Search And Destroy: Lou Reed

i interviewed him for a yet-to-be-published thing — they sent me the book a few months back.

nice!

Cool! Started reading from the beginning but now just skipping around and my jaw is dropping at how good it is, the organization and level of detail. Not really too surprised though, since I loved loved loved LOVE GOES TO BUILDINGS ON FIRE.

Looks like this is yet another step up in his fine, fine, superfine career.

You’ve got to give a little
Take a little

another excerpt on Vulture - dealing with Lulu, amazing

https://www.vulture.com/article/lou-reed-biography-the-king-of-new-york.html

But the finale, “Junior Dad,” was something else. The album’s quietest song, with lyrics written roughly two years prior, it was delivered with a tenderness that had scant precedent in Reed’s work. The verses moved through a Freudian minefield of parental failure and childhood
fears. The singer asks to be saved from drowning, to be kissed on the lips, and envisions their dead father driving a boat. Awakening from a dream, the singer sees how time had “withered him and changed him,” perhaps both of them, invoking the “greatest disappointment.” A father’s disappointment in a child, a child’s disappointment in the father, the child realizing they’d become the parent: Take your pick.

Listening to the playback, the lyrics cut Reed’s bandmates to the core. Hetfield’s dad abandoned him when he was 13; Hammett’s had been physically abusive toward him and his mother, then abandoned them, and had died just a month prior. “I had to run out of the control room,” Hammett said; “I found myself standing in the kitchen, sobbing away. James came into the kitchen in the same condition. He was sobbing too.”

Loved that article, the Lulu details and the stuff around the end of his life was very affecting.

from the vulture excerpt…

"that suggested the guitarist Kirk Hammett had, like most hard-rock guitarists of his generation, been weaned on Rock ’n’ Roll Animal."

Hammett may have been familiar with Rock 'n roll Animal. But "most hard rock guitarists of his generation' have very very little truck with that record/Wagner and Hunter. For sure, that record was an FM hit in 1974 and not only put him in the front rank with Alice Cooper and Dave Bowie, but had a greater penetration with the lumpen rock audience at the time than Berlin and definitely any VU record. But R'nR' Animal didn't stick around at all in the hard rock canon afterwards: the overwhelming majority of Hammett's metal/hard rock cohort could have very easily gone through their formative periods never hearing that record. Will Hermes damn well knows this, and it seems like he should have gone back and come up with another claim.

I gotta think that Hetfield was the least into the whole Lou Reed thing… he likes country, hard rock, metal and hardcore, and that's it. in 89, David "this new stones album is the best since some girls' Fricke profiled the band for RS for the first time, and while on the bus, someone put on "I Want you (She's so Heavy") and hetfield goes "whoa, what the fuck is this? this is HEAVY as fuck!!!" He had never heard it.

^Good post, vm. I thought the same thing about that RnRA quote.

Also still think Jenny Scheinman is kind of an unacknowledged secret weapon of "Junior Dad."

I make no apologies for being the ringleader of our double precovers album but I will be interested to read all of this.

kirk and lars seem to have pretty catholic tastes for metal guys but agreed the RnRA isn't exactly part of the general hard rock canon on which i was reared.

Wasn’t Berlin supposed to be a double album

According to Bob Ezrin, who produced the record and then performed the editing, all that he removed were interludes, instrumental solos and other interstitial material; no songs or vocal parts of songs were excluded.

If anything I thought this went in the other direction: it was a way for Xgau to say “hey, I appreciate hard rock too!”
(xp)

Lou reed live > rock n roll animal imo

ha same show! I don’t know things

kirk and lars seem to have pretty catholic tastes for metal guys

The core dynamic of Metallica is James vs. Lars; when Lars wins the argument, you get Load & ReLoad (especially their album covers) and Lulu, when James wins you get "let's just be Metallica, dammit" albums like Death Magnetic.

Re Rock 'n' Roll Animal, the live version of "Sweet Jane" got airplay on NY classic rock radio into the mid '80s, because junior high unperson was definitely influenced to buy the album.

You think? Lars has the conceptual side for sure, but I got the impression that a lot of Load/Reload was James wanting to express his blues-y side musically. Idk which one of them is more of the driving force behind the 'return to form' thrash records, I'm curious though.

Lars has the conceptual side for sure, but I got the impression that a lot of Load/Reload was James wanting to express his blues-y side musically.

