Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  “The Bells” remained a favorite of Reed’s. He claimed that he improvised the lyrics in the studio. “It was a spontaneous piece,” Reed said. “The vocal came to me as I sang, and each year since, I wonder at its meaning.” Clearly, the song’s lyrics touch on ideas that had been running through his mind and evocative as they are, they serve as an eloquent, poetic summary of the album’s themes. “Love and the desire for transcendence run through these songs,” Reed said. “The characters in these songs are always moving toward something.… They understand the desire to see ‘The Bells,’ to hear the announcement of transcendence and freedom. And that’s what all the lyrics are about.”

  Unsurprisingly, The Bells did not do well commercially; it rose only to number 130 on Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart. Critics, however, responded strongly to both the album’s musical boldness and the apparent sincerity of its lyrics. In that regard, The Bells pushed aside Take No Prisoners and became the true thematic descendant of Street Hassle. In the New York Times, John Rockwell rightly placed The Bells among Reed’s most “personal, intense” efforts, adding, “If he didn’t seem so genuinely confused a person, one might almost suspect that he had created [his] hostile image to make a more striking contrast to the tenderness.” In Melody Maker, Jon Savage called The Bells “the likely keynote for the final year of the seventies.” Reed’s old sparring partner Lester Bangs reviewed the album for Rolling Stone; it was the last piece he wrote for the magazine before his death in 1982. “The Bells isn’t merely Lou Reed’s best solo LP,” Bangs declared. “It’s great art.” He added that “with The Bells, more than in Street Hassle, perhaps even more than in his work with the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed achieves his oft-stated ambition: to become a great writer in the literary sense.”

  14

  GROWING UP IN PUBLIC

  AS THE SEVENTIES DRAINED into the eighties, a sense of cultural exhaustion permeated American society. President Jimmy Carter, an unpretentious man from rural Georgia who had risen to the presidency on the strength of a post-Watergate desire for decency in government, described that mood as a “crisis of confidence” in a speech he delivered in July of 1979. Though Carter never used the word, that speech became known as his “malaise” speech, and it proved to be one of a number of significant factors that led to his crushing defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan in the presidential election the following year. The revolution in Iran that overthrew the shah and installed an Islamic government disrupted the country’s oil production, which affected supplies throughout the world. For Americans, who regarded cars and cheap gas as essential elements of their national identity, the long lines at filling stations represented an emotional as much as an economic blow. In November of 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two American citizens hostage—another shock to American pride. A planned helicopter raid in April of 1980 to free the hostages failed utterly, compounding what was seen internationally as a humiliation for the United States.

  Many Americans viewed these setbacks as part of the inheritance of the sixties counterculture, a post-Vietnam unwillingness to exercise America’s strength around the world. America was losing its global stature, and at home the sex-and-drugs indulgences sanctioned by the counterculture were coming under suspicion. Concern about sexually transmitted diseases was on the rise, and in 1980, the first cases of what would eventually be known as AIDS were reported. Rehab programs sprung up as the toll of drug and alcohol dependence became increasingly clear. Former hippies magically transformed into yuppies, young urban professionals in search of the materialistic good life rather than social change. Riding the wave of these developments, Ronald Reagan vowed to combat the excesses of the sixties and reinstate traditional patriotic values, intensifying a culture war that persists to this day.

