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Video description:
Jonas Mekas, the influential filmmaker and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives and the New York Film-Makers' Cooperative, talks to director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart (1998) about his 1960s loft space in New York where Andy Warhol learned about experimental filmmaking. Mekas recalls tying Warhol to his seat during a six-hour screening of Sleep, and describes the
Reed was always at the forefront of American avant-garde music, beginning with creation of the Velvet Underground in 1965. Gritty and realistic, the brutal honesty in Reed’s lyrics and sound made him a cultural icon of the disenfranchised throughout the ’60s and ’70s. From punk rock to grunge, he has had an unparalleled influence on the American music scene.
Bebop, a style of jazz developed in the 1940's, changed American music but wasn't taken seriously for much of Charlie Parker's life. This mid-century popcorn television commercial shows how the public's perception of bebop was riddled with stereotypes.
Charlie Parker's nickname "Yardbird" came to be while he was on the way to a gig with some fellow musicians and involved a bird in a yard that had an unfortunate fate.