Fellow-Traveling with the Lost Boys of Long Island (Part 2)
Lou Reed's Espionage, Sabotage, and Sleeper Cells. Plus the Philistine's Continuing Guide to Live Classical Music.
(Part 1 is on Whittaker Chambers, who grew up in the next suburb over)
A day or two after Lou Reed died, in October 2013, I was running on my treadmill in the parsonage basement and blasting the 1993 Velvet Underground reunion album. This was shortly after the beginning of what would be my longest stretch of total abstinence from alcohol. My second child was not quite six months old, and he was down there with me in one of those bouncy scooters. When “Hey Mr. Rain” came on, he started bouncing hard in time and sucking on his pacifier like it was his last meal. I glimpsed my own past and his possible future. I’ll do a better job keeping you away from cigarettes and guitars, I thought to myself.
Every enthusiasm leaves its marks, but only some of them are visible. My acoustic guitar has a scattering of small black blotches around the sound hole, at the edges of the areas where I’ve worn through the finish with too-aggressive playing. One night in or around 2005, I was up too late having drunk too much and playing “Heroin.” I got a little carried away, cut a finger on a string, and left those bloody spots before I realized what had happened. I never cleaned them off, whether because I wanted the cautionary reminder or the war story. Somewhere around here there are, or were, drafts of lyrics I wrote back when I was twenty and tried to write songs. I directly stole lines from Lou Reed in two separate songs of my very small corpus. In one case, I actually noted the theft in the next line. It was a song about trying, and failing, to write a love song. I could go on but won’t.1
So I ran on my treadmill, made notes regarding the genetic inheritance I was passing on, and held my little fan’s wake for a few days over some of my old favorites. Then, oddly enough, I stopped thinking about Lou Reed. I didn’t play his albums. I didn’t play “Heroin” or “Pale Blue Eyes” or even “Halloween Parade” on my guitars much, if at all, any more. I hadn’t bought one of his albums since 2000’s Ecstasy and only ever saw him live on that tour, but perhaps the fact that he was still out there, doing something or other, kept his music alive for me. Once he was gone, I managed to let him go. I noticed when an admiring biographer ended up concluding, in a 2015 book, that Reed was a “monster.” There were reasons to let that door close.
Then it suddenly starting creaking open again. First it was the “Foot of Pride” cover coming back.2 New York crept back into mind. A new biography is out, and Phil Christman gave it an excellent review. More importantly, Phil lobbed the provocation of a ranking of Reed’s post-Velvet albums, bringing me back to some neglected favorites and some never-favorites (the post is now for paid subscribers but despite my disagreements I think it’s a good list).
Here’s the Lou Reed arc in a nutshell: He made two albums with the Velvet Underground that changed the trajectory of popular music. Then, having recorded the tracks that would launch a thousand rock sub-genres, he kicked out the band’s best musician and made two albums of excellent but much less revolutionary material. None of them sold. Then he embarked on a solo career that, if you simply describe it with journalistic literalness, sounds like the plot of a Pynchon novel or a Spinal Tap-esque satire. Glam rock album? Check. Fake “blue-eyed soul” album? Check. Noise record, live album that’s mostly Lenny Bruce-style monologues, disco track whose only lyric is “disco mystic” repeated over and over, a few dozen tracks accompanying or about Edgar Allen Poe’s works? Check, check, check, check, and most definitely check.
He was prolific, chaotic and violently inconsistent—even by the standards of perhaps the most self-credulous and self-regarding cohort of musicians who has ever lived. He dug tunnels under the walls of mid-60s pop music and loaded them with dynamite, but after the fuse burned down and the explosion went off, he was just one of the crowd rushing through the breach. He sought mass approval and spurned it, rejecting audiences and collaborators before they could reject him.
