"All The World Loves A Baby"

Lou Reed and the Coney Island Kids

Egon Schiele - self portrait, 1914

Lou Reed’s solo career for some time after the Velvets was a series of provocations, during which he became the bête noire of the music industry and the critics, and there is still something miraculous about his success and survival through this period, and the way he was able to land a series of albums that were spotty in musical quality, questionable in taste, but novel and deeply steeped in conceptual brilliance, into middle-class homes around the globe.
The Velvet Underground had also been provocateurs, though protected by the high-art pretensions of the Warhol and New York minimalism schools, but had so softened with the theft of their effects pedals and the ousting of John Cale that the reflective, self-titled third album (1969) and the pop swan song Loaded (1970) seem to show a mellowing, and the live recordings from this period tell us that Velvets’ concerts were then, for want of a better word, fun.

I love Lou Reed (1972), Lou’s first solo album, for the purity of its songs, which are for the most part the final Velvet Underground set plus the lovely “Going Down” and the first version of “Berlin”, with its Beatlesque touches from unlikely collaborators Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe, of soon-to-be massive prog-rock act Yes. But the band is a mis-match, and the thing fell flat. Lou’s old admirer David Bowie took up the challenge and with Mick Ronson produced Transformer (1972), the album that made Lou a household name.

The early 70’s were interesting times to be a young male music fan. Lou, Bowie and T Rex had the newest, biggest, and sexiest sounds, and gender fluidity and untraditional sexuality were important elements in the frisson they generated. Service stations sold William Burroughs’ novels, with their heady mix of science fiction, social satire, junkie conspiracy theory, and gay erotica, alongside Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Millions of adolescent males were electrified by this culture (or by the fact that girls dug it) and those who weren’t gay or bi secretly hoped that they might be, just enough to fit in. When Todd Haynes captured this zeitgeist in Velvet Goldmine (1998) some modern theorists complained, but those of us present at the time recognized its truth. Lou Reed’s world-changing presentations of queer lifestyles weren’t those any rainbow branding expert today would entertain for a moment; he dropped you into, or allowed you to eavesdrop on the inhabitants of, a dangerous, druggy, bitchy, and misogynistic world; Warhol’s Factory had never been a safe space. But the magic dust of Bowie and Ronson’s production on songs like “Perfect Day” seemed to show a softer, vulnerable Lou who was just putting us on when he sang about violence. Berlin (1973), the follow up, would correct this misunderstanding. The muddily recorded, depressing, but at times quite brilliant Sally Can’t Dance (1974), and the double album of feedback that credits his heroic methamphetamine use throughout this period, Metal Machine Music (1975) – under-rated modernist masterpiece or unlistenable noise as you prefer – ratcheted up the provocations, while the bloated stadium rock of the live greatest hits album Rock n’ Roll Animal (1974) intrigued some hard rock fans but alienated the purists and soiled their fond Velvets memories.

Inspired by Nelson Algren to be the poet of the underdogs, Lou was pursuing underdog status himself (or perhaps more accurately, was uncomfortable about losing it – the Velvet Underground, while they existed, had not been a successful act) and one still wonders why the music industry didn’t just reject him completely – it seemed to be what he wanted. But when Coney Island Baby appeared in 1975, those who still loved Lou Reed felt a sense of relief at hearing a well-recorded soft-rock sound that was perfect for 1975, with a set of romantic songs written for his muse and lover Rachel Humphreys*, plus the extended, arty, experimental track “Kicks” (which sounds even more fascinating coming out of a little Bluetooth boom speaker today) to remind us of the Velvets. Coney Island Baby didn’t chart well, I’m surprised to read now, but no Lou Reed album charted higher until 1989’s New York, and it’s been a steady seller and critical favourite ever since.
The album’s centrepiece is its elegiac, triumphant title track, most of the lyrics to which had appeared in the poem “The Coach and the Glory of Love” published in the Harvard Advocate in 1971.

“All those older guys, they said he was mean and cruel
But I wanted to play football for the coach
Not big enough for line-backer I played right-end
I wanted to play football for the coach.”

What’s not in the 1971 poem is the title phrase “I’m a Coney Island Baby”. In 1979, Brooklyn baby Reed told Rolling Stone's Mikal Gilmore "Saying 'I'm a Coney Island baby' at the end of that song is like saying I haven't backed off an inch. And don't you forget it.”

But why?

As Claire Prentice wrote for the BBC website,

“In the early years of the 20th Century, visitors to Coney Island could see some extraordinary attractions. A tribe transported from the Philippines, "midget villages", a re-enactment of the Boer War by 1,000 soldiers including veterans from both sides, and death-defying roller coaster rides. But for 40 years, from 1903 to 1943, America's premier amusement park was also home to a genuine life-and-death struggle, played out beside the surf.

