had as much trouble as anyone else in trying to navigate the decade's actuality. By its end, he seemed to have just about removed himself from rock & roll for good.
Street Hassle, brave and brilliant as it was, had the melancholy and deadly feel of a testament. Its sequel,
The Bells, while musically challenging and emotionally acute, was nevertheless the first Lou Reed album that sounded more cerebral than autobiographical. The artist seemed content to become an old master, admirable without being vital.
Then Reed entered into a marriage that, by all appearances, has been a source of profound and genuine bliss–which, in his case, seems especially miraculous. Unfortunately, his first try at describing what that relationship means to him, Growing Up in Public, was a lackadaisical effort: not dishonest but slovenly. In retrospect, though, you can hear the beginnings of the move toward the seemingly artless directness of style and approach that pays off so richly on The Blue Mask.
Reed's marriage and the new life it's given him are absolutely central to the current LP, and here his happiness is transformed into renewed aesthetic inspiration. He cares about his work now because it has to do justice to that life, as fully as the Velvet Underground's music did justice to Joseph Conrad's "the horror, the horror." Evocations of Reed's present-day serenity frame The Blue Mask. "My House" movingly completes a cycle begun by the dedication of "European Son" to poet Delmore Schwartz (way back on the first Velvets record) by calling up Schwartz' memory to bless a domestic calm that smolders into a quiet magnificence at song's end. The wonderfully unrestrained finale, "Heavenly Arms" – an unabashed love song to Reed's wife, Sylvia–suggests that if the Velvet Underground emerged partly out of an adolescent rage that the world as promised by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons was a lie, Lou Reed, as much as any of us, still wanted nothing more than to be able to make a Four Seasons tune come true.
Instead of denying all of the other things he's been, the peace of mind that makes a "My House" possible simultaneously allows each facet of Reed's jangled art to fall into place at last, undistorted by irony. (The Blue Mask is the least ironic album Reed's ever made, and maybe one of the least ironic anybody's ever made.) Amazingly, the intimacy and warmth of "Women"–here conveyed by a play of casual jokes – can exist on the same LP with the chillingly quiet terror of "The Gun" in much the same way that things fit together for a man comfortably wandering among
Lou Reed practically invented rock perversion. With the Velvet Underground, he wrote pioneering songs about S&M, drag queens and "Heroin." So by 1982, what was the only shocking stance left for him? "I'm just your average guy," Reed sang. "I'm average-looking/And I'm average inside."
The mundane suited Reed. On The Blue Mask, he sings about domestic bliss at his country home ("My House"), remembers what he was doing on a November 1963 afternoon ("The Day John Kennedy Died") and even declares himself as a bread-and-butter heterosexual ("Women"). He transforms "Heroin" into "The Heroine," praising the bravery of a woman rather than the pleasures of shooting up. Wiping clean a decade of ever-more-desperate provocation, Reed lets the casual poetry of his songs shine again.
The album's offhand sound matches its conversational lyrics. Reed had finally found the musical foil he had needed since John Cale quit the Velvets: Robert Quine. Also famed for his work with Richard Hell (and later Matthew Sweet), Quine, who died earlier this year, was an inventive, electrifying guitarist -- and he had grown up bootlegging Velvet Underground shows. He encouraged Reed to play more guitar; The Blue Mask is almost all live takes, with Quine's guitar on your left speaker, Reed's guitar on the right.
"One thing that's crucial is that I listen to the lyrics," said Quine. " 'Waves of Fear,' if it had been about making an egg cream, my solo would be different than a guy having a nervous breakdown." In fact, "Waves of Fear" is four astounding minutes of psychosis: While Reed shouts, "Crazy with sweat/Spittle on my jaw," the band finally cuts loose, swooping on the song like a hawk on its prey. The paranoia feels as real and specific as the Canada geese at Reed's country home, which makes it twice as scary.
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