Zigzag, #18, March 1971
EYES, IN NEW YORK, BETRAY, OR REVEAL, MORE OF A PERSON THAN ANYWHERE I’ve been in Europe. In the subways, most people avert any gaze, or else their eyes flicker and judder, subjects of pain and pressure. It’s commonplace to meet professionally successful people who, as they talk, seem to focus on a point six feet beyond your head. And then there are the people whose spirit seems to have gone to lunch. They have the eyes of fish. They have abandoned the pretense of contact.
I had this in mind at the Electric Circus, December 30, watching Little Richard after 15 years of listening to his records, wondering how he came across. He wears black make-up on his lips and around his eyes, to intensify his stare. He flashed a glance, as he sang, at pretty much everyone in the audience. And his eyes said: Am I not a star? The star? And the audience, partly phased out by sleeplessness, partly by his gall, nevertheless said: Amen. He’d found his way of staying alive.
Lou Reed, too. You’ve only to listen to Velvet Underground albums to know what’s been in his mind, these last years. I met him in Danny Fields’ office, at Atlantic Records, on Broadway at 60th. And as he spoke, I was continually drawn to his eyes. They’ve as steady a gaze as those of anyone I’ve met. And they reveal the intensity, and the courtesy, that the eyes of the very best journalists have; the journalists who have the ability to see and hear anything, however painful, and yet make sense of it.
I’d written an article which proposed that the extreme terror and violence of Velvet Underground songs derived, not from imagination, but from his journalist’s ability to mirror what there was—and is—to see in New York. I showed it to him tentatively. He read it and put it down, and looked at me, and said, “How did you know?” Most rock music writers go into their heads to create songs. In the old days, Lou carried a notebook everywhere. Years ago, he rented a $29 a month room on Ludlow Street. He and John Cale listened to the Who, and said to each other: that’s it. And decided to put content into their songs, so that people listening would start up (and Lou mimed the reaction, hand to ear) and say, “What’s that? Did you hear that?” That was what was on Lou’s mind when he wrote “Heroin” and “The Black Angel’s Death Song” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” for the first Velvets album. The last song, he said, is the key to the album.
And he sang the words that Nico sings, on that album:
I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are
In case you don’t know.
He wanted to make a connection on that album, he said, so that kids with blasted minds could lift their confusion into the music. So that the music could feel their pain.
Did it work like that, with songs like “Heroin,” I asked? Isn’t it true that kids came up to you after Velvet’s performances, and asked you where they could get heroin? More than that, Lou said, kids would say: hey, I shot up to your song. Hey, I nearly OD’d on that song. (Kids of 13 or 14.) “Heroin” was never a song I cared to sing too often, Lou said. Audiences would always ask for it; even this summer, when the Velvets played each night at Max’s Kansas City, in Chelsea (NY). Maybe the kids did feel a connection with the song, which lifted off their sense of isolation. Maybe. There’s a repeated line in “Heroin”:
I guess
I just don’t know
And I guess
I just don’t know.
Who knows? There are now reckoned to be 50,000 people in New York with a dependence on heroin. Mayn’t they have a song of their own?
Listen, Lou said: I was never a heroin addict. He paused. I had a toe in that situation, he said. Enough to see the tunnel. The tunnel downwards? I asked. The vortex, yes, he answered. “Heroin” isn’t an up song, he said. But I think he knew that that statement wasn’t true. “Heroin” is neither, of itself, up nor down. It’s descriptive. A mirror. People will make of it what they will. At least it’s illumination.
Lou’s notebook. In those days, he said, people he hung around with, had a thing about magic markers. They’d sit about, looking to make pictures of their dreams with magic markers. And Lou would sit outside them with his notebook. They assumed he was making magic markings. In fact, he said, I was writing down all these weird things that people were saying. Being a journalist of the everyday situation of people in extreme circumstances. Or, rather, of people in an extreme city, who were, in their vulnerability, experiencing its extremity. Because they had no means to make a connection with its luxuries. Who were (and are) threatened with the dissolution of their minds, by what Lou called “the jim-jams of this town.” People who were open wounds.
