Night Beat (17 page)

The truth is, Jim Morrison is an ideal radical hero for a conservative era. Though he may have lived a life of defiance and rebellion, it was not a defiance rooted in any clear ideology or political vision, unlike, for example, the brand of rebellion that John Lennon would come to aspire to. Morrison’s defiance had deep personal sources—it derived from a childhood spent in a family with a militaristic and authoritarian disposition. As such, Morrison’s mode of insurrection was hardly insignificant or without merit; indeed, it was often wielded as a badge of hard-won courage, and that courage is partly what today’s audience recognizes and loves about him.

But Morrison’s defiance also often took the form of outright disregard—an unconcern for how his impulses and temper could cause damage not only to uptight moralists, but to the people who loved and depended on him most. In short, Morrison committed his outrages and cultivated his hedonism in sometimes remarkably conscienceless ways, and unfortunately, this habit may also be part of what many rock fans admire or seek to emulate about him. In a time when some pop stars try to engage their audience in various humanitarian and political causes, and in a time when numerous role models and authority figures advise the young to make a virtue of modesty or abstinence, there are numerous fans who are unmoved by these admonitions. A few artists, such as Guns n’ Roses [or, in 1997, Marilyn Manson], are seen to live out this bravado for today’s defiant types, but none, of course, have lived it out quite as effectively as Jim Morrison, who was fond of telling his audience: “I don’t know about you, but I intend to have
my
kicks before the whole fucking shithouse explodes.” It isn’t so much a radical message, since radicalism aims to change something beyond the domain of the self. In a sense, it’s simply a dark extension of the philosophy of self-regard that became so indelibly identified with the Reagan-Bush era.

But the costs of this bravado can be sizable, and it would be nice if the custodians of Morrison and the Doors’ history were more scrupulous about how they portray the nobility of his excesses or the fascination of his death. But then, the myth of a young poet and libertine who sought to test the bounds of cultural freedom and personal license; and who suffered the misunderstanding of not merely established American culture, but of family, friends, and rock culture as well; and who died because he just could not reach far enough or be loved deservedly enough, is probably too good, and too damn lucrative, for any biographer to resist romanticizing or exploiting.

After all, in some ways death is the perfect preserving element of Morrison’s legacy. It has the twofold advantage of having halted the singer’s decline before he might have gone on to even worse behavior or art, and to a large degree it also helped absolve him for the failures of his last few years. It’s almost as if, somewhere, somehow, a macabre deal were struck: If Morrison would simply have the good grace to die, then we would remember him as a young, fit, handsome poet; we would forgive him his acts of disregard and cruelty and drunkenness, and recall him less as a stumblebum sociopath and more as a probing mystic-visionary. Plus, there’s a certain vicarious satisfaction to be found in his end. If you like, you can admire the spirit of someone who lived life and pursued death to the fullest, without having to emulate that commitment yourself. Which is to say, Morrison has saved his less nervy (and smarter) fans the trouble of their own willful self-negation.

And so Jim Morrison died, and then, with the help of former friends, band members, and biographers, pulled off the perfect comeback: the sort of comeback in which the singer and his band might never disappoint our renewed faith, because there would be no new music, no new art, no new statements to test their continued growth or our continuing perceptiveness. In short, it was a comeback in which Morrison would be eternally heroic, eternally loved, and eternally marketable.

Of course, it’s probably a bit graceless to beat up too much on a dead man—especially one who already beat up on himself plenty during life. And so, let’s allow Jim Morrison his posthumous victory: If, in some regards, he was perhaps just a bit too mean-spirited or selfish to be an easy hero of the 1960s, he has certainly proven to be in step with the temper of the last decade or so. Never mind that he threw away his greatest visions and potential in an endless swirl of drugs, alcohol, insecurity, and unkindness, and never mind that he is dead. Never mind, because in the end, death has been this rock & roll hero’s most redeeming and most rewarding friend.

PART 3
remaking the territories

lou reed: darkness and love

Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock ’n’ roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a bad joke.

LESTER BANGS
WRITING IN
SCREEM

I met myself in a dream
And I just want to tell you, everything was all right.

LOU REED
“BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT”

S
eated in the dusky shadows of a San Francisco Chinatown bar, his face lit by the glow of a trashy table lamp, Lou Reed looks like an artful composite of the mordant characters who stalk his songs. His thick, pale fingers tremble a lot, and his sallow face, masked with a poised, distant expression, looks worn. But behind that lurid veil lurks a sharp, fitful psyche, and with several ounces of bourbon stoking its fire, it can be virulent.

Lou has been ranting for almost an hour about his latest album,
Take No Prisoners,
a crotchety, double live set hailed by some critics as his bravest work yet, and by others as his silliest. He seems anxious for me to share his conviction that it’s the zenith of his recording career—something I can’t bring myself to do. Instead, I mention that the record might alienate even some of Reed’s staunchest defenders. Instantly, his flickering brown eyes taper into bellicose slits. “Are you telling me,” he snarls, “that you think
Take No Prisoners
is just another
Metal Machine Music?”

