Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  In what was likely his most emphatic commercial gesture, he not only wrote a fun, upbeat, radio-friendly pop single: he made a textbook MTV video for it. Reed had made videos before, and each attempted, to one degree or another, to present a vision of him that suited both the times and the style of MTV. The video he made for “Legendary Hearts” was misconceived—the song is entirely too complicated to lend itself to a treacly visual treatment. More interesting is his video for “Women,” from The Blue Mask, which shows him fronting his band in a shirt open to the middle of his chest, his short hair and sculpted features presenting him as the ideal vehicle for the song’s ardent heterosexuality, a harbinger in its own odd way of the family values that would become such a centerpiece of eighties culture. Similarly, the video for “Don’t Talk to Me About Work,” from Legendary Hearts, features Reed, wearing a stylish suit, his collar open and the knot of his tie fashionably pulled down a few inches from his neck, as a harried yuppie, another stereotype entirely in tune with the burgeoning eighties cult of work and success.

  But the video for “I Love You, Suzanne,” the first single from New Sensations, goes the furthest in its attempt to endear Reed to the MTV generation. The song itself is a straight-ahead pop-rock song of a type that Reed really had never written before. Over a propulsive, melodic guitar riff, Reed opens the song by loosely quoting lyrics from the Contours’ anarchic 1962 hit “Do You Love Me,” in which the singer, whose girlfriend dumped him because of his ineptness on the dance floor, implores her to come back “now that I can dance.” Reed’s song is a simpler, more direct declaration of love, but the video takes the Contours’ theme as its tongue-in-cheek subject. It begins with Reed in familiar territory: on a darkened street at night, making a call from a public telephone. Trying to reach a drug dealer, perhaps, or arrange an illicit tryst? Hardly. He’s attempting to reach his cute, much younger, pixieish blonde girlfriend, who, like the girl in the Contours song, had grown weary of his reluctance to dance. He’s had a change of heart, it seems, and wants her to come see his band. They’re onstage at a club, and after she arrives, men are trying to get her to dance, but she’s determined to see if Reed will be willing to step up and show her what he’s got. And indeed he is! Reed’s body double leaps off the stage and unleashes a series of moves that combine Jewish soul-boy attitude and martial arts athleticism. He twirls, kicks, and even does a somersault. The end of the video shows Reed still on the phone, waiting for his girlfriend to answer, suggesting that the dance floor scene was a fantasy. The video’s cheerfulness came across to a new generation of fans who helped make New Sensations Reed’s most successful album since Coney Island Baby.

  The video for “I Love You, Suzanne” bears some resemblance to Bruce Springsteen’s video for “Dancing in the Dark,” which came out at roughly the same time. MTV had altered the terrain of the music industry and attracted a new cadre of young fans, which presented a challenge to older artists—meaning artists like Springsteen, who was then in his midthirties, and certainly Reed, who was in his early forties, which seemed ancient at the time. The vast majority of those younger viewers were entirely unaware of the Velvet Underground, and for that matter, they likely knew very little even about a classic Springsteen album like Born to Run, which had come out nearly a decade earlier. Radio remained an important promotional outlet, but video was now the most direct—and, even more important, the hippest—way to reach this new audience. That both Reed and Springsteen had physically transformed themselves into recognizable eighties types—Reed looked like a harried banker, while a newly buff Springsteen resembled a health-conscious gym rat—and were shown cavorting with younger women in their videos played into a conscious strategy to make them relevant in this new era.

  Springsteen’s anguished tales of vanishing working-class communities—forget Reed’s sagas of underground urban decadence—were never going to be the means of introducing these veteran artists to younger listeners. Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau specifically requested that Springsteen try to write a radio hit for his Born in the U.S.A. album, and Springsteen came up with “Dancing in the Dark.” Reed, no doubt, was thinking in similar terms with “I Love You, Suzanne.” Springsteen’s song helped make Born in the U.S.A. one of the best-selling albums in history. While “I Love You, Suzanne” did nothing remotely like that for Reed, it did expand his audience and make him seem contemporary. Even the album’s cover, which showed Reed sitting on the floor playing a video game while watching himself on a television screen, mimicked the viewing and gaming habits of a younger generation. The man who had established a credo of making music for adults was now portrayed as just one of the kids.

