“Let me propose something to you. Take the guy who’s singing in the second part of ’Street Hassle,’ who’s saying, ’Hey that’s some bad shit that you came to our place with/But you ought to be a little more careful around those little girls. . . . ’ Now, he may come off as a little cruel, but let’s say he’s also the guy who’s singing the last part about losing love. He’s already lost the one for him. He’s not unaware of those feelings, he’s just handling the situation, that’s all. And who would know better than the guy who lost somebody in a natural way? That’s what my songs are all about: They’re one-to-ones. I just let people eavesdrop on them. Like that line at the end of “Street Hassle’: “Love has gone away/Took the rings right off my fingers/There’s nothing left to say/But oh how I miss him, baby.’ That person really exists. He did take the rings right off my fingers, and I do miss him.”
Lou digs into the pocket of his jacket for his cigarettes. He lights one and gives me a level look. “They’re not heterosexual concerns running through that song,” he says. “I don’t make a deal of it, but when I mention a pronoun, its gender is all-important. It’s just that my gay people don’t lisp. They’re not any more affected than the straight world. They just are. That’s important to me. I’m one of them and I’m right there, just like anybody else. It’s not made anything other than what it is. But if you take me, you’ve got to take the whole thing.”
I’m not sure what to say for the moment, so I sit there, returning his stare. I recall something he said the day before about Delmore Schwartz: “It must have been really incredible to have been good-looking, a poet, and be straight.”
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Lou is in Los Angeles for a series of shows at the Roxy. On the afternoon of his last show, I visit him at his Beverly Hills hotel and find him lying on the floor before the TV, watching a videotape of the previous night’s performance. “Look at that guy,” says Lou, pointing at himself on the screen. “He sure is shameless about occupying his own life.” Lou Reed on the screen turns and looks over his shoulder and smiles at Lou Reed on the floor. Lou Reed on the floor smiles back.
On the screen a jagged tango pulse announces “Street Hassle.” I’ve seen Lou do this song eight times, and each time something remarkable happened to his character—and to the audience. Although several of the people at those shows were hearing it for the first time, they nearly always sat in stunned silence. It was as if Lou were guiding them through a private and treacherous world, the world of Lou Reed’s ethos. To miss this performance is to miss one of the greatest psychodramas in rock & roll.
Lou on the TV screen slicks his hair back now and begins declaiming to some unseen guest about how that guest has been too reckless with his dope, bringing his girlfriend to Lou’s apartment and then fixing her up so carelessly that she overdoses on the spot. “I know this ain’t no way to treat a guest,” says Lou on the screen, “but why don’t you grab your old lady by the feet and lay her out in the darkened street/And by tomorrow morning she’s just another hit-and-run/You know, some people got no choice and they can never find a voice to talk with that they can call their own/So the first thing they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it/You know what it’s called? Bad luck.”
“You know,” says Lou on the floor, turning to me, “every time I’m doing that song, when it gets to that awful last line I never know just how it’s going to come across. ’So the first thing they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it/You know what it’s called?’ And here comes that line and it should punch like a bullet: Bad luck. The point of view of the guy saying that is so awful. But it’s so true. I only realize sometime afterward what Lou Reed’s talking about. I just try to stay out of the way.”
Lou is up on his feet now and decides he wants to ride into Hollywood to find an obscure patch cord for one of his tape decks. Outside, it’s a damp, gray winter day in Los Angeles. “This is the kind of day where, if you were in the Village in New York,” says Lou, “you might go down to some gay bar and see if you can make a new friend.”
