Growing Up in Public closes with “Teach the Gifted Children,” a song that offers, of all things, Reed’s own highly idiosyncratic version of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Teach Your Children.” Along with the pieties you would expect in such a song (“Teach them about flowers”), Reed offers a darker vision of what children must learn to survive in the world. “Teach them about anger,” he sings, “or the wages of their sins.” He views childhood not as a paradise of innocence but as a state corrupted by original sin and requiring the cleansing of baptism, which he evokes by quoting Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” Emotionally, “Teach the Gifted Children” looks backward and forward. It creates a portrait of the nurturing childhood Reed wished he had, and it also suggests the possibility of having children with Morales and assuming the adult role of a parent himself.
In Reed’s view, Growing Up in Public is a redemption story, with salvation coming in the person of his female lover and the possibility of marriage. Speaking of the character at the center of the album, he said, “I think of the whole thing as being on a very up note. Like he’s going ahead, like he’s found the perfect lady with the incredible grace.” Reed felt strongly enough about what he had to say that he included a lyric sheet with the album for the first time in his career. “I thought it was a good idea because the lyrics are, like, really complex in there,” he said. “It would be asking too much for somebody to take ‘gilt-edged polymorphous urban’ and get that—and not only that, but get the pun on ‘gilt.’ That’s a little much. Hence, the lyric sheet.”
And hence this portrait of the artist as a man extricating himself from a tormented past, and moving toward a new vision of his future.
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JUST AN AVERAGE GUY
REED’S NEXT ALBUM, THE Blue Mask, came out on February 23, 1982, a week before his fortieth birthday. That last point is relevant because The Blue Mask introduces a determinedly—and self-consciously—grown-up Lou Reed, a figure his fans had not met before. Significantly, while Reed had been drawing on older material and collaborating with cowriters since Street Hassle, the ten songs on The Blue Mask are credited to Reed alone. While getting clean, he had gone for a long period without writing or picking up a guitar. Now he was playing again, and his struggle with writer’s block had ended.
In the opening track, “My House,” the ordinarily splenetic singer calmly declares, “I’ve really got a lucky life / My writing, my motorcycle, and my wife.” The “stone and wood” house mentioned in the song isn’t another rented Manhattan apartment but a home in rural New Jersey (“the middle of nowhere,” in Reed’s description) that he and Sylvia, who had been married for two years at the time of the album’s release, had purchased. The house, Reed sings, is “very beautiful at night,” and Sylvia is mentioned by name. Reed describes geese flying above the trees on his property, as well as the mist that hangs over the lake nearby.
The strange turn in “My House” comes when he asserts that the house is haunted by the ghost of Delmore Schwartz, Reed’s “friend and teacher” from his days at Syracuse University, who died in 1966 and was buried in, of all places, New Jersey. In case anyone believed that Reed was inventing a metaphoric haunting, he took great pains to make it clear that he meant the song to be taken literally. “It happened more than once. And continues to happen,” he said of the haunting. “I mean, this includes things like footsteps upstairs when no one’s there. Those kind of really weird things. I mean, real footsteps, real obvious footsteps. And you turn the light on and you go upstairs and it’s gone. You think, well, maybe it’s a tree, maybe it’s a rat…”
After the release of Growing Up in Public, Reed had entered rehab, another development in which Sylvia played a significant role. He now got up early and liked to begin his studio sessions at around two in the afternoon and wrap them up at around ten, or midnight at the latest. Reed’s reimagining of himself included, of all unlikely things, his cooperation in the publication of a 1981 People magazine profile that celebrated him as healthy, calm, and newly domesticated. “You have to be as close as I’ve been to the drug scene to be as repelled as I am” by it, he told David Fricke. Drugs, Reed explained, “interfere with my writing.” He married Sylvia, he said, because “if you meet the perfect woman, you should pick her up in your arms and dash off with her.” The story concludes with Reed’s determination to not allow his image or his audience to destroy him. His fans, he said, “would be far happier if I died. That would have completed the Lou Reed myth perfectly. But I’m not about to kill him off just yet.”
