As this is nominally a pop site, it may seem a bit off to pay tribute to Lou Reed, a man who notched few indisputable hits. But like many of the greats, Reed flashed a number of faces. In a career spanning nearly half a century, he tossed off FM rock staples, delicate compositions with a proto-twee sensitivity, arch portraits of NYC life, and punishing noise — often, of course, mixing these elements into the same song. As has been noted since his passing, he (along with his cohorts in the Velvet Underground) was a star without the standard trappings of stardom: something to which we became accustomed in the college-rock boom, and certainly a fact of existence in the 21st-century blogosphere.
It has also been written that Reed worked without compromise. That’s not entirely true: his final album with the Velvets was named in wry reference to their label’s request that the record be “loaded with hits”. Additionally, Reed’s introduction to the music industry was as a hired songwriting goon, an occupation he shared with many Jukebox alumni. His labels pushed songs to radio, he taped music videos, he even reunited with the original Velvet Underground lineup for an intermittent series of gigs in the ‘90s. Still, there is no denying his caprice, which was just as likely to see him follow a (relatively) huge hit with four sides of looping feedback at it was to see him follow four sides of looping feedback with a hooky pop LP.
As a musical stylist, Reed was most daring on those four epochal Velvet Underground records. (Proper due must be paid to the contributions of John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Moe Tucker — and yes, Doug Yule.) Each LP was a departure from the previous, and each LP was influential in its own way to a different crop of successors across the globe. As a solo concern, Reed wore the mantle of New York Artist with honor — he was a Brooklyn kid who kept his birth name, unlike all those émigré punks who flocked to the city in his creative wake. To the end, Lou did as he pleased. He devoted entire albums to Edgar Allan Poe and Frank Wedekind. He attended performances by New York’s hopefuls. He kept an ear to the culture at large while holding fast to his irascible, sardonic, tender muses. Here are some of our writers’ favorite Lou Reed moments.
Ian Mathers on “European Son”
In a lot of ways, “European Son” isn’t even that good of a song. In 1967, this was a radical way to send out your debut album, I’m sure: a minute of tense intro riffing (from both guitar and Lou Reed), a garbage can falls down a stairwell, glass breaks, and then nearly seven minutes of medium-aimless garage band ramalama. The Velvets themselves would top it within a year with the superior-in-every-way “Sister Ray,” and decades of guitar freakouts since make “European Son” sound a little milquetoast (as just one example, the Wedding Present’s “Take Me!” follows pretty much the same structure to much greater effect). The bulk of “European Son,” while compelling in its scratchy, febrile intensity, doesn’t really build to anything or go anywhere. Several times, it feels like the band is trying to right itself, or just figure out how to get out of a holding pattern. The preceding “The Black Angel’s Death Song” feels more radical now, might even feel like a more appropriate closer. And yet…
My dad, whose taste and record collection defined a lot of what was available to me as a kid, isn’t a big Velvet Underground fan, or a Lou Reed one for that matter. He loves Rock and Roll Animal and New York but Lou never colonized my musical imagination as a child the way Van Morrison or the Talking Heads or Neil Young or the Clash or the Allman Brothers Band did. Once I started reading about music I certainly knew of him, but I never had much direct experience of his work, I didn’t lionize him that way; he was just (“just”) someone who made possible a lot of what I listened to, not someone I listened to in his own right. Certainly I remember hearing “Heroin” for the first time, seeing the creepy video for “No Money Down,” reading about how unapologetically dickish (or just unwilling to play the game?) he could be. I didn’t love everything I heard from or about him, but I respected him as one of the giants. I even respected the way he could be so easy to dislike; there seemed to be less need to kill yr idols with Lou just because he was so prickly. Even after I could comfortably say I was a Velvet Underground fan and had more respect than love for most of his solo stuff, there was a kind of distance there: a giant, but not one of my giants.