Much of the best work in Reed’s long and hydra-headed catalogue was done with these collaborators. Reed seemed to have made a point of antagonizing people whose vision or musical strength could challenge his own, whether it was Andy Warhol (the Velvets’ first impresario), John Cale (The Velvet Underground and Nico, Songs for Drella), David Bowie (producer of Transformer), or Bob Quine (The Blue Mask). Without these collaborators, he was mostly alone with his own conceits and unhinged ambitions. Most of his failed albums (The Bells, Sally Can’t Dance) were, as a result, at least intermittently interesting. But even his decent material often ended up sounding like bargain-bin versions of Bowie, or Dylan, or Springsteen. He marred would-be triumphs (Street Hassle, Set the Twilight Reeling) with tracks that weren’t so much uninspired filler as deliberate, cynical insults.3 Indeed, there’s no critical or fan consensus on distinguishing the halfway successes from the interesting failures.4 And he created two masterpieces more or less alone: 1973’s Berlin and 1989’s New York, respectively the most depressing concept album and the thorniest, least satisfying social-consciousness album in the history of rock music.5
Why does someone do these things? You can blame addiction to a degree (alcohol especially but he was a heavy speed user in the 70’s too), and being a titanic jerk, and maybe also lacerating insecurity. Some guys sang about self-destruction and some guys made lazy or incompetent work because of their self-destruction, but Lou’s music, good and bad, was self-destruction represented in musical form. I’m speculating here because I’ve never actually read one of the many biographies of Reed. But I don’t know anyone who’s been worse at hiding in their lyrics.6
And his music is, not in an esoteric way but right there on the surface, about failure. Critics hailed his “mellow” and “mature” songs on his early-80’s “marriage albums” (yes, this is a distinct period in the Reed canon), but for my money they’re more terrifying than the grotesque, transgressive stuff from the 70’s. You can hear him trying to get sober and stay married but you know, and the narrator knows, it isn’t going to work. Sometimes the resulting music is simply bad. Reed had a tendency to swing between scorning women and putting them on a pedestal.7 Sometimes he’s lashing out and blaming everyone around him for his own problems (“two-bit friends” and “human Tuinals” populate his lyrics, presumably having committed the terrible sins either of sharing his vices or discouraging them). These are genuinely painful things to listen to, at least if you’ve talked that way yourself or loved someone who does. But sometimes the songs reach that sublime desperation that emerges between the rock (being an incorrigible disaster) and the hard place (the world and my body not indulging my dumb crap anymore). The descriptions of dependency and abuse in the Velvet Underground songs are Romantic and juvenile by comparison with “Underneath the Bottle,” “Waves of Fear,” or “The Last Shot.” The pitch darkness in Reed’s work, even when it wasn’t a put-on, is always less horrifying than the many false dawns. I made myself learn “New Sensations” because it plays, and because it nails a particular feeling on the Escher staircase of quitting. But between the 1984 original recording and the 1998 live version I heard first, he had changed some lyrics. “I want to stay married” became “I’m not meant to be married,” and his diner order of “a burger and a Coke” turned into “a scotch and a beer and a Coke.” Whatever else you can say about Lou, he kept you updated. I decided to go with the original lyrics and the live-version music when I’m doing it myself.
There are good reasons to avoid this sort of obviously incomplete and malformed artistic output. I found myself getting irritated to the point of anger as I went through it all. But I finally understood why fans and critics alike treated Reed as if he were their own mercurial, disappointing, eccentrically brilliant and alcoholic dad. What else was I doing, anyway? We come back to the muddy pool because we saw ourselves there once and might again. And it made a few moments on Ecstasy, his last real album, sound truer and better than I’d ever heard them when it was new and I and the world were young. “I’m asking you to let me go, it hurts me when you’re sad / And I cannot do better than this, which must surely make you mad” (this track is extremely NSFW so you’ll have to dig it up yourself). It’s a childish rhyme, one he flogs to death on the same album, but he delivers the line with defensive, exhausted conviction. You believe it. The best song on the album, and one of his best ever, is a stew of nostalgia and regret that culminates in a dream sequence of an alternate life with children and grandchildren. “You wanted children and I did not,” he sings, and then crashes the strings on each syllable when he closes out the verse: “I wish I had.” And the last track on that last record8 ends with a long, gorgeous stretch of droning guitar feedback. It sounds like an homage to the absent John Cale, whose sustain and screeching made Lou’s words matter in the first place. “I’m Waiting for the Man” is a better song, but maybe even it needed that melancholic echo, thirty-five years later, to be resolved.
So back Lou will go into the cabinet, awaiting some obscure future signal to wake again and unlatch the door from the inside. But I’ll keep at least one song with me, on my own guitar, for a while longer. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is a wisp of a tune, two verses sung, it seems, to a lover or a friend who is depressed or isolated. “When you think the night has seen your mind / That inside you’re twisted and unkind… Please put down your hands / ‘Cause I see you.” Covering your face with your hands is one of those childish futile gestures we can’t stop ourselves from doing, as if to hide the world from our sight is to hide ourselves. How badly have we all longed to hear, and to say, “please put down your hands.” Perhaps if the writer had been able to hear and believe it, none of the rest would have happened. Life is a long search for a benevolent face in which we might both see and be seen, love another and recognize ourselves. The realism of our scars, lines, and bloodstains is, at most, a consolation prize.
In Review: Getting Out of the House
This last weekend I went out for live music twice. First was the premiere of the opera version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Dallas Opera. It’s the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, told first in his memoir (and then in the film by Julian Schnabel9 of the same name), a writer and editor who suffered a major stroke and was left with “locked-in syndrome.” He could only move one eyelid, which he used to dictate the book.
This is the sort of scenario about which I tend to have intrusive thoughts (it would have made a good Lou Reed song, frankly), but it’s also undeniably fascinating, and the composer, librettist, cast, and especially the designers of the remarkable set brought it to life. I’ve seen very little live opera in my life and can’t evaluate it with any critical insight but I had a good time at this one. The music is very “cinematic;” there aren’t any really memorable melodies or show-stopping moments (apart from a trio of the main female characters, that was terrific) but the overall effect got stronger and stronger as it went on. It was what live music is supposed to be—immersive, engrossing, showing you something new and unexpected. It was a lot better than staying home, which is the first job of any performance. The tickets were reasonable and there were a lot of available seats. It runs through November 11. Go to the shows, Dallas!