As we swing onto Santa Monica Boulevard, Lou injects the tape resting in my cassette player. “We’re the poison in your human machine,” roars Johnny Rotten. “We’re the future—You-rrr future.” Lou has a queasy look on his face. “Shakespeare had a phrase for that,” he says. “ ’Sound and fury signifying nothing.’ I’m so tired of the theory of the noble savage. I’d like to hear punks who weren’t at the mercy of their own rage and who could put together a coherent sentence. I mean, they can get away with ’Anarchy in the U.K.’ and that bullshit, but it hasn’t an eighth the heart or intelligence of something like Garland Jeffreys’ ’Wild in the Streets.’ ”
We arrive at the stereo store, and Lou spends the next hour meticulously picking through accessory bins until he finds the cord he needs. Back in the car we talk a bit about the early Velvets albums. I ask Lou again why it was so hard for him, after he left the group, to maintain his creative momentum. He frames his reply carefully. “It was just an awful period. I had very little control over the records; they were really geared for the money. When I made Coney Island Baby, Ken Glancy, the president of RCA at the time, backed me to the hilt because he knew me. There were rumors that I couldn’t stand tours because I was all fucked up on dope and my mind was going. I put out Metal Machine Music precisely to stop all of it. No matter what people may think of that record, it wasn’t ill-advised at all. It did what it was supposed to do. But it was supposed to do a lot more. I mean, I really believed in it also. That could be ill-advised, I suppose, but I just think it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever done by anybody, anywhere. In time, it will prove itself.”
What made Coney Island Baby such a statement of renewal?
“Because it was my record. I didn’t have much time and I didn’t have much money, but it was mine. There was just me and Rachel [Reed’s male companion of the last several years and the raison d’être of Street Hassle] living at the fucking Gramercy Park Hotel on fifteen dollars a day, while the lawyers were trying to figure out what to do with me. Then, I got a call from Clive Davis [president of Arista Records] and he said, “Hey, how ya doing? Haven’t seen you for a while.’ He knew how I was doing. He said, “Why don’t we have lunch?’ I felt like saying, “You mean you want to be seen with me in public?’ If Clive could be seen with me, I had turned the corner. I grabbed Rachel and said, “Do you know who just called?’ I knew then that I’d won.
“It’s just that turning that corner was really hard. When Ken Glancy backed me, that was step one; when Clive gave me a call, step two; and Street Hassle and Take No Prisoners are like step three. And I think they’re all home runs. I’m a long-term player. Saying “I’m a Coney Island baby’ at the end of that song is like saying I haven’t backed off an inch, and don’t you forget it.”
We arrive back at Lou’s hotel and he invites me in to hear the difference the patch cord makes in his tape deck. Inside, two members of his sound crew are already waiting to take him to the afternoon’s sound check, but Lou wants to play with his machines first. “It’s funny,” he says, sitting on the floor with his miniature speakers sprawled around him, “but maybe the most frightening thing that can be said about me is that I’m so damn sane. Maybe these aren’t my devils at all that people are finding on these records—they’re other people’s. When I start writing about my own, then it could prove really interesting.”
Maybe so, but I can’t help recalling his earlier comment about what a master of the glib remark he is. I think Lou’s been exposing plenty of his devils all along, and I think he knows it. On an earlier occasion, I’d told him his work sometimes reminded me of that of Diane Arbus, the late photographer known principally for her studies of desolate and deformed subjects. Lou recoiled instantly at the suggestion. “Her subject matter’s grotesque,” he said. “I don’t consider mine grotesque. To show the inherent deformity in normally formed people is what I’m interested in, not in showing beauty in deform
ity.”
By saying that, Lou seems to be saying he knows exactly what devils he’s after, and that he won’t pass them off on anyone as angels.
If Lou Reed has accomplished nothing else, that victory alone would be moral enough.
AFTER THE HARROWING scenarios of his 1978 masterwork, Street Hassle, Lou Reed began working to counteract his profligate image—or perhaps simply to reveal more of the real sensibility behind his songs. The first glimpses came in his 1979 album, The Bells (in some ways, his most resourceful work), during “Families”—a song about a son speaking to his hardened parents across a chasm of mutual heartbreak: “And no no no no no, I still haven’t got married,” Reed sang in a pain-filled quaver, “And no no no, there’s no grandson planned here for you. . . . And I don’t think I’ll come home much anymore.” With The Bells, Lou Reed fulfilled—maybe even laid to rest—a longstanding ethos: one of grim choices and unsparing accountability. A song like “Families” sounded as if it used up the whole of Reed’s emotional being. It didn’t seem possible that either his art or his life could ever be the same again. In fact, they couldn’t.
