NACHT MALERIE

A long walk home after a movie, spooky nocturnal settings and a bike light.

NIGHT GALLERY

Unseasonably warm weather came through last weekend, the evenings were sultry, with a thick haze hanging in the air. I took a walk after midnight.

ANDY WARHOL, ROBERT FORSTER,
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, ETC.

Last Friday evening we went down to the Warhol Museum for an intimate evening of music. The gallery was open late so we had around an hour to take in some of the work of Andy and other featured artists. Andy is always inspiring, not just for the volumes of ideas he brought forth, but also for the seemingly endless energy he dedicated whatever he was creating, even if he was taking amphetamine to stay up all night doing it. His early illustrative commercial work in NYC has inspired countless contemporaries, which is just another reminded it’s truly impossible to do anything original with scores of other artists who carved out the path decades and decades earlier.

With Grant McLennan’s death a few years ago, I would have never thought I’d get the chance to see Robert Forster perform again, the last time in Seattle with the two of them together, a few months before Grant passed. Much has been said of Forster’s difficulty in losing his musical soul mate and reticence to perform Go-Betweens material. He has a new solo album out, The Evangelist, much of it dedicated to the emotions he’d been going through since, and couple of previously unrecorded tracks he co-wrote with Grant. It’s gentle, understated, thoughtful, a beautiful tribute. He played a few of these cuts at the end of the show along with a couple of Go Betweens songs, nothing Grant would have done vocals on for obvious reasons.

The first hour was a charming, if not rough-around-the edges-series of covers to The Velvet Underground, complete with a rather silly rear-projected film by Andy Warhol of VU members milling around The Factory circa 1960-something. Forster, the ever-refined and debonair rocker, along his band featuring long-time bassist Adele Pickford, were a little wobbly at first but pulled it together about halfway into things, just barely drowning out some trio of asshats off to the side who wouldn’t stop talking through most of the set.

After the show Cara and I chatted up their young Aussie drummer who was excited about going to NYC, but lamented all the driving they were doing in the meantime. It was an inexpensive, intimate (120 person seating limit), somewhat magical evening, the sort of thing that’s made Pittsburgh a perfect place to reside.