Lou Reed part 1

I like to compare Lou Reed to a rose; he possesses great (musical) beauty, but also has very prickly thorns. He would go to great lengths to undermine his friendships, he would sabotage his career when possible, and in general he would fly as close to the flame as possible without getting burned. Now I'm mixing metaphors.

Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed was born on March 2, 1942 in Brooklyn and grew up in Freeport, Long Island. His family was Jewish, and although he said that he was Jewish, he added, "My God is Rock'n'Roll. It's an obscure power that can change your life. The most important part of my religion is to play guitar."

Reed attended Freeport Junior High School, notorious for its gangs. Having learned to play the guitar from the radio, he developed an early interest in Rock & Roll and Rhythm & Blues, and during high school played in several bands. Reed began experimenting with drugs at the age of 16. After a period of attacks of depression and anxiety, his parents were persuaded by a psychologist to consent to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Reed appeared to blame his father principally for what he had been subjected to. He wrote about the experience in his 1974 song, Kill Your Sons. In an interview, Reed said of the experience:

"They put the thing down your throat so you don't swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That's what was recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can't read a book because you get to page 17 and have to go right back to page one again."

Even today, you get those bigots who resist outlawing gay conversion therapy. To them I say, "crawl back to the hell-hole where you belong". Here's Kill Your Sons:

Such a traumatic experience would help partly explain his bouts of erratic behavior. While in Syracuse University, studying journalism, film directing, and creative writing, he became a platoon leader in ROTC; he was later expelled from the program for holding an unloaded gun to his superior's head.

In 1961, he began hosting a late-night radio program that typically featured Doo Wop, Rhythm and Blues, and Jazz, particularly the Free Jazz developed in the mid-1950s. According to his sister: "He reportedly libeled some student on his radio show; the kid's family tried to sue my father. And there were other extracurricular possibly illegal activities of which the university didn't approve. I believe they tried to kick him out. But he was a genius; what could they do? He stayed and he graduated."

While enrolled at Syracuse University, he studied under poet Delmore Schwartz, who he said was "the first great person I ever met", and they became friends. He credited Schwartz with showing him how "with the simplest language imaginable, and very short, you can accomplish the most astonishing heights." Reed would later dedicate the song European Son, from the Velvet Underground's debut album, to his teacher Delmore Schwartz, as well as his 1982 song My House.

As we have seen yesterday, Lou got rid of Andy Warhol as well as Nico after the first Velvet Underground album, he fired John Cale after the second album, and he himself left the band before the fourth album was released. Then, he publicly smacked the man who produced his best and most successful solo album, his close friend David Bowie, in the face. Apparently, Lou had been discussing details regarding his upcoming new album - as yet un-recorded. Lou asked David if he would be interested in producing the record and David replied yes – but only upon the condition that Lou would stop drinking and clean up his act. And upon that reply, the aforementioned chaos ensued. It would take years for them to resume speaking to each other.

He was just as comfortable being verbally abusive; in a 1987 interview, he had strong words for his more successful peers in the Sixties. "When [bands] did try to get, in quotes, 'arty,' it was worse than stupid Rock & Roll," he said. "What I mean by 'stupid,' I mean, like, the Doors." And what did he think of John Lennon and the Beatles? "I never liked the Beatles," Reed said. "I thought they were garbage. If you say, 'Who did you like?' I liked nobody."

Elsewhere in the chat, Reed talked about living in a remote part of New Jersey where he threatened curious college kids with a shotgun and the clashes he had with recording engineers at studios.

He also brought up how no one realized the Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs was based on a novel, and said that he felt the reaction to Heroin was like "I murdered the Pope or something." He said his intention with bringing these subject matters to Rock – things that had been in novels, he points out – was to open people's eyes to what Pop music was capable of. "What I wanted to do [was] write Rock & Roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn't lose anything," he said. "It would be timeless, and the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics."