  Predictably, the overall sunniness and pop feel of “I Love You, Suzanne” and New Sensations as a whole alienated some longtime Reed fans who continued to measure his every move by the standards of the Velvet Underground. “There seem to be people who only like it when I write—in quotes—‘depressive’ things,” Reed said. “It’s not that I resent it, but I can’t pay any attention to that. I mean, there’s got to be more to life and more to me than that. And I’m not about to sit down and write a song about angel dust or cocaine. Somebody else will have to do that for this generation. I already did it. Faulkner’s world was the swamp, James Jones had the war, but Lou Reed is not going to just have dope. That was just me passing through, describing as I go. And I would really hope that there’s more to come from my life than to be stuck over there someplace, staring at a wall, and describing in intimate terms every negative thing that’s going down.”

  Others, however, were pleased to see Reed alive and kicking—and, for once, seeming to enjoy himself. In Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder first decried that Reed had “stumbled through one of the most self-indulgent and self-defeating solo careers in the annals of rock,” but then announced that New Sensations had ended that trend. “Never before,” Loder wrote, “has Reed seemed so completely and joyfully human as he does on New Sensations.”

  Against all odds, Reed convinced Robert Quine to tour with him to promote New Sensations, and the shows garnered rave reviews. Once again, Reed felt sufficiently good about the band to document it, this time with Coney Island Baby: Live in Jersey, a VHS release of a concert recorded at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic in 1984.

  While he was carrying out his strategic efforts to reach a younger audience, the power of Reed’s early work began to inspire a younger generation of artists. When local musicians in Athens, Georgia, referred to R.E.M. as a “pop band” because of the group’s relative accessibility, the band’s guitarist, Peter Buck, suggested that they cover the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” to demonstrate their artistic credentials. R.E.M. released its version of the song on the flip side of its 1983 single “Radio Free Europe,” and it was Eno’s remark about the first Velvet Underground album—“I think everyone who bought one of those thirty thousand copies started a band!”—all over again. “Radio Free Europe” was not a huge hit, but it was an enormous succès d’estime, and its B side brought the Velvet Underground closer to precisely the young audience that were likely to become lifelong fans. R.E.M. would go on to perform and record a number of other Velvet Underground songs, but it was hardly the only young progeny of Reed and the Velvets. U2, the Dream Syndicate, the Violent Femmes, and Eurythmics, among many other artists, were also cut, at least in part, from the Velvets’ cloth.

  ANOTHER PART OF REED’S effort to expand his audience was his participation in a 1985 ad for Honda scooters. Through the seventies, the notion that any company looking for anything remotely like mainstream acceptance would use rock music—let alone a song associated with someone as controversial as Lou Reed—to promote its products would have been regarded as ludicrous. But the generation that had grown up with rock and roll was suddenly successful and affluent. In the age of Reagan, business and commercialism were no longer bad words to the generation that had previously regarded itself as a counterculture. Indeed, rock and roll itself increasingly came to
be seen as a business. In a milestone moment for marketing, the Rolling Stones’ 1981 tour of America was underwritten by the fragrance company J¯ovan to the tune of $1 million, a substantial amount of money at the time. That the Stones, whose reputation for a period rivaled Reed’s own for outrageousness, could be regarded as a safe bet for a perfume company broke open the floodgates for corporate sponsorship. The rock press energetically debated the issue of whether or not this was a fatal compromise for rock and roll, and many artists, including Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M., refused to play along. But the advertising community and the vast majority of fans simply regarded corporate sponsorship as good business.

