WHO WAS LOU REED?
It is a good moment to think about Lou Reed again. Todd Haynes’s documentary The Velvet Underground has brought the New York art scene of the late 1960s to life once again, the milieu in which Reed made his mark. And in September, 2022, a compilation of his earliest demos and privately recorded pieces, Words and Music, May 1965, appeared a few months after The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center initiated the first major exhibition from his archive, Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars.
What do these newly discovered versions of Reed’s songs tell us about the man? They are sung in a folksy and bluesy style which is a bit of a shock. Equally surprising, Reed comes off as very open and just plain nice; no posturing or sneering takes place. This is a side of Lou Reed that was usually well hidden and was not part of his public persona at all.
Understanding Lou Reed is a way of getting a handle on a fascinating time and place with all its traps and possibilities. He is an example of what the New York art scene of the 1960s spawned at its best. Even more, Reed is a great study of the contradictions that often beset an artist and how they are worked out through art and life. He went through different phases in his music and took a very different direction with his life from the 1980s onward. The person he was in the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, was not the same person that his third wife Laurie Anderson knew and loved in his later years by any means.
The Velvet Underground
In Haynes’s documentary, we find that the first part of Reed’s life followed a relatively consistent pattern. He was uncomfortable in most places, always insecure, greatly disliked rejection by other people, and, consequently, unloaded on them first. His poetry, his main vehicle of self-expression in his student days, was heavy and featured dark themes involving the gay subculture. When he had his first band, he was a perfectionist with little patience for others’ mistakes. For the first years of The Velvet Underground, the band was preoccupied with making its way and putting out albums and going on tour. But over time, Reed’s deep personality issues rose up again which made the band’s life difficult. He was too controlling, impossible to satisfy, and filled with self-loathing.
When the group was starting up, taking up a posture of disdain for everything seemed like a winning ticket. They set themselves in opposition to a defined position and built upon that. Reed was also able to take up this pose while singing about the pain and the hurt he had experienced as well as the realities that he and his friends had seen. But, as his collaborator John Cale explained, the band members started to feel this disdain for each other. Amphetamines also kicked in, which was reflected in the band’s music which became faster, louder, and more aggressive.
Reed displayed more and more erratic behavior, firing Warhol as the manager and Cale as his main collaborator, before making his own abrupt exit. Reed had felt a rivalry with Cale, who had a far better musical education and greater sophistication, right from the beginning. At first, the rivalry provided a creative tension and spark, but it became a source of conflict and bitter arguments.
The Quest for Stardom
So Reed went off on his own, since he felt that the band was stagnating in any case and not achieving the recognition that his talents as songwriter and visionary clearly merited. He wanted to be recognized and achieve international fame but his ambition set him on a path that wasn’t good for him. After leaving the Velvet Underground and taking a few years to get his life together, he chose to focus on achieving the international success that he believed his art merited. It was this choice which greatly worsened his addictions and removed him from loving relationships. He hung out with a crowd that was predatory — nasty people who tore each other down while putting on airs of superiority.
It was an unfortunate choice but eventually he was able to reverse the direction of his life. In a 1989 interview, Lou recognized that he was a cult figure who would never be famous. But that didn’t bother him because he wrote for himself, first of all. Of course, he was grateful when people understood him but he was not writing and performing in order to bask in their esteem. Anderson says that he cultivated relationships with people which sustained and nurtured his life and art during his later years.
The basic contradiction that was evident since Reed’s high school days was between his great need and love for his art on the one hand and his lust for success on the other. As a high school student, he said that his main goals in life were money and to be a rock star. Yet he had such great energy on stage and gave so much of himself; clearly, art was his real vocation. He was a visionary who inspired many people and treated those who appreciated what he was trying to do with much generosity.
