Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  At the end of his report, Reed returned to the question that had most puzzled him about Havel: why didn’t he leave Czechoslovakia when, as an important literary figure, he had the opportunity to do so? Havel’s answer was characteristically straightforward. “I stayed because I live here,” he explained. “I never doubted that we would succeed. All I ever wanted to do was the right thing.”

  REED’S PROFOUND EXPERIENCE IN Czechoslovakia occurred amid a series of events that caused him to examine his life, his work, and their meaning more deeply. Consequently, his next album, Magic and Loss, extended his run of strong, provocative albums on serious subjects. In a sense, the album’s emotional source went back to the death of Andy Warhol in 1987 and the track “Dime Store Mystery” on New York. That song’s philosophical exploration of life and death expanded into Songs for Drella, which looked at Warhol as a person and an artist, and became a meditation on the impact of a life devoted to surfaces. “Halloween Parade” on New York responded to the holocaust of deaths resulting from the AIDS epidemic, which devastated the gay community, the arts community, and intravenous drug users—three realms in which Reed was or had been deeply involved. Many of his friends and acquaintances had died. He himself had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, and he must have felt that he had dodged a bullet in not becoming infected with HIV. Reed turned fifty not long after Magic and Loss came out in January of 1992, and thoughts of mortality and the meaning of his life clearly were on his mind. “I do consider myself even lucky to be here,” he said.

  Nineteen ninety-one brought two deaths, both from cancer, that intensely affected Reed. One was Kenneth Rapp, more commonly known as Rotten Rita, an amphetamine maven and drag queen on the Warhol Factory scene who was so popular among that crowd that he was dubbed “The Mayor.” Reed and Rita were among a group of speed freaks known as the Moles because of their nocturnal habits, and Rita was among the lost characters Reed mentioned in “Halloween Parade.” The other inspiration for Magic and Loss was the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus, who had written the lyrics for such indelible hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “This Magic Moment,” and “A Teenager in Love.” Like Reed, Pomus, whose birth name was Jerome Felder, had been born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents and had fallen in love with the music he heard on the radio, particularly R & B. A bout with polio as a young boy had left Pomus disabled. He could walk only with crutches and eventually required a wheelchair—a reality that made the lyrics of a song like “Save the Last Dance for Me” especially poignant. “Between two Aprils I lost two friends,” Reed wrote in the liner notes to the album. “Between two Aprils magic and loss.” He dedicated the album “to Doc and especially to Rita.”

  Pomus’s daughter, Sharyn Felder, remembered Reed and her father becoming close friends in the late seventies or early eighties, though Reed recalled their friendship developing later. Pomus was precisely the sort of person Reed was drawn to: urban, articulate, well-read, musically knowledgeable, streetwise, and, like Reed himself, crusty around the edges but sentimental at the core. That Pomus was nearly seventeen years older than Reed allowed the songwriter to serve as something of a father figure to him. While it was difficult for Reed’s own father to show any genuine appreciation for Reed’s accomplishments—and for Reed to accept it if he ever did—Reed viewed Pomus’s regard for him as a kind of benediction. Pomus was like a rock-and-roll Delmore Schwartz to Reed. In Pomus’s presence, Reed could be an unabashed fan—one of his most endearing qualities. “I couldn’t even believe your father knew who I was,” he told Felder at one point. Pomus taught classes for young songwriters at his impossibly cluttered apartment on West Seventy-Second Street—the singer Joan Osborne was among his students—and Reed would sometimes visit as a guest, proud to sit at the feet of the master as well as offer his own advice and suggestions. Reed and Pomus would also watch videos of boxing matches together; despite his illness, Pomus had dreamed of being a fighter, and Reed was fascinated by both the violence and the theater of the fights. When Pomus died, Reed inherited those tapes, Pomus’s pipe, and the decks of cards Pomus had used during tough times, when he had hosted nights of illegal gambling at his apartment in order to make a living.

