You’re a kid, no more than twelve years old, sitting around listening to the radio with your sister. Amid the Styx and Zeppelin and Journey and Stones there suddenly emerges a tune with a weird, slinky bassline over which a male voice casually sing-speaks a sordid little tale about sex and drugs and transvestites. But you don’t hear any of that because you’re too young to understand it and anyway you’re too dumbstruck by the fact that this bizarre sound is on the radio at all. “Who is this?” you ask your sister, incredulously, “and how did it get on the radio? I mean, he’s not singing, he’s just talking.”
It’s a few years later and you’re a fourteen-year-old music
freak, hanging out at a mall, reading Rolling Stone, which, aside from MTV, is your only source for
music information. You believe everything Rolling Stone tells you. The lead review is for a bunch of
reissues of sixties albums by a band you’ve never heard of, The Velvet
Underground. Five stars? The only thing that you’ve ever seen get five stars
previously is Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA. The review hypes up the feedback, the dirty lyrics,
the attitude. The accompanying illustration shows some dudes in black sweaters
and shades. You are filled with excitement. You want nothing more in life than
to hear this music. Like, right now. So you head over to the mall’s little
record store, where the V section turns up only Van Halen.
It's a few months later, you’re fifteen now, and you’ve
finally managed to track down a Velvet Underground record – MGM’s Golden
Archive Series, a cheap cut’n’paste best-of. You found it, appropriately
somehow, amid a pile of records in a disused, smoky trailer. Listening late at
night you’re entranced by “Heroin” and “Candy Says” and “Here She Comes Now”.
You feel like you’ve discovered the key to some keener, more evolved reality.
One where you don’t have to be some kind of genius or prodigy to create cool,
smart, atmospheric music. The lights are off, the music still playing, you
drift off to sleep. You come awake in the middle of “Jesus”. Those whispered
vocals, that creepy guitar sound. The hymn-like words, which you are not
altogether certain are sincere. You are terrified, but you flip the record and
keep listening anyway.
The Velvet Underground and Nico is one of a handful of albums that provide the
soundtrack to your favorite summer. 1987, you’re sixteen. The late nights, the
long trips, the innocence happily sacrificed. On the way back from your first
concert – Suzanne Vega - the album blares from the van’s tape player, and you
try to impress one of the girls there, she has black hair and big brown eyes,
with the fact that you know all the words to “Venus In Furs”. She is
unresponsive.
Fall, 1988. You buy a book of classic rock writing by the
late great critic Lester Bangs. An entire section of the book is devoted to
Bangs’ ruminations on and confrontations with Velvets’ mainman Lou Reed.
Reading it is such a kick – provocative, illuminating, hilarious – that you are
duly inspired. But you can’t decide whether you wanna be the guy who writes the
songs or the guy who finds so many life-enhancing thrills in trying to figure
the songs out. There is a little of the mad genius and the hapless court jester
in both.
Winter 1989. Despite believing, due to the terrible video
for “The Original Wrapper” that Lou Reed the solo artist is a lost cause, you
buy his just-released solo album, New York.
You can’t believe how somebody as old as he is (47!) has been able to come up
with an album so vital, so rock-hard. All those grim, grit-infested songs about
a city you’ve never been to, making you feel a little glad for once that you
only have to deal with the mundane reality of small-town life. “Romeo Had
Juliet”, that pure, visceral sound - those snarling guitars in perfect
interlock with the somehow loose but forceful rhythm, all a backdrop to the
frontman’s sly, if monotone, delivery of those words, which so vividly capture
young love among the ruins without resorting to the usual banalities. “The perfume
burned his eyes / holding tightly to her thighs / something flickered for a
minute / then it vanished and was gone.” So tough, so real, so full of the
helpless wonder of living. Of the song, the album, the sound, you write this in
the little blue notebook that you carry around with you everywhere you go: “That’s
the way I want life to be all the time.”
Spring 1989. You’ve fallen for The Blue Mask, hard, and just like New York a couple months before it’s playing all the time,
coloring everyday life in ways that will come back to you in vivid shades every
time you listen in subsequent years. Your favorite moment is the impossibly
beautiful solo guitar prelude at the beginning of “Women”. This is also your
girlfriend’s favorite song. She thinks of it as a feminist anthem, one
crucially written from a male perspective. You are not so sure. You just think
it’s funny how he sings “We all love women”, because you picture the whole band
smiling and nodding in agreement as if to say “Yeah, it’s true, we do.”