To be a writer, and to be a censor: those are two different occupations. A writer should reveal what he sees, hears, feels. Sometimes a writer has an obligation to be reckless. Unchronicled, misfortunes fester. But at the same time, Lou had no reckoning of himself as a doctor, lancing moral boils.
He spoke, at some length, of Ray Davies as a writer he felt some affinity with. In obvious respects, the Velvets and the Kinks are not alike. The music of the Kinks is a spare, unadventurous vehicle for Ray. The Velvet’s music, on the other hand, is crucial to Lou, and John Cale, musically, [and] at least matched Lou’s writing ability. All the same, there are connections. Lou said his idea was always to make each Velvets album a book; each song a little play. Books, films, records: he happened to choose records as a vehicle. So that kids could, listening, get that shock of recognition. “Wow, did you hear what that man is singing?” To steal their unaware consciousness.
Lou told a story about a girl called Alaska. (Alaska? That’s right.) There was this story from England, Lou said, about a girl whose brain exploded from amphetamine. When the surgeon opened her head, for the autopsy, the brain was all—all scribed, as if by those rows of needles that record your physical functions in laboratories. Lou said that Alaska was like that. He wrote a song about her, which he never recorded, called “Stephanie Says,” which revealed the secret of Alaska’s name. She was cold through and through. The material for the song is in Lou’s notebook. He thought of publishing it once, he said, but those crazy days are passed now.
Compare Lou’s songs with Ray Davies songs like “Do You Remember Walter” and “People Take Pictures of Each Other.” Same style, same type of mind, putting down detail, keeping off generalities. Writing about people in two very different cities; London and New York. One big difference: Lou brings the experience of his songs closer to himself, by singing in the first or second person, narrating events as if they are happening at the time he sings them, rather than in terms of their being past. This technique, with the Velvet’s music, which on the first album sustains a tingling drone, obliges the listener to find sensations in himself which correspond to the state of mind of Lou Reed’s singing alter ego. It forces the listener into the events of the song, as if they are happening to him. How’s this, for example, for the paranoia of the mainliner, standing at Lexington and 125 Street:
Hey white boy, what you doin’ up town
Hey white boy, you chasin’ our women around . . .
Oh, pardon me, sir, it’s furthest from my mind;
I’m just looking for a dear, dear friend of mine. . . .
The dear, dear friend is, of course, his connection.
The Velvets’ first three albums all contained one track much longer than the rest, and therefore which set itself aside from them, and which infected the whole album with its complexity and ambiguity. The kind of track that encourages people to say (as Lou put it): “Wow, Lou, I really liked your last album, except for (. . . ).” On the first album, this track is “European Son (to Delmore Schwartz)”; on the second “Sister Ray”; on the third “Murder Mystery.” On the fourth album (Loaded) “New Age” might have developed into such a track, but it was edited by the rest of the band after Lou had left.
At one time, I wanted to be a novelist, Lou said. But I could never sustain that number of words. We were talking about Borges: Lou was intrigued that Borges had the ability to put the thought that most novels require, into 12 pages. What I was after with tracks like these, Lou said, was to attempt my own “Waste Land.” The way I’d put it, Lou was attempting such a work that Susan Sontag most admires: whose surface is its structure, and which resists being pulled apart and reduced to anything other than what it itself is. That sounds both vague and pretentious. How else to put it? Sontag’s idea is that creative work, to succeed, should be seen in terms of having its own life. If a piece of creative work can be assimilated (by its audience or by a critic) then it is merely commentary on an existing state of seeing reality, which depends on previous perceptions, cannot be altered. But as far as he himself was concerned, Lou was having brand new perceptions.
