Lou Reed was the first rock star to truly mess up my mind. It was the end of the ’70s; I was in high school. With no older siblings and few friends to guide me — my sweet boyfriend was a classical cellist — I was stumbling around trying to educate myself about the foundations of the punk scene I desperately wanted to make my home. I haunted record-store cutout bins because the remaindered albums there, commercial failures, were cheap. I’d buy whatever looked vaguely roughneck (The Clash and the scruffy early Springsteen had revolutionized my life) or theatrical (after Bowie and Kate Bush started the wheels turning). One day, I saw a cover shot of Reed, whom I recognized because I had that Velvet Underground banana album, wearing aviator shades and looking both Hollywood-glamorous and oily. A car’s headlight made a starburst in the plastic that hid his eyes.
The album was Street Hassle, the first solo album that Reed, an acknowledged godfather of punk, made with that movement’s snotty children spitting back at him. Released in 1978, Street Hassle was a self-corrective — Tom Carson, in his Rolling Stone review, called it “an admission of failure that becomes a stunning, incandescent triumph,” an antidote to Reed’s post Velvets plunge into all kinds of excess. But the way I heard it, having not yet discovered the melodrama of Berlin or the glam glory of Transformer or the mean noise of Metal Machine Music, was as a corrective to me, the listener. Reed made me realize that, for all of my self-stylings as a rebel in love with noise that stripped away bulls- – -, I didn’t know the first thing about how rock music could provide a certain kind of unsought enlightenment.
You might call it moral clarity. Ellen Willis did, writing about the Velvet Underground in her landmark essay on the Velvets, first published the same year Street Hassle came out. Identifying Reed as an “aesthete punk” whose relationship to the urban demimonde he always wrote about was intellectual, stylized and distanced, Willis noticed that because he also really grasped the pain of those shadowed characters he wrote about, he ended up a moralist: a writer primarily concerned with the choices that make up people’s lives, choices to hurt or help others, to be safe or potentially self-destructive, to love or to harden the heart. “The point was not to glorify the punk, or even to say f- – – you to the world, but to be honest about the strategies people adopt in a desperate situation.”
Listening to Street Hassle, with its songs about feelings no one would ever want to admit, with titles like “Dirt” and “Leave Me Alone,” I slowly realized what most of the punk or New Wave rock I loved so much rarely gave me. Clarity! Most music was too earnest, too clever, too deliberately gorgeous or bloody exciting to require what Reed’s demanded, which was that a listener sit with the ugliness of a moment and really grasp the fatal mistakes and collapses that go hand-in-hand with the risks that bring humans to life.
Reed’s songs are actually often quite pretty, his pop ear well-tuned by the ’50s rockabilly and doo-wop he loved as a Long Island teenybopper kid. But he would always show the sweat on the lips of the beauty queens and muscle boys he sang about. The fact that those queens were often in drag, and the boys were paying the rent with their erotic encounters, is in some ways secondary. (In another way it’s central, since few other rockers fleshed out those characters, especially the queer ones, the way Reed did.) Reed was just as willing to explore conventional married life unsparingly, as he did on his turning-40 album The Blue Mask, the New Wave crossover hit New Sensations or his late-in-life albums about partnered bliss with his artistic soulmate Laurie Anderson. What matters most in Reed’s music is the commitment to what’s difficult, whether it’s expressed through distorted guitar, lyrics whose exposure of a self or a situation peels deeper with each verse, or the kind of melodic richness that doesn’t comfort but instead renders a song’s singer vividly vulnerable.