I wrote about Load and ReLoad for Stereogum a few years ago and started the piece off with this quote:

“Lars and Kirk drove on those records. The whole ‘We need to reinvent ourselves’ topic was up. Image is not an evil thing for me, but if the image is not you then it doesn’t make much sense. I think they were really after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter ego. I couldn’t get into it. The whole ‘OK, now in this photoshoot we’re going to be ’70s glam rockers.’ Like, what? I would say half — at least half — the pictures that were to be in the booklet, I yanked out.” — James Hetfield, Classic Rock, May 2009

(If you want to read the whole piece, there's a hilarious quote in there from a Rolling Stone review that describes Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and ...And Justice for All as "transitional albums" between Kill 'Em All and the self-titled album.)

Lol. James is just talking about the artwork/fashion/photos there though, not the music. I came across this quote from him that makes it sound like he's often trying different styles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZh7Fw1j0qk

I'm sure the truth is that sometimes one of them is tired of reinventing the wheel while the other is more ready to go back to the well, and vice versa.

Btw the ending of this is way more metal than Lulu -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym9-r1-G8Gg

The core dynamic of Metallica is James vs. Lars; when Lars wins the argument, you get Load & ReLoad (especially their album covers) and Lulu, when James wins you get "let's just be Metallica, dammit" albums like Death Magnetic.

― read-only (unperson), Tuesday, October 3, 2023 5:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this just doesn't seem true at all but whatever

Lol. James is just talking about the artwork/fashion/photos there though, not the music.

Bought this book last night and great so far. Thanks for the rec Ilm

Btw I've been continuing to enjoy getting introduced to the '90s Reed & Cale albums via the Jokermen podcast.

just learned today that LITA is reissuing this obscurity I have never heard, sounds cool

https://www.discogs.com/release/1051337-Lou-Reed-Hudson-River-Wind-Meditations

it's nice, like if metal machine music was a new age album

One of the comments suggests playing it in concert with MMM

am halfway through the Will Hermes book omg i love it

i have only been a casual Reed fan at best … like, I always loved him in theory? but never fully immersed myself in the albums & bootlegs & lore idk

but man this book is like the best kind of immersion in Lou. I love the way Hermes so beautifully situates you in that time/place for each moment, surrounding you with the key players, the sounds, the vibes, it all feels so effortless and far less dull than so many biographies-at-a-distance can be.
and still always providing interiority for Lou that is empathetic, but not hagiographic.

there’s so much immediacy in every chapter, it’s very heady

especially during that 1973 tour

I need to check it out. Is there any new VU stuff?

I read the Bockris book when it came out, it would be good to have something meatier. I also want Laurie Anderson stories!

unsure re VU, someone else would be more qualified to answer that

and xpost to alfred yes the stuff on the 73 tour is great

honestly and maybe this is a small thing or not even a thing but i really appreciate that hermes has enough nuance to always try to parse who Lou is presenting himself as onstage or to the press, vs Lou the human.
you really start to feel the intense weight of VU on him

oh also, there’s a great quote from cale early on about how Reed deliberately pushed people’s buttons & brought out their worst as a way of confirming his paranoia / expecting the worst, so that he could just deal with it out in the open. it was so astute & fascinating. i’ll try to dig it up & post it

I’m finally dipping into lou a bit. I think I was always too intimidated before. The big songs everyone seems to know, I don’t really know so well. So maybe it’s a little trite to say this but “Perfect Day” is a masterpiece and I love it. Do I hear lou channeling Roy Orbison in some of his little crying hiccups?
I’m giving “The Blue Mask” a try as well and beyond immediately loving the Robert Quine guitar it’s growing on me. I guess I always found solo lou’s vocal delivery off-putting but maybe it’s starting to open up for me.

Perfect Day is gorgeous. It's so pretty and sad, and the "reap what you sow" part is just... chilling.

I'm a die-hard VU fan and I love Lou up to Street Hassle, which might be my fave solo album of his. After that I can't deal with his stilted singing. Could not get into the Blue Mask. There are a few songs here and there that I like on his later stuff, but it's pretty sparse. If the only thing he ever recorded was "Street Hassle" it would be enough to win me over. If it was instrumental it would STILL be an amazing song.

The Street Hassle live album, Take No Prisoners is pretty great too. It might be the Louest Lou Reed album of them all.

“Blue mask” title track is the fucking TRUTH

The Blue Mask is what I believe young people call a no-skipper

other great albums include New York, Songs for Drella, Magic and Loss, Set the Twilight Reeling and Ecstasy

and obv Lulu is great fun and has very high highs (it has been awhile since I listened to it in its entirety)

that book sounds really intriguing

I forgot about Songs for Drella. I like that one a lot.