Then, as quickly as he flared, Reed relaxes and flourishes a roguish smile. “It’s funny,” he says, “but whenever I ask anyone what they think of this record, they say, ’Well, I love it, but I’m a little worried about what
other
people will think.’ Except one friend. He told me he thought it was very
manly.
That’s admirable. It’s like the military maxim the title comes from: “Give no quarter, take no prisoners.’ I wanted to make a record that wouldn’t give an inch. If anything, it would push the world
back
just an inch or two. If
Metal Machine Music
was just a memo note,
Take No Prisoners
is the letter that should’ve gone with it.

“You may find this funny, but I think of it as a contemporary urban-blues album. After all, that’s what I write—tales of the city. And if I dropped dead tomorrow, this is the record I’d choose for posterity. It’s not only the smartest thing I’ve ever done, it’s also as close to Lou Reed as you’re probably going to get, for better or worse.”

He has a point.
Take No Prisoners
is brutal, coarse, and indulgent—the kind of album that radio stations and record buyers love to ignore (it hasn’t even nicked
Billboard
’s Top 200). Which is a shame, because it’s also one of the funniest live albums ever recorded. The songs (a potpourri of Reed’s best known, including “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side”) serve merely as backdrops for Lou’s dark-humored, Lenny Bruce-like monologues. At one point, responding to somebody in the audience who objects to one of his many ethnic slurs, Lou snaps, “So what’s wrong with cheap, dirty jokes? Fuck you. I never said I was tasteful. I’m
not
tasteful.”

But the record’s real bounty is its formidable last side, featuring petrifying versions of “Coney Island Baby” and “Street Hassle”—the definitive accounts of Reed’s classic pariah angel in search of glut and redemption. “Street Hassle,” in particular, is the apotheosis of Lou’s callous brand of rock & roll. The original recording, a three-part vignette laced beguilingly with a cello phrase that turns into a murky requiem on guitar, was Reed’s most disturbing song since “Heroin.” The new, live version of “Street Hassle” is an even more credible descent into the dark musings of a malignant psychology, littered with mercenary sex and heroin casualties, and narrated by a jaded junkie who undergoes a catharsis at the end.

Lou Reed doesn’t just write about squalid characters, he allows them to leer and breathe in their own voices, and he colors familiar landscapes through their own eyes. In the process, Reed has created a body of music that comes as close to disclosing the parameters of human loss and recovery as we’re likely to find. That qualifies him, in my opinion, as one of the few real heroes rock & roll has raised.

That is, if you’re willing to allow your heroes a certain latitude for grimness. Long before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed had begun preparing for a career as a hard-boiled outsider. When he was in high school, his mood swings and headlong dives into depression became so frequent that his parents committed him to electroshock therapy (an experience he later chronicled bitterly in a song called “Kill Your Sons”). Another time, during his student days at New York’s Syracuse University, Reed reneged on his ROTC commitment by pointing an unloaded pistol at the head of his commanding officer.

After Syracuse (where, in his more stable moments, Reed studied poetry with Delmore Schwartz, a popular poet of the 1940s), Lou took a job as a songwriter and singer at Pickwick Records on Long Island. While there, he recorded mostly ersatz surf and Motown rock under a multitude of names, and met John Cale, a classically trained musician with avant-garde leanings. In 1965, Reed and Cale formed the Warlocks, with Sterling Morrison, an old Syracuse pal of Lou’s, on guitar and Maureen Tucker on drums. The group was renamed the Falling Spikes and then the Velvet Underground, after the title of a porn paperback about sadomasochism.

In the context of the late-sixties hippie/Samaritan rock scene, the group seemed, to many observers, positively malignant. “I remember,” says Reed, “reading descriptions of us as the “fetid underbelly of urban existence.’ All I wanted to do was write songs that somebody like me could relate to. I got off on the Beatles and all that stuff, but why not have a little something on the side for the kids in the back row? At the worst, we were like antedated realists. At the best, we just hit a little more home than some things.”

In the case of the Velvet Underground’s first album, nominally produced by Andy Warhol, that viewpoint was presented as a remarkably ripened and self-contained group persona. Songs like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Run, Run, Run,” and “Heroin” depict a leering, gritty vision of urban life that, until the Velvets, had rarely been alluded to—much less exalted—in popular music.

The Velvet Underground, of course, would go on to have a profound—probably incalculable—impact on modern popular music. Indeed, next to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones, the Velvets were one of the most influential white rock forces of the 1960s. David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, Elliott Murphy, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Television, Joy Division, Jim Carroll, R.E.M., and countless others would borrow from and extend the Velvet Underground’s sound and vision, though none of them would ever fully match the original group’s inventive depths and astonishing courage. The band’s first three albums,
The Velvet Underground and Nico
(1967),
White Light/White Heat
(1968), and
The Velvet Underground
(1969) are works that stand strongly alongside
Revolver, Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Blonde on Blonde,
and
John Wesley Harding
as some of the most intelligent and illuminating music of the era.

