Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  As for Anderson, disturbing as some of the themes of her work could be, it generally had a genial quality that made her more accessible to mainstream audiences than other, more abrasive experimental artists. People magazine, for example, ran a feature in which Anderson, monologist Spalding Gray, and director Jonathan Demme, all of whom had worked on the film version of Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, went bowling—partly just for a fun setting for the story and partly to show People’s readership that it need not be put off by their arty backgrounds. That Anderson would agree to such a stunt—indeed, that she would agree to be in People at all—shows that she saw herself as an artist whose work could reach a wide audience. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck once described his band’s relationship to the rock underground as being “the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff.” Anderson occupied that spot in relation to New York’s underground art scene. While Reed was hardly a household name, he was vastly more well-known than Anderson and helped to refresh awareness of her among the more adventurous rock fans who would be receptive to her brand of performance art, which combined elements of music, video, and spoken-word recitations. Reed and Anderson would soon become, as Bob Neuwirth put it, “the Ma and Pa Kettle” of the New York underground.

  WHEN WORD OF REED and Anderson’s involvement began to spread, the reaction mingled delight and surprise. They seemed an intriguing match, the sort of union that could only make sense in New York. They seemed to go everywhere together—galleries, movies, concerts, events of all sorts having to do with the arts. Sightings of them walking on the street or dining in downtown restaurants took on the quality of definitive New York experiences, much as seeing Woody Allen or John Lennon and Yoko Ono had been a couple of decades earlier. In public, Reed was unusually deferential to Anderson, almost boyish in his efforts to be pleasing, like a high school kid trying to learn how to properly behave with his first girlfriend. People who met them together and expected to encounter the fearsome Lou Reed were struck by how puppyish he could be around her. Anderson, meanwhile, routinely maintained her air of friendly, benign detachment, almost as if she were as much observing the situation as participating in it. She clearly felt affection for Reed, and somehow seemed to understand how fragile he was beneath his protective armor. She received his attentions not so much as her due, but as if unsurprised by them, maybe even a little amused. Chatty as she could be in her work, she was far more reserved around him, and seemed perfectly willing to let him do most of the talking.

  For all their seeming closeness, they never fully lived together. Anderson kept her Canal Street loft, while Reed maintained an apartment on West Eleventh Street. They eventually purchased a weekend home in East Hampton that they regarded as “theirs”—“a house that was separate from our own places,” is how Anderson described it.

  That they often lived apart was painful for Reed; it was a subject he complained about, sometimes tearfully, to the people closest to him. But Anderson seemed to require such distance in order to maintain her own equilibrium in relation to Reed and not be overwhelmed by him. Reed’s tempestuousness and hair-trigger temper could not have been more different from Anderson’s firm but gentle determination and desire to avoid confrontation. Every couple needs to work out its own rhythm of individuality and union, and Reed and Anderson were no exception. It wasn’t as if they were a young couple just starting out and establishing a home together. They were older, and each had a demanding career that required frequent travel. The time they spent apart was likely essential to their successfully remaining together.

  They were so different that many people reacted to their getting together with something like shock. Jeff Gold had occasion to work with both Reed and Anderson at Warner Bros. “There’s no explanation for relationships,” he said, “but everybody at Warners was trying to do the math on this. We knew Laurie as a highly motivated and interesting artist, but as friendly as could be. And Lou seemed like a changed man around her: docile and pleasant, deferential, pulling her chair out when she was about to sit down. I’m sure she was the best thing ever to happen to him.”

  Steven Baker felt similarly. “I was just so amazed that Lou and Laurie found each other,” he said. “I just saw her bringing out the best in Lou.” On one occasion, Reed and Anderson invited Steven and his wife to dinner at a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side: “That night, Lou would tell me that if I ate this particular food, it would be really good for me—almost like somebody who was looking out for me. Laurie was this conceptual artist, and my expectation was that she was going to be like one of these famous intellectual people. She is very brilliant, but she’s also the nicest person in the world, so wonderful to be around. And all of a sudden, Lou, who could be the polar opposite of that, is now spending time with her, and every time I’m with Lou and Laurie, it’s fantastic. I kept thinking of how lucky Lou was to have met Laurie.”

