tracks by the Zombies, Solange and Fiona Apple, among others — inspires you to ring in the new year with the appropriate amount of optimism, rumination and self-forgiveness. Who knows? Maybe it will even give you your own personal theme song for 2024.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. The Zombies: “This Will Be Our Year”A perennial classic, for good reason. (Listen on YouTube)2. Fiona Apple: “Better Version of Me”Fiona Apple approaches self-improvement with gusto — and a bit of a wink — on this spirited, piano-pounding track from her 2005 album “Extraordinary Machine”: “I’ve got a plan, a demand, and it just began/And if you’re right, you’ll agree/Here’s coming a better version of me.” (Listen on YouTube)3. A Sunny Day in Glasgow: “Failure”“Ashes Grammar,” the ambitious dream-pop opus by the Philadelphia band A Sunny Day in Glasgow, is an album I first fell in love with when it was released in 2009, and ever since then, I’ve carried around the comforting wisdom of this song’s refrain: “Fall forward, feel failure.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Kathleen Edwards: “Change the Sheets”“Change this feeling under my feet,” a restless Kathleen Edwards sings on this standout from the Canadian singer-songwriter’s great 2011 album, “Voyageur.” “Change the sheets and then change me.” Who among us hasn’t been there? (Listen on YouTube)5. Solange: “Cranes in the Sky”I’ve recently been revisiting Solange’s 2016 triumph “A Seat at the Table,” and this song — about getting to the deep root of why we’re so hungry for superficial changes — sounds as profound as ever. Also, if you ever need four and a half minutes of Zen, you know you can always watch the music video. (Listen on YouTube)6. Paul Simon: “Run That Body Down”The new year is often a time for taking a hard look at mortality, reassessing bad habits and perhaps addressing ourselves in the voice of Paul Simon’s doctor as she appears in this 1972 tune: “How many nights you think that you can do what you’ve been doing?” (Listen on YouTube)7. Nico: “Sixty Forty”“Will there be another time? Another year, another wish to stay?” Nico drones on this moody dirge, sounding as omniscient and steady as the march of the seasons. Though it first appeared on her 1981 solo album “Drama of Exile,” “Sixty Forty” was also used to memorable effect in Joanna Hogg’s 2021 movie “The Souvenir, Part II.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Jenny Hval: “That Battle Is Over”On this candid, freewheeling reflection from her 2015 album “Apocalypse, Girl,” the Norwegian musician Jenny Hval considers the passage of time, the nebulous definition of “self care” and the pressures of personal improvement, ultimately arriving at her own wry conclusions. (Listen on YouTube)9. John Lennon: “(Just Like) Starting Over”Though it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at all the “new year, new me” exhortations that surround us in early January, there’s also something to be said for earnestly embraced fresh starts — as John Lennon enthused on the buoyant leadoff track from “Double Fantasy.” (Listen on YouTube)Here it comes — a better version of me,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“This Will Be Our Year” track listTrack 1: The Zombies, “This Will Be Our Year”Track 2: Fiona Apple, “Better Version of Me”Track 3: A Sunny Day in Glasgow, “Failure”Track 4: Kathleen Edwards, “Change the Sheets”Track 5: Solange, “Cranes in the Sky”Track 6: Paul Simon, “Run That Body Down”Track 7: Nico, “Sixty Forty”Track 8: Jenny Hval, “That Battle Is Over”Track 9: John Lennon, “(Just Like) Starting Over” More

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      Just Like a Woman: Female Artists Cover Bob Dylan

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      Hear versions by Marianne Faithfull, Joan Baez, Nina Simone and more.Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in 1963.Rowland Scherman/Getty ImagesDear listeners,In 2016, when Bob Dylan became the first singer-songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Guardian asked six female artists to talk about his work. With his wild, Einsteinian coif, Romantic poet adoration and cryptic, sometimes ornery nature, Dylan is often held up as an emblematic example of the modern male genius. We’ve heard plenty about him from men over the years; refreshingly, The Guardian let some brilliant and fascinating women have their turn. “My mother always thought that Dylan was somewhat misogynistic,” the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega said, “but I don’t see that. I see a whole range of female characters in his music from goddesses and queens and women revered and then also women used, abused.”When adding footnotes to the republished version of an incisive 1967 essay she’d written