After he left Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, which he would eventually rejoin, Van Zandt became an outspoken political activist. He wanted to highlight an issue that, unlike charity events like “We Are the World” and Farm Aid, actually forced artists to take a stand. It was an effort at consciousness-raising and genuine social change: American audiences would get educated about the horrors of apartheid, and participating artists would take a pledge not to play Sun City. “I ain’t gonna play Sun City,” constituted the song’s chorus. With Sylvia’s active encouragement, Reed performed on the “Sun City” single, singing a solo line, and he appeared in the song’s video, along with such artists as Bruce Springsteen, Run-D.M.C., Peter Gabriel, and Ringo Starr. In the video, Reed strolls along a New York street flanked by Rubén Blades and John Oates, his arms around the shoulders of the two men.
Most dramatically, Reed hopped on board the Conspiracy of Hope tour in support of Amnesty International in June of 1986. Along with U2, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Adams, and a number of other performers, Reed traveled to six U.S. cities, playing in arenas and stadiums to call attention to human rights crises around the world. At press conferences, Reed and the other artists discussed the plight of political prisoners, highlighting specific cases and urging audiences to write letters demanding their release. It was a two-week commitment that required Reed to be public about his beliefs in a way he had never been in the past.
AMID ALL THIS ACTIVITY, Reed found the time to record a new album: Mistrial, which was released in May of 1986. Sylvia designed the album’s cover, which shows a standing, unsmiling Reed wearing a black leather jacket and holding a guitar. Through his dark sunglasses he stares directly at the viewer. This clearly is not the upbeat, optimistic Reed of New Sensations, but it is also not the Reed of the seventies indulging in a kind of store-bought decadence. The guitar emphasizes that he is a musician, an artist, and it also provides an indication that, as on New Sensations, Reed would be playing all the lead guitar parts on the album. His look is serious and intense, not degenerate.
The title track gets at some of those distinctions. Over a roaring guitar riff—one of the signatures of the songs on the album—Reed runs through a wry catalog of his past misdeeds: sex at six years old, his first drink at eight, a “bad” attitude at thirty, an education earned in the streets. The bridge includes a classic Lou Reed up-in-your-face challenge—“Don’t you point your finger at me”—but the song’s chorus demands a reconsideration. “I want a mistrial to clear my name,” Reed declares, adding that he means to make his case to the “people of New York City.” The song is funny and its groove is relentless, but it gets at Reed’s conviction that he is in a new frame of mind and needs to be reevaluated.
Some pedantic commentators have pointed out that Reed is misusing the term “mistrial” in the song. A mistrial occurs when either a jury is unable to reach a verdict or a serious error occurs during the trial’s proceedings that in the judge’s view makes it impossible for the trial to continue. A mistrial, then, does not clear the defendant’s name; it simply invalidates the trial. For the purposes of the song, all that is beside the point. Reed’s poetic license gives the word a more intuitive meaning—“mistrial” is a way of saying that the charges brought against him were a mistake (note the prefix), even as he admits them in the song. “What’s interesting is that after I wrote the song ‘Mistrial,’ someone asked in an interview, ‘Lou, do you feel guilty?’” Reed said. “And I realized I’m going to have a problem with this ‘Mistrial’ thing.”
Reed claimed that the line about finger-pointing was the heart of the song for him, a view that was confirmed for him by, of all people, his mother. “I was listening to a tape of the album over at my parents’ house and my mother said, ‘What song is that?’ and I said, ‘It’s called “Mistrial.”’ And later she had some friends over and she came out and said something I consider interesting. She said, ‘Would you play that song about “Don’t you point your finger at me”?’ She didn’t say ‘Mistrial.’ And that’s what I figured the song must really be about, ’cause that’s what both Mom and I keyed into.”