  For his part, Pomus, who had enjoyed his greatest successes in the late fifties and the sixties, often felt overlooked by the contemporary music world. He was flattered that Reed, at the height of his creative powers and perhaps the most daring member of the rock scene that had taken shape after Pomus’s own peak, regarded him with such undisguised respect. When Reed wrote “What’s Good,” one of the strongest tracks on what would become Magic and Loss, after Pomus was diagnosed with lung cancer, Pomus said to his daughter, “Can you believe that Lou Reed wrote a song for me?”

  Reed was devastated when he learned about Pomus’s cancer diagnosis, and while “What’s Good” reflected its impact, Pomus was shielded—or perhaps shielded himself—from the song’s true meaning. “I don’t think he really could hear the lyrics on some level, because we were still trying to be optimistic,” Felder said. Reed stayed close to Pomus throughout the course of his illness, and he chronicled the arc of that emotional journey on Magic and Loss. As writers do, Reed was mining the experience for material, and producing some of his best work. But that process took nothing away from the devotion he showed to Pomus and his family during that difficult time. Equally important, Reed allowed himself to feel the disturbing emotions that Pomus’s steady decline evoked in him, and he openly expressed them, though not in any way directly to Pomus in order not to upset him.

  “When my father got sick, Lou came to the hospital every day,” Felder recalled. “I remember going out with him, and he just said, ‘Doc can’t leave the planet—he’s like the sun.’” No doubt unconsciously, Reed’s remark was a pun straight out of Hamlet. Pomus may have been the metaphorical sun, but Reed was his metaphorical son, and Pomus’s impending death made Reed feel as if he were being orphaned—cast into a black abyss, as the imagery of “Cremation” on Magic and Loss described it. “Lou’s relationship with my father was not like songwriter to songwriter,” Felder said. “It was much more paternal. Their friendship was always about my father’s advice. Lou was always going through something. A lot of drama. A lot of lawsuits. He was really vexed by that stuff. My father would listen and help him find a way through, because, as Lou would always say, there was no college at the time that could teach you about those things. Lou seemed to be looking for someone who could navigate the way for him, because he seemed a bit lost.” Felder also had the sense that at around that time, “maybe Lou’s marriage to Sylvia was shifting a bit. She was still managing him, and they were still living on West End Avenue, but I think their marriage was fading out.”

  When Pomus died, Reed spoke at his funeral, ending his remarks with the wish that Doc, wherever he was, would save the last dance for him. On Till the Night Is Gone, a tribute album devoted to Pomus’s songs that was released in 1995, Reed performed a passionate version of “This Magic Moment,” and it is possible to see the “magic” in the title Magic and Loss as deriving from that song’s simple, eloquent description of falling in love. The title might also derive from a line in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (“O, the wonder, the magic, and the loss!”) that additionally inspired the title of The Magic and the Loss, a play by Julian Funt that ran on Broadway for a few weeks in 1954.

  All the songs on Magic and Loss have subtitles; there’s “Dorita: The Spirit,” “What’s Good: The Thesis,” and so on. (“Dorita” is a conflation of “Doc” and “Rita”; it also derives from the Greek word meaning “gift.”) That was part of Reed’s ongoing effort to frame his writing in literary as much as musical terms—“like a novel,” is how he explained it, “at the head of each chapter a little phrase explaining what it is.” The album’s cover features a photo of Reed placed within a design that suggests both flames and a forest, as if he were a character out of Dante’s Inferno, lost in a dark wood and searching for meaning. On each corner of the
cover is an alchemical image. They also appear throughout the lyric booklet accompanying the album.