  REED’S NEXT ALBUM ADDRESSED both his divorce and his new relationship with Anderson. Released in February of 1996, just before Reed’s fifty-fourth birthday, Set the Twilight Reeling provided a thematic break from the albums that had immediately preceded it. Songs for Drella and Magic and Loss both explored mortality, New York took a hard look at social conditions, and the Velvet Underground’s Live MCMXCIII was a journey through the past, an attempt to see what the most significant episode in Reed’s creative life might mean in the present day. They were all, in their way, rigorously organized concept albums.

  Set the Twilight Reeling is a unified statement as well, though it feels more relaxed than those earlier projects. “I wanted to make a record that would take you on a trip of passion,” Reed explained. “I was having a good old time when I made the record. And I’m having an even better time now.” Even in his interviews to promote the album, Reed seemed in an uncharacteristically easygoing mood. In his conversation with a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, Reed genially chatted about the New York Knicks, whom he was about to go see play against Philly’s hometown team, the 76ers. He complained like any fan about how coddled sports superstars are (“It’s not like we can all go to arbitration when we’re unhappy.… Boy, that would be nice to live like that. But this is the real world”) and explained that he hadn’t smoked in nearly a year. “I feel like I conquered the world,” he said. “I do smoke cigars, but I’m like Clinton: I don’t inhale.” He even responded in a friendly way to a direct question regarding his relationship with Anderson, the sort of “personal” inquiry that would have typically set him off. Asked if “wedding bells are ready to ring,” Reed responded, “I would never answer a question like that, but the minute any plans are set, I will probably make a public announcement from Mount Everest. If I ever get that lucky.”

  What Set the Twilight Reeling does share with its predecessors is that it’s an album about transformation. Reed clearly saw his relationship with Anderson as an essential new beginning, and the promise that relationship held—and the challenge that Anderson presented to him as a person—suggested a future that he was excited about. He had felt that way about the start of his relationship with Sylvia as well, of course, as documented on The Blue Mask and Legendary Hearts. But it’s a lot harder to resist cynicism in your midfifties than it is at forty. Reed saw his horizons expanding in all directions at a time when others might have been feeling the first chill of mortality. “I’d like to think I’m capable of growing,” he said. “That’s part of what this album is about. Change is the only constant. Without getting all New Agey and dewy-eyed about it, I do truly believe that if you practice the guitar, you play better. If you spend enough time with the recording process, you record better. And certainly I believe that I’ve learned things about writing over the years that allow me to write better. So for me, the best is yet to come.”

  “Set the twilight reeling”: it almost seems as if it could be a line from the national anthem, the sound of a new country being born. And if the image of twilight recalls the concern with mortality of Reed’s earlier work, the
title suggests that his discovery of Anderson upended that preoccupation. Rather than meditating on the sense of an ending, he is gripped by the idea of a new beginning. As he sings on the title track, which closes the album, “I accept the newfound man and set the twilight reeling.” That song begins softly, as Reed prays for acceptance—and self-acceptance—as, a bit frightened, he faces the changes to come. Once again, new love has him at his most vulnerable. “A new self is borne,” he sings, “the other self dead.” That use of “borne” rather than “born” is striking. This being rock and roll, it’s possible that it was simply spelled incorrectly on the album’s lyric sheet, though “borne” remains the spelling in the book of lyrics Reed published afterward. Regardless, even as an unintended homophone pun, it’s lovely. The “new self” is not merely being born, coming into being, but must be borne, like a weight or a responsibility. It’s as if Reed understood that the person he was could not survive in his relationship with Anderson, that she would not tolerate the man whose behavior may well have undermined his previous relationships. The song ends with the image of a soul singer onstage, dropping to his knees, the horn section “unrelenting” as he belts out his lover’s prayer. Finally, as he gazes into the microphone, his lover’s face appears, and “I lose all my regrets.” The writing there, like the singing, is both restrained and powerful, Reed at his finest.

