Sunday Mourning
How I felt when I heard about Lou Reed
I feel like I should have been staying up all night, pounding out a 4000-word tribute in a speed-manic torrent just like Lester Bangs would have done for him. Or like he would have done for William Burroughs.
But even now his gift for the perfect statement has shone through, rendering superfluous any effort from those left behind. The first song on the first side of the first album by his first band was called “Sunday Morning.” Poetic to the last, his end came on a Sunday morning too.
It’s customary at these moments to say that you don’t normally get affected by deaths like these. That you don’t get caught up in the mawkish celebration or heritage industry hyperbole.
Thing is, I do. I go back and play the records that first made me love the person who is being remembered. Almost every time.
I just didn’t think I would about Lou Reed.
Not because I didn’t love his music. I just didn’t have him on my wall like Iggy or Bowie or the Stones. I didn’t buy into his schtick, his cool, the way I did with the others. But now I see that you don’t need to warm to great artists to miss them when they go. Pop stars, maybe. But artists, writers, they’re different. The emotional connection is with the work and not with the myth.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since I heard about his death on 6Music earlier tonight. They marked the moment by turning their real-time collaborative playlist show, Now Playing, into a commemoration of Lou Reed’s work. I thought that was wonderful. Not many stations would feel able to be that spontaneous. Fewer still would have confidence in their listeners’ knowledge and love to instantaneously hand over the playlist for ninety minutes for a singer who’s death warranted about 100 words in Metro. But then, 6 is a station that probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Lou Reed. They prioritise artistic value over commercial value — a notion that in rock ’n roll at least started with the Velvet Underground’s slow burn influence seeping its way into left-field pop in the early seventies.
Bowie, Ferry and others travelled the path that Lou Reed showed was there. Like them he was an artist first, one who happened to work in rocknroll. Or rather, he was an artist who saw rocknroll as the only medium in which to make relevant, meaningfully disruptive art.
Reading about The Beatles when I was young — twelve, maybe — introduced me to an older world of art and drugs and sophisticated meaning beneath the pop surface. The messages were largely coded but knowing them made the experience richer, at least to a fourteen-year-old living in rural England at the turn of the nineties. Three years later, I was older, feeling more worldly if not necessarily any wiser, and I heard the Velvet Underground. There was nothing coded about these messages. The experience had bubbled up to the surface, it was there for all to see. But this was the opposite of superficial. The words told you as much. Shiny boots of leather. The blood begins to flow. Twenty-six dollars in my hand. Allusively poetic and viscerally specific at the same time.
The world Lou Reed conjured up still gives an illicit, vicarious thrill of life on the margins. It was dangerous and unknown, seedy and tender. Sick and dirty more dead than alive. Somehow that street corner holds a romantic pull even though you know, deep down, it really, really shouldn’t.
His words — and voice — don’t give you all the answers, but they never fail to put you inside the scene. And the scene more often that not is one you’ve never heard in a pop song before. Can I have an autograph, he said to the fat blond actress. What costume shall the poor girl wear. Plucked her eyebrows on the way. Linger on your pale blue eyes. I feel just like Jesus’ son.
And, of course, Whiplash girlchild in the dark. That ‘girlchild’ is the kicker. Reed captures the self-immolating mire of the john’s deviance so well that you almost miss the clue to the real power at work in this scene. Just how old is this “dear mistress”, and what the hell is she doing here?
But then the band were the voice of vice. You are supposed to fall for it. Their name, taken from a “dirty French novel”, says as much. It is a perfectly calibrated construction, couching the unspeakably alternative in a seductive allure. An enticing exile for the reviled and the different and the adventurous. Luxury for the lost. The velvet underground is a place, but it’s also a scene, a sensibility even. It’s an intoxicating refuge for the kind of outcasts most of us are lucky enough not to be but at times perhaps wished we were. It would have made life so much more interesting.
Maybe the question is less why the group has influenced so many generations. It’s more, why wouldn’t they? At sixteen, identity is taste more than it is experience. Signifying your alternative credentials through the art you choose to consume is what you do. Some artful records by something labelled ‘the velvet underground’? Yes, please.
It seems strange thinking about all this that earlier tonight I was telling my children about this deviant poet, as the radio played a load of his ‘hits’. But it didn’t seem inappropriate. Like mini Mo Tuckers they bashed along, keeping the instinctive, insistent beat of “Vicious” and “Run, Run, Run.” It’s funny, I’ve never thought of them as funky — the Velvets are the most white band imaginable — and yet now I see that that beat is always there.
Lester Bangs said this about the Velvets:
“Everybody assumes that the mind are body are opposed. Why? The trog vs the cerebrite. How boring. But we still buy it, all of us. The Velvet Underground were the greatest band that ever existed because they began to suggest that such was not so.”
Because last night, despite all the complications, you really, really could dance to the sounds of that rock ’n roll station.
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