‘The Bed’: The saddest song Lou Reed ever wrote
New York songsmith Lou Reed was at the peak of his powers in the early 1970s.
Having struck a defiant counter to the summer of love’s psychedelic pop with The Velvet Underground & Nico‘s avant-garde decadence, a move toward relatively conventional rock offerings until his former band’s demise saw a smooth transition from frontman to solo star, flirting with glam and delivering the immortal Transformer LP with production help from David Bowie.
Yet Reed’s dallying with the charts would be brief. Following the divorce of his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, Reed’s mood darkened, and many evenings were spent necking Scotch whiskey and snorting speed.
From this turmoiled fug came the seeds of his next album. Having become acquainted with producer Bob Ezrin, an invitation to his Toronto home became a conceptual meeting, the pair figuring out which direction to take his third solo LP. Already proven as a storyteller off the back of ‘Waiting for My Man’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, Ezrin pushed the idea of a narrative arc, a chance to hang out with his lyrical characters beyond the scope of a single song. Taking cues from Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’ plus various Velvet Underground cuts, Reed began to conceive of his much-awaited follow-up.
Released in October 1973, Berlin told the gruelling soap opera of Jim and Caroline’s tempestuous relationship. Set against the Cold War backdrop of a divided city, Reed takes us on a “film for the ears” as we witness the respective drug dealer and sex worker’s private lives disintegrate into abuse, removal of the children, and bleakly, Caroline’s suicide. Torn between relief and remorse, Jim closes the sorry chapter of his life, pushing down his complicity too deep inside to ever be burdened by guilt.
While Berlin‘s finale ‘Sad Song’ follows, it’s the penultimate track that plumbs the album’s most mournful depth. Caught in a spectral plane of painful rumination, Jim contemplates the bed’s central role in his and Caroline’s lives, from the site of their children’s conception to the discovery of her wrist-slashed, dead body.
There’s a numb energy that fogs ‘The Bed’, as if the tragedy has yet to truly sink in, the enormity of the event too great to initially grapple with, spiked with extra troubled haunt by its austere acoustic guitar and Mellotron whispers. Jim harbours a cool view of their intimate environment, despite carrying such heartache: “This is the place where we used to live / A pit filled with love and blood”.
As ‘The Bed’ closes, a ghostly rush of phantasmic choirs blasts out the speakers like Caroline’s troubled spirit, ensuring she stays in Jim’s gnawed psyche for years to come. The material room has drifted into another realm altogether, Berlin‘s gloomy film projected in front of him, relaying the pair’s dashed hopes, passionate embraces, and questions that’ll never be answered.
Critically maligned upon release but towering in his back catalogue retrospectively, ‘The Bed’ sits in Berlin‘s tragic rock opera with poetic sting, a voyeuristic peep at domestic nightmares and wounded loss with unflinching, visceral authority.
