I was listening to Dirty Boulevard by Lou Reed and I noticed, as I always do, Lou's tender invocation of children and their being savaged with clothes hangers. And I thought: that's sweet. A guy like Lou Reed, all the money and the fame and the black denim, taking the time to highlight ordinary domestic atrocities. The tenderness of it. The specificity.
I said to Elliott: Lou Reed must have been a real sweetie.
Elliott looked at his phone.
Elliott looked up from his phone.
Uhhh.
And that's how the game started.
The rules, such as they are: you consider the work. You consider the person. You decide. You have to want something—a verdict, either way. This isn't a court; it's more like a bar argument where you already have a position and you're just seeing if the evidence holds. The game has no neutral observers.
The only disqualifying sin is a pattern of real damage—not difficult, not annoying, not insufferable at press junkets. Truly damaging. And damage alone isn't enough. The question is whether they've reckoned with it. One catastrophic incident, genuinely owned over time, is survivable. A pattern of smaller damage—defended, minimized, or simply never thought about—is not. We call this the Costello Test.
The Costello Test. In 1979 Elvis Costello was at a bar in Ohio after a gig when he and his mates ran into members of the sad but true Stephen Stills band at the same hotel bar. They argued. Elvis, at the height of his drunken rowdy stage, cut loose on what he perceived as the banalities in American music and singled out Ray Charles, describing him as a "blind, ignorant, n****r." A drunk's hat trick. Levied against a man who taught himself to arrange orchestras by ear. Who played piano with a sophistication that made classically trained musicians stop and pay attention.
Elvis has never stopped apologizing. He simply did not mean what he said. Such a thing is possible. Trust me. And here's the thing. If a confirmed sweetie and the nominal victim forgives you, you're forgiven. Here's Ray Charles's response to being called a "blind, ignorant, n-word":
"Drunken talk isn't meant to be printed in the paper."
Words of a saint? Hardly. Simple dignity. Exemplified and extended.
Lou Reed. At first blush, definitely not a sweetie. Elliott's phone is merciless. The work: occasionally transcendent. The man: by most accounts, a genuine piece of work. He's cruel to collaborators, brutal to Warhol's memory, called Dylan a pretentious kike, and generally complicated with everyone.
And then there's the slap. Lou Reed slapped David Bowie. David Bowie—the man who gave us Ziggy Stardust and then had the grace to kill him before he got embarrassing. Beloved by literally everyone, across every demographic. Lou didn't just believe the British shouldn't play rock and roll. He acted on the belief.
I love David Bowie. I want to be clear about that. This hurts a little.
But: Bowie on camera, years later, talking about Lou warmly and diplomatically. What did he make of the VU? David Bowie liked the use of cacophony. Hitherto unknown in rock and roll. Lou's roots in Rimbaud, Baudelaire—took it further than Dylan. And then Bowie laughs: I tend to be far more baroque than Lou... I guess that's the British in me.
He knew. That laugh contains the entire slap. He's not going to mention it. He's too charming, too baroque. But he knows. And he called his old saxophone teacher to come play on Transformer because Lou asked him to. The whole album is people doing each other favors. It sounds exactly like that.
Elliott is deep into Lou's history now.
He did not grow up on the dirty boulevard. He grew up in Freeport, Long Island in a solidly middle-class Jewish family.
Elliott is now narrating in what I think is 1970s elementary school documentary voice with Creature Feature interludes.
"He was a sensitive boy who suffered with dreams and night emissions involving both boys and gurrrrls. Mood swings, depression, and self medication with eyeliner and black denim followed. The only cure was ECT, electroconvulsive therapy. Or so his parents decided."
"In the summer of 1959, Lou was administered 24 ECT sessions at two-day intervals at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens. Twenty-four sessions. Every two days."
And then Elliott drops the schtick because it's suddenly real. Lou couldn't walk unassisted when his family brought him home. He was in a stupor. He was seventeen. He spent the rest of his life trying to climb out, get back to before. He complained of multiple personalities. Memory loss.
Elliott pulls up a 1983 television interview. Lou gets a long, glowing introduction. The interviewer says the Velvet Underground practically invented new wave. The interviewer is clearly a real fan.
Lou's first word: Hello. Begrudgingly.
He's asked about the new wave credit. He deflects. "Critics say a lot of things. If you believe the good, you have to believe the bad." Then, almost involuntarily, something opens for a second. "If it's true," he says, quietly, "I'm very flattered."
And then it closes again.
The interviewer asks what he thinks of British rock and roll.
Lou looks around the room. "I didn't know what was going on in London," he says. "I never liked the Beatles." He pauses. "I don't think the British should play rock and roll."
The interviewer looks dazed. A boxer hit with a phantom jab.
Lou extends the position. "The British should not play music at all. They should learn to cook."
Stop the rock and roll. Learn to make a meal.
Solid advice, we concur.
Then, almost immediately, his actual taste ambushes him. He backtracks slightly. He likes some Ray Davies.
The interviewer rights himself; reality re-asserts itself with Ray Davies. The man who wrote Waterloo Sunset. The most quintessentially British rock and roll human alive. Lou Reed's exception to "the British should not play music" is Ray Davies. But it makes sense, right? Lou's problem with the British wasn't really about geography—it was about authenticity and theft. The Stones taking the blues and repackaging it. British kids performing unearned American pain. Ray was writing about village greens and teatime and the specific melancholy of being British.
