And so Jim Morrison died, and then, with the help of former friends, band members, and biographers, pulled off the perfect comeback: the sort of comeback in which the singer and his band might never disappoint our renewed faith, because there would be no new music, no new art, no new statements to test their continued growth or our continuing perceptiveness. In short, it was a comeback in which Morrison would be eternally heroic, eternally loved, and eternally marketable.
Of course, it’s probably a bit graceless to beat up too much on a dead man—especially one who already beat up on himself plenty during life. And so, let’s allow Jim Morrison his posthumous victory: If, in some regards, he was perhaps just a bit too mean-spirited or selfish to be an easy hero of the 1960s, he has certainly proven to be in step with the temper of the last decade or so. Never mind that he threw away his greatest visions and potential in an endless swirl of drugs, alcohol, insecurity, and unkindness, and never mind that he is dead. Never mind, because in the end, death has been this rock & roll hero’s most redeeming and most rewarding friend.
PART 3
remaking the territories
lou reed: darkness and love
Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock ’n’ 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 SCREEM
I met myself in a dream
And I just want to tell you, everything was all right.
LOU REED
“BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT”
Seated in the dusky shadows of a San Francisco 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 memo note, Take No Prisoners is the letter that should’ve gone with it.
“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 grimness. 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 of the 1940s), 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.
In the context of the late-sixties hippie/Samaritan rock scene, the group seemed, to many observers, positively malignant. “I remember,” says Reed, “reading descriptions of us as the “fetid underbelly of urban existence.’ All I wanted to do was write songs that somebody like me could relate to. I got off on the Beatles and all that stuff, but why not have a little something on the side for the kids in the back row? At the worst, we were like antedated realists. At the best, we just hit a little more home than some things.”
In the case of the Velvet Underground’s first album, nominally produced by Andy Warhol, that viewpoint was presented as a remarkably ripened and self-contained group persona. Songs like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Run, Run, Run,” and “Heroin” depict a leering, gritty vision of urban life that, until the Velvets, had rarely been alluded to—much less exalted—in popular music.
The Velvet Underground, of course, would go on to have a profound—probably incalculable—impact on modern popular music. Indeed, next to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones, the Velvets were one of the most influential white rock forces of the 1960s. David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, Elliott Murphy, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Television, Joy Division, Jim Carroll, R.E.M., and countless others would borrow from and extend the Velvet Underground’s sound and vision, though none of them would ever fully match the original group’s inventive depths and astonishing courage. The band’s first three albums, The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), White Light/White Heat (1968), and The Velvet Underground (1969) are works that stand strongly
alongside Revolver, Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Blonde on Blonde, and John Wesley Harding as some of the most intelligent and illuminating music of the era.
But back in the milieu of the often skin-deep positivism and florid experimentalism of the late 1960s, the Velvet Underground’s unswerving hardbitten temper, dissolute romanticism, and abrasive improvisations were, as Reed noted, viewed as “downer” elements, and the group itself was seen as a pack of sick party spoilers. I remember that several of my friends during that period—who shared my love for rock & roll—wouldn’t stay in the same room when a Velvet Underground record hit the stereo. (One friend even scratched up the song “Heroin” because of what he termed its “counterrevolutionary nihilism.”)
All together, the Velvets’ catalog would sell something less than 50,000 copies during the time the band was together.
BY THE VELVETS’ fourth album, 1970’s Loaded, financial problems and lack of recognition prompted Reed to quit the band. He embarked on a solo career that became so spotty it seemed irreconcilable with the promise of his earlier work. After finally achieving commercial success in 1972 with “Walk on the Wild Side” (from Transformer, co-produced by David Bowie), Reed immediately began to test his audience’s endurance. First he grilled them with the much-maligned Berlin narrative, then later with Metal Machine Music. In between, there were the hits, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal and Sally Can’t Dance (the latter actually went Top 10), records he now denounces as trivial, commercial contrivances.
Then, in 1976, after a brief, tempestuous marriage (the fodder for Berlin) and increasingly strained relationships with his manager and producer—brothers Dennis and Steve Katz—Reed rebounded. He disengaged himself from Dennis Katz, assembled a stoical, one-shot band, and recorded Coney Island Baby, his most personal set of songs since his days with the Velvets. Following that, he left RCA Records for Arista and last year delivered Street Hassle—a jolting statement of self-affirmation—and now is about to release The Bells, which he thinks will surpass Take No Prisoners and which features a few songs co-written with Nils Lofgren. It would seem that Reed’s gifts of vision and expression are fully revivified and newly honed to a lethal edge.
Sitting in the bar, as a last flush of rain washes away the daylight outside, I figure both of us have had enough to drink for me to ask about where those lost years went. As a way of broaching the subject, I quote a passage from Rolling Stone’s review of Street Hassle, in which Tom Carson describes Reed’s decline as a degeneration into “a crude, death-trip clown.” It sobers Reed right up. He smiles grimly and glances around the room. “That’s not for me to comment on, is it? Obviously it’s someone else’s construction.”