Of the Punk scene he had helped to inspire, he said: "I'm too literate to be into Punk Rock . . . The whole CBGB's, new Max's thing that everyone's into and what's going on in London - you don't seriously think I'm responsible for what's mostly rubbish?"

But despite his itchy hand and his acid tongue, Lou inspired loyalty and devotion: Bowie was very pleased when they finally made up, and worked with Reed again, well into the new century. Former Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker reminisced about Lou Reed in a tribute published in 2013 in the The Observer, recalling her onetime bandmate as a "great songwriter" and a "good and loyal friend."

"It's just dawning on me that he's not out there any more," Tucker said as part of an essay detailing how she met Reed (through her older brother, who was a friend of Reed's from college), the Velvets' first gig ("a lot of people were bewildered") and a San Francisco gig where promoter Bill Graham told the musicians as they took the stage, "I hope you fuckers bomb."

Tucker remembered listening to records in Reed's apartment in Greenwich Village where he impressed her with the subtleties he picked up from what she described as an "extraordinary record collection: old 45s of 1950s Rock & Roll and Doo-Wop singers I had never heard of."

Though she acknowledged Reed's grumpy side, she said it was a result of his perfectionism. "He didn't suffer fools gladly. That's just the way he was, but he was also incredibly encouraging and generous," she said.

Even after the Velvets split, Tucker and Reed kept in touch, she said. "It was one of those friendships where it didn't matter if you didn't see each other a lot," Tucker said. "We'd meet up after two years or five years and it would be like we'd seen each other last week. As you get older, you come to realize that that kind of friendship is rare, so I miss him a hell of a lot."

Patti Smith, who was a one of CBGB's legendary performers, not only wasn't offended by his remarks concerning Punk and CBGB's, but in fact always made it clear that she looked up to him.

"So many of us have benefited from the work he has done," she told USA Today, shortly after Reed's 2013 death. "We all owe him a debt. Most of us that owe a debt are not very happy to own up to it. Sometimes you like to imagine that you did everything on your own. But I think with Lou that everyone will stand in line to say, 'Thank you,' in their own way."

Smith - who inducted the Velvet Underground into the Hall in 1996 - once again proffered her thanks at 2015's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where she gave an eloquent benediction on behalf of Reed, who was posthumously inducted into the Hall as a solo performer.

"Hello everybody. On October 27th, 2013, I was at Rockaway Beach, and I got the message that Lou Reed had passed. It was a solitary moment. I was by myself, and I thought of him by the ocean, and I got on the subway back to New York City. It was a 55-minute ride, and in that 55 minutes, when I returned to New York City, it was as if the whole city had transformed. People were crying on the streets. I could hear Lou's voice coming from every café. Everyone was playing his music. Everyone was walking around dumbfounded. Strangers came up to me and hugged me. The boy who made me coffee was crying. It was the whole city. It was more [Pauses] Sorry. I realized, at that moment, that I had forgotten, when I was on the subway, that he was not only my friend, he was the friend of New York City.

I made my first eye contact with Lou dancing to the Velvet Underground when they were playing upstairs at Max’s Kansas City in the summer of 1970. The Velvet Underground were great to dance to because they had this sort of transformative, like a surf beat. Like a dissonant surf beat. They were just fantastic to dance to. And then somewhere along the line, Lou and I became friends. It was a complex friendship, sometimes antagonistic and sometimes sweet. Lou would sometimes emerge from the shadows at CBGBs. If I did something good, he would praise me. If I made a false move, he would break it down.

One night, when we were touring, separately, we wound up in the same hotel, and I got a call from him, and he asked me to come to his room. He sounded a little dark, so I was a little nervous. But I went up, and the door was open, and I found him in the bathtub dressed in black. So I sat on the toilet and listened to him talk. It seemed like he talked for hours, and he talked about, well, all kinds of things. He spoke compassionately about the struggles of those who fall between genders. He spoke of pre-CBS Fender amplifiers and political corruption. But most of all, he talked about poetry. He recited the great poets — Rupert Brooke, Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara. He spoke of the poets' loneliness and of the poets' dedication to the highest muses. When he fell into silence, I said, "Please, take care of yourself, so the world can have you as long as it can." And Lou actually smiled.

