Was Lou Reed a person or a persona?
Lou Reed died on a crisp late October Sunday morning in 2013. He was 71. This obviously isn’t hugely long-lived by today’s standards, but it was surely still more than enough time to get to the crux of a man who undeniably changed rock music forever.
Yet Reed went to his deathbed largely remaining as a puzzle uncracked, the enigma who always seemed so effervescent and searingly constant in the music industry of the half a century prior, but rarely gave anything away at all as to who he truly was. It begs the question: did we really know Reed at all?
Sure, he went by his real name and his trials and tribulations over the years are well documented, but this accounts for very little in reality if you ever came into contact with the man himself, forced to stare him in the whites of the eyes as he bared down, refusing to give anything of his precious self away lest the mask might fall. He could be accused of typical rock star arsehole behaviour, of course, but it always seemed he was hiding more beneath the surface.
There was a guard who forcefully rebutted even the hint of being asked anything remotely personal – admittedly a slight challenge when he was one of the most famous rock stars in the public eye, and writing songs from lived experience to boot. But as one disastrous interview he gave to The Guardian in 2003 proved, this was something he never budged from his stance on, as the interviewer valiantly continued to probe, but Reed’s only deadpan response was: “I don’t answer questions like that.”
It evoked the feeling that not only was he attempting to mask his private life, possibly to an overly extensive degree, but that he simply couldn’t answer questions about who Lou Reed was beyond the music, because Lou Reed didn’t exist. Never had existed. He was just a character who took to the stage, or sat through interviews, and this real man who played him? No one really knew.
Of course, there is a valid argument for this in the sense that Reed, viewed in the light of the persona, was a creative outlet for music and experimentation. Themes of gender-bending and glam rock innovation were just the expression, not necessarily translated to the man behind it. But they had to come from somewhere in his brain, right? Some remote connection? “I can’t answer questions like that,” was his only response.
The distinction between “can’t” and “don’t” is the essential difference here, almost a slip-up in the act, as the personal questions persisted. “Don’t” was the concrete answer – the impenetrable wall – whereas “can’t” suggests a genuine inability, or indeed vulnerability, to reach into those recesses. As such, we can say that Lou Reed was the persona he wanted to convey, but there was a hint of the real man mixed somewhere in there that he was just completely unwilling to expose.
He would have had his reasons for this, which you have to respect. Whether it was an over-protectiveness or fear of losing some form of anonymity behind closed doors, the real Lewis Allan Reed was a subject matter totally off limits, never to be touched of even alluded to. But Lou the star, the turbulent, enamouring enigma? He was the showman and, largely, just the purveyor of a brand.
