that I developed a personal connection with the depth in Reed's words. There are probably other lyrics in the history of recorded music that surpass the genius of those in "Candy Says." But I don't know of them. Rather, I haven't obsessed over them as I have Reed's lyrics in "Candy Says", particularly the lines "what do you think I'd see/if I could walk away from me?" and "I'm set free to find a new illusion" from "I'm Set Free". (Perspective is such a cornerstone of Reed's writing--the perspective of the young, the wild, the newly sober, the lost, the dying, the denizens of Max's Kansas City, CBGB's and Warhol's Factory, the working class of New York and Berlin...etc) So, it was with the "Velvet Underground" record that I accepted the words of Lou Reed into my heart.
To be continued...
"Between Thought and Expression Lies A Lifetime"
When you are young and trying to shape your own identity, you either take in whatever influences are readily available to you or you go and seek out the people from whom you eventually cobble together a version of the person you would like to be. I didn't have anybody in my life that I could model myself after as a kid because I couldn't relate to anybody I knew. Everybody was either physically and/or emotionally unavailable. So I haunted libraries and record stores (probably to the annoyance of the people who worked at these establishments--"Fuck! There she is again.") and found that the only people I could identify with were writers and musicians. So when I came across Lou Reed, somebody who was both steeped in literature, and rock n roll, the two things that sustained me as a young person, I decided that he would be the template against which I could fashion the kind of person I wanted to be. It sounds a bit preposterous I know because when some people listen to "Waiting for the Man" or "Heroin," and especially if the latter is the only song they know from his recorded output, they imagine a junkie writing about what it's like to be a junkie and "how could that be the kind of person a young person would want to learn anything from except how to drive a syringe into the right vein?" But I dare anybody to try to express an experience as intense as taking heroin in a seven minute rock song and get as close to the marrow as Reed did with just words and sonic textures. It's one thing to write about something and another to be able to encapsulate that thing so succinctly that the audience is able to feel the experience you have written about. It's like "dancing about architecture". Only hypnotists and artists of Reed's caliber are able to make that kind of transference possible. I tried to find out everything I could about Lou Reed's influences because I aspired to write like that and immediately bought a copy of Hubert Selby's "Last Exit To Brooklyn" from the local bookstore. To my dissatisfaction, I had just been admitted to college by the skin of my teeth and was dragging myself to classes I did not have much interest in. I dropped out not long after my first year as a Journalism major, but I remember reading "Last Exit To Brooklyn" in my first semester and being simultaneously traumatized and thrilled by it. Holy shit did it contain some heavy stuff! I would take that once-banned book with its picture of a nude woman on the cover to my classes like a badge of honor. "Yeah, if you only knew the kind of wretchedness and depravity contained within the pages of this book, you would not sit so close to me because I'm reading it!" I could see the parallels in Reed and Selby's work--what Reed must have mined from Selby's fierce disregard for literary conventions. Between dropping out and resuming my studies, I spent a year and a half reading voraciously (Delmore Schwartz's stories among them), observing the cast of characters who loitered the streets in the red light district where I worked, and working things out internally. Taking Reed as my example, I would return from figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and major in English Literature, even contemplating a transfer to Syracuse University before quickly discovering the campus was encompassed almost exclusively by nature and white people. I would complete my studies in San Francisco and move to New York City where two months before Lou Reed's passing, I would encounter him one afternoon on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan and be too spineless to go over and tell him how much his words and his example enriched my life.
To be continued...