“Murder Mystery,” for example. Did you know (I said to Lou) that, for sure, people in London, Paris, Hamburg, and Munich, and places north, east, west, and south, were crouching over their amps, switching from channel to channel, trying to make those words out? Oh, wow, really? said Lou. (And looked pleased.) Stereo! It suddenly came on him, like magic. “European Son” and “Sister Ray” had developed techniques of word—and instrument—overlay. And, on “The Gift,” John Cale recites the story of Waldo’s sad end on one channel (or, I should say, more clearly on one channel) while the music is on the other channel. Lou’s idea, with “Murder Mystery,” was to use words one way on one channel, another way on the other, synch them, so that listeners would find their way to listening first on one channel, then on the other, and afterwards on both. The first dialectical rock ’n’ roll track. Left hand speaker equals thesis, right hand speaker equals antithesis. And the synthesis is in the listener’s own head. So that there is no such thing as the meaning, objectively, of “Murder Mystery.” Its meaning, for any listener, depends where his head is at.
Not, Lou said, that it exactly worked out like that. After recording the voice tracks, he found that one spoke at twice the speed of the other, as if one were recorded at 15, one at 71/2. He decided that he should proceed assuming that this difference was meaningful. More than once, as he spoke, Lou mentioned his forgetfulness and impatience. Neither of us could tell whether this was a virtue or a fault. The right line between instinct and mathematics has to be drawn arbitrarily. On the other hand, it’s too easy to make a mystique of mistakes. (Bird’s squeaks, and Lady Day’s cracked voice, add to our sense of their tragedy, not to the quality of their music.) I think Lou should have recorded both voice tracks of “Murder Mystery” at the same speed.
Lou Reed’s ambitious tracks succeed, not because they are an extended, or elegant, illustration of any listener’s existing perceptual framework, but because they themselves indicate a previously unde-lineated perceptual framework. The songs are part of an attitude of mind, part of an idea of reality, previously unexpressed, certainly in rock ’n’ roll. They are not bendable towards existing ideals. They infect the mind of the listener with their immaculate structure, and work in terms of bending the listener’s mind towards them. That’s what’s meant by their having a life of their own.
And Lou acknowledged that such a life exists independently of his own intentions. For example, we were talking about a line in “Heroin.” Some months ago, I had spent a couple of evenings talking to John Cale. Filled with enthusiasm to be meeting a founder-member of the Velvets, I recited some of “Heroin,” saying how amazing the imagery was, corresponding as it does to a sense of impossible alienated hope:
I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I’d sailed the Tonkin seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land into that.
No, said John. Not “Tonkin.” “Darkened.” No, no, I said. It was definitely “Tonkin.” Listen, said John, gently nettled. I stood behind Lou singing that song, hundreds of times. It’s “darkened.” Well, I thought to myself, I hear “Tonkin,” I prefer “Tonkin,” and so, as far as I’m concerned, it is “Tonkin.” That quick reference to a kind of Oriental Atlantis, flavored with a sense of Tongs, all those exotic evils kids read about in trash magazines: that’s right for the song.
Meeting Lou, I mentioned all this to him. Yes, it is “darkened,” he said. And, at the same time, warmed to the idea of “Tonkin.” I needn’t be the best poet of my own ideas, he said. And he said that listeners often improved his songs.
And also detected things in his songs, or in him, which he wasn’t aware of. Another example. The first line of “Heroin” is “I don’t know just where I’m going.” After a Velvets concert one time, a kid rushed up to Lou, flashing excitement, and said: you changed the song. Why did you change the song? And Lou said: What’re you talking about? And the kid said: you sang, “I know just where I’m going.” And Lou said: nonsense, you are mistaken. Then, later, he sang the song to himself, and discovered that the kid was right. The change in the song corresponded, Lou decided, to a change in himself which he had not up to that time acknowledged. He was beginning to see the light, rather than the tunnel. The song was singing him. That is (to say it again), the song has a life of its own.