Now you’re nineteen years old. You wear a Velvet Underground
t-shirt all the time. You’re in a band. One of the only gigs this band will
ever play is at a little bar in the middle of nowhere, a date that you have
agreed to play simply because the name of the bar is Sweet Jane’s. A better
name for the place might have been Free Bird’s. Gamely, your band plays its
versions of “Oh! Sweet Nothin’”, New
York fave “Strawman” and, of course, “Sweet
Jane” (three versions – fast, slow, mutant hybrid of both) to a sparse crowd of
drunk, uninterested rednecks. The band breaks up shortly thereafter, but every
band you are in subsequently will also do Lou Reed covers.
Songs For Drella. 1990,
you buy this collaboration with John Cale, a song cycle based on the life of Andy
Warhol, on the day of release. Throughout the next twenty-three years you try
to tell anyone who listens how great it is. This is a difficult sell, it is a
concept album, unassuming, very spare, also longish. It also may well be the
most purely listenable recording of either man’s post-Velvets career, give or
take a Transformer here or a Paris
1919 there.
During the winter of 1992 you have moved away from your
hometown for the first time. You have also broken up with your longtime
girlfriend. You are suffering a strange mixture of homesickness and
heartsickness. During this time your constant companion is Lou Reed’s book of
collected song lyrics, Between Thought and Expression. Somehow, it is a comfort to read the bleak,
vindictive lyrics of Berlin, and
“Vicious Circle” and “Kill Your Sons” in stark black and white. Plain,
hard-as-nails. The combination of harsh reality – something like “Temporary
Thing” contains an emotion so ugly that one can only hope it is a figment of
Reed’s imagination, though the horrible truth is that it probably isn’t – and
artistry is a motivating factor at a time when you need it most. Soon you have
a band again, and are writing your own attempts at two- and three-chord rock
tunes with semi-poetic lyrics. None are as good as “Kill Your Sons”, but at
least you’re doing something with your time.
In April of ’92 you drive to the city and spend more money
than you really oughtta be spending (you work at McDonald's) on Lou Reed’s new box set retrospective.
Sharing its title with the recently released book of lyrics, Between Thought
And Expression is three discs outlining
Lou’s solo career in chronological order, from ’72 up to ’86. The song
selection is comprehensive, balanced, unerring. But not nearly as boring as
that sounds. Until a new four-disc set comes along that includes the later
Warner years, it’s still the best overview of Reed’s solo career available. In
1992 this box works for you in the same way that Neil Young’s Decade manages, providing an imminently listenable
presentation of an artist’s many phases and stages via a couple dozen-plus
great songs. Many are new to you. “New Sensations.” One of your faves is the
previously unreleased live tune “Here Comes The Bride”, a loose, bizarre
soul-funk march. “I just wanna tell you a story…” a hoarse Reed shouts, growls,
declaims, building up to the title chorus, which female backup singers repeat
in fervent gospel response. The delivery is offhand, Reed slurs and stumbles
over the words, which seem to be made up on the spot. You think to yourself how
amazing it is that art can be made in the moment, spontaneously. This is a new
concept to you. As if to reiterate, the box also contains “The Bells” which
Reed reveals in his book was made up in the studio and left unchanged. He adds
that it is his favorite among all of his lyrics. Power and mystery. “Here come
the bells!” A revelation - nothing ever need be planned.
It’s winter 1996 and you have fallen in love. You and your
girlfriend spend what will seem in your memory like hours, days, driving around
in the snow listening to an advance copy of Set The Twilight Reeling, an album that coincidentally also contains several
songs about new love. Even amid the bliss and good cheer Lou can’t resist some
equalizing ugliness – the leadoff track, a rocking ode to childhood treat “Egg
Cream” finds Reed claiming that the Brooklyn-born beverage made it “easier to
deal with knife fights, and kids pissing in the street, auggghh”.
It’s 2000, you’re on the verge of 30. You and the girl from
winter 1996 have recently broken up. Reed is there again with words of solace
and wisdom and rage. “Mad” from his new guitar-drenched album Ecstasy, features Lou in classic cold-hearted mode,
outlining a break-up of his own. “I knew I shouldn’t have had someone else in
our bed but I was so tired / so tired / who'da thought you’d find a bobby pin?”
Your own breakup was nothing like this, but you’re pretty tired too, and you
take vicarious thrills where you find them.
