Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  Despite merely being a coda to The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts garnered reviews nearly as enthusiastic as those for its predecessor, Fricke’s notable among them. The album, he wrote in his four-star review, is one of Reed’s “most powerful solo statements—or, if you will, understatements. The gray nakedness of the performances and frayed lyrical nerves of the songs underline the familial tension, romantic hurt, and emotional desperation pumping through Legendary Hearts. This is Reed’s own Scenes from a Marriage (no doubt drawn from his own, at least in part), an extended play of the heart in which he savages the myth of moon/June/croon-type love.” As he did with The Blue Mask, Robert Christgau awarded the album an A, noting that “his great new band is just a way for [Reed] to write great new songs.”

  However much the relationship between Reed and Quine had deteriorated, Reed felt strongly enough about the band he had assembled to take it on the road for a brief European tour and fully document it in the marketplace. Long-form VHS videos were beginning to make an impact on a music world in the process of being reshaped by MTV, and Reed had a February 1983 Bottom Line concert filmed and released as A Night with Lou Reed. In 1984, he released a double LP in Europe titled Live in Italy, which was recorded at shows in Verona and Rome. Reed may not have wanted the album released in the United States for fear that it might have distracted listeners from the studio album he would release that year—which it would have. Even as an import, Live in Italy garnered significant attention because the Reed-Quine guitar interplay excited critics and fans. The two guitarists lock in and roar on tracks like “White Light/White Heat,” “Kill Your Sons,” and “Sister Ray.” On “Rock and Roll,” the band’s adrenaline rushes so high that, rather than ground the group, bassist Fernando Saunders and drummer Fred Maher are swept along in the fury. They’re playing the song in what sounds like double time, with Reed screaming his vocals (while quoting verses from Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight”) in order to be heard. It’s thrilling to hear him being pushed so hard, all the tension within the band channeled into visceral, exultant expression.

  16

  NEW SENSATIONS

  BY THE END OF 1983, when Reed went into the studio to record his next album, his attitude had undergone a significant transformation. His sobriety and the stability of his personal life no doubt made this possible. Though he was an artist of enormous international importance, Reed had led somewhat of a sheltered life. Despite his proximity to New York City during his childhood, Reed’s family life had not exposed him to a larger world, and while it seems counterintuitive, the presumably sophisticated New York underworld where he had spent so much of his young life was—and continues to be—a very insular community. While Reed had occasionally invited friends to tour his late-night haunts as a kind of emotional initiation, those clubs and their denizens did not typically welcome outsiders or scrutiny of any kind. And though it was beginning to achieve societal legitimacy, homosexuality was still a subculture at the time, particularly the more extreme outposts of it, where Reed tended to venture. The loneliness and isolation of life on the road is as durable a rock-and-roll trope as exists. Cities blend indistinguishably, and the repetitive trek from airports to hotels to venues and back again creates a nowheresville of motion. And whether you’re in Paris, Texas, or Paris, France, it makes no difference if all you’re trying to do is score.

  Despite its cosmopolitan airs, New York manufactures its own distinctive brand of high-IQ hicks: people, Reed very much among them, whose comprehension of the world beyond the Hudson River is willfully nonexistent. Drug addiction, too, creates hard boundaries between users and anyone who might be shocked or disapproving of their activities. Particularly with methedrine, paranoia and the threat of arrest necessarily limit the addict’s contact with the outside world. And quite simply, being high does not facilitate honest communication with other people. Finally, Reed’s own deep insecurities and desire for control narrowed his world considerably. “Loneliness” is a word that comes up frequently when people speak of him. “I never felt that Lou was running from anything, hiding from anything,” guitarist Jeffrey Ross said. “I felt like he was just sort of walking around, going, ‘Jesus, where’s the door? How do I get out of here? Leave me alone.’ That kind of thing.”