I always enjoyed reading or seeing clips of Lou Reed being interviewed by hapless journalists unprepared for the task of simply engaging in conversation with him. Reed's acerbic responses to interviewers who were too lazy to do their research on him made me giggle. I often thought, "They should have counted themselves lucky to be the object of his sharp-witted humor." It began to make sense to me after I read an article where he explained that he doesn't go into interviews with the intention of being difficult, but that if you have ever held a conversation with any self-respecting New Yorker, you'd understand the way he interacts with journalists. At its worst (where the bad interviewers are concerned) Reed's answers can be loaded with aggression, sarcasm, and/or dissolve into outright mockery of the journalist. But I've found, reading some of his more illuminating interviews recently (Neil Gaiman's interview and the 1992 Chicago Tribune interview in particular) that he could also let his guard down an inch (stop being "Lou Reed, the persona") and be the most intelligent and fascinating person to talk to. And having lived in New York for going on five years now, I can tell you that Lou Reed is absolutely right about the way New Yorkers talk to each other. You can get them to tell you anything you want to know, but first, you have to get in the ring with them. You gotta work for it, man. When I moved to New York from California, I gradually detected that overt difference in conversational tone between us mealy mouthed West Coast transplants and the unfiltered speech of the New York City natives, whose sentences are habitually punctuated by "fuckin'". When I discovered the music of the Velvets and Reed's solo work (I have more vivid, singular memories of listening to his albums than any other solo artist I can think of. Listening to "Transformer","Berlin," "Metal Machine Music," or "New York" still transports me back to very specific times in my life.), I also tried to learn more about the fecund artistic environment from which the Velvets incubated and sprang forth from. Coincidentally, there seemed to be a renewed interest or at least a resurgence of popularity for Pop Art around the same time that I began to dig deeper into the music. So I went to the Pop Art exhibits until they seemed repetitive and even defiantly sat through a screening of "Symphony of Sound (1967)," a film Andy Warhol made of The Velvet Underground practicing (by the time the film was over, there were about half a dozen people left in the theater including myself). I had romanticized the art and music scene of downtown New York in the 60's and 70's so much so that I didn't mind that the first paying job I ever held was in the seedy part of downtown San Francisco, where there were still pimps and hookers, crackheads, flophouses, homeless punks, and people who were generally just out of their goddamn minds, "'cause those were the characters Lou Reed wrote about!" I thought while cleaning the pee off of the carpet inside a thrift store dressing booth. And I can remember as clear as day as I sit here typing, the time this dude walked into the shop with short-cropped bleached blonde hair, black leather jacket and aviator glasses like Reed during his Rock and Roll Animal/Street Hassle period and for a second, in my head I thought, "Holy shit, that was Lou Reed," knowing full well that that was impossible.
To be continued.
"Between Thought and Expression Lies A Lifetime"
When you are young and trying to shape your own identity, you either take in whatever influences are readily available to you or you go and seek out the people from whom you eventually cobble together a version of the person you would like to be. I didn't have anybody in my life that I could model myself after as a kid because I couldn't relate to anybody I knew. Everybody was either physically and/or emotionally unavailable. So I haunted libraries and record stores (probably to the annoyance of the people who worked at these establishments--"Fuck! There she is again.") and found that the only people I could identify with were writers and musicians. So when I came across Lou Reed, somebody who was both steeped in literature, and rock n roll, the two things that sustained me as a young person, I decided that he would be the template against which I could fashion the kind of person I wanted to be. It sounds a bit preposterous I know because when some people listen to "Waiting for the Man" or "Heroin," and especially if the latter is the only song they know from his recorded output, they imagine a junkie writing about what it's like to be a junkie and "how could that be the kind of person a young person would want to learn anything from except how to drive a syringe into the right vein?" But I dare anybody to try to express an experience as intense as taking heroin in a seven minute rock song and get as close to the marrow as Reed did with just words and sonic textures. It's one thing to write about something and another to be able to encapsulate that thing so succinctly that the audience is able to feel the experience you have written about. It's like "dancing about architecture". Only hypnotists and artists of Reed's caliber are able to make that kind of transference possible. I tried to find out everything I could about Lou Reed's influences because I aspired to write like that and immediately bought a copy of Hubert Selby's "Last Exit To Brooklyn" from the local bookstore. To my dissatisfaction, I had just been admitted to college by the skin of my teeth and was dragging myself to classes I did not have much interest in. I dropped out not long after my first year as a Journalism major, but I remember reading "Last Exit To Brooklyn" in my first semester and being simultaneously traumatized and thrilled by it. Holy shit did it contain some heavy stuff! I would take that once-banned book with its picture of a nude woman on the cover to my classes like a badge of honor. "Yeah, if you only knew the kind of wretchedness and depravity contained within the pages of this book, you would not sit so close to me because I'm reading it!" I could see the parallels in Reed and Selby's work--what Reed must have mined from Selby's fierce disregard for literary conventions. Between dropping out and resuming my studies, I spent a year and a half reading voraciously (Delmore Schwartz's stories among them), observing the cast of characters who loitered the streets in the red light district where I worked, and working things out internally. Taking Reed as my example, I would return from figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and major in English Literature, even contemplating a transfer to Syracuse University before quickly discovering the campus was encompassed almost exclusively by nature and white people. I would complete my studies in San Francisco and move to New York City where two months before Lou Reed's passing, I would encounter him one afternoon on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan and be too spineless to go over and tell him how much his words and his example enriched my life.
