The three-minute guitar duet that kicks off 1974’s Rock ’n’ Roll Animal is kind of satanic when you know what’s coming: “Sweet Jane,” one of the most beautiful and important songs of all time, written by Lou Reed for the Velvet Underground, a beautiful and important band that felt like the last piece of the puzzle to teenage rock fans who discovered them during their renaissance in the early nineties. “Sweet Jane” is the song that liberated a generation from classic rock radio. It proved that you could write something durable without resorting to the exhausting riff-mongering of Foreigner or the idiot machismo of AC/DC. To hear this landmark of art rock used as a prog noodle pot by Reed’s touring band is a profoundly disorienting experience, but the whole album is like that. They do “Heroin” as the kind of uptempo funk that would later be used to get guests on and off of late-night TV. It all sounds very not Lou Reed, but by 1973 the question of what Lou Reed was had become unsettled.
Fans who encountered Reed’s body of work in retrospect may be surprised to learn that Rock ’n’ Roll Animal was his first gold album. I urge you to listen to it—if only to understand what might have happened if he had been born an Allman Brother—at some point before you put on The Blue Mask, an album Reed would release almost a decade later, in 1982, after a series of semi-public crises including but not limited to: moving in with his parents, brakes-off methamphetamine abuse, the slow and occasionally violent end of his relationship with Rachel Humphreys, and asking David Bowie to produce his record seconds before drunkenly assaulting him.
This period of personal disintegration coincided with a six-album run of legendarily confusing studio albums. My favorite is probably Street Hassle, which peaked at No. 89 on the Billboard charts. It contains the masterpiece title track but also the charitably-interpretable-as-satire “I Wanna Be Black,” a song that rhymes “have natural rhythm” with “shoot twenty feet of jism.” All Reed’s post-Rock ’n’ Roll Animal albums feel this way: for every good song, there are three that make you think he wrote the good one by accident, or that he is somehow mad at you for continuing to like him. The peak of this seeming hostility was Metal Machine Music, which Chuck Klosterman cited to illustrate his concept of the “advanced irritant,” an artist who has produced works of genius and then backslides to music that is simply bad. Still, I would rather listen to Metal Machine Music than Growing Up in Public, whose lyrics are disfigured by therapy-speak and whose instrumental arrangements sound alarmingly like Billy Joel.
All this is to say that shortly before he turned 40, Reed had established himself as one of the saddest burnouts of all time. In the absence of artistic and commercial success, his mercurial persona and self-destructive habits made him look less like a rock star and more like an ordinary asshole: someone who had gotten what a generation of musicians dreamed of and traded it for what millions of dumb, violent addicts couldn’t escape.
And then he dropped The Blue Mask. It sounded different from anything he had done before but was unmistakably him—the quote-unquote real Lou Reed everyone recognized but no one could duplicate, a sound that was at once new and a return to form. The first time I heard it, I assumed The Blue Mask was ironic; the second time, I began to suspect that it was the least ironic album of all time. It is strange, specific, and painfully honest, ugly in places and beautiful in others: in other words, a redemption story. Whatever Reed had lost over that last decade, artistically, he got it back.
What changed? For one thing, he dramatically reduced his consumption of drugs and alcohol, although as with many addicts who get clean under their own supervision, how close he got to zero BAC is not clear. He also married Sylvia Morales, a younger painter and poet whom he met at CBGB in 1977. Mostly leaving New York City—Reed kept his rent-stabilized apartment in the Village—the two lived together in Blairstown, New Jersey, in a house in the woods near a lake.
The first track of The Blue Mask, “My House,” is, at least on a literal level, about Reed’s belief that this home in Blairstown is not only “very beautiful at night” but also haunted by the spirit of his former college professor, the poet Delmore Schwartz. This idea is astonishingly self-centered, which is how you know Reed was getting sober. Taking stock, he sings that he’s got “a lucky life/My writing, my motorcycle, and my wife/And to top it all off, a spirit of pure poetry/Is living in this stone and wood house with me.” One can only imagine how thrilled Schwartz would be knowing that he was remembered as a figure of comparable importance to Reed’s motorcycle. But as with almost every track on this album, the real subject of “My House” is not the house or its appurtenances; it is Reed’s ongoing struggle to live productively amid the furnishings of his own mind.
These furnishings are old but unfamiliar, as though Reed had awakened from a blackout and was looking at them for the first time—which, in many respects, he was. The alternately healthful and agonizing experience of seeing himself clearly is the central theme of The Blue Mask, and it is reflected in the alternately beautiful and grotesque sound of the instrumentation. These arrangements are even more expressive than the words, if only because they convey feeling unconstrained by meaning or circumstance and therefore parallel Reed’s dislocating new sobriety. The singular sound of The Blue Mask provides a counterpoint to Reed’s lyrics, nudging them over the line from kind of dumb to definitely dumb and therefore great.
