Unless you’re my mom—or living in a mysterious pit in Death Valley waiting for Helter Skelter to begin—you know Lou Reed is dead. Kaput. No more. Who thought the guy who gave us the Velvet Underground, scads of great solo songs, and the world’s greatest guitar solo on “I Heard Her Call My Name” would ever die? Not me. I thought he was too big a pain in the ass to ever pass away—that even Death wouldn’t want him around.
Because let’s face it: Lou “My bullshit is worth more than most peoples’ diamonds” Reed was a pretentious—The Raven, anyone?—paranoid, and arrogant bullshit artist, and in his case RIP might as well stand for Really Intolerable Prick. Not for nothing did The Dictators sing, “I think Lou Reed is a creep!” I asked Dictator Andy “Adny” Shernoff once what he meant by that line and he responded, “Do you know him? He’s an asshole!”
But I have come not to disparage Lou—Lester Bangs does a brilliant job of letting Reed damn himself in their famous interviews, and I suggest you read those—but to praise him. Before we go any further, I should say that I love the Velvet Underground far more than I’ve ever loved a Reed solo album. Suffice it to say I think White Light/White Heat is one of the best albums ever made and I’ve listened to it thousands of times, the best being the day I passed out in my room after a hard-drinking pig farmer wedding at the Littlestown VFW with side two of WL/WH playing at top volume on repeat. It proved something to me about learning in your sleep, because when I awoke seven hours later I knew every word to “Sister Ray.”
So I could review White Light/White Heat, but in light of his passing I feel it’s the time to let the solo Lou have his moment in the sun. I like, though don’t love, most of Reed’s solo albums, including the infamous Metal Machine Music, and I can only think of three I despise in their entirety: namely, The Raven, Magic and Loss, and the unspeakable Hudson Wind Meditations, a sort of New Age sequel to Metal Machine Music for people who do yoga, eat vegan, and irrigate their nostrils via neti pots. In the end it came down to reviewing The Blue Mask or Berlin, which I love but decided against because it’s so unremittingly depressing it should have been called Musical Accompaniment for Suicides.
So 1982’s The Blue Mask it is. Reed’s 11th studio LP, The Blue Mask may well be the former VUer’s high-water mark as a solo artist. Recorded with a stripped-down band—no cast of thousands, most of them studio hacks, like on Berlin—including Reed on guitar and vocals, former Voidoid Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on bass, and Doane Perry (who later joined Jethro Tull!) on drums, The Blue Mask was released with no instrumental overdubs, and features both some nice quiet tunes as well as several of the most explosive songs Reed ever put to vinyl.
I’m a devotee of The Blue Mask for three reasons. First, it carries with it a real sense of menace; second, it’s a great guitar LP, with the late, great Robert Quine playing some of the most vicious guitar ever heard, while Reed himself plays guitar with a ferocity he hadn’t approached in years; and third, it includes a song about my favorite poet, Delmore Schwartz, who called himself “manic-impressive” and wrote some fabulous poems and died in insane obscurity, telling a friend who approached him on the street, “It’s no wonder you don’t recognize me. The whole shape of my head has changed.”
Reed was a student of Schwartz’s at Syracuse University, where the latter would sometimes show up for class in a rumpled suit covered with grass, as if he’d slept on the lawn all night. The two oddballs became fast friends, and Reed memorializes his former mentor in The Blue Mask’s opening track, the excellent “My House.” Half remembrance of Schwartz and half celebration of domestic bliss—call it Lou’s take on CSN&Y’s execrable “Our House”—“My House” is slow and very pretty, and ends with a nice jam that threatens, but never actually erupts, into mayhem. In the meantime, Reed sings about how Schwartz occupies the spare room in his house, “dead, at peace at last the wandering Jew,” and how he and his wife played with a Ouija board and a spirit appeared: “We were happy and amazed at what we saw/Blazing stood the proud and regal name Delmore.” Reed then goes on to spell out how he’s “really got a lucky life” before repeating, “Our house is very beautiful at night” to close the song, kinda like Graham Nash only with two speedfreaks instead of cats in the yard.
Unfortunately, the dumb “Women” follows. It opens with some quiet guitar, then Lou sings about how he loves women. I love women too, but I would never express it in such a clumsy, ham-fisted way. Reed’s lyrics aren’t poetry, they’re pure bathos: “I love women, I think they’re great/They’re a solace to a world in a terrible state/They’re a blessing to the eyes, a balm to the soul/Blah blah blah blah blah.” (That last line is mine.) And those lyrics are nothing compared to his apologia (“I know that it was sexist but I was in my teens”) for looking at porn. Oh, boy, that’s terrible Lou. You’re a bad person. And I can’t escape the suspicion that you’ve written this confession to impress someone, perhaps your wife, perhaps yourself, with what an enlightened feminist and all-around sensitive guy you are. That said, I like the melody and Saunders’ throbbing bass, to say nothing of the nice instrumental interplay that ends the tune. I just wish someone had informed Reed that between thought and expression there should be a little self-doubt, as in “Do these lyrics blow?”