about Dylan, the great cultural critic Ellen Willis came to a slightly different conclusion. “Here and elsewhere in this prefeminist essay I refer with aplomb if not outright endorsement to Dylan’s characteristic bohemian contempt for women (which he combined with an equally obnoxious idealization of female goddess figures),” she wrote, adding that she’d since come to view these tendencies more critically. Still, these observations didn’t dilute her appreciation of Dylan’s work, nor the rigorous scrutiny she brought to it throughout her life. She was simply asserting something that has often become lost in more recent times — that “talking back” to a piece of art isn’t the same as dismissing it. It is much more often a way of keeping it alive.For today’s playlist, I wanted to put together a kind of musical version of that Guardian piece: a collection of Dylan songs interpreted by women. It’s not meant to be comprehensive; while putting it together I was reminded that there are a lot of great Dylan covers by female musicians, so apologies if your favorite didn’t make the list. (Though feel free to let me know.)As Willis put it, memorably, at the end of that previously mentioned essay, “In a communication crisis, the true prophets are the translators.” She was talking about Dylan, of course. But I think of the following artists — like Marianne Faithfull, Joan Baez and Nina Simone — as translators in their own right, too.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Cher: “All I Really Want to Do” (1965)Cher’s debut single, produced by her then husband Sonny Bono, was this jangly cover of the opening track on “Another Side of Bob Dylan” — a kind of one-person duet between the masculine and feminine ends of Cher’s vocal range. As she writes in her highly entertaining 1998 biography “The First Time,” “No one believed it was just me, because I did both the high part and the low part at the beginning of each verse.” She also recounts, later in that chapter, how she ran into Dylan in a New York recording studio as her version was climbing the charts. He told her that he dug what she’d done with it, which, Cher writes, “made me feel like floating away.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Joan Baez: “Simple Twist of Fate” (1975)By the time she released her 1975 album “Diamonds and Rust,” Baez had been recording gorgeous, reverent covers of material written by Dylan — her folk musical peer, collaborator and former flame — for more than a decade. Her rollicking cover of “Simple Twist of Fate” is something else, though: playful, self-assured and even a little sassy, especially when she uses a laughably nasal Dylan impression in the second half of the song. Writing the haunting title track off “Diamonds and Rust,” a poetic remembrance of her ’60s romance with Dylan, must have freed her up to have some fun with his material. (Listen on YouTube)3. Marianne Faithfull: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (1971)In 1965, shortly after the release of her debut single “As Tears Go By,” Faithfull spent some time hanging in the Savoy with Dylan and his entourage, while D.A. Pennebaker was filming “Don’t Look Back.” At one point, Dylan played Faithfull his latest album: “Bringing It All Back Home.” Six years later, when her voice had begun maturing beyond light pop fare and into that seen-it-all croak, Faithfull recorded her own version of the album’s final track, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” She’d revisit the song again many years later, too, on her 2018 album “Negative Capability.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Nico: “I’ll Keep It With Mine” (1967)It’s a rare experience, getting to hear a song’s muse sing and interpret material that was written about her. (Allegedly, as we must add with any speculation of what or who a Dylan song is “about.”) But such is the poignancy and power of Nico’s rendition of “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which she recorded for her 1967 debut solo album, “Chelsea Girl.” Dylan wrote the song while traveling around Europe with a pre-Velvet Underground Nico during their brief 1964 romance, and though he attempted to record it for “Bringing It All Back Home” and, later, “Blonde on Blonde,” he ended up saving it for release on his bootleg collection. Nico’s version, then, is probably the best known: The signature, heavy-cream richness of her voice makes it sound impossibly melancholy, but there’s a buoyancy to her cadences that conveys the sweetness and devotion to companionship at the heart of the song. (Listen on YouTube)5. Bettye LaVette: “Ain’t Talkin’” (2018)I discovered this smoldering cover just a few months ago, after reading about it in Greil Marcus’s great 2022 book “Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.” (Always read Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan.) One of those seven songs is the creepily somnambulant “Ain’t Talkin’,” from Dylan’s 2006 album “Modern Times,” though Marcus rightly praises this reworking by the beloved soul singer Bettye LaVette for enlivening the composition with her unique sensibility. He quotes LaVette, speaking of this and a few other Dylan covers on her 2018 album “Things Have Changed”: “I wasn’t going to tributize him.” Instead she was looking to make the songs “fit into my mouth,” as she put it, “just as if they’d been written for me.” Mission accomplished. (Listen on YouTube)6. Mavis Staples: “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1999)The story goes that Dylan — a huge fan of the Staples Singers — proposed marriage to a young Mavis Staples when his career was just getting off the ground; she turned him down because she wasn’t yet ready to settle down. (She told The Guardian in 2016, “I often think what would have happened if I’d married Dylan.”) Musically, though, the two linked up throughout their lives: Staples joined Dylan for a 2003 duet of his 1979 gospel song “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” and in recent years they’ve toured together repeatedly. Staples’s blazing solo version of “Gotta Serve Somebody,” from a 1999 Dylan tribute, revels in the gritty rasp and bottomless depths of her one-of-a-kind voice. (Listen on YouTube)7. Marianne Faithfull: “Visions of Johanna” (1971)I simply could not choose just one Marianne Faithfull cover! And then I realized I didn’t have to! (Listen on YouTube)8. Emmylou Harris: “Every Grain of Sand” (1995)Emmylou Harris’s voice strains and nearly cracks open with exalted feeling on her passionately sung cover of “Every Grain of Sand,” a standout from Dylan’s spiritually minded 1981 album “Shot of Love.” It’s a welcome spotlight on a less appreciated stretch of Dylan’s songwriting. (Listen on YouTube)9. PJ Harvey: “Highway 61 Revisited” (1993)PJ Harvey dredges up the darkness in “Highway 61” with this wild version that appeared on her landmark 1993 album “Rid of Me.” Gone is the whimsical slide whistle; taking its place is Harvey’s torrential storms of guitar distortion and menacingly whispered vocals, making Dylan’s cheeky biblical sendup sound more like a nightmare. (Albeit a very cool one.) (Listen on YouTube)10. Nina Simone: “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1969)On her 1969 album “To Love Somebody,” Nina Simone completely reimagines “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in both arrangement and tone. The version Dylan made famous on “Highway 61 Revisited” is charmingly cluttered, chock-full of layered instrumentation and reference-stuffed lines. But Simone clears almost everything out, building something extraordinary out of little more than quietly played piano, hand drums and that magnificently weary voice, turning Dylan’s surrealist fresco into a deeply felt hymn to the down-and-out. (Listen on YouTube)I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Just Like a Woman: Female Artists Cover Dylan” track listTrack 1: Cher, “All I Really Want to Do”Track 2: Joan Baez, “Simple Twist of Fate”Track 3: Marianne Faithfull, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”Track 4: Nico, “I’ll Keep It With Mine”Track 5: Bettye LaVette, “Ain’t Talkin’”Track 6: Mavis Staples, “Gotta Serve Somebody”Track 7: Marianne Faithfull, “Visions of Johanna”Track 8: Emmylou Harris, “Every Grain of Sand”Track 9: PJ Harvey, “Highway 61 Revisited”Track 10: Nina Simone, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”Bonus tracksTina Turner’s cover of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is — alas! — missing from most streaming services, but if you dig around I bet you can find it on YouTube. Ahem.Also, on this week’s Playlist, Taylor Swift rewrites her back pages, plus new songs from First Aid Kit, Anohni and the Johnsons and more. More

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      Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops

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      Hear songs that memorably accompanied scenes in “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and more.Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” She’s always late, but worth waiting for.Touchstone PicturesDear listeners,One day when I was 14, I stayed home sick from school and watched a weird little movie called “Rushmore” on Comedy Central. When it was over, I thought to myself, “Oh, so that’s what a director does.”I had never before encountered a movie that so distinctly seemed to come from a single person’s perspective. The filmmaker Wes Anderson had created his own alternate reality, with its own color scheme, its own vernacular, and — perhaps most crucially — its own killer music. I wanted to live inside of that world. I bought the soundtrack as soon as I could.For aspiring aesthetes, Anderson’s movies can be gateway drugs. Eager to catch all of his cinematic references and influences, his films led me to the work of directors like François Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu and Satyajit Ray. But the songs in his films are vehicles of discovery, too. I’d never heard the Creation’s “Making Time,” that garage-rock classic with guitars that rev like a souped-up engine, or the Who’s gloriously bombastic rock opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away” until I saw “Rushmore.” I learned about Nico from “The Royal Tenenbaums” and Seu Jorge from “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” Anderson’s carefully curated soundtracks felt, to me, like eclectic, handmade mixtapes.As I got deeper into movies, I realized that even the most personal-seeming film is the result of collaboration with countless others: cinematographers, production designers, wardrobe stylists, and, of course, music supervisors. The needle drops in most of Anderson’s films are the result of his longtime working relationship with the music supervisor Randall Poster. In more recent movies, like the Oscar-winning “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and the underrated “The French Dispatch,” he’s also worked with repeatedly with the composer Alexandre Desplat, who has composed intricate and appropriately quirky scores that help bring Anderson’s worlds to life.In honor of Anderson’s new movie, “Asteroid City,” which I am very excited to see when it comes out this weekend, I put together a playlist of some of the most iconic and unexpected songs featured in his films. Quite a few have become inextricably tied to Anderson scenes. Never again will I hear “These Days” without picturing Margot Tenenbaum walking off a Green Line bus in slow-motion, or “A Quick One, While He’s Away” without imagining Herman Blume destroying poor Max Fischer’s bicycle. Sic transit gloria, indeed.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Creation: “Making Time”The tracks used in Anderson’s movies often serve as unofficial theme songs for characters, reflecting the way they see themselves — the song playing in their own heads as they walk down the street. Fischer, the scheming protagonist of “Rushmore,” is too square to truly embody the bratty, take-no-prisoners attitude of this jangly 1966 rocker from the British band the Creation; for him, it’s more of an aspirational soundtrack. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Ramones: “Judy Is a Punk”Anderson is a master of the montage, and many of his most memorable ones rely on a great, propulsive song to give its disparate shots a unified mood. One of my favorites compiles footage of a private detective’s dossier on Margot Tenenbaum’s secret life in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The sonic jump-cut from silence to the Ramones’ explosive “Judy Is a Punk” sets the moment apart from the rest of the film, and makes all of Margot’s exploits seem that much cooler. (Listen on YouTube)3. Paul Simon: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Or maybe this is my favorite montage in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” When the disreputable patriarch Royal, played indelibly by Gene Hackman, wants to bond with his precocious, track-suited grandsons Ari and Uzi, he takes them out for some light mayhem: go-karting, water-balloon-throwing and petty larceny — all to the tune of Paul Simon. It’s against the law! (Listen on YouTube)4. Seu Jorge: “Life on Mars?”Anderson’s 2004 feature “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” featured the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge as a kind of one-man Greek chorus, singing acoustic covers of David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The melodies are so universally recognizable that you don’t need to understand the language to at least hum along to Jorge’s tender, sweetly crooned renditions of classics like “Rebel Rebel,” “Starman,” and of course, “Life on Mars?” (Listen on YouTube)5. Nico: “These Days”It’s the scene that launched a million Halloween costumes: Richie Tenenbaum waits for his escort from his days on the circuit, his sister, Margot. As usual, she’s late — but well worth the delay as she gets off the bus in her ever-present fur coat and raccoon-rimmed eyes, to the heart-stopping musical cue of Nico’s “These Days.” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Beach Boys: “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Several Beach Boys songs are used to great effect in “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” but none as stirringly as “Old Man River,” which soundtracks a heavenly moment at the end of the film when the animals find themselves in a supermarket. “Get enough to share with everybody,” Mr. Fox instructs, “and remember, the rabbits are vegetarians and badgers supposedly can’t eat walnuts.