Death Makes Three
1990–93
I think the most important thing in life is art. It’s art that I turn to for sustenance. It’s art that elevates things to the finest level where you can go for examples of greatness, and that’s what I want to try and impart on this record Magic and Loss. Not the Lou Reed character who at this point is rather amorphous, unless you want to think of it as a literate sensibility tempered by compassion.
Lou Reed
Any concern Reed had about losing himself in the association with Warhol or Cale were assuaged by a great climax of Lou’s career that followed fast on the heels of the release of Songs for Drella.
In the spring of 1990, Lou was invited to sing in front of 72,000 people at Wembley Stadium in London in a benefit for the South African political hero Nelson Mandela, recently released from prison after twenty-seven years. Returning to the folk roots of his college days, Lou, playing an acoustic guitar, performed two songs from the New York album. Unlike other acts performing that day, Lou made no attempts to meet Mandela or make any statements of his views about the momentous occasion. Instead, he watched Mandela’s speech from backstage on a TV monitor.
From London he traveled on to Prague to interview Czechoslovakia’s new president, the writer and former dissident Václav Havel, for Rolling Stone. Havel was a big fan of the Velvet Underground and had agreed to do the interview as a tribute to Lou.
On the way to the interview, an uptight Lou worried about his tape recorder malfunctioning, his mind going blank, failing at the task of interviewing he had so often belittled as work fit for a moron. “We passed a bust of Kafka on a street but were told not to bother to see his apartment,” he recalled. “We ate some dumplings in the oldest restaurant in Prague and then gathered ourselves to go to the castle to meet Václav Havel.”
The opening exchange should go down in the history of the interview as a classic example of the bald-faced arrogance of a journalist. Lou embarked on the taped discussion with a description of how he was sure the waiters who had served him breakfast at the hotel were members of the secret police:
HAVEL: The State Security was liquidated in our country, but these people work in spite of this fact. I think they are interested more in me than in you, these people.
REED: I don’t think so, I don’t think so.
When Havel interrupted Lou’s lengthy account of how he, a rock star, had reduced himself to a mere interviewer, saying, “I think I have some message work for this magazine, and I would like to tell it to you in this interview, but we must begin immediately because unfortunately I have a lot of work,” Lou barreled on regardless, pressing upon the chief executive a copy of Songs for Drella. When he finally let Havel get a word in, the famous writer and revolutionary launched a spiel about the influence of the VU on the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and the relevance of rock music in general. Lou, however, seemed famously unable to listen, throwing in abstract comments like “Joan Baez says hello” and “I admire you so much.” The remainder of the interview, which could have been written by Samuel Beckett, was dominated by Lou’s explanation of why he could not and would not play for Havel: “You see, I’m a very private person; when I came here, I didn’t want any photographers at the airport because I don’t like my picture taken. I don’t like being interviewed—and, er, I like controlled situations—as opposed to just a lot of people. It would be a privilege to play for these people under the right circumstances, but I’m not aware of the circumstances, and it’s difficult for me to walk into—”
Little wonder that Rolling Stone turned down the manuscript. Lou wasn’t Andy Warhol. He thought anybody could do an interview. He was wrong.
It turned out that, as one man who interviewed him pointed out, the man who was legendary for his antipathy toward being interviewed was even more uptight about being on the other side of the tape recorder: “The only reason I did it was that I really wanted to meet him, and here was a chance to meet him and ask him things that I was really interested in. But it’s just really hard work.”
Reed later said he was “dumbstruck” when Havel presented him with one of the two hundred hand-printed editions of his lyrics (“from the Velvet Underground straight through”) that had circulated among Czech dissidents in pre-glasnost Prague.
“He was amazing—the whole thing was amazing!—and I found out how much the Velvet Underground meant to those people in Eastern Europe all those years ago. They were out listening to us, only we just didn’t know it.” Not since Delmore Schwartz and Andy Warhol had Lou been recognized by such a heavyweight character.