  Now that he was fit, however, and no longer using drugs, Reed began to take the outside world more responsibly into account. Though Sylvia was much younger than Reed, her own travels as a military child, her grounded personality, her intelligence and her ambitions provided her with a confidence that she was able to instill in him. Buying a house in Blairstown, New Jersey, and learning to appreciate it was not something that Reed would have been able to do without her. She was creative, politically aware, and knowledgeable about the music scene, and Reed increasingly involved her in all aspects of his professional life. “Sylvia is one hundred percent for Lou,” Reed’s manager Eric Kronfeld said at the time. “She’s supportive. He relies on her a lot. He’s certainly happy.” Little did Kronfeld know that before too long Sylvia would replace him at his job.

  REED ENTERED THE STUDIO again in December of 1983 to begin work on the album that would become New Sensations. Despite still playing with Reed onstage, Robert Quine was not invited to the sessions. Fred Maher, whom Quine had brought into the band, felt funny about working with Lou without Quine being involved, and he asked Quine if he felt okay about it. Quine encouraged Maher to go ahead. Maher himself had thought about moving in a new direction and had enrolled at Cooper Union in New York City to study architecture. In a touching sign of respect, Reed scheduled the sessions for New Sensations to coincide with Maher’s Christmas break from school.

  Reed claimed that he didn’t involve Quine in recording New Sensations because he wanted to play all the guitar parts himself. “I’ve been practicing and practicing, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do in the studio. I didn’t need a translator,” Reed responded when asked about recording without Quine. Fernando Saunders and Fred Maher were back as the rhythm section, but Reed expanded his sound for the album, a reflection of his relatively buoyant mood at the time. Peter Wood played keyboards, and a horn section that included Randy and Michael Brecker also joined the sessions. With a quartet of background singers, Reed once again tapped into his love of R & B. Most significantly, along with the generally positive emotions chronicled on the album’s eleven songs, Reed made a determined effort to engage the music and media world as it existed in the early and mideighties. Working with engineer John Jansen, who received a coproducer credit, Reed crafted a bright, crisp sound for New Sensations, one that was not only well suited to radio but something like the sonic equivalent of the bold pastel colors that MTV was establishing as the visual signature of the decade. It was not a period geared for artists who dressed exclusively in black leather. Reed did not change his look, but he did change his point of view.

  “This is a positive album, looking at things positively,” Reed said about New Sensations at the time. “And I think that’s the direction I’m interested in.” The album took him longer to make than usual, but only because “I was capable of longer concentration.” The song “New Sensations” details these emotions, and earns its place as the title track of this most outward-looking of Reed’s albums. The song describes a recovered protagonist whose new sensations include a heightened appreciation of the everyday world around him. Over a beautifully articulated guitar groove that is simultaneously propulsive and introspective—not to mention Saunders’s jaw-dropping bass riffs—Reed declares his desire not to be “stoned or stupid” and laments that “two years ago today” he’d been arrested on Christmas Eve. Though that was not true, Reed had once been arrested on Long Island on Christmas Eve while trying to pass a fake prescription at a pharmacy. The word “today” suggests that Reed is recording the song on Christmas Eve, which gives it the feeling of a Christmas promise to reform, a Christmas gift to himself of a new life.

  He sings about the desire to “eradicate my negative views” and the wish t
o get rid of the people around him “who are always on a down.” He treasures his new life, insisting that “I want to stay married / I ain’t no dog tied to a parked car,” that latter line recalling Jake LaMotta’s desperate declaration in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a film Reed mentions elsewhere on the album: “I’m not an animal!” That LaMotta’s statement occurs within a prison cell lends resonance to Reed’s allusion to his own arrest. The prison cell, in this case, is the prison of the self, and Reed is determined to escape and engage with others. In concert, Reed described writing “New Sensations” immediately after a police officer let him off after stopping him for speeding. The cop recognized him and couldn’t believe that Lou Reed, the king of the underground, was out riding a motorcycle near the Delaware Water Gap. The song, then, is in part about finding yourself on the right side of the law—or, better yet, being forgiven for a transgression.

