The Lou Reed Birthday Meditation
Today would be Lou Reed’s 74th birthday. When he died in 2013, I mourned for days on Facebook. I’m taking the occasion to round up those thoughts, lightly edited for 2016. In chronological order.
- Oh my god. Lou Reed is dead.
2. When I was 15, I lacked social coordinates — new school; no subculture; all my music culled from Top 40 radio and MTV, and therefore shapelessly ridiculous. This didn’t stop me from being outspoken in my social studies class. My teacher Mr. Staller, bearded ex-hippie, worked afterhours and summers in the local used record store. One day I was in there browsing and he called me over to the counter. “Jeremy,” he said, “I think you’d like this record.” He held up this white-sleeved album with a banana on the cover. I bought it. By the end of that evening, I can honestly say that my life had been changed. I remember this feeling of having gained a glimpse of “home” — a place where I might belong, if I could find it. Which I think many young people in our culture experience when they first hear the music that matters to them. Or when they read the books, or see the movies, that give voice to the things that were already in their hearts and minds — I remember William Burroughs’s Queer or Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire having a similar effect on me. In these ways our confusions are resolved, our inner lives shaped, our social coordinates established. Figures like Lou Reed come to seem like fragments of ourselves, externalized; they remind us of who we’d like to be, and, if we’re of a creative bent, they guide us toward our own voices.
So here’s the first Velvet Underground song I ever heard: “Sunday Morning.”
3. “Sweet Jane” is Lou Reed’s most multifaceted song, and with this cover, Margo Timmins captured one of its facets perfectly.
4. Here is another facet of “Sweet Jane,” this time captured by Lou himself, but here is the real reason why you need to watch this: It is a pure spangled slice of 1970’s rock-n-roll. Plus, it reminds us that Lou could, in fact, dance. Something that’s easy to forget if you saw one of his shows after 1990.
5. Compare and contrast this cover of “Here She Comes Now,” by Cabaret Voltaire, with the Cowboy Junkies cover of “Sweet Jane.” Two very different songs from the same mind, covered by two very different bands.
6. Here children’s musician Elizabeth Mitchell covers “What Goes On.” Again, check this against the Cabaret Voltaire and Cowboy Junkies covers shared above, if you really want to understand Lou’s range.
7. Lou’s 2003 concept album The Raven is a failure, one of many. But Edgar Allan Poe + Lou Reed made perfect sense to me, and to Lou as well, obviously. “To my mind Poe is father to William Burroughs and Hubert Selby,” he wrote in the liner notes. “I am forever fitting their blood to my melodies. Why do we do what we should not? Why do we love what we cannot have? Why do we have a passion for exactly the wrong thing? What do we mean by ‘wrong’?” This song from The Raven is one of the album’s better pieces, and it seems like a fitting selection for tonight.
8. I’m not done mourning Lou Reed, sorry.
When I was younger, I hated Transformer — too popular, too pop!
Bah: youth.
Now I don’t so much love it as consider its songs to be part of the furniture of my mind, and periodically I sit in one of the songs. “Perfect Day” is a good example. As a teen, I just thought this song was maudlin and slow. And like everyone else, it seems, I assumed it was a druggy song — two people having one of those stoned days. That refrain at the end didn’t mean much to me. I had to get much, much, much older before I understood what the song was actually about, and what that refrain implied. The song’s maudlin quality turned to genuine self-hating melancholy in my ears.
True story: In the late nineties, I saw Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson walking through Faneuil Hall in Boston. They were holding each other close and eating ice cream, and they looked happy.
9. “Pale Blue Eyes” is another song that is, like “Perfect Day,” about stealing a moment of happiness that you don’t feel you deserve; it’s the moment you take from others, that creates unhappiness around it. Or, to state the problem another way, it’s about splitting yourself in two and then hating one of those selves. But this is a less pure, much more complicated song than “Perfect Day”; it’s searching, broken, preoccupied with questions that can’t be answered — the fleeting moment of shameful, secret intimacy with another person as model for everything we have but can’t keep, to paraphrase the lyrics.
10. When I heard “Egg Cream,” back during those innocent days before we knew what Bill Clinton did with cigars and interns, I was like, “What the hell is an egg cream?” Turned out they served egg creams at JP Licks, my favorite Boston ice cream joint — and so I had myself a little egg cream phase. These days, I can’t stand them. But I still like this song.
