Legendary Heart

Legendary Hearts

Remembering Lou Reed

10/27/13

by Jeff Wenger

Lou Reed signed my copy of Street Hassle. He was playing in Boulder that night but made an appearance at a Denver record store. He was promoting his New Sensations album.

There was a short line - not pathetically short, but certainly not Beatlemania.

I slid my copy over the counter, he signed on the photo of his cheek. I said “Thank you.” He looked intensely into my eyes, gave it half a beat, and said, “You’re welcome.”

We didn’t have especially good seats, but I remember it as a good show. I really liked - and still really like - New Sensations. The show was heavy with tracks from that album, but also the established crowd-pleasers. Lou Reed was a type of rocker to come out of the 1970 and work a long, screaming guitar solo into almost anything. I’ve always liked that.

He was a unique artist. His songs were musically simple (Wasn’t it Lou Reed who said anything with more than three chords is jazz?) and he certainly wasn’t vocally gifted - distinctive yes, gifted no - but he was, as a writer, unflinching in the raw depiction of life in the city, telling the intimate, personal stories of people trying to make a go of love, addicts, people who wanted to stop being addicts, prostitutes and children at risk. New York was Lou Reed’s beat in practically every sense of the word. 

The period of Lou Reed’s most enduring work coincides with some of the darkest time in New York City’s history - economic instability, crime and drugs, and drugs and crime. It was the New York of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver - characters from which would later appear in Reed’s lyrics.

Lou Reed will be widely remembered for the Velvet Underground, for his association with Andy Warhol, and for the haunting doo-doo-doo-doo-doodoodoo of “Walk on the Wild Side.” Maybe some other stuff from “Walk on the Wild Side.”

I  think more often of his work from the 1980s. Though he was not immune to the scourge that was the beep-beep accompaniment of the synthesizer, that came mid-decade and only briefly in the not great Mistrial.. In 1982, The Blue Mask received rave reviews, but I’ve always favored Legendary Hearts and New Sensations which were the subsequent albums.

I would never try to convince someone that “Legendary Hearts” trumps “Sweet Jane” or “Perfect Day” but only that this later music spoke to me more personally, as : “Wherefore art thou, Romeo? He’s in a car, or in a bar” from the title track.

I’ve mentioned “The Last Shot” to Chris Levine many times as it turns out I had my last shot with him. Or I think I have. Lou reminds me: When you’re quit you’re quit, but you always wish, that you knew it was your last shot.”

I listened to Lou Reed the first time because Bruce Springsteen sings an uncredited part on “Street Hassle.” It was pretty bleak. It knocked my socks off.

But I welcomed the change when New Sensations had a fun song - not Katrina and the Waves fun, but I mean relatively speaking - with “I Love you, Suzanne.” 

(This song may have been fueled by commercial considerations, which would explain the video: Lou and his band playing in a club. Lou is timeless in black jeans and black t-shirt and black sunglasses. Everything else, and I mean everything else, was so 1980s it could have fallen off a Patrick Nagel painting. The haircuts, the shoulder pads, the jackets and ties, and the high waisted, acid-washed jeans of Lou’s video girlfriend, Suzanne. Watching it again for the first time in years, it’s not a ridiculous video as so many were. Suzanne is trying to get Lou to dance and in what passed for artistic ambition in a video that would play 3:15, the scene would cut to a backstory that included Lou’s vanity and some discord in the relationship. But by the end, Lou sheds his electric guitar and shows Suzanne and the rest of us that he really can dance and he’s back to let us know he can really make romance.)

“New Sensations” tells about an early morning motorcycle ride through the country and it was the first time I ever imagined Reed or one of his characters outside a dense urban core.  Reed was a motorcycle enthusiast and even appeared in print ads and TV commercials pitching a Honda scooter. “Turn to Me” is a terrific song and I’ve always liked “Down at the Arcade” and would have even if I hadn’t played the eponymous video game. “I’m the great defender and I really know just how to get along” is something to which I aspire. 

In 1989 he released the gritty New York, and “Dirty Boulevard.” He had returned to his city and was telling the stories with which he was comfortable and that I am not. It’s bleak, like life on those streets, but Lou Reed told hard truths about the world. 

