I was thinking recently about how influences are passed down, how they converge, etc. I spent several years researching and meditating on dreams for a screenplay I would eventually complete during the height of the pandemic, and since my ability to remember and transcribe my own dreams had traditionally been limited, I sought out friends who had better instant recall, and asked them to relay theirs on camera.
Flashback to many years ago, when I was first getting into Lou Reed's solo work, primarily via his first boxed set, Between Thought and Expression, a compilation of tracks from the first two decades of his post-Velvet Underground career (I bemoan the journeys of younger music fans, who are likely to explore artists via a random, temporally schizophrenic list on Spotify as opposed to seeking out one album at a time, or diving into a boxed set with a nice book of liner notes). I soon learned that for several years and albums Lou played with sessions guitarist Robert Quine, who began as a VU groupie (his cassette bootlegs of their shows were eventually released in the early 2000), and who I recognized from his fantastic solos on Matthew Sweet's album Girlfriend (which also features Television guitarist Richard Lloyd on a handful of tracks).
One of Reed's most acclaimed solo albums is The Blue Mask (1982), which was notable not just for the dueling guitars of himself and Quine (the album has a note included about whose guitar is in which channel), but for the strides he had made as a writer. From Robert Christgau's Village Voice review:
Never has Lou sounded more Ginsbergian, more let-it-all-hang-out than on this, his most controlled, plainspoken, deeply felt, and uninhibited album. Even his unnecessarily ideological heterosexuality is more an expression of mood than a statement of policy; he sounds glad to be alive, so that horror and pain become occasions for courage and eloquence as well as bitterness and sarcasm. Every song comes at the world from a slightly different angle, and every one makes the others stronger. Reed's voice--precise, conversational, stirring whether offhand or inspirational--sings his love of language itself
Reed was in a relatively happy place at the time, having recently married his wife Sylvia after years of tumultuous relationships, and sobered up with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. The album contains songs that reflect this new outlook, but also some clearly written during the struggle, or through the eyes of a self-loathing addict he had been. The album opens with "My House", a tribute to the greatest mentor of Reed's life, his NYU poetry professor Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966). Schwartz had been previously credited on the Velvets' debut album, with the song "European Son" dedicated to him. But here, he's more directly referenced, as Reed recounts a story where him and Sylvia summoned Schwartz's spirit with a ouija board and were subsequently haunted by his presence.
In additional to teaching, Schwartz was a respected poet himself, counting T.S. Eliot among his admirers. His most notable publication was a book of poems and short stories called In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the title story about a man who dreams he is in a movie theatre watching a film of his parents meeting and becoming involved romantically, which disturbs him greatly, even attempting to influence the events he's watching as a spectator. In real life, Schwartz's parents had gone through a very messy separation which was traumatic for him.
Schwartz's influence would pass through Reed to U2's Bono, who in the liner notes to the album Achtung Baby (1991) gave "Special Thanks to: Lou and Sylvia Reed (For Delmore Schwartz)" under the info for the album's penultimate track "Acrobat", which namechecks Schwartz's story in its lyrics, a text recommended to Bono by Reed years earlier. Just as the album's sound took a drastic left-turn away from the band's established sound towards a darker, European approach influenced by industrial music, the "baggy" sound of current Manchester dance rock, and proto trip-hop elements, Bono's lyrics became less universal and more confessional, more full of doubt than proclamation or aspiration. One can draw a line from Reed's self-reflection and poetic style on The Blue Mask to what we see here, particularly on "Acrobat":
Don't believe what you hear
Don't believe what you say
If you just close your eyes
You can feel the enemy
---
No, nothing makes sense
Nothing seems to fit
I know you'd hit out
If you only knew who to his
And I'd join the movement
If there was one I could believe in
Yeah I'd break bread and wine
If there was a church I could receive in
And I must be an acrobat
To talk like this and act like that
And you can dream
So dream out loud
And don't let the bastards grind you down
--
And you can build
And I can will
And you can call
I can't wait until
You can stash
And you can seize
In dreams begin responsibilities
The words are complemented by some of the band's heaviest, densest playing to date, and one can draw another link between this and what Reed & Quine were doing on The Blue Mask's title track:
