‘Heroin’: The Velvet Underground’s ode to William S Burroughs?
Lou Reed’s perfect 1972 song ‘Perfect Day’ is often thought to be about the effects of taking heroin, an interpretation that Reed himself found “laughable”. Expanding on the meaning behind the song in a 2000 UK radio interview, he said that “this guy’s vision of a perfect day was the girl, sangria in the park, and then you go home; a perfect day, real simple. I meant just what I said.”
He did quite famously write a song about heroin and its effects, though, and there is no ambiguity about the meaning behind that one. One of the most celebrated songs from The Velvet Underground’s 1967 avante-garde debut The Velvet Underground & Nico, ‘Heroin’ is an unapologetic ode to the drug and its effects, but is it also an ode to Beat-writer William S Burroughs?
Loping from one-time signature to another, ‘Heroin’ is at times dreamlike and at others nightmarish. On a bed of light percussion, an electric guitar drifts in and out of earshot throughout while a listless violin hovers high in the mix. The song swells up at times like a rush of the drug and comes crashing down before the next hit picks up the pace again.
At the crescendo, that distorted, scratching and scathing violin overwhelms and drowns Reed’s droning voice out at times. All the while, every line in the song explicitly lays out the process of getting hold of a fix, shooting up and feeling the big decision flood his veins and nullify the singer’s life, recalling the same level of detail that Burroughs went into in his semi-autobiographical 1953 beat novel Junkie.
Much like Lou Reed’s ‘Heroin’, Junkie contains an explicit account of the effects that the drug has on the system. More than the song, the novel is a dry, direct piece of work that doesn’t waste time worrying about the ethical or moral implications of what the user is doing.
And, much like ‘Heroin’ is not Lou Reed’s only song on The Velvet Underground’s album about the drug – ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ is a song about waiting for his dealer to arrive with his next fix – Junkie wasn’t Burroughs’ only book on the subject, either. Arriving eight years later, Naked Lunch is a much more experimental ride over similar terrain.
The book, like the song, has no clear linear plot and drifts around a series of non-structured scenes involving the acquisition and ingestion of the drug. It can be a difficult read, not just because of the subject matter but also because of the writing style, much as the song can be a difficult listen, at times, too.
When they were released, Burroughs’ novels were not huge successes, but they were controversial, pushing the limits of what could be spoken or written about in an American art form and published piece of work. Lou Reed would have undoubtedly read these books as an acolyte of the Beatnik movement and a voracious reader. His reading of them would have no doubt informed his own writing when it came to songs like ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ and, especially, ‘Heroin’. What Burroughs could do in 200 pages, Reed could do in seven minutes and 16 seconds.
In a sense, these songs are not just written as a love letter to the narcotic itself but as a thank-you to Burroughs for opening up the possibility of writing about it in the first place. When he eventually met William S Burroughs in 1979, Lou Reed supposedly asked him, “Can a pupil ever do better work than his teacher?”
“In this case”, Burroughs replied, “I believe so”.
