Night Beat (18 page)

Since Lou in his dark moods, though, is probably Lou at his most reflective, I decide to ask him how this affects his songwriting. He’s said in the past that he never writes from a personal point of view, that he has “nothing remotely in common with the Lou Reed character.” Indeed, much of his work, especially
Berlin,
seems the product of a detached observer, with no stake in the outcome of his characters’ lives and no moral interest in their choices. But
Coney Island Baby
and
Street Hassle
seem as revelatory and personal as anything in seventies music. Isn’t the real Lou Reed in there someplace?

Lou sits quietly for several moments, studying a gold-plated lighter cupped in his hands. When he speaks, it’s in a soft, murmuring voice. “There are some severe little tangent things in my songs that remove them from me, but, ah, yes, they’re very personal. I guess the Lou Reed character is pretty close to the real Lou Reed, to the point, maybe, where there’s really no heavy difference between the two, except maybe a piece of vinyl. I keep hedging my bet, instead of saying that’s really me, but that
is
me, as much as you can get on record.”

Lou signals the waitress over to order a double Johnnie Walker straight. He seems to be coming alive a bit to the idea of conversation, his eyes studying me as he talks. “I have songs about killing people, but Dostoevski killed people, too. In reality I might not do what a character in my songs would, if only because I’d be jailed. It goes back to when I began to write songs—I didn’t see why the form should be looked upon as restrictive, although since then I’ve seen the resistance it can generate. But that’s only if you lose your impetus.

“In my own writing, for instance, I’m very good at the glib remark that may not mean something if you examine it closely, but it still sounds great. It’s like a person who can argue either side of a question with equal passion, but what do they really think? They might not think anything, so you might not get to know them.”

Lou spots a copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
on a nearby table and fetches it to show me a review of his concert the night before. He turns momentarily livid. The reviewer, Lou is quick to point out, spent most of his space denouncing the ticket price ($9.50 at the door) and Reed’s take (reportedly $7,500 a night) before commenting on his “unmusical manner,” “incoherent lyrics,” and his spawning of “sick-rock.”

I recall that the Velvet Underground received similar reviews when they played the West Coast. “When we left New York,” says Lou, “we were
shocked
that we were such a big deal. For anyone who goes to movies or reads anything, why should we have been shocking? One reason, I guess, is that singing a rock & roll song is a very real thing; it’s accessible on an immediate level, more so than a book or movie. People assume that what’s on a record applies to the person singing it and they find that shocking, although they can pick up the newspaper and read things far more shocking.

“Maybe one of the reasons my stuff doesn’t have mass appeal is that it
does
approach people on a personal level. It assumes a certain agreement of mores, or if not an agreement, then at least an awareness on the listener’s part. But with somebody like this—”Lou slaps the review with the back of his hand—” it’s just deemed incoherent and offensive from the top.
Unmusical manner,
he spits. “What a great phrase to be used by such a poor writer. It’s like saying Philip Marlowe was unsavory.

“Anyway, there wasn’t anything like us at the time of the Velvet Underground. There still isn’t. “Heroin’ is just as right on the nose now as it was ten years ago. Shocking? I suppose, but I always thought it was kind of romantic.”

Romantic?

“Yes, because it’s not really like that at all,” he replies. “There’s not that much strain in that world. I’ve had kids come up to me and say, “You turned me on to junk because of that song.’ Well, you can’t concern yourself with being a parent for the world. People deserve the right to be what they’re going to be, both in the positive and pejorative sense. I just wish they’d see that you can’t evolve through someone else.”

But one thing that disturbs people about Reed’s music, I note, is its lack of what might be called a moral stance. Lou shrugs his nose in disdain. “It’s simply professional detachment,” he says. “I’m not spinning around in the caldron of it all with no viewpoint. There
is
a viewpoint, although it’s mainly the view that that’s the way things are. Take it or leave it. The thing that allows a lot of my characters to leave it is something that ends up negating them.

“Let me propose something to you. Take the guy who’s singing in the second part of ’Street Hassle,’ who’s saying, ’Hey that’s some bad shit that you came to our place with/But you ought to be a little more careful around those little girls. . . . ’ Now, he may come off as a little cruel, but let’s say he’s also the guy who’s singing the last part about losing love. He’s already lost the one for him. He’s not unaware of those feelings, he’s just handling the situation, that’s all. And who would know better than the guy who lost somebody in a natural way? That’s what my songs are all about: They’re one-to-ones. I just let people eavesdrop on them. Like that line at the end of “Street Hassle’: “Love has gone away/Took the rings right off my fingers/There’s nothing left to say/But oh how I miss him, baby.’ That person really exists. He
did
take the rings right off my fingers, and I do miss him.”

Lou digs into the pocket of his jacket for his cigarettes. He lights one and gives me a level look. “They’re not heterosexual concerns running through that song,” he says. “I don’t make a deal of it, but when I mention a pronoun, its gender is all-important. It’s just that my gay people don’t lisp. They’re not any more affected than the straight world. They just
are.
That’s important to me. I’m one of them and I’m right there, just like anybody else. It’s not made anything other than what it is. But if you take me, you’ve got to take the whole thing.”

I’m not sure what to say for the moment, so I sit there, returning his stare. I recall something he said the day before about Delmore Schwartz: “It must have been really incredible to have been good-looking, a poet, and be straight.”

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Lou is in Los Angeles for a series of shows at the Roxy. On the afternoon of his last show, I visit him at his Beverly Hills hotel and find him lying on the floor before the TV, watching a videotape of the previous night’s performance. “Look at that guy,” says Lou, pointing at himself on the screen. “He sure is shameless about occupying his own life.” Lou Reed on the screen turns and looks over his shoulder and smiles at Lou Reed on the floor. Lou Reed on the floor smiles back.

