I first became aware of Lou Reed when I was 13 or so, the year I finally dipped into FM rock radio after a childhood of scratchy 45s; my first 2 dozen LPs by the likes of The Beatles, The Band, Joe Cocker, and Traffic; AM radio; and the latest TSOP album-length cuts hot off Philadelphia’s FM soul station, WDAS. Rock radio on the FM dial in 1976 wasn’t all the cool, older kids at my school made it out to be. I got to hear cuts from Who’s Next for the first time and more Mick Taylor-era Stones than I’d ever heard before on AM radio—and there Beatles A to Z weekends galore—but I had to wait through a bunch of stoopid blooz-rock that typically bored me once songs ran past the 3-minute mark: Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers…not to mention the often perplexing genre known as progressive rock. Jethro Tull slotted in between all these uncomfortable sounds. Worse yet, FM rock in Philadelphia circa 1976 featured way more Jackson Browne and Eagles than I could stomach. Often I figured, The hell with trying to impress the cool kids! and flipped back to the comforting AM sounds of The Spinners and Elton John.
One long guitar-driven song that occasionally hit the airwaves on WMMR and WIOQ at that time was the Rock ‘n Roll Animal version of “Sweet Jane.” I already knew and loved “Walk on the Wild Side,” which somehow got played on AM radio when I was a preteen, but Lou Reed was just a name back then. The live version of “Sweet Jane,” with its swirling, fuzzed-out guitar intro followed by Reed’s strange, talk-sung, hectoring vocals and fatalistic lyrics always made me reach for the dial, the VOLUME dial. I cranked it up and marveled at the crunch Reed and his band produced. While the cool kids were slobbering over the quintuple-guitar solos of bands playing California Jam, I wanted to know more about the racket that this Lou Reed character was making. “Sweet Jane” (the live version), long intro solo and all, was the kind of song worth sticking out a friggin’ Foreigner song in hopes of hearing. The hairs stood up on my neck every time Reed sang, “Some people like to go out dancing/There’s other people like us, we gotta work.” This was the language I heard from my hard-working Mom after another long day’s work. This was way more true to the language in my home than songs about rockin’ and rollin’ all night, as was that “life is just to die” line that caps off “Sweet Jane.” Many a Saturday and Sunday morning in my house growing up was centered around such certain thoughts, as my Mom struggled to get out of bed and face another lonely day.
Not really the “best of,” but a boy’s got to start somewhere.
After a few months of waiting for “Sweet Jane” to play, I finally took matters into my own hands, buying the Rock ‘n Roll Animal album as well as a cheapo “best of” album. The “best of” album included “Walk on the Wild Side,” of course, as well as a bunch of songs that were really strange to my ears. “Satellite of Love” sounded familiar, like a David Bowie or Mott the Hoople song I would have already known, but some of the awkward songs stuck out, stuff like “How Do You Think It Feels,” which dealt with really personal, depressing stuff in a stilted musical arrangement. Like some of those lines from “Sweet Jane,” the mood of the song rang surprisingly true to the mood that sometimes pervaded my house. “Wild Child” was an easy release, like a cheap follow-up to “Walk on the Wild Side.” Some of the other songs were unlistenable for me then and now. From the beginning I would come to terms that Lou Reed had an amazing propensity to turn out absolute crap.
Rock ‘n Roll Animal was a nonstop assault of crunching guitars and hectoring vocals. I didn’t know what to make of it as a whole. Because of the subject matter of a really long song called “Heroin” I could only crank up the album and really get down with it when no one else was home. Although my Mom could wallow in the darkness with the best of them, she did not find the soundtrack of loud, depressing rock ‘n roll to be a salve. “How can you listen to that stuff,” she would say if she came down to the basement while I was lost in such an album, “It makes me want to kill myself!” One other song that would stand out for me on Rock ‘n Roll Animal, when I was a young teenager, was “Rock ‘n Roll.” The live version is by no means the definitive studio version (ORIGINAL VINYL VERSION, without the added measures of room mic’ed rhythm guitar that would appear on the VU box set!) I would discover freshman year in college, but my life was in the process of being saved by rock ‘n roll. I could identify.
