Chapter Twenty-Four
2001–04
“There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of precipice, thus meditates a plunge.”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”
In late 1999, Robert Wilson approached Lou Reed, asking him to write the libretto and score for his latest stage production, POEtry, based on the poems and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. “He asked if I wanted to work on his play about Poe, and I was thrilled. He said, ‘You should write this.’ I said, ‘I’ve never written anything like this before.” He said, ‘You were made for this.’”
Reed had much in common with Poe: Poe always dressed in black; he was always angry, particularly with journalists; he drank to excess and got high on opium; he wrote a lot; and he attracted certain types of women. They were both legends in their own lifetimes. As Lou recalled, “To my mind, Poe is father to William Burroughs and Hubert Selby,” writing that “I am forever fitting their blood to my melodies.”
Wilson explained his own role in the work. As a student of architecture, in the theater he made mega-structures. “Let’s say an architect designs a building and each tenant can design his or her apartment however they want. They will have different aesthetics, but there will be cohesion among them because of this mega-structure. So in a sense, what I do in collaborations with other people is that I make a form and a structure that allows other people to fill it in.”
“Bob is the director,” Lou insisted. “He has the overall vision and knows what he is looking for, so no one knows better than Bob where he wants to go or take it or take some of us with him.”
So began a new regimen. Lou asked Laurie to work with him on how to tackle this monumental task. “It was a wonderful chance to do something really different,” Lou said. “So I sat down to rewrite various things from Edgar Allan Poe that appealed to me. I figured Bob really knows what he’s doing and if he says I can do it, I can do it.” Once they had an outline and some characters, Lou’s writing process began to flow. This journey into Poe’s language was to have a strong influence on Reed.
In the process, he stumbled upon the Poe short story “The Imp of the Perverse.” When Lou read Poe’s claim that “perversion is a radical, primitive, and elementary impulse,” he saw in a flash how everything he had done wrong made sense.
“I have wrestled with the question why am I drawn to do what I should not innumerable times,” Reed wrote. “Why do we love what we cannot have? Why do we have a passion for exactly the wrong thing?”
In the short story, Poe explained: “Through its promptings, we act for the very reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.” Embracing Poe’s concept, Lou now accepted that he was one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse. This was another step in his transformation.
After Hal Willner and Laurie had helped him work out how to do it, Lou started writing the music for POEtry. Lou loved working with actors. If he was commissioned to do so, he could reel off one monologue after another. Working in the theater gave him a different way to see his songs emerge. One month after the release of Ecstasy, POEtry premiered in Berlin in the middle of April 2000.
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Lou loved Wilson and the opportunities afforded him by the theater experience, but he could only get full satisfaction when he recorded his songs with his band or made an avant-garde work closer to Laurie’s palette than his own. Thus the production of POEtry in 2000 led in 2002 to the recording of Lou Reed’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven.
According to Gavin Martin, “Lou considered The Raven his magnum opus, as the culmination of everything he’s striven to attain in a career that’s spanned five decades of rock & roll outrage.”
Laurie Anderson appeared in the part of Rowena on the album’s most infectious song, “Call On Me.” It is the most poignant recording Lou and Laurie ever made. Lou locates Laurie in the wild being whose spirit rejects control. She constantly travels in pursuit of her soul. They find each other in the prolonged hesitant call-out of the title: why didn’t she, why didn’t he, call on each other …?
The album received mixed reviews, ranging from “You will need inordinate patience” to “Surprisingly compelling.” Although it reached 122 in the UK charts it did not chart in the States. The track that drew most positive criticism was his reaction to 9/11, “Fire Music.” Jason Anderson wrote in the British rock magazine Uncut, “‘Fire Music’ is an abrasive squall of electronic noise that may borrow its title from Archie Shepp but is pure Metal Machine Music by nature. It represents a more satisfying communication between Reed and the dark energy that fills the work of his literary forebear than any of The Raven’s wordier passages. It also would have terrified Poe, which may be the highest compliment of all.”
A few months after the release of The Raven in January 2003, NYC Man (The Ultimate Collection 1967–2003) was put out, which featured career-spanning tracks that had been selected, remastered and sequenced under Reed’s supervision. For this, Lou’s great labor of love, he got together the original tapes of all the songs he wanted to archive and improve. He said at the time: “When you’re putting out a compilation, the last person they talk to is the artist. They usually hope he’s dead …” Except in this case, the BMG people counted on him to be involved. Lou and Willner had a wonderful experience listening to different takes on the original tapes. In every case, as Reed described the process, the listener was rewarded. On the first song they resurrected John Cale’s previously hidden piano track on “I’m Waiting for My Man.” On the last song, the Bertallot Radio Mix of “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou nakedly adds the name of James Dean to his pantheon of heroes.
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In April 2003, Reed embarked on a world tour supporting both The Raven and NYC Man. During some of the concerts the band was joined by Reed’s personal tai chi instructor, Master Ren Guangyi. Master Ren’s remarkably graceful performances of tai chi movements became part of the music on the stage every night.
Roderick Romero saw him do The Raven in New Mexico on the Animal Serenade tour in 2004. “I was still working for Val Kilmer. We drove about two hours and got there and it was in an open-air theater—it was so beautiful. Lou played guitar and he recited the whole Raven poem word for word in that lower-cast Lou Reed voice. He had a little reader down at the base where his monitor was so he could look down if he lost a word, but it was like boom-boom-boom. It was just phenomenal and I was crying. It was packed and people were freaking out. That was because of his dedication to poetry. He loved the poets.”
When he came off stage, whether he had sung two songs or put on a two-hour show, Lou would shut himself up in his dressing room and cry. This was of course not the crying of desolation; it was the crying of emotional exultation.
Critics wrote that Lou didn’t give us much new music in the second half of the 1990s. Just as in the previous decade, he did not give us another record for another three years—but then look at what came out in the following years. In Lou’s case, live albums and compilations should be treated like studio albums because they are so creative they become new records in their own right. The tour was recorded and became the basis for Reed’s next live double album, Animal Serenade, which was released in 2004. I could not get through these wonderful years without Lou’s trilogy of albums on which he’d worked hard to achieve superb results: A Perfect Night in London, NYC Man, and Animal Serenade. On this last album, Lou recites The Raven with such vivid and distinct phrasing it either blows your mind or reduces you to tears. That recitation was another step in changing the way he was perceived.