For Scott Lemieux and Brian Koppelman.
I was a very poorly socialized child. After my incredibly obese toddlerhood, I assumed the more or less regular dimensions of a boy. But I had issues. I had not started speaking in English until well after I turned three (up until that point I communicated with my mother in a made-up language) and once I began attending school, teachers noticed some problems, including a lack of physical coordination that suggested to them that I was “spastic.” My inability to connect with my peers led me to act out (not vandalism or anything, just spending entire schooldays speaking in a fake British accent) and I was submitted to a bunch of physical and psychological tests and assigned to a social worker. I mention all this not to elicit sympathy but to demonstrate why, as the early 1970s and my early teens rolled around, I was completely ready for Lou Reed.
I’d been reading about him and his work in Creem and Rolling Stone for a little while when Berlin came out in 1973, when I was going on 14. I think it was the first Reed album I bought, and I got the relatively deluxe first pressing that came with that fancy libretto printed on very thick paper and illustrated with photographs depicting scenes in the album’s loose narrative. I was of course intrigued by the whole thing but also vaguely disappointed—where were those guitars I had heard so much about. Then I got Transformer, and there they were, and there they were too on White Light/White Heat, so shit started working out.
Lou Reed’s was the first rock show I saw by myself, early October 1974, at the luxurious Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. Up until this point my dad had been pretty generous with his time and disposable income, indulging my Teenage Lust For Rock by taking me to shows. We had seen Ten Wheel Drive at Creskill High School and then he offered to take me to a show in “the city.” I thought about Zeppelin at the Garden, but blanched at the thought of sitting through “The Lemon Song” with my dad (I imagine there would have been plenty more to blanche at), so I settled for Delaney and Bonnie at Carnegie Hall, which my dad dug because he liked King Curtis. (We had no idea at the time that the guitarist in that band was Duane Allman.) As far as Lou Reed was concerned, I was on my own. My folks dropped me off outside the venue and told me to be outside again at 11:30, no ifs ands or buts.
It was an evening of discovery for me in many ways. On the line to get in, many dirty filthy hippie types chatted. “What do you think of the new album,” one asked a companion. “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten into it yet.” That was the first time I’d heard the phrase “gotten into it.” (The new album was Sally Can’t Dance, a record that vexed Lester Bangs mightily.) Inside the hall, I was distracted by the smell of pot and the sight of young braless women in diaphanous tops silhouetted in the entrance to the ladies’ room. I hated openers Hall and Oates, who were flogging their own “concept album,” War Babies and who, to my mind, WOULDN’T GET OFF THE STAGE. (Years later I experienced a similar irritation when R.E.M. opened for Gang of Four at the Ritz, and I have to admit that I never quite got over it.) Reed’s set was perfunctory, even the distasteful theatrical bits—this was the tour on which he simulated shooting up during “Heroin.” Near the end of the show some schmuck screamed “’Sister Ray’!!!” to which Lou replied, in the evening’s sole bit of stage patter, “Go fuck yourself.” I had to leave before the encore.
I remained a Reed devotee, to the extent that I actually became a professional rock critic. And as a professional rock critic, yea, even well before I achieved that status, I hewed to the standard critical line that John Cale was a better, more ambitious, more interesting overall solo artist than Lou Reed was. While all the time really just wanting Lou Reed to make great solo albums.
Eventually the rock critic paradigm broke down. Exhibit A, 1984 saw the release of Lou Reed’s New Sensations and John Cale’s Caribbean Sunset. But I’m not here to re-litigate an old and probably boring case that’s among other things unfair to both Cale and Reed. Rather, I’m here to offer a unified field theory of Lou Reed solo albums, which is that they are all great and that while one might contain better “material” or “songs” than another, each one is an incredibly valuable component in a life’s work that is in fact best considered as a life’s work.
The thing that turned me around is not a 20th century release but rather a 21st century collection of 20th century recordings, that is, the box set Lou Reed: The RCA and Arista Recordings. I sprung for it on release, in October of last year, and I went through the 17 discs in chronological order at home, but it was really through spinning its 148 songs with my iPod on shuffle and discovering, to my surprise, that I did not feel like skipping a single one. Even the songs I didn’t like were telling me something, something worth hearing, something worth weighing—about Reed, sure, but also about the city that we shared. The world we shared. And so on. I came upon songs that I had slept on—“High in the City” from New Sensations, “My Old Man” from Growing Up in Public—that suddenly struck me as no-qualifications great. I got out from under the influence of Peter Laughner with respect to Coney Island Baby. And more. And found each song was best experienced in the context of the other 147 songs in a way that I’ve never experienced with another artist. Good, bad, very bad, or indifferent, the work creates a world unto itself.
Of course I am hardly the only person to perceive this. Alexis Petridis, in his very astute December 2016 review of the set, cites a Reed quote in which the artist likens his run of albums to a book: “Every record a chapter … Listen to it in order, there’s my great American novel.” Petridis then outlines the narrative, which sees Our Hero “crashing into frustrating dead ends.” Indeed, or maybe even driving into walls at full speed with eyes wide open. The only mistake Reed made in his self-assessment, and I can’t blame him, is saying “great American novel” rather than “great American autobiography.”
Reed’s greatest glory as an artist also happened to be his Achilles’ heel. To go back to Cale for a minute, Reed’s former Velvet Underground bandmate was, like so many rock artists, adept at pulling off personae, from the refined classically-trained artiste of Paris 1919 to the studio-rock renegade of Slow Dazzle. And, of course, in the many phases of Cale’s career his persona would at times directly reflect the perilous state in which he was himself living. But Lou Reed, no matter how many looks he tried on, no matter how many story-songs about other people he wrote, could ultimately never present as anybody but himself. (This comes out not just in the overt content of the songs but in the way he strains and shifts his vocalizations, his disinclination to follow strict rhyme schemes or adhere to meter, his phrasing either slack or micro-beat accurate.) And very often his self was of course his own worst enemy. When the work reflects this, as it has to, it reflects it in ways that can be mortifying, exasperated, embarrassing, but when you are fully committed to getting through these patches, you don’t feel these things in a way that’s detached from Reed, you feel that way with him. Dylan’s “I Threw it All Away” could be this set’s theme, except that for every willful perverse loss there follows some kind of corresponding gain. Without the tossed-off cynicism of Rock and Roll Heart you won’t get the buckled-down complexity of Side A of Street Hassle. Without all but giving up guitar completely for Growing up in Public (a bid for Bruce Springsteen/Billy Joel style credibility that Reed had to somehow know was the last thing he wanted or needed), you wouldn’t have the triumphant picking up of the guitar, alongside Robert Quine, on The Blue Mask. And in spite of all these contrasts there is, if you listen with a certain ear, no actual diffusion from the whole. Whether this makes Reed actually unique among rock artists I can’t say. But it certainly makes him massive, and always massively moving.
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