LOU REED: NO MORE HEROES, BUT PLENTY OF RESPECT

One of the words mentioned most often in regard to Lou Reed's work is honest so I may as well start this story with a confession. I met Lou Reed once before I talked to him on the verge of Street Hassle's release. It was in 1972; a small and devoted bunch of us rock 'n' roll crazies had taken over our college's concert committee and our inauguraral presentation wound up being Reed's very first gig as a solo artist. It meant, a lot to us that he was going to play two nights in the enchanting Millard Fillmore Room on the campus of the University of Buffalo. The one and only time that I'd seen the Velvet Underground live was during their final glorious stand at Max's Kansas City two summers previous, and that show affected me more than any other concert I'd ever seen before.

And now here he was in town. The day after the first show, a few of us wandered over to his motel room to formally meet him. As we walked in, I noticed that he had the local daily newspaper spread out on the bed, open to the page that included a rave review of the show the night before; a rave review that I had written. I felt a bit awkward about telling him, as we were introduced, that the by-line belonged to me, but I was really just so dumbfounded at finally meeting him that it seemed the only way to break the ice. But Lou just looked up, shoved the paper away, and mumbled, "Yeah, always nice to get good press" in a voice that seemed so condescending that I was just flattened. We spent about five excruciatingly long minutes in his room, with hardly a word more said by anyone, and then we left. Throughout the weekend, Reed was curt to the point of obnoxiousness with just about everyone he met. Yet I stood in the back of the hall watching him play the second night with that very first new band of his, those kidsv from the suburbs. He was so nervous, uptight, rigid and tentative onstage, that a whole slew of thoughts crowded my mind concerning an artist's relationship to himself and his audience. If the Lou Reed we'd met was not one tenth as interesting as the Lou Reed we'd been idolizing on record for all these years, did it take away anything from our feelings about his work? Moreover, if the Lou Reed I was seeing that night seemed to be light years away from the Lou Reed I'd been overwhelmed by that night at Max's, did that affect my opinions of that previous work? When I realized that the answer to both questions was no, it occurred to me that I had never before really thought of my favorite rock stars as human beings, and that assuming that they were like their songs was something I'd be doing little of from that day on. I guess I was growing up.

"I'm too much of a smartass...! knew Bruce ( Springsteen) would do It seriously."

So there I was at a little Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, waiting for Lou Reed to show up for an interview (he was already almost two hours late), and remembrances of things past such as the preceding ran through my head. I was there because I'd heard a cassette of Street Hassle and that old fire seemed to have finally been rekindled; a messed-up, transcendant collection of songs that just had it, y'know. Except for his first album for RCA and Coney Island Baby, I didn't care much for Reed's solo stuff—maybe a song here and there, like "Satellite Of Love" or "Kill Your Sons"— but, like most other people with roughly the same sensibilities as me, each new album would bring that brief spark of hope just before you played it, like maybe this time he'd really do it again.

That my expectations had been raised in regard to Street Hassle was mostly a result of seeing Reed play last summer at the Bottom Line, that sardine-packed showcase club. After the abomination that was Rock And Roll Heart and that most contemptuous and offensive tour' with the video banks, there he is at this club and I can hardly believe it. Smiling again onstage, relaxed, even friendly, playing some guitar for a change. I hadn't seen, him this comfortable in seven years of live appearances. And wouldn't you know it? People that night were feeling cheated, complaining about how this wasn't' the real Lou Reed and what was he trying to pull by acting nice? I guess I was finally starting to understand the pattern of Reed's solo career; Berlin, Sally Can't Dance, Metal Machine Music, those 40 television sets spewing forth'nothing save interference. "Find some other hero jack," it all seemed to say. "Leave me, leave me, leave me, leave me, leave me ALONE!"

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Lou finally showed up and honey, the bitch was back. My tape recorder started fucking up and within five minutes, Lou had me on the ropes, talking to no one in particular (but certainly not me) about the general ineptitude of most people on earth. When we finally got the machine working (had to find a table near an outlet to plug the thing, in—-batteries had. died, prompting Lou to suggest that I take a run to a drugstore—"I think there's one within a few miles"), I figured we'd get the technical stuff out of the way, hopefully spend something less than two minutes on the binaural angle. "Binaural stuff?" said Lou. "Have you heard the record yet?" 1 told him that I'd heard a cassette.

I tried to explain that the technology of record making didn't matter that much to me, but Lou interrupted again. "The technology is wedded to the aesthetic on this album," he said. "I'm making a claim that it is important to people like you who say it isn't. This technique gives you a chance for studio perfection while retaining the live sound. You can get so much more t information on the tape without making it distorted or unintelligible. There's just more space you can occupy; which means that if you're dull, you have just more room in which to be stupid." "Yes," I said, "so this process wouldn't matter so much if the songs weren't good to begin with."

"Look," he said, "you have to hear it on a decent system and then you can say whatever you want, 'cause it's not fair to you and you can come off sounding like a schmuck 'cause you have nothing to go on. I'll just keep throwing it up to you that you haven't heard it..."

