I was 16 years old and living in Fairfax, Virginia when I first heard The Velvet Underground’s debut album. It was 1967 and I was ready for something, anything, to slough off the teenage suburban blues that encased me like dead skin. I had no exact idea of what I was listening to when I listened to that album but whatever wild form of rock and roll it was it dug down deep into me and altered something very essential in my nature.
The Velvet Underground’s music was literally electrifying. Their songs were like subatomic particles saturating my cells and transforming me into some kind of new being. For 18 hours straight I listened to that album while eating bennies (benzedrine). Sitting and spinning in circles on a smooth wooden floor while the music hummed, droned, surged and sparked all around and within me.
The electronic equivalent of one of William Burroughs word viruses or Rimbaud’s poetry as a “derangement of the senses,” the music of The Velvet Underground infected me and scrambled my brain forever.
I was indoctrinated into the splendid darkness, muttering the Warholian oath of Doctor Frankenstein: “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder.” Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and Nico were turning me into a teenage Frankenstein and I was ready to thrust myself into the “meat pit of mortal desire” with a monstrous passion. I was only 16 but I knew how to nasty.
A year earlier, The Fugs had prepped me for the surgery performed by The Velvet Underground and now the transformation was well on its way. I left the comfort and deadly dullness of suburbia for the untamed streets of New York City, landing in an apartment on West Houston street that I shared with a drag queen and a runaway friend of mine that had left the ‘burbs months before me. The streets were teeming with young hippies, rockers and weirdos and I felt immediately at home. This was a world in which we were all waiting for our man, whether he was a drug dealer, guru or lover….or all three. There was a jittery anticipation in the air like when you were about to cop something that would get you high or get you by or just make you thrilled to be alive. And that anticipation was its own high and very much like a song by The Velvet Underground.
Hey baby, don’t you holler, don’t you ball and shout
I’m feeling good, I’m gonna work it on out
I’m feeling good, feeling so fine
until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time
I’m waiting for my man
I’m waiting for my man
I’m waiting for my man
man-man-man-man-man-man-man
As much as I was formed and inspired by The Velvet Underground as an artist, it was Lou Reed specifically that made me want to become a songwriter. The title of his album “Transformer” was truth in advertising, it encouraged me to become something I wanted but never thought I could be: a rock singer.
Lou wasn’t a great singer and neither am I. So what. He made songwriting appear simple. It ain’t. But Lou made the art of song attainable by taking everyday reality and finding within it the riff that made it extraordinary. Like Warhol did with soup cans. The shape, the color, the essential “itness” of it. There is nothing in life that is artless. At certain angles, even shit shines.
Lou wrote about stuff, the stuff of life, the stuff I wanted to write about. The unspeakable stuff, the real stuff. I wasn’t interested in music that soothed the savage breast, I wanted to write savage music about breasts…and cocks and city streets and dark tunnels winding their way underneath those streets. Lou Reed made it all seem possible. You could write about your life while dancing to it. You could be both profane and divine. Lou found the spiritual in the dirty boulevards, Coney Island, hookers, junkies, and the whole of the wild side. Poetry was everywhere, under the mattress with a bag of dope and a blood-stained tee-shirt, in the shadow of the Berlin wall and inside the tenement where
Caroline says
while biting her lip
Life is meant to be more than this
and this is a bum trip
Lou Reed, more than any creative being on the planet, let me know it was possible I could become a rock and roller. And he did that for a lot of people. It has been said that The Velvet Underground spawned more bands than it sold albums. It’s true. Lou opened up the field for millions of us. There are few modern singer/songwriters that haven’t been influenced by his direct way of telling a story in song without hyped-up sentiment or maudlin platitudes. His hard-edged, cynical style, shot through with harsh beauty and tenderness, created a new level of sophistication and adultness in rock that hadn’t much been heard before him. He cut through the cute shit and talked about the raw side of city life like Cole Porter on a cocktail of crystal meth and Seconal. And yet for all the tough guy stance, here was a cat that could write lines like:
Thought of you as my mountain top,
Thought of you as my peak.
Thought of you as everything,
I’ve had but couldn’t keep.
I’ve had but couldn’t keep.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see,
I’d put you in the mirror,
I put in front of me.
I put in front of me.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Beneath the black leather veneer and dismissive smirk of Lou Reed there was something vulnerable and fragile. It was covered up out of necessity. The shit he wrote about, the shit he lived, could kill you. But you can’t write with the insight he did about the darker side of life, the lost souls and broken hearts, without having an incredible sense of empathy and love. On the surface, Reed was a badass. But somewhere a satellite of love was beaming down signals and Reed was there to catch them….and to beam them out to other satellites, of which I was one.