Both thematically and in terms of its sound, Mistrial constitutes another example of Reed’s attempt to engage the world around him. He coproduced the album with Fernando Saunders, who programmed drum tracks for six of the album’s ten songs, a clear nod to the eighties’ radio-friendly move away from live drummers. Reed also takes on the video culture that took shape in the eighties in “Video Violence,” one of the album’s strongest songs. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), cofounded by Tipper Gore, the wife of then-senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of then–treasury secretary James Baker, had begun turning the heat on the music industry for the violent and sexual content in song lyrics and videos. Congressional hearings were called to discuss the impact of so-called porn rock on young people, inaugurating an intense five-year culture war fixated on rock and roll and hip-hop. The whiff of censorship and McCarthyism was decidedly in the air.
Understandably, artists and record companies began to circle the wagons, an attack from outside their precincts causing them, for once, to recognize and act in their common interests. As a means of fending off further Congressional interference, record labels agreed to print “Explicit lyrics” warning labels on albums that contained songs thought to be unsuitable for children. Reed, needless to say, was near the top of the list of artists who most required freedom of speech protections. For him to release a song called “Video Violence” was a distinct provocation. That title could easily have served as the subject of one of the Congressional hearings, which, of course, proceeded despite the record companies’ agreement to the request to post advisory stickers. But Reed’s song, one of his best, was, unsurprisingly, not a lament over the violence portrayed in music videos. It was a cold-eyed examination of it, and a smart, penetrating one at that.
In the song, Reed describes how the emergence of video culture, the home VCR machine, and available VHS tapes enabled people to enjoy otherwise forbidden pleasures in the comfort of their living rooms—in a sense, domesticating their most extreme fantasies: “Up in the morning drinking his coffee / Turns on the TV to some slasher movie / Cartoonlike women, tied up and sweaty / Panting and screaming, thank you, have a nice day.” Perhaps more significantly, the “age of video violence” made it possible for companies to exploit such desires for profit—and, in the process, trivialize them even further. Slasher movies and corporate, saccharine Disney films exist side by side in a “twisted alliance,” as Reed’s song indicates.
It’s a brilliant point. In the age of video violence, the tawdriness and superficiality of the depictions of sex (a Madonna song provides the soundtrack for a stripper) and the treacliness of the slick, prepackaged, soulless art presented to children are two sides of the same profitable coin, just like the “redneck evangelist” exploiting his fearful, desperate congregation. All are betrayals of trust, empty versions of activities that are meant to communicate, however disturbingly, to audiences on the deepest level. People, and particularly young music and movie fans, understand on some level how they are being manipulated, and that is the reason for their nihilism and hair-trigger anger, not the lame content of what they’re listening to or looking at. The PMRC might bemoan the sex and violence of pop culture, but it’s the insidious, for-profit channeling of those raging currents within us that is the real problem. That is the violence being done to us and to the culture. The “age of video violence” is “no age of reason,” Reed sings.
On “The Original Wrapper,” Reed puns on the hip-hop music that was becoming one of the definitive sounds of the decade and, with the help of Saunders’s programming, fashions a driving beat to carry his funny jeremiad on conditions in the modern world. The song is a rap in itself, and Reed implicitly credits his word-heavy song-speech as a rap precursor. “I wanted to do a rap song—my version,” Reed said. “It’s just me singing the same way I always do.” In the song, he men
tions AIDS, the Middle East, President Reagan, Jerry Falwell, and, once again, music videos (“The baby sits in front of MTV / Watching violent fantasies”). Interestingly, Reed made a terrifying video of his own for “No Money Down,” an innocuous, upbeat pop song about the importance of trust in love relationships. In the video, which was directed by the English duo Godley and Crème, an animatronic version of Lou Reed rips the flesh off his own face. Exactly what this had to do with the relatively benign song it accompanied is a mystery, but the video attracted considerable attention, not all of it favorable. Notably, Beavis and Butt-Head, the hilariously stupid cartoon characters that MTV invented to spoof the notion that the network was damaging young minds, later praised the video with their ultimate compliment: “Cool.”
The peppy “Outside” is ostensibly about the problems and complexities of the external world set in opposition to the simplicity of a couple’s life at home. The world is a “mindless child,” the song begins, unable to control its impulses, and, consequently, it’s destructive. But the punning references to unprotected sex (“When we come inside”) and the song’s odd last line (“A baby’s what you want inside”) suggest that in the back of Reed’s mind was Sylvia’s desire for a child, one of the issues that had begun to emerge in their marriage.
