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.