  It was within that cultural context—and strangely congruent with it—that Lou Reed and Sylvia Morales got married on Valentine’s Day in 1980. Reed had announced their forthcoming nuptials from the stage of the Bottom Line during a run of Christmas shows in 1979. The choice of Valentine’s Day reflects Reed’s deep romanticism, which could border on Hallmark card clichés. Of course, in the life of Lou Reed, even such heartwarming gestures had a serrated edge. Reed and Morales were married in Reed’s apartment on Christopher Street near Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, the same space he had shared with Rachel. Now Rachel was gone and Sylvia was fully installed there, with all the institutional and legal legitimacy that marriage provides. Reed, looking like a promising young banker, wore a dark suit and a white shirt and tie, and Morales wore a white wedding dress. His hair was cut short—not the butch short style he had favored at around the time of Rock n Roll Animal, but respectably cleaned up. A telling photograph from the event shows the smiling couple, looking cutely self-conscious, cutting the wedding cake together, both of Reed’s hands carefully enfolding Sylvia’s right hand as she holds the knife. It’s the sort of photograph that graces the wedding albums in every one of those suburban homes that Reed indicted in “Families.” Reed’s old friend the singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys, himself wearing a suit and tie, looks on appreciatively, if a bit confusedly. After the wedding, the guests repaired to Playland, a pinball arcade in Times Square. Reed was an obsessive player, and Sylvia joined him in his enthusiasm.

  With encouragement from Sylvia and his doctors, Reed would soon be on the road to cleaning himself up, in keeping with the tenor of the times. But the sessions for his next album, Growing Up in Public, were something like one final lost weekend. To make the album, Reed and his band journeyed to the island of Montserrat in order to record at the AIR studio that Beatles producer George Martin had established there in 1979. For Reed, who loved beaches and the water, it was an ideal environment. He and Michael Fonfara lived and worked together throughout the project. “I was pleased with that album, because Lou allowed me to write all the music for it and to produce it,” Fonfara recalled. “We split the writing. George Martin provided housing for everybody, and Lou and I shared a house overlooking a cliff. It was a big estate on the water. Lou and I would get together every night. He’d bring his guitar, and we’d write the songs at night and teach them to the band in the morning. In the studio, the recording console sat next to a floor-to-ceiling window and an Olympic-size swimming pool right outside the door. All you had to do was get up out of the producer’s chair, take three steps, and fall into the water. It was a beautiful thing.”

  As he did about so many things, Reed made contradictory remarks about the Beatles over the years, so it’s fascinating to think about his interactions with George Martin, the fifth Beatle if anyone was. Speaking about the Velvet Underground’s approach not long before the sessions for Growing Up in Public began, Reed said, “I got off on the Beatles and all that stuff, but why not have a little something on the side for the kids in the back row?” Later his remarks about the band were much harsher. “I never liked the Beatles,” he said bluntly. “I thought they were garbage.” Still, Reed’s obsession with technology and sound made the prospect of meeting and working, at least informally, with one of the century’s most distinctive producers extremely attractive. “Lou and George got along perfectly,” Fonfara said. “Absolutely perfectly. They had a huge respect for each other. It was a great advantage to have George come around and tell us which he thought were the better songs and the better takes. Lou and I sat with him and his wife every night.”

  For better or worse, Montserrat offered other pleasures as well. Reed had begun to cut back on his use of speed but had not yet stopped drinking. “Growing Up in Public is one of the great drinking records of all time,” Reed said. “We were in Montserrat, where they come up to you: ‘Sir, would you like another mai tai?’ Me and Fonfara were ridiculous. We both almost drowned in the pools they’ve got there. It’s not a good way to make a record. We were animals.” Fonfara had similar recollections. “This was a studio where they had waiters come by constantly with trays of beautiful tropical drinks,” he s
aid. “I mean, we wrote a song called ‘The Power of Positive Drinking.’”

  That song, its title a clever riff on The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale’s classic tome of optimistic self-improvement, provides one of the lighter moments on Growing Up in Public, which came out in April of 1980. The song declares Reed’s love for Scotch, skewers drinkers who become morose or overly familiar after having a few, and promises, “When I exit, I’ll go out gracefully, shot in my hand.” The rest of the album, however, takes on far more serious themes. Despite the lavish circumstances under which it was recorded, Growing Up in Public continues, as that title would suggest, the personal exploration and reevaluation that Reed had begun on Street Hassle and The Bells. He was now approaching forty. His journey into the sexual underworld with Rachel was in the past, and marriage to Sylvia Morales was looming. The album marked the end of his relationship with Arista. The seventies were coming to a close. And even if Reed was still swimming in alcohol, his doctors had told him he had to clean up, and he was beginning to. He told Fonfara, “When we get through with this album, I’m going to go on the wagon.” And he stuck to his word.