  Alchemy was a medieval science, a predecessor of chemistry, which attempted to transform base metals into gold. At its heart lay the belief that all matter is somehow perfectible, which, in turn, made alchemy a potent metaphor for the transformation of the physical into the spiritual. It’s a particularly resonant concept for a man whose best-known album is titled Transformer—and whose work rested on the assumption that even the most degraded human beings could somehow be redeemed. According to Spencer Drate, who, along with his partner, Judith Salavetz, codesigned the album’s cover with Sylvia, the alchemical symbols were consciously chosen by Reed and his wife. Reed specifically refers to one of alchemy’s central goals—“gold being made from lead”—in “Power and Glory: The Situation,” a song on Magic and Loss. That sense of transformation is central to the album. Pomus, a physically enormous man, wastes away from cancer, his booming voice growing quiet, and Rita loses her youth and beauty as death approaches. Finally, both figures pass “through the fire” of life and perhaps, Reed speculates, hopes, ultimately dissolve into spirit—some magic, possibly, to compensate for the desolation of loss.

  Reed’s direct, profoundly personal lyrics on Magic and Loss show us a man examining his own life in the deepest ways. The most powerful example of that comes on the title track and the album’s closing song, “Magic and Loss: The Summation.” In it, Reed takes the image of passing through fire and uses it as an image of purification, as if the flames of all the struggles one faces in life were a kiln in which one forged one’s perfection. However, like the radiation treatments that Doc Pomus underwent (and which Reed mentions in “Power and Glory”), the same heat that can cure you can kill you. Describing the passages of his own life in “Magic and Loss,” Reed indicts his insecurities (“a maze of self-doubt”), “arrogance,” “anger,” and “caustic dread”—all of which will “never help you out.” He looks honestly at his own soaring ambitions and seeks to divine a direction through them: “They say no one person can do it all / But you want to in your head / But you can’t be Shakespeare and you can’t be Joyce / So what is left instead?” The only possibility of deliverance lies in acceptance, “the strength to acknowledge it all.” When that happens, you can “survive your own war,” and “You find that that fire is passion / And there’s a door up ahead, not a wall.”

  Magic and Loss, Reed said, “is the culmination of everything I’ve tried to achieve, all the mistakes I’ve made.” Death, he concludes, is only one part of life, not the entire story: “There’s a bit of magic in everything,” he sings, “and then some loss to even things out.” The meaning of the album, he said, is “the magic of art transforming meaningless loss into something else.”

  ONE INTRIGUING RESULT OF Reed’s friendship with Doc Pomus was his discovery of the jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott, who was himself a close friend of Doc’s and one of Doc’s favorite vocalists. Scott had a strong commercial run in the forties and fifties, but then his career stalled. He suffered from Kallmann syndrome, a hereditary hormonal condition that, along with other effects, forestalls the onset of puberty. In Scott’s case, the disease left him with an extraordinary voice that seemed neither male nor female—without question, one of the reasons Reed became so taken with him. Scott’s voice was high, delicate, and expressive—Billie Holiday was one of his biggest fans—but somehow informed by a masculine intelligence and perspective, a combination that made his vocals extremely distinctive. At Pomus’s request, Scott sang a soulful version of “Someone to Watch Over Me” at his funeral. That performance—and Reed’s relentless importuning—led Seymour Stein to sign Scott to Sire Records, sparking a strong career revival. Scott also sang a haunting vocal on “Power and Glory,” and he and Reed would perform together many times.

  Reed was understandably proud of Magic and Loss, and as usual, he was not shy about saying so. “I don’t think of my records as disposable,” he said. “I’m always in there trying to make the one that will really live, that you go back to ten years from now, two hundred years from now, that is not encompassed or attenuated by some fad or circumstance that’s purely temporal.”

  As he had on New York and Songs for Drella, Reed looked outside himself and the subterranean world that had been the focus of his work for years. “I’m not interested in ‘Lou Reed’ the character now,” he said. “I’m interested in Doc and Rita and how you deal with something like their loss, and giving that to the listener.” That desire to look outward derived from an increasing understanding of his own connection to other people, his growing belief that, his talent aside, he was no different from anyone else. “The people who I would keep at bay are the people who approach me as ‘Lou Reed.’ That ‘Lou Reed.’ That makes me very uncomfortable. I can’t really function in that situation. Because of the expectations they bring or because they’re looking for the feet of clay. Well, I’m just a person, too. I’m not on any pedestal. Read my stuff to verify that. I’m as human as the next person. I make the exact same mistakes that I write about.”

