Encounters With Great Recording Of The 20th Century #4: Lou Reed, "The RCA And Arista Album Collection" (Released and acquired October 2016)

For Scott Lemieux and Brian Koppelman.

I was a very poorly social­ized child. After my incred­ibly obese tod­dler­hood, I assumed the more or less reg­u­lar dimen­sions of a boy. But I had issues. I had not star­ted speak­ing in English until well after I turned three (up until that point I com­mu­nic­ated with my moth­er in a made-up lan­guage) and once I began attend­ing school, teach­ers noticed some prob­lems, includ­ing a lack of phys­ic­al coördin­a­tion that sug­ges­ted to them that I was “spas­tic.” My inab­il­ity to con­nect with my peers led me to act out (not van­dal­ism or any­thing, just spend­ing entire schooldays speak­ing in a fake British accent) and I was sub­mit­ted to a bunch of phys­ic­al and psy­cho­lo­gic­al tests and assigned to a social work­er. I men­tion all this not to eli­cit sym­pathy but to demon­strate why, as the early 1970s and my early teens rolled around, I was com­pletely ready for Lou Reed. 

I’d been read­ing about him and his work in Creem and Rolling Stone for a little while when Berlin came out in 1973, when I was going on 14. I think it was the first Reed album I bought, and I got the rel­at­ively deluxe first press­ing that came with that fancy lib­retto prin­ted on very thick paper and illus­trated with pho­to­graphs depict­ing scenes in the album’s loose nar­rat­ive. I was of course intrigued by the whole thing but also vaguely disappointed—where were those gui­tars I had heard so much about. Then I got Transformer, and there they were, and there they were too on White Light/White Heat, so shit star­ted work­ing out.

Lou Reed’s was the first rock show I saw by myself, early October 1974, at the lux­uri­ous Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. Up until this point my dad had been pretty gen­er­ous with his time and dis­pos­able income, indul­ging my Teenage Lust For Rock by tak­ing me to shows. We had seen Ten Wheel Drive at Creskill High School and then he offered to take me to a show in “the city.” I thought about Zeppelin at the Garden, but blanched at the thought of sit­ting through “The Lemon Song” with my dad (I ima­gine there would have been plenty more to blanche at), so I settled for Delaney and Bonnie at Carnegie Hall, which my dad dug because he liked King Curtis. (We had no idea at the time that the gui­tar­ist in that band was Duane Allman.) As far as Lou Reed was con­cerned, I was on my own. My folks dropped me off out­side the ven­ue and told me to be out­side again at 11:30, no ifs ands or buts. 

It was an even­ing of dis­cov­ery for me in many ways. On the line to get in, many dirty filthy hip­pie types chat­ted. “What do you think of the new album,” one asked a com­pan­ion. “I don’t know. I haven’t got­ten into it yet.” That was the first time I’d heard the phrase “got­ten into it.” (The new album was Sally Can’t Dance, a record that vexed Lester Bangs migh­tily.) Inside the hall, I was dis­trac­ted by the smell of pot and the sight of young bra­less women in dia­phan­ous tops sil­hou­et­ted in the entrance to the ladies’ room. I hated open­ers Hall and Oates, who were flog­ging their own “concept album,” War Babies and who, to my mind, WOULDN’T GET OFF THE STAGE. (Years later I exper­i­enced a sim­il­ar irrit­a­tion when R.E.M. opened for Gang of Four at the Ritz, and I have to admit that I nev­er quite got over it.) Reed’s set was per­func­tory, even the dis­taste­ful the­at­ric­al bits—this was the tour on which he sim­u­lated shoot­ing up dur­ing “Heroin.” Near the end of the show some schmuck screamed “’Sister Ray’!!!” to which Lou replied, in the evening’s sole bit of stage pat­ter, “Go fuck your­self.” I had to leave before the encore.

I remained a Reed devotee, to the extent that I actu­ally became a pro­fes­sion­al rock crit­ic. And as a pro­fes­sion­al rock crit­ic, yea, even well before I achieved that status, I hewed to the stand­ard crit­ic­al line that John Cale was a bet­ter, more ambi­tious, more inter­est­ing over­all solo artist than Lou Reed was. While all the time really just want­ing Lou Reed to make great solo albums.

