The new Lou

Cleaning up the life of an American master

by Matt Ashare

"Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is." That's one of the nicer things the notorious gonzo rock writer Lester Bangs had to say about the former leader of the Velvet Underground in March of 1975. And that was before Reed recorded "I Wanna Be Black" -- a song so perversely politically incorrect that Bill Maher would cringe. A song so offensively funny that the writers of South Park should look into licensing it. A song parody as downright mean as anything Ween have ever done, with sentiments so prickly that Reed himself made the executive decision not to include it in the box set Between Thought and Expression: The Lou Reed Anthology (RCA; 1992), even though it did appear the previous year in the companion book Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed (Hyperion). A song so cuttingly accurate that a group of Wesleyan University undergraduates threatened to bring a friend of mine up before the Student Judiciary Board when he played it for a history of African-American music class. In other words, it's classic Lou Reed.

It bears noting that for all the venom of Bangs's comments -- in the same piece he describes Reed as a "bizarre crossbreed of Jerry Lewis of idiot movie fame and a monkey on cantharides" and, my fave, "a panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn't have the energy to commit suicide" -- Lester Bangs was the biggest Lou Reed fan who ever lived. Which didn't leave Reed's actual detractors much room to maneuver. Those genuinely disgusted with particular aspects of Reed's "art" -- tying off and mock shooting up on stage during "Heroin," detailing in song form an unseemly array of transgressive behaviors (sado-masochism, homosexuality, transvestitism) -- tended to opt for less subtle forms of character assassination. As former New York Times critic John Rockwell remembers in an interview taped for the new documentary Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, the mainstream press in the '70s tended to want to blame Reed for "turning a whole generation of Americas into faggot junkies." (An hour-long version of Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, which features footage shot at the taping of Reed's new Reprise live CD, Perfect Night, airs this Wednesday, April 29, at 10 p.m. as part of the American Masters series on WGBH/Channel 2.)

In hindsight, it would be more accurate to credit Reed with picking up where the Beats left off, by making a fine art out of nothing more complicated than slumming it -- though Lou, natural-born ironist that he is, has always had a way of making even the simplest things seem difficult. Think of it this way: Reed was a nice Jewish boy from Long Island who went directly from his commencement at Syracuse University to the Lower East Side, where he immediately put his dystopian version of the bohemian lifestyle into practice through the medium of rock and roll. He was the classic rebel without a cause, or, to quote from "I Wanna Be Black," "a fucked-up, middle-class, college student" dead set on taking "middle class" and "college student" out of the equation. Remember, he wrote the lyrics to "Heroin" when he was still an undergraduate, presumably before it became his wife or his life.

If the public persona Reed invented for himself -- "I do Lou Reed better than anybody" was one of his particularly tasty mid-'70s soundbites -- was bad (his alter egos were "The Phantom of Rock" and "The Rock and Roll Animal"), then his private life was edging toward diabolical. Reed gave Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale the boot after the band's second CD, White Light/White Heat (Verve; 1968). But Cale got off easy: in the years that followed Reed left a trail of shattered psyches and deeply frustrated associates in his wake. His first wife, Bettye Kornstadt, attempted suicide in 1973, an experience that is widely thought to have inspired the deeply depressive tenor of the recently reissued RCA album Berlin (1973). Some have speculated that Reed's bullying of Bettye may have escalated to abuse, and indeed that's one of the poorly supported theories biographer Victor Bockris floats in Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. In interviews at the time of their marriage, Reed, perhaps in an effort to shock, appears to have boasted about how badly he treated Bettye -- but he also was telling the press that he'd been kicked out of an ROTC program in college for holding a gun to an officer's head, a story he later admitted was untrue. Whatever, it's clear that the marriage was, in '90s parlance, severely dysfunctional.

Other '70s casualties included Bob Ezrin, the then young hotshot producer who worked with Reed on Berlin. He was hospitalized for what has been characterized both as a nervous breakdown and as heroin addiction -- Ezrin himself has called it a "chemical breakdown" -- shortly after the album was finished. And Reed's unusually nasty relationship with his record label was perhaps best summed up by Metal Machine Music, an unmarketable double album of atonal feedback and electronic noise -- basically a four-sided, 64-minute "fuck you" -- he delivered to RCA in 1975. (For years Reed also insisted that Metal Machine Music was a sophisticated composition that included, as he told Lester Bangs, a "harmonic build-up" on each of the sides and "all kinds of symphonic ripoffs . . . little pastoral parts . . . like Beethoven's Third, or Mozart." He's since admitted he was making all of that up.)

