Lou Reed: 1942-2013

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 47^th 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.