  For Honda, Reed typically went further than other artists had. Rather than simply license a song for an ad, have a company name printed on concert tickets, or permit corporate signage at a performance venue, Reed actually appeared in the Honda ad. As the music (though not the lyrics) for “Walk on the Wild Side” played, images of Reed in a black leather jacket and shades were interspersed with raw depictions of New York street life—hookers, graffiti, squeegee men, buskers—that made the city look at once edgy and glamorous. At the end of the spot, Reed, leaning on the seat of a red scooter, removes his sunglasses and says in his best New York accent, “Hey, don’t settle for walkin’.”

  The spot represented a dramatic break from the clichéd formulas that governed advertising—and, particularly, television advertising—at the time. For one thing, the product being advertised was not even mentioned until the very end of the spot—a radical gesture at the time. That Reed in real life would not be caught dead riding a scooter seemed beside the point. At times he appeared defensive about the ad—“Who else could make a scooter hip?” he asked one journalist. But he also cited more pragmatic reasons for his decision, and mentioned Andy Warhol as a model for his thinking. “I can’t live in an ivory tower like people would like me to,” he said. “I’ve got to grab money here and there so that my albums can maintain a certain integrity and purity. My records, except for the fluke of ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ have never been very successful commercially.”

  “I got that from Andy a long time ago,” Reed continued. “It’s just one more tool to use. I don’t think of it in terms of bullshit like ‘He’s selling out.’ I used to watch Andy do something for TV Guide or Absolut Vodka so that we could put on our Plastic Exploding Inevitable [sic] show. When our equipment broke, that’s how it got replaced. We didn’t turn around and tell Andy we can’t touch that money because it came from doing a commercial. I don’t think that occurred to anybody. I’m just interested in putting out my vision as purely as possible, and anything legal I can do to facilitate that is fair game.” At shows, Reed began to wryly introduce “Walk on the Wild Side” as the “Honda commercial.” But even as he dismissed it, the notion that he had in any way “sold out” wounded him; he felt that he had made every conceivable effort never to do that. That was the sin Delmore Schwartz had warned him about, after all, and he had no desire to be haunted by that ghost. Reed was much more cautious about commercials for many years, though he always would gratefully believe that “ad people play fair with you.”

  NOW THAT HE WAS sober, Reed also stepped into the political arena, with his wife’s encouragement. Characteristically, once he made the decision to publicly engage issues in the world around him, he went at it with conviction. The mideighties were a time of renewed energy at the intersection of rock music and politics. The policies of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in England had pushed both countries far to the right, and musicians began to push back. In England in 1984, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure organized a group of artists to record the single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to raise money to combat famine in Ethiopia. To follow that up in the United States, an extraordinary collection of superstars recorded a single called “We Are the World” and then put together all-star concerts in Philadelphia and London to raise even more money for the same cause. As he performed at the closing set of the Philadelphia concert, Bob Dylan mentioned from the stage that he wished a similar event could be organized to help farmers in the United States, who were facing their own economic challenges. That led to the formation of Farm Aid, which was organized by John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young, and which staged its first benefit concert in Champaign, Illinois, on September 22, 1985. Along with such artists as Kenny Rogers, the Charlie Daniels Band, and John Denver, Lou Reed performed.

  By any measure, Reed, perhaps the most definitively city-identified artist of the age, was an unlikely choice to play such an event. Other than at the 1972 Save the Whale benefit in London, to which David Bowie had invited him, Reed had never performed at a show like this. Apart from whatever reservations he had about getting politically involved, his desire for control rendered the notion of sharing the stage with dozens of other acts, many of which had nothing to do with his style of music, extremely unattractive. But Bob Dylan had personally invited him, and once again, his new life with Sylvia played a significant role in his agreeing to perform. Reed’s life in Blairstown had acquainted him with some of the issues that rural people face. Having gotten involved in local politics there, Sylvia had encouraged him to accept Dylan’s invitation.