Bad-behavior Lou, however, is a thing of the past. Since cleaning up his act in the early '80s, he's traded shooting drugs for the thrills of riding a motorcycle (see "Bottoming Out," a tune on 1983's Legendary Hearts, for details) and taking photographs (he recently had a few shots on display at Boston's Photographic Resource Center); a decadent suite at NYC's Gramercy Park Hotel for an apartment with a rooftop garden and an 18-acre retreat in rural Blairstown, New York; and flamboyant homosexuality for an almost corny heterosexual domesticity. He married his second wife, Sylvia (Morales) Reed, on Valentine's Day of 1980; last we heard he was happily cohabiting with (NEA-approved) performance artist Laurie Anderson. He patched things up with Cale just in time for them to collaborate on an album commemorating their mentor Andy Warhol, 1990's Songs for Drella (Sire/Warner Bros.), and a short-lived Velvet Underground reunion three years later. And civilized Lou has been rewarded with various accolades, including a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, the French government's Chevalier Commander of Arts and Letters award, and the Heroes Award from the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, not to mention the thank-you he received from Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel for making music that played a "special social role" in that country's emancipation.

The transformation from disreputable outlaw to respectable poet/artist has been a gradual one for Reed, but it's also been remarkably thorough. There may be no better measure of that than the American Masters program that's being broadcast nationally this week. Culled from a slightly longer documentary that screened earlier this year at both the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart presents an eerily sanitized portrait of the former Rock and Roll Animal. Directed by photographer Timothy Greenfield-Smith, who seems more interested in artfully alluding to the screen-test celebrity film-portraits Andy Warhol "invented" than in scratching too far into the surface of the new Lou (lest some deeply repressed bile come squirting out onto the film), the 60-minute special is an upscale, wonderfully edited, more sophisticated version of your basic MTV rockumentary. Interviews with Reed, performance clips, and archival footage are woven together with segments in which Reed and his work are praised by famous folks like David Bowie ("Lou Reed brought rock and roll into the avant-garde") and Thurston Moore ("To sing so explicitly about heroin should be considered one of the most groundbreaking things in rock and roll, and it definitely was"). Even Bob Ezrin stops by to proclaim Berlin -- the album that put him in the hospital -- as one of "the bravest steps in pop history."

What's missing from this story of Reed's life is any sense of what he went through, what he experienced, in the process of bringing rock and roll into the avant-garde and breaking new ground in pop. His history of substance abuse is only vaguely alluded to: we're told he's clean and sober, and in reference to Metal Machine Music, Reed recalls being "really stoned." But the late Delmore Schwartz, the poet professor at Syracuse who was one of Reed's early mentors, actually gets a worse rap than Lou does when it's mentioned that he survived a "decade of amphetamine abuse and alcoholism." The subject of Reed's homosexuality is never broached; instead, much is made of what a great character actor/storytelling he is, the implication being that what may appear to be first-person accounts of transgressive behavior in his songwriting are actually masterful first-person fictions.

Listening to some of the older tunes on Perfect Night, which was recorded last July at London's Royal Festival Hall, you can even hear a change in the attitude Reed has taken toward the characters in his songs. There's a palpable distance between Reed and the messed-up mom who's losing her children in "Kids" that simply didn't exist when he recorded the original version of the song for Berlin. Back in '73 Lou sounded as if he were right there in the room with her, paralyzed, experiencing a tragedy first hand. He was on a level ground with the character in the song, even if he was only slumming it. Now he's the omniscient narrator, viewing a situation from above, looking for a moral rather than just a few depraved kicks.

In 1980, just two years before his death, Lester Bangs made a strange prediction about Lou Reed. In a fit of what might best be described as drug-addled, cynical-bordering-on-paranoid self-pity, he imagined that the day would come when Reed would no longer be an exile on main street but would find a home there. "We will end up there in one way or another, probably sharing bar beers with our parents at our side, and they will know what no one else must know, that the unspeakable sin, the love that dare not speak its name, the dope addict, finally came home to roost." As usual, Lester was right.