  Because of its seriousness and depth—not to mention the stature of its creator—Magic and Loss was the sort of album that made critics stretch in their own writing, attempting to match Reed’s eloquence with their own. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that Reed’s “pose of cultivated cool, of someone who has not only seen it all but experienced it, has always masked an incendiary rage that can be sensed in the quiver that ruffles his monotone. And in these songs about final things, the tension between his affectless attitude and his suppressed fury is as palpable and as gripping as it has ever been.”

  20

  BETWEEN THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION

  IN APRIL OF 1992, about four months after the release of Magic and Loss, Reed put out Between Thought and Expression: The Lou Reed Anthology, a three-CD overview of his solo career with RCA and Arista—which is to say everything before he moved to Sire Records for New York in 1989. The original idea for the box set came from Rob Bowman, a professor of musicology at York University in Canada who had assembled highly regarded box sets devoted to Stax/Volt singles and Otis Redding. When New York came out, Bowman got an assignment to interview Reed. Given Reed’s obsession with soul music—and his unspoken regard for academic credentials—the two men hit it off immediately. Reed even used Bowman’s Otis Redding box set as the house music before he came onstage at some of the shows on his tour in support of New York.

  So when Bowman proposed a box set of Reed’s solo work, Reed expressed interest. “He immediately gave me his phone number,” Bowman said, “which shocked me. He said, ‘Look, start putting together what you think a track list should be, and let’s start talking about this.’” Bowman had a carefully worked-out concept for what the set should be, and he presented it to Reed in great detail. “I saw it as a celebration and summation of his art up to that point,” Bowman said. “If you think about the way Lou talked about Delmore Schwartz and other artists he respected, he really had a sense of those people being recognized and their art being appreciated with a dignity, richness, grace, and depth that the art merits. He was really excited that this was going to happen with his catalog. He was excited about his music being treated as art and given this high-class treatment, if you will.”

  By the early nineties, box sets had become a kind of artistic gold standard in the music industry; Bob Dylan’s Biograph and Eric Clapton’s Crossroads were both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. The CD format generally, with its precious jewel case, book-size presentation, and higher price point, had already begun to transform albums into status objects. Box sets were the inevitable next step. The original assumption was that only artists, movements, and labels of great artistic significance would warrant the box set treatment. Of course, once the format proved commercially successful, everyone with enough material to fill three or more discs eventually got a box set. But at their best, with their aspirations to definitiveness
, elaborate artwork, remastering for state-of-the-art sound, and hefty price tags, box sets epitomized connoisseurship. They suggested seriousness—and sometimes achieved it—and flattered their purchasers, frequently baby boomers, many of whom had considerable disposable income to spend on their youthful passions. Record companies loved box sets because, just as the transition from vinyl to CD had done, they enabled labels to sell music that they already owned yet another time.

  Bowman was nothing if not meticulous, and he quickly set out to uncover the kind of rarities—alternate versions of familiar Lou Reed songs, neglected gems, distinctive live tracks, revealing demos—that deepen and add texture to such collections. “I spent somewhere between six weeks and two months locating and listening to reams and reams of material—live recordings, studio takes,” Bowman recalled, “trying to put together what I thought really represented his work in the strongest way—including a significant number of outtakes that would blow people’s minds.

  “Meanwhile, Lou would call me virtually every day. To be honest, it seemed to me that he was kind of lonely. It was like he didn’t have other friends to call. I realize that he must have, but it was surprising. Sometimes he’d call me at two in the morning to tell me what he and Sylvia had done that day. He’d tell me about some spa they’d gone to. He’d say, ‘You should bring your wife down here and go to that spa. It would be great. You guys would love it!’ On the box, I dealt with Lou directly on everything. It was like we were becoming close friends.”