Within a year or two of discovering Lou Reed, I got deep into rock ‘n roll, focusing on the hippie artists from my childhood I rediscovered through The Last Waltz, The Who (thanks to The Kids Are Alright documentary), and then punk rock. My 2 Lou Reed albums were picked over now and then for their handful of winning songs, but I didn’t enter college having earned the right to identify myself as a “big Lou Reed fan.” Sometime during freshman year I bought a double-album collection called Rock and Roll Diary: 1967–1980. This was the moment I became a big Lou Reed fan. By this point, 5 years past my young and innocent, straight-laced, idealistic, feather-haired freshman year in high school, I was a solid couple of months into a rapid transformation into a stoned, psychedelic punk rocker, albeit a psychedelic punk rocker incapable of reaching an even halfway formed sense of style. My second night on campus I got drunk (for the second time ever—first since 8th grade), I got high (first), and I met my first partner in crime, Karl, a similarly large, transforming former would-be jock who was too sensitive at heart to resist succumbing to the teachings of John Lennon et al and leaving the jocks in the dust.
I was high, man, the first time I dropped the needle on that Lou Reed collection. My dorm room was a triple. I was stuck with 2 super-straight guys from the midwest who months into freshman year had not been tempted in the least by the wild world of campus life. One was a quiet, friendly Christian guy who found plenty of activities and groups to keep him out of our room. The other was a quiet, judgmental guy who was as set as I was on establishing dominance of our oversized room. Maybe this guy wasn’t so judgmental with everyone as he was with me and my group of weirdo friends. Maybe we were open for judgment. He’d come back to the room, for instance, to find Karl and I getting high and blasting the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now (featuring dialog from key scenes) out the window to the unsuspecting ears of kids headed to their next class. All my roommate wanted to do was study and listen to his new J. Geils Band album, Freeze Frame. He played that album constantly. It tormented me the way Karl and I could only hope to have been tormenting other people with our guerrilla tactics.
I was high when I first dropped the needle on Rock and Roll Diary and heard The Velvet Underground bashing out “Waiting for the Man.” I never got high to get mellow. I never intended to get high to chill and listen to the Dead with headphones. I was getting high to get higher, to get a charge, and “Waiting for the Man” was the kind of music worth waking up and getting high for. I started listening to that album every day, when I was alone. Cranked up.
After the lead-off track the album sequenced “White Light/White Heat,” a mess of anxiety and ecstasy. It made the rawness of any punk album I’d been blasting prior to then, like the first Clash album, sound like Terry Jacks. The lead guitar, mixed way too high, in “I Heard Her Call My Name,” was the cri de coeur I’d been feeling throughout my rage-filled life, from the kindergarten days of throwing desks at kids through sudden episodes of throwing haymakers at the slightest perceived insult through a constant undercurrent of shame through simply being up to here with the adults in my family too often being so shitty to each other during hard times. As I had my life-affirming, anger-can-be-power moment with that song, the Velvets brought things into a sad, accepting perspective with “Pale Blue Eyes.” And these songs all sounded simple enough for me, a still-clumsy guitarist, to figure out and play along to.
Side 2 turned me onto the original studio versions of “Rock ‘n Roll” and “Sweet Jane.” Oh my god, these recordings were mind-blowing. How did I live 18 years in a major US city and never hear these records? Why weren’t these songs the fucking “Stairway to Heaven” and “Freebird” of my generation? Unbelievable. Then there was the studio version of “Heroin,” which I’d crank up in the occasional privacy of my dorm room and let carry me through previously unarticulated feelings that not even The Who could explain.
Then the collection got into tracks from Berlin, which I would buy in the coming months along with every other VU and Lou Reed album I could find in Chicago record stores. Berlin came in really handy sophomore year, when my first girlfriend, in a romance cultured long distance over the summer between freshman and sophomore years, suddenly broke up with me and dredged up the worst feelings I thought I was growing past, feelings of inexplicable abandonment after my parents got divorced and my Dad just as definitively divorced himself from being a father to me and my brother. “I’m gonna stop wasting my time,” went the previously unarticulated chorus from “Sad Song” that I would listen to through life-affirming tears, “Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.” Who you gonna call when you need a lyric like that to work through some really horrible thoughts? No one else but Lou Reed.