At the end of the interview, Lou grudgingly agreed to play in a small club in Prague for Havel, his friends, and associates that night. “I did a few songs from my New York album. I started to leave and Kocar [his guide] asked me if the local band [Pulnoc] could join me. They did and we blazed through some old VU numbers. Any song I called, they knew. It was as if Moe, John, and Sterl were right there behind me, and it was a glorious feeling.”
***
Reed’s next solo album, Magic and Loss, focused on a subject that had always been at the core of his writing, the value of lost friendship. The album commemorated the deaths of two close friends in the early 1990s. One was the songwriter Jerome “Doc” Pomus, whom Reed had befriended in 1988. Pomus had penned a stack of hits in the 1950s and 1960s for, among others, Dion and the Belmonts, Elvis Presley, and the Drifters. The other friend, Rita, was unknown. “Within a short period, two of the most important people in my life died from cancer,” said Lou, “so the piece is about friendship and how does it transform things. These were people who were inspiring me right through to the last minute. These were people I was lucky to have known all the way through.
“Though I only got to know him in the last couple of years, I really loved Doc. He was an amazing creature. A mutual friend said we should meet, and I only lived two blocks away from him so I started traipsing round. I went to his writers’ workshop and it was a real thrill for these people to have their songs edited by him. I went over to talk, but not as much as I wished. It’s really sad not being able to call Doc Pomus up right to this day, because he was like the sun. He was just one of those people that you feel good when you’re around them. You could be feeling bad, and you go visit them and they say two words and you feel good. But it would have been even worse not to have known him at all. That’s part of the whole Magic and Loss deal.
“It’s inspiring to see how a real man and a real woman face death. I could visit Doc while he was going through these extreme medical processes, and I still felt great when I was around him. Both of them made jokes straight through. Unbelievable. I had said there’s this great widescreen color TV I could get for you, and I’ll hook up all the wiring for you, you don’t have to worry about any of that. And he said, ‘Lou, this is not the time for long-term investments.’”
Though the album focused on the deaths of Pomus and Rita, it also gave Lou the opportunity to touch on other losses he had recently experienced. In February 1990, his closest friend from Syracuse, Lincoln Swados, was found dead in his East 4th Street storefront slum apartment. This caused a small sensation and local press coverage because of the suggestion that his death was hastened by a greedy landlord who was forcing Lincoln to abandon the premises so he could renovate. Lou, who had turned his back on Lincoln in the mid-sixties, incurring the wrath of Swados’s sister, Elizabeth, made no comment at the time, but would later react in the way he knew best.
Reed wrote two songs, “Home of the Brave” from Legendary Hearts and “My Friend George” on New Sensations, about Swados. And now “Harry’s Circumcision” on Magic and Loss was also about Lincoln. Zooming back to 1962 when Lincoln was more famous than he was, Lou reflected that “Lincoln Swados will become a celebrity for this. Lincoln had jumped in front of a train, and lived to tell the tale. Albeit, missing an arm and a leg on the same side. That’s the closest thing I could think of that resonated with ‘Harry.’
“This album is not particularly about Lincoln. It was just that thing—I did know someone who did that, literally. He was a very talented guy. He was just insane. I always thought he made the people at the Factory pale by comparison. Nothing I saw there was anything compared to what I saw him do.”
Reed and Rathke spent “incalculable hours” in research and refinement. “I practically studied with some technical people who really helped me out. Because there’s millions of choices out there, and even if you had a zillion dollars and bought all these machines to try them, it’d take forever. So you really need someone knowledgeable and talented to guide you. Even down to the kind of tape you record on. I find the sound on this album awe-inspiring.”
Lou’s development as a writer mirrored his increasing technical proficiency. “I know more about writing now than when I was a lunatic,” he explained. “I’m very respectful of it now and I try to do everything in my power not to impede the process. I’ve been around a long time, and I know things that do impede it: drugs impede it; getting in a fight with a friend impedes it; tension impedes it. I’m not a person that works well from tension. In fact, for me, calm is absolutely the essential thing or what I write will be way off-base or be for a purpose that’s incorrect.” Lou finished writing and recording Magic and Loss between January and April 1991, then for marketing reasons waited until January 1992 for its release.
