Rock rebel
Quick: Who are the most influential recording artists of the rock ’n’ roll era? Longtime Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis names four in his new book. Bob Dylan, of course. The Beatles, certainly. James Brown, sure. Who would argue?
But the fourth name — the subject of DeCurtis’ book — might draw a few doubters. Other than the Bard, the mop tops and the Godfather of Soul, “no one has exerted as great an influence on popular music,” he claims, as Lou Reed.
On first glance such a statement might seem like a blatant provocation, an invitation to the kind of verbal sparring for which Reed himself was infamous. Ask a random stranger — make sure he’s over, say, 40 — to name a Lou Reed song, and he may come up with “Sweet Jane,” from Reed’s band the Velvet Underground, or “Walk on the Wild Side,” or maybe “Perfect Day,” which was featured in a commercial for the PlayStation 4.
But DeCurtis’ biography (not the first since Reed’s death four years ago at age 71, and it won’t be the last) makes a case for Reed’s influence that’s as durable as black leather. Reed combined literary aspirations with a fearless eye for deviance and, by extension, a staunch defense of freedom of expression. The sum of these parts made him the dark prince of rock, a black-hearted antihero with the sheer gall to make unpopular music. He was an influencer — of punk, metal and even hard-core rap — in spite of himself.
In DeCurtis’ analysis, Reed knew from an early age, when he was kicking against his parents’ suburban Jewish lifestyle, that rock ’n’ roll could be a medium for the kind of subversive literature that was, by the late 1950s, challenging the polite middle class he’d been born into. Rock ’n’ roll’s rebelliousness — “its ability to get under the skin of adults generally and authority figures in particular” — provided an untapped opportunity, he believed, to mess with conventional morals just as William Burroughs and Hubert Selby were doing in prose. “If you were going to be attacked anyway, why not say something that truly unnerved the powers that be?” DeCurtis writes.
Not that Reed was recommending his own choices — the speed, the Johnnie Walker, the streetwise transvestites. “Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life. Or maybe it is,” he said. “I mean, Othello murders Desdemona. Is that a guide to what you can do? The guy in Berlin” — his third solo album, from 1973 — “beats up his girlfriend . ... Maybe they should sticker my albums and say, ‘Stay away if you have no moral compass.’ ”
From the beginning, when the Velvet Underground became the house band of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, Reed embodied a persona. As one old friend from his college days recalled, he was cultivating an “aloofness that, in his mind, he thought a rock star should have.” Reed successfully maintained that attitude, at least in the public eye, for half a century.
Apparently, though, he was armoring his own vulnerability. In fact, plenty of Reed’s music exposes the side of him that craved the kind of domesticity his whole being seemed to oppose. “Perfect Day” was written for his first wife (or so she swears). Reed’s mid-’70s live-in relationship with “Rachel,” a male by birth who identified as female, is treated here with compassion, and Sylvia Morales, Reed’s second wife, explains how she became his manager by default: “There’s a lot of need there,” she said. “Here’s Lou the great artist in this misunderstanding world. ‘You understand me. Help me with this.’ ”
Even as he remained adamant about speaking for no one but himself (“I didn’t write anybody’s national anthem,” he once groused to the New York Times when asked about the long shelf life of “Walk on the Wild Side”), he gave voice to the misunderstood. “Reed would always regard himself as among the damned — the addicted, the deviant, the impulsively cruel, the mad,” DeCurtis writes.
As Brian Eno once suggested, if the Velvet Undergound sold 30,000 copies of their debut album, everyone who bought a copy went on to start their own band. Reed’s “Transformer” helped define the glam era. His “New York” album (1989) stuck up for the ugly beauty of his beloved hometown during one of its low points, and the notoriously unlistenable “Metal Machine Music” was “a screeching f— you” not just to his record company, but his own fans.
If Reed could dish it out, his admirers could take it. One young man who was in attendance at the Velvet Underground’s first paying gig, at a New Jersey high school — the guy went on, unsurprisingly, to become a rock musician — explained the perverse appeal.
“I felt like someone turned a blender on inside my head,” he recalled.