Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [90]
If Lou Reed seems like rock's ultimate closet queen by virtue of the fact that he came out of the closet and then went back in, it must be also observed that lots of people, especially lots of gay people, think Lou Reed's just a heterosexual onlooker, exploiting gay culture for his own ends. And who knows but that they may be right. When I asked him about his plans for his next album, he said: “I may come out with a hardhat album. Come out with an antigay song, saying ‘Get back in your closets, you fuckin’ queers!’ That’ll really do it!”
But let's just suppose that Lou Reed is gay. If he is, can you imagine what kind of homosexual would say something like that? Maybe that's what makes him such a master of pop song—he's got such a great sense of shame. Either that or the ultimate proof of his absolute normality is the total offensive triteness of his bannered Abnormality. Like there's no trip cornier’n s&m, every move is plotted in advance from a rigid rulebook centuries old, so every libertine ends up yawning his balls off. Just like Lou said earlier that day: “There's really no interesting information to hold back. Everybody insists that there's a story here, and there really isn’t. It's like a clamshell that's been eaten.”
The concert was okay. Reports on this tour have varied dramatically—depending on expectations and how Lou happens to be feeling, I guess—and his band, a bunch of high school kids assembled by Steve Katz, is more than adequate.
But there's probably more going on here than meets the eye. Katz must have had plenty of musicians to choose from—he could conceivably have assembled a high-charged ensemble a la Elephant's Memory, he could certainly have gotten a crew of faceless high-tech sessionmen if they didn’t want anybody to detract from Lou. But what he got was a bunch of competent high school kids off anybody's block, who also happen to be some of the ugliest cretins ever assembled on one stage! These guys are the absolute apotheosis of the Flushing NY or Hoboken NJ schlub. They’re so nada that they become not faceless, you can’t ignore ‘em because they contrast so sharply with Lou Reed's leather trip.
For somebody who has based so much of his career on sex, Lou Reed has certainly surrounded himself with an asexual band. It would be easy to conclude that this is simply because he didn’t want anybody else stealing the show (in which case it backfired—his bassist is the ugliest person I have ever seen) or that he's so dunced out he didn’t make such considerations (unlikely). So you end up with the possibility that Lou may have an intentionally asexual band as a reaction to glam-rock and his own image. Which, if you follow that logic to the terminal, reeks of self-destructive guilt. Just imagine if Lou Reed did to his lead guitarist what Bowie does to Mick Ronson—pretending to blow him—he’d look like the archetypal homosexual criminal. It would be the most repulsive (in a sense never dreamed of by people like Alice Cooper) spectacle in the history of rock.
The audiences, however, usually love the show, and it's gratifying to see them flood down to the stage at last, giving Lou Reed the adulation he's deserved for so long. It's only because when you start to think about the basic lameness of his band, the dirgelike tempo at which he sings most of the songs, the generally funereal atmosphere, and the speculations that all this leads you into, that you begin to get bugged. Because Lou Reed's finally got a chance at real sustained stardom, and he is blowing it. He's still riding on the legend now, but people are going to get tired damn fast of a legend who slunks out with a bunch of blobs behind him, sings his songs as if he's falling asleep, forgets the words half the time, stands as still as if he's embalmed except for remembering every five minutes