Reed saw himself as having no alternative but to clean up. Drugs and alcohol were destroying his career, and threatening his life. Looking back on the seventies, he said, “There were a lot of drugs going on during that period. It ruined a lot of careers.… Speaking for myself, I could not continue that way.… So I had to set about starting at square [one] again.” That meant withdrawing from the world he had moved in. “He set me up as a gatekeeper,” Sylvia said, “the person to say, ‘No, he’ll call you back,’ sometimes to evade whatever person he was trying to evade. Sometimes those reasons were for health, for a desire not to be involved in a certain scene. Other times it was for business. I think he did that his whole life. He tended to eventually just shut the door on people, sort of like they’re in the past. He didn’t really make any qualms about that. I think there’s a whole litany of people who eventually were surprised, like, ‘Oh, I’ve known you this many years, and there’s no longer any communication or access?’”
Starting from square one also meant getting a new band. According to Michael Fonfara, Reed called him after Growing Up in Public was completed and said, “‘I can’t have another drink or do another shot of speed. My doctor says my liver is going to explode. So I’m calling the band off. I’m disbanding it temporarily.’ He said, ‘I’ll call you if I ever get it back together again.’” After that, “our relationship tapered off into almost total evaporation, except for a call once a year,” Fonfara said. “There was no dramatic falling out—or if there was, he kept it from me. I mean, I counted him as a very good friend, and I still do. I want to always remember it that way.”
Reed may have had other reasons for seeking out a new band. Fonfara and the other musicians in what had come to be called the Everyman Band were all well-trained players who valued technique as much as the Hunter-Wagner Rock n Roll Animal band had. Reed valued it as well, but he was beginning to move beyond that phase. “Lou’s a poet, but I never did think he could play great guitar,” Fonfara said. “I told him that once and I never wanted to say it again because it made him so upset that he didn’t talk to me for weeks. See, he imagined himself as a great rock-and-roll guitar player. He had the soul and heart of one, but he just didn’t have the chops.”
The Blue Mask’s cover, which Sylvia designed, is another recasting. It features the Mick Rock portrait used on the cover of Transformer, the solo album for which Reed was still best known, and it’s shaded in soulful blue tones. That coloring suits the stringent emotional honesty of the album, but the choice of the cover photo also suggests Reed’s commercial ambitions for The Blue Mask. Transformer was his first hit, and he clearly hoped that The Blue Mask would be more than an artistic comeback.
The sound that Reed’s new band fashioned for him recalled both the thunder and the delicacy of the Velvet Underground. Guitarist Robert Quine, a brilliant player, had followed the Velvets on tour as a fan, recording their shows and studying their music with a scholar’s intensity. He had met Reed back then, but Reed did not remember him when Sylvia reintroduced them. Quine had been the lead guitarist in Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Sylvia took Reed to see the band at CBGB precisely so that Reed, who was searching for a new direction, could hear him. Reed was mightily impressed and called on Quine when he was ready to record. For Quine, it was a creative dream come true. The Voidoids’ songs did not provide him with the canvas that Reed’s did, and Quine had an extraordinary ability to render in sonic terms t
he jarring extremes of Reed’s lyrics. And since the Velvet Underground was Quine’s primary inspiration, Reed was able to step into a musical frame that he himself had invented.
Quine, of course, had a much different perception of Reed as a guitarist than Fonfara did. “Lou Reed became such a big influence on my playing,” Quine said. “He was a true innovator on the guitar and was never appreciated at the time.… I completely absorbed his style.” As far as Quine was concerned, Reed had to play guitar on The Blue Mask. “I bullied him into playing guitar,” Quine said. “I told him straight up if he doesn’t play guitar, I’m not working with him, so he played guitar again for the first time in a long time. I would force him to take solos.” Quine’s encouragement squared perfectly with Reed’s own assessment of what he needed to do with The Blue Mask. “For the last few years, I was working with musicians who were into funk and jazz,” he said of the Everyman Band at around the time The Blue Mask came out. “I wasn’t playing the guitar on my records because I couldn’t really play with those guys, being a simple rock-and-roll player. I thought it would be interesting to explore that direction, but there was a gap between me and them. You can hear it on the records. I heard it one day when some radio station was being brave and played one of my albums. And I said, ‘You’ve carried this experiment far enough. It’s not working. The ideas are there and then they disappear. The music isn’t consistent. You seem isolated. There’s a certain confidence that’s not there because you’re not really in control.’ So I dissolved the band.”
