By Deborah Sprague and Kara Tucker
Deb
In the wake of Lou Reed’s death, a lot of folks
came forward to say that the man was a great artist despite the fact that he
didn’t give a damn, which isn’t the case – he was a great artist precisely because he didn’t give a damn.
Oh,
he cared plenty about the work he was doing – in nearly a half-century of
making music, it’s hard to pick out more than a handful of things that came
across as half-assed or tossed off, not even in the days when he was a
piece-work staffer hired to jump-start a new dance craze or conjure up images
of the wild surf from a warren in the bowels of the Big Apple. What he didn’t
care about was what you – or me, or anyone else for that matter – cared about
the finished “product” (a word that’d no doubt elicit an epithet from Reed if
he heard it applied to his work).
That
tunnel vision didn’t translate into pretense – well, not too often – when it
came time to actually put his ideas into practice. That’s because Lou Reed was
his generation’s archetypal New York musician: Not only did he constantly write
about the city – sneering at the slumming debutantes of “Downtown Dirt” and celebrating one of
its culinary treasures in “Egg Cream”– he embodied it. His sense of place was
immutable. Reed absorbed
the sounds that surrounded him, from the street corner doo-wop that permeated
the Brooklyn streets of his earliest youth to the sentimental journeys of the
post-Sinatra balladeers that sprang up all around the tri-state area in those
ostensibly fallow years before the Beatles and Stones came along to shake
things up again.
Reed
never discarded the lessons he picked up in those early days, the harmonies,
the lyrical economy, the straightforward structures – remember, he’s the guy
who matter-of-factly noted that when you get to “three chords, you’re into
jazz.” He applied them a lot of different ways, ways that his progenitors
probably never would’ve dreamed of (although Dion, who Reed would lovingly
induct into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, knew the needle and the damage done
every bit as well). But even at his most ostensibly outlandish, Lou Reed bared,
as he put it in one of his most straightforward songs, a rock and roll heart –
a leather-cloaked, but infinitely vulnerable spirit not all that far removed
from Brando’s Wild One character, who, when asked “what are you rebelling
against,” shot back, “whaddaya got?”
Rebellion was everywhere in Reed’s work. Allies, virtually nowhere. In the Velvet Underground, he and
his bandmates created a counter-counterculture that was as alien to the hippies
on the left coast as it was to the so-called squares in middle America. They
did their best to disperse the mellow haze of weed and good vibrations conjured
up by those peers by painting red doors – and everything else – black, then
pulling the walls in and practically force-feeding the listener the brown acid
that the “good guys” tried to warn people away from.
Heroin,
violence, obsession, sado-masochism and other alternate sexualities – these
were Reed’s lyrical stock in trade, but rather than make them seem exotic, he
took them at face value and presented them as part of everyday life. There was
no rubber-necking in something like “Waiting for the Man,” just a sense of,
well, time to go grab the 6 train and my wallet, I need to go grab a bag of smack.
His deadpan delivery sealed the deal. The guitars might’ve screamed through
“Sister Ray” with monumental violence, but Reed never raised his voice above a
calm monotone, making things all the more foreboding.
He
took that aesthetic with him when he split the band to embark on a solo career
that clearly harkened back to his roots, a self-titled first album that kicked
off with the Brooklyner-than-thou “I Can’t Stand It,” resplendent with
mop-wielding landladies and blaring radios – but a nod to his own reality in
the form of asides to Candy Darling, the transsexual Warhol superstar that
remained dear to him even as he discarded his other peers from the era.
Throughout
the early ‘70s, Reed wrangled with rock and roll -- with his audience, with the
world for that matter – like a champion boxer, thrusting and parrying,
sometimes playing rope-a-dope and sometimes stinging like a bee. He knew how to
tease, how to please and how to infuriate, and his mercurial nature made
figuring out which he’d do on any given day something of a crapshoot.
But
even those who thought they could predict when Reed might zig or zag were
likely given whiplash by his most divisive, spectacular, ugly, beautiful
project – Metal Machine Music. The
four movements of that set --
created, as the notes sneer, with "no instruments, no synthesizers, no
panning, no phasing" -- split the difference between machine-shop audio
vérité and the sort of eerie drones one can hear walking beneath transformers
in the middle of nowhere. Move around the room while it plays, and you'll be
amazed at the subtle but discernible differences created as the air shifts. Of
course, you may find that it works just as well if you're merely trying to
scare off a den of pesky squirrels.