As autobiographical as “My House,” the excellent “Underneath The Bottle” is a mid-tempo rocker with whoomph that never changes speed, features no solos, and just goes on, like a blur of a weeklong drinking binge. Guitar notes get bent, Doane Perry’s drumming is great, and Reed is telling the truth for a change, singing about the ups and (mostly) downs of the liquored life. “Things are never good,” he sings, “Things go from bad to weird/Hey give me another scotch with my beer.” He may sing, “Liquor set me free,” but he knows he’s going down; “I lost my pride/And it’s hiding there underneath the bottle,” he concludes, and the band bashes on for a few measures, while presumably he keeps drinking.
The slow and menacing “The Gun” marks the return of Lou Reed, Poet Laureate of Violence and Decadence. It opens with some cymbals and quiet but ominous guitar play, then Lou sings, “The man has a gun/And he knows how to use it.” His lyrics are top-notch here; as one electric guitar strums on and another sprays stray series of notes, and Saunders contributes a great bass line, Reed sings, “He’ll point it at your mouth/Says that he’ll blow your brains out.” “Carrying a gun,” gets repeated a lot, with Reed appending to it such terrifying lines as, “I’ll put a hole in your face if you even breathe a word” and “Tell the lady to lie down/I want you to be sure to see this/I wouldn’t want you to miss a second.” And so it goes, Lou’s voice redolent with sadistic delight, before the song, which like “Underneath The Bottle” is just one great extended riff, finally ends, just like that.
On show-stopper “The Blue Mask” Reed returns to the sadomasochistic theme of “Venus in Furs.” But while the Velvets’ tune was vague, quaint, and romanticized, “The Blue Mask” is detailed, hardcore, and very disquieting. I like S&M as much as the next guy, but “The Blue Mask” is scar my face, kill me stuff, and Reed barks out the lyrics in a drill sergeant’s voice like he means every word. To be blunt the lyrics kinda freak me out, but the guitars! Oh, the guitars. The song opens with monstrous squalls of feedback and drum rolls that go on for about 1:15, then evolves into a fast, feedback-drenched march. Meanwhile Lou sings, “They tied his arms behind his back to teach him how to swim/They put blood in his coffee and milk in his gin” and things get scarier from there, but the guitars are so busy roaring and Perry is making such a din you can ignore the lyrics if you’re as squeamish as I am. Towards the 4-minute mark Quine launches into a feedback-frenzied solo that is simply incredible, a landmark like all those stupid presidents on that stupid Mt. Rushmore, while the song picks up speed with Perry pounding away until it finally dissolves into feedback and drum rolls again.
“Average Guy” is, unfortunately, just an average song: I like the melody, and the interplay between the guitars of Quine and Reed, but why Reed opts to sing it in a Jerry Lewis squawk remains a mystery to me, and by the middle of the song I’m thinking, “If he sings ‘I’m just an average guy’ one more time, I’m going to punch him in his average nose.” But he does, plenty of times, and whereas the repetitions in “The Gun” increase the sense of overwhelming menace, the repetitions in “Average Guy” are just plain annoying. For a funny song, for I suppose that’s what it’s supposed to be, it simply isn’t that funny. “You wouldn’t know me if you met me face to face” is about as hilarious as it gets, which leaves one to listen to the cool guitars in the background, Quine firing off notes as sharp as shards of broken glass while Reed plays one long dirty riff. If there was a way (and there must be) to eliminate Reed’s vocals and turn this baby into an instrumental, it would be one cool song.
“The Heroine” is a strange tune, just an electric guitar and Lou singing about an out-of-control ship, a baby in a box, and a heroine. I can’t say I understand what the fuck’s going on, as the baby becomes a bunch of men wondering whether she’ll let them out, the sea rages, and so on. Some of the lines (“The mast is cracking as the waves are slapping/Sailors rolled across the deck/And when they thought no one was looking/They would cut a weaker man’s neck”) are excellent, but it’s all one long mysterious symbolist poem to me, less important for its meaning (which I think is indiscernible) than for the mere sound of the words. The heroine tries to steer the ship, she “transcends all the men,” and “pale and ascendant” she finally finds herself “strapped to the mast” as the song ends. I don’t know, maybe Lou was drunk and hallucinated he was Arthur Rimbaud when he wrote this one. I don’t hate it but I don’t love it either, and when it comes to people in boxes I’ll take the Velvet Underground’s sick joke song “The Gift” any day.
