_**Prairiewolf - East Coast Tour 2025**_ I can hardly believe it, but a week from today, Prairiewolf is headed out to the east coast for a very brief tour! We’ll be playing three shows with our Sloppy Heads pals in Brooklyn, Kingston and Philadelphia. If you’re anywhere near these locales, I encourage you to come out and say hello — lord only knows when we’ll do something like this ever again! _**Mama Tried (Aug. 14):**__****_ This one is part of the Sloppy Happenings residency that the Heads have been putting on for a couple years now. Previous bills in 2025 have included Peter Stampfel, Kid Millions & Sarah Bernstein, Jennifer O'Connor & James McNew and Antietam. Heady company indeed! And it’s FREE. _**Tubby’s (Aug. 15):**__****_ This one is part of a groovy Raven Sings the Blues-presented weekend upstate — and we’re sharing the bill with Wet Tuna! Matt Valentine’s super-freaky project has been a longtime fave of mine, so this is an honor indeed. I’ve also been repeatedly told that Tubby’s is the coolest club in the country, so I’m looking forward to experiencing it in person. _**Jerry’s On Front (Aug. 16):**__****_ Then, it’s on to the City of Brotherly Love, where we’re playing Chris Forsyth’s joint in the Kensington neighborhood. Both Prairiewolf and Sloppy Heads will no doubt be fully road-grizzled at that point … maybe we’ll just join forces and play Sun Ra covers all night? And that’s it! I’m sure it’ll be fun. For a little preview of where we’re at currently, check out a recent ‘wolf bootleg from an outdoor Shakedown situation in Boulder, featuring some very jammed-out jams. Here’s what Aquarium Drunkard’s Brent Sirota had to say about the tape: “Prairiewolf treated the crowd at Upslope to a sprawling two hours of their hippie trail-meets-autobahn brand of mechanized psychedelia. And from the pristine-sounding recording Erwin made, it sounds like a hell of a time. The Korg drum machine was bumping; the bass was creeping; the keys were vamping; and the guitar was blowing all kinds of bubbles into the atmosphere. It is terrific hearing album tracks get unspooled into improvisational odysseys, even as the band never loses its low-key cool.” And for those of you in Colorado, Prairiewolf has some very cool gigs coming up as summer turns to autumn, including shows with heavy hitters like Luke Schneider, Rose City Band and Bitchin Bajas. Stay tuned.

See Hear sign, 7th Street (2002) | photo by Mike Macioce See Hear music magazines and books, also known as See Hear Fanzines, was an underground subculture emporium located in the East Village, fir…

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_**The Velvet Underground - La Cave, Cleveland, Ohio, April 28, 1968**_ Happy Sweet Sister Ray Day! This high holy day for Velvet Underground fanatics is always worth celebrating. But today, on the 57th anniversary, it’s especially worth celebrating because Mr. Charlie has unearthed an “extraordinary, previously uncirculated low generation source tape” of this legendary Jamie Klimek recording, which has been bootlegged in inferior quality for decades now. We’re still talking about an audience tape from 1968, of course, but I’m going to agree that “extraordinary” is the right word to use — there’s a new clarity and crispness here that blows away any previous version I’ve heard. And that is great news, because “Sweet Sister Ray” is one of my favorite things in the world. Thank you, Mr. Charlie! And thank you to the late/great Jamie Klimek for bringing his gear to La Cave all those years ago and capturing this unbelievable performance. In case you need a deeper dive, you can read my long essay “The Velvet Underground’s Elusive ‘Sweet Sister Ray’” after the jump … Recorded at a tiny subterranean Cleveland, OH club called La Cave in late April of 1968, “Sweet Sister Ray” isn’t exactly a song, per se. It’s a close-to-40-minute jam, a languid, endless boogie. The audience tape we can listen to all these years later is murky, but that feels appropriate. “Sweet Sister Ray” is nothing if not a murky experience. The journey kicks off with the band (most likely just Cale, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison; drummer Maureen Tucker isn’t audible here) chugging steadily, slowly over a spare, spidery riff. It’s easygoing, like they have no particular place to go, though there’s an underlying tension and menace. Reed’s guitar spirals off into a more abstract direction for a bit, almost reminiscent of Roger McGuinn’s flights of fancy on “Eight Miles High.” You lean in. What exactly is going on? Is the band just warming up? Is there even anyone (aside from the taper) in the club? Through the murk, a decidedly surreal atmosphere develops. The music continues at a morphine-drip pace, drifting and droning, with Morrison playing a nervier counterpoint to Reed’s laconic fretwork, Cale rattling around in the background. At some point around the half-hour mark, Cale switches over to keyboards, lending the proceedings a curiously magisterial feel, as Reed begins coaxing beautiful, simmering feedback from his amp. It’s as if some new genre of music is being invented on the spot. Extended live improvisations were, of course, nothing new to the VU. The aforementioned Columbus, OH show in 1966 features two marathon performances, “Melody Laughter” and “The Nothing Song,” that showcase the band’s most adventurous, avant-garde leanings. But those pieces were created to complement the extravagant multimedia overload of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with dancers, lights and films adding to the experience. La Cave might’ve had a light show, but it was undoubtedly low-tech. On this particular night in Cleveland, it was just the Velvet Underground, the small audience and “Sweet Sister Ray.” We haven’t even mentioned that throughout the song, Reed has been stepping up to the mic from time to time to sing a few verses. The lyrics may be off-the-cuff (Reed was known for his ability to generate lyrics at will), but they’re not indecipherable. In fact, they might even tell a fairly cohesive story, a veritable prequel to the actual “Sister Ray,” as our titular protagonist watches a movie — “the weirdest movie I’ve seen in my days.” Reed goes on to sing about a topic he was intimately familiar with: electroshock therapy. “All the vaseline on your forehead / makes you feel so nice,” he deadpans. “My hair stood on end / and I thought I’d been frozen with a knife.” It’s a thinly veiled slice of autobiography — Reed was subjected to electroshock as a teenager to curb his homosexual tendencies — where you’d least expect it. And the final lyrics feel even more hauntingly personal, if still oblique: “Just then I saw a hole in the ground / and I jumped right in ‘cause there was no one around.” Down the rabbit hole young Lou eagerly goes, to rock and roll, to Warhol, to the dangerous and thrilling dreamscapes of “Sister Ray” itself. Which is right where the rest of the Velvets join him back in Cleveland, as Moe Tucker finally ambles onstage and beings thumping out that unmistakable beat and they segue into what was likely an even wilder excursion. Alas, it’s at this point that the tape fades out … So where did “Sweet Sister Ray” go after La Cave? There’s some indication that it was further refined and developed into “Sweet Rock And Roll,” a mythical lost VU number from the summer of ‘68. Lou’s old sparring partner Lester Bangs is mostly responsible for the legend, calling the performance he witnessed in San Diego, CA “the most incredible musical experiences” of his life. “It was built on the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling mournfully, somewhat like ‘Venus In Furs’ but less creaky, more deliberate and eloquent.” Bangs even quotes some of the lyrics, which fall into line with what Reed was singing a few months earlier in Cleveland: “Sweet Sister Ray went to a movie / The floor was painted red and the walls were green / ‘Ooooh,’ she cried / ‘This is the strangest movie I’ve ever seen.’” Will we ever hear “Sweet Rock And Roll”? Probably not. But Sterling Morrison claimed that a tape of the show Bangs wrote about was made, but quickly added that it was “stolen that very night. Stolen within seconds, actually. As soon as it ended, it vanished, never to reappear on this earth.”

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