Johnny Marr picks the contender for the “song most universally loved” crown
A lot of the best things in life are an acquired taste: the glorious amber nectar of a cold beer tastes bloody horrid to a soda-loving 13-year-old. The drab prospect of a 0-0 draw precludes many people from falling in love with the beautiful game. Hot sauce is no good for an unaccustomed youngster. Hell, it even takes your first bout of acne before you can truly admire the lilting guitar of Johnny Marr and lyrics relating to road traffic deaths.
However, there is a second type of masterpiece that goes beyond the sense of heightened artistry. As Nick Cave said when he was moved to tears by the Karen Dalton song ‘Something on My Mind’: ”The thing about the song: it wasn’t that it was sad that made me cry, it was that it was perfect. There is something about human achievement when it reaches so high in such a causal way and can do something that is so utterly perfect.”
Perfection is a rarity in art, but when something comes close to it, the art has the potential to floor universally. As it happens, the track that Marr rightfully picks out as a beloved anthem comes from one of music’s most divisive stars. As Marr explained to the Guardian about why he holds Reed in such high esteem: “His reputation for documenting the more subversive side of human nature is well known, but it doesn’t tell the whole story of a writer who had real insight into human frailty and vulnerability – cruelty too,” Marr says.
Before quoting Reed’s dark lyric from his oblique masterpiece Berlin, “‘Caroline says, as she gets up off the floor, Why is it that you beat me? It isn’t any fun.’” As Marr continues: “He turned slang into poetry, very deliberately using modern language to tell his stories of the city, and he made street talk into literature.”
Beyond this singular style, he also had a rock ‘n’ roll heart that ensured his tunes were enriched with a pointed, visceral and concise edge. As Marr adds: “His titles alone make him as good as anybody; ‘Satellite of Love’, ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘White Light / White Heat’ almost define the rock era, and that the young man who first became known for writing a song called “I’m Waiting for the Man” at the age of 23 could turn his talent to write ’Perfect Day, a song which would surely be a contender for ‘song most universally loved’, says it all.”
As that sage, once again, Nick Cave said, “He taught me that you can put the most sonically aggressive music and put it side by side by with some of the most beautiful ballads that anyone has ever written.” ‘Perfect Day’ is the latter. It sits aside Reed’s acerbic view of the world as a literal picnic, and it even takes the ugly old notion of a middle eight, and cooks up perhaps the greatest one in music history.
Its wholeness makes the demo below all the more fascinating. You can barely imagine a song as seamlessly beautiful as ‘Perfect Day’ even actually being written, let alone being worked on. It’s like a hymn or ‘Happy Birthday’, it’s just there, coaxed from the ether to keep things flowing on the right path. Such is the perfection of the tune; you imagine it came out as a whole all arithmetically in order in brimming with confidence.
He might have been known for his obfuscated wordplay that paired the visceral edge of rock with beat literature, but ‘Perfect Day’ is as unassuming as a children’s fable. As he simply put it himself: “That’s a lovely song. A description of a very straightforward affair.” Now, it is a transcendent mainstay in culture. It’s the sort of melody you know even if you think The Velvet Underground is a subterranean strip club.