Bettye Kronstad, his first wife who was with him during the early 1970s commented on the two sides of his personality. There was “his extraordinary ambition, with equal parts humility; his incredible confidence, which contrasted with his equally devastating insecurity and dependency; his tenderness, which was more privately seen only by his partners, and with friends and family, along with his wicked, and sometimes cruel tongue and actions.”
He was abusive toward Bettye, completely inattentive to her needs, and totally dependent on her to function under the pressure of making albums and going on tours. Still, his empathy, effusive charm, sensitivity, intelligence, and coolness were present at the same time he was destroying himself in his pursuit of fame. Reed was also the rock star who proudly scorned the living dead, the conformists who created nothing and merely obeyed. Yet his secret wish was to be good and to hate himself less,
It has been said that Lou Reed brought together the European avant-garde and the ethos of the street. He clearly helped to open up a larger space for the appreciation of certain types of social outcast. He was the first to write about the disenfranchised in this country within rock ‘n roll. His virtue was an ability to go directly to the truth, which very often was something that people did not want to talk about. He was also a person who never had a “real” job, an icon of the alternative scene which was replete with drug use, free love, varied forms of sexual orientation, and extreme non-conformity.
Those who jumped on the bandwagon of punk and new wave music found in Lou Reed a kindred spirit who had paved the way for them. Conditions were right for the New York music scene to assume central importance in the evolution of popular music in the mid-1970s, just as in the late 1960s, the forward-looking energy and optimism prevailing in California’s psychedelic and soft rock music was in tune with the youth culture and pervaded it. Lou Reed’s best work with The Velvet Underground as well as his album Transformer came before punk, and his radical tolerance of hard drugs, sexual ambiguity, and acting out appealed only to a small select group.
For those whose sensibility was nourished by the flower children, the New York alternative scene came across as ugly and disheartening. There was a time when Reed gave a poetry reading where the crowd turned against him for violating its cardinal rule: always be cool and never be sincere. Lou’s transgression was to express genuine feelings in his poetry, whereas his audience would only accept him on their terms, even if it meant he had to put on an act.
The Mature Artist
From the 1980s onward, Reed began to feel differently about his life and who he wanted to be. Free from his worst addictions, he meditated and enthusiastically embraced tai chi. Living in the midst of New York’s frenetic pace, tai chi helped him to slow down as he came in contact with his own body and its energies. He earnestly promoted tai chi and composed music that would help the student experience a suitable vibrational frequency for effective tai chi practice. Laurie Anderson says he died while doing tai chi. “I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open.”
Reed’s humane qualities took center stage after he drastically toned down his addictions and resorted to smoking cigarettes. Anderson writes that “he loved and appreciated other artists and musicians. He was always so generous.” They loved each other and when conflicts arose they learned to forgive. For 21 years, their minds and hearts were entangled.
Nevertheless, it would not be accurate to say that Reed turned into a hippie or laid-back California-type person. By all accounts, he did tai chi with great seriousness, discipline, and commitment. His preferred form of this martial art was one which emphasized both power and serenity, and the warrior aspect greatly attracted him. So did its aesthetic and metaphysical dimensions. His teacher embodied his ideal. “He combines the very beautiful form, the great control, the focus, and a really, truly remarkable fajing (explosive power.) When I saw that combination of grace and power, the fast and the soft, the yin and the yang, that’s what I’d been looking for.”
If we look at the album New York, we encounter songs that reflect a mature outlook. Reed received much critical acclaim for this album which was motivated by his outrage at what was taking place in the city. Jonathan Cott evokes his apocalyptic view. “Released in 1989 and simply titled New York, Lou Reed’s fifteenth solo album unflinchingly depicted with savage indignation and the fervency of a biblical prophet an AIDS-stricken city in which friends were continually ‘disappearing’ — a desolation row of pestilential welfare hotels; of battered wives, crack dealers, TV bigots, racist preachers and venal politicians; of kids selling plastic roses for a buck by the Lincoln Tunnel; of a Hudson River deluged with garbage; and of bloody vials washing up on city beaches.” Here we see Reed’s social conscience in operation and are struck by the urgency he feels to do something constructive within a seemingly hopeless situation.