When I picked up the first Velvet Underground record (because I was still young and it was One of the Greats You Had to Grapple With… thankfully I wound up loving it anyway) I don’t know what I expected but it certainly wasn’t the gentle “Sunday Morning.” And then it certainly wasn’t “European Son,” which seemed both more and less extreme than I wanted. But despite not noticing that I liked it for quite a while, the song loomed large in my memory. (And not just John Cale’s bassline, which is actually pretty catchy.) Specifically four seconds of it: 0:58-1:02, that trashcan breaking a window. In my memory that bit spread over the rest; surely, “European Son” was some sort of crazily abstract wall of noise? It isn’t. But those moments, strangely addictive, opened a door for me. Whether or not you ever want to hear “Walk on the Wild Side” again, that’s one thing a lot of Reed’s work did, because of when and how and with whom he did it. He’s a figure who provided the genesis for whole careers, even subgenres, in just one song, and he did it countless times. He’s responsible for a lot of the noisier stuff I listen to not just in an ancestral sense, but in a personal one; without following up on my reaction to “European Son” I never would have discovered or developed that part of my taste. The last I’d heard from or about him was that he was healthy; when my wife texted me Sunday to say he’d died I couldn’t muster much more than “WHAT.” He just seemed like he would always be around, and not in that way like you wish Bob Dylan would stop making albums. But he was human, of course; what’s still around are all the doors he opened, and all the ones he’ll open for future listeners.
Rebecca Gowns on “Candy Says”
This is what Candy Darling does when she’s not “taking a walk on the wild side”: she sits in quiet places and thinks about her body and death and decay and tiny kernels of possibility.
When I “discovered” the Velvet Underground around the age of 16, I was also preoccupied with those thoughts, mulling them over in very similar dreadful quiet places. The anxiety that I had lived with for most of my life as a low background hum had sharpened in adolescence; turned into a sea urchin in my pocket that brushed against me throughout the day. And it grew bigger at night, in my dark, blank room, lying in bed with the words that my stepdad had yelled at me earlier, wondering what it would be like if we had money, or if I was allowed to hang out with other kids after school.
My stepdad and my dad were both worried about what could happen to a young girl in a strange place, and they tried to prevent me from going anywhere or doing anything because of it. Little did they know that things were already happening — in school. Cornered in abandoned hallways between classes, fistfuls of my skin grabbed in dark empty rooms. By the age of 16, I was coming to a realization: “I hate my body and all that it requires in this world.”
I couldn’t believe those words coming out of Doug Yule’s mouth. That was it. Exactly. The first words of the first track of my first Velvet Underground album, and I felt as if I was hit by a dart, dead-center. “I do hate my body. I can’t understand all that it requires in this world. I don’t understand why my body is so pliable and its contents so fragile. I would like to know completely what others so discreetly talk about. I do hate the endless revisions in my mind. How does he know what it’s like to be vulnerable, wistful, resigned, and yet so determined at the same time?”
Maybe it was all Candy; maybe Lou Reed wrote it down verbatim. At the very least, he created the river on which the words arrived: lullaby guitars and friendly echoes. This song is like staring into the abyss with a friend who’s right behind you and holding you tight.
Which is just the sort of gift that a 16-year-old girl needs — especially as she, like Candy, discovers what it means to be a woman.
Anthony Easton on “Jesus”
Lou Reed’s early work — the work with the VU and the solo work, has a reputation for being jaded and incapable of sincerity. It might be the Andy Warhol covers, the laconic delivery, the references to drag queens, the heroin-infused affectlessness — and so listening to something like “Jesus,” the critic’s response is to retreat to irony or metaphor. He is making fun of Christ, or he is using the mimetic power of Christian ecstasy. The drone and return of the music suggests that this might also be the case.
But listening to either Glenn Campbell’s death-rattling version (on Meet Glen Campbell) or listening to Elizabeth Cook’s mostly traditional Gospel Plow EP, where “Jesus” is the last track after “These Men of God” — it makes me wonder what the implications are of reading the song as respectful. Perhaps more than respectful: maybe even pious. What does it mean, that a secular Jew writes or performs this song of such gravitas that it cannot be taken as anything but serious by people who take their faith with such rigour?