  Reed’s journey to some semblance of health was gradual but determined, and Sylvia played a crucial role in it. “When I met Lou, he was living with Rachel and he was taking a lot of drugs, just a lot,” Sylvia recalled. “Episodes of being up for two days, three days.” But, she added, “there was enough of his self-preservation instinct still functioning that he’d come out of those episodes and there would be this drive to move things forward. The end result was going to be that he moves toward getting clean, moves toward health, and moves toward pulling his business situation together. Somewhere in there he had a very clear focus that change needed to happen and that I was the vehicle for it.”

  The cover of Growing Up in Public dramatically reflects that sense of transition. “Look at that cover,” Mick Rock said. “He antis his entire image. And he gets me to shoot it.” The cover shot is a stark portrait of Reed, wearing a green V-neck sweater with no shirt underneath. He is looking directly into the camera, but not with his usual sneering defiance. His eyes and his facial features are soft, and his shoulders are relaxed, even a bit slumped. His look is questioning and open, not the look of the Lou Reed determined to convince you—and perhaps himself—that not only does he have all the answers, but that you don’t dare question him. His face looks weathered; he’s grown up in public and then some. He’s taken some hits—and given some, too. Maybe he’s learned something as well.

  The notion of growing up in public is one that Reed would return to in interviews. Though he would never admit it, part of him came to feel embarrassed about things he had done and said during his years of greatest excess in the seventies. It was one of the reasons he refused to discuss his personal life in interviews after 1980. “You do interviews and what they want to know is, ‘Did you and David Bowie fuck a goat in Central Park in 1974?’” he said. “‘Did you live with a drag queen?’ ‘What were the drugs like?’ What bullshit is this?” Having done interviews while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, Reed came to hate being asked to respond to statements he had made in the past. That resentment—and underlying sense of humiliation—typically expressed itself as anger. “Most of [my] major mistakes were in public,” he said, “and I put them on record to boot.” He found that idea excruciating but eventually came to accept it. Growing Up in Public was a key moment in that process.

  The album begins where “growing up” begins: in the family. The first song is “How Do You Speak to an Angel,” which, on the basis of its title and lilting piano riff, one might think would be a syrupy ode to his new heteronormative love. Instead, the song’s first verse is as raw as anything Reed had ever written. “A son who is cursed with a harridan mother / Or a weak simpering father at best / Is raised to play out the timeless classical motives / Of filial love and incest,” Reed sings in the pinched, quavering vocal style he had begun to define on Street Hassle. Casting his struggle in explicitly Oedipal terms, Reed portrays his father as “weak” and “simpering,” not the overbearing bully he would sometimes conjure, suggesting that the boy’s taboo passion (“filial love and incest”) provokes both feelings of manic omnipotence against which the “weak” father is defenseless and feelings of guilt—frightening feelings that evoke the specter of inevitable paternal revenge.

  Those feelings are all summoned by anxiety over the question of “how do you speak to the prettiest girl?,” a reference to Sylvia, whose beauty was one of the first things anyone who met her mentioned about her. The question has a strangely adolescent quality, the nervousness of a teenage boy approaching one of the best-looking girls in his school. “What does he say if he’s shy?” Reed wonders, an astonishing question coming from an artist known for his boldness and aggression. Those elements of the song, along with its title, recall the high romance of doo-wop, even as musically the song bears no resemblance to that genre. Reed refers to his obsessiveness, how his thoughts “dance on the head of a pin,” as well as his sense of alienation, how he always feels as if he is “on the outside looking in,” a reference to the gorgeously agonized 1964 Top 20 hit by Little Anthony and the Imperials. By the end of the song, Reed is screaming in his most guttural voice. “How Do You Speak to an Angel,” in short, introduces the album on an unnerving note of sexual panic.