The legacy of Lou Reed starts and will surely end with constant references to his ground-breaking perspectives on the seedy side of big city life: the inglorious side of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Reed’s legacy is well earned, but personally, I was always a “nice” kid deep down. I wanted no business with needles, transexuals, that Andy Warhol scene…the stuff codified by many rock critics as being alluring meant nothing to me. I liked getting high, man, because I liked getting high and doing my thing. I had no interest in winning the approval of Andy Fucking Warhol or Edie Sedgwick or whatever Factory types a future Reed biopic will focus on. Lou came off like a prick in just about any interview I ever read. I never wanted to hang with Lou or be like Lou, as I did with many of my other rock heroes, but I with thrilled to have his bad attitude yet tender rock ‘n roll heart there for me when I needed it. I felt like understood where he was coming from, through all the bullshit, and I can’t tell you how many times I was thrilled to feel that he validated antisocial stuff that I was feeling. I sense some Bowie fans feel this way about their hero. Lou Reed was my misfit, alien saint.
My scholastic career crashed for some time following a really painful, wasted sophomore year. I committed to another path, what would be a beautiful “it’s the journey, not the destination” path of trying to be a professional musician. Deep down I still felt like shit on many levels, but I was getting high and making music with my friends with a purpose.The Velvet Underground albums were a template for almost any underground musician. We all got into the VU in the early ’80s, “we” being the new cool kids, the kids who were too cool to have wasted time getting into the myth of the Lizard King, Mr. Mojo Risin’, after reading 1980’s Jim Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. The underground musician friends we were making had all rallied around those VU albums. Privately, I felt a little sad, as I did earlier today, reading all the tributes to Lou, that Lou and the Velvets were no longer just “my” thing, to be enjoyed in the privacy of my own room and the depths of my own mood dives. But it was cool to be a part of something. I’m not sure that punk rock ever really happened for me in the US as I fantasized it would happen for me the way it may have happened for outcasts in New York City in the mid-’70s or the English punks in 1977. I never celebrated the rise of American hardcore punk. The punk rock boat I wanted to board had long left the dock, but the rediscovery of bands like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges and Captain Beefheart and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd by music fans of my generation may have been our little taste of a cultural cruise.
In 1982, Reed released The Blue Mask, a stripped-down, twin-guitar, VU-style celebration of…The Straight Life! Reed sang of getting sober and deciding that he loved women, after all. A very strange turn, but he was the same brutal, hectoring, confrontational, and even sometimes corny guy. His new guitar partner, Robert Quine, was out of this world. My friends and I listened to that album and watched the A Night With Lou Reed video religiously. We were getting really high while listening to and watching this stuff. Reed could be both liberating and laughable. There was a particular guitar face Reed made during the live performance of “Kill Your Sons,” I believe, that we spent what seemed like 2 hours trying to freeze just so, for in-depth analysis and hilarity. It was hard, mind you, to find just that frame and get it to show somewhat clearly on a VHS in 1983. Then we’d resume watching the concert and passionately air-strum along to the rhythm guitar in “Rock ‘n Roll” with the fellow dork in the audience at the Bottom Line.
I got wasted to the accompaniment of The Blue Mask probably 100 times over the next couple of years. All the while the message of getting straight slowly sunk in. I have no idea if Reed stayed sober through the years, but I’ve been sticking to it a day at a time for a long time. It was the right move for me. The feelings Reed tapped into, the feelings I tapped into when first getting turned onto Reed’s music, haven’t really changed. I cranked up “I Heard Her Call My Name” today and still felt that life-affirming sense of lashing out at the entire world for all it did to me. Big fucking baby style. No time for reflection and clear-headedness. I listened to the third album and got chills, as I always do, during the solo in “I’m Set Free.” I’ll make time this week to listen to Berlin and, while Lou sings the chorus to “Sad Song,” think about the pain a couple of people I loved caused me. I’ll listen to “Men of Good Fortune” and relive the shameful class hang ups I suspect I will never shake. I’ll listen to the Take No Prisoners version of “Coney Island Baby” and think about how deeply I still relate to Lou’s preamble about wanting to play for the coach. “Street Hassle” will load on my iPod and I’ll think about how perfectly that song tied up the ending of The Squid and the Whale, a film that speaks deeply to many of my teenage experiences.
I’ve been working at writing a book about my own experiences being saved by rock ‘n roll. We’ll see what comes of it. If it’s only for my own edification that’s cool. One of Lou’s lyrics is my working title. Although I’m a “big Lou Reed fan,” I have my limits. I disliked most of his work after that third album with Quine. I never saw him live, having missed out on opportunities to see him with Quine. I don’t even like that New York album that everyone got excited about. It sounded phony and forced to me. No matter, the guy had long earned his spot in the real rock ‘n roll hall of fame, the one that we know artists qualify for as certainly as Supreme Court justices know pornography when they see it. I’m not going to claim to be among the top 1,000,000 Lou Reed fans, but the guy turned out a body of work that spoke to feelings few approached before or since.
