Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  In an interview following the release of Street Hassle, Reed backed off his frequent claim that he had nothing remotely in common with the “Lou Reed” character. Speaking about that album and Coney Island Baby, he said, “There are some severe little tangent things in my songs that remove them from me, but, ah, yes, they’re very personal. I guess the Lou Reed character is pretty close to the real Lou Reed, to the point, maybe, where there’s really no heavy difference between the two, except maybe a piece of vinyl. I keep hedging my bet, instead of saying that’s really me, but that is me, as much as you can get on record.” In the same interview, Reed, who typically resisted interpreting his own songs, offered a deep reading of the “Street Hassle” and “Slipaway” sections of “Street Hassle” that beautifully ties them together.

  The character in “Street Hassle” who suggests dragging the young girl’s body out of his apartment, Reed suggests, “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.… 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.”

  That image of removing rings resonates as a primal symbol of a relationship that has come apart but also as an allusion to the criminality and thievery that were so much a part of the hustling world Rachel lived in. To make that point explicit, in the interview, Reed emphasized the word “him” in the lyrics he quoted, and then explained why it’s there. “They’re not heterosexual concerns running through that song,” Reed said. “I don’t make a big 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.”

  That interview marked one of the last times Reed would publicly describe himself as gay. As Rachel receded and Morales became more of a force in his life, Reed increasingly identified as heterosexual. To that extent, the song “Street Hassle” was a farewell to both a person and an identity. Beyond its extraordinary title track, however, the Street Hassle album was something of a hodgepodge. Among its stranger aspects is the notorious “I Wanna Be Black,” which channels into a song the racial provocations Reed had indulged in interviews and elsewhere. A swipe at white artists who mimic black styles—odd coming from a man who, as Michael Fonfara said, had decided he wanted to be James Brown just a few years before—the song expresses the wish to no longer be a “fucked-up, middle-class college student” and instead to have “a stable of foxy whores,” “shoot twenty feet of jism,” “have a big prick,” and “fuck up the Jews.” Beyond those coarse stereotypes, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X come in for equally dim-witted treatment. Reed played the song live many times but eventually grew uncomfortable with it, though it continued to turn up on various anthologies over the years.

  Such songs doomed Street Hassle commercially. According to Reed, Clive Davis lost patience with him when he heard the stunning opening line of the “Street Hassle” section of the title track: “Hey, that cunt’s not breathing.” Davis did not recall it that way, and said he encouraged Reed to expand “Street Hassle” into the extended tour de force that it became. Regardless, the album did not perform “meaningfully,” in Davis’s terms, i.e., commercially. Critically, however, it was a major success. To John Rockwell, it sounded “as if Mr. Reed were finally beginning to make some sort of productive synthesis of the warring tensions within himself.” In a lead review, Rolling Stone called Street Hassle “a stunning incandescent triumph—the best solo album Lou Reed has ever done.” The review concludes, “After all this time, he still cares. How strangely moving that is.”

  REED HAD BEGUN TO make the Bottom Line something like his New York headquarters, as he had seen Bruce Springsteen do. Ever since the four-hundred-seat club had opened in 1974, the small, comfortable venue on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Streets in Greenwich Village had become an essential part of the music industry and media scene. Record companies would showcase new performers there in order to generate coverage and buzz. More-established acts like Reed, who could easily fill much larger venues, played there to rally the faithful and create a sense of occasion. Reed concluded his tour in support of Street Hassle with a five-night stand at the club, from May 17 to 21, 1978, for a total of ten shows—two per night for an admission charge of seven dollars. As always when Reed played his hometown, expectations ran high. He was particularly excited by his band at the time: a ferocious combo that consisted of Michael Fonfara on keyboards, Stuart Heinrich on guitar, Ellard “Moose” Boles on bass, Marty Fogel on saxophone, Michael Suchorsky on drums, and Angela Howell and Chrissy Faith on backing vocals. “I thought I had a killer group,” Reed said. “I couldn’t play guitar with a lot of those earlier bands. I loved playing guitar with this one.” Reed decided to record the Bottom Line shows for a live album.