While finishing Magic and Loss, Reed also completed his selected lyrics and poems, Between Thought and Expression, published in the summer of 1991 by Disney’s Hyperion Press. “I took those songs that satisfied two criteria,” said Lou. “One, that, as most of the lyrics are supposed to do, they did not need the music. They could survive on the printed page. Two, they helped rhythmically advance a narrative, following someone through New York over three decades—the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties.
“The book is arranged and annotated to give you a sense of movement from the sixties to the nineties. I just love all of it. From day one, it was adult-oriented material, avoiding slang that would date. In the sixties I didn’t want to use slang terms like dig it and then be faced with it twenty years later. The most you get is a couple of hey, mans. In ‘Heroin’ I made up my own slang—‘Jim-Jims’—so that the song wouldn’t be tied to a particular time period.
“It isn’t a rock star’s compilation. There’s no picture of my house or of the band. I didn’t bring in some Belgian to paint the cover. It was serious. A lot of the lyrics only existed on record. I don’t have drawers full of ’em and I’ve thrown away the notebooks. I couldn’t read the handwriting anyway. The songs are like my diary. If I want to know where I was, the book gives me a good idea.
“Well, I’m thrilled that the collection is out. I always wanted to do it, but just never had the opportunity. Put it this way: when people approached me regarding books, it was always a rock-star book they were talking about. That is to say, ‘Here’s where he was born, this is his first guitar, and, look, here’s a drawing too.’ Illustrated stories. But this book is very straightforward. Lyrics that can stand alone.”
There were also two poems first published in 1976 (“The Slide,” “Since Half the World Is H2O”), and interviews with Václav Havel and a writer Lou greatly admired, Hubert Selby Jr.
“The collection vividly traces how he swam up and out of his original bookish gloom so cherished by a vanished dropout demimonde,” wrote Milo Miles in the Voice.
To publicize the book’s release, Lou gave two readings in New York, one at Central Park’s Summer Stage in July, the second at the NY Center for Ethnic Studies in November. They were both as successful as his 1971 reading at St. Mark’s Church had been and harkened back to it also in marking another beginning of sorts. At the Summer Stage Lou held a crowd of several thousand spellbound on a hot night as his acrid voice recited some of his most famous lyrics devoid of music. He ended both performances with an impassioned reading of material from the as yet unreleased Magic and Loss, none of which appeared in the book.
“These shocking lyrics tangled the feelings of loss and guilt, gallows humor, and dark despair,” reported Bobby Sutf in the NME. “The standing ovation that greeted this unnerving finale was more genuine and heartfelt than anyone connected to this bald promotional stunt could have dared wish for. Here was an audience who recognized an artist at the height of his powers nearly twenty-five years after they were first saluted.”
On the release of the single most significant piece of work he had so far handed down to the public, Lou made a revealing gesture that no reviewer or interviewer picked up on. He dedicated the book to his parents, sister, and wife: “For Sid, Toby, Bunny and most of all for Sylvia.”
Reed’s audience had grown steadily over the years. Many of the early bohemian fans of the Velvets and the gay fans of Transformer had stayed with him. They were joined later by supporters of punk rock in the 1970s and of political and vintage rock in the 1980s and 1990s—particularly on college campuses.
In November 1991, Lou made a triumphant visit to London where he was presented with the Q Magazine Award of Merit for his outstanding contribution to rock music. Reed was introduced to the audience as a man who “still says, on occasion, that there’s nothing to beat two guitars, bass, and drums—but his work has broadened our vision of rock’s possibilities, forming it into something more real, more literate, and more grown-up than we’d probably have settled for otherwise. Scores of musicians will readily admit their debt to this man’s influence, and any that won’t are probably lying.”
