The final word on this disturbing aspect of The Blue Mask is “Waves of Fear,” a song that in its very title distills all the terror that getting straight, in all senses of the term, was meant to keep at bay. Again, Reed’s and Quine’s guitars howl as the singer details a catalog of suffering that culminates in the line, “I must be in hell.” He is out of both alcohol and pills, and, even more frightening, he is out of control. Beyond its significant role in The Blue Mask, the song stands as something like a definitive statement from the core of Reed’s heart of darkness. “Waves of Fear” would become a blistering staple of his live shows for many years.
The outlier on The Blue Mask is “The Day John Kennedy Died,” a song unlike any other that Reed had ever written. The song has two narratives: a dream the singer has that he is the president of the United States and his recollections of November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Reed recalls hearing the news of the shooting while watching his college football team play on television “upstate in a bar,” obviously in Syracuse, whose college team was a football powerhouse in those years. Reed wrote his memories as he actually recalled them. The only problem is that Kennedy was shot on a Friday, and Syracuse University did not have a game scheduled that day.
It’s likely—or at least possible—that Reed was unconsciously conflating the murders of John Kennedy and John Lennon, who was shot to death in New York on December 8, 1980. In “The Day John Kennedy Died,” Reed recalls the football game he was watching being interrupted by the announcement that the president had been shot. While that did not happen, many millions of people, possibly including Reed, who was an ardent football fan, learned about John Lennon’s death when legendary sports announcer Howard Cosell interrupted his Monday Night Football broadcast to report that Lennon had been shot and was dead by the time he reached the hospital. For the baby boomer generation, of which Reed was a charter member, “Where were you when John Lennon was shot?” soon stood beside “Where were you when Kennedy was killed?” as a generational milestone. Their sharing a first name reinforces that connection.
Lennon may well have been on Reed’s mind; Lennon’s final album, Double Fantasy, shares many aspects with The Blue Mask, most notably a song called “Woman” (recalled by Reed’s “Women”), which offers praise to Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, in much the same way that Reed was doing with Sylvia. Lennon had ended a life of wild excess to reunite with his love in quiet domesticity, much as Reed had done with Sylvia. The men were nearly the same age (Lennon was less than two years older), and Lennon’s life was cut short just at the moment when Reed decided that he needed to get clean in order to avoid his own premature demise. And in another similarity, a song like Double Fantasy’s “I’m Losing You” displays the same desperate fear of abandonment that runs throughout The Blue Mask. Reed had met John and Yoko in the back room at Max’s, and the parallels between his and Lennon’s experiences would not have escaped him.
In “The Day John Kennedy Died,” Reed replaces John Kennedy, as if he had been able to live the life that the president could not because he was gunned down. “I dreamed I was the president of these United States,” Reed sings, and then imagines that he had been able to accomplish all the good things that he believes Kennedy would have, had he lived. He was “young and smart” and had overcome “ignorance” and “hate” in the course of creating a “perfect union.” But reality intrudes, the dream ends, and the song concludes on a mournful note of lost possibility.
Essentially, the song takes a boomer trope—the Kennedy assassination, the “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century,” in novelist Don DeLillo’s phrase, as the end of the innocence—and personalizes it. Now cleaned up and married, Reed looks back and imagines an American future that was similarly cleaned up, with him as the charismatic, aggressively masculine young pioneer of the new frontier, not the “fucking faggot junkie” he had once been and was now embarrassed by. “Some people like to think I’m just this black-leather-clad person in sunglasses,” he said after The Blue Mask came out. “And there’s certainly that side of me; I wouldn’t want to deny my heritage. But while I have my share of street smarts, I’m not a rat from the streets by any means. I always wanted to be a writer, and I went to college to prepare myself for it.” He would later say more bluntly, “I think of myself as a writer. I operate through a rock-and-roll format.”
It was relatively rare in those days for rock musicians to have college degrees, so Reed’s pride has some justification. But his praise for himself in that regard could be ham-fisted and off-putting. “I took a major in English and a minor in philosophy; I was very into Hegel, Sartre, Kierkegaard,” he told the New York Times at around the time of The Blue Mask’s release. “After you finish reading Kierkegaard, you feel like something horrible has happened to you: Fear and Nothing. See, that’s where I’m coming from. If you have my interests and my kind of academic background, then what I’m doing is not really an unlikely thing to do. And now that I’ve made this album, I’m very, very happy.… I feel like I’m just starting to peak, and I want to feel like I’ve got plenty of time.”