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”In “Moonrise Kingdom,” from 2012 and set in 1964, young Sam and Suzy run away together and attempt to live out their own feral version of adulthood on an island. Among their possessions is a portable record player for 45 RPM singles, meaning they can soundtrack their own lives. Just before the awkward beachside dance that results in their first kiss, Suzy puts on Françoise Hardy’s 1962 single “Le temps de l’amour,” an achingly perfect choice for a 12-year-old trying on an air of sophistication like a pair of too-big high heels. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Rolling Stones: “Ruby Tuesday”As it’s used in a crucial scene in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” this early Stones classic casts such a rosy, romantic glow that you almost forget that you’re rooting for Richie Tenenbaum to end up with his adopted sister. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Kinks: “This Time Tomorrow”Like the Beach Boys in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” sometimes an Anderson film will feature several songs from a single artist. Anderson’s fifth feature, “The Darjeeling Limited,” conjures its Indian setting by using instrumentals from the films of Satyajit Ray, though its placement of several songs from the Kinks’ 1970 album “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One” — including the sweetly bleary “This Time Tomorrow” — serve as reminders that the film is filtered through a Westerner’s sensibility. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Who: “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Yet another top-tier Anderson montage, from “Rushmore”: a battle of petty acts of revenge between Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) and Blume (Bill Murray), given an anarchic grandeur thanks to this nearly nine-minute epic by the Who. Fun fact: While the version that appears on Rushmore’s official soundtrack is from the Who’s unrivaled 1970 concert album “Live at Leeds,” the version used in the film comes from the storied 1968 BBC special and eventual live record “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Van Morrison, “Everyone”Anderson has a knack for ending his movies with a bittersweet, emotionally resonant song that lingers in the air long after the credits roll. One of my favorites is “Everyone,” the clavinet-kissed Van Morrison track that rings out at the end of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” At once melancholy and hopeful, it’s the perfect way to conclude a movie that pierces your heart even as it’s making you laugh. And I think it’s a pretty good ending for this playlist, too. (Listen on YouTube)The Amplifier was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops” track listTrack 1: The Creation, “Making Time”Track 2: The Ramones, “Judy Is a Punk”Track 3: Paul Simon, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Track 4: Seu Jorge, “Life on Mars?”Track 5: Nico, “These Days”Track 6: The Beach Boys, “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Track 7: Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”Track 8: The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”Track 9: The Kinks, “This Time Tomorrow”Track 10: The Who, “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Track 11: Van Morrison, “Everyone”Bonus TracksSeriously, behold that performance by the Who in “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” and bow down to Keith Moon in all his glory. Some people believe that the reason the Stones shelved the TV special and did not officially release it until 1996 was that they thought the Who upstaged them. I’ll let you be the judge: Watch this performance and ask yourself if it’s an act you’d want to follow.If you’re looking for new music, too, this week’s Playlist has fresh tunes from Meshell Ndegeocello, Doja Cat, Peggy Gou and more. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Velvet Underground’ Review: And Me, I’m in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band