I skip "Average Guy" and "The Day John Kennedy Died."

also *cough* Coney Island Baby, Legendary Hearts, New Sensations -- all good to great.

I co-sign the love for those '90s albums.

(xp) Both are funny but only the first is intentionally so.

Mind you, in retrospect, the line about him worrying that his liver's too big and it hurts to the touch is a bit :-O

Will Hermes is on the latest Jokermen pod, should be good. I've been enjoying their trawl through '90s Reed & Cale (and even listened to all 3 hours on Bisch Bosch).

xxp I skip “The Gun” b/c it’s too disturbing to handle. Love the others…

the bells is great too, imo

The Blue Mask is a no-skipper for me, and I also love the live video (still on DVD) that he recorded at the Bottom Line for a "homecoming" show around this time - everyone plays great and is in great spirits, clearly still on good terms.

There's a "more disturbing" version of "The Gun" that's been talked about over many years - I imagine the NYPL has it now, but I would definitely listen to it. By this point, I doubt it's as harrowing as people's imaginations have speculated it to be.

i'm reading ian penman's new yorker piece on the book. i might wind up reading the book at some point. i don't know. right now, tertiary sources will do. penman says:

Reed later claimed that the aim of the ECT was to “cure” him of being gay, but his sister, who seems like one of the more reliable witnesses here, denies this, and there’s no evidence to support it. Whatever the reasoning, the treatment became a defining moment in his life. Hermes describes it as “part of Reed’s mythology.”

it just frustrates me so much, this argument. was lou reed given electroshock because he was gay, like he says, or because he was mentally ill, like the people who knew him during this period say? like there's a differential diagnosis to be made there.

maybe people are confused by the fact that homosexuality was widely considered a mental illness at the time. by the fact that he _could_, in fact, have been given electroshock because he was homosexual, and for no other reason. penman, above, claims that there's "no evidence" to support this, which is an interesting way of framing it. that reed said, personally, that he was given electroshock because he was gay isn't considered "evidence"; he doesn't have the right to speak about his own life, his own experiences. this is, i've found, a pretty common experience queer people have.

-

lou reed and i are very different people, but i do think we have something in common. i think that in our own separate ways, lou reed and i are sort of mythological creatures.

it was one of the most curious parts of transition, for me - realizing that i had unwittingly become a mythological creature. a fantastic beast, if you will. all of a sudden everybody looked at me and judged me and had all of these _ideas_ about me. it's not that i love that or hate that, i just find that... very interesting. other people saw me in all of these different weird, mythological ways, and it changed the way i thought of myself. i started looking at myself in all sorts of different mythological ways, understood that i didn't have to be one thing, didn't have to have one consistent self that everybody agreed on.

-

which is to say that there are multiple perspectives to look at reed's electroshock from, and that, to me, is what i see in reed's narrative and weiner's narrative.

In later years, Lou spoke of being beaten up routinely after school at Freeport Junior High School, which boasted a number of gangs at the time. However, our next door neighbor told me, years later, that Lou was challenging, unfriendly, provocative even, daring him to “cross that line onto my property and you’ll see what happens.”

so what's the narrative in there? lou reed was 'provocative', and so other people beat him up. i understand this narrative. i was bullied as a child. i was _asking for it_ because of my behavior.

how often, do you think, other kids at that junior high called lou reed a "faggot"?

-

reed himself is a mystery to me. i didn't ever know him. he's dead now. anything i say about him says a lot about me, and very little, if anything, about him. this is the nature of mythological figures. we want to know their reality, who they really are. not only can't we, confronting them is to confront the impossibility of knowing anyone, really, who's different from us. lou reed was different from pretty much everyone. That's still what being queer is, to me, today. for reed, in his day, how much more might he have felt that?

so penman asks:

What happens when mythmaking becomes part of your daily life? The difficulty for any Lou Reed biographer—including the latest, the rock critic Will Hermes, the author of a bulky new chronicle called “Lou Reed: The King of New York”—is that sometimes Reed embraced his persona, and took it as far as it would go, and sometimes he talked as though he were merely its pained victim. In the seventies, coverage of Reed swung between binaries, sometimes in the same article: serious artist vs. sleazy hustler, brave truthteller vs. sly put-on merchant.

i myself have a tendency to "swing wildly between binaries". there are many ways people describe this tendency, many lenses through which people see us, many myths. fearful-avoidant attachment time. complex post-traumatic stress disorder. borderline personality disorder. these are all newer myths. in reed's day, people didn't see him through those lenses. today, i can look at penman write:

