Lou Reed “The Blue Mask”
Most every Lou Reed solo album sounds like a middle age album. Even during his twenties and thirties, Lou was staring out into the abyss, closer to death than his actual age indicated. But in 1982, the year he got sober, turned forty and released “The Blue Mask,” he fully surrendered. He sang about his house. His motorcycle. His average life. His wife (a lot). He reveled in the mundane. But, he also feared it. Part mid-life crisis and part paean to domesticity, “The Blue Mask” is my favorite Lou Reed solo album. I do, of course, adore “Transformer,” but I also think of it as a VU post-script. I’m not a “Berliner.” Not a “Rock and Roll Animal.” And, despite my birthplace, not a “New Yorker.” “The Blue Mask” is my jam — and my jazz.
While he was always capable of writing elite songs, as Lou’s solo career meandered on he appeared less capable of producing great albums. Throughout the Seventies, he grew more ornery, elusive and addicted. And unsurprisingly, his output suffered. But critics were in the bag for Lou and his cult seemed perpetually willing to grade him on a velvet curve. He was, after all, Lou Reed. For many years, there was the idea of Lou — and the shadow he cast — and there was the reality of his solo albums — many of which were uneven. Or worse. But it can be hard to separate the man from his music and the music from his myth. Especially in the case of this man, his music and his myth. So, in revisiting “The Blue Mask” in 2020, as a middle-aged man myself, I was not sure I could be objective about Lou Reed, middle-aged man. I was more in the cult than out. And, even if I could resist bias, I was concerned that I might not like what I heard (or saw). Forty something Lou inspired images of muscle shirts and drunken dead eyes. Sunglasses and mullets. Motorcycles and headless guitars. And beneath all of the pretense was an addled fury that I did not want to touch.
Decades earlier, I had no such qualms. It was the mid-Nineties, I was in college, and it seemed gauche to not at least familiarize myself with the entire Lou Reed oeuvre. Wasn’t that the grown up thing to do? And so, when I first listened to “The Blue Mask,” I think I enjoyed it. I think I liked a couple of songs. I think that I told people who inquired that I did, in fact, love the entire album. But that was probably a lie. I definitely did not hate it. But, as a younger man, I could not appreciate the music apart from the legend of the artist and his former band. My experience with Lou Reed was still mediated through Lester Bangs’ interviews, The Velvet Underground, and “Dirty Boulevard.” Moreover, I simply could not relate to the songs. What did I know? Though I pretended the answer to that question was “everything,” the truth was nearly the opposite.
So, to return now, in middle-age, seemed both like a necessary reckoning and an impossible do over. Was I sure the album was any good? Absolutely not. Was I confident that I could talk about Lou Reed and his music without the rest of the baggage? Nope. I’d barely touched the record for twenty years. So, it was with great humility that I took that black and blue album off the shelf and dropped the needle onto the record.
Just as I recalled, “The Blue Mask” is basic — in the very best sense of the word. Two guitars, a bass and drums. Barely any overdubs. The drums are free and jazzy. The guitars — Lou Reed’s and Robert Quine’s — are presented in two flavors: delicate and broken. You know that part in “Back to the Future” where Marty is on stage playing guitar for Marvin Berry and his hand disappears because his future parents are not getting together? Remember how clumsy that guitar sounds in that moment— like Michael J. Fox is using an anvil for a pick? Well, that is kind of what the guitar solos sound like on “The Blue Mask.” They live somewhere between anvil-pick Marty McFly and Neil Young when he closes his eyes and hammers down. So focused was Lou on the sound of each guitar that he actually mixed the guitars into separate channels so you can hear the difference between his and Quine’s. It’s a useful trick, one that proves Reed’s mettle against an all time great. And, yes, it does also reek of early Eighties audiophile bullshittery.
Noisy and nifty as they may be, the solos exist primarily for release. They don’t paint the full picture. Most of the guitars are clear and graceful with a delicate hum surrounding them. Truthfully, I never thought Lou could play a gentle rhythm. I knew he could play a good, fast rhythm. But on “The Blue Mask” you hear each note in each chord. And this technique opens things up for solos and occasionally (yes) jams. Meanwhile, each chord and each minor change is tended with extra care. You feel like you are hearing the exact sound of the room it was recorded in. You feel like you are right next to Lou’s amplifier. And you are reminded that it was Lou’s knack for melody which made the drones and the noise so compelling.
By this point in his life, however, Lou simply could not hold his melodies with his voice. And so, he mostly talks his way through these songs. The lyrics here range from conversational (a verité style that David Berman, Bill Callahan and many others later adopted) to existential to simply poetic. And often all of the above — at once. The songs consider the loss of his mentor, his sobriety and his love of women, in general, and his wife, in particular. Whereas twenty years earlier, Lou’s life was saved by rock and roll, more recently his life was saved by a woman. One woman. And her name is Sylvia Morales. They married in 1980. She designed many of his album covers and it is clear that he loved her deeply and wanted to honor her and their love. To be clear, when he sings “I love women / we all love women” (actual lyrics) it sure sounds dated and it’s not not sexist. But, most of the time, that’s not how I hear him on this record. I hear a middle-aged man, lost for so long, stunted in relationships, trying to appreciate the full spectrum of his love. The joyous parts. The objectifying parts. The selfish parts. The submissive parts. I applaud him for even trying to articulate something so complex in the plainest terms possible.
On a record that generally thrills, there is one clunker — the heavy, tempo-less assault of a title track. “The Blue Mask” (the song) conjures pictures of Lou in a black tank top, on stage, battling feedback and distortion with tai chi. He yells the words, an affect that I don’t particularly mind when there is some structure rooting him. I am all for noise and dissonance. Anger is a perfectly valid emotion. I don’t mind anxious Lou or even frightened Lou. But angry chaotic Lou is the version that I want tune out. I prefer seething guitar to a barking singer.
Otherwise, the album gently ambles around his suburban home, from one lovely, plaintive number to another, more wistful, tone poem. And with the exception of the title track, he only really freaks out once. “Waves of Fear” completely approximates the anxiety beneath his newfound sobriety and domesticity. It’s startling, but it’s also spellbinding. There is a section where he raps a verse, but, even that works out OK. It’s an uncomplicated song, built on a single bent note, a steady beat and an extended Robert Quine guitar solo that sounds like a man bleeding out on a gurney. It is the outlier on the record and a tour de force.
Forty one minutes after he welcomed us into his house, “The Blue Mask” ends with “Heavenly Arms,” a yearning tribute to Sylvia, wherein he repeats her name over and over to close the album. All told, Lou’s eleventh solo album is a near perfect song cycle about sobriety, anxiety, middle-age, marriage and motorcycles. I’m glad I heard it when I was eighteen. But, I’m more so glad that I returned to it so many years later. In my forties, it is really quite something. And quite something else from what I remembered. This album was the beginning of a new Lou and, without it, I’m not sure we’d ever get Lou and Laurie, “Magic and Loss” or “Lulu” for that matter.