And I Guess I Just Don't Know

Growing up, I just didn't get Lou Reed.

Beatles songs were easy when I was eight. Octopuses and green paper flowers on the shore, songs about girls and onions. Yeah, I didn't go deep back then, but I could get my head around a Beatles album. The Rolling Stones were a little more sophisticated, I thought. Their songs were about something more adult than I understood, but at least they were catchy. "I can't get no satisfaction..." Did you hear that? He used a double negative! Mom! Why can't I use double negatives? Pink Floyd did something else to me. I knew that there were awful things going on under the surface, but I liked that they said "hell" in a lot of their songs and told me I didn't need to go to school.

But Lou Reed? To me, he sounded like those records they would play after you went to bed, things that were inaccessible to the child mind. I could tell that they were about things that I just wouldn't know. They were boring and grating at the same time. Lou Reed songs were like finding sand in your chocolate pudding. And then some glass would break and the whole melody went sideways and ... fuck. I don't know. I gave up.

I ran off to the fanciful worlds of understandable chaos. I rode the early wave of hip hop, I wallowed in grunge, I didn't hide my soulful chick singers quite carefully enough in the 90's. And then I met Helen.

Where I grew up with Pink Floyd and Neil Young, I'm pretty sure she had Cole Porter and Catholic hymnals. I don't know where she found the music she did. I knew about some of it, and I didn't much care for it. Moxy Fruvous? My ass. But I liked her and she liked music. She mentioned something about Lou Reed one day, and though I never really understood the charm, I wanted to charm her, so I bought her a CD and the brand-new book of Lou Reed's songs arranged as poetry and art. It was quite a gesture. I still don't know if she really liked Lou Reed or if I just believed that she did, but last I'd checked, she still had that book in a prominent place on the shelf. I think she gave back the CD before we broke up. I don't dig into that binder too often.

But there he was, firmly lodged in my subconscious and paired with something I found pleasurable and confusing and frustrating and exciting and thoughtful all at the same time. It took a few years, but that shard started to grow into something more. Eventually, there was a Lou Reed-shaped geode in my skull. Somewhere in the mid-2000's, I laid on the floor of my apartment and listened to the entirety of Metal Music on headphones. I didn't do drugs, but I felt like I should.

Songs like Walk on the Wild Side, Sweet Jane, Pefect Day, and Waiting for the Man always made it into my life through radio or soundtracks to movies. My sister wrote about a memorable car ride one summer where my mother typed up the lyrics to Wild Side and made us kids sing the back up while we listened to the tape and drove through Southern Ohio (we were the colored girls). I put one or two of them on mix tapes. I don't think I quite understood at first. Then I found Heroin.

I think I've mentioned that I've never done drugs. People who have spent a lot of time with me wonder if that is true, but I will say it clearly here: I have never consumed illegal drugs, abused prescription drugs, or even quasi-legal concoctions like that Peruvian Mate crap. I drink a lot of beer and wine and I love a good cocktail, but I rarely consumed any alcohol before I was 21. I have smoked maybe eight cigars in my life and I have never had a cigarette. I have had some absinthe that would have been banned in the U.S. but I wasn't in the U.S. at the time. I was for a long time a straightedge kid, and I'm only a few genetic tendencies away from that now. But I do like the Heroin that the Velvet Underground produced in 1966.

The song is quite obviously about the mental and spiritual transitions that overtake the writer when he injects that awful opiate into his body. His complicated, conflicted feelings are elevated and driven to a maniacal precipice before slipping into a gentle free fall back to a drifting, idly-philosophical haze. The heights of the song are somewhere between a car crash and a tornado. The lows of the song are dreamy post-coital sighs. It's a song that spans the range of emotion and experience that the healthy human soul is capable of and it both elevates and demeans all of it. And it's goddamned noisy.

I'm not sure where I got it. I do love some dark, grindy metal. I have turned up Ministry so loud that it would break my headphones. I went through a Pantera phase before they got all overtly racist, or before the racists overtly found them. I'm still not sure how that evolved (or devolved). I still listen to Anthrax's The Sound of White Noise a couple of times a year. I once fell in love with a band from Philadelphia called Stendhal, whose rhythm section was mostly feedback, trash cans, and a stolen STOP sign. I like noisy music. I especially am fond of music that uses noise as an instrument. And I think it came from Heroin.

Heroin is the first song I can think of that used feedback as a sustained instrument in the song. It carries the last half of the opus, an undercurrent of distress and pain that offsets the tribal heart-thumping and descent into silence. It is the noise that got me. Who would do that? Fucking noise, the things you try to cut out in the recording studio, is now the thing you're putting in? Awesome.

After I came to appreciate Heroin, I really dug into the Lou Reed experience. I can go on about it at length, but not better than many other people have written before me. I will sum it up by saying that Lou Reed is that prodigal son uncle that you only meet when you're a lot older and you thought you had the family dynamic down. Then this guy in a leather jacket shows up and starts calling your mom by that old nickname that was scribbled on photos....

Go read my sister's post about Lou. It's quite good.

One more thing: When Kurt Cobain died, I really couldn't give a shit. I really like Nirvana. I think Kurt and the boys were great, and I remember (anecdotally, because I can't find the damned thing anywhere) around 1995 when Liz Phair (I think) hosted an end-of-year, best-of radio program that was put on while the regular DJ on 107.9 WENZ (THE END) was eating Xmas dinner, and she said that most people just don't understand how influential Kurt Cobain really was. But when Johnny Cash died, I wore black for a week. I feel the same way now that Lou is gone. Something good in the world, a great light has gone out. A lifetime of work has room, finally, for an afterword. Fuck Kurt Cobain and his angst at age 27. Try suffering and creating music at 70, when your liver is killing you, or after the love of your life has died from cancer. That's where influence really means something.