  Take No Prisoners was released in November of 1978, just in time for the lucrative holiday record-buying season. No doubt it was intended to be something like a live greatest hits set that would appeal to both initiates and the curious. Instead, it turned out to be one of the most notorious albums of Reed’s career. It was a double album with a gatefold sleeve running more than ninety minutes and featuring a mere ten songs. Reed was right about the band. When it was allowed to play, it was funky, jazzy, and rocking, injecting contemporary life into Velvet Underground classics like “Sweet Jane” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” while delivering all the emotional drama of “Street Hassle” and “Coney Island Baby.” Repeatedly, however, Reed halts the proceedings to bait and insult the audience, complain about his career, and ramble on about his personal history, the characters in his songs, the denizens of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and life in New York City. He rails against critics, mentioning John Rockwell and Robert Christgau by name even though both had been supporters of the Velvet Underground and his solo career. Perhaps that very support was part of the problem. “Fuck you! I don’t need you to tell me I’m good,” Reed spits. (Christgau’s response in his Village Voice Consumer Guide column: “I thank Lou for pronouncing my name right. C+.”) The album is cringeworthy at times and funny at others, as if Lenny Bruce had morphed into Henny Youngman in a comedy club version of Max’s Kansas City. It’s unlike any album, recorded live or in the studio, before or since.

  Reed put Michael Fonfara in charge of assembling the live album. As far as Reed’s rants from the stage went, Fonfara simply said, “I thought he was too drunk. But his audience worldwide expected him to be drunk. If they saw him walking up onstage totally straight, they’d say, ‘This isn’t the Lou Reed we came to see.’ I know he felt that he had to live up to his image.” That insistence from his fans that Reed push to extremes is part of what led Reed to title the album Take No Prisoners. “When we were in Montreal before we went on, somebody out in the audience was yelling, ‘Take no prisoners, Lou, take no prisoners!’” Reed said. “Then the guy would just bash his head against the table. ‘Lou Reed, take no prisoners!’—smack! I thought the phrase was great. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. ‘Don’t take prisoners; beat us to death. Shoot us. Maim us. Kill us. But don’t settle for less. Go all the way!’ That’s what I took it to mean.”

  Reed compared the album to Metal Machine Music in both its impact and its intent. After describing the album as “manly,” he said, “I wanted to make a record that wouldn’t give an inch. If anything, it would push the world back just an inch or two. If Metal Machine Music was just a hell
o note, Take No Prisoners is the letter that should have gone with it. You may find this funny, but I think of it as a contemporary urban blues album. After all, that’s what I write—tales of the city. And if I dropped dead tomorrow, this is the record I’d choose for posterity. It’s not only the smartest thing I’ve ever done, it’s also as close to Lou Reed as you’re probably going to get, for better or worse.”

  Reed wanted an album documenting the highly idiosyncratic Bottom Line shows, and that’s exactly what he got. Whereas his introduction to “I’m Waiting for the Man” on the Velvet Underground’s live album 1969 is a perfect example of his ability to turn on the charm from the stage while maintaining his tough-as-nails persona, on Take No Prisoners he succumbs to a fatal case of logorrhea. “Everybody said, ‘You don’t talk enough onstage. Can’t you just introduce songs?’” Reed joked about the album years later. “Well, there it is: Lou Reed talks—and talks and talks and talks.” In his Rolling Stone review, critic Ken Tucker accurately described Take No Prisoners as “a barrage of invective, self-laceration, barbarity, and the all-out savaging of just about everybody who happened to pop into Reed’s head.”