Eventually the rock crit­ic paradigm broke down. Exhibit A, 1984 saw the release of Lou Reed’s New Sensations and John Cale’s Caribbean Sunset. But I’m not here to re-litigate an old and prob­ably bor­ing case that’s among oth­er things unfair to both Cale and Reed. Rather, I’m here to offer a uni­fied field the­ory of Lou Reed solo albums, which is that they are all great and that while one might con­tain bet­ter “mater­i­al” or “songs” than anoth­er, each one is an incred­ibly valu­able com­pon­ent in a life’s work that is in fact best con­sidered as a life’s work.

 The thing that turned me around is not a 20^th cen­tury release but rather a 21^st cen­tury col­lec­tion of 20^th cen­tury record­ings, that is, the box set Lou Reed: The RCA and Arista Recordings. I sprung for it on release, in October of last year, and I went through the 17 discs in chro­no­lo­gic­al order at home, but it was really through spin­ning its 148 songs with my iPod on shuffle and dis­cov­er­ing, to my sur­prise, that I did not feel like skip­ping a single one. Even the songs I didn’t like were telling me some­thing, some­thing worth hear­ing, some­thing worth weighing—about Reed, sure, but also about the city that we shared. The world we shared. And so on. I came upon songs that I had slept on—“High in the City” from New Sensations, “My Old Man” from Growing Up in Public—that sud­denly struck me as no-qualifications great. I got out from under the influ­ence of Peter Laughner with respect to Coney Island Baby. And more. And found each song was best exper­i­enced in the con­text of the oth­er 147 songs in a way that I’ve nev­er exper­i­enced with anoth­er artist. Good, bad, very bad, or indif­fer­ent, the work cre­ates a world unto itself.

 Of course I am hardly the only per­son to per­ceive this. Alexis Petridis, in his very astute December 2016 review of the set, cites a Reed quote in which the artist likens his run of albums to a book: “Every record a chapter … Listen to it in order, there’s my great American nov­el.” Petridis then out­lines the nar­rat­ive, which sees Our Hero “crash­ing into frus­trat­ing dead ends.” Indeed, or maybe even driv­ing into walls at full speed with eyes wide open. The only mis­take Reed made in his self-assessment, and I can’t blame him, is say­ing “great American nov­el” rather than “great American autobiography.”

Reed’s greatest glory as an artist also happened to be his Achilles’ heel. To go back to Cale for a minute, Reed’s former Velvet Underground band­mate was, like so many rock artists, adept at pulling off per­sonae, from the refined classically-trained artiste of Paris 1919 to the studio-rock reneg­ade of Slow Dazzle. And, of course, in the many phases of Cale’s career his per­sona would at times dir­ectly reflect the per­il­ous state in which he was him­self liv­ing. But Lou Reed, no mat­ter how many looks he tried on, no mat­ter how many story-songs about oth­er people he wrote, could ulti­mately nev­er present as any­body but him­self. (This comes out not just in the overt con­tent of the songs but in the way he strains and shifts his vocal­iz­a­tions, his dis­in­clin­a­tion to fol­low strict rhyme schemes or adhere to meter, his phras­ing either slack or micro-beat accur­ate.) And very often his self was of course his own worst enemy. When the work reflects this, as it has to, it reflects it in ways that can be mor­ti­fy­ing, exas­per­ated, embar­rass­ing, but when you are fully com­mit­ted to get­ting through these patches, you don’t feel these things in a way that’s detached from Reed, you feel that way with him. Dylan’s “I Threw it All Away” could be this set’s theme, except that for every will­ful per­verse loss there fol­lows some kind of cor­res­pond­ing gain. Without the tossed-off cyn­icism of Rock and Roll Heart you won’t get the buckled-down com­plex­ity of Side A of Street Hassle. Without all but giv­ing up gui­tar com­pletely for Growing up in Public (a bid for Bruce Springsteen/Billy Joel style cred­ib­il­ity that Reed had to some­how know was the last thing he wanted or needed), you wouldn’t have the tri­umphant pick­ing up of the gui­tar, along­side Robert Quine, on The Blue Mask. And in spite of all these con­trasts there is, if you listen with a cer­tain ear, no actu­al dif­fu­sion from the whole. Whether this makes Reed actu­ally unique among rock artists I can’t say. But it cer­tainly makes him massive, and always massively moving.