Discovering Music and Lou Reed: A Review and Personal Retrospective

Just some of my 4000+ records

Timing is everything, but sometimes nothing at all. Like oiling up a vintage piece of found furniture or visiting a city for the first time, “old” things can be new if we’re just discovering them for ourselves. With the music of Lou Reed, I still had this chance even though I wasn’t there in person its first go around. With the recent passing of this rock legend, I can still remember when I first “discovered” his music. I’m almost ashamed to say it wasn’t that long ago, but I’ll get to that. I invite you, urge you, to take a look at this man’s rich catalog not just for its impact on the decades that followed, but to appreciate the simple beauty that all those songs hold. Let’s begin, where I did.

Growing up in the rural town of Denton in the 1970s, I was sheltered musically, to say the least. I was exposed to the basics of Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, Ray Charles, and Simon and Garfunkel, but the bulk of my musical upbringing was the painful and narrow perspective of Lawrence Welk on TV and country music on the car radio. For my generation, the buttons were out of reach and beyond our control. I don’t exaggerate when I say we listened to the same few tapes (including Carly Simon and Kenny Rogers) over and over again on the six-hour car ride to Atlanta one year, and my parents’ stack of records was not my own. Furthermore, my older sister’s room was off limits, and she was the keeper of the forbidden trove of classic rock and hipper, more contemporary sounds. She did let me stand outside her door when Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” came on her radio. I envy the young William character on the movie Almost Famous who inherits his older sister’s record collection when she runs away with her boyfriend. She tells her brother, “Look under your bed; it’ll set you free.” Unlucky me, I would have to get my records the hard way. 

When I was old enough to walk to the public library, I raided their skimpy donated record stack and checked out everything I could that had words with the music. They had Led Zeppelin III, half of the Who’s Tommy, and some Blood, Sweat, and Tears. I found a spare record player my dad had brought home from school and listened more closely to Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. When someone I knew loaned me Rush’s Signals, I listened with shocked ears but withstood the experience and had fallen in love with it by the end. In my room, I listened quietly enough to not get yelled at, or when nobody else was around. I absorbed what I could. And so it was until I learned to drive and could venture the 24 miles to the Asheboro Mall after hoarding my lunch money for the week. I could afford to get a tape or two each visit after paying for gas, and ventured into the music of Pink Floyd, Eagles, all of Led Zeppelin, Rush, and others that I still consider to be the classics. On blank tapes, I diligently recorded Rock 92’s Monday night classic album and my music collection grew. My meager musical beginnings received a foundation that would last me until my adulthood.

And then came Lou Reed. I had this odd notion tucked in the back of my brain that the Velvet Underground was some kind of “devil” music, some hardcore, heavy group that was somehow off-limits. I really had no idea. The only Lou Reed song I had heard to that point was the same and only one that most people have heard, the prostitute and transvestite-filled “Walk on the Wild Side.” What kind of impression does that make on an innocent young boy from Denton?

It wasn’t until I bought a used CD Lou Reed box set at Ed Mackay’s that I finally discovered his music beyond that single song. It was somewhere around that time that I found some Lou Reed and VU albums on vinyl at a local flea market. And so the musical discovery began. I was twice as old as I was in those boyish days crouched over a ratty record player in my bedroom, but the feeling was just the same. Those first few notes after the drop of the needle and the rumble in, the first sound of an unfamiliar voice, the first guitar wail or drumbeat, the first song that sets the stage for the entire album, the song you’re hearing for the first time and it caresses your ears and brain like it was created just for you--those moments are truly magic. For anyone who has not experienced that magic, it saddens me because you don’t know what you’re missing.        

