This article caught my eye on RollingStone.com today:

Fans who’d eagerly bought Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music when it came out in 1975 soon returned to their music stores in droves, demanding refunds and complaining that the record was broken. MMM is Reed’s most controversial record, the black sheep in his catalog: a 64-minute double album that consists almost entirely of jarring, swelling guitar feedback. Was it a joke? Was he serious? The argument endures among music fans to this day, but regardless of his motives, the album has a secure place in rock history as one of the most unlistenable records of all time.

Did you know that super-melodic jazz guitarist Pat Metheny did the same thing? The album was called Zero Tolerance for Silence and was released in 1994. Most fans hated it (me included, it was unlistenable) and some even tried to pressure him to disown it, which he never did. When I heard it, I figured Pat released it to piss off his record company Geffen, who quietly discontinued it after a couple of years. But, Pat, not surprisingly, has stated otherwise:

That rumor was started by a journalist who was seriously not listening to the album. All it would have taken was a quick phone call [to me] to find out that that wasn’t the case. Besides, I would never do something like that. It isn’t the way I operate, which I think has been pretty self-evident over the years. That record speaks for itself in its own musical terms. To me, it is a 2-D view of a world in which I am usually functioning in a more 3-D way. It is entirely flat music, and that was exactly what it was intended to be. [via Wikipedia.org]

Hmm, you’d think that if Pat felt so strongly about it, he would have put the screws to someone to keep selling it. Currently, the only place I could find it on CD (I had a tape) was the mishmash of used CD sellers on Amazon, of course.

If anyone out there owns it, can you send me a clip?