As a longtime fan of Lou Reed, I was amazed and astonished to turn on the TV this morning to see Susan Boyle standing majestically on the Today Show plaza with a white-robed children’s choir behind her, singing Reed’s 1972 song “Perfect Day.” The song sounded airless, pristine, and wholly artificial, as if it were made of shiny plastic like a Jeff Koons sculpture.
When I first heard this song I was a sophomore at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It was the immediate post-Woodstock era: the cool artsy kids (which I saw myself as trying to be) had disavowed hippies and were looking for something darker and tougher. My suitemate and pal Howard Rutkowski, who hailed from Cabot, Vermont, had much more advanced knowledge than I did of all things musical and cultural. He turned me on to the Velvet Underground, the MC5, Iggy Pop, and the New York Dolls. Now this was rock and roll as it was meant to be – loud and fast and brazen, but with an edgy pop-art sensibility.
“Perfect Day” appeared on Lou Reed’s great album “Transformer.” The themes of the songs included transsexuality and drug addiction. If there was a “hit” on the album it was “Walk on the Wild Side,” which reached #16 on the Billboard charts. The album reached #29.
Generally, while in cities like Boston Lou Reed found an audience, his brand of cutting-edge art was anathema to radio. In Cincinnati, my home town, he was regarded as a dangerous freak. “Progressive” FM stations that had embraced the lovey-dovey hippie culture recoiled against what came next as being too aggressive, too unschooled, and not adult enough when compared to respectable, grownup bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
“Perfect Day” was one of the reasons we liked Lou Reed. The song has real musical credibility and a great melody that is as good as any mainstream product. But there is a subversive element to the lyrics. Is it about drug addiction? Why does it seem so oddly dreamlike? And why the sinister Biblical reference in the coda – “You’re gonna reap just what you sow”? We thought it was a delicious poke at traditional pop songwriting, a subversive little poison pill that said, “You want craft? I can beat you at your own game.”
But now the song, like so many works of art, has a life of its own. What was subversive and commercially unsuitable in 1972 is now mainstream. Not just mainstream – it has been embraced by the very class that Reed was presumably rebelling against back in 1972. The prodigal song has returned and has been welcomed with open arms.
It’s happened before. Back in 1976 the Ramones were radio poison. Even in progressive Boston, you had to tune into Oedipus’s show on WMBR to hear them. As late as 1979, when the Atlantics were briefly signed to MCA Records, MCA exec Russ Mottla held up the Ramones to us as an example of a band that was doomed. Their cartoon-like songs would never survive against “quality” rock acts like the Eagles or Steely Dan. Twenty years later, “Blitzkreig Bop” was used on TV commercials for Budweiser and AT&T. The Ramones have achieved iconic status. It just goes to show that what is revolutionary today may be mainstream tomorrow.