To be continued...
I always enjoyed reading or seeing clips of Lou Reed being interviewed by hapless journalists unprepared for the task of simply engaging in conversation with him. Reed's acerbic responses to interviewers who were too lazy to do their research on him made me giggle. I often thought, "They should have counted themselves lucky to be the object of his sharp-witted humor." It began to make sense to me after I read an article where he explained that he doesn't go into interviews with the intention of being difficult, but that if you have ever held a conversation with any self-respecting New Yorker, you'd understand the way he interacts with journalists. At its worst (where the bad interviewers are concerned) Reed's answers can be loaded with aggression, sarcasm, and/or dissolve into outright mockery of the journalist. But I've found, reading some of his more illuminating interviews recently (Neil Gaiman's interview and the 1992 Chicago Tribune interview in particular) that he could also let his guard down an inch (stop being "Lou Reed, the persona") and be the most intelligent and fascinating person to talk to. And having lived in New York for going on five years now, I can tell you that Lou Reed is absolutely right about the way New Yorkers talk to each other. You can get them to tell you anything you want to know, but first, you have to get in the ring with them. You gotta work for it, man. When I moved to New York from California, I gradually detected that overt difference in conversational tone between us mealy mouthed West Coast transplants and the unfiltered speech of the New York City natives, whose sentences are habitually punctuated by "fuckin'". When I discovered the music of the Velvets and Reed's solo work (I have more vivid, singular memories of listening to his albums than any other solo artist I can think of. Listening to "Transformer","Berlin," "Metal Machine Music," or "New York" still transports me back to very specific times in my life.), I also tried to learn more about the fecund artistic environment from which the Velvets incubated and sprang forth from. Coincidentally, there seemed to be a renewed interest or at least a resurgence of popularity for Pop Art around the same time that I began to dig deeper into the music. So I went to the Pop Art exhibits until they seemed repetitive and even defiantly sat through a screening of "Symphony of Sound (1967)," a film Andy Warhol made of The Velvet Underground practicing (by the time the film was over, there were about half a dozen people left in the theater including myself). I had romanticized the art and music scene of downtown New York in the 60's and 70's so much so that I didn't mind that the first paying job I ever held was in the seedy part of downtown San Francisco, where there were still pimps and hookers, crackheads, flophouses, homeless punks, and people who were generally just out of their goddamn minds, "'cause those were the characters Lou Reed wrote about!" I thought while cleaning the pee off of the carpet inside a thrift store dressing booth. And I can remember as clear as day as I sit here typing, the time this dude walked into the shop with short-cropped bleached blonde hair, black leather jacket and aviator glasses like Reed during his Rock and Roll Animal/Street Hassle period and for a second, in my head I thought, "Holy shit, that was Lou Reed," knowing full well that that was impossible.
To be continued.
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