Bassist Fernando Saunders provided a perfect balance to Quine’s and Reed’s guitars. “When I first heard Fernando play, I went over to him and said, ‘You are the best bass player I’ve ever heard,’” Reed said. “And I don’t say things like that, generally speaking. Most musicians I run into have lots of technique; they can play scales and their solos sound like that. It doesn’t mean anything. You can get a buzz out of it the first listen, maybe even the second, but not after that. And I’m in it for the long run. That’s why I work with Fernando.” Saunders would remain a regular collaborator until the end of Reed’s life. Because Reed wanted as few overdubs as possible on The Blue Mask, it was essential that he have players with great skill and originality, but who could also play together seamlessly and support his vocals with finesse, finding sounds that underscored his meanings. As always with Reed, the words were the most important element of the song. Quine, Saunders, and drummer Doane Perry fit the bill in every regard.
Describing the recording of the album, Quine said, “We did The Blue Mask under very unusual circumstances. Lou gave everyone in the band a cassette of him just strumming these songs on an acoustic guitar, and I was free to come up with whatever I came up with. Total freedom. We went in with no rehearsals. None of us had ever played together before, but it just clicked immediately. What you hear on the record is totally live. There are no overdubs, except on one track.… Any mistakes that happen are on the record. If I take a solo, I stop playing rhythm. There is no rhythm guitar fill going underneath. It’s the way they used to do things in the fifties. I’m especially proud of that record.”
THE WILD, AMBISEXUAL NIGHT crawler of the early seventies may have settled down, but, like the seemingly idyllic home in “My House,” his newfound peace is haunted. Reed went to extreme lengths to assert the normalcy of his new life—to a degree that sometimes makes it impossible to determine if he was being ironic. The song that follows “My House” is “Women,” whose chorus endlessly repeats the declaration “I love women.” Presaging the political correctness of the years to come, the singer sheepishly apologizes for having looked at pornographic images of women in magazines. It was “sexist,” he confesses, but offers the excuse that “I was in my teens.” Still, he slings the macho boast that “I couldn’t keep my hands off women / And I won’t until I die.” One additional odd moment in the song is the singer’s wish that he could hire “a choir of castrati to serenade my love” as a kind of foreplay to their lovemaking. In one sense, it’s an innocent enough image, but the notion of castration will reappear in much more disturbing terms on the album. That unsettling echo and the introduction of the notion of castration in a song (and on an album) so gripped by the redemptive power of heterosexual love makes the image worth noting.
Perhaps just as startling is Reed’s repeated insistence in “Average Guy” that he is precisely what that title denotes: “just your average guy, trying to do what’s right.” Because it’s a more up-tempo track than “My House” or “Women,” it’s easier to read the tone of the song as playful. Given Reed’s lifelong conviction about his own specialness, it’s difficult to take the song seriously. But “Average Guy” also corresponds to the twelve-step code of disowning your sense of specialness, of accepting that you are no different from anybody else and that the rules that apply to everyone apply to you as well. A sense of personal exceptionalism is part of the illness of addiction, according to the twelve steps, and Reed is obviously so grateful for the stability he has found that he is willing to deny his ego to preserve it.
“Only a woman can love a man,” Reed sings on “Heavenly Arms,” the ballad that concludes The Blue Mask. On that song, Reed reaches back once again to the overwhelming romance of the doo-wop songs he loved so much growing up. The singer is helpless, but his lover’s heavenly arms come to his rescue. As the Cadillacs did in their 1954 hit “Gloria,” Reed repeatedly chants his woman’s name as if it were an incantation and Sylvia were a magic force who could protect him from all harm. In a world filled with hate, threatened by an “impending storm,” Sylvia is his deliverance.