I wonder if the secret is that regardless of what he was doing in the ‘70s with Bowie in Berlin, or the taciturn New Yorker schtick, that Reed agreed with Warhol when he talked about how Pop was about liking things. Reed might not have liked Jesus, but the harrowing track was about taking the feelings of isolation, of exhaustion, of profound melancholy, of separation between man and the world seriously. It is Reed being earnest — like he was earnest when he talked about Metal Machine Music as a kind of genuine art project, or how he was earnest when he sang about doo-wop, or about the twenty years of the tai chi practice, or his love of Edgar Allan Poe, or how he was earnest near the end of the life, at the Occupy protest, when he worked the mic check as well as anyone.
I wonder if Reed’s gift is how he spent his life asking a wide variety of people, in a wide variety of situations, “Help me find my proper place… Help me find my proper place/Help me in my weakness/’Cos I’m falling out of grace.”
Sally O’Rourke on “Rock & Roll”
In a last-ditch effort to straighten The Velvet Underground out into commercial rock stars, Atlantic Records barred the group from drawing on their usual standbys of sex and drugs for Loaded. Even so, that left the final high in the unholy trinity up for grabs. Lou Reed might have penned “Rock & Roll” with one eye on the pop charts, but its subject matter was too sacred for him to coast on cynical pandering. “Rock & Roll” is a gospel song by a true believer, from its conversion narrative (Jenny is “saved by rock & roll”) to its call-and-response climax, as Reed and the band trade ever more ecstatic cries of “(it’s) all right (now)!” before surrendering to the guitar solo. Far from diluting the sound, the cleaner guitars and tighter grooves of Loaded-era Velvets grant the song an anthemic directness that in artier days would have have been drowned out by distortion or played for irony. “Rock & Roll” not only affirms the title music’s primal power — how the physical act of dancing can be a form of spiritual deliverance — but also the possibilities that it opened up to a certain Long Island kid: proof of life beyond the parents, TVs and Cadillacs of a suburban upbringing. “Rock & Roll” might not have given the band the hit they needed, but it’s since become the hymn it was meant to be, adopted by converts who experienced their own road-to-Damascus moments through music — in more than a few cases, by discovering a particular New York songwriter and his rock & roll band.
Jonathan Bogart on “Walk on the Wild Side”
“And the colored girls sing.”
I would have first heard this via Marky Mark’s bowdlerized fake-tough hip-hop version in the early nineties. I was still feeling my way into secular radio after thirteen years of nothing but Christian pop, and everything I leant my ears to seemed to be charged with an illicit, unfathomably decadent sexuality. TLC’s “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex,” C + C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat,” even En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind” held the thrill of pornography to ears that had never heard adult sexuality discussed in frank and unembarrassed terms. But while Madonna, Color Me Badd, and, um, Duran Duran were equally charged, I don’t think it was an accident that the voices I associated with my earliest pop-cultural sexual education were those of black women.
I don’t know whether Lou Reed meant to point out exactly how he was commodifying the voices of black women within his lounge-folk rock song, making them decorative accessories to the mostly assumed-to-be-white people whose post-Stonewall life stories he relates in his dry croon. I don’t know whether he meant to create a New York version of Gainsbourgian lecher-pop. I don’t know whether he meant to be respectful or provocative with his adjective and pronoun choices throughout. I don’t particularly care.
Today I still hear “Wild Side” as shot through with original sin — but it is no longer the crawling pit in my stomach that means the dark morass of depraved and disordered sexuality that I once thought I heard. It’s my soul, not Reed’s and certainly not those of his characters, that concerns me now, and it’s hearing my own propensity for reducing people to their sexualities or their sexual history, for using people of color and especially women of color as symbols of my own self-congratulation, for centering the voice and the perspective of a white man with an authoritative voice and a groovy bass line, for speaking for people who are entirely capable of speaking for themselves — or remaining silent, if they prefer — reflected back at me that catches at me and keeps me from being able to sink mindlessly into the groove. Whether or not any of that was intentional, I remain grateful to Lou Reed for it.