  Reed’s performance went so well that he became something of a Farm Aid regular, returning to perform in both 1987, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in 1990, in Indianapolis. For the 1987 show, Reed and Sylvia stayed at Mellencamp’s guesthouse in Bloomington, Indiana, and Reed performed with Mellencamp’s crack band backing him. To calm Reed’s nerves about the gig, Mellencamp arranged for the two of them to play an unannounced show at the Bluebird, a small Bloomington club. Everyone had a great time, though Mellencamp recalled that his band had a hard time getting used to Reed’s noisy and idiosyncratic guitar playing. Consequently, they repeatedly turned his amp down behind his back. “Lou kept going, ‘My amp’s fucked up!’” Mellencamp recalled, laughing. “He didn’t like it, but he didn’t say much. He just turned it back up.” At Mellencamp’s recommendation, Reed also agreed to visit and answer questions at a history of rock-and-roll class taught by Glenn Gass, a prominent scholar and composer, at Indiana University’s famed School of Music.

  Initially, Mellencamp, who was a great fan of both Reed and the Velvet Underground, was surprised by the Lou Reed he met. “He was very personable,” Mellencamp said. “He was a lot more interested in sports than one would imagine. He liked basketball and football, and he actually asked me if I knew how to play golf. I do, and I taught him how to swing a golf club. And he didn’t want to just take a couple of swings. He was interested in the way you would be if someone was teaching you how to play guitar. He wanted instructions: how do you hold your hands, things like that.” At one of his Farm Aid appearances, Reed addressed the audience, stating that he hoped his showing up in support of American farmers meant that the audience would be equally supportive of him when his lyrics came under attack from moral guardians. It was a bold gesture and a challenge, but one that, in its own way, emphasized the possibility of connection.

  Reed’s relationship with Farm Aid followed a typical pattern for him—that is, having begun with great enthusiasm and promise, it ended with an unfortunate falling out, which was foreshadowed for Mellencamp by a strange exchange he had with Reed. As one of the organizers of Farm Aid, Mellencamp checked in on Reed backstage to make sure that everything was okay with him. “It was peculiar,” Mellencamp said. “I looked in on him and said, ‘Well, Lou, just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.’ And he kind of snapped back at me—and, you know, I’m not used to people snapping at me. He said, ‘What do you think you could do for me?’ I said, ‘Lou, it was just a pleasantry.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I was just wondering what the hell you thought you could do for me.’ It was very Lou Reed.”

  For the 1990 Farm Aid concert in Indianapolis, Mellencamp invited Guns N’ Roses to headline, which proved to be a controversial decision. Guns N’ Roses was the biggest band in the world at t
he time, and the band’s lead singer, Axl Rose, and rhythm guitarist, Izzy Stradlin, had grown up in Indiana. But the band’s song “One in a Million” included a line complaining about “immigrants and faggots” and claimed that gay people spread disease—a clear reference to AIDS, which was ravaging the gay community at the time. Many people did not want Guns N’ Roses to play the show, but Mellencamp would not back down. “Everybody was mad about it, even at Farm Aid,” Mellencamp said. “It pissed me off. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is the biggest band in the country right now, and you don’t want them to come?’ It’s their song—it made no difference to me. Everything I like doesn’t have to be politically correct, and every band that plays here doesn’t have to be politically correct. But Lou came into my dressing room and jumped my shit. He was worked up about it. I said, ‘Lou, this is a funny conversation coming from a guy who wrote a song named “Heroin.”’ He just walked out, and I don’t think I ever spoke to him again.”

  ON ANOTHER POLITICAL FRONT, Reed agreed to participate in Steven Van Zandt’s antiapartheid protest culminating in the song “Sun City” in 1985. The Sun City resort in South Africa would offer performers exorbitant fees in an effort to get them to violate the African National Congress’s request—supported by the United Nations—that artists refuse to play in South Africa as long as apartheid was the law of the land. Many artists had violated that boycott, including Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, and Queen, as well as such black artists as Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, and Tina Turner. Performances in South Africa by artists of that visibility and stature allowed the country’s government to perpetuate the myth that conditions there were not as bad as the Western media portrayed them.