Indeed, it was at this point in his career that Reed, who had been shockingly open about his life in both his music and his interviews, began to rigorously guard his privacy and his past. Asked about “Walk on the Wild Side” being regarded as “a kind of national anthem in homosexual circles,” Reed snapped at a New York Times reporter in a 1982 interview. “I didn’t write anybody’s national anthem when I wrote ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’” he said. “I wrote a character study of four people who hung around Andy Warhol’s studio. My past is my past, and it’s my business.” More privately, he told a friend who offered to return some manuscripts and letters that Reed had sent him years before, “I want nothing to do with that faggot.”
In addition, Reed had been a studiously apolitical figure up to that point in his life and career—“Gimme an issue and I’ll give you a tissue—you can wipe my ass with it,” he had spat at his audience on Take No Prisoners. So “The Day John Kennedy Died” is a curious song from that perspective as well. Reed, in fact, denied the political implications of the song. “I really have no feeling about politics one way or the other,” he said. “I just felt bad and I wrote a song about him.” Sylvia, however, was more worldly in that regard, and with the fog of drugs and alcohol lifted, Reed could begin looking outward a bit, a development that she encouraged and that would become more pronounced later in his life. His public praise for Sylvia continued in his interviews following the release of The Blue Mask. Sylvia, he said, “helped me so much in bringing things together and getting rid of certain things that were bad for me, certain people. I don’t know what I would have done without her. She’s very, very smart, so I have a realistic person I can ask about things: ‘Hey, what do you think of this song?’ I’ve got help, for the first time in my life.”
The Blue Mask has come to be regarded as one of the strongest albums of Reed’s solo career, and its reception was no less enthusiastic, beginning with Reed’s own immodest assessment of it. “I’m not above appreciating my own work,” he said at the time. “And I don’t think The Blue Mask is just a good album. It’s way better than that.” Robert Palmer declared in the New York Times that The Blue Mask was “the most outstanding rock album of 1982,” adding that it had taken Reed “fifteen years to match” the songs on the first Velvet Underground album. Critic Brian Cullman, writing in Musician, called The Blue Mask “the best album of 1982. It’s the record I’d given up all hope of Lou Reed ever making: musically, emotionally, and spiritually.… After years of fitfulness and sleepwalking, Lou Reed has begun to dream again.” Robert Christgau gave The Blue Mask an A—the first he’d ever assigned to one of Reed’s albums—and called it Reed’s “most controlled, plainspoken, deeply felt, and uninhibited album.” Rolling Stone was similarly rhapsodic. “Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask is a great record,” the lead review in the magazine beg
ins, “and its genius is at once so simple and unusual that the only appropriate reaction is wonder. Who expected anything like this from Reed at this late stage of the game?… Grace has never sounded so tough-minded.”
Reed himself saw The Blue Mask as “the end of something, the absolute end of everything from the Velvet Underground on. The Blue Mask was the final ending and Legendary Hearts like a coda.”
THE ENTHUSIASTIC RESPONSE TO The Blue Mask buoyed Reed. But one aspect of it troubled him: the focus many of those positive responses (justifiably) placed on the role that Robert Quine played in his musical resurgence. While no evidence exists that Reed read Brian Cullman’s review of the album in Musician—though, given Reed’s obsession with his critical reception, he very likely did—one sentence summarizes the source of his disturbance. Cullman wrote, “If the late poet Delmore Schwartz, Reed’s mentor and friend, is at the spiritual center of the record, Quine is clearly at the musical center.” It was fine, of course, for Cullman to emphasize the significance of Schwartz in The Blue Mask, not only because of Reed’s admiration for him but also because such notions flattered Reed’s sense of himself as a writer. But even though Reed himself had recruited Quine to play on the album, the credit Quine was garnering for the album’s success and, eventually, for the renewed power of Reed’s live shows began to eat at him. As with Andy Warhol, John Cale, and David Bowie, Reed was happy to collaborate until the goal of the collaboration was achieved. Then every collaborator became a competitor and needed to be cast aside. All those critical statements expressing surprise, even shock, that Reed had managed to make a great album carried the implication that he could not have done it without Quine. That may well have been true. Nonetheless, it became clear to Reed that Quine had to go.
