Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  Part of New York’s power and appeal is its conceptual boldness and simplicity—beginning with its title. In a sense, virtually all of Reed’s recorded work is about New York, so calling a particular album New York is a challenge to both himself and the listener. As Reed himself said, “Faulkner had the South, Joyce had Dublin. I’ve got New York—and its environs.” How was this portrait of the city supposed to differ from his previous ones?

  For one thing, Reed believed that, having overcome his drug and alcohol problems, he had both the stamina and the concentration to construct a focused concept album—one he viewed in literary terms, as if it were a novel or a collection of short stories. In his liner notes for New York, Reed told listeners that the album was meant to be heard straight through, as if it were a book. Of course, he took criticism for the “pretension” of that demand, as well as its implication that somehow making a rock-and-roll album was inherently a less serious aesthetic undertaking than filmmaking or writing. Regardless, Reed was increasingly thinking of himself as a writer and distancing himself from what he saw as the childishness of rock and roll. The man who had talked for years about making rock and roll for adults was now consciously doing so and letting it be known in no uncertain terms. When he toured in support of New York, Reed shaped his show like a theatrical performance, including six nights at the St. James Theatre, a Broadway showcase in the heart of New York’s theater district. For the first half of the show, he performed the album straight through; then, after an intermission, he performed a set of his other songs. However, rock-and-roll audiences—and Reed’s audience, in particular—are not inclined to follow rules. At a show in Los Angeles, Reed carefully explained the format of the show, and then the band kicked into “Dirty Blvd.” When the song ended and a voice from the crowd shouted, “‘Walk on the Wild Side’!” Reed was apoplectic.

  Though Reed insisted that the songs be listened to in order both on record and live, the sequencing of the album was hardly scientific. “We had tried to put the songs in order, to tell the story moodwise and emotionally,” Reed said. “And when it didn’t work, it was so bad it was unbelievable. Then Victor [Deyglio], one of the engineers, said, ‘There’s a trick I’ve learned over the years. Why not put it in the order that it was recorded in?’ And there it was. Wow!”

  New York was also a departure in that Reed turned the focus of his writing away from himself and, with the exception of “Halloween Parade,” away from the worlds he had moved in. “For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed kind of songs,” Reed said. “I should have understood that a Lou Reed was anything I wanted to write about.” That new understanding allowed for a new directness. “In New York, the Lou Reed image doesn’t exist, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “This is me speaking as directly as I possibly can to whoever hopefully wants to listen to it.” Songs like “Romeo Had Juliette,” “Hold On,” and “Dirty Blvd.” explore the lives of New York street characters, but not the doomed and glamorous, sexually ambiguous underground figures that populated his songs previously. These are the New Yorkers whose ships failed to rise with the tides that lifted the affluent to even greater heights during the Reagan-Bush years. “It really is the eight years of Reagan,” Reed said. “I’m trying to make you feel the situation we’re in.… That’s what this album is all about.” His subjects’ drug of choice is crack, which has destroyed their communities. They are the junkies who die anonymously in alleys, not the ones who would have dropped by Andy Warhol’s Factory or frequented the after-hours bars that had consumed so much of Reed’s life and artistic focus. Indeed, at the time, they would not have occupied much space in the media at all. That many of them are Hispanic—Romeo Rodriguez in “Romeo Had Juliette”; Pedro, the young, abused boy in “Dirty Blvd.”—may well have had to do with Sylvia’s Mexican American heritage, as well as her class-oriented political consciousness. Reed presents their lives with sympathy and dignity, as well as a keen awareness of the daily struggles they face. The term “Statue of Bigotry,” repeated on New York, is Reed’s telegraphic rendering of how the American dream has been betrayed with devastating consequences.

  Perhaps what most sets apart New York is that the city, so often treated by Reed as an isolated world of its own, is portrayed on the album as a microcosm of America itself. “We’re in this terrible morass of people absolutely not giving a shit about anybody but themselves,” Reed said. “And a mean-spirited government that is essentially attacking people that can’t defend themselves. That’s the weakest people—the kids, the sick, the elderly. And I think we should fight back.” With New York, Reed was living up to the statement he had made in 1986 at the time of the Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope tour: “The days of me being aloof about certain things are over.”

