Lou Reed's Nightshade Carnival

By JAY COCKS

Classic rock of grim wit and menace

Back at Syracuse University in the early 1960s, Lou Reed was a platoon leader in the campus ROTC unit. He was already dabbling in extreme forms of social behavior and cultivating notoriety like a rare hothouse herb. He also wanted out of his military commitment. To make sure that the authorities would oblige, he recalls holding a gun to the head of his commanding officer. It wasn't loaded, but this was no time to take chances. Lou got the boot.

Since then he has seen quite a few changes and made fine, weird, wired rock-'n'-roll music out of all of them, no matter how bizarre or diverse--high school memories and heroin jags, sweet romances and violent one-night stands, soirees with Warhol's underground crew and cruises through the lowlife. There has been one constant throughout. That gun is still drawn, and likely loaded. Danger is what Lou Reed's music has always been about. And that makes it classic, vital rock 'n' roll.

Beginning with Reed's tenure in the Velvet Underground more than a decade ago, he has been fashioning some of the strongest music you can hear anywhere. Going solo, he anticipated and helped launch both the underground and glitter rock extravagances of the early '70s; his finely focused rage, his risk-it-all personal reflections, have given the punk rockers strong inspiration. Reed's recent Arista album, Street Hassle, is one of his very best, bitterest and most adventurous records, prime rock unconditionally guaranteed to give you the night sweats.

The voice is somewhere between a snarl and a come-on; the often simple melodies build, repeat, undulate, suddenly press home. Reed constantly recalls old rock songs, phrases lifted from ancient hit parades, but his images evoke Celine masquerading as an all-night FM deejay.

Raised conventionally enough in Brooklyn and Long Island, Reed endured the usual humiliations of adolescence (recalled in a lovely, almost sentimental song called Coney Island Baby) before setting out for Syracuse. After that came a flight into the nether regions of the New York pop life. He soon settled down with Warhol's crew of dilettantes and debauchees, a sojourn both memorialized and satirized in Reed's best-known song, Walk on the Wild Side, a barbed anthem to cafe society transvestites and chic street hustlers.

In the mid-'60s, he also became the generative force behind the Velvet Underground, a band notable in the era of peace, posies and good vibes, for laying down rock music that virtually throttled the listener. Some of the Velvet's music is still among Reed's finest work, including a lengthy threnody called Heroin that is as devastating a drug song ("I'm goin' to try to nullify my life") as anyone has ever written.

There has never been anything polite about Reed's music, then or now; not a laid-back note or a smug lie. Reed has seen his poetry published in the Paris Review and Fusion, and both stubborn bards and diehard rock 'n' rollers will recognize--maybe even sympathize with--the sentiments expressed in the chorus of a new Reed tune:

Gimme, gimme, gimme some good times Gimme, gimme, gimme some pain Don't you know that both of them look ugly To me they always look the same

Other tunes in the album include a denunciation of a former associate called Dirt and, best of all, Street Hassle, the album's centerpiece, an eleven-minute kaleidoscope of destruction compressed into three separate dramatic vignettes and linked by a single musical phrase. Tough stuff, often outright scary, as when a character in one of the vignettes advises a fellow junkie how to dispose of his ODed girlfriend:

Grab your old lady by the feet And just lay her out in the darkened street And by morning She's just another hit and run

What keeps these excursions along the wild side from being slumming expeditions is Reed's own rapt sympathy for the grifters, freaks and crooks who populate much of his music. Many of his songs are shot through with the kind of deadend romanticism that would stir Bruce Springsteen (who, in fact, appears unbilled and unannounced on Street Hassle, reciting the melancholy introduction to the third vignette). If Lou Reed gives no quarter in his music, neither does he yield to sensationalism or condescension. "You know," he sings in Street Hassle, "some people got no choice/ And they can never find a voice/ To talk with/ That they can even call their own":

So the first thing that they see That allows them the right to be Why they follow it You know what it's called? Bad luck.

"I'm like an Elvis Presley with brains, or Bob Dylan with looks," says Reed. "If you're intelligent at all, I'm a lot of fun." Finding the fun, however, can present a problem. Despite rave reviews for Street Hassle and a seismic stage show with which Reed is currently touring the country, playing his transparent Lucite guitar, radio play--crucial to an album's success--has been very limited. Says Arista President Clive Davis: "Every artist of original talent is a commercial challenge. Quality eventually wins out." He has no intention of urging Reed to cool down or slick up.

Of late, however, the self-ordained "rock-'n'-roll animal" has spruced up considerably, put on some weight and diminished his waning-moon pallor. Now 36, he lives with at least a semblance of normality, sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with a male lover named Rachael, who chews him out in the manner of spouses everywhere whenever Lou plays his guitar at peak volume. "The most frightening thing anyone can find out about me is how sane I am," Reed insists, glowering out from behind his wrap around shades.

He may not be able to make you see it quite that way. But listen to his night shade music enough, and if distinctions do not actually start to disintegrate and boundaries blur, you will at least know there is one mean street where such things happen. And you will have a taste of what it is like to live there.

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