  A Rolling Stone review of Reed at the Bottom Line in 1979 noted that his shows at the club were more like family reunions than concerts, and indeed, the performances captured on Take No Prisoners do have the feel of a rambunctious Thanksgiving dinner with relatives. Even at their most abrasive, Reed’s screeds and his exchanges with the audience imply an intimacy that could have been achieved only in front of a New York crowd, and in as tight a space as the Bottom Line. “I always think of the audiences in New York as friends,” Reed said. “Or else they’d shoot me.” In its credits, Take No Prisoners is dedicated to “Cecil and Beanie” (correctly spelled “Beany”), two puppets and, later, cartoon characters whose smart, satirical antics date back to the 1940s. Asked about the dedication, Reed responded, “Why did I do it? Who knows? It was just there to show you, hey, we’re not always so serious. But I guess you could already tell that from the recording, right?”

  If, as he did throughout the seventies, Reed followed up a triumph—such as Street Hassle—with outrage—such as Take No Prisoners—he once again tried to get back on track, this time with The Bells, which came out in April of 1979. Not that The Bells is immediately accessible. Some songs on it seem confoundingly simple, even one-dimensional; the rest, in contrast, are thick with sound and emotion. Trumpeter Don Cherry joined the group in the studio for these sessions, and Reed made much of the jazz elements in the band’s sound on the album. But it’s not jazz that anyone who typically listened to jazz would be likely to enjoy or even want to hear. As Reed himself joked, “If you can’t play rock and you can’t play jazz, you put the two together and you’ve really got something.” The album’s jazz components, its descent into atmospheric noises and effects, particularly on the title track, are part of its intense experimental impulses. Like so much of Reed’s work, The Bells moves back and forth across a line separating commercial gestures, attempting to grapple with the recognizable sounds of the contemporary moment while compulsively pushing the music well beyond the boundaries of mainstream acceptability. Reed delivered his vocals in the same staccato, strangulated style he had defined on Street Hassle, and in a bid for spontaneity, he wrote most of his lyrics in the studio. The album’s title nicely gets at the extremes Reed was always attempting to bridge. “The Bells” was a highly dramatic early fifties R & B single by Billy Ward and the Dominoes (with the great Clyde McPhatter on lead vocals) and was later covered by James Brown. Reed doubtless knew both versions. On the opposite end of the spectrum, “The Bells” is also the title of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most wildly obsessional poems.

  The Bells was the fourth album of Reed’s five-album deal with Arista, and it’s the one that drove a stake through the heart of his relationship with the company. There was nothing remotely like a single on it, and whatever hopes Reed and Clive Davis had once entertained about Reed’s reaching a wider audience had been buried. Reed claimed that Davis wrote him a long letter explaining that he thought the album was not really finished and needed more work. (Davis did not recall doing that but admitted that he might have.) Reed, of course, dismissed Davis’s suggestions. Characteristically, Reed believed that, because of his refusal to address Davis’s concerns, Arista refused to support the album. “It was released and dropped into a dark well,” Reed said. No question, if Davis believed that The Bells did not have sales potential—and it didn’t—Arista would not have promoted it extensively.

  Reed chose to confront Davis from the stage of the Bottom Line, giving him the finger and demanding, as Davis sat in front of him, “Where’s the money, Clive? How come I don’t hear my album on the radio?” Davis had never been accused of cheating artists, and as for the possibility of Reed hearing his music on the radio, Davis took his best shot at that with Rock and Roll Heart. Reed issued an apology: “I’ve always loved Clive and he happens to be one of my best friends. I just felt like having a business discussion from the stage. Sometimes out of frustration you yell at those you love the most.”

  In addition to cowriting two songs on The Bells, Michael Fonfara served as the album’s executive producer. Other band members were also listed as cowriters on songs, making The Bells the first occasion on which Reed acknowledged cowriters since his days with the Velvet Underground. (Reed also cowrote three songs on the album with guitarist Nils Lofgren, who does not play on the record. According to Reed, their collaboration took place as a “first-class mail correspondence.”) The rocker “Looking for Love” is the only song on the album credited to Reed alone.