Things went around in a circle like this'for some time, and I was starting to think that I'd found myself in the middle of a special Twilight Zone episode called "The Interview" and I'd never get out. Sample excerpt from the next 15 minutes: "How would you compare this album to your others?" "I don't. Do you?" "Sure, what else can you compare an artist's work to if not the rest of his work?" "Nothing." "Well, that's why..." "Well, I don't;" "What do you think people do when they hear a new album of yours?" "Usually masturbate... You look like a cabana boy I used to know at the Malibu Beach Club. Either that, or my dentist..." I figured it was time to drag out my one ace up* the sleeve. For years I'd been saying that Reed's rhythm guitar playing, easily the best in the business, seemed to stem from Bobby Fuller's "I Fought The Law," and in Street Hassle's "Dirt," Lou had actually invoked both Fuller's name and the song, bringing together not only that guitar connection, but also Fuller's apocraphyl demise in the late 60's, the kind of death you hear about in Lou Reed songs. I told him this and it's almost like the mask dropped from his face right there; as if he'd suddenly decided that I was not a total buffoon. "Yeah," he said. "Nobody wants to be a rhythm guitarist anymore except niggers. You know that Marvin Gaye song, 'Gotta Give It Up,' the album version?" I nodded yes. "When Marvin says, 'Here comes the good part,' and like, it's the truth. That rhythm guitarist, his throwaways are riffs that people would give; their left ball for. I tried fo do that kind of guitar on 'I Wanna Be Black;' naturally, I fucked it up, but that's my attempt to do Ed Brown.

"You know," He said, "one day I got paranoid 'cause I heard someone playing 'Sweet Jane' on a guitar in the back yard. I thought someone was out to get me, some signal from somewhere. And a friend said, 'Lou, don't you realize that that's a rhythm guitar riff that people now practice, like on the level of a Chuck Berry riff?' "

We started talking about Street Hassle's title cut ("Oh, the 'masterpiece,' " Lou chuckled), and I remarked that the little cello melody which holds the whole thing together sounds a lot like the kind of line John Gate would come with. "Well," he said, "people are always using whole string sections, and we just zeroed in on the groovy part. But I know what you mean. With Cale, you could focus in on that one string, really hear it. And Cale can p/ay. I mean, I don't know more than maybe three players who really have the heart and the technique together. Cale always seems to play best when he's in the setting of other people's specific trips.

Chelsea Girl was mentioned. "Yeah, if they'd just have allowed Cale to arrange it and let me do some more stuff on it. I mean that song, 'Chelsea Girl.' Everything on it? those strings, that flute, should have defeated it. But the lyrics, Nico's voice. It managed to somehow survive. We still got 'It Was. A Pleasure Then;' they couldn't stop us. We'd been doing a song like that in our beloved show, it didn't really have a title. Just all of us following the drone. And there it sits in the middle of that album." "Amidst all that sweetening," I said. "Sweetening," Lou said, shaking his head. "For real."

I asked Loii about Bruce Springsteen's uncredited cameo recitation on "Street Hassle." "He was in the studio below and for that little passage I'd written, I thought he'd be just perfect. 'Cause I tend to screw those things up." "What do you mean?" I asked. "What about 'I Found A Reason'? It's as great as Elvis on 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' " "No," he said, "it is my best recitation, but I just couldn't resist that. 'Walking hand in hand with myself' part. I'm too much of a smartass. And L knew Bruce would do it seriously, 'cause he really is of the street, y'know?"

The second side of my tape had run out, but we continued talking about everything from A1 Green's Belle album ("Man that record is for keeps. It is no accident. And what's he singing about. Man!") to Jackson Browne and Running on Empty. "What's right with him is also what's wrong with him. I mean, on this record he's revealing himself and you can see just what a California tot he is and how dumb L.A. really is. These Days' was a great song, got pretty close to the existential angst we all feel, but he's never really gone past there. With this-album, he could have really made a bid, you know? Didn't have to be heavy, but as long as you're gonna do it—but it's just patty cakes, superficial as the day is long. Cinema verite? Come on. I mean it really isn't. Or is it? Sometimes I wonder if Jackson knows what He's saying in his songs.").

Lou invited me over to his house so I could hear Street Hassle with headphones, on a "decent" system. And I sat in his living room, playing with his two little dogs, and it did sound a lot better than on my dinky cassette player. Does it make a world of difference? Not really that much, I concluded. 'Cause a good song is a good song and a bad one is a bad one, and I've heard enough of both from Lou Reed to know when he's on and when he's not. And so, after I left his house to go eat dinner ("I'd come," said Lou, "but I've got some drugs boiling on the stove"), I wandered out into the street a bit dazed. Like I said before, that gap between an artist'and his "real" self can often be a huge one, and I can't imagine a more complex artist that Lou Reed. All these years, and he'll still talk about ten-year-old songs as if they were written yesterday.

I suppose it all bounces around at varying intervals in his head, affecting what he's done before, what he's doing now, what he may do. His next four albums can all be garbage, and I'll still be there hoping, sucker that I am, because when a Lou Reed album is there, it's like few others are. Making no pretense, hiding nothing. It knows.