  On “Dirty Blvd.,” Reed brought in one of his musical idols: Dion DiMucci, the famed lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts. (Reed appeared on Dion’s own album, sang background for him at a Madison Square Garden benefit, and, in early 1989, inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Reed also invited Moe Tucker to play drums on two of New York’s tracks. He planned to have John Cale play on the album, but Maher inadvertently sabotaged that possibility when he mentioned to Cale that Tucker would be coming in as well. Reed had not informed Cale, who said to Maher, “What is this, some sort of Velvet Underground reunion?” That was the end of that—at least for a while.

  “Last Great American Whale” indicts America’s ecological failings, while “There Is No Time,” “Sick of You,” and “Busload of Faith” all evoke the urgency of then-current political conditions, the desperate need for action to overcome the nation’s crisis. Interestingly, “Endless Cycle” takes a much more psychological view of social conditions. It describes how violence and child abuse pass from generation to generation, with alcohol and drugs blunting people’s ability to rise against their circumstances and change them. The song ends with a stark conclusion about a couple doomed to repeat their parents’ bitter histories: “The truth is they’re happier when they’re in pain / In fact, that’s why they got married.” The only percussion on the track is a metronome that Maher sampled, its regular ticktock underscoring the song’s main theme: the passage of time and its repetition.

  Perhaps the most complicated song on New York is “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim,” which, among other things, highlights the degree to which Reed’s awareness of himself as a Jew grew stronger with his sobriety. Throughout his life, Reed had either ignored or spoken dismissively—even disparagingly—of his Jewish background. His parents were not observant, and he bitterly rejected the stereotypical suburban aspiration that he become a doctor, lawyer, or businessman. He went through a period of being fascinated by Nazi imagery and, as part of the Warhol crowd, represented a cultural movement that couldn’t have been further removed from the self-seriousness of the New York Jewish intellectual world. In conversation, he’d been known to use anti-Semitic slurs.

  “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim” takes its title from Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian diplomat and politician who had served as secretary general of the United Nations and was revealed in the mideighties, when he was president of Austria, to have been aware of Nazi atrocities during World War II, when he was in the German Army. Reed also refers to “Pontiff” in the song, an apparent allusion to Pope John Paul II, whose boyhood in Poland had begun to be explored for his possible youthful connection to, or at least passive acceptance of, Nazi war crimes. But the real target of the song is Jesse Jackson, who, in an interview with a Washington Post reporter during his 1984 presidential run, had used the term “Hymie” to refer to Jews and called New York “Hymietown.” Jackson had believed the comments to be off the record, but the reporter published them and completely derailed Jackson’s campaign. He ended up formally apologizing to a group of national Jewish leaders at a synagogue in New Hampshire.

  As a presidential candidate once again in 1988, Jackson had given a speech at the Democratic National Convention that took the ter
m “common ground” as its conceit—a space where all Americans could come together regardless of their differences. At the time, Jackson represented the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He had run a campaign that pointedly addressed class as well as race inequality, and he had energized many African American voters. In fact, Jackson was by far the only candidate to make serious issues of all the problems Reed identified in the songs on New York. Reed admitted how powerfully Jackson’s speech had affected him. “I saw the speech Jesse made about ‘common ground,’ and it was amazing, emotionally moving,” Reed said. “He should have been elected on the spot, on the basis of that speech. Except for one problem. Does that ‘common ground’ include me, Jesse? If I met the man, that’s what I would ask him.”