11. It’s (very) presumptuous of me to say so, but I’ve always felt like Václav Havel and Lou Reed misunderstood each other. All this talk about “freedom” seems fluffy and inexact to me. One of the things I learned in my travels through the Communist and post-Communist countries is that Soviet-style communism split cities and people in two. There was no private life, only the obedient public self and that madrugada-time secret self, with nothing to mediate them. That’s a situation any teenager can understand — which one doesn’t want more privacy? — and that adolescent preoccupation with individualization and split-selves seems to me to be the primary point of contact for the two men.
My ex-wife and I once saw Lou Reed play in Prague. Lou came out in a black muscle shirt and jeans, and the music was as manly and thumping as his attire. After the show, it was too late to catch the bus back to Mlada Boleslav and too late to get a hotel, and so we spent the entire night wandering around Prague. This turned out to be one of the most…pardon the word…magical experiences of my life. As the people disappeared from the streets, the buildings revealed themselves to us, and Prague became more like itself. These were the small hours Lou Reed loved to write about, when sleepless people cross an invisible border from one city into another city, from Besźel to Ul Qoma, and find different versions of themselves.
So how political was Lou Reed? Many left-wing friends shared songs from New York yesterday, especially “Dirty Blvd.” But I would argue that if any political grouping can claim Lou Reed, it’s the libertarians — which is why it is I just ignored Mr. Reed’s politics.
Incidentally, most Czechs I knew when I lived there had no idea who Lou Reed was, and they didn’t seem to care much about any alleged role he played in the Velvet Revolution. I once played the third VU album for my adult students, and they all hated it. This is a purely subjective impression; perhaps in Prague it was different.
12. David Bowie performs “White Light White Heat” with Lou Reed on guitar. Just fun.
13. Lou Reed stood accused of glamorizing heroin use and encouraging other unhealthy, anti-social behaviors. In “It Wasn’t Me,” he responds to those accusations, through the voice of Andy Warhol. (I’m sharing the live version, because it’s powerful, but the following comments are based on the recording.)
On their face, the lyrics deny all responsibility for other people’s behavior: “I didn’t say this had to be/You can’t blame these things on me/It’s wasn’t me/I know she’s dead, it wasn’t me.” But listen to the way Lou’s voice drops as he denies responsibility; listen to the melancholy in the guitar. This is the reasoning mind pitted against conscience; this is cognitive denial of inescapable culpability. Reed and Cale fill that gap with sadness; underneath the lyrics, there’s grief and self-hatred.
We’re back to the split-selves I talked about with “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Perfect Day.” He sings, over and over, “It wasn’t me” — no, it was someone else who did these things, some other bad person who just happens to inhabit the same body, “bad eyes, bad skin, gay and fatty,” as Reed sings in another of the Songs for Drella. Faced with the consequences of our actions, we see danger; we turn and we run; or we turn and we fight. This song contains both the fight and the flight, which is why it works so well to my ears.
Reed could only, I think, have successfully, artistically engaged with this question of culpability in the voice of another man; in other words, by splitting himself in two: “It wasn’t me.” Of course not. Then why do you feel so horrible?
14. Lou Reed was, above all, a model of perseverance — at least for a certain kind of person who cannot take it for granted that life must go on. Lou’s music said: We’re all going to die, so we may as well live; we’re going to disappoint each other, but you can’t stop struggling to connect; we’re all going to fail, but we have to get up and try again. These are peculiarly self-help-y messages from a guy who was typecast as a dirty junkie bard.
In fact, Lou was, from the beginning, something of a positive thinker, and many of his most classic songs are essentially pep talks. His particular appeal — again, for a certain kind of person — is that he was simultaneously awake to the awful things people can do to each other and to the ways in which we can take care of each other. He had a genius for finding the light in the dark and the dark in the light, the good in the evil and the evil in the good. In Lou’s moral universe, good feeling was something you earned, by slogging through the bad feelings. He almost never took goodness for granted (and when he did, the results were artistically disastrous).
My friend Peter said something insightful on Sunday: “What I really loved was the combination of hard and soft. ‘Sunday Morning’ has this beautiful, but ridiculous little tinkly piano. I don’t think I ever thought of it consciously like this, but an underlying message I think I got was that you could be soft and sweet, and still tough and hard. That’s what Lou Reed was.”
Right. Exactly. This is why my own debt to Lou Reed is so strong: He gave me a way see the world that was able to encompass its opposites — and it was a way of seeing that helped me go forward through that murky, jagged gray space that we call, for lack of a better word, life.
15. “Halloween Parade” to me is the best song on New York. And, of course, it is apropos today. [This was published on Halloween day. It’s my last mourning post.]
