music friday: lou reed, “temporary thing”

My goodness, we are all getting old. It was 35 years ago … well, 35 years ago Wednesday past … that I saw Lou Reed on his Rock and Roll Heart tour. I was 23, Lou was 34. Reed’s solo career at that point had taken many twists and turns. His first album included many leftover songs from the Velvet Underground days. Transformer gave Lou his only pop hit, “Walk on the Wild Side.” Berlin was a concept album, and depressing as hell. Rock n Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live, taken from the same concert, turned Reed momentarily into an arena rock star, thanks to the monumental guitar work by Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter. Sally Can’t Dance actually made the Top 10, even though Reed’s presence was barely noticeable. (I first saw Lou Reed live on the Sally Can’t Dance tour … when he played “Heroin”, he tied off with the mic cord, pulled a syringe out of his boot, and pretended to shoot up.) The record company wanted a quick follow-up to this hit; Reed responded with Metal Machine Music, about which Lester Bangs wrote, “as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity.” Metal Machine Music was just over an hour of nothing but guitar feedback. Having established his integrity, Reed offered Coney Island Baby, one of the most moving pieces of work he ever recorded; the way his voice breaks at the end of the title song gets me to this day.

And so, Rock and Roll Heart. The first track was a jaunty number, “I Believe in Love” (in the first three lines, he managed to tell us that he believed in good times and the Iron Cross). Next up was an ode to jerking off, “Banging on My Drum”, with lyrics that repeated “I’m banging on my drum, and I’m having lots of fun.” And so it went.

At the concert, the backdrop to the stage included a bunch of televisions stacked on top of each other. He opened with “Follow the Leader”, on the album a 2 minute 12 second ditty, but which in concert went on for a very long time, reminiscent of the days of the Velvets. After that, to be honest, I don’t remember much. As I recall, at one point he sat on the edge of the stage just like an average guy. I assume he sang ‘Temporary Thing”, which closed out the Rock and Roll Heart album. One would guess the song is a favorite of Reed’s, since he has included it on a couple of greatest hits compilations where he chose the tracks. It’s a song that treads some of the usual dark-side-of-life stuff Reed was famous for, but for once, he isn’t pandering … he’s trying this time, and when Lou Reed tries, he’s as good as anyone. And while a song like “Heroin” is about heroin, “Temporary Thing” is about heroin, or love, or hate, or just about any kind of ugly addiction you might have.

There is nothing gentle about how it starts out. A gentle, rhythmic drumming, accompanied by an ominous keyboard or sax or guitar (I can’t tell) takes us right into the first line: “Hey now, bitch!” Reed is never clear about what the narrator is doing that is just temporary, but whatever it is, he says “It ain’t like we ain’t never seen this thing before.” And then he makes his claim: “I know, it’s just a temporary thing.”

He understands that “this thing” repels her: “If things like this turn you away … I know that your good breeding makes it seem not so nice.” All the while, the music continues its drone, insistent, even annoying. And the way Lou spits out the next line, full of anger and despair, is scary and heartbreaking all at once: “Where’s the number, where’s the dime, and where’s the phone?!?!” And then came the verse that meant more to me at the time, when I was in the midst of my decade in the factory, than any of the others:

Your mother, your father, your brother
I guess they wouldn’t agree with me
But I don’t give two shits
They’re no better than me

Here is the original album version:

Here’s a live version from about a month before I saw him:

And here he is, earlier this summer, almost 70 years old, still at it. It’s funny … if he sounded like a pissed-off junkie in the original, now he’s got that whole get-offa-my-lawn thing going. Except I don’t know that many grandpas still playing music like this:

Comments

[JPK]

There's a whole mid-level of Lou Reed albums that I always forget about -- Rock and Roll Heart, Sally Can't Dance, Growing Up in Public. They usually have a few or even a bunch of pretty-good-to-great songs, "Temporary Thing" definitely one of them, and which I had forgotten about, so thanks. I remember liking the title song on this album a lot too. (I agree with you that Coney Island Baby is top-tier.) So funny to see him pushing 70 and still cranking away at it. He's got to have eardrums of leather.

[Steven Rubio]

The Velvet Underground are my favorite-ever band, but I came along too late to actually see them. I made up for it by seeing Lou live many times in the 70s and 80s, from '74 through the New York album. Eventually the limitations of his middle-aged-and-older vocals got to me ... I thought he was just fine for a long time, but he didn't have a lot of breathing room, so to speak, and when he started speak-singing I lost interest. But Rock 'n' Roll Animal, Coney Island Baby, Street Hassle, The Blue Mask, "I Love You Suzanne" ... not the Velvets, but close enough. And Fernando Saunders is such a great and idiosyncratic bass player.