The album concludes with “Tell It to Your Heart,” one of Reed’s most eloquent ballads. It celebrates the singer and his partner as “New York City lovers,” even as it hints at a nameless anxiety that creates sleepless nights. The singer sees his lover in the lights of the sky at night, as well as in advertisements and other city landmarks. It’s a deeply affecting song that relies on none of the classic overwrought imagery of love. Instead, the singer’s love resides and manifests itself in the city that surrounds him. It is no more or less beautiful than that, and is all the more meaningful for its tangibility and immediacy. When the singer declares, “We’re no teenage movie that ends in tragedy,” it’s the expression of an adult love that is meant to survive. It’s also Reed draining the dark side of any romantic mystique. For all his past fascination with the abyss, its allure is dismissed in this song as merely the easy melancholic indulgence of a teen fling.
17
NEW YORK
I’VE BECOME COMPLETELY WELL-ADJUSTED to being a cult figure,” Lou Reed said in 1989, and just about as soon as he spoke those words, it looked as if he might enjoy a commercial breakthrough. His album New York, released in January of 1989, received nearly universal critical praise, broke into the Top 40, and performed well enough to qualify for a gold record: it sold more than half a million copies, Reed’s only studio album to do so.
Mistrial had been the last of Reed’s five-album deal with RCA, and while he had not emerged as a commercial powerhouse during that time, an artist like Reed will always muster a certain amount of attention at record companies. He had sold enough records to create the enduring impression that additional success was just around the corner. Because he was a critics’ darling, signing Reed would inevitably generate extensive buzz, which is helpful to any label. Finally, difficult artists like Reed can sometimes appeal to the competitiveness of record executives. If you imagine yourself to be the sort of executive who understands and works well with artists, it’s possible to convince yourself that the musician’s previous labels simply did not understand or were not creative enough to form a meaningful relationship with him or her. To some extent, Clive Davis had thought that way when he signed Reed to Arista, and now Seymour Stein thought similarly when he signed Reed to his label, Sire.
Stein had cofounded Sire Records in 1966, and in the seventies and eighties, it had earned a reputation for its progressive tastes and its ability to translate those tastes for mainstream audiences. Sire had signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Smiths, the Pretenders, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. Most notably, the label had signed an underground dance artist from New York named Madonna and launched her into superstardom. Many of the artists on Sire were Reed’s aesthetic heirs, so the label made sense as his home. In addition, Sire was owned by Warner Bros. Records, a company famous for its willingness to work closely with artists and allow them as much creative freedom as possible.
Stein was a man known for his musical enthusiasms, so his signing Reed was hardly a shock to his staff. Still, given Reed’s recent track record, not everyone saw signing Reed as a brilliant move. “Lou obviously was a great artist and had great stature, but it wasn’t like Seymour had signed a superstar,” said Steven Baker, who worked for Warner Bros. in Los Angeles and was Reed’s “product manager” at the company—meaning he was something like an in-house advocate for Reed, his representative to the marketing, sales, advertising, and publicity staffs. “It’s not as if Seymour was bringing a commercial juggernaut to the label. There were a lot of doubts. ‘Why are we signing Lou Reed?’” But when Baker heard the advance cassette tape of New York that Stein had given him, he got enthused, and he began to get the rest of the company keyed up. This was something the label would be able to work with.
Reed and Sylvia flew out to Los Angeles for a series of meetings with the relevant people on the Warner Bros. staff. Stein, too, flew in from New York, and Baker and Howie Klein, Sire’s general manager, were there as well. Making nice with record executives was never Reed’s idea of a good time. However artist-friendly Warners may have been, it was a large record company, and it survived on hits. “It was like Lou was going to meet the players,” Baker said. “Some of these people were going to be like, ‘Wow, Lou Reed!’ Some of them were going to be like, ‘Who?’” But Lou was on his best behavior, according to Baker. “I’m sure he and Sylvia were thinking, ‘This is the new label. Let’s get off on the right foot.’ Lou must have thought that he’d delivered one of his career-defining records, so it’s important that everybody get along and understand what he’s accomplished.”
