Busload of Faith: Lou Reed’s New York Turns 35

Reflections on his finest album of the 1980s

January 10, 2024January 10, 2024 Craig Peters 1 Comment 1989, 35th Anniversary, Dirty Blvd., Halloween Parade, Lou Reed, New York

Lou on the cover of Musicland’s Music Express April 1989 (Image: Etsy)

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Lou Reed released 22 studio albums in his career, roughly a third of which are defensible as his greatest record.

Transformer, Berlin and Coney Island Baby are easy choices for his top five. Street Hassle and Songs for Drella are right up there, too, while Magic and Loss and The Blue Mask have their fair share of defenders.

For my money, though, New York is the one album from Reed’s exceptional catalog I’d choose to bring to the proverbial desert island. Every track is a gem.

Released January 10, 1989, New York is the flip side of Manhattan, filmmaker Woody Allen’s romantic love letter to New York. Reed explores some of the city’s filthiest nooks and crannies and hard truths toward which even lifelong city dwellers prefer to turn a blind eye, all filtered through a fierce blend of brutal honesty and world-wise cynicism.

The album opens with “Romeo Had Juliette,” sonically signaling the stripped-down bare-bones rock and roll sound that permeates the album. We get a clear sense of the city that Reed is singing about on the entire record: “Manhattan’s sinking like a rock / Into the filthy Hudson what a shock / They wrote a book about it / They said it was like ancient Rome.”

As for Romeo Rodriguez? Reed creates a three-dimensional character in just three lines: “A diamond crucifix in his ear / Is used to help ward off the fear / That he has left his soul in someone’s rented car.” (Reed may well be one of rock’s most underrated lyricists.) As crack dealers ply their trade on the steaming streets outside, Romeo performs a do-it-yourself abortion, cleaning up “the mess that he has dropped / Into the life of lithesome Juliette Bell.”

What a way to kick off an album.

“Halloween Parade” is up next, taking us to the annual Greenwich Village tradition that began in 1974 and has its roots in the city’s gay community. Reed uses it as a powerful way to acknowledge how that community was ravaged by the AIDS crisis, which at the time of the album’s release was still largely being ignored by government officials as it was horrifically claiming more and more lives every day.

The singer is struggling with reconciling the gaudy happiness of the parade (“There’s a Greta Garbo and an Alfred Hitchcock / And some black Jamaican stud / There’s five Cinderellas and some leather drags / I almost fell into my mug”) with the loss experienced in the time since last year’s parade (“This celebration somehow gets me down / Especially when I see you’re not around”). Anyone who’s ever lost a loved one will find the emotions here all too familiar.

“Dirty Blvd.” introduces us to Pedro, one of 10 kids being raised in poverty by an abusive father. “Pedro dreams of being older and killing the old man / But that’s a slim chance / He’s going to the boulevard” to deal drugs. Dealing on the boulevard is the dream of others being raised in similar circumstances, but not Pedro. At night, Pedro stares at the cracked ceiling and dreams of flying away from the dirty boulevard, as if he could magically will himself into a better life.

VIDEO: Lou Reed “Dirty Blvd.”

The song segues effortlessly into “Endless Cycle,” turning the songwriting eye from child to parents and we see that so many like Pedro never had a chance. The problems of the father and mother are passed down to the son and daughter, with horrible results. “The man if he marries will batter his child / And have endless excuses / The woman sadly will do much the same / Thinking that it’s right and it’s proper.” They may start out with some good intentions (check out “Beginning of a Great Adventure”), but the end result is as full of misery as it is inevitable: “The truth is they’re happier when they’re in pain / In fact, that’s why they got married.”

In the midst of all this awfulness, “There Is No Time” is a call to arms, a cry for action in the face of such overwhelming widespread suffering and pain. But, in another dose of brutal honesty and world-wise cynicism, Reed acknowledges in “Busload of Faith” that the cry falls on deaf ears. Because no one and nothing is dependable — not friends, family, churches, intelligence … well, not exactly nothing: “You can depend on cruelty / Crudity of thought and sound / You can depend on the worst always happening / You need a busload of faith to get by.”

If there’s any downside to this album 35 years later, it’s that some of the name-checking might require a bit of Googling for younger listeners. The title of “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim” refers to Austrian politician and diplomat Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981 who was banned from entering the U.S. on April 27, 1987, because of revelations about his involvement with the Nazi party and alleged participation in war crimes.

The song also references Rev. Jesse Jackson referring to New York City as “Hymietown” in a January 1984 interview with a Washington Post reporter. Yep: Lou’s singing about anti-Semitism here, and his references to Jackson’s 1988 Common Ground and Common Sense speech make his condemnation of Jackson’s hypocrisy all the more powerful.

But the upsides are even higher than they were in 1989: The passing of three-and-a-half decades has honed Reed’s lyrics to a finer razor-sharpness, making many of the social and political observations ring truer. The final few lines of “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim” resonate strongly in light of today’s highly polarized politics: “Or is it true / The Common Ground for me is without you / Oh is it true / There’s no Ground Common enough for me and you.”

Commercially speaking, New York was a modest success for Reed. It rose to #40 on the album charts and was certified gold. It won Reed a 1990 Grammy nomination for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (Don Henley took the trophy for The End of the Innocence), but it’s hardly the kind of album that wins Grammys.

It is, however, the kind of masterpiece that belongs in everyone’s music collection. Go give it a listen. And, as Reed writes in the liner notes, listen to it “in one 58-minute 14-song setting, as though it were a book or a movie.” If you haven’t heard it in years, you’ll be surprised by how fresh it sounds … and if it’s your first time listening, I envy you.

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Craig Peters

Craig Peters has been writing about music, pro wrestling, pop culture and lots of other things since the Jimmy Carter administration. He shook Bruce Springsteen’s hand in 2013, once had Belinda Carlisle record the outgoing message on his answering machine, and wishes he hadn’t been so ignorant about the blues when he interviewed Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983.