Standing-O for that, Mod. Tough thing to see first thing this morning on the front page: Lou Reed, 1942-2013. The Lou love/hate thing is big around here, obviously, and it mirrors my own feelings. I could never warm up to a lot of his solo material, even the records I like–if that isn’t self-contradictory. I suppose it is, but I think a lot of his work is self-contradictory. Sometimes in a great way, sometimes not. But, geez: the guy gave me a lot. I’ll always take the melodic Lou of the 3rd Velvet Underground lp and VU and Loaded. I’m Beginning to See the Light, I’m Set Free, What Goes On, I Can’t Stand It, Foggy Notion, the amazing live version of Guess I’m Falling in Love on the box set, and God almighty, above all, Rock and Roll (as it was meant to me heard, sans middle eight). Just that handful alone is a lot to me, and obviously there is so much more. I wasn’t into the whole smack and transvestites thing either, but does that diminish the power of Heroin or the pathos of Candy Says (with a nod to Doug Yule’s singing)? It does not. Will I ever forget listening to Sister Ray for the first time? I will not.
A lot of how I feel about Lou Reed is summed up in his performance at the mostly woebegone Dylan 30th anniversary concert, aka the Bobfest, where Lou takes on the great Infidels reject Foot of Pride. Where most performers were settling for greatest hits, Lou plucked a gem out of obscurity. Mostly, it’s a disaster, to tell you the truth. But it made me happy that Lou had the insight to see what a great song it is and the guts to try to put it across.
Anyway, no matter how you look at it, he was friggin’ Lou Reed. The one and only.
I always appreciated Lou, occasionally loved him, mostly was confused by what he was trying to accomplish. So many left turns, strange mistakes, bad hair and clothes, and just questionable direction put me off. When he was good he was good-great, but I guess I needed someone to lead me through the wreckage (the kick-ass Lou Reed Mixtape?) I owned New York (really liked this one), Magic & Loss and Drella (didn’t like) that I picked up used in college. I don’t still have any of them so I guess they funded a 6-pack at some point. I always liked “I Love You Suzanne” and the cool scooter ad.
I listen to “Ron & Fez” every day on XM and they close the show with “Satellite Of Love” so I have heard that song 1000+ times on the radio in the last 5 years (with “and that’s the end of our show… DONK!.. Up next is Opie and Anthony” as part of the song to me)
Bowie at the end of Satellite Of Love and the background vocal that sounds like Kenny Loggins on Walk on the Wild side are his two best musical moments to me, and neither are him.
Covers of Lou’s music meant way more to me. Cowboy Junkies, U2, Georgia Satellites, Blondie, Duran Duran (I really liked their “Perfect Day”) and I love most bands that cite Lou as an influence.
So I guess I will not be speaking at the funeral?
Wonderful stuff, Mr. Mod.
RTH was on my mind a lot yesterday, as I listened to a lot of VU and solo Lou. In many ways, he is as key a member of the RTH gestalt as Costello or the Beatles. And, of course, many of the recurring jokes and performance-art pieces of this site revolve around Lou as his music was meant to sound.
Like Mr. Mod, I established my little corner of Lou in college. For me, this was the mid-’90s. The Peel Slowly and See boxed set came out my freshman year, and it quickly became a soundtrack for me that year. That box has it’s flaws, but I still think it’s a great way to get virtually everything of note by VU in one place.
I’ll freely admit: I don’t totally get Lou’s solo career. Sure, I love “Satellite of Love,” “Street Hassle,” “Waves of Fear” and others. But — and I’ve said it here many times in so many words — the mullets, the headless guitars, the decision sometime in the ’80s to give every song that same one-note melody — it’s not exactly to my taste.
But Lou probably saved my music taste from disappearing up my own asshole in some sort of XTC/Jellyfish prock clusterfuck I owe my love of droning, feedbacking guitars — i.e. The Dream Syndicate, Eleventh Dream Day, Sonic Youth and Wussy — to Lou, along with Neil Young. I’ll always totally be in debt to him. even if just for his work with the Velvets. To this day, I’m amazed and impressed by how much emotional and musical terrain that group of so-called amateurs covered, and that’s totally down to Lou as much as anyone. RIP.
Lou brings back memories of college and the cutouts — we listened to Rock N Roll Animal and New Sensations constantly. Rock N Roll Animal is how live albums are meant to sound.