Sunday’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra bill of the Brahms violin concerto and Sibelius Symphony #1 featured the best soloist performance I’ve seen in Dallas. Granted, it’s not a large sample size. But violinist Maxim Vengerov really blew the doors off the place. The Brahms concerto isn’t a sentimental favorite of mine and I don’t know anything about violin playing but this was the sort of thing that left me hyped and jittery for a while after it ended. I’m a misanthrope about the universal standing ovation but I joined this one and we kept at it long enough that he came back out and played a Bach partita as an encore (the Sibelius was really good too but this was the winner).
I don’t know anything about anything here but thanks to the DSO’s student card I was able to go with my second child for free and there were a ton of empty seats. I didn’t go in with any expectation other than “this will be better than watching football/looking at my phone” and ended up having a mind-blowing aesthetic experience. So I’ll repeat my advice here and encourage you to take a flyer on some live classical music when you get the chance. It could be awesome! Or it could be unremarkable! But it will be a thing that actually happens, right in front of you, and that’s better than most ways an afternoon or evening can be spent.
Still, read the program notes at your peril. I for one love Brahms’s heavily orchestrated concertos, but apparently it was a controversial approach at the time and even after his death, the work was dismissed as “a concerto not for, but against, the violin.” It was so badly received that Brahms burned the draft of his second violin concerto, which just breaks your heart. Likewise, Sibelius withdrew into alcoholic reclusion for the last quarter-century (!) of his life, producing nothing and eventually destroying all of his unpublished work too. It can be a rude shock to remember that the classics weren’t always classic and the canon was built by pain, disappointment, and long-delayed critical reversals. So it went for the practitioners in a form, and an age, whose imagined posterity had no place for the morose obsession on the outtake, the demo track, the sketch of an unfulfilled ambition, the interesting failure, the might-have-been-if-only.10 I respect Brahms for preserving only the work he considered his best (indeed, I can’t remember ever hearing anything of his that struck me as less than excellent), but I think the world would have indulged him for, and treasured, his almost-successes, too.
“Lou Reed: A Personal History” is unlocked for subscribers at the Johann Tetzel level
Along with the very poignant cover of “Tarbelly and Featherfoot” from a benefit album for Victoria Williams, this was possibly my earliest exposure to his work. He should have done more covers.
“That’s what killed Dennis Day, contempt for the audience,” I heard myself saying again and again as I went through this discography.
This is to say nothing of the utter trash of which at least one authority has somewhere said, “this is the best thing he ever recorded.” I can’t think of another contemporary musician who has inspired such baffling attachments.
Even these albums, which I’d say are his best, each has a real dog on them. “Men of Good Fortune” on Berlin should have been left in the Velvets’ drafts folder, and “Beginning of a Great Adventure” on New York should never have been recorded at all.
Someone could maybe make a case that “I Wanna Be Black,” the biggest album-ruining turd on Street Hassle, is not the work of a bigot but it is most definitely the work of a monumental jerk. To me, when he sings about Black people, Reed sounds like Norman Podhoretz: suspicious, rivalrous, and guiltily insecure.
There is some debate over just how misogynistic Reed’s songs are. More specifically, whether they’re misogynistic songs or songs about misogyny. These are, of course, not mutually exclusive categories. I can’t think of a songwriter of Reed’s prominence who wrote as much about domestic violence, and it’s frank and brutal stuff rather than patriarchal celebration. But he does seem to have been violent with some of his own partners, and just in general I think you have to wonder what gets a man to ruminate on that theme. He also wrote a rare rock song about child removal, which is just shattering and maybe exploitative and perhaps ventriloquizes his own judgments about women who use drugs and have sex (with him). The case for acquittal here is very weak and the kindest way to view it is as another of his many pathologies, externalizing his self-hatred and insecurity onto the women he needed and despised.
Last album that wasn’t a literary adaptation, with or without Metallica, or a songless instrumental experiment (as I said, he was a real-life Spinal Tap). That said, there’s some decent material on The Raven. I am tickled by “Edgar Allen Poe,” which sounds like he’s warming up an auditorium for Solomon Burke.
I’ve not seen the movie but Schnabel is somewhere recorded as saying that one of those monstrously awful Lou Reed songs is his best work, which makes me think less of him despite having no familiarity with his own art. I’m reliably told that the movie is great so I should give it a chance.
There’s an alternative history in which “White Light/White Heat” is a radio hit, getting a few of the first album’s tracks into the charts, and the inertia of success keeps a feuding Reed and Cale together through the 70’s à la Jagger and Richards, with Maureen Tucker doing a version of Keith’s once-per-album vocal leads.