Lou Reed brought that magic back for me the first time I really discovered his music. Many people focus on his start with the Velvet Underground and neglect his solo career, but fans of his work realize that he wrote many of those songs when he was younger, and he took many of those songs into his later albums. When I listened to my first VU album, I knew I had to have all of them (there are only four real VU “albums”). Since the originals are virtually unobtainable, I hit ebay and bought special editions in colored vinyl, each in an appropriate hue. White Light / White Heat is white with a hint of flame, Loaded is red vinyl that goes along with the seeping, sewer gas on the cover, etc. I had to find out just what all the fuss was about. They say that the original Andy Warhol banana-covered first album only sold 1,000 copies, but every person who listened to it went on to start his own band. 

It is hard to listen to “Venus in Furs” without literally dropping everything you’re doing just to listen. Even by today’s standards more than 40 years later, it is unique and innovative. With its droning ostrich guitar (tuning with each string in the same note) and cacophonous viola, its sensuous content leaves you in a state of spellbound mystery. Right in the middle of the aural landscape is Reed’s jarring, deadpan voice. At first, you’re like, “Wow, this guy can’t sing,” then you realize, “He’s singing it exactly like he wants to. Every note he sings is on purpose!” That’s difficult to understand, unless you’re also a fan of Bob Dylan (I am). Why would someone sing off-key on purpose? 

Part of the answer lies with Phil Spektor and his “wall of sound” that permeated the mid-to-late 1960s. To imagine this sound, picture the glammest Motown song you’ve ever heard, replete with a string section, an array of background singers, and the “perfect” lead vocal or boy/girl group harmonies. Realize those many hours in the studio, mixing and polishing every track, beat, and note.--the end result--perfection? Not to Lou Reed. Just like the garage rock and psychedelia that reacted against mainstream culture in the 1960s, Lou Reed had a similar vision. Reed sought a stripped down, basic, raw sound that some people would later call “primitive” rock. 

Those Velvet Underground albums I got in the mail that day are still treasures to me. Songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” on the third album are so haunting. Such simple, bare words create a lyric of such power: “Skip a life completely, / Stuff it in a cup. / She said, ‘Money is like us in time, / It lies, but can’t stand up, / Down for you is up.’ / Linger on, your pale blue eyes.” The beauty of Reed’s lyrics is truly tested in one of few songs sung by Nico on the VU’s first album, “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” “She’ll turn once more to Sunday’s clown and hide behind the door,” and we follow the path of the poor girl who ends up being mourned in the end just as she mourned her life away for “all tomorrow’s parties.” Are we to pity her? I am comfortable in saying that I still have no idea what the song really means, the same as I have no definitive answer to the right “answer” to the meaning of a great novel, or the “correct” interpretation of a famous painting. I believe that a great song, like a great work or art, is a mirror that helps us experience it differently every time we approach it. 

Musically, we can also not minimize the simple power and innovation of Reed’s guitar work. While he never had the virtuosity of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or Eric Clapton, he is rated by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the top 100 guitarists of all time--for a reason. I heard him in an interview tell his story of his first and only guitar lesson. His teacher wanted to send him home to learn “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or somesuch song, but Reed showed him a book from one of his idols and said, “I want to play THAT.” His teacher said, “Are you sure? That’s just three chords.” He said he drew out the charts for the chords and he went home and learned them, and that was his first and last guitar lesson. This story is not to say that Lou Reed was a lazy player and didn’t have a full repertoire of musical background. Some people say he strapped on a guitar when he got up in the morning and kept it on him all day. The driving guitar sounds of “Sister Ray” and “White Light / White Heat” are as pure and primal as any licks in rock history. 

With his solo career, Reed clearly was able to express himself without competing with other band members for the stage and without anyone else to cloud his vision. Reed’s guitar work in “Coney Island Baby,” is some of the purest, most elegant playing I’ve ever heard. Although it sounds deceptively simple, even as an intermediate guitar player, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to attempt it. His notes trill and crescendo in waves, and maybe only Clapton can give a punctuating note the same kind of chilling vibrato. Listen to “Baby Face” and focus on the guitar work, and you would think you were listening to something out of the Eric Clapton songbook. 