I had an extensive Lou Reed 70s solo collection thank to Wards 8-track cutout bin: Sally Can’t Dance, Coney Island Baby, Rock and Roll Heart — and my favorite — BERLIN! RCA/Arista let Lou crank them out and see what stuck. It was like they thought he was album away from selling like Bowie. All that stuff ended up en masse in the discount rack.
I found VU through other artists. It was probably R.E.M.’s cover of Pale Blue Eyes that got me interested.
Lou was kind of scary, kind of cool, and didn’t seem to give a crap what anyone else thought, which is how I like my rock stars. RIP.
I definitely have to give RTH credit for helping me come to terms with Reed, the last of the certified Rock titans who I always had trouble getting/embracing. Like Mod, I don’t want to paint myself as a mega-fan or anything like that, but the discussions of Reed here – both serious and the always funny “…as he was meant to sound” series – got me to really go back and listen and appreciate The Blue Mask and Loaded in particular.
Aside from his own music, his influence looms large over a lot of music I love, and I will always have room artists who try different things and are willing to fail or just be plain weird because that’s what they’re driven to do, as well as creative people who are willing to embrace being outsized “characters”.
I was searching the RTH blog archives in hopes of finding something I thought I had once managed to do: take multiple screen captures of Reed’s soloing faces through “Kill Your Sons” or “Martial Law” in his A Night With Lou Reed performance and analyzed his progression of faces, as my friends and I did that legendary night in 1983 or so. I have not yet found that goldmine of work, if it exists here, but I did go back into the RTH Yahoo Groups listserv and come across this old post from January 2006:
After learning how to save screen captures, I did document that Robertson-Clapton showdown in these hallowed halls.
I’m seeing some good tales from old friends and will pass them along. Feel free to post your own scribblings or those of your ex-RTH music friends. This one centers on Lou’s groundbreaking work as a Tai Chi practitioner.
http://tuenight.com/2013/10/when-lou-reed-beat-me-up-in-tai-chi/
The “softer side” of Lou Reed?
Country singer Elizabeth Cook talks about Lou eating cereal:
“Lou Reed knew I’d covered Sunday Morning bc we had to clear the licensing. When he played The Ryman, we were politely invited. I waited in the VIP line after the epic show, to be ushered back for a brief hello. I was super nervous. As I was led into his dressing room just off the stage, he was already changed, wearing awesome pajamas and eating cereal. Like a rock n roll teenager. He stood up and set his cereal and down and walked up to me, put his hands on both my shoulders almost like he was going to shake me but then he softly said “I believe you are coming from an honest place.” I thought that was a great note to end on, so i said “Thank you Mr Reed” and booked it the hell out of there.”
http://blog.siriusxm.com/2013/10/28/elizabeth-cook-remembers-lou-reed/
Lou forgives an unknowing remark by Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner:
“It was my first time meeting [Lou], and I asked him a question about Sterling Morrison,” the guitarist in the Velvet Underground, Pirner recalled. “He looked at me real intensely and said, ‘You know he just died yesterday?’ I sort of just whimpered away. I felt like such an idiot.”
Twenty minutes later, though, Reed put Pirner at ease: “He came up and apologized, and went out of his way to make me feel better. I was really touched he’d do that, which was very different from the sort of curmudgeon reputation he had.”
When Reed took the stage with Minneapolis’ little-band-that-could — in front of 50,000-some fans plus a TV audience with HBO – he yelled out, “This is for Sterling Morrison.” And with that, they launched into a full-throttle version of “Sweet Jane”
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/blogs/Artcetera.html
Our old friend and face analyst Jeff reminded me of the amazing face solo that Reed pulls off in this performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=97WFt9IPCyQ
I don’t have anything critical or intelligent to contribute to summation of Lou’s career, influence. and his music. Like Mr Moderator, I feel the need to open up and talk about myself and how Lou and his music affected my life.
I may have mentioned before that my favourite concert of all time took place on April 1 1998. It was Lou Reed at the Fox Theater in Detroit. I was 17 with a life of concerts ahead of me. Yet ,I somehow knew as I walked out after the concert that no other show would ever top what I just witnessed.
