Pickwick Records

He had that, he had that bizarre instrumental, didn't he? Uh, we, uh, I forget the name.

No, he wrote, um, he wrote for Pickwick Records.

Right.

And that stuff has all been collected, and he was an expert at ripping off, as he freely admitted, surf songs-

Can I just interrupt? Was Lou Reed at this point writing songs as well? I've got a feeling he was in sort of the same sort of bracket as those people, what's it called?

Yeah, he moved to New York in 1964 and he got a job at, excuse me, got a job at Pickwick Records as an in-house songwriter.

I'll come back to that a bit later.

Anyway, then you've got John Cale.

I mean, what a crazy song.

It's my life and it's my wife, Kicker.

don't try it at home but like quite a few songs on this album this one was written by Lou Reed when he was at Pickwick Records and they'd employed him with the aim of churning out cheaply recorded soundalike songs to cash in on current pop trends like surf music and this is from a 1972 interview Lou Reed says I was working for a record company as a songwriter they'd lock me in a room and they'd say write ten surfing songs you know and I wrote Heroin And then I said, hey, I've got something for you.

And they said, never going to happen.

Oh, is

that the Pickwick Records one? Yeah.

No, that's the one I'm so free

when he was the Pickwick stuff was when he was writing for Brill Street, like, you know, pop groups.

Okay, the All Night Workers from 1965 with Why Don't You Smile Now.

Now, this is a song written by Lou Reed and John Cale, apparently also with Jerry Vance and Terry Phillips, who were kind of the guys that ran Pickwick Records.

I'm not sure if they had any hand in writing it, or if just the fact that they were the bigwigs at the small record company meant that they just put their names on it as well, because I don't think you need four songwriters for this song.

But the All Night Workers are... a band from Syracuse, New York, which is where Lou Reed was from.

So these are the Louie Louie chords, A to D to E minor chord.

it's an a louis louis uh to e minor and then back to d so that it's uh that it's got that minor chord in there then you're like yeah that's the louis louis chord so this one really is

yeah a louis louis like and then the question is is it there because i mean when he is on the uh he's a songwriter for pickwick records I guess I was reading somewhere, because I think I was looking at those compilations and trying to find the liner notes for them on Discogs, which sometimes you can blow up and read.

And I think I saw on one that, or wherever I read it, is Pickwick's would say, okay, we want 10 California songs.