  In “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim,” however, Reed focuses on Jackson’s seeming bias against Jews and his refusal to disown his relationship with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. The song’s title implies that Jackson’s racial slur puts him in the same moral category as a Nazi sympathizer. Reed also draws a comparison between the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan. Such sentiments were a reflection of how Reed’s feelings about his own Jewishness—and his relationship to the state of Israel—had changed. “He could take a conservative stance on the pro-Israel side,” Sylvia said, contrasting that position to Reed’s leftist views on most other issues. “Somebody wrote very eloquently on that subject that if you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew. You can’t escape it. You can’t change it. That’s who you are, and it marks you. And Lou would often define himself that way, sometimes really irreverently, like, this is what Jewish culture represents. You want a lawyer, you get a smart Jew. You want a doctor, get the Jew. On and on and on. That was part of him, part of who he was.”

  “Beginning of a Great Adventure” touches, once again, on Sylvia’s desire to have children. The title evokes a phrase that many people use when embarking on parenthood, which Reed attributes to Sylvia: “I hope it’s true what my wife said to me / She says, ‘Baby, it’s the beginning of a great adventure.’” But the song ultimately treats the idea of having children humorously. Over a jazzy guitar riff, Reed first imagines that it might be fun “to have a kid that I could kick around.” Then, in a shift from the connection he felt to his rural New Jersey neighbors in “New Sensations,” he imagines having enough children to “breed a little liberal army in the woods / Just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar / With their tribe of mutant inbred piglets with cloven hooves.” While Reed’s anxieties about what he perceived as the traumas of his own childhood ultimately prevented him from agreeing to become a father, the song’s jauntiness and sense of fun suggest that the idea still remained a possibility in his mind. The song ends with Reed alluding to “Love Is Strange,” the classic 1956 hit by Mickey and Sylvia (note the female name), as he sings, “Sylvia, what do you call your lover man?” It’s a sexy close to a song about a sexy subject that had been treated quite unsexily up to that point.

  New York concludes, oddly, on a spiritual note, one far removed from the social issues that preoccupy the rest of the record. “Dime Store Mystery” begins with a meditation on Jesus Christ’s last moments alive. Reed was inspired by hearing Martin Scorsese on a television news show discussing his film The Last Temptation of Christ, which came out in 1988 and had been virulently attacked for blasphemy. “I was watching Marty Scorsese on Nightline,” Reed recalled, “trying to explain to these fundamentalists and Ted Koppel his take on Christ. I was writing down the things he was saying: human nature, godly nature, the dichotomy. It reminded me of when I was in college, philosophy classes.” The singer notes that he could imagine that Christ “might question his beliefs”—that is, his divine origins—given the horrors of his crucifixion. Reed continues to explore this duality, how “godly nature, human nature / Splits the soul.” Which brings him, in the song’s concluding verse, to pondering the passing of Andy Warhol, who died in 1987. Reed seems to wonder if Warhol had at any point rethought his studied superficiality. Warhol may also have come to mind because of his staunch Catholicism (the faith in which Scorsese was also raised), emphasized by Reed’s alluding to Warhol’s memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “What must you have been thinking,” Reed asks, “when you realized the time had come for you? / I wish I hadn’t thrown away my time / On so much human and so much less divine.”

  The reviews for New York were very strong. In Musician, Bill Flanagan wrote that the album “sounds like the best thing Lou Reed’s ever done.” In a four-star lead review for Rolling Stone, I wrote, “In whatever future there is, whenever anyone wants to hear the sound of the eighties collapsing into the nineties in the city of dreams, New York is where they’ll have to go.” But as troubled as Reed’s hometown was, he did not read his own fate into it. “I’m not going to let that be my future,” he said, still grateful for his recovery. “If the town has to go down, it can go down without me.” Reed was feeling at the absolute height of his powers, and he was about to enter one of the most transformative periods of both his life and his work.