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      Todd Haynes’s documentary paints a jagged, revelatory portrait of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s.Sometime in the 1960s, John Cale, a classically trained Welsh violist with avant-garde leanings, met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college dropout from Long Island who dreamed of being a rock star. Their creative partnership, encouraged by Andy Warhol and enhanced by the mercurial presence of the German model, actress and singer Nico, was the volatile bedrock of the Velvet Underground, a commercially marginal band that altered the course of popular music.The Velvet Underground story is hardly obscure, and in outline it might fit fairly neatly in the standard music-documentary template. Early struggle gives way to (relative) triumph, and then the whole thing blows up in a squall of battling egos, substance abuse and self-destructive behavior. In the aftermath life goes on, solo careers are pursued, and the survivors — fans as much as artists — look back with mellow affection on the wild and heady past, brought alive by excavated television footage.“The Velvet Underground” has some of those elements, but it’s directed by Todd Haynes, a protean filmmaker who never met a genre he couldn’t deconstruct. While not as radical as “I’m Not There,” his 2007 Bob Dylan anti-biopic, this movie is similarly committed to a skeptical, inventive reading of recent cultural history. It’s not content to tell the story in the usual way, and it finds revelation in what might have seemed familiar.Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. And also to see — to feel, to experience — the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan.A lot of eloquent people are on hand to talk about what it was like. Cale and Maureen Tucker, the drummer, the two original Velvet Underground members who are still alive, share their memories, as do some of Reed’s old friends and surviving members of the Warhol circle.Their faces, shot in gentle, nostalgic, indirect light, share the screen with a rapid flow — a kinetic collage — of images. While those images sometimes document places, events and personalities — offering up Allen Ginsberg, Max’s Kansas City and a news clip about the downtown scene narrated by Barbara Walters — they serve more importantly to link the Velvets’ music to the experimental cinema of the time.From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Reed and Tucker in a split-screen frame from the film, which places the band in context of the aesthetic ferment of mid-60s Manhattan.Apple TV+Warhol was, along with everything else, a filmmaker, as was his associate Paul Morrissey. Haynes dedicates “The Velvet Underground” to the memory of Jonas Mekas, the great champion and gadfly of New York’s cinematic vanguard who died in 2019. In the film, Mekas marvels at the sheer abundance of artistic activity in the city in the early ’60s, and the constant blending and cross-pollination that was taking place. Traditional boundaries — between poetry and painting, high art and low, film and music, irony and earnestness — weren’t so much transgressed as shown to be irrelevant.It was a remarkable time, but not exactly a golden age. Haynes respects the art too much to idealize the artists, or to impose retrospective harmony on their dissonances. The overt cruelty and menace of the music — the droning and distortion behind lyrics about addiction, sadism and sexual exploitation — didn’t come from nowhere.The film critic Amy Taubin, who appeared in a Warhol film about “the most beautiful women in the world,” bluntly recalls that the Factory, Warhol’s headquarters, was a bad place for women, who were valued for their looks rather than their talents. An aspect of Warhol’s genius was a gift for using people, and often using them up. Reed, who died in 2013, is a posthumously beloved figure, but not many of his contemporaries would describe him as a nice person.And niceness was, in any case, antithetical to what the Velvet Underground was trying to do. “We hated that peace and love crap,” Tucker says. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the Velvets on the West Coast, elaborates on their hostility to the California counterculture: “We hated hippies.” Never a political band, it nonetheless articulated a powerful protest — against sentimentality, stupidity, false consciousness and positive thinking — that would sow the seeds of punk rock and later rebellions. Testimony to their influence is provided by the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw them live 60 or 70 times when he was a teenager in Boston, and whose enthusiasm is undimmed more than half a century later.Drop a needle on any Velvet Underground record — or queue up a playlist, if that’s how you roll — and what you hear will sound new, frightening and full of possibility, even on the thousandth listen. “The Velvet Underground” will show you where that perpetual novelty came from, and connect the sonic dots with other, contemporaneous artistic eruptions. As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.The Velvet UndergroundRated R. “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray” — you do the math. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More