The Reeling Twilight: Ten Years Without Lou Reed
Remembering the wit, humor and acerbic heart of a New York rock legend
I was in Lou Reed’s Manhattan office, Sister Ray, in 1996, doing an extensive interview for his album Set The Twilight Reeling.
We talked a lot of rock ‘n’ roll, touched upon bipolarity, joked about him being at the White House for Bill Clinton’s inauguration and in a reception line talking to Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, who formed the Parents Resource Music Council. She asked Reed how we could best communicate with our children.
Reed thought it was a pointless question. He said he replied something along the lines of “We would have to sit down and discuss something like that over a bottle of scotch and maybe some crack.”
A funny, ballsy line. But Reed’s drinking and drugging days were in the rearview mirror. During an interview break, he asked if I wanted something to drink from the small fridge. As an addict in recovery, he said he had nothing alcoholic, but offered a non-alcoholic beer. I said, “Oh, great” and Reed’s response was, and I’m paraphrasing, “No it’s not great, but it’s what I have to drink.” He was right. It was not great.
Reed, in his later years, practiced tai chi and led a healthy lifestyle, trying perhaps to make up for lost time, rectify what had gone down over the decades. Yet the damage had been done, the singer-songwriter was suffering from severe liver disease. He had a transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio in April 2013 and a few weeks later declared himself “up and strong.” But that hope was short-lived; he was not to be among the 79 percent that survive the first year. He died 10 years ago on Oct. 27 at his home in East Hampton, NY, there with his wife Laurie Anderson.
The last time I saw Reed in concert was at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 2009, where he played, essentially, a support role. Reed, then 67, sat on a chair stage left and played electric guitar and synthesizer, complementing Anderson who played violin and synthesizer and talk-sang via a voice Vocoder. Their sound veered between a cacophonous storm and disquieting ambience, like the creaking of a ship’s masts. If music had a color, this would be dark gray. There was no banter between them, little chat with the crowd – they were not avant-rock’s answer to Johnny Cash and June Carter.
VIDEO: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson “The Lost Art of Conversation”
No hits. They wove 13 or so stories and songs together. One piece bled into another. Noise gave way to calm and then it reversed itself. There was no applause until the work was completed.
The two shared the spotlight effortlessly, often overlapping vocals and instrumental leads. In “Fenway” – that’s a local reference for us Bostonians – Anderson spoke of “an old married couple that always hated each other.” When they got divorced in their 90s, people asked “Why not earlier?” They answered: “Well, we wanted to wait until the children died.”
The couple certainly had a complementary sense of humor.
Reed and Anderson, who met in 1992, got married in 2008. One of their bonds, Reed once told me, was that she was as much a gearhead as him, albeit with a different skill set. “Laurie can run a [mixing] board; I couldn’t. She’s into effects and keyboards and all that; I’m into guitars and — not really extreme effects, but reverb and all that. We do talk gear. What we do more than that is play together. Melodic and heartfelt.”
I’ve seen Reed play in New York and Austin, but for most part, in Boston, my home city. And kinda his. A lot of rockers will tell you how much they love your city. They may spew it from the concert stage, blather about it on the radio, or tell it to the press. Remember the moment in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap when the band attempts to yak up the city it’s in and gets it wrong? It’s a fine line between reality and satire.
Reed, however, could talk about Boston and mean it. He may have been the quintessential New York City rocker, but Boston was just up the road. “I’ve got a real deep connection to it,” he told me in 1997. “I’d be in a lot of trouble if I didn’t have Boston. I got the history to prove it.”
Indeed, Boston was, with New York and Cleveland, one of the key markets for Reed’s seminal band, the Velvet Underground – there was a point where they played the city almost monthly. Sure, the Velvets were misunderstood, underappreciated and scorned elsewhere. And, yes, they’re revered now in retrospect – always referred to as seminal – but those were different times: the late ’60s, when the VU’s nervous, clattering, minimalistic art-rock ripped through the peace ‘n’ love vibe. Back then, the Velvets played the old Boston Tea Party on Lansdowne Street. In 2023, that’s the site of the House of Blues, and in 1997 the rock club Avalon.
“I like that it’s the old Tea Party,” said Reed. “I just found out the other day. We just played the Knitting Factory [in New York] for their 10th anniversary, and it was so great playing together we didn’t want to stop. I called up the person who books us and I said, `Is there someplace near here we can go and play for fun?’ We just like thrashing around. And that’s why we’re going to Boston.”
Avalon is where David Bowie, Reed’s pal and sometime collaborator, played when he wanted to kick out the jams in a small(er) room. “I just found that out,” Reed says. Bowie went to Avalon before he and his guests, including Reed, played Bowie’s 50th birthday bash at Madison Square Garden earlier in ‘97.
