There are two great figures in American rock ‘n’ roll: Elvis Presley and Lou Reed.
The other great difference between Elvis and Lou is a difference in generations: Elvis was an entertainer, while Lou is an artist. Again and again, in reading about Elvis, one encounters–from even the most disinterested critics–a description of the power he is said to have emanated on stage. Lou, meanwhile, is out to please himself first and foremost. The audience has got to come to him. This essential difference in the two is shown most clearly in that, while Elvis did “Hound Dog” and “Mystery Train” until the day he died, Lou ignores his great work from the 60s, treating it as if it were recorded by someone else. That Lou is attempting to emphasize his position as a vital artist is not a defensible excuse.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Reed came to the Arie Crown Theatre recently, touring behind what has become his most popular record of the decade, New York. In the liner notes to that album, he writes that it is “meant to be listened to in one 58 minute (14 songs!) sitting as though it were a book or a movie. That phrase illustrates all of Reed’s current problems as an artist. As a Village Voice reviewer pointed out, why does this record have to be elevated to the level of a novel or film to be taken seriously? Why can’t one sit through a 58-minute performance of the record at home not as if it were a videotape but as if it were, yes, a fine piece of music? Yet there was Lou dressed in black suit jacket and wearing his froufrou New York version of the Lou Do–short in front, long and curly in back–pounding the point home, standing behind a small music stand that held his sheet music and lyrics, as if he were delivering a recital. And he was. He ran through, in order, almost all of the 14 songs on New York, leaving out 3 toward the end (“Sick of You,” “Hold On,” and “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim”). The performance wasn’t bad; neither was it passionless. Reed’s put together a fine band, and his new songs–while not his best work–still require a high level of commitment, and he was up to that. Yet sequencing that works in one’s living room often falls flat in the concert hall. After getting the crowd on its feet with “There Is No Time,” Reed walked to the back of the stage, took a seat, and moved straight on into “Last Great American Whale,” a terrific song but a bit of a drag on the tempo, and certainly on the momentum, of the show.
The Velvet Underground remains the one rock band that made music deserving of that overused adjective “existential.” Its songs were based on choices made and accepted–both by the characters Reed wrote of and in the music the band made to illustrate their lives. The magic of “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs,” early songs of decadence, lies in their unjudgmental acceptance of these lives as viable options–in the chuckle Reed delivers after saying, “It’s my wife and it’s my life” in the former, and in the line, “Ain’t love not given lightly” in the latter. By the time of the third album he is equally comfortable adopting the attitude of a Christian: in “Jesus,” Reed asks the Lord to “help me find my proper place” with the same straight-faced sincerity. That he found religion to be as acceptable an opiate as heroin is nothing startling; that he found that in the end, all life’s options lead to the same thing–delusion–is still one of the main sources of tension in his work.
Reed’s two subsequent works–New York included–have lacked those new sensations. They’ve been depressed, bitter, and deterministic. Compare the country folk of “New Sensations”–“arguing about football as I waved and went outside”–with the “redneck lunatics I see at the local bar” in “New Adventure,” and their children, a “tribe of mutant inbred piglets with cloven hooves.” The last line is, one could argue, somewhat humorous, but it’s the biting, satiric, mean-spirited humor that Reed’s come to be associated with, and perhaps that’s part of the problem.
