Lou Reed, Delmore, Dreams, Acrobat, etc.

 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:

Oddly enough, on the band's landmark "ZooTV" tour to promote the album, "Acrobat" was the only song that was never even performed once during the 2 years on the road. Despite becoming a cult object of hardcore fans, it was not played until 2018's Experience + Innocence tour, where it appeared nightly. What did appear frequently during ZooTV was Lou Reed himself, via a "broadcast transmission" on the wall of TV screens, virtually duetting with Bono during the band's cover of his "Satellite of Love". And perhaps most surprisingly, the Velvet Underground's 1993 reunion would include 5 dates in Europe opening for U2 during that same tour.

My own path nearly crossed with Reed's, as he was doing an appearance at Tower Records while I was living in Boston in the 1990s. One of his handlers had come into Urban Outfitters looking for an ashtray that Reed could use while he was sitting at a table, and the guy told me if I had anything he would get Lou to sign it for me. On my lunch break I went across the street to the famed Newbury Comics music store, where I purchased a vinyl copy of my then-favorite Reed album...The Blue Mask.

So without even meeting the man, I have this bit of memorabilia by proxy. That same year I would see U2 in concert on their Popmart tour, and afterwards was lucky enough to speak with Bono and The Edge, who graciously spoke with me and signed my hardcover copy of Dubliners by James Joyce, who, perhaps not coincidentally, was Delmore Schwartz's favorite writer. In 2012, Schwartz was still heavy on Reed's mind, as he penned the essay for Poetry magazine, "Oh Delmore how I miss you", a fantastic bit of writing you can read via the link below:

Oh Delmore how I miss you

Reed would die a year later of cancer.