REED DID THINK OF his new album that way, and justifiably so. New York is raw and hard-hitting, in both its sound and its subject matter. Reed himself said, “Generally speaking, I have to say that with most of my albums, I’ve felt that I was behind myself, that the albums didn’t represent where I really was when they came out. But on New York, I’m not behind myself—that’s where I am, that’s what I’m capable of doing.… I gave it my best shot.”
The band consisted of Reed, guitarist Mike Rathke, bassist Rob Wasserman, and drummer Fred Maher, who coproduced the album with Reed. It was a bold choice. Since playing with Reed on New Sensations, Maher had joined the British New Wave band Scritti Politti and had lived in London for a year. Reed called him up and asked if he would play on the sessions for New York. He also asked Maher (because he was “the young guy,” in Maher’s view) for recommendations for a producer. “I rattled off a list of the usual names, and I guess people weren’t interested in Lou at that point,” Maher said. “Full of beans, full of probably too much confidence, I said, ‘Well, Lou, how about me?’ He said, ‘What do you know about recording guitars? All you do is that synth-pop crap.’ I said, ‘Let’s just get one day in the studio. Trust me.’” Reed agreed, and according to Maher, he was knocked out by the results. On that first day, Maher said, “we actually recorded the opening song on New York, ‘Romeo Had Juliette.’ He called me the next day, and he said, ‘Fred, it’s Lou. I sound like Lou Reed again for the first time in however many years. Let’s do this.’”
Despite his trepidations, Maher reported that Reed was easy to produce—relatively speaking, of course. “Strangely, I was uniquely qualified to be his producer, because I had watched other engineers and producers try to make ‘hits’ with Lou and make him try to sing—‘Sing, Lou, sing!’ Lou doesn’t sing. He’s Lou. But I knew that I was heading into new territory. I was going to be in the studio with Lou, long days for a long time. So I psychologically prepared myself.…‘This is going to be brutal.’ And it wasn’t.… It was magical. He was in really good form. He was really comfortable.… It was done in six weeks, soup to nuts, basics to mixed. Done.” As for Reed’s
health, Maher said that he was “in great shape. He was very funny about the alcohol stuff. I remember him holding up a big bottle of Evian as he was about to record a vocal and going, ‘Mm, vodka!,’ and chug[ging] it.”
THE RAW, STRIPPED-DOWN, GUITAR-BASED sound of New York was not to everyone’s taste. The singer-songwriter James McMurtry recalled discussing the album with John Mellencamp, who said, “It sounds like it was produced by an eighth grader, but I like it.” But the rawness of the production suits the rawness of the album’s themes: it’s an unflinching look at a city under siege, an era in which more than two thousand murders a year routinely occurred in New York’s five boroughs. The AIDS epidemic was also raging, decimating many communities to which Reed had long-standing ties—communities of gays, intravenous drug users, and artists.
AIDS provides the melancholic backdrop to “Halloween Parade,” one of the most moving songs on the album. The city’s Halloween parade is something like an official holiday for the gay community, an opportunity to celebrate all the theatricality, artifice, outrageousness, sexual adventurism, liberation, and creativity for which the scene is justly famous. The song begins very much in that vein, as Reed casts an affectionate eye on characters dressed like Greta Garbo and Alfred Hitchcock down where “the docks and the badlands meet.” In that regard, the song is something like a nearly two-decade-later update on “Walk on the Wild Side.” But Reed is no longer capable of maintaining the coolness and detachment of that original song. The political consciousness that began taking shape in him a few years earlier, along with the disease that was ravaging the gay community, force him to break out of his characteristic stoicism. The Halloween parade, with its many thousands of participants, only makes him aware of those who are “not around” because they’re too sick to participate or have already died. He insists on “no consolations” but feels the past weighing on him. The “See you next year” that concludes the song sounds casual and offhand, but it is something between a wish and a prayer.
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