Lou Reed

A walk on the wild side

Lou Reed, songwriter and musician, died on October 27th, aged 71
Nov 2nd 2013 | From the print edition

HE HAD to get there, wherever it was. Wade through seas of blood if necessary, like
Macbeth. Or, in his case, wade through New York streets filled with rain-soaked mattresses,
prostitutes, transvestites, exploding Uzis and men selling heroin at $26 a time. You had to
push past the rage to get to the light, fight past the flames to get to the open door. And if
you found a bit of magic in that wonderful fire, then some loss would even things out.
The world of Lou Reed was one of continuous contradictions, a good thing cancelled by a
bad thing, and vice versa. His music heavily influenced the rock and punk bands that
followed him, so much so that he was said to have revolutionised the scene; but he and the
Velvet Underground, the band he formed and led from 1965 to 1970, never sold that many
records. He stayed subversive, a dark force, a cult. Parents did not approve of him, if they
even knew. His songs became the soundtrack of lives as raddled by drugs and sex as his
was; but also, when smuggled by Vaclav Havel into Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, the
underground anthems of liberty.
He sang of drug overdoses in lurid detail, blood [shooting] up the droppers neck. He
mused dreamily on fellatio and random coloured girls, doo de-doo de-doo. When Havel
wanted to take him as a guest-performer to Bill Clintons White House at the height of the

Monica Lewinski scandal, aides paled at the prospect. But he also produced in Perfect
Day, his most popular song, an apparent hymn to sweet, simple, times:
Just a perfect day
Drink sangria in the park
And then later, when it gets dark
We go home
Lines so innocent could not mean what they said; and, sure enough, the kicker came:
You made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else
Someone good
The last line, many times repeated, was: Youre going to reap/just what you sow.
Everything had its opposite, just as the euphoria of the spike in the vein, when he felt like
Jesuss son, was followed by the low. His style was often to mismatch melody and words,
or sing flat, or comment as if he was on the sidelines, rather than in the song. Critics
struggled to grasp what he was up to, but he couldnt have cared about their receptions,
deceptions, hellos, goodbyes, huzzahs, hurrahs. He wrote for himself, and if it was ugly to
others, you think what youre making is beautiful.
At his best, as on the Transformer album, his songs could be lyrical, as well as witty and
sharp; at his worst, he was just dissonant and tedious. The first song that got him into
trouble, The Black Angels Death Song, which the Velvet Underground performed once
too often (having been told not to) at the Caf Bizarre in Greenwich Village in 1965, was a
long toneless lyric over screeching electric viola. (Happily, though, it caught Andy Warhols
attention, and hanging out at Warhols Factory made the band famous.) His album Metal
Machine Music (1975), forced out of him (it was said) by a recording contract, was four
sides of feedback from an electric guitar. He said he knew no one who had listened to the
whole thing.
The man could be just as perplexing, and played it up. Was he really a badass city boy? In
fact he came from the New York suburbs, and for two yearsbetween leaving the Velvet
Underground in 1970 and making his first solo albums, helped by David Bowie, in 1972
he worked as a typist in his fathers accountancy firm. Did he really take so many drugs?
No, he didnt take them at all (he blurrily told a circle of reporters at Sydney airport in 1974),
but he thought everyone else should, because they were better than Monopoly. Was he
homosexual? He had a very public transvestite love affair once; in the mid-1970s he
adopted leather jackets and short blonde curls; later he wore nail varnish and mascara. But
there were heterosexual marriages too, paired with romantic songs.
The twisted stars
He was clever, and a poet; that was a fact he wanted everyone to know.

Caught between the twisted stars

The plotted lines the faulty map
That brought Columbus to New York
Betwixt between the East and West
At Syracuse University (briefly subdued by electric-shock treatment ordered by his parents)
he had studied English; after that he went to Pickwick Records to write hit songs to order,
which he found he couldnt do. He approached his lyrics like a novelist, he said, or as
Tennessee Williams might have done. Shakespearean echoes were everywhere (though
You cant be Shakespeare and you cant be Joyce/So what is left instead/Youre stuck with
yourself, he had concluded).
Tantalised by literary greatness, but labelled as a rock musician, he was crushingly rude to
those who tried to analyse him. He preferred to leave them in confusion. Perhaps, as his
songs said, he wanted to nullify life; or perhaps, contrariwise, he was high on it. The world
he sang of was very often vicious, decadent and dirty. But, he said later, My heart was
pure and my soul was pure too, as he passed through the fire to wherever he was going.
From the print edition: Obituary