Martin Couney's Infant Incubator facility was one of Coney Island's most popular exhibits. "All the World Loves a Baby", read a sign above the entrance. Inside, premature babies fought for their lives, tended by a team of dedicated medical staff. To see the babies, you paid 25 cents. A guard-rail prevented visitors getting too close to the tiny figures encased in incubators.”

Couney, a German-Jewish immigrant, was “shunned by the medical establishment, and condemned by many as a self-publicist and charlatan”, but his incubators, imported from France, were streets ahead of US pre-term medical practice, where many doctors held the view that premature babies were genetically inferior "weaklings" whose fate was a matter for God. 6,500 premature babies were saved at Coney island, with a success rate of 85%, care which was paid for by the viewing public, while the first comparable ward in a public hospital didn’t open till 1936.

Lou Reed was born in 1942 and the Coney Island incubator attraction ran as a large, popular, and profitable venture from 1903 to 1943, but if he heard the story from his parents’ generation, then his addition of it to “The Coach and the Glory of Love” gives the lyric of “Coney Island Baby” additional poignancy, because the protagonist playing football for anyone can’t be taken for granted, and to be a Coney Island Baby is to know what it’s like to be the underdog from a very early age.

Lou Reed would go to on be honoured by the post-communist Czechoslovakian government (alongside his old Nemesis Frank Zappa), be happily married to Laurie Anderson, and, true-to-form, make a divisive last album inspired by Lulu, the femme fatale from Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, with Metallica, before he died; you wouldn’t have predicted such a grand old age before Coney Island Baby. Shortly before his death Reed, always a well-informed and literate, though rarely published, music critic himself, composed a review and defence of another divisive album, Kanye West’s Yeezus, informed by insights from his own years of provocation, and his own struggles with his reputation and his muse.

I did see Lou play once, in Dunedin in 1977, and he was relaxed and friendly (and obviously trying to make up for his bad behaviour there on the 1975 tour); his band had pony tails and flared jeans (in 1977! Lou’s band!) and were a little too funky and mellow for my liking. He played just the one guitar solo, in “I Wanna be Black”; only one note, but really quite good.

A few years ago Emma Smith made a Radio New Zealand program from local’ memories of Lou’s 1975 tour, around the time of Coney Island Baby, to which I was able to contribute some observations (I didn’t see Lou in 1975 but I did see Bob Sutton, who was babysitting Lou’s record collection in Invercargill on behalf of his road manager). Lou Reed and the Velvets were a huge influence on my generation of musicians, just listen to, e.g., The Clean or the Jesus and Mary Chain for a start. But what does Lou Reed mean to people hearing him today?

My critical paradigm that’s most relevant here is the tension between desire and exploitation, which Lou Reed was one of the first to complicate extensively though song. The Velvet Underground’s name was drawn from a pulp 1963 paperback about sexual perversions in the USA, while the song “Venus in Furs” draws on Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s famous 1870 novel, reprinted in pulp editions and sold in the same shops. Desire and exploitation are intertwined in Lou’s world, and if there’s anything like innocence in there it’s the state of a mind swept clean by disenchantment (a position very much in the US literary tradition; Lou having studied writing with poet Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse University in the early ‘60’s).

Lou affected a look of icy cool (which many of my peers studied and copied) and his singing tone is usually an affectless drone, often harsh but capable of surprising tenderness on occasion. So when we look for Lou Reed’s name in 21st century music, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear it invoked, in a talismanic way, by Lana Del Rey in “Brooklyn Baby” (from 2014’s Ultraviolence):

I think I'm too cool to know ya
You say I'm like the ice, I freeze
I'm churnin' out novels like
Beat poetry on amphetamines

I say

I say

Well, my boyfriend's in a band
He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed
I've got feathers in my hair
I get down to Beat poetry
And my jazz collection's rare*
I can play most anything
I'm a Brooklyn baby.

Yes, Lou Reed is an icon of cool, and Lana Del Rey’s far more artful singing style has often been called affectless too; but I think it was also relevant, at such a tricky point in Lana’s career, that it was Lou who first made transgression and provocation acceptable in soft, radio friendly, major label music. His ghostly presence on Ultraviolence (he was booked to sing on “Brooklyn Baby” but died the day before) is endorsing her own poetic license. Maybe there’s still some punk kid in cropped hair, drainpipe jeans, leather jacket/ black T-shirt, and shades out there who thinks he’s Lou’s rightful heir - here’s hoping - but radical influences will keep on radiating, and I already care more about Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, due to drop tomorrow as I write, than I’ve cared about any Lou Reed album since Street Hassle.
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Footnotes

* “By far the nicest person in Lou’s entourage” - Phil Gifford, in the radio interviews I link to a little later in the piece.

** I started listening to Albert Ayler again after hearing his drummer’s sloppy, busy patterns being used on a couple of tracks from Lana’s Blue Bannisters (2021). On 2003’s The Raven, Lou recorded “Guilty” with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who had inspired some of his early guitar moves.

Algorithmic nudge - I’m Not Saying (Nico cover) by Purple Pilgrims