  Reed’s motorcycle and New Jersey house emerge once again as the means of his transformation. He takes his “GPZ out for a ride”—Reed rode a Kawasaki GPZ900—and exults in the beauty of his surroundings, the sensuality of his bike (“The engine felt good between my thighs… / I love that GPZ so much you know that I could kiss her”), and the bracing speed (this time not the drug) of his ride. He stops at a roadside diner for a burger and a Coke and feels a warm connection to the locals inside who are talking about football and neighbors who got married or recently died.

  With the possible exception of “Coney Island Baby,” in which the singer’s point of view is more internal and complicated, “New Sensations” marks perhaps the only time that Reed expressed such a profound empathy for people so different from himself. He is, of course, rightly revered for portraying characters from the demimonde with respect, but so often that vision seemed accompanied by a contempt for the kind of characters he encountered in that diner, people whose ordinary concerns are seldom the stuff of avant-rock songs. That is far from the case here, and the song infuses a moving sweetness into the album.

  The scenes Reed describes in “New Sensations” correspond to the life he was living with Sylvia in Blairstown. They would spend three days in the city and four in New Jersey, and the contrast could not have been more pronounced. Reed’s childhood friend Richard Sigal taught sociology at a New Jersey college and lived about a forty-five-minute drive from Reed’s house. They became friendly again in the eighties and would often visit each other’s homes. One of Sigal’s professional specialties was deviant behavior, and he was always threatening to bring Reed to his class as “my classic deviant.”

  “Their house was in a very rural area,” said Sigal of Reed’s New Jersey home. “It was impossible to find unless you had very specific directions. It was a large piece of property. Once through the big farm gate, I passed a small caretaker’s cottage, a private pond, and got to the house, which looked like a hunting lodge. Dark wood inside and out. Lou loved toys, and he had a snowmobile, a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, a beautiful old jukebox filled with doo-wop 45s, lots of cutting-edge electronics—and a gun. Scary. You’d have to know Lou the way I did, but I never felt putting a loaded pistol in Lou’s hand was a very good idea. He proved me right later, when he told me he’d put a round through the living room floor when the gun went off accidentally. I asked him how that happened, and he said, ‘I didn’t think there was one in the chamber.’ Famous last words.”

  Sylvia got involved with a local environmental group, and their house had an earth toilet, which turned human waste into compost, rather than a septic system. Reed, Sigal, and their wives would go bowling together—and, as with his tennis playing back in high school, “he didn’t like losing,” Sigal said. Reed explained that he could no longer drink hard liquor, but when they would have dinner together, he would occasionally drink wine. And he would smoke pot. “Lou actually brought some dope out for me,” Sigal recalled. “Lou the drug dealer from the city! I don’t remember how it came up, but he said, ‘I’ll bring you something to smoke.’ I remember we were at a bowling alley in Sparta, which is where I was living, and we were in the parking lot. All of a sudden he nervously shoved a bag in my pocket, and I paid him for it. And he took the money, too!”

  Reed was always gracious to Sigal’s children, who were young adolescents at the time. “We would all skate on Lou’s pond,” Sigal said, “and he was always a technophile, so he would show them all the newest, latest stuff. If it was brand-new, Lou had it. He had an Atari, and we didn’t even know what Atari was. He taught the kids how to play, and they were ecstatic. They couldn’t get enough of it.” One time, Sigal brought his friend a copy of the first record Reed ever made, the Jades’ “So Blue” backed with “Leave Her for Me.” He had found it in a long-forgotten box hidden away in one of his closets. Reed did not have a copy himself. “I gave it to him,” Sigal said, “and he said, ‘You know, you shouldn’t just give this to me. This might be worth something someday.’ I said, ‘You’re my friend. It’s your record. Take it.’ So I gave him that 45, and he put it on his jukebox.”

  Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a friend of Reed’s, had a house near the Delaware Water Gap in northeastern Pennsylvania, not far from Reed’s country home. He shared Reed’s love of motorcycles. “One day, he came over on his bike, with Sylvia on the back,” Kaye said, “and we took off. It really was a beautiful day, one of the most memorable days ever. I’m driving in back of him, and he’s wagging his rear, showing off for me. It was really great to see him at play. I also remember swimming in his pond with him and John Cale. I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, man, this is my Velvet Underground dream come true!’ And then Lou was showing my daughter how to fish. In a weird way, I used to call him and Sylvia the paranormals, because he seemed so normal, but you know that it was like some strange planetary conjunction!”

  ON THE ORIGINAL VINYL version of New Sensations, which came out in April of 1984, the title track closes the first side and is followed on the top of the second side by another masterpiece, “Doin’ the Things That We Want To.” The song captures a split imperative Reed felt at this time. Even as he was attempting to engage the realities of the eighties music industry, he was also becoming more conscious of his status and ambitions as a writer. His sobriety and stability gave him the confidence to move forward on these two seemingly disparate fronts: the increasingly youth-oriented music scene and the more elevated world of his literary ambitions.

  Reed once said, “My expectations are high… to be the greatest writer that ever lived on God’s earth. In other words, I’m talking about Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky.” He would later walk that statement back, explaining, “That was just me shooting my mouth off, but it is a real dream. To do something that’s not disposable, that could really hold its own forever… whether it’s on record or on the printed page.” Nonetheless, his open desire for a lasting legacy as a literary figure was understandable and, after all, given his interests and the stature he had already attained, relatively reasonable.

  “Doin’ the Things That We Want To” floats on a hypnotic guitar riff and a gorgeous, atmospheric violin part by L. Shankar. Reed’s vocal is deadpan but intense, as he describes how inspired he felt by a production of Sam Shepard’s play Fool for Love, which was staged in New York in 1983. The play, which centers on the tangled relationship between a man and a woman, trades on themes straight out of Reed’s playbook: sexual jealousy, violence, incest, substance abuse, and the crushing weight of the past. As Reed describes the characters and their actions (“The man was bullish, the woman was a tease”), Shepard’s talent, and the impact both had on him as a viewer, the background singers chant variations on the song’s title. The characters, Shepard, and Reed are all doing the things that they want to.

  Reed then describes how the play reminded him of “the movies Marty made about New York / Those frank and brutal movies that are so brilliant.” He rightly draws the connection between Fool for Love and Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which came out in 1980 and is regarded as among the greatest fi
lms of that decade. Like Fool for Love, Raging Bull deals with violence, jealousy, family tensions, and painfully destructive psychological obsessions. Reed clearly identifies with both Shepard and Scorsese and the characters in their work, the way they do the things they want to do, regardless of the taboos they violate or the more conventional sensibilities they outrage. But Reed also sounds envious of the freedom Scorsese and Shepard enjoy. He often said about the controversies that erupted over his work that if he were writing books or plays or making films, no one would have been concerned. He must have felt that far more acutely as the insurgent energy of punk and the general outrageousness of the seventies receded, and the mainstream blockbuster culture of the eighties took shape. Through the rest of the decade, Reed would make the case that in order to truly understand what he was trying to achieve, the listener had to think of him outside the context of rock and roll.

  With his life under control, Reed was also making his play for commercial success. “I really think I have it more together than I ever have in my whole life,” he said. “I have more of my powers and abilities to reason, function, and to take a thought, carry it through, complete it, and accomplish what I set out to do over a long span. I personally would love to have commercial success because I know what I’m doing is good.” At shows at around this time, he would tell audiences how happy he was to play “Walk on the Wild Side” for them. The song had paid his rent for years, he explained, and if people wanted to hear it, well, Lou was only too pleased to perform it for them.