When I was a kid, I was fascinated by a guitar amp by grandfather used. Messing around with it once, I discovered that, if one turned one of the dials up all the way (reverb, I think), picked up the amp and then sat it down roughly, a truly horrific noise would come from it. My memory may be inaccurate, but I recall it being something like the reverberation of a bunch of springs, all overlapping each other and resulting in strange frequencies I’m not sure I have ever heard before or since. It made my head hurt, yet I find the sensation compelling. So, of course, I had to do it again.
The closest thing I have ever encountered to that experience is Lou Reed’s notorious double album Metal Machine Music. In my beloved copy of the book The Worst Rock n’ Roll Records of all Time, it is surpassed in ranking only by the “all-talking” Elvis album Having Fun with Elvis on Stage. I must be a glutton for punishment, because I found that album mildly amusing. But I have listened to MMM at least ten times now over the years, putting the lie to this statement from the book concerning mastering engineer Bob Ludwig: “perhaps the only person without a long history of substance abuse who has listened to all four sides.”
But the book did correctly anticipate, though cynically, is a cult would eventually form around the record. Lester Bangs famously, though perhaps facetiously, sang its praises in a review. Pitchfork, for whatever its worth, once gave it an 8.7 out of 10, which seems half-assed to me. This is the kind of extreme, polarizing work that warrants either a 0.0 or a 10, and nothing in between will do. In 2002, an avant-garde ensemble performed the work in its entirety, using only analog instruments. Despite admirable intentions, I question the point of faithfully transcribing free-form electronic noise into an ensemble piece.
And yet, as I listen to it again as I write this, is it really that free form? While it doesn’t follow any kind of conventional structure, there are a few basic types of sounds that seem to recur throughout it. I will call these “voices”. One of the main voices is a medium-high pitch that I can imagine as a sine wave. Another voice is like extremely distorted guitar. Yet another voice (and probably the one most likely to set listeners’ teeth on edge) is a squeal at the top of the range of sounds here, but it is used sparingly. Then there’s a staccato voice in the mid-range, as if somebody is trying to send a morse code message (an SOS, I imagine) to the listener. There are also some bowel-rumbling bass frequencies, which is the element I find most disturbing.
The result is something that sounds to me not like the complete absence of music but instead the sound of all music. It’s like we’re listening to the big bang of music, with all potential frequencies that could ever be used in any tunes from the beginning to the end of time are occurring all at once, stepping on each other and creating terrifying new permutations of sound. The sensation I get from listening to this is akin to trying to drink from a fire hose. However, I do constantly hear little snippets surfacing of what could be the DNA of tunes throughout this work, even if they immediately submerge once again into the raging stream of sound.
Something I think I would appreciate about this work even if I couldn’t bear to listen to it is its purity. Each side is 16:04 seconds long, without fades in or out at the beginning or end of each of its four sides. The sudden silence at the end of each track is more startling than the wall of noise hitting you at the start. Side D ends in a locked groove, something I can admire, though it cheapens the experience a bit. By having any small portion of this looped for as long as you care to play it, it establishes a pattern, a rhythm. It tames that snippet of the work, and this is a beast that should remain wild. Something that greatly amuses me, however, is my “quad mixed down to stereo” copy, which reveals the two additional channels had simply been each track in reverse. Playing the end of each track backwards reveals it is the same as what you heard going forwards.
There are many stories and theories about how the sounds on Metal Machine Music were created. The version I prefer is that Lou simply turned two amps towards each other, jacked the volume, plugged a guitar into each and hooked up some effect pedals. Then he laid the amps against the speakers and let them feedback off each other. The layers of sound puts the lie to that, in my opinion. It is simply too complex for that to work, however fascinating that would have been. Still, I hope that one day somebody will create an installation like that and live-stream the sound for all eternity, finally accomplishing what that locked groove at the end of the last side tried and failed to do.