In December, RCA Records released Reed’s solo boxed set, also titled Between Thought and Expression. Reed, who had worked hard on compiling the collection in collaboration with Rob Bowman, had discovered among other surprises that the master tapes for some of his albums, such as The Bells, had either been lost or stored so carelessly that they had oxidized or disintegrated. Reed had agreed to take part only if he had control of the sound. For example he had bought an unopened copy of The Bells, which was no longer available, for $50 and put it through a process called Sonic Solution, which created, by the time they had finished, a clearer sound than the original. Lou had every reason to be proud of the results. The only criticism was that, as with the book, he had virtually denied the whole period of his relationship with Rachel. Otherwise, the excellent reviews were well deserved.
“Bruce Springsteen may be more user-friendly, and Neil Young may own the territory west of the Mississippi, but Lou Reed’s loud works of art speak with the same extralarge authority, and burn with the same enduring dedication to authentic feeling and hard answers,” wrote a reviewer in the New Yorker. “His new greatest-hits boxed set, Between Thought and Expression, is an utterly convincing document made up of equal parts of nastiness, tenderness, and sorrow, and it is astonishingly mature from start to finish. When he’s playing those songs live, this man is the King of New York.”
With the widespread international recognition accorded Reed’s book and boxed set, the release of Magic and Loss in January 1992 could not have come at a better time. “If a song cycle about a friend’s death from cancer seems to be the stuff hits are made of, well … it’s not,” commented one reviewer. “But what Magic and Loss lacks in pop appeal is more than made up by emotional impact. With arrangements so skeletal they’re barely noticeable, the album stakes everything on its songs. Reed makes them work with sly melodic twists and a well-framed narrative, assuring that we not only understand his emotional turmoil, but share in it. Which, in the end, makes this a perfect modern blues: heartbreaking, thought-provoking, involving as life.” Newsweek called it “the most grown-up rock record ever made.”
The album received some of the best reviews he had ever had around the world, but there were, as always, some dissenting voices. Adam Sweeting commented: “Reed has suggested a link between Magic and Loss and 1973’s Berlin, but the telling difference is that the latter mediated its harrowing subject matter through powerful, vivid music. Though Magic and Loss
touches upon a range of styles, Reed is so immersed in the minutiae of suffering that his musical ideas remain undeveloped, while the subject matter has squeezed out the sardonic wit and throwaway cynicism of his best writing. What’s left is a slim volume of morbid verse, set to half-finished music.”
Lou now saw himself, and rightfully so, as a warrior king more than a rock-and-roll animal. “This isn’t a bleak record,” he claimed. “I’m not the only person in the world who’s experienced loss—especially these days with what AIDS and other diseases are doing. These are complex emotions. There’s a song, ‘The Warrior King,’ which is about the anger that the narrator of the record feels about what the disease is doing to his friends. Of course, he’s impotent; there’s nothing he can really do about it. You have the best doctors in the fucking world sitting there—they’re going to try new techniques, they’re going to put isotopes the size of a nickel inside you. The cure is to try and kill the cancer, but, unfortunately, in the process, they’re killing healthy cells—you. It’s whichever gives out first.
“We’re talking about people with indomitable spirit. Nonetheless, nonetheless, they do not survive the process. This puts the narrator in a rage and he pictures the disease as a person and himself as the warrior king. The warrior king seems like the only character powerful enough to beat something as all-powerful as this enemy.
“You can’t walk around with anger in your heart. It causes very negative things,” Lou said of “Harry’s Circumcision,” “a suicide fantasy worthy of William Burroughs,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times, “in which a man who is unhappy about the fact that he is growing to resemble his parents cuts off his own nose, then slits his own throat but is saved from dying.”
“The beauty, however dark, of Magic and Loss is in the asking,” wrote David Fricke in Rolling Stone, “in the subtle elegiac lift in Reed’s stony sing-speak, the sepulchral resonance of his and Mike Rathke’s guitars, and the Spartan grace of the storytelling. On Magic and Loss, Ol’ Poker Face looks straight into the face of the Big Inevitable—and flinches.”
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