No one can rely on someone else to that degree without dreading the possibility that the other person might leave. That is certainly the subtheme of “The Heroine,” whose title puns on that notorious song from the first Velvet Underground album. Both songs, ultimately, are explorations of addiction and dependency, whether to drugs or to a lover. After all, as Reed sang of heroin in the VU song, “It’s my wife and it’s my life.” Reed would later write that “The Heroine” is about “Jackie Kennedy trying to claw her way out of that car,” a reference that ties the song to The Blue Mask’s “The Day John Kennedy Died,” as well as to one of Andy Warhol’s great silkscreen subjects, the mourning Jackie as Pietà.
Unlike the vast majority of Reed’s songs, particularly during this period in which he was continually paring his lyrics to the bone, “The Heroine” works primarily in metaphoric terms. In an elaborate allegory, the song describes a ship that is battered in a storm; its crew is waging war against itself, and no one can bring the vessel under control except “the heroine.” The helpless crew members are all male; the heroine, of course, is female. In an extraordinary parallel story line, Reed describes a baby in a “box,” or crib, also male, also helpless and fearful, desperately waiting for the saving hands—or, perhaps, the heavenly arms—of his mother, the heroine, “who transcends all the men.” For Reed, the song was about the “overwhelmingly intense desire for this woman.… There’s a ship that can’t be steered; there’s a storm, nobody can control it, the men are down below fighting with one another… and where’s the heroine?” He acknowledged the “phallic and Freudian imagery” not only in this song, but throughout The Blue Mask.
The song does not end happily. The heroine, a symbol of purity in “a virgin white dress”—like the dress Morales wore for her wedding to Reed not long before—is strapped to the mast of the ship, helpless to calm the storm and rescue the crew. Reed himself described this vision of the impeccably pure heroine as “naive” and “childlike.” If the heroine had remained a fantasy, Reed said, hope could persist that if she were to appear, salvation might be possible. But when she does enter the scene and is “immobilized,” incapable of saving the ship and the men, the terrifying conclusion is that “things are going to continue on as they were, which is terrible.”
“Underneath the Bottle” describes the process of hitting bottom as an alcoholic, or possibly relapsin
g—that feeling when “you get so down, you can’t get any lower.” However, the tone of the song isn’t harrowing, even though the singer describes falling down stairs and finding bruises on his body but not remembering how they got there. He talks about the “shakes inside me,” losing his pride, being unable to work, and his desire for another drink, but his delivery is detached and matter-of-fact, even humorous at times. Reed and Quine’s guitars establish a seductive, easygoing groove that also lightens the song’s mood. Still, “Underneath the Bottle” is the flip side of “The Power of Positive Drinking”: it tells of a life that has gone from “bad to weird” and might not be able to turn itself around again.
Epitomizing the phallic imagery running through The Blue Mask, “The Gun” describes a character who hides behind his weapon, controlling everyone and everything around him because of the firearm he is holding. As his and Quine’s guitars intertwine in a hypnotic, sonic dance, Reed delivers the lyrics as if he’s narrating a dream, or as if he were Travis Bickle speaking to himself in the mirror in Taxi Driver. (Reed recorded an alternate version of the song with lyrics so revoltingly explicit that he decided that he had pushed the boundaries too far, and he went with the somewhat tamer version for the album.) After the song ends, the album explodes into the roar of the title track, a psychosexual phantasmagoria of fear, violence, and sadomasochism. Explicit references to Oedipus, to incest and patricide, to castration, and to childhood abuse link the song to all the themes underlying the idyllic portrait of domestic bliss the album celebrates. It’s as if the blue mask is the brilliant, elegant disguise concealing the horrors inside “My House,” the inferno burning within the “Average Guy.” Even Reed was spooked by the song and found it difficult to listen to. “‘The Blue Mask’ as a song is really devastating,” he said. “I don’t anticipate doing any more of that”—though, of course, he would.
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