Mallory O’Donnell on “Satellite of Love”
A casual, almost dismissive tale of unfaithful bodies in geosynchronous orbit, “Satellite of Love” is both one of the best and most puzzling songs from the evergreen Transformer. Reed’s characteristic strong, simple melody line is present, but nearly loses itself in the arrangement, which seems at times like a series of stitched-together musical interludes rather than a formal exercise in songcraft. The lyrics are even more daft (“parking cars?”) than the accompanying instrumental curlicues, but Reed’s plaintive simpleton delivery makes them resonate as deeply as Bowie’s haunting, wordless backing vocals. While the glam trappings seem harmless enough, even charming, our narrator quickly realizes that he is as alone on earth as he would be on Mars. It’s no wonder Major Tom never came home.
Michaela Drapes on “New York Telephone Conversation”
They will ask you what it’s like to live in New York City. “Hot in the summer, and cold in the winters, but not as cold or hot as other places,” you will say with a semi-dismissive shrug. “You also have to do your laundry in the rain sometimes.” “But what about the parties, and the celebrities, and…” “Oh, yes,” you’ll say, with a faintly impatient sigh, cutting them off with a wave of your hand, in what you hope passes for sophisticated insouciance. “They live here, too. But they’re just like everyone else — waiting for the subway, ordering bodega coffees. Having the same banal conversations about the same banal things. Everyone’s always on their phones. Occasionally, you overhear the most amazing things, though.” The conversation drifts to other things, and you are glad not to trot out the same old celebrity sighting stories. But walking home, later, you start to feel like a shit for being so blase about it all. Even when you almost get run over by a rogue gypsy cab as you swerve to avoid, yes, another person on their goddamn phone, you remember: You live in New York City. This is your home. Dirty, beautiful, banal — all of it, all at once, all the time. And if it hadn’t been for “New York Telephone Conversation” — or, hell, anything and everything Lou Reed touched, breathed on, inspired in this city, spangled with two chords and gutter poetry — you might have found this shocking. But instead, you were prepared.
Frank Kogan on “N.Y. Stars”
I know people who’ve told me they shot dope ’cause of the Velvets, but none who claimed that “Oh Jim” inspired them to beat up their girlfriends. It must be hard, thinking you’re a shit when no one else takes your shittiness seriously. On Berlin, Lou had loaded the dice to make sure you wouldn’t sympathize with him. I kinda did anyway. Next album was a more with-it sound: Sally Can’t Dance, his only attempt to take in the car-shaking bumps that James Brown had dug into the pavement of American pop and that the Velvet Underground had always avoided. Maybe the bumps and shakes are courtesy of producer Steve Katz, formerly of Blood, Sweat & Tears. According to Wikipedia, Lou claimed to be detached from the production. Perhaps the thing’s an amalgam. His voice on “N.Y. Stars” sounds piped-in from some ghostly pain session — overall, the most interesting sound he got since White Light, White Heat, and he never got there again. Atop the ruts and potholes he’s rancid and sarcastic. The song’s about scene-making assholes, but he’s the big asshole here. Calls out fans for paying five bucks for “fourth-rate imitate whores”: possibly aimed at the N.Y. Dolls, who were better than he was. (Lyric sites merely say “fourth-rate imitators,” but they also substitute “It’s really getting to crowed here” for “It’s really getting too crowded here.”) The music is outside of Lou’s comfort zone, and he’s outside of everybody else’s. But I know that in an average week in late 1974 I listened to Sally Can’t Dance more than I’ve listened to Loaded, The Bells, The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, New Sensations, and New York put together in my entire life.