Everything that Lou taught me, I remember. He was a humanist, heralding and raising the downtrodden. His subjects were his royalty that he crowned in lyrics without judgment or irony. He gave us, beyond the Velvet Underground, Transformer and Walk on the Wild Side, Berlin, meditations to New York, homages to Poe and his mentor Andy Warhol and Magic and Loss.

His consciousness infiltrated and illuminated our cultural voice. Lou was a poet, able to fold his poetry within his music in the most poignant and plainspoken manner. Oh, such a perfect day. Sorry. [Crying] Such a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you. You made me forget myself. I thought I was someone else. Someone good. You were good, Lou. You are good.

True poets must often stand alone. As a poet, he must be counted as a solitary artist. And so, Lou, thank you for brutally and benevolently injecting your poetry into music. And for this, we welcome you, Lou Reed, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

One may say that these people overlooked Lou's faults because of his greatness as an artist, or because he died, but I don't think that this is the case. My theory is that his brothers and sisters in arms recognized that his outbursts came from a place honest and true, so they forgave him for them. Also Reed was forever pushing boundaries, be it in his music or in his life, and this struggle to reach uncharted territory often requires people made of sterner stuff.

Anyway, enough editorializing, let's get on with the music:

Reed's first solo album, Lou Reed, came out in 1972. The album comprised eight new recordings of then-unreleased Velvet Underground songs, plus two new songs. Reed was backed by London session musicians, two of whom, Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe, were from the Progressive Rock band Yes. With increasing interest in the Velvet Underground, Reed's debut album was highly anticipated, but the result was a commercial and relative critical disappointment, peaking at only #189 US.

The album opens with I Can't Stand It:

Another highlight is Lisa Says:

My favorite song from this album is Wild Child:

The guy tentatively reworking unreleased Velvet Underground tracks on 1972’s Lou Reed sounds like a completely different person to the one who released Transformer six months later, perhaps because the guy on Lou Reed was the former frontman of a largely ignored band who had spent the previous two years making ends meet as a typist in his father’s office, while the man who released Transformer was being hailed as a vastly important influence by David Bowie and Roxy Music, the hottest artists in the UK at the time.

In fact, Transformer, released on November 8, 1972, was produced by David Bowie and his guitar player and right-hand man Mick Ronson. Ronson played a major role in the recording of the album, serving as the co-producer and primary session musician (contributing guitar, piano, recorder and backing vocals), as well as arranger, notably contributing the lush string arrangement for Perfect Day. Reed lauded Ronson's contribution, praising the beauty of his work and keeping down the vocal to highlight the strings.

The album was a hit, peaking at #29 in the US and #13 in the UK, while the single Walk on the Wild Side was Reed's only hit single (until Perfect Day was re-discovered in the 90s), peaking at #16 in the US and at #10 in the UK.

In 1997, Transformer was named the 44th greatest album of all time in a 'Music of the Millennium poll conducted in the United Kingdom by HMV Group, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. Transformer is also ranked number 55 on NME 's list of "Greatest Albums of All Time." In 2003, the album was ranked number 194 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It is also on Q Magazine's list of "100 Greatest Albums Ever".

It's an especially LGBT significant album, with no weak songs in it. So, we'll get to listen to it all. Heck, even the back cover is scandalous:

The album's opening track, Vicious, is a perfect example of good camp. Lou Reed said it was Andy Warhol who inspired the song. "He said, 'Why don't you write a song called Vicious," Reed told Rolling Stone in 1989. "And I said, 'What kind of vicious?' 'Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower.' And I wrote it down literally."