Only a couple years earlier, I had heard Walk On The Wild somewhere for the first time. I was fortunate that my older brother let me dub his cassette copy of the aforementioned Rock and Roll Diary 1967-1980. I poured over that cassette hearing what seemed to be alien sounds of the late 60’s and 70’s. I had assumed that those times were dominated by Zep, Mac, and The Eagles. His music was different. I was discovering cool. Since we didn’t have cable TV, I would stay up to watch late night video shows hoping they would play some Lou Reed. I was rewarded a few times with clips of I Love You Suzanne and My Red Joystick. Certainly, it wasn’t Pale Blue Eyes or Sweet Jane, but it was something. And at the time, I couldn’t quite understand the “controversy” of Reed showing up in a Honda scooter commercial. What I did know was that this fucker was cool.
The album New York was a big welcome after the iffy Mistrial. There was a renewed steady confidence in his storytelling and songwriting. When I heard he was coming to town, my friend and I jumped at the chance to make sure we were witnesses.
The show got off to a shaky start though. Twice Lou came out to sing the first song and both times he was getting shocked by the microphone. He refused to come back out until the roadies fix the problem. Once they solved the issue he intimately worked through each song on the New York album and after an intermission he came out and played “classic VU” and a strong selection of his 70’s output. I managed to make my way to the side of the stage for Heroin during the encore. I was rewarded with Lou standing inches away grinding the arm of his guitar against the wall of amps next to where I was standing. It was more than a “moment” in my life.
I never much followed Lou’s music into the 90’s and further. I wanted that moment to stay with me. It has after all these years.
Thank you Lou Reed.
Which one of the 10,000 people who bought the first VU album and started a band could have ever thought that Lou would reach the stature where his death/obituary was on the front page of the Hartford Courant?
That says something about something but it will take somebody better than me to figure out what.
Good stuff, Mr. Mod. I hope you don’t have to write any more obits for awhile. I was pretty surprised to hear about Lou, but then I don’t think I’m a huge fan. I like a lot of what he did and I won’t deny his impact on a lot of bands I’m in love with, but I was pretty surprised to see how big his death was on the national stage. It’s not like he was a hit machine, and I’ll still bet more people talk about VU than have actually listened to them.
Some other cool Lou-related thing from the internet.
A remembrance by friend-of_RTH Lenny Kaye:
http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/lenny-kaye-remembers-lou-reed/?fref=300030&ecid=tafcb&tafisnid=3D87FEDC7DCC8FB3512E60AFE7962EDE
And a cool article about interviewing Lou by writer Neil Gaiman:
http://neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Interviews/Waiting_for_the_Man_-_Lou_Reed
Here’s a new addition to our Lou-story:
http://m.skybluewindow.org/indianapolis/the-weirdest-thing-lou-reed-ever-did/Content?oid=2180858&fb_action_ids=10201791984814278&fb_action_types=og.likes
A movie critic’s response:
Lou Reed, though a hipster, gave the rock underground a glow of beauty
By Owen Gleiberman
In 1972, a couple of years after the Velvet Underground imploded, Lou Reed, struggling to latch onto his identity as a solo artist, kicked off a period of rapid-fire image transformation roughly parallel to the more high-profile one that David Bowie was enacting. For three or four years, Reed tried on his outlaw personas like costumes from hell (Iggy-ish gutter hunk, kohl-eyed leather-bar rock & roll animal, cropped-blond ambisexual mannequin). It was his way of tapping into the liberating boundary-bashing of the post-’60s wasteland. During that period, Reed tried to live up to the ideal of being a “transformer” (the title of his second, and still arguably greatest, solo album), and those days etched an important dimension onto his legend. Yet they were totally the exception. For most of the nearly 50 years he spent as a rock star, Lou Reed had a persona — and a look — that was startlingly consistent. The image, like the man, never really got old. (Last year, I trailed after him for about a block on East Houston St., and he looked lean and mean, his face etched but still vigorous.) He was the ultimate icier-than-thou hipster, in shades and a black leather biker jacket, with a gaze of indifference — an appraising glint of street-cool contempt — that no one could match, because no one could rival the invincible tossed-off hostility of Lou Reed. He was a misfit, a rebel, a notorious a—hole, a former junkie, an East Village-gone-uptown aristo radical, a back-alley explorer, a transgressor, a poet, and — quintessentially — a punk.