Brad Shoup on “I Want to Boogie With You”
From the venerable lineage of teenage confidence songs, begat by Hank Ballard, disseminated by Chubby Checker. The beats are similar: our parents don’t get it, we should dance. Of course, both “Boogie” and “Twist” are sung by grown men; Reed’s spin is to quiver and plead like an geezer. (“He gets so useless after so few drinks” is the time-bending signature of a careful writer; it’s also a half-profundity some punk might stumble into.) His kid has seen some shit, man: started from the bottom but decided to hang around, sniping at impediments, tottering around with a handle of scotch, brain detuned a half-step. The track’s one big beer buzz. It’s the Brooklyn summer sun to the Arctic orb of Cale’s “Big White Cloud”: Marty Fogel’s peppy orange honks dropped into Michael Fonfara’s ascending Oberheim concoction. The capper’s those hupping backing bros, furnishing the SVP on the boss’s invite. Reed sloughs off his negatives; they hurl them into the ionosphere. They smooth his irritation until all that’s left is the refrain, the promise, the everlasting Oh Yeah.
Alfred Soto on “Bottoming Out”
It begins with a guitar scratching out basic notes. Fernando Saunders plays the hook: a couple of high-end bass notes plucked, down-up, up-down. Fred Maher holds a tight beat. Robert Quine’s name appears in the credits — a courtesy. Cruising down Route 88, Lou Reed flees a violent rage that turns inward, one that “cannot be held by drink,” he sings, voice between a tremble and a gulp. Saunders answers each iteration of the title with a moan from his instrument. The poignancy of this track from Legendary Hearts rests in its conviction that good times beget bad times, over and over, until the bottoming out.
Josh Langhoff on “Dirty Blvd.”
The vaunted journalistic gaze turns to Pedro — poor, abused, one of 10 children, with no future but dealing on the Dirty Boulevard. Reed’s final verse is “so on the nose that it feels like it was workshopped,” writes Chris O’Leary. The whole thing sounds pat, actually; Pedro’s landlord wets himself right before the Statue of Bigotry pisses on the huddled masses, so no prize for guessing what Dirty Blvd. smells like. But this patness works in the song’s favor. A big single for Reed (#1 Modern Rock for four weeks!), but I always listen in the context of the New York album because Reed told me to — “IT’S MEANT TO BE LISTENED TO IN ONE 58 MINUTE SITTING AS THOUGH IT WERE A BOOK OR A MOVIE.” Yes sir! That explains why Reed mutters his way through three songs before he finally opts to sing Pedro’s hopeless epiphany, at which point he fly-flies away into his upper register and Jeffrey Lesser and Dion hop aboard for a coda, cheering Pedro on. Heard in the wake of Reed’s death (“Fly fly away from the Dirty Blvd.” could be a terrible obit title), in the midst of an album that kills someone off in nearly every song, Pedro’s epiphany movingly establishes a pattern for the remaining 40 minutes. Moments of transcendence surrounded by lots of death and chit chat — that’s basically what novels are, right?
Mark Sinker on “Images”
Of course he was a dick. If he didn’t invent being a dick as a pop move — Lennon and Jagger and Dylan, dicks all, plus ffs Jerry Lee Lewis — Lou Reed invented being a dick as the fake-out art move that was actually (first and last) a pop move. And “Images”, in its abrupt, affectionate way, is his thankyou to the fellow who pretty much opened the door for that (which means for us). Songs for Drella was Reed/Cale’s 1989-90 remembrance of Warhol, a two-man song cycle developed first for live performance, then a studio record (and then inevitably they argued and once again went their different ways). Many of the Drella songs are lovely, and very on-point right now — Lou would never have signed off on something like this when Andy was alive; it’s too generous, too open, too awkward, too vulnerably revealing — but “Images” is maybe the closest the former ever came to the setting out of a manifesto, in the form of a portrait of the ways the latter would head off and defuse such questions, motive and implication of oeuvre and all that distracting stuff. Mask of a mask of a mask (are we surprised?). Warhol’s gift to the art of being interviewed wasn’t talking exactly, but it wasn’t not talking either: these odd little shut-down homilies, shyly deflating near-joke one-liners that state the obvious in unsettling ways.