“Waves of Fear” is the LP’s best song, and in my opinion of the greatest guitar freak-outs you’ll ever hear. One of the greatest songs about drug withdrawal, too. It opens with a big bending guitar riff, the drums come in, then both guitars enter in all their glory, feedback sizzling like a live wire. Meanwhile Reed sings, “Waves of fear, squat on the floor/Looking for some pill, the liquor is gone/Blood trips from my nose, I can barely breathe/Waves of fear, I’m too scared to leave.” The song is one pounding mid-tempo din, then everything stops as Reed quickly sing-songs, “I’m too afraid to use the phone/I’m too afraid to put the light on/I’m so afraid I’ve lost control/I’m suffocating without a word.” Then it starts again, the horror, until in comes Quine with the best and most demented extended guitar solo since, well, “I Heard Her Call My Name.” He shreds and shoots out the lights, and his guitar sounds like derangement, poking and jabbing at your nerve endings like the embodiment of the biggest come down ever. It’s a piece of pure genius, and Reed’s crushing power chords provide the perfect backdrop, as does Perry’s drum thunder. And when it all fades out, you feel enervated, like you’ve gone through withdrawal yourself, but then you listen to it again, because the song isn’t withdrawal, it’s the drug itself.
“The Day John Kennedy Died” is mid-tempo and quiet, with lots of cool guitars in the background and some nice cymbal work by Perry as Lou recounts that ill-fated November day in 1963. I don’t care much for the first two stanzas, where Lou dreams of all kinds of pie-in-the-sky bullshit, but I know why they’re there. What I do like is the way Lou describes where he was the day the news from Dallas flashed on the TV and radio, and being a cynic I especially like his closing stanza, which features Reed at his most acidic and bitter: “I dreamed I was the president of these United States/I dreamed I was young and smart and it was not a waste/I dreamed that there was a point to life and to the human race/I dreamed that I could somehow comprehend that someone/Shot him in the face.” Let’s forget for a moment that Kennedy wasn’t shot in the face—that’s just poetic license on Reed’s part—and praise Lou for the song’s elegiac quality, its rich level of detail, and its simple but great chorus, which features Lou and some female backups singing “Ooh, the day John Kennedy died.”
Closer “Heavenly Arms” is a love song to Reed’s wife and a pretty darn good rocker to boot, with some nice power chords and Lou singing “Syyyl-vi-a/Syyyl-vi-a/Syyyl-vi-a/Syyyl-vi-a” on the chorus. The lyrics may be a bit hokey, but you can’t beat the melody with a hockey stick, the guitar interplay is wonderful as usual, and as Manilowesque as the line “Heavenly arms as soft as a love song” may be, the way Reed sings it, it doesn’t sound like treacle. His “Only a woman can love a man” is odd coming from a guy who came out of the closet only to climb back in, but all is forgiven when the female singers come in at the end, singing a modified doo-wop while another woman sings, “Heavenly arms reach out to hold me” and “Sylvia you mean so much to me” in an ethereally beautiful voice.
The Blue Mask is a top-notch LP, as Lou himself modestly pointed out: “I’m not above appreciating my own work. And I don’t think The Blue Mask is just a good album. It’s way above that.” Unfortunately, by the time Reed was recording follow-up Legendary Hearts, his legendary paranoia and hatred of sharing credit (in this case, with Quine) had reemerged, and he pulled a typically sleazy Reed stunt; namely, he went back into the studio and without telling anyone remixed the entire LP, to make himself stand out while mixing down or eliminating some of Quine’s best playing. When Quine heard the final mix he pulverized the cassette with a hammer, and joined the legions of others who found out the hard way that Reed was an untrustworthy bastard.
But hey, so he was paranoid and a creep. I love the novels of Louis Ferdinand Celine, and he was a vicious anti-semite. At his best Lou Reed produced some of the most innovative and finest rock music ever. He wrote “Rock’n’Roll,” for Christ’s sake. And he WAS rock’n’roll, at its best and worst. “Heroin” alone would have made him immortal. Ditto “Sweet Jane.” But he kept ‘em coming, and if he’s in Hell now the Devil has reason to be worried. Especially if they cut an album together. Lou just might sneak into the studio one night and wipe out the Dark One’s vocals. Because nobody, not even Lucifer himself, upstages the late, great Mr. Reed.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
