Lou Reed – Don’t Settle For Walking
I was really into Lou Reed. In 1981 you couldn’t just download everything he had ever recorded. I would see him and the Velvet Underground referred to in punk zine interviews with bands when they would talk about their influences. This was exactly how I discovered Charles Bukowski and Lou Reed.
Bukowski was difficult enough – few bookstores carried his books, but there was something out there. In 1983 I got a record store in Dubuque, Iowa to order The Velvet Underground and Nico with payment of $14 and change up front. I remember walking back as the first snow of the winter was falling – I was a California boy in college far from home buying an album by a band that I had never heard and walking a four mile round trip for the privilege.
The album utterly changed my perception of what songs could be. It sounded so far ahead of its time seventeen years after its recording. It kinda still does. My whole year at Clarke College was spent acquiring Velvet Underground albums, books, all ordered from far away, and listening. Listening, listening, listening.
Before I heard Lou Reed, music came in strict categories. After I heard him I realized “OH… there is an epic number of possibilities to make great art that defy pinheaded labels”. I understood Bob Dylan perfectly because the Velvet Underground made his output make sense. All art after that I have had to laugh at pissant tiny box categories that establishments demand. I never respected a dictionary or encyclopedia since.
Consider the range of Lou Reed. Sure, David Bowie covers his rocking “White Light/White Heat” and there is no substitute for “I’m Waiting for The Man” but these were written and composed by the same guy who wrote “Candy Says”, and “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, let other people in his band sign them while he lingered on your “Pale Blue Eyes”. The breadth of just the songs listed above span radically different approaches and yet a Velvets album would pile them in with more and shift gears more smoothly than an Indy car driver.
I listened to the Velvet Underground and some Lou Reed so much that those songs are in a way always going on in my head. Lou Reed to me was like a god of cool who was an impeccable arbiter of what was in and what was out. And the girls who could venture a thought in two parts of their cerebellum who had taste could hold on through his thrashings specifically because he soothed on that macho harsh with his melodies and vulnerable poetry.
So then the weirdest thing that ever happened to me up to that point in my life happened. I’m in a living room in a small town in Minnesota with this girl, my girlfriend then and we are watching television and a commercial comes on and it has all sorts of shots of New York city and music that sounds like Lou’s “Walk on the Wild Side”.
Well this is too much; I begin my 20 year-old pontificating about how the media was ripping off Lou Reed and how he was one guy would never sell out to an advertisement as he was the coolest man who had ever lived.
So then just as I paused to pat myself on the back for being cool enough to express how cool Lou was, well, there was Lou, on a goddamned Vespa. “Hey!” he snarled at the camera, “Don’t settle for walking”.
The sinking feeling – like when your team loses a big game – overwhelmed me and it was compounded by that girl howling with laughter, reveling in a moment of my humiliation. What the fuck had just happened.
Lou Reed was too cool for that rigid boundary of art and commerce. And he probably needed the money. But he made me understand that selling out isn’t what I thought it was. He never sold out to his music, his muse, his art, his legacy. If you listen to enough of the sounds he produced on a guitar and the mesmerizing talk-singing he pulled off, you realize he could have sold out in a minute.
That teenage lover of mine rubbed it in and it took a while to digest and I ended up the wiser for it – you can do whatever you want and if you are still you… well then, what’s the problem?
Mighta been a year or two later, back in LA, the redhead in Hokah, MN a tragic memory and it was with a brunette at a trendy bar- as trendy as a suburb would allow, we are talking pink neon 1980s margarita on clear plastic tabletops with nonstop rock videos playing as the substitute jukebox. This girl is buying and so there I must sit, suffering through the slings and arrows of outrageous synthetic garbage when the synthesizer drivel is interrupted by a phone ringing. This is a generation before cellphones and there is just a loud phone ringing and people, the dweebs of the mainstream that I live to be different from in my twenty-something alcoholic desperation to break out of it all, these mulletted camaro dirvers and their sorority dates are looking around, irritated. Up on the video screen Lou Reed is standing in a phone booth – the phone just rings and rings. The song finally starts, “I Love You Suzanne”, his pop apogee, and a bit of order is restored to the suburban pseudo-debauchery but I enjoyed that kick to the shins he gave every blended strawberry-daquiri in that place with just sound. It was simple, it pissed everyone off and then it was a pop song – now that is great art.
This video has edited out the “annoying” beginning of that video so you will just have to believe me.
But the dark side has consequences and the one man to rage negatively against Lou was John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten who saw his friend Sid name himself after Reed’s rocker “Vicious”. One could not imagine the Sex Pistols without Lou Reed’s innovations, his breakthroughs, his art. But John pointed that Sid bought into the glamor of drugs and played around too terribly deep too quick to even know what was happening to him. Funny that John would be on the same conceptual dais as Tipper Gore but Lou never addressed the karma of making the scabies of a street junkie more fashionable than Versace. He was too loyal too his art to care about consequences, impact or body counts. Maybe we added the glamor and he was just warning us anyway.
If they take my brain out of my body at death and hook it up to a machine to see what is in there, the four Velvet Underground Albums and VU would play incessantly, intertwined with most of my thoughts and perceptions before they just up and blew out the speakers of their contraption at some point. But not before the loop of that girlfriend howling in laughter arose – reliving the time he showed up on teevee to show me he was so far ahead of me that I better not settle for walking if I really ever wanted to be as cool as him.