  Reed closed the album with four songs that seemed to have a strongly personal perspective, an approach presaged by the album’s cover. In marked contrast to the cartoonish cover of Take No Prisoners, the photo on the front of The Bells depicts a straightforward, conventional-looking Reed gazing directly at the viewer. It’s a cleaned-up, nontheatrical visual. His face is intent and focused but expressionless, and with his right hand he’s holding up a mirror to his face. It’s as if he had momentarily turned away from examining himself to stare at the viewer, implicating his audience in the reflections the album contains.

  “City Lights,” the first of the four songs that close the album, borrows its title from Charlie Chaplin’s classic 1931 silent film. The song is a touching meditation on Chaplin’s banishment from the United States, the result in large part of moralistic media attacks on him orchestrated by the FBI and its Red-baiting director, J. Edgar Hoover. Reed clearly saw something familiar in the notion of one of America’s greatest artists being hounded into exile for issues in his personal and political life. Interestingly, the song is not a screed. The music, defined primarily by a lilting piano part, is almost whimsical—a sonic representation, it would seem, of the Little Tramp’s genial appeal. Reed delivers the lyrics in a thoughtful recitative, and the tone carries regret that the United States, a nation founded on the concepts of freedom and liberty, had become so oppressive that one of its most distinctive talents would be driven to foreign shores.

  The next track, “All Through the Night,” is set in a party atmosphere, with Reed’s vocal competing with cocktail conversations (“The drinks are on the house—they’re on me,” Reed announces right before his vocal kicks in). The song offers an affecting portrait of the city’s night crawlers struggling to maintain an emotional grip on their lives. Over a repeated, almost childlike trumpet figure played by Don Cherry, Reed tells a tale of junk sickness and hospitalization, of “a daytime of sin” that descends into “a nighttime of hell,” and the struggle to make it all through the night to the following day. He sings with empathy about the fear and loneliness that plague so many lives, not just those on the fringes. No one is excluded from the song’s compassionate embrace, which is both sustaining and unsentimental. The quaver in Reed’s voice, which could sound affected, perfectly suits the song’s emotional tenor. The singer’s handle on his feelings is pre
carious, and his unreliable relationship to pitch underscores that tenuousness.

  “Families” is one of the most personal songs Reed ever wrote, and one of the fairest. In it he takes on the life he grew up living with his family on Long Island, but he doesn’t treat it in the extreme ways he sometimes did. Musically, the horns establish a groove that is both insistent and mournful, and apart from some inevitable sarcasm, Reed treats the breakdown of his relationship with his mother, father, and sister with some ruefulness. The familiar charges are leveled once again. His parents are disappointed because he’s not living a more conventional life. He isn’t married, hasn’t given them grandchildren, doesn’t want to take over his father’s business, isn’t as recognizably pleasing to them as his younger sister is. Even his dog is underappreciated. But the line “And families that live out in the suburbs / Often make each other cry” and the plural noun of the title indicate Reed’s understanding that, serious as they were, the problems in his home were by no means exclusive to the Reeds. “There’s nothing here we have in common except our name,” he concludes. “And I don’t think that I’ll come home much anymore.”

  The title track ends the album on a bold note, recycling an experimental technique Reed had used previously in which the lyrics and vocal are buried within the sound of the song, meant not so much to be heard as suggestively wondered about. More than halfway through the nine-minute track, Reed’s voice emerges from the instrumental sludge and he offers a meditation on the emotional fragility of performance—and, by extension, the vulnerability and dangers of the artistic life. In its portrayal of artists as isolated, misunderstood, and suffering figures, the song pulls together and deepens themes articulated in “City Lights,” “All Through the Night,” and “Families.” The music grows more portentous as Reed repeats the line “Here come the bells”—with all the associations of alarms, funerals, and other endings that the tolling of bells connotes—and the track comes to a dramatic conclusion. “I had rented a fifteen-foot gong for the occasion and it is still thrilling to hear it end the work.”