Ostensibly, Reed maintained the same band as on The Blue Mask, other than replacing drummer Doane Perry with Fred Maher, to whom Quine had introduced him. So Quine’s execution was not immediate. But it began with the fact that Quine had become good friends with Reed’s onetime critical champion and eventual nemesis, Lester Bangs. Quine became something like the third element in an emotional triangle that took shape between himself, Reed, and Bangs. While Bangs had done everything possible to damage his own relationship with Reed, he grew jealous of the closeness that had developed between Reed and Quine during the recording of The Blue Mask. Before it was released, Quine played the album for Bangs, evidently with Reed’s permission, and Bangs responded that he liked it, though he thought the lyrics were “weak,” information that, incredibly, Quine relayed to Reed. “It was probably the worst thing I could have done,” Quine said. “I was just so infatuated with being able to hang around with this guy, my hero.”
Quine may have been infatuated with Reed, but conveying Bangs’s critique of the album to him was also a means of keeping Reed in his place, a way to express his own reservations about the album using Bangs’s comments as a vehicle. Quine could therefore maintain his status with Reed but still get his points across. The strategy did not work. Quine believed that Reed had softened “The Blue Mask” by paring back the more extreme lyrics he had written for the track. Reed had also rerecorded the vocals he had done live with the band in the studio, and Quine compared the vocals Reed ultimately used on the album to crooning. Whether or not Quine expressed these opinions, Reed, with his acute sensitivity to criticism, certainly would have sensed Quine’s less-than-total approval of an album that Reed believed to be among the strongest he had ever made. Reed also had enough of a history with Bangs by this point to see Quine’s delivering Bangs’s views as evidence of Quine’s agreement with them—and he may well have been right about that.
That Bangs died of a drug overdose shortly after The Blue Mask was released made matters worse. Quine was devastated by his friend’s death, while Reed distanced himself from it. When Quine brought the news to Reed the day after Bangs’s death, Reed responded, “That’s too bad about your friend,” and tore into a lengthy denunciation of Bangs. Quine concluded that his “friendship with Lou ended with Lester’s death.… He’s an egomaniac and that’s why he has no friends. If you’re not a yes-man, you’re not his friend. He respected the fact that I wasn’t a yes-man, but ultimately I had to go.”
Reed’s first step in the process of pushing Quine out was to minimize Quine’s contributions to his next album. “He mixed me off Legendary Hearts,” Quine said. “I’m barely audible on it.” He particularly noted Reed’s treatment of a guitar part on “Home of the Brave,” an elegiac ballad in which Quine hoped to express his feelings about the death of Lester Bangs with a coruscating solo. He described his playing on the track as “naked and brutal,” but complained that Reed added echo to it and blunted its impact. In Quine’s view, Reed had grown jealous of his guitar playing, or, more likely, of the recognition Quine got for it. After Quine had encouraged Reed to begin playing again, Reed got his confidence back. At that point, Quine said, “he turned it into a competitive thing. If there is a competitive thing, there is no way I am going to win. Not when he is telling the guitar guy to mix me out, when people can’t hear me taking guitar solos. When he keeps me out of a mix to make sure I’m not being heard. He’s an asshole.”
As Reed put it, Legendary Hearts, which came out in March of 1983, was something of a coda to The Blue Mask. The album’s cover featured another kind of mask, one that didn’t simply shade Reed’s face but completely obscured it. That mask was a motorcycle helmet, which he held in the black leather gloves he wore when riding. It was the first Lou Reed album cover that didn’t show his face, and the imagery, quite brilliantly, cut several ways. Motorcycles, of course, are about as butch an image as you can find, dating back at least to Marlon Brando’s 1953 film classic The Wild One, and the helmet’s smooth, cold surface recalls the dehumanizing objectification of bondage masks. But riding his motorcycle had also become an essential element of Reed’s newfound country life in New Jersey, an extension of his domesticity in that regard, and he specifically refers to it in the album’s lyrics. Similarly, the black leather gloves evoke the “black-leather-clad person” that epitomized Reed’s image, but they, too, were part of the safety gear for what could now be seen as his weekend warrior hobby. Beyond that, it’s a strikingly impersonal cover for an album titled Legendary Hearts, as if Reed had raised his guard again against the painful intimacies of his previous album.
