Legendary Hearts (1983) can get lost between what is regarded as Lou Reed’s last classic album, the cooly menacing The Blue Mask (1982), and his cashing in his cool as the 1980s fully got underway, marked (or marred) by that ridiculous Honda scooter ad. But Legendary Hearts, while building on the self-portrait in a cracked mirror of The Blue Mask, pushes even further into territory that most at the time would regard as feeling awfully new. Being a prophet of excess, Lou becomes a pioneer of recovery – as if there were any question, really, that he’s doing it on his own terms – epitomized by “The Last Shot,” a bleakly humorous ode to walking out of a barroom prison:
Here’s a toast to all that’s good
And here’s a toast to hate
And here’s a toast to toasting and I’m not boasting
When I say I’m getting straight
Again, none of it is easy, and the song that follows, “Turn Out the Light,” is a rocky ride to a moment of calm: “The tension has gone from my will.” But that moment will soon be gone, and, as Lou puts it, in the comically direct “Don’t Talk to Me About Work,” he feels like everyone else in NYC just trying to get through the daily grind.
Lou’s hitting hard, and traditional rock arrangements fall by the wayside. In the opening title track, a country song dressed up in a leather jacket, he’s singing in a little higher register than is expected, which he can do, because as he found in The Blue Mask, he can dial down the rhythm guitar tracks and use Fernando Saunder’s soaring fretless bass guitar as a vocal counterpart. This spatial background places front and center Lou’s revealing view of relationships: “You’ve got to fight to keep your legendary love.”
Which sounds similar to what Sam Shepard staged, in the same year, in Fool for Love: the play opens with a woman’s clutching onto a man’s leg as they battle in a motel room close to the Mojave Desert. It’s possible that Lou became familiar with Shepard’s work through Patti Smith, Shepard’s collaborator and, like Lou, a fixture in the NYC artistic community. Shepard’s plays were recognized for their volatility, containing acerbic takes on national myths, particularly with regards to the American West.
In other words, there’s a dramatic undercurrent to Legendary Hearts, and whether Lou’s crafting dialogues or monologues, there’s the intensity of two lovers going at it (with some rather candid admissions of his own abusive behavior). How bad it can get is summed up by “Martial Law,” featuring, in a rare appearance, Robert Quine’s knife-edged guitar playing (although credited on the album, Quine seems as if he’s, overall, been buried, if not absent, in the mix). Lou has no qualms in “Martial Law” about describing a fantasy of an outside force intervening to fix his relationship problems (although, certainly, songs such as “Martial Law” and “Don’t Talk to Me about Work” can also be regarded as contemporary satire).
A year later, Lou’s “Doin’ the Things That We Want To” references watching Fool for Love: “The other night we went to see Sam’s play,” about “a cowboy from some rodeo”. Even as Lou becomes taken by the sheer physicality – “it held you to the stage” – of Fool for Love, he’s been, like Shepard, grappling with a nation lost in past glories. On “Home of the Brave,” the penultimate track on Legendary Hearts, Lou bears witness to those who, because they don’t fit in, have gone missing in action in a nation that claims to offer protection to all. Here Lou’s poetic precision is on display, each word crafting a eulogy, as his guitar in the distance wails with feedback.
Yet Lou takes care, in “Home of the Brave,” not to tell us, specifically, what’s horrific about America; his point is that national ideals can never deliver on their promise. When people lie about that, and, even, make that into a central conceit of a political campaign, is where the trouble begins. And so the crucial issue is, faced with such trouble, where do we run to? Lou’s answer is that we have to create our own home (“of the brave”), which makes for a somewhat more hopeful conclusion: “And here’s to the life that is saved.”
As if a camera then pans upwards, we enter, what seems, tonally, into the completely different world of “Rooftop Garden.” A feeling of calm sustains, like a droning note (made literal in Bill Callahan & Bonnie Prince Billy’s 2021 cover version). It’s as if Lou, who’s always made a virtue of simplicity in songwriting, can take a rather simple idea, being with your partner and looking out over a city in the early morning, and make it hit as hard as fighting to “keep your legendary love.”
“Rooftop Garden” is on my list of Lou’s best solo songs. You can play it repeatedly and get a slightly different impression every time, as if you’re looking at city lights through a prism. It’s his best album closer since the title track of Coney Island Baby (1975). Like that song, developed from a poem that Lou wrote and was published in 1971, “Rooftop Garden” is created out of an inspiration that Lou is careful to enunciate in the last words, “up on the roof,” the title of The Drifters’ 1962 classic (written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin).
Lou was well known, maybe too much so, for his idol smashing, but it was because he knew that the past could never be interred in such a way. The past is always living, and it lived through him. And he couldn’t make the music he made, much less in 1983, without songs such as “Up On the Roof.” These songs guided him to where he was at this very moment: an awareness of a precious few minutes of his own life. That he’s sharing it with us, well, that simply moves me beyond belief. And beyond words.
Objection! The existence of New York suggests otherwise for “last classic Lou Reed album”.
Good point! I think, perhaps unconsciously, that I meant “classic” as a phase, like Lou’s career up to, like 1985. Certainly he has put out great albums, maybe, even, masterpieces after that. I’ve heard people refer to Lulu in this way.
Until now I’d never had considered Reed as an a purveyor of the revisionist Western. Thank you for opening my eyes to a deeper meaning to this album, and to the expanse Reed’s artistic range.