  Next comes “My Old Man,” a song that directly addresses Reed’s feelings about his father. Once again, the song begins with an immersion in the emotions of childhood, with Reed attending public school in Brooklyn and longing to “grow up to be like my old man.” But as he gets older, he grows “sick” of his father’s “bullying.” The Oedipal combat continues, particularly when he describes his father beating his mother—“It made me so mad I could choke.” The man who in the previous song was weak and simpering is now a physically abusive tyrant, so threatening that the singer vows to return to his home only when he is “much richer, in every way so much bigger / That the old man will never hit anyone again.” The phallic connotations of “in every way so much bigger” emphasizes the sexual competitiveness of the father-son relationship, part of the entangled nexus of desire, fear, and rebellion that Freud brilliantly termed “the family romance.” Reed ends the song singing in a staccato fury, this time triggered by the outrage he felt when his father confronted him. “And can you believe what he said to me?” Reed sings, rage bristling in his vocal. “He said, ‘Lou, act like a man’”—and here’s another reference to a period hit: the Four Seasons’ 1963 number one single, “Walk Like a Man.” In the previous song, he impugned his father’s manhood; now his father undermines his.

  It’s important to note that no evidence whatsoever exists for Reed’s assertion in “My Old Man” that his father beat his mother. Reed himself admitted as much. Speaking about Growing Up in Public and the notion that he was “baring his soul” on the album, Reed explained, “Well, actually, my mother’s not dead, my father never beat my mother—you’ve gotta take it, like, I’m a writer, you know what I’m saying? I take a thing and… I’m not restricted to me.… Whether my mother’s dead or not really doesn’t matter; it’s the attitude I’m interested in. I wanted to express a view, so I manipulated the events to justify the view.”

  Reed’s family, all of whom were still very much alive, predictably, did not see it that way. His sister, Merrill, felt strongly enough about Reed’s allegation that she published an article after his death explicitly countering his claim. Of course, Reed had the right to assert whatever he wanted within the context of a song. But he must have known that his lyrics would be heard as autobiographical. Having the father in the song address his son as “Lou” only reinforces its seeming realness. It’s a reflection of the continuing hostility Reed felt for his family, and particularly his father, that he would feel compelled to go to such lengths.

  On “Standing on Ceremony,” Reed sings in the voice of a father commanding his son to observe the basic requireme
nts of etiquette (“Remember your manners / Will you please take your hat off?”) because his mother is dying. It’s another revenge fantasy, and it ends with Reed, as he often did in real life, ordering his family that if anyone asks about him, “Tell them that you haven’t seen me.” On “Smiles,” Reed blames his mother for his notorious flat expression, saying he was “taught never to smile” and that his mother warned him to never “let anyone see that you’re happy,” unless he was “in front of a camera”—a slap at what he perceived as his parents’ concern with appearances. The song ends with Reed singing “Doo doo doo,” evoking the chorus of “Walk on the Wild Side,” and suggesting that the ironic result of his family’s suppression of his emotions is his journey into the sexual underworld.

  The last two songs on Growing Up in Public are the most affecting and the most nakedly vulnerable. The ballad “Think It Over” is a marriage proposal in song, presented in terms that are both ultraromantic and tentative. In a clear rendering of Reed’s relationship with Morales (“I wrote that song specifically for Sylvia,” he said later), he offers her “his heart / Once and for all, forever to keep,” but exerts no pressure, asking her simply to “think it over.” She responds, “When you ask for someone’s heart / You must know that you’re smart / Smart enough to care for it.” Hidden within the gentleness of those lines, one hears a warning from Reed to himself, an awareness of his anger and its self-sabotaging ability to destroy the things and people he loves the most. That the quality that will preserve their love is intelligence is worth remarking. It’s Reed’s reassurance that the trait he felt most certain of and valued the most in himself would see the marriage through. The female character’s “lah-dee-dah-dee-dah” refers to Diane Keaton’s verbal tic in Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s most romantic film.