The title track, which opens the album, pulls back from the idealized romantic imagery of The Blue Mask. It’s an affecting description of how our human flaws—our fears, our anger, our insecurities—prevent us from achieving the love we strive for. The honeymoon is over and reality has set in. In the unforgiving light of the real world, those idealized images transform from shimmering goals into taunting proofs of our inadequacies. As eloquent as the song’s melody is, Reed characteristically pushes his theme to an unsettling extreme, suggesting that an essential flaw, a kind of original sin (“His basic soul was stained”), renders the singer incapable of true love. Reed evokes the quintessential Shakespearean lover (“Wherefore art thou Romeo?”), except this gallant is numbing himself with alcohol or drugs and fading into oblivion, “seemingly lost forever.” The couple in the song is fighting—an unsettlingly recurrent image on the album—and, in a brilliant bit of Reed wordplay, come to understand that they’ve got to “fight to keep [their] legendary love.”
The fighting imagery continues on one of the strongest tracks on Legendary Hearts: “Martial Law.” An irresistible guitar groove propels the song, which quickly became a highlight of Reed’s live shows. With great humor, the song describes two law enforcement officers, the singer and his friend Ace, who are called to quell a domestic disturbance. They quiet down the battling couple and declare “martial law”—another pun, this time visual, which rests on the close relationship between the words “martial” and “marital.” Reed understands how love and war not only exist side by side but are sometimes inextricable, even indistinguishable. In “Bottoming Out,” the singer describes tak
ing a spill on his motorcycle—a ride he took because “if I hadn’t left, I would have struck you dead.”
“Home of the Brave,” the song in which Quine had hoped to express his feelings about the death of Lester Bangs, takes a proud image from “The Star-Spangled Banner” and explores the vulnerability and fear running through the lives of the people living with nothing left to lose in the land of the all too free. For each person who has found someone to hold on to (“Micky’s got a wife”), others, like the singer, are “shaking in [their] boots.” Those people, like Reed’s old friend Lincoln Swados (“a friend who jumped in front of a train”), are the ones who are “not saved.” They’re “the daughters and the sons / Lost in the home of the brave.” Domestic violence emerges in this song as well (“A man’s kicking a woman”), loneliness, fear, and abandonment erupting in brutal anger. In a move that is both lovely and tense, Reed ends the song quoting lyrics from the 1965 country-soul hit “Every Day I Have to Cry Some.” Like Reed, Arthur Alexander, who wrote the song, understood that everybody has to cry some—and die some.
Legendary Hearts ends with a lovely, understated ballad, “Rooftop Garden.” The literal reference for the song is the rooftop garden at the West Village apartment Reed shared with Sylvia, here presented as an oasis of tranquility and peace amid the violence and mayhem of the New York that Reed spent so many years chronicling. It is a touch of their rural New Jersey retreat in the heart of New York street life. As he was on The Blue Mask, John Lennon was again on Reed’s mind. Reed adapts a line from “I Am the Walrus,” substituting “rooftop” for “English” in Lennon’s lyric “Sitting in my English garden, waiting for the sun.” For all the images of strife on Legendary Hearts, “Rooftop Garden” ends the album on a serene note. “What a lovely couple are you and I,” Reed sings, and the couple shuts out the world for a moment of connection—avoiding the phone, not answering letters, pretending they’re not at home. Once again, Reed brings a song to a close with an allusion to an R & B classic, in this case the Drifters’ 1962 hit “Up on the Roof,” a suggestion on Reed’s part, as David Fricke noted in Rolling Stone, that “while there are no legendary loves, legendary love songs are a wonderful inspiration.”
Lou Reed Page 31
