‘The Gift’: The Velvet Underground song inspired by the “best short story ever”
Lou Reed often took a literary approach to songwriting in his work with The Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, crafting transgressive, character-driven songs like ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ that cemented his status as one of the great songwriters of the 20th century. His studies in journalism and creative writing led him to write the dark and twisted short story that would later become ‘The Gift,’ a track which appeared on the band’s 1968 album White Light/White Heat.
The story, read aloud by bandmate John Cale, depicts Waldo Jeffers, a heartbroken man who attempts to post himself across the country to his former lover in hopes of reuniting. Naturally, the story doesn’t have a happy ending; our protagonist is stabbed in the head as his former partner attempts to open the well-sealed package.
The song builds in anticipation, pairing the character’s trembling anticipation at the reunion with the listener’s sickening sense of the story’s impending doom. As Cale reads, that Sheila “plunged the long blade through the middle of the package / Through the masking tape, through the cardboard, through the cushioning / And right through the centre of Waldo Jeffers’ head,” we are horrified, but not surprised. Another tragic tale is unfurled.
The track is crafted in such a way that the story is heard in one channel and the backing instrumental in the other, with Reed explaining that “If you got tired of the words, you could just listen to the instrumental”. White Light/White Heat stands out as a particularly experimental, avant-garde moment in Velvet Underground history, eschewing commercially successful, easily accessible hits for a more innovative musical odyssey, evident in the 17-minute song ‘Sister Ray.’
Reed was heavily inspired by author and poet Delmore Schwarz, his mentor, while he studied at Syracuse University. Reed admired Schwarz throughout his career, later dedicating two songs to the author he described as “everything”. Schwarz’s most famous work was the 1937 short story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, another dark story which depicts a man watching the disintegration of his parents’ relationship play out in a movie theatre, distraught but unable to change the outcome. Reed was heavily influenced by this work, calling it “the best short story I’d ever read.”
The influential author died two years before the release of White Light/White Heat, but Reed continued to pay homage to Schwarz for the rest of his life. In 2012, he wrote the poem ‘O Delmore How I Miss You’, a tribute to his late mentor, which begins: “O Delmore how I miss you. You inspired me to write. You were the greatest man I ever met. You could capture the deepest emotions in the simplest language. Your titles were more than enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck. You were a genius. Doomed.”
“The mad stories. O Delmore I was so young. I believed so much. We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better in life than to devote oneself to Joyce. You’d annotated every word in the novels you kept from the library. Every word.”
While it can be relatively easy to pinpoint the success of Lou Reed down to his ability to create avant-garde pop that both stuck in your tooth like a candy cane and sliced your gums just as sweetly, tracks like ‘The Gift’ are a reminder that while his delivery may have felt simple, the technique and creative endeavours behind those songs were anything but.
