Danny Fields has been a driving force in rock and roll as a band manager (The Stooges and The Ramones), journalist, disc jockey, A&R man, author and champion of New York’s punk rock scene from the beginning in the mid-seventies onward. A documentary about Fields,Danny Says, will premier at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin.
In this video from 1994, Fields takes MTV’s Tabitha Soren on a tour of some of New York City’s seminal punk rock clubs, including CBGB and Max’s, and some historic musical landmarks like Electric Lady studios and The Ed Sullivan Theater.
As someone who practically lived at CBGB and Max’s in their heydays, Danny Fields was an omnipresent source of rock and roll energy and enthusiasm, as essential to the scene as the musicians, club owners and booking agents who helped make the scene happen.
In one of her very few televised appearances, Nico performs “You Forget to Answer” on French TV’s POP2 program in 1972. The songs’s cryptic lyrics convey the despair the avant garde ice queen felt over hearing of the death of her former lover Jim Morrison and how she was unable to reach him by phone on the day he died. It would eventually appear on her 1974 album The End, which takes its title, of course, from her infamously doomy cover of the already infamously doomy Doors’ original.
Talk about low budget, it looks like they’ve got her singing in a rec room or something, here, but still, once she gets started, it’s like she blots outs everything else and pulls this remarkable, spine-tingling black musical shadow from deep within her desolate junkie soul.
In case it passed you by, last November Universal Music Group put out an expanded 2 CD edition of The End and it sounds a lot better than the old CD does (comparing the two, it sounds like the earlier “budget” disc that Island put out in 1994 wasn’t even mastered for CD). I’ve gotten massively into this album over the past few months, playing it from start to finish on headphones in the darkness (the way it was obviously meant to heard) dozens of times.
Produced and arranged by John Cale and featuring Brian Eno (doing some astonishing things on his VCS3 synthesizer) and Phil Mananzera, The End is clearly not for everybody—or even most, or even many, people when you get right down to it—but to my ears, the new deluxe set, with outtakes, OGWT performances (audio only), Peel sessions and her controversial take on “Das Lied Der Deutschen” from the June 1st, 1974 concert (If Jimi Hendrix could play “The Star Spangled Banner,” why couldn’t Nico perform the German national anthem?) makes for one of the most satisfying releases of the past 12 months.
Below, Dangerous Minds pal Danny Fields tells the “meet cute” story of how he introduced Nico and the Lizard King at The Castle in Los Angeles.