Yet there’s one word, or phrase, that would sit awkwardly, at best, in the same sentence with Lou Reed, and that is pop star. When you think of Lou, the essential image of the man resists almost every connotation of the word pop. (That’s true even though he got his start with the king of pop, Andy Warhol.) He had exactly one song that became a bona fide pop single, and that is “Walk on the Wild Side,” and the supreme irony of its status as an annoyingly overplayed Top 40 chestnut is that the last reason on earth it probably appealed to most people were the lyrics, rooted in tales of the hustlers and drag queens who gathered around the Warhol Factory. “Walk on the Wild Side” was an incredible fluke because, if you can imagine it with different lyrics, it comes close to being an easy-listening ditty (albeit it “sung” by a guy who sounds more like the studio electrician than a lead singer). As for the other great Lou Reed crossover songs, the ones that everyone’s heard a million times in radio rotation — namely, “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll,” both from the last Velvet Underground studio album, Loaded, released in 1970 — they are unambiguously not pop songs. They are pure, vintage rock & roll, spoken-sung by Reed like the bully-beatnik Dylan of Long Island. They are songs that live in a black leather jacket.
And yet, precisely because Lou Reed was the godfather of alternative rock, because he had such a spiky and uncompromised aura that he carried with him to his dying day, the temptation to put up a wall between the concepts of “Lou Reed” and “pop” ends up missing, I would argue, the essence of his genius. I come at Reed’s career from an idiosyncratic angle, because even though I grew up in the ’70s and heard snatches of his solo records from time to time (most of which, frankly, bored me), I was late — insanely late — in discovering the Velvet Underground. I never really heard them until 1995, because I’d had an alienating experience in college in which my buddy, attempting to introduce me to the majesty of the Velvets, made the mistake of playing me their second album, White Light/White Heat (1968), which except for the title track I found — and still find — to be borderline unlistenable. I had also, over the years, heard “Heroin,” and it always struck me as an overly celebrated masterpiece — yes, it was its own kind of “great song” that dared to capture the experience of a heroin high in the very texture of the music, and if you were stoned yourself you could fall into its trance, yet it was almost like the prose-poem soundtrack of a performance-art piece, as conceptual as it was compelling. I just assumed, over the years, that the Velvets weren’t my cup of noise, and I never got around to them, even though I love, and own every recording by, dozens upon dozens of artists — everything from Television to R.E.M. to Patti Smith — who are thought of as part of the Velvets’ legacy.
So there I was in the Virgin Megastore in 1995, looking over a rack of CDs that were being hawked for half price to get rid of the stock, and I spied that famous Andy Warhol banana cover of the VU’s first album, and I thought: My God, after all these years, I have never even heard this. So I spent $7.95 and changed my life. I went home and put on the CD, and the first thing I heard was “Sunday Morning,” and instantly, I was transfixed, but it was the furthest thing in the world from what I’d been expecting, because the best way I can describe “Sunday Morning” is to say that it’s a very warped pop song. From the opening baby xylophone tinkle to the weird whooshy air tunnel of softly catchy chords to Reed’s disaffected croon (“Watch out, the world’s behind you,/There’s always someone around you who will ca-a-all,/It’s nothing at all…”), it sounded, somehow, like “My Girl” performed with a hangover of drug paranoia.
Here, really, is why I bother to bring up the embarrassing 20-years-too-late first flowering of my romance with the VU. It’s almost inevitable that when you read about the Velvet Underground, you hear about all the ways that they were revolutionary: the forbidden demimonde they cracked open, the universe of taboo subjects (heroin, S&M, toxic love, a kind of free-floating decadence) that they somehow tipped and stirred into the cauldron of the ’60s. They were, and always will be, rock & roll’s shock-of-the-new visionaries. And because they’re so famous for their influence, we tend to link them up will all the bands that came afterwards. Yet hearing the Velvets as I did, in an almost Rip Van Winkle out-of-time experience, years after their influence had been absorbed into the culture, I couldn’t really hear the radicalism of what they were doing. The Velvet Underground & Nico didn’t sound to my ears like the first “alternative rock” record. It sounded both older and newer, not to mention more classical. It was like listening to the downtown version of the Beatles.
