I’ve read a lot of pieces about Lou Reed since his death. My Twitter feed was flooded with them, with links to articles (and song recommendations, and the occasional person admitting they thought he was already long gone). It’s been startling and beautiful to see a musician, a person, reflected in the collective kaleidoscopic gaze of the music press. Alfred Soto over at The Quietus drew attention to details that I’d once loved and forgotten: the Motown, the gospel, that five-note pulse that pulls you under at the start of ‘Street Hassle’. The NME dealt mostly in others’ tributes, showing the impact of Reed’s art in modern popular music with comments from Bowie, Morrissey, Patti Smith, David Byrne – and of course, long-time collaborator and multi-instrumentalist John Cale. Well, I’ve not the musical knowledge nor the journalistic chops to take either of those routes in my own, low-profile tribute; all I’ve got are affection and a couple of English degrees. So here, in the spirit of Cambridge University’s Bob Dylan exam question, are five close readings of Lou Reed songs. They are brief, and unpolished.
1. ‘Romeo Had Juliette’
‘Romeo Had Juliette’ is the opening track on Lou Reed’s 1988 album New York . In an album overflowing with references to figures both fictional and non-, ‘Romeo Had Juliette’ makes explicit its literary heritage (although other works, most obviously Scarface (1983), also crop up in supporting roles). It’s Shakespeare mapped on to New York in the late 80s in much the same way that Baz Luhrmann would map Shakespeare onto ‘Verona Beach’, but it’s also a musical translation of formal notes which underline the play itself. The song flits between the micro and the macro, the literal and the metaphorical – at points it is hard to tell the two apart (‘inside his pants he hides a mop / to clean the mess that he has dropped /into the life of lithesome Juliette Bell’). Reed’s gaze moves dizzyingly from the heavens to New York to the one titular couple and back again. The lyrics are similarly unpredictable, shifting from the chiasmic pared-down simplicity of the chorus to the abrupt change of tenses which closes one meandering verse: ‘He’s thinking of his lonely room […] and her voice was like a bell’. The final verse equates Manhattan disparagingly with ‘ancient Rome’, but also states that the singer will take it, albeit ‘in a garbage bag/ with Latin written on it that says/ “it’s hard to give a shit these days”’. It’s difficult not to take the line as a joke which gestures to the conceit of the song: disinterest dressed up. Jane Austen aside, Romeo and Juliet is the literary work most frequently misinterpreted as lower-case-r romantic. Perhaps New York is the geographical equivalent. Lou Reed, luckily, isn’t falling for either.
2. ‘Pale Blue Eyes’
The Velvet Underground’s eponymous 1968 album The Velvet Underground was their third. The album is far more subdued than those featuring John Cale – we’ll get onto those in a moment – with little of the distortion and complexity that marked earlier releases. ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ tells the story of an affair; possibly an affair aborted. If the lyrics begin simply, they also quickly skewer the emotions involved in loving one one perhaps shouldn’t: ‘Sometimes I feel so happy/ Sometimes I feel so sad/ Sometimes I feel so happy/ But mostly you just make me mad’. The song, backed by twin guitars, continues to focus on the relationship between the singer and his lover until the third verse where, unexpectedly, a ‘they’ appears (to say ‘Money is like us in time/ it lies but can’t stand up’. But of course). As in ‘Romeo Had Juliette’, the world outside the couple reveals a series of concentric circles; but this time the song’s view narrows further, with the lover ‘put … in a mirror / I’d put in front of me’. The closing refrain – ‘linger on your pale blue eyes’ – seems to reject any suggestion that this sublimation is merely narcissism; but perhaps complicates the idea of ‘mere’ narcissism more than anything else.
3. ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’
It was only a matter of time before the topic of drugs came up. ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ is from The Velvet Underground’s debut album, Velvet Underground and Nico (1967). It’s a song about purchasing heroin in Harlem, with its opening featuring motifs of number and colour: a tactician’s account, taut with anxiety. The singer has ‘twenty-six dollars’ in his hand, ‘up at Lexington, 125′. Being in the neighbourhood leads to comments (‘Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown?’) until his ‘man’ appears ‘all dressed in black’, after which they head together ‘up to a Brownstone’; a story set in a sepia colour-scheme reminiscent of the drug’s various shades. After the deal, the numbers fade away to be replaced by more abstract reasoning (‘you got no time to waste’; ‘until tomorrow, but that’s just another time’) — precise taxonomy blurring into generality. The cast of ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’ are difficult to pin down. There is no reported speech here, only direct quotations – a technique that adds to the sense of temporal immediacy but makes it hard to identify different voices. We’ve obviously the singer and his dealer, the locals who question him in the street; but then, towards the end, the line ‘baby don’t you holler, darling don’t you bawl and shout’ gestures to another figure in the wings (a girlfriend, one supposes). Of course, any analysis of the song’s lyrical content would be incomplete without noting a further ambiguity: the odd slippage between ‘the man’ in the title and ‘my man’ in the lyrics themselves. There are several possible explanations here. Is it that ‘the man’ is used in the slang meaning of an authority figure or power, and the term simply sounded too clumsy in the lyrics? Or are we supposed to notice the linguistic transition from shared to particular, and read it as reflective of some psychological shift? Whatever the case, his is the voice most notably absent; but then again, who would want to bother displaying much empathy towards their dealer?
4. ‘Venus in Furs’
The first line of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus Im Pelz roughly translates as ‘I had good company’ (Emilie Mataja’s 1928 translation puts it ‘My company was charming’). It’s a sentiment one quickly comes to doubt – and not only because the company is soon revealed to be a dream. Venus in Furs telescopes dream women with the real: the Venus of the title is a painting, too, but she is also before long Wanda, a character whose wants and desires are far more complex than the popular imagination grants her. To quote again from Mataja’s version:
… every man – I know this very well – as soon as he falls in love becomes weak, pliable, ridiculous. He puts himself into the woman’s hands, kneels down before her. The only man whom I could love permanently would be he before whom I should have to kneel.
It’s a glib truism of sadomasochism that the submissive partner really holds the power, and one that Sacher-Masoch’s novel preemptively takes to task (spot the etymology of the term ‘sadomasochism’). The Velvet Underground’s take is far less concerned with power, however, than it is with symbolism. The usual imperatives and verbs are there (‘strike’; ‘given’) but more prominent are objects, props: the whip, the ‘shiny shiny boots of leather’. Neat, tight lines like ‘tongue of thongs’ and portmanteaus ‘whiplash’ and ‘girlchild’ save ‘Venus in Furs’ from cliché territory, while the focus on objects renders the Venus as interchangeable as Severin’s in the novel. Rather than the woman in question, Reed invites us to ‘chase the costumes/ She shall wear’. The question of who is really running the show is left unanswered.
5. ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’
And so we finish on the song that launched a thousand trips to Butlins. Another one off the debut album, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ was inspired by watching people at The Factory (and was allegedly Warhol’s favourite Velvet Underground song). Better pens have covered the song’s musical details: the guitar tuned all to D and Cale’s paper-clipped piano, which rumbles delicately under the track. Its lyrics are less celebrated, but similarly intriguing. Far from the Shakespeare of ‘Romeo Had Juliette’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ takes its intertextual cues from children’s stories – Cinderella most obviously, but also the days-of-the-week rhyme that informs us ‘Thursday’s child’ ‘has far to go’ (all of those parties, perhaps). In fact the song is generally preoccupied with the days of the week; the girl is both Thursday’s child and ‘Sunday’s clown’, once midnight hits – ‘and what will she do with Thursday’s rags when Monday comes around?’. Her changes of costume recall more childlike make-believe, with the ‘hand-me-down dress’ of the first verse changing to ‘a blackened shroud, a hand-me-down gown of rags and silks, a costume’ by the last. The ‘fancy dress’ vibe of the song is re-enforced by the repeated line which opens each stanza: ‘and which costume shall the poor girl wear?’. (There is a queer beauty in a song so focused on time and the future already opening in medias res ). Of course, one can hardly miss the deathly overtones. Aside from the shroud, the girl is one ‘for whom none will go mourning’. Note that the lyrics don’t close with her crying at all tomorrow’s parties, but for them. They are, I think we can infer, parties which she won’t be attending.
The song ends abruptly. After all that rolling piano and Maureen Tucker’s steady, bright percussion, the unceremonious fall into silence jars.
Lou Reed
Stephanie Boland is an editor at Don’t Do It.