  The song “Trade In,” a ballad distinguished by a melodic bass line by Fernando Saunders, also addresses the theme of Reed shedding an old, abrasive self (“such an obvious schmuck”) in order to transform into someone new. That is the “trade in” of the title. He insists that he now desires a “fourteenth chance at this life.” In a telling image, Reed credits Anderson as the source of his willingness to change. “I met a woman with a thousand faces,” he sings, “and I want to make her my wife.” The “faces” Reed is referring to are the many characters Anderson assumes in her work, her own transformations that blur gender, and the shifting nature of reality in her art. Reed has also described the character of “Lou Reed” as ever-changing. Those changes pertain to his life as well as his art. Many people have pointed out that dealing with Reed was complicated because no one could ever be sure which version of him was going to appear in any situation. Anderson’s own mutability held an allure for Reed because of the control she was capable of exerting over it. It would not be surprising if Reed himself had occasionally been shaken by his unpredictable responses to people and situations. Anderson’s placid demeanor, her Buddhist detachment, served as a kind of model for him, something to aspire to.

  Anderson is also the subject of “Adventurer,” the title a reference to not only her intellectual daring but her willingness to put herself in physically dangerous situations in pursuit of spiritual knowledge. The song moves forward with rapid rhythmic propulsion and a profusion of words, as if Reed is racing both to say everything he wants to say about Anderson and also to quell his anxiety over her behavior. He admires her adventurousness, but fears for her physical safety and feels abandoned by her. He recognizes that, artistically, he is an adventurer as well, and that her travel, like his own, is, in an unusual phrase for a song lyric, “a necessary adjunct to what we both do.” But he is afraid of losing her. Her leaving is like “splitting up the atom, splitting up what once was, splitting up the essence.” A woman with her own serious ambitions and goals, Anderson was the least compliant of any of Reed’s lovers. She met Reed as an equal and steadfastly maintained that status, regardless of whatever fears of abandonment that might awaken in him. Her independence was not designed or intended to unsettle him, but if it occasionally did, that did not dissuade her from exercising it.

  The anxiety underlying Reed’s love for Anderson manifests itself in other songs on Set the Twilight Reeling. On “NYC Man,” Reed assumes the tough guy posture of the New York native, but turns the song into a kind of plea for honesty and directness. If his new lover doesn’t want him, she doesn’t need to lie or pretend, the song says. As a “New York City man,” the singer wants her to tell it like it is. All she has to do is “say ‘Go’ and I am gone,” he asserts. But as always with Reed, vulnerability underlies the hard posture of the song. A quick, uncomplicated ending is preferable only because dragging it out would make it even more painful. “Hang On to Your Emotions” echoes “Hang On to Your Ego,” the early title of the Beach Boys song “I Know There’s an Answer,” cowritten by Brian Wilson, one of Reed’s idols. Reed’s song seems to be addressed to Anderson, who sings background on the track. He confesses the deep self-loathing within him, the “demagogue” inside his head, the feral “cat” and rabid “rat” who occupy his mind and tear him apart for his “litany of failures.” Only the sound of his “lover’s breath” allows him to free himself from those feelings and “let go.” It’s a powerful statement of how Reed looked to his lovers—specifically Anderson, in this case—for a kind of salvation, for the absolution of his sins.