Like a lot of people, I became not just hooked by the Velvets but possessed by them. I’d never bought into the sentiment, back in the punk/new wave era, that the Clash were “the only band that matters,” but hearing the Velvets so many years after they were around, I totally understood how someone in the late ’60s or early ’70s might believe that they were the only band that mattered. Because their music (created, of course, not just by Reed but by John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker) had a magical pull quite beyond its “transgressive” surface. And that pull, at least to me, is inseparable from the incandescence of pop. John Cale (who I sometimes love — especially his 1992 piano-man concert album Fragments of a Rainy Season) was the band’s avant ringleader, but Reed, who started off in the early ’60s writing pop jingles for hire, had pop in his DNA, and you can feel that glow and flow of melodic rapture in the fusion of their talents. “I’m Waiting for the Man,” the second song on the first album, was textbook proto-punk, but then came “Femme Fatale,” which, once again, set disquieting lyrics — in this case, about a sex tease who will “break your heart in two” — against music of wavery, off-kilter beauty; it’s as if the song was poised between the moment of falling for this girl and of waking up to the reality of what you’ve fallen for. “Venus in Furs,” the powerful dominatrix anthem, was the one track that sort of lived up to my image of the Velvets, its ominous beat and viola sawing evoking the looking-glass moment when sadomasochism becomes a person’s addictive muse. But then came the song that let me know that I would be a Velvet Underground devotee forever: “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” The lyrics were astonishing: the way its portrait of an Edie Sedgwick party girl as tattered Cinderella reached across the decades to evoke the New York handbag princesses who I now saw around everywhere. Yet what bowled me over, and always does, is the grandeur of the music. Alternative rock? This was a jangly symphony of glamour and despair.
Reed composed a number of other timeless pop songs: the lovely, lilting “Perfect Day” and the scathingly sublime “Satellite of Love” (originally written with the Velvets), as well as several of the tracks on Loaded, like the opener, “Who Loves the Sun” (another jaunty bauble on drugs), and also what is perhaps the most overlooked great song in the Velvets’ canon, the transportingly gorgeous “New Age.” I love a handful of Reed’s solo records (the sarcastic snarl of Street Hassle, the bumptious humanity — and awesome clean grunge sound — of New York), but his solo career stands in relation to the Velvet Underground as John Lennon’s stood in relation to the Beatles. Like Lennon, Reed was a brittle closet romantic who wore the armor of a witty scoundrel. The rock-crit establishment that treats Metal Machine Music, Reed’s infamous 1975 feedback stunt-album, as a serious work of art might deny it, but both solo careers exist — justifiably — in the earlier bands’ shadows.
To me, the greatest Velvet Underground album is their third, The Velvet Underground (1969), and what I think that album lays bare is the single, powerful emotion that underlies all of the Velvet Underground’s music, and that is faith. I don’t know if I would call “What Goes On” a pop song, but it’s one of those tracks that, while you’re listening to it, becomes the greatest rock & roll song ever recorded (and it may well be). That’s not just a beat driving the song forward, it’s a kind of life force, and that force extends to the double winding snake-charmer guitar solo and, finally, to the way the song drives on and on, like a bullet train, that spectacularly relentless chugga-chugga-chug-chug chugga-chugga-chug-chug rhythm guitar laid against pearly-pure pipe-organ notes that can only be called holy; that sound offers the redemption that the singer, lost in a broken relationship, is seeking. In the glorious context of this music, the quintessential Lou Reed phrase “all right” expresses the ultimate state of grace: to be…all right. To be there, in yourself, alive. That is rock & roll.
The lyrics on The Velvet Underground can oscillate between darkness and euphoria. Yet if you listen, right in a row, to tracks 5, 6, and 7, to the touching soft plaint of “Jesus” (a prayer for transcendence), then the liberating thrust of “Beginning to See the Light” (a fall from love, but just maybe the singer likes it), followed by the ecstatic slow wail of “I’m Set Free” (a song of almost divine liberation, even though he’s now simply free to “find a new illusion”), those three songs, in impact, comprise their own indie-punk stairway to heaven. They capture how the Lou Reed who sang of feeling like Jesus’ son at the tip of a heroin syringe looked for God in other places as well, and maybe even found Him.
Great stuff
That was good, but poor Doug Yule can’t get a mention, even though he’s all over Gleiberman’s favorite VU album!
Maybe because it gibes so well with my own views on Reed and VU–I liked that very much. Boy, you are right, Mod: can Doug Yule get some love? People who love John Cale give him credit due credit for the avant garde leanings of the first two records, so can we not give Yule some credit for the increased melodicism of the later records? As one who prefers the Yule VU over the Cale VU, as it were, and values Yule’s actual contributions as a singer and musician to those records, I say, all hail Doug Yule!
Anyway, Glieberman is dead-on right about “What Goes On.” Just one of the best songs ever.
Maybe when Yule too leaves this mortal coil, Gleiberman will get around to a new heartfelt reminisce.