Reed
used that album the way old-fashioned farmers used controlled fire – to burn
off the chaff around him and start over, charting a clear path with steely-eyed
precision and sticking with it for the next decade-plus. Yes, he ventured into
the abyss (on much of Street Hassle and The Blue Mask), and occasionally
steered into the seas of cheese (on the oddly bouncy New Sensation, one of the
mercifully few documentations of Reed seemingly paying attention to popular
culture), but for the most part, he cast an aura of a man who was – to borrow
the title of one of his more underrated offerings – Growing Up in Public.
By
and large, Reed removed himself from the rock and roll arena a while ago . He’d
made his peace with John Cale -- a
reunion that redoubled the poignancy of Songs For Drella, itself an olive
branch of sorts to Andy Warhol, who was both a mentor and a bête noire in
Reed’s life – then stepped to the precipice to address mortality in an even
more close-up fashion with Magic and Loss, a painfully elegant dissertation on death
that conjured both of the titular elements in spades.
By
the dawn of the new millennium, Lou had settled into an odd-but-appropriate
position as an elder statesman of the “other” – a guide, not to the
self-conscious, flamboyant outré stylists that command headlines, but to those
traveling art’s underground railroad, those who move unblinkingly into the
storm, like modern-day Flying Dutchmen. In death, as in life, he and his work
reveal the most to those willing to peel slowly and see.
Kara
At some point on his 1978 spoken word/Lenny Bruce-inspired standup comedy/live
music double album “Live: Take No Prisoners,” Lou Reed deadpanned the line,
"I do Lou Reed better than anybody, so I’d better get on it.”
Reed passed away Sunday at the age of 71, less than a year after he had a liver
transplant.
While it wasn’t the sudden shock of, say, Joe Strummer’s passing years earlier,
that didn’t keep it from feeling like a punch in the gut to anyone who had the
slightest bit of appreciation for Reed’s career.
One could make the argument that a good chunk of
various strains of rock would not have existed in the way and time they did had
Reed not opened the door. Of course, Reed would probably bristle and cop an
attitude at being given a sobriquet like “Godfather of Alternative Rock”,
“Godfather of Punk”, “Godfather of Glam” or any other such title that would be
extremely apt and correct.
Reed could often come off as a pretentious,
prickly jerk in interviews and other situations. He knew his stuff and gave off
the air of someone who didn’t give a shit, because, well, he didn’t. This was
no practiced air of indifference. He really didn’t give a shit.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that it certainly served a purpose. By keeping
some things at arms length, Reed was able to maintain a level of artistic
freedom few get to enjoy. He took full advantage, both musically and lyrically.
The Velvet Underground were Reed’s first serious foray into music of his own,
with some songs having been written on the side while he worked a day job as a
staff writer for Pickwick Records, a label known for cheesy capitalizations and
outright knockoffs.
Their four albums with Reed came out from 1967 through 1970. Television was
squeamish to show married characters sleep in anything other than separate beds
and here were songs dealing with subjects like homosexuality, sadomasochism,
transsexuality and domestic violence.
Reed’s material wasn’t just running counter to the prevailing mainstream, it
also wasn’t in line with the prevailing counterculture, either.
Lyrically, it’s a different sentiment to go from “Turn off your mind. Relax and
float downstream” as Lennon sang in 1966 to “I don't know just
where I'm going. But I'm gonna try for
the kingdom, if I can. 'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man, when I put a
spike into my vein” as Reed sang a year later (in a song written before the
Beatles’ one, mind you).
Whether lyrically or in the presentation, dressed in black and wearing shades
on stage, it all seemed to say, “Fuck this hippie shit.” Given the response to
the VU’s live act in San Francisco, the feeling was mutual.
Musically, the material was in uncharted waters as well -- dissonance from
Cale’s viola, the primitive drumming from Tucker, the loudness with which they
all played, the distortion and feedback, the mix of arty ambitions and
pretensions with basic primitivity (basing some songs off two chords or three).
Given the climate these albums were released in, you’d probably say that it was
not the wisest commercial strategy. You’d be right. Only one of VU’s albums hit
the Billboard chart at the time of release and it peaked at 197.
