Lou Reed 1942-2013

Some years ago the singer Rickie Lee Jones took me to a Lou Reed concert; she had never seen him perform. About half way through the set she said, incredulous: But he can’t sing. What was astonishing to Rickie was the lack of musicality in Reed’s voice–it’s flat almost atonal sound, not to mention his off the cuff delivery–but I think the point of his music was not so much the way HE sounded as the worlds he evoked. It’s always too late and too silly to talk about what artists should or shouldn’t have done with their careers after they’re gone, but my own memories of Reed’s music revolve around the atmospheres he created with other musicians, specifically Nico and the Velvet Underground. Reed had to deal with Nico because of Andy Warhol, who was producing his band, and of course Andy wasn’t wrong to add her to the mix: she transported Reed’s songs into little playlets about her own alienation, and everyone else’s, in a way Reed couldn’t do with his voice or persona: he was no actor and she was. What Reed did was to act on the page–in his lyrics–and it was the listener who brought the drama while Lou laid back, sometimes in his sunglasses, or turning away from Nico, who was the dark sun he could never be because he wasn’t a beautiful woman but he was a diva, and that was the complication. In any case, I think Reed cultivated the sunglasses look to hide his eyes, which always looked slightly astonished. They were the eyes of the boy he was: a nice Jewish one from Freeport who wanted to out cool all those “real” New Yorkers. Sometimes he tried too hard, but his best songs, for me at least, are when he tells a story ostensibly about someone else, those living metaphors that expressed his real or inner self and sense of outsiderness, such as his unrequited love for Shelley Albin in “Pale Blue Eyes,” or the incomparable Candy Darling in “Candy Says,” a story that moved Reed to dig deep, and find Candy’s wistfulness and trust in his own voice, which, for most of the song, never rises above a wrenching whisper.