When I proposed marriage to someone with a song, Lou Reed did the work for me. I handed over a small mirror with a handwritten note, which said only, “I’ll be your mirror.” The lyrics sum up the work of marriage better than any song I know: “When you think the night has seen your mind, that inside you’re twisted and unkind, let me stand to show that you are blind. Please put down your hands, because I see you.”
According to a 1998 Times piece, “Mirror” was also Reed’s favorite Reed, out of hundreds of songs. Between his recordings with the Velvet Underground and his solo albums, Reed’s work, song by song, spawned bands and genres. The famous quote from Brian Eno that “only thirty thousand people bought the Velvet Underground’s début, but they all started bands” is not wrong; if anything, it is conservative, though we have to range over many albums to size up Reed’s impact. “What Goes On” gave us the Feelies; “Sister Ray” gave us Spacemen 3; the third, self-titled Velvet Underground album gave us Galaxie 500, and maybe a chunk of the independent rock music made in New Zealand during the late nineteen-eighties. Reed’s tendency toward structural simplicity married to noise, and a faith that no word was above his listener’s head, is at the root of so much music that I am scared to make a list, in fear of the counterlists that will point out everyone who is missing.
On the Pixies’ 1987 début, “Come On Pilgrim,” Frank Black sang, “I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed.” That’s a fairly solid citation, so we’ve got one, for sure. We could venture further and say that David Byrne, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, and Ian Curtis would have thought very differently about music if not for Reed’s existence. The real list of who loved Lou Reed songs is probably something like “everyone,” though that doesn’t do much for anyone looking to find something to listen to right now. His work spans my life and is woven into it, and it is impossible to imagine my own imagination without thinking of the direction in which Reed told me to look. Some people have Dylan, some have Tori, others have Kanye. I started with Lou, and he rarely failed me, even when he failed me. (Hell, I liked “Lulu,” give or take twenty minutes.) Dylan, in the director Todd Haynes’s formulation “wasn’t there,” which is a brilliant plan. Reed, for better or worse, was always right in front of us, no different from anyone, except that he had some pretty nice guitars. But he barely pretended to be a singer, and the simplicity of those songs lulled so many of us into thinking we could do that, because, hey, there wasn’t even a third chord on “Heroin,” just two! That isn’t so hard.
Reed died this weekend at the age of seventy-one, on Long Island, likely from complications following a liver transplant in May. He is survived by his wife, the artist and musician Laurie Anderson. The measure of his influence and importance dwarfs the news item, the obituary, the tribute. He is everywhere. As a kid not even in my teens, I didn’t like hippies and their endless noodling and phony optimism, so Reed was my man. (It took me a few decades to realize that “Sister Ray,” at seventeen minutes, was pretty noodly, which helped me learn to love so much of the music that I had foolishly scorned as only a young man can scorn things.) When, as a teen-ager, I decided that Reed had figured out part of what I wanted to figure out, I sat at my father’s electric typewriter and transcribed the lyrics to every Velvet Underground album. Transcribing “The Gift” was a task that changed me, as it happened. The lyrics, written by Reed, are recited only in the left channel, by the bassist John Cale. I had to pin the balance to the side to hear Cale’s voice, stop, write, start again. When I was done, I realized that the song was about a man named Waldo Jeffers who has mailed himself to his lover in a box. At low volume, you might not even notice the story at all. And so, what was more surprising, that you could hide a short story on a rock record, or that you could release something so grisly on a record? (I won’t spoil it if you’re new to the Velvets.)
Reed may have cited Joyce as an influence, but he kept the largest part of his faith in the cadence of conversation, the familiar and fat-free way that we speak to each other. Everyone could hear him without seeing it written down. Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, Fiona Apple, Malkmus, John Darnielle—the list begins to feel vertiginous and potentially incomplete when you try listing all the people who learned from Reed’s love of concrete detail and his faith in direct, personal address. Houston’s Scarface, as good a storyteller as rap has known, tweeted today: “Lou Reed was a brilliant song writer may he rest in peace.”
You can always imagine Reed and his characters talking directly to you, as if they were standing next to the song as it played, not entirely convinced by this whole “music” scam. “Hey, white boy, what you doing uptown?,” an unnamed character asked him in “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a song about someone looking for the pusher who may be the closest he has to a friend. “Hey, white boy, you chasing our women around?” The “Lou” voice answers: “Oh, pardon me, sir—it’s furthest from my mind. I’m just looking for a dear, dear friend of mine.” That combination of faux Victorian syntax and even phonier deference is pure Reed. Often, when I find myself wandering around, looking for an address I can’t find, that “dear, dear friend of mine” echoes in my head.
Summoning courage through words was a Reed songwriting trademark. His songs are always tougher than he is, and he never disguises that. When, as an older teen, I sang for the first time in public, I performed “I’m Waiting for the Man,” because it seemed like something to sing if you didn’t have much range (I have zero) and a good choice if you wanted to sounded tougher than you were. On 1982’s “The Blue Mask,” Reed gave up trying to sound tough entirely, and sang about his alcoholism, without metaphor, on “Underneath the Bottle”: “Seven days make a week, on two of them I sleep, I can’t remember what the heck I was doing. I got a bruise on my leg, from I can’t remember when. I fell down some stairs. I was lying underneath the bottle.” (A New Yorker fact-checker would call this last bit a metaphor, as he wasn’t, as far as we can tell, actually lying under a bottle, so that may be up to the referees.)
The woman I gave the Reed lyric to said yes, but not everything lasts—not even Lou. So I’m listening to “What Goes On” now, as loud as I can. I can’t imagine that these songs will ever stop starting new bands, new ideas, new counter-arguments, and new lives.
Photograph by Chris Felver/Getty.