Reed moved deeper into the theme of familial fatalism—the fear, hate, and defeat that parents too often bequeath upon their children as their most lasting and bitter legacy—on the following year’s album, Growing Up in Public. But Growing Up in Public was also an album about summoning up high-test courage: the courage to love, and along with it, the will to forgive everybody who—and everything that—ever cut short your chances in the first place. On Growing Up, Reed’s material bridged the difficult chasm between moral narrative and unadulterated autobiography. In part, the new compositions were about Reed’s decision to marry again—a decision that flabbergasted many of the people who’d pegged him as a middle-aged, intractable gay—but they were also seared recollections of the prime forces that almost fated him. In “My Old Man,” he railed at the memory of a Karamazov-like father in a burst of near-patricidal rage: “And when he beat my mother/It made me so mad I could choke . . . /And can you believe what he said to me/He said, ’Lou, act like a man.’ ” And Reed did act like a man. He shattered the album’s claustrophobic web of hatred and self-defeat—perhaps the most frightening he’d ever constructed, because it was also the most universal—by choosing to run the same risk at which his parents failed: the risk of the heart. “When you ask for somebody’s heart,” he sang in that album’s most tender moment, “You must know that you’re smart/Smart enough to care for it.” It was hardly a detached lyric: On Valentine’s Day, 1980, Reed married Sylvia Morales, and for a time, both his life and music seemed deepened by the union.
Indeed, several of the records that Reed made during that marriage—including The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, and New Sensations—were tough-willed statements of personal love as the only remaining act of defiance, and as such, they also worked as a reexamination of his earlier mores. In “Heavenly Arms,” he made the act sound like nothing less than an urgent and vital good fight: “Lovers stand warned/Of the world’s impending storm.” But in such songs as “Legendary Hearts” and “Home of the Brave,” Reed fully expressed the difficulty of trying to integrate the frustrations and limitations of his distant past and the reality of his fiery temperament with the knowledge that real love requires constant recommitment—demands, in fact, a daily renewal to a struggle of uphill faith. “The thing about love,” he told me back during our 1979 and 1980 conversations, “is that it isn’t logical. You don’t necessarily love what’s logical or good for you. Believe me, I know. At the same time, that’s the beauty of love—when you’re passionately caring for the welfare of somebody beyond yourself.” Then he laughed. “Maybe what we’re talking about is the touch of an angel’s wing. And the possibility of transcendence.”
In time, Reed’s marriage to Morales ended, and as I write these words in 1997, it is reported that he has recently been quite happy with artist and singer Laurie Anderson (talk about a meeting of the minds). In the 1990s, Reed has continued to make strong, vital, and imaginative records—including New York, Songs for Drella (an elegy to Andy Warhol, co-written with former Velvets partner John Cale), Magic and Loss, and Set the Twilight Reeling. He also briefly re-formed the Velvet Underground in the early 1990s, making—oddly enough—for the only truly unaffecting music that remarkable group ever produced.
After all my years of listening to and loving popular music, I can say that—along with Bob Dylan—Lou Reed remains my favorite rock & roll artist; indeed, along with Dylan, he is probably the only artist who has grown and weathered so well, and whose lapses are even something to pore over, time and again, in wonder. If I had to pick my favorite lines he has ever written, they would be these: “It was good what we did yesterday/And I’d do it once again/The fact that you are married/Only proves you’re my best friend/But it’s truly, truly a sin” (from 1969’s “Pale Blue Eyes”). Also, these: “With a daytime of sin and a nighttime of hell/Everybody’s going to look for a bell to ring” (from 1979’s “All through the Night”). It seems to me that in his best music—even in his darkest, most brokenhearted reveries—Lou Reed has always rung a bell, loud and clear, pealing a clarion call of hope that the glory of love, despite (or because of) our daytimes of sin and nighttimes of hell, might see us all through yet.
brothers: the allman brothers band
Some say there was a ghost. Some unkind spirit, the rumor went, had clambered up out of a dark legacy of death and bad news, and had attached itself to the Allman Brothers Band, like a mean dog trailing its quarry, until it had dragged the band down into the dust of its own dreams.