  Reed treats his romance with Anderson again on “Hookywooky.” His desire to “hookywooky” with her means exactly what you think it does, and it’s hilarious to hear Reed, who never backed off from describing the most extreme sex acts in unvarnished detail, use a childish euphemism to describe sex with his girlfriend. The song’s upbeat rock-and-roll groove underscores its playful tone, as Reed once again compares his black-and-white thinking to Anderson’s open-mindedness. He describes how “civilized” she is, how she remains friends with all her former lovers—as opposed to him (“When things / End for me, they end”). He allows that he could “learn a lot” from her about “people, plants, and relationships” and “how not to get hurt.” Finally, he wonders if, should he adopt Anderson’s easygoing approach to life, he wouldn’t so much want to throw her ex-lovers off the roof of her building and watch them be crushed “under the wheels of a car on Canal Street.”

  The outlier on the album is “Sex with Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II,” which Reed recorded live in the studio. It’s a furious, obscenity-laced screed against right-wing moralizing that mentions Robert Dole, the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1996, by name. Understandably, Reed took the culture wars of the late eighties and nineties personally. He viewed them as driven by the basest hypocrisy, and that’s the explicit tone of “Sex with Your Parents.” The song posits that Republicans’ hatred of sexuality in art derives from their own Oedipal desires and crimes. It’s not a subtle critique, but Reed was writing out of fury and perhaps fear that his own work would, once again, be targeted by the Right. As if to start that fight rather than wait for his opponents to attack, Reed unleashed a song that he was certain would incite controversy. The only problem was that no one noticed.

  Rolling Stone dependably awarded the album four stars. But typically, it did not sell well, and typically, Reed blamed his record company. Warner Bros. released “Adventurer,” Reed’s hymn to Laurie Anderson, as the first promotional track to radio, and it failed to perform. Reed was fired up by “Sex with Your Parents” and was determined to have it released both as a way to reshape the conversation about the Republican Right and to ignite interest in Set the Twilight Reeling. The suggestion did not go over well. “I was talking to Lou somewhat regularly on the phone at the time,” Jeff Gold recalled, “and I had made the big mistake of giving him my home number, which record executives typically don’t do because you want to have some semblance of a homelife. In 1996, I had an eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old daughter, and, to the degree that I could, my weekends were devoted to hanging out with them. I vividly remember my wife coming into the backyard where I was playing with my daughters and saying, ‘Lou Reed is on the phone for you.’ My reaction was, ‘Oh, fuck! Why is he calling me on a Sunday afternoon?’ At that point, we were six years into working with him, so I knew it couldn’t be good news.”

  It turned out that Reed had a promotional idea for his album that could not wait until Monday. “He was pissed off because radio wasn’t embracing his record, and he wanted us to send out �
��Sex with Your Parents’ to all of radio with a copy of the First Amendment,” Gold said. “He might have wanted to have that song released first, and we had said, ‘Look, nobody’s going to play that.’ So Lou’s pushback was, ‘Fuck them, I’m going to give them the real message of this record.’ There was no scenario where radio was going to get behind that record, and rubbing shit in their face is not a way to advance your cause. He was really fucking pissed. And I don’t think he thought for a quarter of a second, ‘I’m calling this guy at home on a Sunday. Maybe that’s not the right time.’ Unfortunately, those experiences become the ones you remember about an artist.”

  LOU REED DEDICATED THE song “Finish Line” on Set the Twilight Reeling to Sterling Morrison, who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma on August 30, 1995, one day after his fifty-third birthday; he had been diagnosed with the disease in 1994. The song does not explicitly refer to Morrison, but the notion of “heading for the finish line” suggests the approach of mortality, the subject that, understandably, would always come to Reed’s creative mind whenever someone who had been close to him died. Reed had trouble viewing virtually any experience except in terms of himself, and death, in particular, was difficult for him to see in any objective way. He understood that, given his self-destructive habits over many years, luck alone had shielded him from an early death (“I should have been dead a thousand times,” he said when discussing the song at one point), so the passing of others affected him powerfully. And the more complicated his relationship had been during the dead person’s lifetime, the more his ambivalent emotions transformed into openhearted generosity.