When I began exploring Reed’s catalog of work, I began to discover one songwriting gem after another. I love to look for themes and patterns, and one thing I can put my finger on is Reed’s use of contrast and his understated way of laying out a dramatic situation. It’s easy to use pages and pages of words to express an idea; using a bare few words takes talent. Reed cuts a landscape with sweeping verbal strokes. In “Satellite of Love,” a man sits watching a satellite being launched on TV and we’re suddenly aware that he’s just realizing that his lover is cheating on him. He says, “I like to watch things on TV,” and then repeats that she’s “been bold” with a number of other men (even having a different one each day of the week). The repeating chorus, “Satellite of love” just makes us ask, “What in the world does he mean by that?” We scratch our heads and wonder. Does he mean that love is like a satellite that passes close, far, around, orbits, comes and goes, what? Who knows? Reed casts this stark contrast and juxtaposition (the man sitting in front of his TV in this state of realization) to leave us in the same stupefied state as the man himself. I literally fell in love with this song when I heard it; how could you not?

In the same way, “Perfect Day” is beguiling and deceptive and powerful. While we hear the nostalgic mantra, “It’s a perfect day,” and see the story unfold, a bold but subtle line rips us back to reality when the speaker says, “You made me forget myself /  I thought I was someone else / someone good.” I walked through the main hall this morning on the way to my classroom singing the song’s repeated last lines, “You’re going to reap just what you sow.” Great art is sometimes beyond words and difficult to explain, or “put your finger on,” and this song is a example. With Mick Ronson’s stirring piano in the background, we’re left to wonder what happened to the speaker’s friendship and we feel the same bittersweet tinge as the speaker. Reed’s voice and vocal treatment is perfect for this tone and type of song. Notably, in the chorus his voice is brighter and sharper than usual, but the break point lets his emotion show through. I think it’s difficult to hear this song and still conclude that Reed does not have a beautiful voice. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s “real,” and that’s really what his music is all about, anyway, right?

A music lover realizes the full influence of Reed’s pioneering music when you see what famous artists walked in his shadows and went on to carve out their own contribution. David Bowie idolized Reed so much he went on take the Glam Rock that Reed invented and take it to its logical extreme. Bowie even produced some of Reed’s later work, including the groundbreaking Transformer album, and you can hear Bowie’s background vocals in “Satellite of Love” and others. Patti Smith, a pioneer in her own right, took what Reed started and lent her own style and content as an alternative punk icon. Some say that Lou Reed developed the “grammar” that gave alternative rock its voice and made it possible in the first place. While earlier rock musicians wrote about real issues, Reed was among the first to bring some painful and troubling issues to the airwaves in songs like “Caroline Says” from the album Berlin where the title female says, “You can hit me all you want, but I don’t love you anymore.” Bowie says that Reed “supplied us with the street and landscape and we [future musicians] ‘peopled’ it.”

In a world once again proliferated with bubble gum and Bieber, it’s refreshing to hear music stripped down to its bare essence. If Lou Reed were a contemporary artist just coming onto the scene today in 2013, his music would make just as much of impact as it did more than 40 years ago. Music runs in trends, and all truly good music has a permanent place in our consciousness and on our record shelves (or cloud or playlist). I’ve heard people say that Reed’s voice always sounds familiar, like a friend who’s telling you something. He is definitely someone that I want to listen to, though not always happy, but I guess that is life. 

Influenced by writer Delmore Schwartz; Reed once said that as a writer he could use the “simplest of language to accomplish the highest of art.” Seeing a documentary on him just the other night a week after his passing, I realized the same is true of Lou Reed. He was a master of language and a brilliant musician who needed very few words and few notes to make his impact upon the world. It is always sad to lose a legend. Seeing the documentary, I learned many things I didn’t already know about him, making me think deeply about my own life and journey to musical discovery. I found out that night that I am still discovering Lou Reed, music, and myself. Goodbye Lou Reed, but we are still listening.