  18

  I HATE LOU REED

  ON FEBRUARY 20, 1987, Andy Warhol entered New York Hospital (now New York–Presbyterian) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan under the pseudonym Bob Roberts for gallbladder surgery. He had complained to his dermatologist about pains in his right side that were diagnosed as gallbladder attacks, but surgical treatment had been put off because of Warhol’s fear of hospitals. (He evidently had a premonition that he would die in one.) Finally, after second opinions were sought, it was agreed that Warhol’s gallbladder would have to be removed. The three-and-a-half-hour surgery, which removed his gangrenous gallbladder, took place the following day, February 21, and seemed to have gone well. On February 22, a Sunday, Warhol died. It was stunning news that no one expected.

  The quality of the care—or lack of it—that Warhol received at New York Hospital became the subject of a wrongful death lawsuit more than four years later, and, in a sealed agreement, the hospital paid an undisclosed sum described as “substantial” (the hospital also called it “fair and equitable”) to the heirs of the Warhol estate. (The settlement was later reported to be $3 million.) Warhol, who was five foot eleven, weighed a mere 128 pounds when he checked into New York Hospital, and despite having been described as in “good” health on the hospital’s admission report, he was, according to the estate’s attorney, anemic and undernourished. The hospital “negligently pumped more than twice the required volume of fluids” into Warhol (a doctor at his autopsy indicated his weight then as 150 pounds), according to Bruce Clark, the lawyer for the estate, and then it had failed to monitor his condition, causing the heart attack that killed him.

  In a chilling statement that underscores the loneliness that seemed to be so much at the heart of Warhol’s life, Clark said, “No doctor looked in on him. The floor nurses never looked in. The only one to inquire about Andy Warhol’s condition after his surgery was a resident in training who called the private duty nurse on the phone.” The nurse, who had been reading her Bible at the time, noticed that Warhol had turned blue and that his pulse was weak. When she couldn’t wake him, she called the floor nurse, who, in turn, summoned an emergency cardiac team. Warhol could not be revived and was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m. That a figure of Warhol’s fame and stature would receive such shoddy treatment—and seemingly be so alone at a time of acute crisis—was as shocking as his premature death. He was fifty-eight years old.

  After he was shot in 1968, Warhol told Reed that he felt as if he may have already died. His actual death triggered an enormous response in the media and, needless to say, among the thousands of people who had known, worked with, socialized with, or simply met him. By 1987, Warhol had achieved the affectionate status of a New York tabloid staple—indeed, it seemed as if he had held that station forever. Arguments about the quality and importance of his art, once eagerly—often heatedly—debated, had long ago fallen to the experts to adjudic
ate. For New Yorkers, it seemed that not a day could go by without a mention in the gossip pages or on the local television news regarding where Warhol had gone the night before and with whom. Drifting through the media landscape like a benignly smiling specter, invariably positioned next to someone well-known or socially prominent, he seemed to have achieved the kind of ubiquitous anonymity, or famous invisibility, that he had always sought. Warhol was a member of the city’s media family—the dotty uncle who hobnobbed with the rich and famous—and his death struck a nerve. Suddenly everyone remembered that the eccentric character they’d long taken for granted was an important and influential artist, one of the essential architects of the postmodern age.

  Warhol’s obituary in the New York Times was dutiful, even respectful, though not extravagant in its praise, noting that “Mr. Warhol’s keenest talents were for attracting publicity, for uttering the unforgettable quote, and for finding the single visual image that would most shock and endure.” The Velvet Underground went unmentioned.

  Of course, those who knew Warhol responded far more viscerally to the shock of his death. A complicated figure—sweet and manipulative, generous and withholding—Warhol left his survivors to untangle the knot of their often contradictory feelings. For Lou Reed, whose encounters with him ran the full emotional gamut from loving to resentful, Warhol’s death actually simplified matters. “Lou was always very wary of Andy, always a bit guarded,” Sylvia said. But once Warhol was no longer present to remind him of past grudges or incite feelings of guilt, Reed could more easily access the genuine love that he felt for one of his earliest benefactors, the man who played the most significant role of anyone in putting the Velvet Underground on the map. Warhol was no longer there to cast his long shadow, so Reed did not have to diminish him in order to be free of it and stand on his own. “He may be the American artist—period,” he said of Warhol in 2006.