“How bad could it be?” said Reed of the Avalon gig, with his characteristic wit. “This is not a big deal — not a big show. It’s just we wanted to play for fun, which is, after all the only reason any of us got into it in the first place.”
The club gig, Reed said, will be somewhat different from his last time through town at the bigger Orpheum Theater, when he was touring to promote his latest album, Set the Twilight Reeling.
“There’s a bunch of different things,” he said. “We’re going to do an acoustic set at the beginning, a song from Berlin called ‘The Kids,’ and we’re doing ‘Perfect Day,’ which first appeared on Reed’s 1972 breakthrough solo album, Transformer.
As to the hits, so to speak? “I always want to satisfy the faithful because I know when I go to see people, I like to hear them do stuff I know also,” he said.
But last time through, I noted, he omitted two longtime staples, “Rock and Roll” and “Heroin.”
“It’s interesting what people think are staples,” mused Reed, with a laugh. “One man’s staple is another man’s spit. You never know. I enjoy playing them all. It’d be fun to do a tour where I did a bunch of [obscurities]. I’d like to do a song called ‘The Bells’ — things I don’t think anyone wants to hear about. It’s one of my favorite lyrics.”
At any rate, says Reed, “It’s just rock ‘n’ roll.” For Reed it was just a matter of fact and a matter of pride.
I interviewed Reed for the first time in 1980. I was a little intimidated – I knew his rep; he wasn’t exactly known as journalist-friendly. But we clicked and he could take as well as he could give. He enjoyed sparring. I asked what it was people most misunderstood about him. “I don’t think people realize the sense of humor that’s running through these [songs],” he said. “To say my sense of humor is dry is in itself a dry joke. I think I’m very funny. I find most things very funny.”
He did allow that humor was, often, very dark.
That interview came at the dawn of the Reagan era and the fear was out there that the Cold War would become a nuclear conflagration. Total annihilation. “We’d all be ashes,” Reed said, who’d just been reading U.S. News and World Report’s “How Ready to Fight?” issue. Reed termed it “their annual end of the world issue” and he likened those times, those anxieties, to the Bay of Pigs incident.
“Those of us who were in school were all ready to hop in cars and drive to the mountains and hide,” said Reed, who at the time was at Syracuse University studying film and drama, being mentored by poet Delmore Schwartz. “Wasn’t everything going to end then?”
“If you sat down and seriously thought about things,” he continued, “you’d drive yourself nuts. You’ve got to remember: This is New York, where a few weeks ago a guy got shot with a bow and arrow and there’s a guy running around with a meat clever down on the subway. What can you say about that?”
I said I wasn’t sure. But the question was really rhetorical and Reed jumped on it: “I think it at least shows some innovation on physical assaults on the citizenry – going back to more primitive weapons. Now, I would find it perhaps scary if they found out that somebody were laser-beaming people to death in the subway. A guy like that would be hard to catch.”
There have been numerous Reed biographies over the years and another is on the market, Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes, published earlier this month. It comes six years after Anthony DeCurtis’s Lou Reed: A Life. DeCurtis’s book, a complex, critical bio, which is excellent; I expect Hermes’s will be as well. He is the first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library’s Lou Reed archive, utilizing the library collections, including previously unheard recordings.
All this, says the publisher, MacMillan, gives us “a new Lou Reed,” a work about a man who was “a pioneer in living and writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.”
Can’t argue with any of that, though I’m not sure what Reed would make of the term “nonbinary sexuality,” not in the mainstream lexicon when he passed due to liver disease. I’m guessing he might wince.
Reed had fun with simple songs – “I Love You, Suzanne,” “Banging on My Drum,” “Egg Cream” – but his meat and potatoes was the deep dive, from Berlin to The Bells to The Blue Mask. From Set the Twilight Reeling to the collaboration with old VU partner John Cale, Songs for Drella.
“I remember reading this book by Saul Bellow where he was quoting Walt Whitman,” Reed told me, “and he said, `Until Americans and American poetry can deal with death, this is a country that has not grown up.’ There might be something to be said about that.”
Is the perception just too pervasive that rock ‘n’ roll is still supposed to mean simply “let the good times roll?”
“I’m saying you can have a real good time,” says Reed. “Just on a different level. A concept album of the rock equivalent of Eugene O’Neill, that’s what I’m talking about and that’s what I’m trying to do. You know, where is the rock equivalent of A Streetcar Named Desire? Is that such a far-fetched idea? Is that completely impossible? Why have any resistance to that? That’s like having your cake and eating it, as you get older: Be able to have that level of writing plus the fun of rock. Why would you want to listen to what an 18-year-old is getting off on?”
Maybe, it is ventured, there’s just too much music industry pressure to keep it simple, to dumb it down.
“Not to me,” says Reed. “What am I supposed to do? I’m not 18.”
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