Lou Reed’s Heart of Darkness
Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock & roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a bad joke.
—Lester Bangs, writing in Creem
I met myself in a dream / And I just want to tell you, everything was all right.
—Lou Reed, “Beginning to See the Light”
Cloistered in the dusky shadows of a Chinatown bar, his face lit by the glow of a trashy table lamp, Lou Reed looks like an artful composite of the mordant characters who stalk his songs. His thick, pale fingers tremble a lot, and his sallow face, masked with a poised, distant expression, looks worn. But behind that lurid veil lurks a sharp, fitful psyche, and with several ounces of bourbon stoking its fire, it can be virulent.
Lou has been ranting for almost an hour about his latest album, Take No Prisoners, a crotchety, double live set hailed by some critics as his bravest work yet, and by others as his silliest. He seems anxious for me to share his conviction that it’s the zenith of his recording career—something I can’t bring myself to do. Instead, I mention that the record might alienate even some of Reed’s staunchest defenders. Instantly, his flickering brown eyes taper into bellicose slits. “Are you telling me,” he snarls, “that you think Take No Prisoners is just another Metal Machine Music?”
Then, as quickly as he flared, Reed relaxes and flourishes a roguish smile. “It’s funny,” he says, “but whenever I ask anyone what they think of this record they say, ‘Well, I love it, but I’m a little worried about what other people will think.’ Except one friend. He told me he thought it was very manly. That’s admirable. It’s like the military maxim the title comes from: ‘Give no quarter, take no prisoners.’ I wanted to make a record that wouldn’t give an inch. If anything, it would push the world back just an inch or two. If Metal Machine Music was just a hello note, Take No Prisoners is the letter that should’ve gone with it.
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“You may find this funny, but I think of it as a contemporary urban-blues album. After all, that’s what I write—tales of the city. And if I dropped dead tomorrow, this is the record I’d choose for posterity. It’s not only the smartest thing I’ve ever done, it’s also as close to Lou Reed as you’re probably going to get, for better or worse.”
He has a point. Take No Prisoners is brutal, coarse and indulgent—the kind of album that radio stations and record buyers love to ignore (it hasn’t even nicked Billboard’s Top 200). Which is a shame, because it’s also one of the funniest live albums ever recorded. The songs (a potpourri of Reed’s best known, including “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side”) serve merely as backdrops for Lou’s dark-humored, Lenny Bruce-like monologues. At one point, responding to somebody in the audience who objects to one of his many ethnic slurs, Lou snaps, “So what’s wrong with cheap, dirty jokes? Fuck you. I never said I was tasteful. I’m not tasteful.”
But the record’s real bounty is its formidable last side, featuring petrifying versions of “Coney Island Baby” and “Street Hassle”—the definitive accounts of Reed’s classic pariah angel in search of glut and redemption. “Street Hassle,” in particular, is the apotheosis of Lou’s callous brand of rock & roll. The original recording, a three-part vignette laced beguilingly with a cello phrase that turns into a murky requiem on guitar, was Reed’s most disturbing song since “Heroin.” The new, live version of “Street Hassle” is an even more credible descent into the dark musings of a malignant psychology, littered with mercenary sex and heroin casualties, and narrated by a jaded junkie who undergoes a catharsis at the end.
Lou Reed doesn’t just write about squalid characters, he allows them to leer and breathe in their own voices, and he colors familiar landscapes through their own eyes. In the process, Reed has created a body of music that comes as close to disclosing the parameters of human loss and recovery as we’re likely to find. That qualifies him, in my opinion, as one of the few real heroes rock & roll has raised. That is, if you’re willing to allow your heroes a certain latitude for sleaziness.
Long before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed had begun preparing for a career as a hard-boiled outsider. When he was in high school, his mood swings and headlong dives into depression became so frequent that his parents committed him to electroshock therapy (an experience he later chronicled bitterly in a song called “Kill Your Sons”). Another time, during his student days at New York’s Syracuse University, Reed reneged on his ROTC commitment by pointing an unloaded pistol at the head of his commanding officer.
After Syracuse (where, in his more stable moments, Reed studied poetry with Delmore Schwartz, a popular poet in the Forties), Lou took a job as a songwriter and singer at Pickwick Records on Long Island. While there, he recorded mostly ersatz surf and Motown rock under a multitude of names, and met John Cale, a classically trained musician with avant-garde leanings. In 1965, Reed and Cale formed the Warlocks, with Sterling Morrison, an old Syracuse pal of Lou’s, on guitar and Maureen Tucker on drums. The group was renamed the Falling Spikes and then the Velvet Underground, after the title of a porn paperback about sadomasochism.
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