After a taut moment, he reconsiders. “Let me tell you a little story,” he says. “It comes from a collection of personal prose that my friend, the late poet Delmore Schwartz, wrote, called Vaudeville for a Princess. In this one chapter he’s talking about driving a car, and how as a youngster he had driven one as contemporary as he was; in other words, the year he was driving it was the year of the car’s model. Subsequently, as he got older and fortune, perhaps, didn’t smile upon him as he wished it would, the car he would drive was not at all of the same year as he was driving it, but it would be older—five, ten years older. Eventually, we get around to a time fifteen years later and he felt he was making progress because the car he was driving was only two years older than the year in which he was driving it. As a slight tangent, he makes mention not to mock him over this because he, too, has seen visions of glory and ticker-tape parades in New York City. Anyway, he’s now at last out driving this car that’s almost contemporary with his time, so he’s obviously progressing. But he observes that nobody is with him to take note of the event, because he didn’t have a license and his erratic driving reflected the fact that “life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous.’ ”
Lou pauses and smiles curtly. “Life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous. I’ve probably had more of a chance to make an asshole out of myself than most people, and I realize that. But then not everybody gets a chance to live out their nightmares for the vicarious pleasures of the public.”
EARLIER IN OUR conversations, during the tour that spawned Take No Prisoners, Lou and I meet in the same bar. Instead of his usual playfully testy demeanor, he seems sullen, almost solitary. “This is one of those days,” he says, taking a seat at a corner table, “where everything’s going to go wrong.”
At first Reed’s mood is hard to place, since his shows of the night before had clearly been fervently fought successes. But then I recall that when he’d come out for his second show, he found his guitar out of tune and threw it angrily to the floor in the middle of the opening number, cracking its body. “I could’ve cried then,” he says, “but I don’t really care now. I use my moods. I get into one of these dark, melancholy things and I just milk it for everything I can. I know I’ll be out of it soon and I won’t be looking at things the same way. For every dark mood, I also have a euphoric opposite. I think they say that manic-depressives go as high as they go down, which isn’t to say that I’m really depressive.”
Since Lou in his dark moods, though, is probably Lou at his most reflective, I decide to ask him how this affects his songwriting. He’s said in the past that he never writes from a personal point of view, that he has “nothing remotely in common with the Lou Reed character.” Indeed, much of his work, especially Berlin, seems the product of a detached observer, with no stake in the outcome of his characters’ lives and no moral interest in their choices. But Coney Island Baby and Street Hassle seem as revelatory and personal as anything in seventies music. Isn’t the real Lou Reed in there someplace?
Lou sits quietly for several moments, studying a gold-plated lighter cupped in his hands. When he speaks, it’s in a soft, murmuring voice. “There are some severe little tangent things in my songs that remove them from me, but, ah, yes, they’re very personal. I guess the Lou Reed character is pretty close to the real Lou Reed, to the point, maybe, where there’s really no heavy difference between the two, except maybe a piece of vinyl. I keep hedging my bet, instead of saying that’s really me, but that is me, as much as you can get on record.”
Lou signals the waitress over to order a double Johnnie Walker straight. He seems to be coming alive a bit to the idea of conversation, his eyes studying me as he talks. “I have songs about killing people, but Dostoevski killed people, too. In reality I might not do what a character in my songs would, if only because I’d be jailed. It goes back to when I began to write songs—I didn’t see why the form should be looked upon as restrictive, although since then I’ve seen the resistance it can generate. But that’s only if you lose your impetus.
“In my own writing, for instance, I’m very good at the glib remark that may not mean something if you examine it closely, but it still sounds great. It’s like a person who can argue either side of a question with equal passion, but what do they really think? They might not think anything, so you might not get to know them.”
Lou spots a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle on a nearby table and fetches it to show me a review of his concert the night before. He turns momentarily livid. The reviewer, Lou is quick to point out, spent most of his space denouncing the ticket price ($9.50 at the door) and Reed’s take (reportedly $7,500 a night) before commenting on his “unmusical manner,” “incoherent lyrics,” and his spawning of “sick-rock.”
I recall that the Velvet Underground received similar reviews when they played the West Coast. “When we left New York,” says Lou, “we were shocked that we were such a big deal. For anyone who goes to movies or reads anything, why should we have been shocking? One reason, I guess, is that singing a rock & roll song is a very real thing; it’s accessible on an immediate level, more so than a book or movie. People assume that what’s on a record applies to the person singing it and they find that shocking, although they can pick up the newspaper and read things far more shocking.
“Maybe one of the reasons my stuff doesn’t have mass appeal is that it does approach people on a personal level. It assumes a certain agreement of mores, or if not an agreement, then at least an awareness on the listener’s part. But with somebody like this—”Lou slaps the review with the back of his hand—” it’s just deemed incoherent and offensive from the top. Unmusical manner, he spits. “What a great phrase to be used by such a poor writer. It’s like saying Philip Marlowe was unsavory.
“Anyway, there wasn’t anything like us at the time of the Velvet Underground. There still isn’t. “Heroin’ is just as right on the nose now as it was ten years ago. Shocking? I suppose, but I always thought it was kind of romantic.”
Romantic?
“Yes, because it’s not really like that at all,” he replies. “There’s not that much strain in that world. I’ve had kids come up to me and say, “You turned me on to junk because of that song.’ Well, you can’t concern yourself with being a parent for the world. People deserve the right to be what they’re going to be, both in the positive and pejorative sense. I just wish they’d see that you can’t evolve through someone else.”
But one thing that disturbs people about Reed’s music, I note, is its lack of what might be called a moral stance. Lou shrugs his nose in disdain. “It’s simply professional detachment,” he says. “I’m not spinning around in the caldron of it all with no viewpoint. There is a viewpoint, although it’s mainly the view that that’s the way things are. Take it or leave it. The thing that allows a lot of my characters to leave it is something that ends up negating them.
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