Laurie Anderson was a performance artist and musician with a following among New York’s boho art scene for years before she became suddenly famous in 1981, when star British DJ John Peel championed her single “O Superman.” He propelled it to No. 2 on the UK charts, and her resulting LP “Big Science” did the rest. She went on to become the most widely known avant garde musician in the country and the wife of Lou Reed.
Her most cited work from her early days, “Duets on Ice,” involved Anderson strapping on ice skates embedded in a block of ice and playing the violin until the ice melted. She also invented a violin that uses magnetic recording tape instead of horsehair in the bow, with a pickup in the bridge to amplify the screeching. That sort of thing.
Though she started as a visual artist, she began incorporating musical elements into her work by the mid-’70s. This tune was recorded as a single for a late-’70s gallery installation that consisted of a jukebox with several Anderson songs. It’s dedicated to Chris Burden, a New York performance artist most famous for his 1971 piece “Shoot,” in which he had a man shoot him in the left shoulder with a .22 from 15 feet away. Burden, for his part, said his piece was prompted by the “televisual motif of getting shot in America, whether real or faked, without knowing how it actually felt.”