On the screen a jagged tango pulse announces “Street Hassle.” I’ve seen Lou do this song eight times, and each time something remarkable happened to his character—and to the audience. Although several of the people at those shows were hearing it for the first time, they nearly always sat in stunned silence. It was as if Lou were guiding them through a private and treacherous world, the world of Lou Reed’s ethos. To miss this performance is to miss one of the greatest psychodramas in rock & roll.

Lou on the TV screen slicks his hair back now and begins declaiming to some unseen guest about how that guest has been too reckless with his dope, bringing his girlfriend to Lou’s apartment and then fixing her up so carelessly that she overdoses on the spot. “I know this ain’t no way to treat a guest,” says Lou on the screen, “but why don’t you grab your old lady by the feet and lay her out in the darkened street/And by tomorrow morning she’s just another hit-and-run/You know, some people got no choice and they can never find a voice to talk with that they can call their own/So the first thing they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it/You know what it’s called?
Bad luck.”

“You know,” says Lou on the floor, turning to me, “every time I’m doing that song, when it gets to that awful last line I never know just how it’s going to come across. ’So the first thing they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it/You know what it’s called?’ And here comes that line and it should punch like a bullet:
Bad luck.
The point of view of the guy saying that is so
awful.
But it’s so true. I only realize sometime afterward what Lou Reed’s talking about. I just try to stay out of the way.”

Lou is up on his feet now and decides he wants to ride into Hollywood to find an obscure patch cord for one of his tape decks. Outside, it’s a damp, gray winter day in Los Angeles. “This is the kind of day where, if you were in the Village in New York,” says Lou, “you might go down to some gay bar and see if you can make a new friend.”

As we swing onto Santa Monica Boulevard, Lou injects the tape resting in my cassette player. “We’re the poison in your human machine,” roars Johnny Rotten. “We’re the future—You-rrr future.” Lou has a queasy look on his face. “Shakespeare had a phrase for that,” he says. “ ’Sound and fury signifying nothing.’ I’m so tired of the theory of the noble savage. I’d like to hear punks who weren’t at the mercy of their own rage and who could put together a coherent sentence. I mean, they can get away with ’Anarchy in the U.K.’ and that bullshit, but it hasn’t an eighth the heart or intelligence of something like Garland Jeffreys’ ’Wild in the Streets.’ ”

We arrive at the stereo store, and Lou spends the next hour meticulously picking through accessory bins until he finds the cord he needs. Back in the car we talk a bit about the early Velvets albums. I ask Lou again why it was so hard for him, after he left the group, to maintain his creative momentum. He frames his reply carefully. “It was just an awful period. I had very little control over the records; they were really geared for the money. When I made
Coney Island Baby,
Ken Glancy, the president of RCA at the time, backed me to the hilt because he knew me. There were rumors that I couldn’t stand tours because I was all fucked up on dope and my mind was going. I put out
Metal Machine Music
precisely to stop all of it. No matter what people may think of that record, it wasn’t ill-advised at all. It did what it was supposed to do. But it was supposed to do a lot more. I mean, I really believed in it also.
That
could be ill-advised, I suppose, but I just think it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever done by anybody, anywhere. In time, it will prove itself.”

What made
Coney Island Baby
such a statement of renewal?

“Because it was
my
record. I didn’t have much time and I didn’t have much money, but it was mine. There was just me and Rachel [Reed’s male companion of the last several years and the raison d’être of
Street Hassle
] living at the fucking Gramercy Park Hotel on fifteen dollars a day, while the lawyers were trying to figure out what to do with me. Then, I got a call from Clive Davis [president of Arista Records] and he said, “Hey, how ya doing? Haven’t seen you for a while.’ He
knew
how I was doing. He said, “Why don’t we have lunch?’ I felt like saying, “You mean you want to be seen with me in public?’ If Clive could be seen with me, I had turned the corner. I grabbed Rachel and said, “Do you know who just called?’ I knew then that I’d won.

“It’s just that turning that corner was really hard. When Ken Glancy backed me, that was step one; when Clive gave me a call, step two; and
Street Hassle
and
Take No Prisoners
are like step three. And I think they’re all home runs. I’m a long-term player. Saying “I’m a Coney Island baby’ at the end of that song is like saying I haven’t backed off an inch, and don’t you forget it.”

We arrive back at Lou’s hotel and he invites me in to hear the difference the patch cord makes in his tape deck. Inside, two members of his sound crew are already waiting to take him to the afternoon’s sound check, but Lou wants to play with his machines first. “It’s funny,” he says, sitting on the floor with his miniature speakers sprawled around him, “but maybe the most frightening thing that can be said about me is that I’m so damn
sane.
Maybe these aren’t my devils at all that people are finding on these records—they’re other people’s. When I start writing about my own, then it could prove really interesting.”

Maybe so, but I can’t help recalling his earlier comment about what a master of the glib remark he is. I think Lou’s been exposing plenty of his devils all along, and I think he knows it. On an earlier occasion, I’d told him his work sometimes reminded me of that of Diane Arbus, the late photographer known principally for her studies of desolate and deformed subjects. Lou recoiled instantly at the suggestion. “Her subject matter’s grotesque,” he said. “I don’t consider mine grotesque. To show the inherent deformity in normally formed people is what I’m interested in, not in showing beauty in deformity.”

By saying that, Lou seems to be saying he knows exactly what devils he’s after, and that he won’t pass them off on anyone as angels.

If Lou Reed has accomplished nothing else, that victory alone would be moral enough.