He was one of those people who carry the air of a child hurt so bad he never quite recovered. Always testing the bona fides of friends, like the hipster equivalent of a polygraph. The eggshells they once walked on they now make other people tread.

and say oh yeah, i got that too, that's my BPD, i'm working on that, working hard to not perpetuate that cycle of abuse. that's not him, though. those were different times, as distant from me as a stutz bearcat was from reed himself. that's one of the reasons i don't feel like i can truly understand him - people back in his day just _thought_ differently. the frameworks around reality were different.

to an extent. to an extent. the things lou reed wanted... nearly everybody, including people who wanted those same things, thought it was sick and wrong to want those things. put in those terms, framed that way... that's my lived experience. that's how i grew up. i learned to hate myself. i internalized a bunch of fucked up ideas. i've tried to deal with them as best i can, but not all of those ways were healthy. i didn't... i didn't really have a stable sense of self. Penman says Lester Bangs says of Reed: "three different justifications for one course of action may be proffered in a single night, each believed in the moment it’s delivered". This is attributed to Reed being a "speed-freak". Maybe that's the reason. I've done that exact same thing, many times, and I've never done speed. I take Adderall a lot, but _right now_ most people don't consider that speed. That framing might change later.

The world keeps shifting around me. The world keeps changing. If I change, it's me just trying to keep up with this crazy shit. Five years is a lifetime to me. Ten years is two lifetimes.

-

Hermes doesn’t dig too deep when it comes to Reed’s sexuality, which is perhaps understandable; speculation about the intimate lives of others is difficult to pull off without undue prurience. But the book’s reliance on more au-courant terms, such as “gender fluid” and “nonbinary,” can feel like decals applied to an opaque surface, with none of the silt or soil of real life.

which i guess answers a question i had just last week, when i read an excerpt from Hermes' last book, published ten years ago, describing "old-school trannies washing down demerol capsules with swigs of whiskey". What, I wondered idly, would Hermes say about that scene today? i guess he avoids "undue prurience". personally, i prefer the prurience. i prefer it to the discreet assumptions, the quiet myths. that's just me, though.

me, i'm not going to judge the way penman does. i don't... i don't need someone else to provide the silt and soil. i know enough about the reality of things. penman says "Reed claimed, at one point, that he was 'one hundred per cent gay'." i don't really know why Reed said that. those were different times. i know how fucking hard i've worked to be queer. how much i've given up. i know how hard all of us work. i didn't do all that so i could be fucking _straight_. lou reed said he got electroshock therapy to _cure_ him of being gay. what does it mean, what does it say about _him_, if he loves women, if he marries women?

to me? nothing. precisely nothing. marrying a woman doesn't have to make you straight. you can love whoever, be whoever, and be queer. it wasn't like that then. he had to _prove_ it. over and over again.

-

so when it comes to rachel humphreys... i can see why he might have done what he did. why he might have called her a man, over and over and over again, referred to her with he/him pronouns, over and over again. why he might have needed to believe that, even as he defended her against everyone else, the ones who said cruel, vicious things about her. i feel so _strongly_ about what he did, though. so strongly. to do that to someone you love, someone who supports you, someone who _trusts_ you, over and over and over again... reed did many cruel things in his life. to me, it is the most shocking. it makes me angry, and it makes me sad, and i allow myself to admit that, i allow myself to feel those things about him. i have the right to feel how i feel. it's not a question of right or wrong.

lou reed was probably the best hope humphreys had. lou reed was at his worst, a cruel, fucked-up man, but it was more than most women like her had. we can call her, today, a "trans woman", but then, she was a tranny, a man, a monster, a fraud, a threat. that was how people saw women like her. i can look at pictures of her now and see a woman whose beauty i envy. what difference does it make? she died many years ago. died and was buried in a mass grave.

that's not lou's _fault_. she loved him and he hurt her, he called her a man and wouldn't let her get the surgery she so desperately wanted. he needed to be 100% gay. he needed her to be a man. he loved women, married women, but he needed her to be a man. it's not his fault what happened to her.

reed was the best chance she had, he offered her more than any other man could in those days, and it wasn't enough for her. they broke up and she consoled herself, perhaps, by washing down demerol capsules with swigs of whiskey, and she got sick and she died. well. we remember her now. we know her name. because of the man who loved her deeply and hurt her deeply.

there's no right or wrong in that. reed isn't a good or evil man because of it. it's just something that happened, things that were done by a man i didn't know, a man i admire deeply, i man i despise deeply. this man, this monster, this myth.

would people be interested in a chronological Lou Reed solo listening thread

Yes!

Seconded.