Not that Lou was ever shy this way; notoriously, his deflection technique was derision, hostile and shit-stirring — or else he’d invite you, interviewer and so-called music-writer, to plunge with him down into the netherworld of the technical and the technological. “I think there’s a deeper meaning/Mechanical precision or so it’s seeming/…/What I paint is very ordinary/I don’t think I’m old or modern, I don’t think I think I’m thinking/It doesn’t matter what I’m thinking/It’s the images that are worth repeating”: phrases Warhol used, or might well have, Reed’s delivery a mix (as so often) of the conversational and the unbiddably, nigglingly odd — faintly aggressive pronouncements over a writhing bed of Cale viola scribble and pushy chunking fuzzpulse guitar, with pretty much just two chords alternating as basic tension and release. It’s the opposite of modern art-speak, no anxious crowding polysyllabic hustle here, nudging or intimidating you into accepting the artist’s line or school or philosophy. Any prettiness comes out of the crackle of two musicians who’ve known each other all their lives and can and can’t work together — but Reed, as he mimics and mocks and mourns Warhol, does nothing at all to smooth Andy’s phrasing towards poetry or actual argument. These words give nothing away here you couldn’t work out for yourself: as a consequence, any anxiety, any justification is stuff you bring into it yourself.
And maybe that’s the point, the point shown not told. Rock as we know it might have emerged without Reed — it has many parents and many modes — but I don’t honestly know that rockwriting would exist, at least in a form we’d recognise or care about. If Andy was the birth of Reed and Cale (and etc.), Reed was the birth of us: you’ve heard the claim (Eno’s, more or less) that everyone who heard the first VU LP went off and formed a band. But you could just as well say everyone went off and WROTE about bands: talked about them, argued, worried, formed bands to sustain (or win) the argument. When the news broke, we were drinking, my friends and I, and already feeling a bit gaudy. Our immediate response wasn’t very kind, but it maybe was in keeping, true to us and to him and to the moment; by-the-yard flippancy as a way to keep the dark at a distance. Some would say glee; some would say spite. But after all, sententious moralising does pop-as-art-as-pop little good — and even Songs for Drella (the studio version) sometimes only misses the monumentalising, falsifying impulse to reverence the recently dead by a hair. (Probably because I’ve known it longer, I think the better version is the live filmed one; “Images” here more clipped and intense, the music in other songs more tentative and perhaps a little less carefully stately.) The subworld Lou birthed was rockcrit and fanfic before it was rock; the anxiety and the justification, we bring these ourselves, and have to snark ourselves away from them back towards the jokes and spark of love.
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy on “Junior Dad”
Reed’s final album is the Metallica collaboration . You are most likely aware of this album and its infamy, but haven’t heard anything from it. In which case, don’t listen to “Junior Dad”. Yet. Take on the whole album: a punishing piece, frequently bedazzling and befuddling, with Reed tracing through sexualised imagery both alluring and terrifying, reaching to craft a slab of literate viscera. After seventy minutes of being puzzled and pushed, violas introduce “Junior Dad” and catharsis finally arrives. The lyrics to “Junior Dad” have been around for a while (here they are performed as part of an improv piece with wife Laurie Anderson and John Zorn), but they find an unlikely home in Metallica’s pared-down majesty. The band usually perform with thunder in their bellies or with wavering sentiment, yet Reed finds a way to simultaneously tame them and make them fiercer. His sheer being – his energy, if we’re being corny – focuses the music. He illustrates a messy father/son dynamic in bursts of muzzy images and commands (“burning fever burning”, “mental bullet”, “get the coffee, turn the lights on”, etc.), turning the mundanity of family ties to existential mystery. Ten minutes in, he hums about age withering you, about cycles of life, and fades, croaking, into a riff. The imprint of the song then fades into a sea of cellos and violas. It is a true finale: after the strings begin, we don’t hear from him again. We won’t hear from him again.