Lou Reed: 1942-2013
One night in the mid-seventies, Patti Smith was finishing a set at New York’s CBGB with a Lou Reed song, “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” when she and her band suddenly veered into the frat-rock anthem “Louie, Louie.” At the end, as she walked off the stage, Smith ran into Reed, a hero and acquaintance of hers, leaning against a wall. Smith said hi. Reed, who had written the former song when he was the singer-guitarist in the Velvet Underground, coolly replied, “So I heard that. What was your intention?”
“I said, ‘Respect,'” recalls Smith, who saw the Velvets live in 1970. She is telling this story the day after Reed’s death, at 71 of liver disease on October 27th. “He looked at me, then he said, ‘OK.’ That was it. We were fine.” She laughs. “I think he secretly had a little laugh out of that segue. It came from a heartfelt place.” But, she noted, “he was checking on me.”
Reed, who underwent a liver transplant in April, died at his home in Amagansett, New York, after a half-century of composing, recording and touring: first in the mid- and late Sixties with the Velvet Underground, arguably the most misunderstood and prophetic band of that decade in its fusion of severe avant-garde drive and Reed’s frank, gripping songcraft; then across more than two dozen consistently provocative solo albums. His run of work just through the mid-Seventies was an extraordinary, unpredictable seesaw of grace and danger: the 1972 glam-rock breakthrough, Transformer; the harrowing ’73 operetta, Berlin; the arena-rock muscle of 1974’s Rock N’ Roll Animal; the 1975 shotgun gift of Metal Machine Music, a double album of improvised guitar feedback; and Coney Island Baby, a song cycle about growing up lonely and wrong, infused with Reed’s love of Fifties street-harmony R&B.
It was a lifetime in which Reed consistently challenged the rock & roll song’s capacity for extremes in dissonance, propulsion, vulnerability and blunt lyric trauma. Armed with a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and a passion for contemporary, transgressive American writers such as Hubert Selby Jr. and William Burroughs, Reed honed his love of the direct physical and emotional jolts in rockabilly, doo-wop and Motown into pioneering explorations of sexual taboo, emotional alienation and drug addiction: the explosive Velvets songs “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “White Light/ White Heat”; the elegant-misfit parade in his risque 1973 hit “Walk on the Wild Side”; the sex, death and hard candor in 1978’s urban-noir epic “Street Hassle.”
“Rock does this thing to you: You get directly to somebody, unfiltered,” Reed told me in 1987, during one of our many interviews over nearly three decades. “This person doesn’t have to go to a movie theater. This person will be listening, alone, maybe at five in the morning. “The other idea,” he said of his song-writing in another conversation, “was the music matched the words. If the words were scary, the music would get scary. If the words were sad, the music would get very sad. You think, ‘Yeah, why would anyone want to buy despondency?'” Reed did his version of a grin — a thin smile of iron conviction. “I thought there was a certain kind of aloneness going on, and I felt I wasn’t the only one feeling that.”
Reed was “his own contradiction,” says U2 singer Bono, a friend since the mid-Eighties and a fan since adolescence, when he first heard Transformer. “Then he stretched that contradiction to the limit, that daring to say something simple and beautiful, then putting the right sonic landscape around that.
“Lou,” Bono says, “was the genius of black beauty.”
Reed was only an intermittent pop star. “Walk on the Wild Side,” co-produced by an early disciple, David Bowie, for the Transformer album, was Reed’s sole Top 20 single. His only gold album was 1989’s ode to home, New York. Reed’s singing — a dry, conversational monotone, capable of both great tenderness and cool, cutting fury — was too raw even for Bob Dylan fans. “It was a writer’s voice,” says Bono. “And it gave him great intimacy.”
The influence of that closeness, paired with the raw, enthusiastic assault of Reed’s guitar playing, has run deep and constant for the past four decades, through glitter rock, punk and virtually every subsequent strain of alterative rock; in peers and students as successful and varied as Bowie, the Stooges, the Smiths, R.E.M., Nirvana and the White Stripes’ Jack White. Reed never doubted his worth. “My week beats your year,” he famously wrote in the liner notes to Metal Machine Music. On the 1978 album Live: Take No Prisoners, Reed dismissed rock criticism with an imperious flourish: “Fuck you! I don’t need you to tell me I’m good.”
As recently as August, in our last interview, Reed characterized the Velvets’ 1968 distortion-and-feedback classic, White Light/White Heat — the second and last album by the lineup of Reed, viola player/bassist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker — as “the Statue of Liberty of punk, with the light on top.” He complained about its reception at the time: two weeks on the Billboard album chart at 199. “No one listened to it. But there it is, forever.” And, Reed added proudly, “No one goes near it.”
In 2008, he was a little more sanguine about his lack of conventional acclaim and reward. “I’m not big-time,” Reed admitted to me. “I’ve always been on the outside, and I still am. And maybe that’s why I’m still here.”
“He was to rock & roll what Miles Davis was to jazz — the guy has changed the music a number of times,” says producer Hal Willner, who first worked with Reed in the mid-Eighties and became a trusted collaborator and confidante. “Whatever he was feeling at the time, he wrote.” Among the records Reed made with Willner over the past decade: 2000’s Ecstasy, a rumination of relationships and marriage; The Raven, a 2003 concept album based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, one of Reed’s favorite writers; and 2011’s titanic, controversial Lulu, adapted from Reed’s score to a Robert Wilson opera and recorded with the speed-metal band Metallica.
“It’s not that he didn’t care what people thought,” Willner adds. “He cared. But it wasn’t going to change what he did.”
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