( This article was published in Audiby magazine’s January edition and the same can be viewed here – http://issuu.com/audiby/docs/audiby_jan-feb . It was written in context of Lou reed’s death on October 27,2013 )
It was Lou Reed’s dream to have his entire body of work read as a Great American Novel.
It all began in Brooklyn and Long island and Lou had more than the requisites for rock n roll. He hated school, received electroconvulsive treatment at fourteen for deviant sexual tendencies and grew completely disenchanted at his Alma mater, Journalism at Syracuse University .He found his true education studying under the poet Delmore Shwartz and just like the Shwartz-based character in Saul Bellow’s Great American Novel , Humboldt’s Gift , Lou peaked, soared , plummeted and then disappeared in equal measure.
Sufficiently educated in expression and language, with toughest subject matters always closest to his heart, Lou founded the avant-garde act Velvet Underground along with John Cale, which was anchored initially by Andy Warhol. The ones who realized what was happening when Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), came out in 1967, instantly spotted his genius. Tracks like ‘Velvet in furs’, ‘I’m waiting for my man’ and ‘Heroin’, etc. brought out previously unseen depictions of urban decadence with an unsparing honesty and simplicity. As opposed to an era of glamorous rebels, celebrated causes & token revolution the underbelly of human nature was exposed in the viscera of the agonizing urban American youth. The ‘street’ was supplied to song for the first time, and the subconscious of city life that lay behind postcard-America came alive in downtowns and dangerous alleys, drug abuse, prostitution and stories of compulsion and adversity. Additionally his first hand experiences at the drug-fuelled circus of Warhol’s factory and its ‘superstars’, also found its way into his songs, painting the then-prevailing poster elitism in its true colors of degradation. Forthright on controversial subjects and with a brand of experimental psychedelic music, Velvet Underground held a pocketful of critics and empty wallets. Tasting only lukewarm commercial success in some of their later efforts, they would gain posthumous accolades and father figure statuses for nearly everything that emerged from the roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll .One of the most famous quotes in the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll, credited to Brian Eno, summarized Lou’s five years and three albums-long Velvet Underground career,” while the first Velvet Underground album may have sold only 30,000 copies in its early years, everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”
And payback came soon enough. One of his most prominent protégés, David Bowie, took the producer’s seat on what was arguably his best record – Transformer – launching his solo career and propelling it to commercial success. This was the part with the ‘perfect day’s , ‘walks on the wild side’ and ‘satellites of love’ in his novel – and, today, when one attempts to specify when it was that Lou Reed found his signature sound, it was this period: Transformer (1972) and Berlin (1973), where his deep-throated deadpan vocals finally began finding arrangements suitable to his diction-minded recitals that the feedback driven Rock ‘n’ Roll experiment with Velvet always seemed to miss out on.
The successive chapters of Lou Reed’s career cover the spectrum of settings available for rock albums at a rate of nearly a record a year. Sally Can’t Dance (1975), highest charting album of his career followed by his lowest charting album Metal Machine Music (1975), a lyric-less hour of feedback and white noise designed to, not without humor, see out his contract with RCA records. Albums like Rock and Roll Heart (1976) and Street Hassle (1978)also tasted success.
As opposed to the successful seventies, the eighties saw him fading away until recovery was made with his masterpiece for the decade, New York (1989), with a far more mature (and sober) Lou exploring the American psyche. In the nineties, Songs for Drella (1990), a personal biography of Andy Warhol, which featured a reunion with John Cale was followed by a string of records with fleeting impact. The millennium,by the advent of which he was a forgivable sixty, brought The Raven (2003) and Hudson River Wind Meditations (2007) – concept albums on Edgar Allen Poe’s works and meditational music respectively – that completely lost his listeners, inevitably pushing him onto obscurity.
Grumpy old Lou, always operating within his own set of laws, never reached the heights of a sensation. Even his biggest fan had reason to hate him on an occasion or two. “I don’t have any fans left. After Metal Machine Music, they all fled. Who cares? I’m essentially in this for the fun of it.” was his response to feedback at his final crime, with Metallica as accomplice, viz. the absolutely forgettable, Lulu (2011). Gorillaz’s ‘Some kind of nature’, from their Plastic beach (2010)album, would be the appropriate Lou Reed retirement day keepsake.
While it is often said that poetry and song writing can’t take each other’s place, the post-Lou world, where verse is saved by Hip-Hop at best and critically endangered by EDM, is left with his body of work to prove otherwise and all evidence suggests it might never happen again. One could argue that he went from a highly clinical, widely appreciated songwriter to a musician whose music became an excuse for his literary ambitions and was, hence, widely ignored. He did away with his own genius and he didn’t care.
Shock Therapy, Delmore Shwatrz, Andy Warhol, Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Rehab, Gorillaz, Metallica, and we’ve not even begun talking about Lou’s life which, perhaps, is only paralleled in decadence by his own characters.