Although he may not have racked up the body count of a Nick
Cave or Johnny Cash, the late Lou Reed sang about death more often than many a
popular musician. Indeed, he did it often enough that what I originally thought
would be a single piece examining how his approach to the subject of mortality
mutated over his creative career has become a two-parter, of which this is the
first. So let’s get down to business; the business of singing about death, that
is.
The first track I can think of where Reed explicitly dealt
with human perishability is “The Gift”, on the second Velvet Underground album,
which was released in 1968 (I’m not counting the impressionistic ramblings on
“Black Angel’s Death Song” from the previous year’s debut LP). Not really a
song but rather a short story written by Reed and narrated by the greatest
living Welshman over a throbbing bass line banged out by the same, “The
Gift” tells the story of a chump who mails himself to his indifferent
girlfriend. He then gets stabbed in the head when her friend opens the box with
a sheet metal cutter. Reed was a young man then, a lad of 26, and in “The Gift”
death appears as a macabre joke, a punch line that ends a sardonic tale about
modern relationships: boom boom!
However five years later in 1973
and we find Reed, now aged 31, writing about both relationships and death in a
much more intimate, disturbing and aggressively depressing way. The year before
he had released the successful Transformer
LP; co-producers David Bowie and Mick Ronson had added persuasive and even pretty
glam makeovers to ambiguous songs such as “Perfect Day” and “Walk on the Wild
Side”. So now the habitually
antagonistic Reed decided to assault/horrify his new fans with Berlin, an ultra-downer of an album he
recorded with producer Bob Ezrin, who had made a name for himself recording
tongue-in-cheek bad taste songs about dead babies and necrophilia with Alice
Cooper.
Berlin was as
theatrical as anything Alice Cooper ever did, but it was a decadent, Weimar
rock cabaret type of theatricality, informed by Ezrin’s skill at combining
full-on orchestrations with avant-rock. Indeed, Reed was largely sidelined as a
musician on the record, all electric guitar duties being handled by virtuoso session
musicians; even the bass lines were laid down by Jack Bruce and future King
Crimson prog titan Tony Levin.
But Ezrin also knew when to strip down the sound, to expose Reed’s
stark lyrics for dramatic effect. Case in point: “The Bed”, a song in which
Reed’s narrator quietly contemplates the bed he shared with a woman he loved,
the bed where their children were conceived, which is also the bed where she
cut her wrists one alternately odd and strange “fateful night.” And yet, as he
remarks with a chilling callousness: “I never would have started if I had known
that it would end this way/But funny thing, I’m not at all sad that it stopped
this way.” The detachment which manifested itself in the jocular tone of “The
Gift” had become something eerie and disembodied. There is no body, no blood,
only an empty bed:
Berlin tanked, and Reed followed it up with a few more
commercial records, before reverting to combative type and assaulting his fans
and record label alike with the not very listenable double LP of guitar
feedback noise Metal Machine Music.
By 1978 he was writing songs again although Reed, now aged 35, was getting on
in rock star years by the standards of the era. Written in a semi-punk vein by
a progenitor of the movement (less convincing disco dabbling would
follow a year later), Street Hassle
is a solid album, and it contains one of the best tracks Reed ever recorded-
the three part title suite about love, sex and death.
“Street Hassle” is written from several different
perspectives. In part one, Reed sings about an encounter between (likely) a drag
queen and a male prostitute culminating in a fairly earth-shaking sexual
experience, before cutting abruptly in part two to a room where a woman is
lying dead from a drug overdose. The voice alternates between faux sympathy for
her partner and utter disdain: Hey that
c**** not breathing/I think she’s had too much/Of something or other, hey man
you know what I mean?
Reed’s narrator is again detached, but whereas in the
previous two songs the body was unseen, or even absent, now the corpse is the
object of the song, and viewed with extreme distaste as dead meat, a nuisance,
a bummer, a buzzkill that could cause problems with the cops. Irritated, the
narrator advises the (presumably traumatized) man to take his “old lady” and
dump her in street. I can’t think of another song where a dead body is spoken
of with such cold, disparaging disregard. Reed cuts to the chase with this
line:
When someone turns
that blue you just know it’s a universal truth that that bitch will never f***
again
And then Bruce Springsteen starts mumbling.
The onset of early middle age brought about radical changes
in Lou Reed’s personal life and in his music. Whereas he had spent much of the
70s living with a Brazilian transsexual named Rachel and maintaining his
reputation as a drug-addled denizen of New York’s demimonde, in 1980 he got
married to a designer named Sylvia Morales and seemed to have consigned his
bisexuality and rampant drug consumption to the past. By 1982 he was
proclaiming “I love women” to the world, in a fairly terrible song
recorded for The Blue Mask. By 1984
he was in a very good mood indeed, and released the most upbeat recording of
his long career, New Sensations.
Exceedingly poppy by Reed’s standards, New Sensations definitely sounds like a record made by a middle
aged rocker hoping for some hits and an infusion of cash. It features the
processed, tinny, crashing drum sound that marred many a pop song in the 80s,
and yet Reed does not go full cheese as his peers Mick Jagger and David Bowie
would at the same time. In fact, I really like New Sensations: Reed mixes confessional lyrics about struggling
with his darker side into the love songs, dabbles in satire on a track about
playing video games, sings convincingly about having a pleasant night out in
the city, and also turns in a song track about having an awfully good time on
his motorbike.
On side 2 however he does death again, in a song entitled
“Fly into the Sun.” It was the height of the Cold War and filmmakers and even
Frankie goes to Hollywood were churning out depressing stuff about mutually
assured destruction and slow death by radiation. But Reed just wasn’t feeling
that down about global death by nuclear fire. In fact, he rather liked the
idea.
Thus at age 42 Reed recorded the first song in which he
contemplated his own mortality directly in the first person, and not only the
possibility of his death but everyone else’s, striking a remarkably cheerful
note as he mused upon the annihilation of our species, the earth and the stars: I would not run from
the holocaust/I would not run from the bomb/I’d welcome the chance to meet my
maker and fly into the sun/fly into the sun/fly into the sun/I’d break up into
a million pieces and fly into the sun
Indeed, this kind of death is something to look forward to;
Reed describes it as a blessing, a relief not only from “worldly pain” but also
as providing an answer to the “mystery,” as if he found pondering existence
something of a drag. The central image is of being embraced by an extinguishing
light, and disappearing: to cease to exist is liberation, death in a global
cataclysm is “a wondrous moment,” an opportunity even- “I’d shine by the light
of the unknown moment and fly into the sun”
Of course, there’s something very abstract about looking at
death this way. Is the prospect of global extinction really so awesome? Or perhaps, beneath the upbeat poppy
melodies, there lurked a profound undercurrent of ennui, and a desire to
disappear, to vanish, to cease to be. But Reed had a good three decades left to
go before he would reach that point. And in the meantime, he still had a lot of
singing to do about death, as we shall find out in part two….