There's a reason they call him the Boss

Review of Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin

Touchstone Books; 500 pages; $28

By Jeff Wenger

Consciously at least, growing up, Bruce Springsteen was more of an influence on my life than my own father. Some may find it shocking and some may find it sad, but I swear that it’s true and I’ve made my peace with it. Quite evidently that says much about my relationship with my old man. It also, it turns out, says something about Springsteen’s relationship with his old man.

I undertook Peter Ames Carlin’s recent biography, Bruce, with enthusiasm. The book had been reviewed well and, having thirty years ago devoured Dave Marsh’s Springsteen bio Born to Run merely as a fan, I looked forward to an objective, journalistic inspection of the man and the artist.

Mostly I got that. Bruce provides insights and leaves the reader with a feel for the person. If it fails to to be completely satisfying, it may be that, however cooperative he may have been, the subject himself remains elusive.

Springsteen has said ‘trust the art, not the artist’ and given his enormous artistic presence, there is nothing else that he can say; human beings with their peeves, flaws, warts and ticks would invariably come up short - at least in the long term - of the transcendence of “Badlands” or “The Promised Land” or “The Rising”, the joy of “Rosalita”, the thrill of “The Ties That Bind”, and on and on. He shows what he’s willing to reveal in his work. But still, you wonder a little what harm there could be in trusting the artist.

Carlin’s “honest account of (Springsteen’s) life” reveals a pretty good guy. The world doesn’t need, and this reader and fan doesn’t want, another decadent romp through the dark side of rock and roll. Springsteen isn’t a cad, and indeed, is seen often as a perfect gentleman. Nevertheless, he has at times behaved badly and subsequently broken hearts.

More broadly, far from treating fans with disregard, he seems legitimately motivated, even now, by profound respect for them and is committed to giving them a great experience with both excellent records and live performances. Nobody here wants Springsteen to be exposed as a bad guy and it turns out that he isn’t a bad guy. So everybody can honestly leave the show pumped.

But afterward, as feet settled back down onto the earth, you wonder about things and some are explored in Bruce, though others less so. Further, fans will recall many of the stories in Bruce from the original sources in other interviews in books and magazine articles.

Nevertheless, it is a penetrating look into Springsteen’s childhood and the sense of his father’s social isolation that was passed on to the son. I saw Springsteen perform “Johnny Bye-Bye”, a song about Elvis’ death, 25 or 30 years ago in concert and he introduced it by talking about how a person who could come to mean so much to so many people might really be lonely and hurting. And I thought he was talking about Elvis - and he was, but, I’m embarrassed to say now, I was slow to see that it works on a couple of different levels.

Bruce reveals the subject to be an absolute professional, still working, some 50 years since his mother bought him his first electric guitar, to perfect his craft. The E Street Band were not - are not - a tight unit accidently, but became that way the same way Delta Force operatives do: through hours and days and months of practice past the point of exhaustion, believing in the rightness of the cause, and viewing their commander with a mixture of respect and awe. It's not for nothing that Springsteen is called the Boss.

The shared memories of members of the E Street Band are most illuminating because they have stood side by side for decades. Steve Van Zandt, a keen intellect and true rocker himself, shows great discernment about Springsteen and certain situations that arose within the band. Van Zandt’s contributions to the final sound on the albums with the E Street Band weighed it toward an early 60s pop and rock sound. I realize now that the music with Miami Steve is the Springsteen music I like best. To learn that Van Zandt and Springsteen’s manager and co-producer Jon Landau were at logger heads is of interest. The conflict seemed to presage Springsteen’s desire to work for a while with other musicians.

But Carlin realizes, as people should, that Springsteen is one of a handful of the true greats in his chosen field. Few artists - let alone rockers - have remained so relevant for so long, the new music becoming as important and personal and permanent as the early work. (When I say that Mick Jagger hasn’t contributed anything of relevance since being accomplice to Jimmy Fallon in a Mick Jagger parody, isn’t to take anything away from The Rolling Stones except to say that it’s hard to be king of the mountain for such a long time and that maybe Charlie Watts had the right idea by retiring.)

Springsteen is just a man. He cannot command time and tide; his best efforts didn’t get John Kerry elected president in 2004, and 2007’s Working on a Dream wasn’t really very good, but who cares? The Rising, and Magic were great albums and Devils and Dust and Wrecking Ball were very good.

And maybe just there I fell into the trap of confusing the art with the artist. But with the music being so personally important to me, I could only ever write so objectively about Bruce Springsteen. It’s woven into my DNA now and it’s just another thing to make my peace with.