But back in the milieu of the often skin-deep positivism and florid experimentalism of the late 1960s, the Velvet Underground’s unswerving hardbitten temper, dissolute romanticism, and abrasive improvisations were, as Reed noted, viewed as “downer” elements, and the group itself was seen as a pack of sick party spoilers. I remember that several of my friends during that period—who shared my love for rock & roll—wouldn’t stay in the same room when a Velvet Underground record hit the stereo. (One friend even scratched up the song “Heroin” because of what he termed its “counterrevolutionary nihilism.”)

All together, the Velvets’ catalog would sell something less than 50,000 copies during the time the band was together.

BY THE VELVETS’ fourth album, 1970’s
Loaded,
financial problems and lack of recognition prompted Reed to quit the band. He embarked on a solo career that became so spotty it seemed irreconcilable with the promise of his earlier work. After finally achieving commercial success in 1972 with “Walk on the Wild Side” (from
Transformer,
co-produced by David Bowie), Reed immediately began to test his audience’s endurance. First he grilled them with the much-maligned
Berlin
narrative, then later with
Metal Machine Music.
In between, there were the hits,
Rock ’n’ Roll Animal
and
Sally Can’t Dance
(the latter actually went Top 10), records he now denounces as trivial, commercial contrivances.

Then, in 1976, after a brief, tempestuous marriage (the fodder for
Berlin
) and increasingly strained relationships with his manager and producer—brothers Dennis and Steve Katz—Reed rebounded. He disengaged himself from Dennis Katz, assembled a stoical, one-shot band, and recorded
Coney Island Baby,
his most personal set of songs since his days with the Velvets. Following that, he left RCA Records for Arista and last year delivered
Street Hassle—
a jolting statement of self-affirmation—and now is about to release
The Bells,
which he thinks will surpass
Take No Prisoners
and which features a few songs co-written with Nils Lofgren. It would seem that Reed’s gifts of vision and expression are fully revivified and newly honed to a lethal edge.

Sitting in the bar, as a last flush of rain washes away the daylight outside, I figure both of us have had enough to drink for me to ask about where those lost years went. As a way of broaching the subject, I quote a passage from
Rolling Stone
’s review of
Street Hassle,
in which Tom Carson describes Reed’s decline as a degeneration into “a crude, death-trip clown.” It sobers Reed right up. He smiles grimly and glances around the room. “That’s not for me to comment on, is it? Obviously it’s someone else’s construction.”

After a taut moment, he reconsiders. “Let me tell you a little story,” he says. “It comes from a collection of personal prose that my friend, the late poet Delmore Schwartz, wrote, called
Vaudeville for a Princess.
In this one chapter he’s talking about driving a car, and how as a youngster he had driven one as contemporary as he was; in other words, the year he was driving it was the year of the car’s model. Subsequently, as he got older and fortune, perhaps, didn’t smile upon him as he wished it would, the car he would drive was not at all of the same year as he was driving it, but it would be older—five, ten years older. Eventually, we get around to a time fifteen years later and he felt he was making progress because the car he was driving was only two years older than the year in which he was driving it. As a slight tangent, he makes mention not to mock him over this because he, too, has seen visions of glory and ticker-tape parades in New York City. Anyway, he’s now at last out driving this car that’s almost contemporary with his time, so he’s obviously progressing. But he observes that nobody is with him to take note of the event, because he didn’t have a license and his erratic driving reflected the fact that “life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous.’ ”

Lou pauses and smiles curtly. “Life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous. I’ve probably had more of a chance to make an asshole out of myself than most people, and I realize that. But then not everybody gets a chance to live out their nightmares for the vicarious pleasures of the public.”

EARLIER IN OUR conversations, during the tour that spawned
Take No Prisoners,
Lou and I meet in the same bar. Instead of his usual playfully testy demeanor, he seems sullen, almost solitary. “This is one of those days,” he says, taking a seat at a corner table, “where everything’s going to go wrong.”

At first Reed’s mood is hard to place, since his shows of the night before had clearly been fervently fought successes. But then I recall that when he’d come out for his second show, he found his guitar out of tune and threw it angrily to the floor in the middle of the opening number, cracking its body. “I could’ve cried then,” he says, “but I don’t really care now. I use my moods. I get into one of these dark, melancholy things and I just milk it for everything I can. I know I’ll be out of it soon and I won’t be looking at things the same way. For every dark mood, I also have a euphoric opposite. I think they say that manic-depressives go as high as they go down, which isn’t to say that I’m really depressive.”