WINE IN THE MORNING

Many important, famous people have and will eulogize Lou Reed. Yet I feel like his music, both with The Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, is a personal possession. As a teenager I wanted to BE Lou Reed. He was the first of many who shaped my idea of what it means to be an artist. But it goes much deeper than that. With his music came the feeling that I could do it. It exploded the certainties I saw around me.
Pop art was a movement, started in the early 20th, or late 19th, century that brought elements of popular culture into high art. Lichtenstein’s comic books, Oldenburg’s hamburgers, Warhol’s Brillo boxes…Frank O’Hara’s coke bottles…Joyce’s newspaper headlines…Duchamp’s urinal…Jarry’s bicycles…the list is huge. Bartok with Hungarian folk tunes. You know, Pop Art. But Lou Reed did the opposite, and it was his special genius to do so: he brought high art into pop music. He could write a pop tune with the line, “You gotta hit her!” Irony, sarcasm, satire, camp, romantic decadence, explicit invocations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud mixed up with gay film celebrity worship, Jane Mansfield and Maya Deren in the same breath…Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground were, like John Casevetes, volcanoes erupting future indie art, the idea that bad is good, infinite possibilities of sound and word.
Lines like ‘And curtains laced with diamonds dear for you…” haunted me. I wanted to write one poem as good as Pale Blue Eyes. I wanted to write a cycle of poems with the depressing horror of the Berlin album. Lou Reed was kind of a jerk in public, capable of delivering a terrible performance, of making bad jokes for a half hour instead of singing a song, of recording the majestically unlistenable Metal Machine Music, or belting out a song with passion and honesty, suffused with true pathos and anger, full of the kind of lyric poetry contemporary literary culture pounds out of poets at a young age. He could shoot up water on the stage, shamelessly exploiting the metal guitar sound of the mid seventies…and write a suite of extended songs like Street Hassle, which appeared on the same album as the song I Wanna Be Black (“I wanna pass a hex over President Kennedy’s tomb, and have a big dick too…”)
His lyrical output is to my mind still a major contribution to American poetry. I would take a handful of Velvet Underground songs over almost anything written in American poetry in the post war period. If poetry took a number of paths in the modern era, the one that led through song lyric is the most immediately available to me as an artist, that the traditional stuff of lyrical poetry didn’t die with modernist difficulty, the linguistic turn, but went underground, into the lyrics of artists like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. The emotion of alienation, rebellion, self-indulgence, of making art out of the materials at hand without regard to tasteful aesthetic theories was Lou Reed’s gift to the world. He had precursers, but he did what all great artists do, he took them up and obliterated any trace of the influence. He made tradition his.
Rock and Roll is a minimalist art. Expressionistic brilliance trumps technical virtuosity. Lou Reed’s singing and guitar playing, like Dylan’s, isn’t exactly what the teacher taught. No. That’s why every kid with a guitar and something to say heard him and went out and did it. the famous ones were Patti Smith and Jim Morrison and Joey and Dee Dee Ramone and Iggy Pop and Jonathan Richman. And all the others. For me it meant I could express my serious thoughts and feelings in genre novels about drug addicts and pharmaceutical test subjects, with hovercraft and ray guns. I, and everyone else like me in this world, discovered the truth spinning a record in a dark room, with a cigarette and pair of sunglasses and some really shitty drugs. For over a decade I did indeed have a little “wine in the morning, and some breakfast at night.” And we still live in a time with “All the politicians making crazy sounds, all the dead bodies piled up in mounds…” Lou Reed was serious. And funny. “My sister lives out on the Island, her husband takes the train/ He’s big and he’s fat, and he doesn’t even have a brain”.
I think the challenge to artistic and  intellectual culture in this country and this day is to make art as good, as relevant, as funny, as beautiful, as tough as Lou Reed did. Anyone could get it. It inspired revolutionaries (like Vaclav Havel), even as he wrote lines like, “There are problems in this world, but WOOOOOO! none of them are mine…” It’s important to feel this way sometimes. The freedom of not giving a shit. To escape into darkness. To emerge into a sunlit room with those curtains laced with diamonds dear for you. And really, it’s the alliteration of diamonds dear, and the fact that he says dear, so sweetly, so truly that made you know the tough guy who never meant a thing was a wounded romantic.
In the end, the sheer complexity and weight of what Lou Reed did is overwhelming. I have spent much more than half of my life thinking about it and assume I’ll spend the rest of it doing the same. Thank you, Lou Reed.