Unlike perhaps his closest contemporary in terms of following one’s muse no
matter what – Neil Young – Reed didn’t always have huge chart success. He only
had one chart single, 1972’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Of course, even then, he managed to put some very risqué subject matter into a
song, as no doubt some fans (and even the censors) got so caught up in all
those “Doo Doo Doos” to pay attention to, for example, the line, “But she never
lost her head even when she was giving head”, let alone the fact that the she
in question was a trans woman.
Reed did manage to one-up Young in another department. The latter basically
spent a good chunk of the ‘80s effectively giving the middle finger to his
label (and perhaps some of his fans) were either weak genre exercises or lesser
versions of turf he’d he traveled before.
As for Reed? He took care of it in one double album – 1975’s “Metal Machine
Music.” To a select few (like Deborah); it’s a solid effort exploring the
concept of drone and No Wave, territory later explored by bands like Sonic
Youth. To the rest of us, it’s an unlistenable endurance test of nothing but
minutes of feedback loops without the slightest bit of songs to tether them.
They owe more to Reed’s admittedly chemically altered state of mind at the time
than any sort of great art (and, plus, he did cacophony better with “Sister
Ray.”).
He may have told Lester Bangs, “My bullshit is worth more than other people’s
diamonds” but this all-time infamous major label album smells more like an
industrial feedlot than West 47th Street.
While Reed did not have hit songs in the conventional chart
sense, he wrote songs that became standards and songs that were highly
influential. Even if they weren’t songs that sounded exactly like Velvet
Underground or Lou Reed (although there were a ton of those), chances are you
heard songs by artists and bands influenced by parts or all of Reed’s songs and
approach to artistic integrity.
There’s a certain level of freedom in not having to give a damn as an artist,
to being able to maintain that detachment. It allowed Reed to tackle subject
matters almost with the eyes of a documentarian as much as a poet. It didn’t
matter whether the subject matter was a junkie strung out in some New York City
park or the 1 percent (well before that term came into being) or whether it was
about the lives of people in Reed’s life or Reed himself.
He tried to avoid judging a lot of the people and scenarios he wrote about,
trying to preserve the detachment. But while the metaphorical camera didn’t
blink, Reed’s approach, where he chose to point the lens, didn’t necessarily
lead to emotionless ironic detachment. He could write songs as affecting and tender
as anyone. There was “Pale Blue Eyes”- an achingly lovely, bittersweet song
about a love that any sensitive ‘70s singer songwriter would have killed for --
or “Hello, It’s Me,” about Andy Warhol’s death with Reed at his most
vulnerable.
Whether that muse, that desire to document what was in the path of the lens was
turned inward (“The Blue Mask”), towards the city that was his actual and
spiritual home (“New York”), expressed through concept (“Berlin”, “Raven”) or through
relatively unbridled happiness (“New Sensation”).
Wherever it was pointed, the results taken as a whole resulted in a body of
work that, along with that desire to maintain the detachment and become all
navel-gazey, certainly could have played into Reed’s aversion to dealing with
the press a lot of the time. Or for that matter, to write anything resembling a
memoir.
He told Rolling Stone in 1987, “All through this, I’ve always thought if you
thought of all of it as a book, then you have the Great American Novel, every
record as a chapter. They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole
thing, stack it in listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”
While Reed had a better career batting average than most with few outright
misfires – the aforementioned “Metal Machine Music”, the somewhat tossed off
“Sally Can’t Dance”, the ultimately clunky and ill-conceived “Lulu” album with
Metallica – the misfires kept it from being THE greatest American Novel. And heck, even “Sally” gave us the powerful
“Kill Your Sons” and the poignant “Billy.”
It also couldn’t be the Great American Novel because Reed’s body of work was
also part memoir. Whether he maintaining his detached gaze outward or inward,
the career, taken as a whole says a lot about who Reed was than a book would
and did so without diverting from wherever his musical desires took him next.
Taken as a whole, Reed was a man who, yes, could come off as an egotistical and
needlessly grumpily contrarian at times, but he had the body of work to back it
up – an often amazing songwriter and a terrific and influential guitarist
behind that career’s worth of material. Behind the detachment and the
occasional arms length-inducing assholery was often a man with real heart,
kindness, intelligence and integrity and a truly unique giant in the world of
rock and roll.
He may have said it with more than a little sarcasm and irony back in 1978, but
damned if the man wasn’t right. He DID do Lou Reed better than anybody.