Andy's Chest is another tribute to Reed's mentor and lifelong friend Andy Warhol. Warhol was shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanas, immediately after the Velvets split with him, and only narrowly survived the ordeal. Reed’s song was written in sympathy and in thanks to Warhol. The title indicates to the substantial scar across Warhol’s chest (the shot went through both lungs, spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus) and also refers to Warhol’s factory, a fantastic menagerie of bizarre, wonderful and precarious characters that the songs surreal lyrics describe.

Perfect Day is one of the album's masterpieces. The song has a sombre vocal delivery and slow, piano-based instrumental backing balancing tones of sweet nostalgia ("it's such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you"). It was written after Reed and his then fiancée (later his first wife), Bettye Kronstad, spent a day in Central Park. The song's lyrics are often considered to suggest simple, conventional romantic devotion, possibly alluding to Reed's relationship with Bettye Kronstad and Reed's own conflicts with his sexuality, drug use, and ego. Some commentators have further seen the lyrical subtext as displaying Reed's romanticized attitude towards a period of his own addiction to heroin (especially the sinister closing line, "You're going to reap just what you sow"); this popular understanding of the song as an ode to addiction led to its inclusion in the soundtrack for Trainspotting, a film about the lives of heroin addicts. But, even taken at face value, it's just a perfect day...

Hangin' 'Round is a series of biting portraits of strange people who hang around Lou:

Then comes another of the album's masterpieces. If Walk On The Wild Side was the only song that Reed wrote, it would still be enough to earn him a place in this narrative. The song received wide radio coverage, despite its touching on taboo topics such as transsexuality, drugs, male prostitution and oral sex. In the United States, RCA released the single using an edited version of the song without the reference to oral sex.

Each verse refers to one of the "superstars" at Andy Warhol's New York studio, The Factory.

"Holly" is based on Holly Woodlawn, a transgender actress who lived in Miami Beach, Florida as a child. In 1962, after being bullied by transphobes, the fifteen-year-old ran away from home; and, as in the lyrics, learned how to pluck her eyebrows while hitchhiking to New York.

"Candy" is based on Candy Darling, a transgender actress and the subject of an earlier song by Lou Reed, "Candy Says". She grew up on Long Island ("the island") and was a regular at "the back room" of Max's Kansas City.

"Little Joe" was the nickname of Joe Dallesandro, an actor who starred in Flesh, a 1968 film about a teenage hustler. Dallesandro said in 2014 that he had never met Reed when the song was written, and that the lyrics were based on the film character, not himself personally. Hmmm, OK.

"Sugar Plum Fairy" was a reference to actor Joe Campbell, who played a character by that name in Warhol's 1965 film, My Hustler. The term was a euphemism for "drug dealer".

"Jackie" is based on Jackie Curtis, another Warhol actor. "Speeding" and "crashing" are drug references. Curtis at one time hoped to play the role of James Dean in a movie; Dean was killed in a car crash.

Make Up is another song of LGBT significance. The chorus goes:

Now, we're coming out

out of our closets

Out on the streets

yeah, we're coming out

Satellite Of Love is another of the album's greats. The song is about a man who observes a satellite launch on television, and contemplates what Reed describes as feelings of "the worst kind of jealousy" about his unfaithful girlfriend.

Is it a science-fiction tale of infidelity and voyeurism, a space-age lullaby, or an allegorical lament? For 45 years now, it's been a riddle, wrapped in a melody, inside an enigma.

Wagon Wheel is a Do-Wop song with Bowie helping out in the composition, as well as providing great background vocals:

New York Telephone Conversation is a short and funny song, which is also campy in the best way:

I'm So Free, is about the freedom one experiences in New York, Times Square in particular:

Goodnight Ladies is Lou Reed being Frank Sinatra... But doing it his way:

There will be more tomorrow. Until then, I leave you with this:

In 1997, the BBC commissioned an all-star cover of Perfect Day The singers included Bowie, Bono, Elton John, Emmylou Harris, and, croaking three words, Shane MacGowan from the Pogues. The profits went to charity, and the single went all the way to Number One in the UK for 3 weeks.