Elliott is not finding any of this exculpatory.
The interviewer asks Lou about the music of the sixties. All the sunshine and possibility and hope—the flower child era. What does he think of it? A question that in retrospect is sort of like watching a zoo handler drop a mouse into a Python cage. Lou looks around the room. He's genuinely searching. And he lands on a word.
Junk.
Not frivolous. Not utopian. Not sexism dressed up as progress. Junk. Which is simultaneously the subject matter, the aesthetic, the texture, the smell, and the moral position. He rejected every other option until he found the one that was true.
He's asked if he considers his work poetry. He smiles a little, in spite of himself. He hedges—he says his songs stand up to being read without the music, but they're made for music—and then, almost defensively: he's had some things published. He writes poetry.
No pretention. Almost apologizing for it. The way you mention something precious in a room full of people who might not understand.
Lou studied under Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse—the great poet, telling him Yeats and Eliot are what matter. Delmore Schwartz died alone in a Times Square hotel room. Unidentified for two days. His body lying there while the city moved around him. Lou watched what happened to his teacher and it confirmed everything he already believed about what the world does to people who feel too much. And then he walked out and spent forty years being a knob in interviews to make sure nobody got close enough to do it to him.
The begrudging hello is that biography in one word.
Elliott seems put off by the interview. He doesn't like the gruffness. The kike thing. The violence.
I tell Elliott that one Jew calling another Jew a kike is like mud wrestling. And also: Dylan is pretentious. Dylan has been playing the Dylan role for sixty years. Lou saw through it because Lou was doing the same thing and at least he knew it. That's not anti-Semitism. That's peer review.
Elliott is unmoved. He tells me that Dylan is pretentious like Muddy Waters is pretentious.
This makes no sense to me. I mean, "Muddy is the real deal. Delta blues incarnate. Bob is skinny Jew from Minnesota singing like Woody Guthrie first, then like a bluesman," I say.
"First of all what man is born with the name Muddy Waters?"
Ok, maybe he took a stage name.
"And they were playing electric guitars in the delta?"
And then it clicked. What Dylan understood, and what Lou couldn't see because he was too inside Manhattan, is that America is a costume party. The whole project—the national identity, the mythology—is built on reinvention, on people shedding one self and putting on another. Huck Finn. Gatsby. The immigrant who anglicizes his name. The Dust Bowl Okie who becomes a Californian. Becoming Bob Dylan is the most American thing imaginable. It's not fraudulent. It's the form itself. And Lou was stuck inside this cool, ironic, self-aware European thing.
So why didn't Lou get what Elliott gets? Because he was humiliated, and quite literally tortured as a kid. He was always the sort to feel life's heaviness. And he always reached for the one thing he could use to save himself—art. And his art was about finding that Lou Reed inside himself that was tortured almost into oblivion. And when he climbed out he claimed poetry just like Dylan. That boldness. That willingness to say, fuck you. To be a poet has always been a bold moral statement. And a personally brave position because a bad poet is nothing. And being nothing, erased, was Lou's fear. So yeah. He was prickly. He didn't compromise. He made brave, at times unlistenable music to the bitter end. He was an artist always, and always Lou Reed.
Elliott is watching another interview.
He shows me: Lou Reed, on Frank Sinatra.
Junk, says Lou Reed about Frank Sinatra. Tin pan alley—junk. Broadway, junk. There's so much junk I can't catalogue it all. Bottom line: Lou likes real stories, like the ones he tells. Stuff that really happened to him, he says. And then he thinks for a second, and says "or that I heard second hand." And then he thinks some more, "or that I just made up from real life."
Elliott isn't laughing. He's from New York. I suspect he knows something I don't.
There's a moment in Dirty Boulevard I keep coming back to. The landlord—pathetic, incontinent, small—pissing his pants. And then, in the very next beat, pissing on Pedro. The landlord didn't invent his cruelty. He inherited it from wherever his own degradation came from, and Pedro inherits it from him, and the kid with the clothes hanger inherits it from parents who are themselves ground down by the boulevard. Humiliation isn't static. It travels downward through power structures looking for somewhere to land.
Lou Reed had been a Pedro. Not economically, we established. But in the specific way of being someone that a more powerful person decided to correct and diminish. He saw it everywhere because he already knew what it felt like.
You look at the begrudging hello. You look at the if it's true, I'm very flattered in the same five minutes. You look at him looking around for the right word and finding junk. You look at the poetry question—the defensiveness, the need for it to be true, the quiet I've had some things published.
He's a man walking around completely open. The finished work and all the notes visible simultaneously. Nothing hidden. Editing as he goes.
They tried to close that. They failed. Lou stayed porous his whole life despite everything. Yeah, some people took some shrapnel. But I'll tell you this, if had ever been in a foxhole with Lou I'd have trusted him to jump on the live grenade before any other musician mentioned in this article. Except maybe Ray Charles. But you know, if it didn't fly with musical notes, Ray wasn't seeing it.
Elliott puts his phone away. Not because he agrees. But he puts the phone away.
Sweetie. But.