Bringing It All Back Home
One of the factors that went into making Reed a highly creative artist was where he grew up. He once said that living in Brooklyn was bad but moving to Long Island was so much worse. He lived in a narrowly provincial area of Long Island. This experience of isolation and utterly not fitting in nurtured his great sensitivity and empathy. And we can’t ignore his experience of electroshock therapy, which widened the gap between him and his parents. Since the society that surrounded him had nothing to offer, he had to go to Manhattan to find a milieu in which he could breathe. What also helped Reed become a world-class composer and performer was devotion to his craft. He was able to concentrate on one thing, his music, and would focus for years on a small aspect of his music like learning how to play a D chord exactly right, which he totally mastered.
Reed was very dependent on women, drugs, and critical approbation in the early 1970s. He was not well understood and few people were capable of appreciating such an uncompromising artist. Reed wanted his writing to be admired but his audience idolized him as a glam rocker. These fans loved his themes of sado-masochism, sexual ambiguity, and drug use and enjoyed his dark and menacing persona. But this wasn’t him, even though it brought him fame and notoriety. It was a devil’s bargain that gave him the adulation he thought he wanted in return for his soul. When he finally let his craving for success go, he could move forward in his art. The result was a rich, almost literary portrait of the United States over a 50-year period as he aspired to write the Great American novel through his music and lyrics.
But was the work produced by the happier and mature Reed as good as what he did with the Velvet Underground and in Transformer, his most popular album? His later work like New York was clearly not as revolutionary and did not blaze new trails the way his 1960s songs did. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t as good, if by “good” we mean the level of consciousness that is expressed, the insights that pour out, and the technical skill displayed. It may not be as creative, in the sense of bringing together disparate elements whose connections had yet to be perceived. After all, in his Velvet Underground work, Reed gave us a unique blend of simple and basic music, lyrics with literary flair, characters from society’s fringes, and unsentimental honesty. No musician had yet ventured into this territory, although something of the kind had been done by writers like Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Hubert Selby Jr., as Reed liked to point out. So his most creative work was produced early on.
The 1960s was a time when Lou was perfectly situated to be the voice of emerging social groups. Within the alternative culture, he was part of a larger coterie of artists that recognized the absurdity of current social mores as well as the hypocrisy of those who defended them. His singularity was to present the experience of hard drug users without moral condemnation so that we could see these people, too, as fellow beings. He was far ahead of his time because it is only recently that more and more people have realized that treatment of drug addiction is more effective than punishment. And in the late 1960s, people in the United States began to understand that the society itself was riddled with social pathology and that its outcasts were struggling with great difficulty to escape a dismal fate. People also started to realize that artists successfully make use of this experience to not only save themselves but to support others as well. They are the advance guard of social change.
Reed lived the extreme life that he described in his lyrics. And he never denied this. In 1989, looking back on those days, he said “I’m not harsh on myself for any of that. If anything, I have an understanding and sympathy for the situation. What I’m devoted to now is never letting those situations happen ever again. I would just walk away.” He also stated that he is “a genuinely nice guy.” Although he did allude to his extremely temperamental behavior in the more distant past, he believed he had come to terms with it.
Along with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Reed is one of the three great white male chroniclers of America in my time. Interestingly, Lou and Bob are Jewish and Bruce is working class. But they are not only great lyricists; we are captivated by their poetic lyrics together with their sounds and styles. Moreover, hearing them perform their music is a very rich experience. Their intelligent and poetic music plus contemporary works of fiction and memoir by mostly African American writers have helped me better understand myself and the America I live in. But here is my question. Who are the artists we can look to as we face a very dark future? Who are the creative visionaries to shed light on who we are and where we are going as a nation and, more importantly, as citizens of the world? Are they women and artists from outside the West?
