Dave's Song of the Day
The Ostrich – The Primitives
Monday song of the day: Today’s song was a silly little dance song, but it led to the formation of the Velvet Underground.
In the early 1960s, young Lou Reed was working as a staff songwriter for Pickwick City Records, a label that specialized in low budget compilations and sound-alike records. If there was a popular trend, Pickwick would try to cash in by releasing records that, while original compositions, tried to capture the feel of whatever happened to be hot in mainstream music.
One of the trends Pickwick tried to emulate was the dance craze record, such as the Twist, the Mashed Potato, the Loco-Motion, etc. So, they had Reed write a song about a dance, and he came up with
The Ostrich. It was more a joke about a fake dance than a real attempt to create a dance craze. The dance itself was pretty silly, with instructions in the lyrics on how to dance
The Ostrich including “Hey, take this forward and stand on your head” and “Hey, put your hands up, upside your knees.” The song was recorded by The Primitives, which were actually Lou Reed and some studio musicians.
The record was released in 1964, and was far from a hit, but it did get enough local popularity in the New York area that Pickwick decided to put together a band to support the record with some live shows. To create a real band to be The Primitives, a Pickwick executive recruited a few people he saw at a party to join Lou Reed. One of these was John Cale, a Welsh musician with a penchant for experimental music.
As Cale tells it, “Tony Conrad, Walter de Maria and I were picked up one night at a party because we had long hair, and they told us, ‘You look commercial. We think you’d make a great band, why don’t you come out and visit us.’ Okay, so we go out to Pickwick Records on Long Island City, go into the back room of this plant that manufactures LPs of second-rate orchestras playing concertos. The back room had one Ampex two-track tape recorder. There were three guys milling around. One of these guys was Lou, who looked suitably funky, and two other guys, they were into trying anything. They played me this thing that they recorded on their two-track.”
One of the things that Cale liked about Reed was the guitar sound he used in
The Ostrich. Instead of the regular tuning where each string is set to a different note, Reed had tuned all six strings to the note D, which created a droning sound as he played. Cale had been experimenting with droning in some of his compositions, so the two hit it off. After a few shows as The Primitives, Reed and Cale, along with Sterling Morrison and Angus MacLise formed The Velvet Undergound later that year. Several months later, MacLise was replaced by Maureen Tucker. And the rest is history.
The guitar technique of all strings tuned to D was used in a few Velvet Underground songs, including
Venus in Furs and
All Tomorrow’s Parties from their 1967 debut album
The Velvet Underground and Nico. Due to its origin, it is now known as the Ostrich tuning.
View: https://youtu.be/5r998weOUiM
Tomorrow: There is no denial