You’re 36 now. Working a desk job. Florescent lights,
cubicles, endless computer drudgery. You feel used up. As though your identity
is fading, your soul is off looking for kicks elsewhere. How did you end up
here? Every day for days on end you listen to Lou Reed’s live album Animal
Serenade. Staring at the screen, numbers and
letters scrambling, not making any sense. But Lou Reed is in the headphones,
and it’s like he’s trying to tear the curtain away from this nonsense and
reveal the beating heart beneath. You’re grateful for the effort, even if it
only provides momentary comfort. Your favorite track is the stripped-down take
on “Street Hassle”. The guitar rumbling ominously while Lou tells the sad story
of Waltzing Matilda. Then the part about the dude telling the other dude to put
her body in the street for somebody else to find. Then the explanation, or the
excuse. Among the finest lines he ever wrote: “Some people have no choice /
they can’t even find a voice / to talk with that they can call their own / so
the first thing they see / that allows them the right to be / they follow it /
you know what it’s called / bad luck.” On the studio version, those last two
words are spoken, matter-of-fact. On this live version, Reed shouts them at the
top of his lungs. “BAD LUCK!” The effect, for you, is cathartic. It gives you
hope that you might be able to find your own voice again eventually.
Finally, in April 2008 the man plays in Nashville. The show
is good. Lou is fit and fiery. He plays many of the best songs ever written.
“Pale Blue Eyes”, “Satellite Of Love”, “Sweet Jane”. But you are distracted by
the fact that Music City, despite all the lip service it pays to the art and
craft of songwriting, has filled barely more than half of the auditorium.
As the decade turns “Perfect Day” is suddenly everywhere.
Your mother plays for you a version that she loves. It’s by angel-voiced Scottish singer Susan Boyle. You are reminded of the time twenty-odd years
earlier when you were in your room listening to “The Black Angels Death Song”
and your mother stood in the doorway and looked at you as though she thought
you might be mentally ill.
Fall, 2013. For your first post on your little blog after a
two-month layoff you’re trying to write a few simple words about your beloved 1969
Live, by the Velvet Underground. Word comes
that Lou Reed has died. For a few days you ponder the man and his work. You
don’t know if you should write about it at all, or how to go about it if you
do. You decide that the best way to honor the work is to show how it
intertwined so vitally in your own life. You decide also to do this in a weird
third-person format, despite the device seeming a little silly and forced. But
if Lou Reed taught you anything, it is that it's essential to risk looking
foolish. (It’s right there in Songs For Drella, via Andy Warhol, voiced by John
Cale: “I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool.”) Besides, any other approach seems either too dry or too sentimental.
Lou Reed had no use for sentimentality, and this was one of
his great virtues as an artist. Lack of sentiment, however, does not equal lack
of compassion. And dedication to observing and delineating the harshest truths
of modern living does not preclude the existence of positive forces.
So many of his songs, including some of his greatest, are
gentle, romantic, downright pretty things. “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, “I’m Set
Free”, “Perfect Day”, “Coney Island Baby”.
Still, it seems like we always focus on the dirt, the
sordid stuff – “Heroin”, Berlin, “The
Blue Mask”.
As usual, life does not bifurcate so easily into black and
white. There are plenty of subtle gradations within these extremes. Lou Reed
always recognized that shit is complicated, and he never stopped dealing with
it in his own laconic, three-chord way.
So he was able to take a long cold look at the gruesome
realities of human nature, and do it without flinching. This was a brave and
necessary artistic act in and of itself. But what elevated his work is that he
was so often able to consider our most grotesque, base impulses and turn them into
something else - pathos, beauty, redemption. The gamut is often there in one
song – “New Sensations” just as a for-instance. One year he’s arrested on
Christmas Eve, the next he’s riding on his bike in the mountains, wanting to
free himself from those who are “always on a down”.
Or maybe as listeners we make the (sorry, there’s no other
word) transformation ourselves. How else to account for why “Street Hassle” and
“Temporary Thing” and “The Blue Mask” and “Kicks” and “Mad”, ugly things all,
could end up being cleansing, hopeful, regenerative? It’s part of the deal
between artist and audience. We do with the work what we will.
It’s a deal you’ve been engaged in for decades now with Lou
Reed’s music. Living with, in, and around it, allowing it to color and shade so
much of your life.
Lou Reed liked to point out that his friend and mentor, the
poet Delmore Schwartz, believed that a man could do worse than to devote his
life to studying the work of James Joyce.
You’re pretty sure you can take Lou Reed’s music and run
with it for the remainder of your own limited days, and you will feel no sense
of loss, no regret, no guilt. You will only feel more alive.