Two members of Reed’s new band seem to have been responsible for this sound. The first is Robert Quine, a former guitarist for the Voidoids and documented Lou Reed superfan who bootlegged a series of Velvet Underground shows in 1969, when he was trying and failing to pass the California bar. Quine’s guitar is on the left side of the stereo mix. On the right is Reed himself, whose return to playing guitar was reportedly a condition of Quine’s appearance. Together they developed a loose but steady sound that is atmospheric on tracks like “Women” but sharp and vital on the rockers—a sound reminiscent of Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones but slower, the honky tonk before it opens, while it still belongs to the staff.
The second new player behind this sound was bassist Fernando Saunders, a 25-year-old hired gun whose work on The Blue Mask can be heard, in echoes, on many of the bass sounds in subsequent 1980s pop-rock albums. Playing at the front of the mix with sharp attack and the treble turned all the way up, Saunders makes the bass a midrange instrument, dropping fills from the top of the neck into the pauses in conversation between Reed’s vocals and the guitars. These bass fills are such an organizing feature of The Blue Mask that you can kind of guess when one is coming, e.g. “Seven days make a week [boing]/On two of them I sleep.” In addition to evoking the first step of a 12-step program, this moment from “Underneath the Bottle” suggests that punctuation from Saunders was what Reed’s writing needed all along.
The other element of The Blue Mask that you can’t get out of your head, once you know its context, is how raw it all is—like a dental procedure put off too long. If “Underneath the Bottle” is the honest version of the cynical “The Power of Positive Drinking” that Reed recorded two years earlier, the title track and “Waves of Fear” are the price he paid for lying. “The Blue Mask” is a noise jam about S&M, kind of like “Venus in Furs” from The Velvet Underground & Nico, but in a way that does not make kinky sex sound at all hip or fun. “Cut the stallion at his mount/And stuff it in his mouth!” Reed shouts before the whole thing collapses into a disorganized guitar solo. It is kink as pathology rather than transgression, a too-clear reflection of insecurities and half-repressed failures that ends in humiliation instead of a downtown leather scene.
“Waves of Fear” is about the psychological experience of withdrawal, the often ignored but undeniable place where your body rubs up against your mind. It is not in free time, and neither is it simply a jam; it has its own rhythm and structural logic, but that logic is awful in the biblical sense of the word. “Waves of fear/Squat on the floor/Looking for some pill/The liquor is gone/Blood drips from my nose/I can barely breathe/Waves of fear/I’m too scared to leave,” Reed sings with terrible specificity. Here, at age 39, is his penitence for two decades of songs about how drugs are cool. Here is the process of getting clean not as relief but as de-anesthetized surgery. Here, in other words, is the particularly ugly and beautiful experience of continuing to become Lou Reed.
Not every track on the album reaches that level of fusion between form and content; some are simply failed experiments or regressions to post-Animal pandering. “Average Guy” is what I can only describe as some Joe Walsh shit: a snotty novelty song about how Reed is perfectly ordinary, ha ha. “The Day John Kennedy Died,” while more winsome in tone and seeming intent, ends on the line, “I dreamed that I could somehow comprehend that someone shot him in the face.” This historical inaccuracy brings to mind John Cale’s remark, in his autobiography, that Reed could be extremely funny without knowing when he was doing it. In the context of Reed’s lifelong willingness to embarrass himself twice to produce something beautiful once, though, it is these wabi-sabi elements that perfect the album.
There is a video of the version of “The Blue Mask” that Reed and his band performed live in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2000, in which the essentially two-note bass riff of the original has become a mastering pattern for the entire rhythm section—mostly D and then mostly G played over and over, tighter and seemingly harder each time, the cymbals just behind the beat. Reed is 58 years old. His face has settled into the William H. Macy grimace he would wear in the 21st century. When he begins to sing, he does so almost perfunctorily, in contrast to the driving energy of the arrangement, as though he had been mumbling these words to himself in elevators and on subway platforms for the last two decades. When I watch this video I think about how, at any moment, you can do or say or conceive something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. It might even be something good.
The Blue Mask is good. After I heard it for the first time, I could not stop thinking about it for months. During that initial infatuation, I recommended it to several people, but since then I have become careful not to, because most of them turned out not to like it. I have come to think of that as part of the appeal. To paraphrase Wayne Campbell, we didn’t need Lou Reed to write songs that everybody liked; we left that to the Beatles. What we needed from Reed was that singular thing only he could render, with the conviction that no experience was so terrible it could not be redeemed as art, and if that thing that made it possible went away for a while, it would come back to you. And so it did.
