Music: Lou Reed's Nightshade Carnival

Classic rock of grim wit and menace

Back at Syracuse University in the early 1960s, Lou Reed was a platoon leader in the campus ROTC unit. He was already dabbling in extreme forms of social behavior and cultivating notoriety like a rare hothouse herb. He also wanted out of his military commitment. To make sure that the authorities would oblige, he recalls holding a gun to the head of his commanding officer. It wasn't loaded, but this was no time to take chances. Lou got the boot.

Since then he has seen quite a few changes and made fine, weird, wired rock-'n'-roll music out of all of them, no matter how bizarre or diverse—high school memories and heroin jags, sweet romances and violent one-night stands, soirées with Warhol's underground crew and cruises through the lowlife. There has been one constant throughout. That gun is still drawn, and likely loaded. Danger is what Lou Reed's music has always been about. And that makes it classic, vital rock 'n' roll.

Beginning with Reed's tenure in the Velvet Underground more than a decade ago, he has been fashioning some of the strongest music you can hear anywhere. Going solo, he anticipated and helped launch both the underground and glitter rock extravagances of the early '70s; his finely focused rage, his risk-it-all personal reflections, have given the punk rockers strong inspiration. Reed's recent Arista album, Street Hassle, is one of his very best, bitterest and most adventurous records, prime rock unconditionally guaranteed to give you the night sweats.

The voice is somewhere between a snarl and a come-on; the often simple melodies build, repeat, undulate, suddenly press home. Reed constantly recalls old rock songs, phrases lifted from ancient hit parades, but his images evoke Celine masquerading as an all-night FM deejay.

Raised conventionally enough in Brooklyn and Long Island, Reed endured the usual humiliations of adolescence (recalled in a lovely, almost sentimental song called Coney Island Baby) before setting out for Syracuse. After that came a flight into the nether regions of the New York pop life. He soon settled down with Warhol's crew of dilettantes and debauchees, a sojourn both memorialized and satirized in Reed's best-known song, Walk on the Wild Side, a barbed anthem to café society transvestites and chic street hustlers.

In the mid-'60s, he also became the generative force behind the Velvet Underground, a band notable in the era of peace, posies and good vibes, for laying down rock music that virtually throttled the listener. Some of the Velvet's music is still among Reed's finest work, including a lengthy threnody called Heroin that is as devastating a drug song ("I'm goin' to try to nullify my life") as anyone has ever written.

There has never been anything polite about Reed's music, then or now; not a laid-back note or a smug lie. Reed has seen his poetry published in the Paris Review and Fusion, and both stubborn bards and diehard rock 'n' rollers will recognize—maybe even sympathize with—the sentiments expressed in the chorus of a new Reed tune:

Gimme, gimme, gimme some good times Gimme, gimme, gimme some pain Don't you know that both of them look ugly To me they always look the same