Maybe the group had attracted the spirit on one of those late nights more than a generation before, when various band members would gather in the Rose Hill Cemetery, not far from where the Allman Brothers lived in Macon, Georgia. The story is, they drank wine and whiskey there, smoked dope, took psychedelics, played and wrote dark, obsessive blues songs, and laid their Southern girlfriends across sleek tombstones on humid, heat-thick Southern nights, and made love to warm, twitching bodies that were laying only a few feet above other bodies, long prone and long cold. Maybe on one of those occasions, in some ungodly moment in which sex and hallucinations and blues all mixed and formed an unwitting invocation, an insatiable specter was raised, and decided to stay close to the troubled and vulnerable souls that had summoned it. Or maybe it was something even older and meaner that trailed the Allmans—something as old as the hellions and hellhounds that were said to haunt Southern rural crossroads on moonless nights.
Yes, some say there was a ghost. Some even say they witnessed that ghost—or at least, witnessed how palpable it was for those who had to live with the effects of its haunts. There are stories about late night reveries in the early 1970s, when the band’s most famous member would sit in darkened hotel rooms, watching early morning TV, brooding. By this time, the Allman Brothers Band was the most successful pop group in America—in fact, the band had played for the largest audience ever assembled in the nation’s history. But perhaps that success was never enough to stave off fears that there was yet more that this band was destined to lose.
In those postmidnight funks, the blond blues singer sat and watched TV, sometimes horror movies with the sound down. An empty chair was sometimes close by. To at least one visitor, the singer insisted that a spirit sat in that chair—and that he knew that spirit well. In fact, he said, he and the ghost were on a first-name basis. He and the ghost even shared the same last name.
WALK INTO A room to meet the surviving members of the original Allman Brothers Band, and you walk into the midst of a complex shared history. It is a spooky, gothic story of family ties—of both blood brotherhood and chosen brotherhood—and it is also a story of amazing prodigies, dogged by amazingly bad fortune. Indeed, the four men seated in this room—keyboardist Gregg Allman, guitarist Dickey Betts, and drummers Jai Jaimoe and Butch Trucks—are people who helped make history: They once personified what rock & roll and blues could a
chieve in those forms’ grandest moments of musical imagination, and they also once played a significant role in the American South’s social and political history. But like anybody who has made history that matters, the members of the Allman Brothers were also bruised by that history. They do not seem like men who are unduly arrogant or proud; rather, they seem like men who have learned that proud moments can later form the heart of indelibly painful memories.
It has been several years since these musicians have recorded together, but on this sultry afternoon in mid-spring, as they gather in the lounge at Miami’s Criteria Studios, they are beginning the final work on Seven Turns—a record that they boldly claim is their most important and accomplished work since 1973’s Brothers and Sisters. In many ways, this is an adventure they never thought they would share. In 1983, after a restive fourteen-year history, the Allman Brothers dissolved into the caprices of pop history. The band had broken up before—in the mid-1970s, on rancorous terms—but this time they quit because the pop world no longer wanted them. “We had been credited as being a flagship band,” says Dickey Betts, pulling nervously at his mustache, his eyes taking a darting scan of the other faces in the room. “All of a sudden managers and record company people were telling us that we should no longer use terms like ’Southern Rock,’ or that we couldn’t wear hats or boots onstage, that it was embarrassing to a modern audience. We finally decided we couldn’t meet the current trends—that if we tried, we were going to make fools out of ourselves playing disco music, and ruin any integrity we had left. Looking back, splitting up was the best thing we could have done. We would have ruined whatever pleasant images people had of us by trudging along.”
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