There again, take the made-up “Chinese” phrases in “The Black Angel’s Death Song.” They belong in the song. In a context saturated with imagery, they cool out the song, make its texture more open; allow the listener to find his own level and his own thoughts. As with “Sister Ray” and “Murder Mystery,” the song is a mine in which ore of a particular nature can be quarried. To go back to the beginning of this article: Lou’s style strikes me as courteous. In the midst of a music which has an incandescent and relentless beat, Lou creates space. Every time Lou’s long songs are played, they sound different, and can never be pinned down, because they contain a factor which varies each time they are played: the listener’s mind.
Is this writing trying to be an intellectual bathyscape dive into the Velvets’ music, or a fave rave? A reasonable question. I can only answer it by mentioning Constantine Radoulovitch. Aside from Lou and Danny and me, in Danny’s office, and Karin Berg from WBAI, there was also Constantine. He sat on the floor of the small room, by the door, knees hunched into his chin, holding a big book. As the conversations went on, plus telephone calls in and out, he’d take surreptitious photographs. Or glance up at the poster on the wall, advertising the Velvets’ summer gig at Max’s. Constantine lives in Arlington, Virginia. He was very tired, having taken a day off from the record store where he works; and traveled up starting in the early morning. He was also very hungry. If only I wasn’t so tired and hungry, he said, I’d be enjoying this so much more. But I am enjoying it. Constantino’s book contained all the Velvets’ lyrics, plus commentary; two years ago, he heard White Light/White Heat, and he’s been listening to the Velvets ever since. He is 17 years old. So is Constantine’s interest intellectual, or fanatical? The answer is: both. That’s the way the Velvets get you. Why don’t you write a thesis on the Velvets at school? I asked him. Oh, I have, he said. Thirty pages. The teacher had little enthusiasm for it, he said.
As he spoke, Lou was saying that, this last summer, he’d found less and less enthusiasm, too; in his case, for continuing with the Velvets. His decision to split was influenced by Brian Jones’ death, and I’d guess confirmed by the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Many rock musicians have been hurt, or paralyzed, by having their persons sucked up and consumed by the vortex of their personae. Loaded was Lou’s good-bye to the Velvets; he’d decided, in time, to become himself again. To proceed from beginning to see the light, to the beginning of a new age. He played some tapes of his new songs, and showed me a poem he’d written after seeing the film Little Big Man, in which he’d put himself in the head of an Indian chief feeling his people die. The poem contains the line “we are the insects of someone else’s thoughts.” The line works for a rock ’n’ roll star, too.
Do you know, Lou said, that I’ve only ever received three, or four, letters from Europe, about my music? We were discussing why people were scared to approach him, and why no other band ever recorded his songs. The reason is to do with the completeness of his songs. People listen to the Velvets as individuals. It’s always a surprise (a pleasant surprise) to find that a friend is also a Velvets devotee, because their music never addresses people collectively. That’s right, said Lou. My songs are little letters. But, alas, he said, “I never got to people playing the records, so I could cheer if they got them right.”
I’d like to put on top hat and tails, Lou said, like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, and do a number with a high soul chorus. And he mimed out the number, “Lonely Saturday Night,” putting in the instruments with hums, and the “aahs” and “oohs” of the chorus. “The Velvet Underground wouldn’t do that,” he said. We laughed. And we talked a bit about John Cale’s solo album Vintage Violence, and about Nico.
Lou had been reading Wilde’s De Profundis, in an edition with an introduction by W. H. Auden, and had been annoyed by Auden’s assertion that Wilde’s reaching for Jesus was pathetic. That’s the best part, Lou said. The book bit me. And, after a long search, he was reading Dante, in the translation used by Wilde.
Danny had to go. He took Constantine to the Village for a feed. Lou walked off in the other direction, in a leather jacket, no richer than when he’d started. Off 8th Avenue, copies of the Velvets’ third album were selling at $1.50 each.