Reviewed by Paul J Zickler
Released: October 1981 Willie Alexander (AKA Willie Loco Alexander) Solo Loco Genre: Sloppy Noise Rock Rating: 2 out of 5 Highlights: Gin Willie “Loco” Alexander was 38 years old in 1981 when this record came out. He played with a bunch of bands starting in the late ‘60’s, took Lou Reed’s spot in the Velvet Underground for a very brief spell in 1971, started a Boston version of the Ramones (Boom Boom Band) that toured the US as an opener for Elvis Costello, and, after all that crashed and burned, worked as a dishwasher. He got together with some musicians he knew and made this album, which did a little business in France. Later he started doing mostly spoken word pieces and playing avant garde jazz. He’s 80 and still rocking, at least according to his website. Whether you like Willie “Loco” Alexander or not kinda depends on how you feel about Lou Reed. There’s a lot of noise-for-noise-sake, quite a bit of macho-yet-sensitive posturing, some look-how-poetic-I-am lyrics, a bit of in-studio-off-the-cuff jamming, and precious few musically memorable moments. Willie plays piano, talks, recites, whistles, breathes, whines, sings, and generally makes a mess in what’s apparently supposed to be a charmingly tuff persona. It’s not really doing it for me. I fall into the meh camp when it comes to Lou Reed. I love some of his Velvets stuff and a few of his solo songs, but I don’t listen to much else, nor do I want to. If there were any real highlights here, I might be more inclined to like Willie Alexander, but this just feels like a bunch of tossed off half-ideas. Even the covers (Be-Bop-a-Lula, Tennessee Waltz) are terrible, although I will admit that when Willie stops singing and lets guitarist Ted St. Pierre start committing audio mayhem, things get more interesting. The lone highlight, Gin, uses wobbly pink noise and background synthesizer to fill in the gaps, giving Alexander a bigger base for his rambling vocals, creating something that feels like it was at least discussed for a few minutes before being recorded. It was released as a 7” single, so somebody else must have liked it. I think the B-side was So Tight, which has a similar feel, but overstays its welcome by several minutes of repetition and muttering. If you're a fan of demo-quality jam sessions by musicians you’ve never heard of, you might enjoy those last 17 times he goes “woo!” but I did not. Another potential highlight, if you like bands like The Fall, might be Take Me Away, a jerky, discordant mess of sound that ends with some moaning over stray piano chords and a drunken conversation. It’s the kind of thing I’d consider excusing as a lark if it was on the same album as Perfect Day or I Love You Suzanne, instead of Gin and So Tight. The only place the album exists online is in a YouTube playlist where the songs are completely out of order, and when you try to listen to them in the correct order, you have to skip two ads every time you switch songs. I hate YouTube ads more than almost anything I can think of, so that may have soured me on this album. Or maybe it’s just not very good.
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